I spent a month watching every television program and it was my idea of heaven. But I wasn’t able to find out much more about the near-miss nuclear war. It was old news and they tried to pretend it never happened. Eventually, I raided the stack of back copies of The Herald and there I was finally able to read the whole story. As Horrie put it at the time, it was a close run thing all right.

 

The last book to be serialised in The Sun News Pictorial was, for me anyway, Level Seven by Mordecai Roshwald. It is a diary of a man who lives 4000 feet below the surface of the earth, along with thousands of others in a nuclear war shelter. Contact with the surface is lost and nuclear devastation presumed and they wait it out, searching for news or clues. And when finally it comes, it is the realisation that the system has failed and the radiation from the surface is leaking in. One by one, the levels above die off and the narrator keeps his diary until his last moments.