The Wall Within

An Introduction

“The Wall Within”.

“The Wall Within” has a sub-title “A Half-Life in the Cold War.”

"At the age of twenty Adam Somerset, unable to find work in a recession-hit Britain, hitch-hiked to Berlin. His further travels took him to the republics of Central Europe, behind the Iron Curtain, to the Carpathian Mountains, the beaches of the Black Sea and the estuary of the River Danube.

"Europe was the centre of the Cold War but super-power rivalry was mirrored across the continents.

“The Wall Within” recounts travels; an underground nuclear shelter along with encounters in Africa, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean.

"The London, that was home for fifteen years, was a different city. De-industrialising and shedding population it was a place of political volatility, power black-outs, a new disease and urban terrorism.

"The era, home and abroad, was captured in the culture of the 1970s and 1980's. “The Wall Within”, moves in a unique way between personal encounters, history and the music, films and books of a time marked by fear of conflict with nuclear weaponry."

Historian Dai Smith:

“Fizz and panache in the telling enliven the contemplative reflections on a life passing through the mills of history...the approach was stunning, not sure I have read anything quite like it before.”



Introduction

Around the turn of the century an edition of the Cambrian News published one week a pair of obituaries. Two women had both lived long lives. Both were much loved. One had been raised in a Ceredigion village, had married and moved a dozen miles from her home of childhood. The other had been born in Saint Petersburg from which her family had fled in a time of revolution. Their place of refuge was Bordeaux. Two decades on, in 1940, that too became a second city from which the family fled. The county of Ceredigion became an eventual place of refuge and constancy for her life's ensuing chapters.

The two lives, adjacent on a newspaper page, lingered in the memory. They felt to capture in miniature the flavour of their century. David Lodge said of his own birthdate “Quite a good year to be born.” I too, seventeen years younger than Lodge, had long come to share his view. The two halves of the century divided around the fulcrum of my own time of birth. I was in the first cohort of infants, at age three, to be offered the Salk vaccine. The horror of polio epidemic ceased. The adults whom I grew up among all had their war stories. They were little told but spanned a range of fates: five years of imprisonment after capture at Dunkirk, three days mid-Atlantic on a raft before rescue, the loss of a limb. The psychological after-effect of the Second World War was a constant in my home of childhood.

“The Wall Within” occupies in the main that second half of the last century. Four cities in Europe and the Mediterranean were divided, three by confessional difference, the most renowned by political confrontation. I crossed the dividing lines of three. Ironically, the one in my own country was the most foreign, although its effects were the most severe. My working life was in a city that, year on year, lived under alert of explosion.

The travel recorded here had an inherent difference. A month now with an Inter-rail pass tends to be a pre-clicked set of journeys and accommodations. Then with little option of pre-booking it was made up as it went along, as dependent for decisions on recommendations and chance encounters. Hitch-hiking was inherently serendipitous. A wait might last minutes or it might be hours; a journey might be a dozen miles or several hundred. Most of all it was to share a vehicle of a stranger.

author:Adam Somerset

original source:
04 December 2025