Reminiscences of a young CND activist

Sorry I’ve been offline for so long. I’m back. For now, anyway. Among other things I’ve been writing a little bit about what it was like for me being a teenager involved in left wing politics at the beginning of the 80’s. This is the first (and far the longest) of a series of reminiscences that were prompted by a casual conversation with one of my excellent graduate students. Feel free to ignore! If you like them, I’ll also be posting them on a substack. Here goes: We moved to Oxford in the wake of the 1979 general election. Dad had become Chief Education Officer in Oxfordshire a year earlier, but we’d waited to move till I finished my O’Levels and my sister finished primary school, to minimize disruption (because Oxford, itself, then still had a system of middle schools, my sister was more disrupted than I was, having to spend a year in a middle school before going to an ‘upper’ school. I did the sixth form at Peers School, an inaptly named comprehensive which served two council…