“I found myself in a dirty, sooty city. It was night, and winter, and dark, and raining. I was in Liverpool….. we found a broad square, dimly illuminated by streetlights, into which many streets converged. In the centre was a round pool…”

Carl Gustav Jung’s Dream, 1927

Conversation awoke me, and I looked around the bus shelter. It was built of grey stone to better blend with the Lakeland cottages dotted about the valley. At its rear was a narrow bench painted black, and while dozing on it, I had been joined by several locals whose chatter now disturbed me. The time was 7.00 am. A Keswick-bound bus pulled up, and my noisy neighbours boarded, leaving me alone again. Rain lashed down onto the dark, drab road outside. Turning over on the cramped seat, I tightened the sleeping bag close to my neck and fell back asleep.

Sometime later, a car stopped, and I got in. Headed for Whitehaven, the driver offered to drop me on the coast at my destination, Windscale, part of Britain’s family of nuclear reactors. He shared that, as a mountaineer, he’d moved to Lakeland because he loved the mountains. Still, living amongst them, they’d grown too familiar and no longer concerned him. I also had a fondness for the district, so he advised me not to make a similar mistake. I was seventeen.

At Windscale, the guard’s rifle hung from his shoulder as he beamed at me through a high wire fence. His two gun-bearing friends smiled as well. I grinned back. Had they seen an anti-nuclear protest anywhere? They motioned loosely with their guns towards a lay-by opposite. An old coach and van had been parked there for a while.

Hearing this, I thought I should head to Scotland’s southeast coast, where a mass demonstration I knew had also been planned for the bank holiday. An articulated lorry carrying a single container pulled out of nearby security gates. Its small, stocky driver jumped from its door and joined our conversation. He was heading south and then north to Dundee and, if agreeable, I could take a lift and help him out. Thinking a couple days of work helping with loading and unloading would be okay, I climbed into the enormous white cab, heaving up my rucksack. The gears whirred, and we headed down to Liverpool.

Would I like to drive? We were pulling back onto the motorway after leaving a depot in Carnforth, and the last image on my mind was a boiler-suited man warning about the danger of bald tyres. I hadn’t even taken my car test. An impenetrable dark wall surrounded the next stop, Bootle Dock, Liverpool. Crouched under the dashboard and hidden by a tartan blanket, we trickled through the entry gate and sneaked past the customs checkpoint. 

“We’ll be here a while, so we may as well get some rest.” Although not sleepy, I lay on the bunk next to the driver as suggested, and soon after, his hand grabbed my crotch. Sitting up, I muttered, “I don’t feel so tired after all”, and, escaping his clutch, returned to the passenger seat. Promptly, booted out of the lorry with my fare unpaid, I stood outside the big port wall. It was still a dull grey day. A small man wearing a cap comes into view. With little else to do, he stopped for a chat and dug around in his trouser pocket after listening to my predicament for a while. “Here’s 30p. Catch the bus into town,” came his counsel.

Many believe that Mathew Street, a crooked, narrow thoroughfare in the city’s centre, is built over the magical pool of Jung’s dream. Later, the Beatles and the Cavern Club brought it more fame. Still, by the late seventies, Eric’s had replaced it as the street’s entertainment venue. That night, bumped up onto the kerb outside, an old battered bus along with a three-ton van.

Not the group of travellers I had missed earlier, but a rock band, Here and Now. Once inside the club, I conversed with a stranger inviting myself to spend the night on his floor. The gig finished, the rain stopped, and daylight had turned to darkness. We caught a bus out to Old Swan. 

That was 2nd May 1979; as they say, it had been a long day. I slept well.