1974

1 year six months - 2 years six months

Who governs Britain? This was the question on which the Conservatives launched their electoral campaign. The electorate answered no one. Edward Heath’s Conservatives lost their majority, but Harold Wilson’s Labour had not gained a majority of the vote even though it had won more seats. The media was overwhelmingly in favour of Heath, with Kingsley Amis labelling the Labour MP Tony Benn ‘the most dangerous man in Britain.’ With no one party commanding an overall majority, the real winners seemed to be the Liberals led by Jeremy Thorpe.

Thorpe himself was in no mood to celebrate. He was a troubled man to say the least. His wife had died in a car crash two years previously and it had taken him a long time to recover. He had remarried but his fortunes once again were turning even as the Liberals succeeded in winning a greater degree of power than they had held in decades. Heath wanted them to enter into coalition with his government, or at least form some form of pact. When this failed, Harold Wilson formed a minority government with the intention of fighting another election at the earliest opportunity to secure a working majority.

Thorpe’s problem wasn’t on the political front so much as his private life. A former lover, Norman Scott, had been a thorn in his side and a constant worry, threatening to expose his sex life and destroy his political career. Thorpe had already spoken to a close friend about somehow silencing Scott. The more it looked as though the Liberals were about to make a breakthrough, the more urgent it became that Scott not be allowed to derail his political career and with it, his party’s future.

The house at Paradise was slowly beginning to seem habitable. The winter months in the caravan weren’t easy. Although it warmed up nicely, when the wind blew up the fells from the Irish Sea, the caravan would rock like a cradle in a tree. Peter worked on the house every night, eating his dinner standing up as he went about his work in the light of the clip lamps, until the evenings began to get longer. Uncle Jack came on his moped, ready in his overalls. Friends stopped by and helped. All weekends and Bank Holidays were spent working on the house. But it seemed as if they would never finish.

And Rosaleen realized she was pregnant again. There was no way she could bring another baby into the caravan. She still had nightmares about what had happened to me the year before. But the work on the house seemed endless. Peter was a stickler, a perfectionist. The radio played Waterloo by Abba, who had just won the Eurovision song contest. The Portuguese entry was Paulo de Carvalho's “E Depois do Adeus”. When the song was aired on the radio in Lisbon at 10:55 p.m. on 24 April rebels in the Portuguese military began to assemble in preparation for the planned coup. The troops seized strategic points and declared the overthrow of the Estado Novo and the dictator Marcelo Caetano. Despite the army telling people to stay in doors, spontaneous demonstrations broke out throughout the country. In the flower market in the centre of Lisbon, a restaurant worker handed carnations to the soldiers who put them in the barrels of their guns. The Carnation Revolution saw Portugal become a democracy and the abandonment of its colonial wars in Mozambique, Angola, Congo and Guinea.

Gary Gygax was a Jehovah’s Witness, 36 years old with five children and living in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. He’d lost his job the year before and had taken to cobbling shoes in his basement to make ends meet as he desperately tried to turn his hobby - wargaming - into a money maker. With a fellow gamer Dave Arneson, he’d written a new game but no one would take the plunge and publish it. Joined by his friend Don Kaye, he formed a company called Tactical Studies Rules. They both invested $1000 but still didn’t have enough money to publish their game, so after much hesitation accepted further financing from Brian Blume, another gamer, who took on an equal third share of the company. The game was now ready to be published. The box included three booklets, “Men and Magic”, “Monsters and Treasure” and “The Underworld & Wilderness Adventure”, as well as some reference sheets and charts. One thousand boxes of Dungeons & Dragons were packed in Gary’s living room, ready to be shipped around the country.

The Irish were coming. This was good news for Rosaleen. It meant that Peter had to make some of the rooms of the house habitable, because otherwise where were they going to stay? When his sister Vera had come up with Brian to help on the house, Peter had hired another caravan, but now the visit in July gave them a goal to aim for. The living room, the kitchen, the bedroom needed to be habitable. The Irish family were a lot of funny. They had all the jokes and Patsy had his own band. It was a humour born of desperation.

Grandad Frank had been the youngest of nine children. His mother had died when he was one of tuberculosis. His father, who had been a teetotaller all his life, went on an almighty week long bender and when he finally came back home he found the house empty. The clergy had stepped in and sent the children to different orphanages all over Ireland. Frank was put in the care of his sister Mary who was sixteen. As each of the children came into their teens they’d come back to the house in Belfast. Eddie, Jimmy who got a job in the library in Belfast, Hughie and John. His eldest brother John emigrated to Canada and his sister Mary, who had been like a mum to him, went as well.

