Tuesday 9 April 2013

A different world.

I mentioned the 70's yesterday - I've been thinking about them again today - I was in Waterstone's earlier and picked up a copy of Dominic Sandbrook's 'biography' of the 1970's 'Seasons in the Sun' - been meaning to buy it for a while. I wasn't kidding when I said it was a different world, and I'm only just waking up to the fact that I've lived through some very interesting times - as a kid, all the grown-ups 'knew' the War - In some ways, I've seen just as much. It's impossible to explain what it was like if you were not there - but these are some of the things I remember vividly.

Munich. I watched this live on TV, very young and not really able to understand - but frightened and horrified - even as a child - I understood how terrible this was, and that it wasn't just about a few 'bad guys - it was much more than that - I felt it was a giant, black creeping monster that was going to grow and grow and envelope the whole world.

"Protect and Survive" - I had a copy I bought mail order with my pocket money, kept it under my pillow and read it every night - we never had enough books to block a window like in the pictures, but I have now. I was then, and am probably still now - waiting for it to happen.

The Yorkshire Ripper. Being brought up on the Cheshire/Merseyside borders was no comfort - this was on my doorstep. My mother worked at night at a cinema for a while to make extra money - and every night I would stand at the window waiting for her to come home, with an absolute conviction that the Ripper would eventually kill her. New murders seemed to come frequently - and even as a child I was aware of the tangible difference in tone when a woman who was 'not' a prostitute was murdered - as if it was worse in some way. It was a giant blight and stain on my childhood - like the bogeyman - but this was a real monster.

Lights Out. I cannot make young people understand what general strikes and power cuts were like - accepting that there was no electricity, gas or television for regular intervals - for what seemed like years - nothing but the testcard on TV every night. My mother getting into a fight over a bag of sugar in the supermarket, no bread for sale, potato shortages. Another world.

Bin Bag mountains in Leicester Square. Almost impossible to fathom - even with the photographs. Images on the telly of rats crawling over bags dumped outside hospitals filled with body parts. The dead unburied.

The Falklands - where to start??? Both sons of a local man died. His name was Duggie - they had banners and flags draped all over the outside of the local X-serviceman's club. It didn't bring them back.

Casual racism and sexism. Everyday social currency. Women were second class citizens, but that, at least, was better than being black, Asian, Irish or gay - if you were lucky - you could be one of the 'funny' ones who were tolerated. There is a scene in 'The Rotters Club' by Jonathon Coe where one of the female characters, a major character - after confronting a racist bullying episode, simply vanishes - that sort of thing happened. We used to watch 'Love Ty Neighbour'on the TV and laugh. Not anymore.

Pub Bombings. On the rare occasions my parents went out socially, I would be quite convinced they were going to be blown up by the IRA. I used to watch them on the TV with inevitable frequency, as if all evenings out for grown-ups ended in horror.

The deaths of the Maguire family - mother and 3 children, Finagy Road North - mown down by a car one of many infamous episodes where terrorism spilled into real life. I still remember the first news broadcast in vivid detail.

Ted Heath - gave me the creeps then - still giving me the creeps now.

Shit Clothes, brown and beige and orange. We never had anything new - that's not a boast or badge of working class honour - I resented it more than I can say. My mother made a lot of stuff ( badly ) and bought from jumble sales - all my trousers had fake turn-ups she would fashion in suede to make them longer and adapt to our growing patterns. Eventually - she joined a catalogue and we started getting crap nylon leisurewear from Hong Kong delivered to the door. It smelled of machine oil.

School was shit. It wasn't hard to be brighter, more articulate and better read than your teachers when you were about 12. But you did learn to hide it. I went to a Catholic school - there was a real class divide, kids with professional parents and kids with working class parents - not a fair fight. I still have a close friend that was at school with me. She ran away eventually and vanished, appearing again many years later living in a bus as a traveller at Greenham Common - she's now a very well respected teacher and head of drama at one of the most expensive girls schools in the country. I also went to school with Ian Rush - who was already a schoolboy international - but with no discernible IQ whatsoever - and Clare Fox - she was my head girl - and is now the director of the Institute of Ideas and regularly appears on The Moral Maze. She left school to join the Workers Revolutionary party. She was also one of the few people who wasn't afraid to show her intelligence.

Music - until the Sex Pistols - everything was hell, almost without exception.

The Queen's Silver Jubilee street party - I'd never seen sweets and cakes like that before ( we didn't have them at home) - I couldn't believe it - I ate loads and made myself violently sick. I can still remember the experience and smell of vomiting marzipan with absolute recall.

