On the day before my seventh birthday, which I spent at my grandma’s in Yorkshire, a young man named Raymond Jones walked into North End Music Stores in Liverpool and asked the guy behind the counter for a record on which an obscure local group called the Beatles provided the backing track for a song titled ‘My Bonnie’. The guy behind the counter was the shop’s manager and the son of its owner. His name was Brian Epstein, and as a restless budding entrepreneur he felt he should be alert to what was going on around him. Because of young Raymond’s evident enthusiasm, Brian made a note on a piece of paper saying: ‘The Beatles? Check on Monday.’ Which he did. Intrigued by what he saw, he wondered if he should become their manager.
Forty-eight hours after Raymond’s purchase, on the day after my seventh birthday, while I was still in Yorkshire, the Soviet Union tested a thermonuclear device that proved to be the most powerful ever created. It produced by far the largest manmade explosion in history. It was more than a thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs combined. It was more powerful than all the munitions exploded in the 20th century combined. It was almost certainly more powerful than all the munitions exploded in all of human history combined. Its shockwave circled the world three times. It was one of nearly 60 nuclear tests carried out by the Soviet Union in the year I turned seven.
A year later, on the day of my eighth birthday, which I spent at home in Birmingham, the Cuban Missile Crisis ended. I don’t remember much about it. I have a memory of my parents acting tense and weird for a while, but I thought nothing of it.
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