Eddie married Minnie and they had Patsy and Jimmy (another one). But Eddie died of TB as well. He left Minnie a widow at twenty years of age and with Patsy aged two and Jimmy, at three months. Frank was eighteen at the time and Eddie had made him promise to look after Minnie and the boys. Hughie had won the lottery with enough money to pay for their passage to Canada, both Hughie and Frank, but Frank had promised to look after Patsy, Jimmy and Minnie and so Hughie left on his own to join John and Mary. They moved in with Frank and his dad, but that first year, Jimmy the baby and Frank’s dad both died. It had been a hard year. It had been a hard life. Frank never talked about Ireland. The stories all came from the cousins, nephews and nieces, aunties and uncles. Frank sent to Canada to ask for help with the cost of the last funeral. John and Mary sent money but Hughie couldn’t. It was the cause of bad feeling and Frank never asked anyone for anything again.

Frank only got married once Patsy was grown to woman called Jean Lee. He was thirty six; she was twenty four. She’d been a Lyon’s Tea House waitress, nicknamed a ‘nippy’ because they had to be very slim in order to fit between the tables. She worked in an Oyster Bar in London called Wheeler’s which still exists. She boarded with an Italian family and learned to cook pasta, which was unusual, exotic even. She met Frank at an Irish club in Kilburn. He knew her sisters and she’s seen him back in Belfast. He was working as part of the fire brigade then. In Barrow-in-Furness she found a ship chandler’s which sold the ingredients she needed, tomato puree, dried basil, pasta etc. Frank and Jean would have three daughters, the youngest of whom would be Rosaleen, my mum.

The World Cup was coming up and it was going to be a new one. The old trophy had been retained by Brazil, when it won the cup for the third time in 1970. There had been 53 proposed trophies. Silvio Gazzaniga, an artist from Milan, designed the winning idea. Two footballers, their arms raised in victory and exultation, support the world.

Some of their furniture was stored at a friend’s house and so once the rooms were in a state of reasonable safety Dad put in wardrobes. Hugo and Maureen stayed in the house. Uncle Patsy - as we always called mum’s cousin - stayed with grandad and Auntie Maureen. We moved out of the caravan as well. I slept in a room with Francis. Mum was big with the new baby coming. The Irish christened the house with their noise and jokes, and the smell of hot food. It was the height of summer when the cow parsley grows high in the hedgerows and the animals are loud in the fields, the light in the west hangs around until ten - eleven o’clock at night.

West Germany beat Johan Cruyff’s Holland after a controversial penalty was awarded. Polish striker Grzegorz Lato scored seven goals, becoming the highest goal scorer of the tournament.

The dining room suite was brought over from storage. A Curry’s van came up the drive delivering a washing machine Auntie Maureen had bought for us. A sideboard was put in the hallway. There was an arch that went through tot he living room. Dad had left the original slate wall and fireplace exposed. The living room was given over to the boxes and the work continued on the rest of the house. Richard Nixon resigned and Gerald Ford was sworn in as the new President of the United States. Harold Wilson won the British General Election with a three seat majority in October. He was fed up though. He didn’t want to do it anymore. He’d won four of the five general elections he’d fought in as Labour Party leader. The issues didn’t interest him and he took to sneaking in a brandy when he could to deal with the stress and alleviate the boredom. A referendum would be held on whether to stay in the European Economic Community. It would be a resounding yes.

In November, Catherine Sarah Bleasdale was born. She was the easiest of the three children but would be the last child Rosaleen would have. She was brought home to Paradise to meet her two brothers. She did not have to stay in the caravan which still sat beside the house, though not used.

Near the Awash River in Ethiopia, Donald Johanson and Tom Gray were searching for fossils of early human origin. In a small gully, they found some bone fragments, a piece of an arm bone and some vertebrae. In the afternoon they returned with their team and tied off the area. They listened to the Beatles on a cassette machine as they worked. AL 288-1 consisted of about forty percent of her original skeleton. There were no signs of what had caused her death except for one tooth mark in her pelvic bone, though no indication if this was post mortem. She was only three foot seven inches tall and had a brain the size of a chimpanzee’s, but she walked upright as a hominid. She was named Lucy after the song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” which the scientists had been playing on the cassette machine when they celebrated the first night of the find.

I wore shorts when I was a kid. I wore them all the time. In all weathers. I didn’t feel the cold. Didn’t care. Rosaleen often bought two sets of the same clothes for Francis and me. Matching cardigans, matching bomber jackets. Catherine sometimes got similar clothes but she was also different because she was a girl, and the youngest, and the last. 17 Paradise was now a proper home, with a roof and windows, a door and plumbing, and electricity. When Peter went to the building suppliers to pay for all the materials, the owner had been so entertained by my father’s efforts that he billed dad for everything at cost, making no profit. It was a generous thing to do.

17 Paradise had been built by my father and mother, by their vision and courage, their youth and determination, with help from my uncles and aunts, my grandad and my cousins. It was furnished with gifts. Auntie Marjorie sent rocking chairs from Yorkshire. And strangers had got involved, walking by to have a look. My life had been saved. My sister had been born. My brother was with me. At the end of the day, last thing, dad and mum would lock up, climb the stairs and turn all the lights out except the one in the landing. That stayed on and we could see it through a gap in the door.

Paradise wasn’t lost or found. It had been built.