1976

An Experiment in Autobiography

1976

Another girl falls

Alessandra Piovesana was 14 years old and on holiday in the Dolomites with her school friends Francesca and Giovanni. They had pushed into the cable car which was packed with people, too many people. As it was going down the mountain, it reached the first pylon and suddenly the car jerked to a stop and they hung swaying in the wind for about a minute. A man shouted out a joke, and everyone started laughing, the sort of laughter that comes when strangers are suddenly sharing something profound.

Then the car started once more to some cheering and a lot of relief, but this time there was a loud strange noise, the movement of the car changed. It began to fall, vertically and then swinging, the cable which was supposed to support it, was now dragging it down and crashing it into the side of the mountain before sending it seventy meters down, onto a field of snow. The upper part of the car that held the giant wheels that held the cable and weighing three tonnes, collapsed, crunching the structure of the car like it was made of paper and crushing the people inside. Alessandra had no memory of the fall. She came to among the bodies with both of her legs broken and one of her feet pointing in the wrong direction. The car was supposed to carry forty people. It had been carrying forty-three.

The owners justified themselves saying there had been a lot of children in the car. But the children were dead. Of the forty-three tourists, forty-two died. Alessandra was the only survivor, saved by the bodies who cushioned her fall. Alessandra remembered the voices of the people dying in the snow around her. A man said that hew as going back to Milan. A child cried out for her mother. A woman said, “I want my son.” She died too.   

The beginning of memory

Some memories must be left of 1976. We generally starting form memories from two to four, especially if there is a significant event: a house move or a death, the birth of a sibling. I have no memories of Catherine arriving. And no memories where Catherine is noticeably absent.

Some early memories are tied to photographs I’ve seen. At St. Bees on the Cumbrian coast, I totter towards Uncle Francis, ice cream on my face. But there’s the photograph… so perhaps I’m simply remembering the photograph as a memory. I would be two. My hair is blond and it was only blond when I was a toddler.

There’s another picture of me in the garden on a swing; and one of my favourites, where I’m dressed in a great coat, like a general in the First World War, and I’m bending over a daffodil in the garden. I remember the swing and the coat. I must have been two or three. Maybe four. I remember that part of the garden. There was a hedge that made a tunnel of sorts.    

But I remember our car. It was a blue Triumph Herald. I could lie down in the backseat with my ear against the the internal hub and listen to the wheel spinning below, whirring against the road. I remember dad going really fast one day and telling us he was going a hundred miles an hour. It was near Broughton, probably going down the hill towards Grizebeck. Only now, literally now, do I realize that there was no way the Triumph Herald even had the capacity to get to a hundred miles per hour, let alone on a twisty-turny country lane like that. Such is the power and persistence of parental fibs and the credulity of children. Francis texted me telling me that the car before that was a Hilman Husky, also blue. Francis has a successful career in cars. He’s the sort of executive who gets head-hunted and spends a lot of time on golf courses, sponsor’s boxes and attending Formula One races. I trust him on cars.

It’s 2023 and Mum is in hospital. She’s 77-years-old. They put a stent into her kidney 14 months ago. It was only supposed to be in there for 4 months. When they took it out, they couldn’t stop the bleeding and there was already an infection that quickly became sepsis. I flew back to England to see her. She looked like Auntie Maureen in her last days; the same Irish complexion, the face that increasingly resembled black and white photographs of themselves as children wearing confirmation dresses, shrunken to the size of childhood, but with the stupidity of age. I sat beside her. I joked that she was just waiting for her favourite son to turn up. And she said “You were always my favourite, but don’t tell the others.” I asked her to repeat it while I pretended to record it. She laughed and called me “Golden Boy”.

When they finally decided to drain the clot – 1.5 litres of poisoned blood – it took several days and the bag filling at her side smelled of putrid cauliflower. When they came to take the bag she joked with the nurses, “Coming for more Merlot.” The nurses are all from different countries and this makes her angry about Brexit all over again.

