(One of those defining moments in a lifetime when anyone old enough can recall what they were doing.  We were all doing the same thing - shitting ourselves.  Its 50 year anniversary in 2012.) 

I’d never heard my mum or dad speak like that before;

“Shut up!” they shouted as we played upon the kitchen floor;

This photograph of memory will live for evermore.

An overbearing silence between us then ensues

Embarrassingly trodden on by the TV’s news -

A charge of domesticity we kids feared to defuse.

We sensed an interlinkage of the shouting and TV

For once the news had ended there settled normalcy

Apart from guilty glaring from my dad to mum and me.

I’d never heard my mum or dad speak like that before;

“Shut up!” they shouted as we played upon the kitchen floor,

Their irritation spiked by prospect of the nuclear war.