I am collecting anecdotes for a forthcoming Autobiography (which will be years in the making) and like the fishing story from Devonport wharf, this is another incident I will never forget.
I left home at age 19 in September 1973 to go to Harwell, the atomic energy place. This is where I also did the HNC at Oxford Polytechnic. The first 6 months at Harwell was the World famous Harwell training course for newbies, and I must say from 50 years on that it was a pretty fantastic educational experience. However, that’s not the point. I noticed that there were a helluva lot of blokes walking around the Harwell site, limping, duff legs or feet or whatever, and I was no idiot. I had just left school with a grade A in Physics, I knew radiation poisoning when I saw it, and here it was in Spades. In fact I was starting to feel pretty queezy myself. So that lunchtime I came running up petrified to the Training Officer who looked at me aghast. “What’s up Greg?” he said. I blurted out “What is it with all these blokes walking around with duff legs? There’s been a bloody radiation leak hasn’t there, and nobody’s been told?” This was the first, but not the last time I have reduced someone into fits of tearful laughter. “No Greg, there has not been a radiation leak. This is the Scientific Civil Service and we do what all Government Departments are meant to do, but don’t. We take on our full quota of disabled workers.”
Sometimes you can be just too clever for your own good.
