The first understanding of the injustice of limited freedom
Mum baked bread and she made cakes. She had a Kenwood food processor. With it she mixed the butter and sugar and flower into a cake mix. We sat on stools and watched her do all of this. She added currents and raisins, and poured the mix, folding and beige, into the cake tin to then put in the already hot oven. Then she unscrewed the attachment and gave one of us that to lick. The other two got spoons and the bowls to scrape what hadn't gone into
the tin. The big wooden spoon as well was worth licking. I could never understand – and this might well be one of my first conscious disagreements with mum – why she didn’t just give us the whole of the cake mix to eat. After all, the cake was nice, but nowhere near as nice as the gloopy pudding from which it was made.
Catherine had rusks which were big biscuits that went mushy in milk. Though we were too old, Francis and I sometimes had rusks0 too. Mum made sandwiches with fruit. Banana sandwiches or apple sandwiches with brown sugar on top. Toast with butter and sugar on top. We had a treat box full of chocolate biscuits, like Penguins, Orange Clubs, Wagon Wheels, Milky Bars. I remember the adverts. “The Milky Bars are on me!” the Milky Bar Kid would declare having defeated the baddie in a wild west town. The Milky Bar Kid wore glasses and looked like you’d hate him in real life.
We played outside. We had gooseberry bushes, blackberries grew in the hedges. In the orchard, we had crab apples and baking apples, pears as well. But the apples were all very bitter. We ate them anyway. The gooseberries were always very bitter but that was only because we ate them as soon as they were visible and didn’t wait until they were properly ripe. The shed was dark and dad had bits of motorcycles that he built from a kit.
The road that ran passed the house wasn’t particularly busy but because we lived on a dangerous corner we weren’t allowed to cross to the other side or walk along it on our own. We went, mum and us all in single file to the post office once. It was a hot day. The post office was at the top of Ireleth Hill which was the first village on the way to Barrow. In Ireleth you could either go up the hill – over the tops – towards Ulverston (where I had been born) and Dalton, or you could go downhill towards Askam where dad had been born in Marsh Street and along to the estuary and the Irish sea. We could see the sea from our house along with the whole panorama from Black Combe up to Scafell and along to the Old Man of Coniston. In the winter, the peaks would be iced with snow.
I learned time as well. Mum went for coffee mornings. She and other mums took it turns to host these. She said we’ll be an hour and we’d play with the other children who were out age. An hour – this is an hour.
Mum slapped us when we misbehaved. She threatened us with dad a lot too. Wait until your father gets home, she said. Which was also a cartoon with a song that sang exactly that: “wait until your father gets, until your father gets, wait until your father gets home!” I misbehaved sometimes. Sometimes, I’d sulk or have a tantrum. But most of the time I was a “Golden boy.” Mum said I was entertaining. Always full of fun.
The Queen’s Silver Jubilee was celebrated on the Row – as we called the houses that made up Paradise – with games for us children, hay bales stacked as an obstacle course and pop and cakes. Mr and Mrs Steel had the house that was furtherest away. Then there were the Allonbys, Mr and Mrs Rogers, the Atkinsons who had kids who were older than us. Then there was the man with the ice cream van and next door we had Ray and Dot Gedling who had two sons Lee and Mike. Lee was Francis’ age and Mike was one year older than me. Lee had real charisma. He could make anything. This happened later, but I’ll put it her so I don’t forget. We decided we wanted toy guns and we were going to making them out of wood. Dad made me something like a Thompson machine gun. It looked great, but then Lee turned up and he’d made a Schmeiser, the German machine gun, but his looked like a replica, the real thing. Dad’s was more like a toy, a cut out of a gun. Lee’s was painted black and the magazine came out and slotted back in. Dad was massively impressed. Mike didn’t have his brother’s grace or skills.
It was hot and I always wore shorts. I wore shorts whenever I could. Almost all pictures of me from this point until I went to secondary school featured me in shorts. I even went sledging in the snow in shorts.
In the summer, we went to the cinema for the first time ever. We went to see King Kong. It starred Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lange. Kong climbs up the World Trade Centre in New York where he is attacked by men with flamethrowers and helicopters. He falls to his death. The Astra in Barrow-in-Furness was the name of the cinema. The Astra was deep reds and greens and hidden lighting and heavy velvet curtains which parted before the film and closed when the adverts were over. There was an ice cream lady who came in with a tray of ice creams, lollies and choc-ices on a tray between the short film and the main feature. The adverts were for Chinese restaurants close to the cinema and Westlers Hot Dogs available from the foyer.
We went to visit Auntie Vera and Uncle Brian in Bedfordshire and Auntie Marjorie and Uncle Derek in Holme, in Yorkshire. Helen, their daughter, had a horse and we went up to see the horse in its field. We go for a walk with Helen and her dog Tara, a collie, but the police stop us and take us back home, because the Yorkshire Ripper has killed six women. Football fans mock the police with chants of “6 – nil.”
When we were home we’d visit grandad on Fridays. If grandad wasn’t in the mood, he’d tell mum he was washing his underpants. It was almost like it was code for her to make it quick. If he was in the mood we got 50p and used it to buy Warlord, a comic book which featured Union Jack Jackson and Charlie’s War, along with other stories which greatly glorified the Second World War and the role of the British in saving Europe and the world from the Nazis. This and Where Eagles Dare and Zulu cemented my view that Britain and the British were unquestionably a force for good in the world.
The other comic book I read – along with Warlord – was The Beano. I liked Dennis the Menace and the Bash Street Kids and Billy Whizz.