We talked about 1976

Mum had been hopeless when it came to 1975. A lot of the information had come from dad. Dad, despite the Alzheimer’s loved to talk about the past and especially the building of the house. The building of the house, I realized, was the highlight of his life. It was the achievement he was most proud of. Of course, he was proud of the family, he loved mum in a way that scared me sometimes. If the house was on fire, I was in no doubt he’d save mum before he’d save us. One time when I’d upset mum and I was very young (though not 1976-young) he came up into my room and sat beside my bed and told me that if I was a thousand, mum was a million, and I’d better bear that in mind before upsetting her again. It was a gangster warning. Terrifying and yet oddly reassuring. Lines were drawn. Who wouldn’t want their dad’s to feel like that way about their mums?

Now mum had stuff to say about 1976. She remembered the Triumph Herald but not the car that came before and we went through a list of family cars. The metallic brown Renault 16 and the red Audi. Then we talked about Sullom Voe. This was in the Shetland Islands. Dad went there to work around about this time. For two full years. I remember this very vaguely. There was a cartoon called “Wait Until Your Father Gets Home” which had a very catchy tune and it summed up how I felt in this period. Dad was away for 3-4 weeks at a time. Sullom Voe was in the Shetland Islands. They had discovered oil in the North Sea in 1969 and keen to exploit it had begun work on an oil refinery and the oil rigs and pipelines which would extract, transport and refine the oil. There was a small airport that he would fly into. The weather was bad there a lot of the time. The North Sea was often rough and the winds were freezing cold. Dad had a large parka coat with a fur-lined hood which he’d have to zip up and look through the snorkel as if it were a periscope. He lived with the other men and worked on the building of the refinery and the rigs before they were transported out to sea. The oil company would bring in entertainment, like movies which weren’t being shown anywhere in the UK yet. When I watched videos, the copyright warning at the beginning always mentioned not to be shown in prisons or oil rigs and I thought about dad watching those films up in Sullom Voe.

Shetland is the most northerly region of the United Kingdom. Scottish partly, certainly not English and almost Norwegian, but also its own thing: Zetland. It’s famous for its miniature horses, the Shetland ponies and the wool which my mother would use to knit us all Arran sweaters. This was the first time the family had money and there were a series of purchases that were made on account of the money from Sullom Voe. This was always pointed out, always underlined, as if mum and dad both needed to justify repeatedly the sacrifice they were making by being separated for so long. The decision also meant that with three children, Catherine a two-year-old, mum was effectively a single parent this whole time and in this important period we children grew up with a father who was intermittently present but who grew in power as a symbol.

The garage and utility room were built with Sullom Voe money for instance. There was definitely a new car. Maybe the Renault 16 came along. There was a lot of fuss about it being metallic brown and not simply brown. Which meant it glittered. There was a discussion about price, because metallic meant more expensive. I wonder if we bought it new. I don’t think so. We bought many, many things second hand. As children we would only learn about this later.

On April Fool’s Day, a company was founded on the proceeds of the sale of a VW bus and a high end calculator. Apple computers was the brain child of the Steves Jobs and Wozniak. The computer that would go on sale in July was a prototype of what would later be known as a PC. It was priced $666. That same month the Viking lander plunged through the thin atmosphere. Its rockets fired and it landed with a slight jolt on the Martian surface in what was known as the Golden Pain. It began to transmit data and pictures back to Earth. It began taking pictures so soon after it landed that dust still hung in the air from its impact.

Heatwave

There was a heatwave that summer. It was so hot that the sands of the Dunnerholme dunes were too hot to walk on barefoot. You got to Dunnerholme by driving down Tippin’s Lane, throughout Penny’s farmyard and then you had to stop at the railway line. There was a gate you opened and a little telephone box where you’d phone the station master at Askam and ask if there was a train coming, before driving through. The last part was the golf course where the sheep grazed and the long blond grass that grew on the dunes spread.

