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Nuclear Garden
Tasslebury is a quiet, serene village nestling in the Cheshire hillsides. Its picture postcard cottages and rolling scenery attracts its fair share of tourists, and property prices are sky high. So when Derek Sideboard and his wife moved into number fifty-two Poplar Lane over fifteen years ago, they hoped the quaint, seventeenth century cottage would be the ideal place to spend their retirement. But just two months after the Sideboards had exchanged contracts, the Government designated their back garden an official nuclear test site. "It’s terrible," Mr. Sideboard tells me. "Really awful - all that banging day and night. Sometimes it goes on for weeks at a time. We can’t sleep at night and it frightens the dog." Today it’s quiet, and Mr. Sideboard can make the most of the peace and solitude. It’s late afternoon as I stand with him on the patio. Mr. Sideboard points down to the bottom of the garden., beyond the newly mown lawn and the neatly tended flower beds. "There, just behind the shed," he says. "That’s where they do it. During their busy periods they detonate anything up to seven hundred megatons a day up there, just where my compost heap used to be. I’ve lodged an official complaint with the parish council, but they say there’s nothing they can do." I ask Mr. Sideboard whether he’s worried that an ongoing series of nuclear tests in his back garden may be at all dangerous? "You might expect me to be a little nervous about it," says Sideboard. "But to be honest I’ve never given much thought to the dangers involved. I suppose there is always the possibility of them hitting the house one day, but in the fifteen years I’ve been here they’ve never missed the compost heap once, so I can only conclude that they know what they’re doing. No, it’s more of an inconvenience really. You don’t realise until it happens to you just the kind of problems it can cause. For instance, my insurance premiums have gone through the roof, and my social life has suffered: nobody wants to visit you when you’ve got tactical nuclear weapons going off behind your shed every five minutes..."
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