A dark and stormy night

‘Where were you when they crucified the Lord?’; when news of Waterloo was brought, or the Mutiny, or the Charge of the Light Brigade, or the death of Victoria? Thence into living memory and universal communications — when Edward VIII announced his abdication; when Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich with ‘peace in our time’; when VE, then VJ, were proclaimed; when the Suez débâcle shocked the nation; when JFK’s assassination shook the world.

All these except the last are before my memory begins to go beyond feeding the ducks and collecting civic clocks (anything from the high street jewellers to Big Ben himself). With the Kennedy tragedy I remember looking out from my student eyrie in Cambridge, high above King’s, its views eastwards towards Chapel and northwards up the river, counting the display of college flags at half-mast, and not knowing what or how to feel.