We parked the car and skipped over the hot sand as fast as we could. Mum had a wind break. Dad went in the water. Mum never did. The sea came in almost to the shore, but when the tide was out it retreated to the horizon, though the estuary of the Duddon River ran through the middle and there was quick sand. We heard a lot about the quicksand. On TV and in films, people would get caught in quicksand frequently. I’m not sure why. It didn’t happen in the 90s. Maybe it was a cheap special effect. Or it spoke to some primal fear of the 70s. Mum had made a picnic. It was always windy at the beach.  

That autumn, I went to a playgroup in Askam-in-Furness which was at the community centre. It was run by the mothers. I went three days a week. I remember wetting myself at a Christmas party. This was something I did a few times. Going to the toilet struck me as a waste of time. So I would hold it in until I couldn’t. I was playing hide and seek with Anthony and Carrie once in our house and I didn’t want to come out from my hiding do I did a poo on the floor. Mum was angry because I was hiding behind the door of the bathroom, so it wouldn’t have taken much to have made it to the toilet.

Auntie Maureen would sometimes take us to reading groups and we went to church every Sunday at Saint Anthony’s in a small chapel with yellow flock wallpaper and the stations of the cross hung on the walls. Father Kernan had a stammer but was thought of as modern because he had a CB radio with which he communicated with his housekeeper. His handle was “Cloth Man” and hers was “Busy Bee”. I don’t think I had a missal yet, not being able to properly read, so I think these outings would just have been lessons in excruciating boredom – not unuseful for the future. I liked looking at the pictures on the walls. But the benches were uncomfortable and the chapel was really nothing more than a large room. There was nothing particularly churchy about it. Years later I’d notice the same yellow flock wallpaper in a pub in Askam.              

In the autumn of that year the BBC began to broadcast the “Multicoloured Swap Shop” for the first time. This was a Saturday morning show with Noel Edmonds presenting and Keith Chegwin out and about around the United Kingdom where somewhere there would be a bunch of kids swapping things. Mum liked Noel Edmonds. She liked the way he joked and the cameramen would laugh. She thought it was relaxed and fun. This was a program we watched. We watched the BBC. “Mr Benn”, “Play Away”, “Blue Peter”, and “Jackanory” were all staples and were being broadcast by 1976. The television didn’t transmit continuously – showing only a test card for most of the day - and there were only three channels: BBC1, BBC2, and ITV.

Mum thought ITV was common. Mum read books. When I was older, I’d eat blocks of jelly raw. Mum made treacle toffee. She made Irish Stew, soups, and real chips in a deep fat frier.

For Christmas, dad was home and Granddad and Auntie Maureen came over for lunch. We would have a turkey and mum would make a Christmas cake. We always had mince pies and Milk Tray chocolates. We got stockings which were full of tangerines and colouring pencils. I can’t remember my 1976 presents.

I remember in the downstairs living room, we had wooden beams and we hung decorations and streamers from the beams. The slate shelf was a low slate wall, topped by flags you could sit on and then it rose up as a slate wall. It was a perfect precipice for toy soldiers to fight across. It was fascinating in its detail. The slate was different, each stone and the cement that held the stones together was abrasive to the fingertip, but you could gouge at it and reduce it back to sand.

The television was on the slate shelf in one corner so I’d lie on the carpet in front of it. We had a coal fire. The coal was delivered by a coal man who had a horse and cart and would carry the sacks to the bunker at the back of the house.  The Christmas tree was real and dropped needles. I lay under the Christmas tree and looked up at the decorations. Mum hated people who decorated things tastefully. She liked throwing everything on the Christmas tree. Tinsel, miniature Santas, baubles, three sets of lights and an angel or a star on top.

We watched “Flash Gordon” in the mornings, starring Buster Crabbe, “Top of the Pops”, “The Queen’s Speech” and “Bruce Forsyth’s Generation Game” in the afternoon, and “Morecambe and Wise” in the evening. We always watched the News. There was even a news show for children called “Newsround” and I remember John Craven as the presenter. He spoke like a news reader. The radio was always Radio 2 and Terry Wogan, who mum liked because he was Irish. Val Doonican did a show on Boxing Day.

Robins came to visit the twigs on the hedge outside the kitchen window.