When I was a very small kid (when we lived in Blacon) - I ran across the main road with some other boys - there was a boy behind me who wasn't as fast - he was hit by a car and killed. I ran home, nobody said anything - I just remember standing at the window behind the net curtains and seeing a group of people circled around his body - just staring at him. They were all wearing anoraks with the hoods up - they looked like monks. He wasn't even a friend - I don't know who he was.  Later - when we moved to Connah's Quay - I went to get the papers for my mum - and our milkman ran across the road in front of me and was hit by a car - he had a wire basket of milk bottles - I can remember it all in very slow motion - cartwheeling in the mid air - milk bottles flying and smashing, and oddly enough - it was in silence, or so it seemed to me.

The economy. There was nothing, no hope, future, ambition, no incentives - it was all flatline. My dad worked at British Steel on Deeside to support us when we were a young family - and although the strike destroyed him and redundancy took away his self respect - he hated that job and the people, would cheerfully admit to not having actually worked for several years (there was nothing to do) and spent most of his time fixing his bike and making things for the house in the workshop. He used to steal stuff ( everyone did ) - the standard colour for British Steel was a flat, taupe blue - you knew who worked there because every house had their front door and woodwork painted the same colour. We had a shed load of ball bearings and pots of dried blood "good for the garden".

My childhood was spent planing an escape to anywhere else, I used to lie in bed at night thinking that it couldn't be any worse - all I wanted to do was move to a big city and disappear, make my own life, do my own things, find out for myself - feel safe inside my own four walls and have locks on the doors. Never have to struggle with money like my parents, and never feel that aching, yawning loss of control that they must have felt every day of their lives.

Food was crap, plastic, tasteless shite. We were lucky - my dad was Spanish - about once a month my mother would get the 1 hour bus to Chester where there was a small deli ( large Spanish Community ) and buy olie oil, cooked meat and anchovies - but appart from that, every week was the same.

Sunday - roast chicken and boiled to death vegetables
Monday - rice, white sauce, the left over chicken
Tuesday, Spaghetti bolognese
Wednesday - a fray bentos pie
Thursday - chips with something random, tinned sweetcorn
Friday - Fish fingers for he boys, boil in the bag cod for the girls
saturday - fry-up and plain sponge cake

The 70's were shit, just thinking about them is upsetting. Lets not waste any time romanticising them.


4 comments:

ro said...

you forgot purple.
only good thing was punk.

Richard de Pesando MA(RCA) said...

actually - you are right, the whole house was orange and brown - mostly every curtain or bit of fabric was chocolate brown and even the ceilings were wallpapered - except my room - which was, for some bizzare reason, all purple - except the sheets, we had lemon yellow nylon vallances.

Steerforth said...

I've got a wonderful photo of my parents' kitchen after they repainted it orange - utterly hideous.

But my experience of the 70s was very different. Yours sounds like 'Kes', whilst mine was more 'Minder'. Growing up in Teddington, I was undoubtedly shielded from the grimmer aspects of the decade.

But I remember the inedible food very well - fish cakes for dinner (i.e lunch), followed by a chemical cocktail of sugar and preservatives called Birds Eye Supermousse. Powdered milk, powdered potatoes, powedered orange juice...just add water. Awful.

I also remember how scruffy everything was. Railway stations were overmanned, staffed by men in donkey jackets, fag in mouth, half-heartedly pushing a broom along a platform before sloping off for their 17th tea break. The chocolate machines rarely worked.

There was also this feeling that Britain was crap. Our economy was weak, our cars were unreliable and nobody took us seriously any more.

My nostalgia for the 70s used to be much stronger, but the discovery that at least 50% of my childhood heroes were sex offenders has taken the shine off things, somewhat.

Richard de Pesando MA(RCA) said...

ah - you've hit on something there - my parents were ADAMANT that it was 'breakfast - lunch - dinner' - and occasionally 'high tea' if someone came to visit - we didn't have 'supper' or 'tea' - because my mother thought that was modern and vulgar and we used to get shouted at for calling 'lunch break' at school 'dinner time' - it was all part of their aspirations for the future and desperate need to cling onto the past, and because my mother was a bit of a snob.

Your point about everything being shoddy also makes me think of Euston Station - my first encounter with the modern world was at Euston Startion aged about 14 - it's still exactly the same, shoddy, badly designed, cramped, claustrophobic and threatening - Kings Kross - just a few minutes walk away is now wonderful - until Euston is dragged into the new century - the 70's and 80's will still cling on.

I also forgot to mention that the whole of Britain was clouded in a thick smog of cigarette smoke.

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