In America, Elvis was found dead in the bathroom by Ginger Alden, his girlfriend. He was overweight and had been abusing prescription drugs for some time. His performances had become so poor and short, often with Elvis forgetting the words of his most famous songs, that his fans began to boo him. In his hotel room he’d spend his time reciting his favourite Monty Python sketches or reading his books on spiritualism. The radio announced Elvis’ death while mum was ironing. She had piles of ironing around the ironing board and the radio played non-stop Elvis. I remember dancing around the piles like I was King Kong and the piles of clean, sweet smelling washing were the Twin Towers.
Punk
President Carter was sworn in. Red Rum won the Grand National for the third time. Hamida Djandoubi is the last person to be guillotined in France. The Space Shuttle Enterprise was taken on several test flights, piggybacking on modified Boeing 747s before being released and landing autonomously. Pioneer 10 – launched in 1972 – was now in between Saturn and Uranus. On Earth, on 20th of August, Voyager 2 was launched, a probe which was to fly past Jupiter. Voyager 1, which had been supposed to go first, was launched in September. In December, both probes entered the asteroid belt and Voyager 1 overtook Voyager 2 as they both headed towards the gas giant.
On the 9th of November, a record ship owner in Nottingham Chris Seale was arrested for obscenity. He had placed a display of the Sex Pistols first album Never Mind the Bollocks Here are The Sex Pistols in his shop window. The police had order him to remove it four times already and he had done so only to put it back once they were gone. Some thought that the head of the Virgin record company, Richard Branson, wanted to provoke a legal case in order to drum up publicity for the new record. He immediately offered to pay Seale’s legal costs and QC John Mortimer was hired. Mortimer had joined the Communist Party while at Oxford and played a well-received Richard II, before turning to film writing and then the law. In 1975, he created Rumpole of the Bailey, a popular character played by Leo McKern, an Australian character actor who suffered from terrible stage fright.
Mortimer argued that a double standard was applied as newspaper had printed the full title of the album without being prosecuted. He also called Dryden expert and literary scholar Professor James Kinsley, who testified that “bollocks” was an old English word which appeared in early versions of the Bible, where it meant testicles. In the King James Authorized Version the word was substituted for “stones”. At which point the lead singer of the Sex Pistols Johnny Rotten passed a note saying that if they lost the case he’d be happy to change the name of the album to “Never Mind the Stones.” They won the case and the publicity helped the already exploding album sales.
Johnny Lydon – as he is now more commonly known – is now a fucking arse. He pontificates on the dangers of immigration, Brexit and his pride in being British while living mostly in California. His own history as an Irish immigrant – his autobiography published in 1993 is called Rotten – No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs – doesn’t appear to inform him as to the hardships of others. As Flaubert once noted, inside every revolutionary is a policeman fighting to get out.
I was never really a punk anyway. I was a post-punk. An influential album released this year was 77 by Talking Heads. I’ll buy this a lot later and the group will become a constant in my life until the present day. Decades, even though by the time I like them they’re basically finished. I’ll also like Wire, who will have a strange oasis of popularity in Barrow-in-Furness. There is a savage music scene in Barrow. Who you like and don’t like will matter more than it does anywhere else I’ve ever been.
Our Lady of the Rosary
In September, I began school at Our Lady of the Rosary Roman Catholic School in Dalton-in-Furness, which was a town about four miles from our house. It was a modern one-storied building with flat roofs and skylights that sometimes leaked when it rained. There were the infants, the juniors and the seniors, though I might be getting the names mixed up. Every day there was assembly in the gym with a prayer and a song we all had to sing. A hymn. Mr Poole the headmaster blew into a flute with a keyboard so we all started in the same key. Mrs Classic took the infants and we learned how to tie our shoelaces and tell the time using a big clock. There was playtime and if the weather was nice we were allowed to play outside but we weren’t allowed onto the grass unless it was summer, which it very rarely was. As infants I don’t think we were allowed out of sight much.
There were dinner ladies and we ate dinner – the midday meal was always dinner – around a big table. When you got to your place, you would grab your glass and breathe or spit in it so no one else could have it. The food was old fashioned. Sheperd’s pie or burgers and chips. Rice pudding and semolina for afters. The worst was when they gave us ketchup but it was actually tomato puree which was horrible. At the bag of the canteen were the bins with all the potato peals and slops for the pigs. It stank.
My favourite place in the school was the Quiet Room. It was purple and made of fabric. There were big steps that served as seats up to the windows and went around the walls. We would lie on the seats and go to sleep in the afternoon, or have a story read. Some games – like Sleeping Tigers – were designed to make us go to sleep. We lay on the floor pretending to be asleep and Mrs Classic made sure no one moved. I got a sty on my eye and Mrs Classic had to lance it. She did it with the minimum of fuss and gave me a sweet for being brave. A few months later I got another sty and she did the same. One of my classmates asked me how it went and I said loudly that I was very brave and last time I got a sweet and Mrs Classic was apologetic and said she was sorry she’d forgotten and quickly let me pick a sweet. I was mortified at myself and to this day I feel a nauseating sense of self-hatred and embarrassment thinking of this story.
At Christmas, there were Elvis films every day in tribute to the King of Rock and Roll who had died aged forty-two that Summer. We watched “The Two Ronnies” with Auntie Maureen and Granddad. Everyone came with presents. We liked presents. I still believed in Santa Claus. I couldn’t sleep before Christmas. I was too excited. On Christmas Eve there was a special Jim’ll Fix It. Children wrote in to the white haired ex-deejay asking Please fix it for me to yodel in the Alps ... or sing with Val Doonican ... or make a giant cake ... or meet Father Christmas!” Jim always fixed it. And they got a Jim Fixed it for Me Badge. After his death in 2011 at the age of 84, it was revealed that Jimmy Saville had committed hundreds of sexual assaults including rape, against children. There were even credible accusations of necrophilia in the hospitals where he volunteered.