1979

An experiment in autobiography

Good Morning to All

New Year’s Day fell on a Monday, fittingly. The beginning of the year - the beginning of the week, I thought. But I was surprised to be told by Father Keiran that Sunday was actually supposed to be the beginning of the week. I always assumed it was Monday. In the Islamic world, Friday is the Sabbath. I once heard a story about how the Americans were baffled by the fact that all the Iraqi soldiers they captured during the Gulf War had birthdates which were either the first of January or the first of June. But in the Arab world birthdays were for children and many people didn’t keep track of their birthdays into adulthood and so when it came to the draft, a birthdate was chosen for them. I don’t know if this is true. It’s such a good story, I don’t want to go to the trouble of disproving it.

But it reminds you that everything that you think is inevitable and universal and timeless, is actually context dependent, local and historical. “Happy Birthday” was a song that was written by sisters Patty and Mildred J. Hill, or at least they wrote the melody to a song called “Good Morning to All”. People didn’t say “hello” or “okay” before the Twentieth Century.

At the beginning of the year, the Pol Pot regime collapsed in Cambodia and Iran began its age of Ayatollahs, following the Islamic revolution. There was always something happening somewhere.

Being bad

There comes a time in a child’s life when they stop feeling that they are automatically good. Sometimes that’s why children can seem capable of cruelty; not because they’re being cruel, but because they don’t yet have a concept of it, so they inadvertently do cruel things while assuming they’re actually being good. It’d be interesting to find out when I stopped feeling I was automatically good. When did I make that shift between innocence and experience?

I remember we would take snails off the walls near the bus stop at school and put them on the road to get crunched by the cars and lorries. Did I know that was cruel? I remember there was a boy who sat at the back of the bus with curly hair and we used to make fun of him because he was too old to do anything about it. We were protected by being little. Thinking back we must have made his journey to college truly unpleasant. But he had this mop of curly hair and that was enough.

I remember being the victim of bullying. That bit’s easy. Stewart Rhodes was a bully. As the only black kid in our class - or for that matter in the whole school - he probably didn’t have much choice but to be a bully. His older brother though would later become a chef and then come out as gay. Stewart, on the other hand, became a rugby player and nightclub bouncer. Problems followed later.

There was a moment in primary school when Stewart Rhodes said that my mum was fat. It was a rude and horrible thing to say, nasty, and I knew he was just saying it to hurt me but I looked at my mum and for the first time, I saw that she was actually fat. The concept had never occurred to me.

Maybe she wasn’t even particularly overweight, and anyway what did it matter? But knowledge and shame often come together.

I entered this year as six and would leave it as seven. I’d be in the Juniors by now, learning important things every day. Or so it seemed. We were done with tying our shoelaces and working out what time it was on the big clock. We didn’t spend as much time playing, now the work of understanding things was beginning. I was reading more and more. Carving out my own area of understanding. The bus ride to school from the end of Paradise to Dalton-in-Furness. The scary large black-uniformed kids from Dowdales. The lad with silly hair. We had bus passes which were called bus contracts. The bus company was called Ribble after the river in Lancashire where the company was based.

The Muggletonians

On February 3, 1651 a London tailor called John Reeve heard the voice of God. God had spoken to him like a voice of someone speaking in his ear and told him that he was granted the status of being his messenger. Reeve would be the ear that heard God and his cousin Lodowicke Muggleton, would be his mouth. They believed that there was no God but Christ; there was no devil but the unclean reason of man; Heaven is a place beyond the stars; Hell is the Earth with the Sun extinguished; Angels are beings of reason and the Soul dies with the body and is resurrected with it.

Lodowicke also believed that God paid no attention to what people were doing and if sin occurred the sinner was only hurting themselves. They believed the end was nigh, but also found time to argue with the Quakers and Ranters. Their meetings had no shape or form. Songs were sang, people talked, a meal was eaten, a few drinks shared and at a certain point everyone went home. It was described as “disorganized religion” and William Blake was said to be influenced by the ideas he picked up that were still around in the 19th century.

On the one hand, there was a rationalism to their creed, which greatly valued the idea of freedom, and on the other it was bonkers: a highly intellectual anti-intellectualism according to EP Thompson, the author of The Making of the English Working Class. The witnesses claimed to be able to damn people to death, but there was also the argument within the group that preaching to other people was pointless, perhaps even dangerous.

The sect dwindled in the 20th Century. Philip Noakes was the last Muggletonian. He died in February in 1979 in Kent. The papers and tracts were transferred to the British Library.

CHiPs

There were a number of American television programmes that became fixtures this year. CHiPs and The Dukes of Hazzard were two which cemented the idea of the US being a place of motorcycle and car chases and constantly blue skies. The first had been the idea of Rick Rosner, who had been a reserve deputy for Los Angeles County Police Department. It starred Vietnam Vet Larry Wilcox as Jon and Erik Estrada as “Ponch.” Estrada couldn’t actually ride his motorcycle and had to have an intensive course. He broke both wrists in an accident. The Dukes of Hazzard was developed from a film, The Moonrunners, a backwater car chase movie starring James Mitchum, son of Robert Mitchum. Its Good Ol’ Boy ethos draped in a Confederate flag went unnoticed in Cumbria. All I wanted to do was live in America, because the cars were bigger and it was always sunny.

I thought that was a racial signifier of an American: the squint. Lee Majors and Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen, they all had this squint, they probably got from growing up where it was just so constantly sunny.

Mum preferred Terry Wogan who was Irish and didn’t squint. She listened to on the radio in the morning and who presented Blankety Blank. The week began to organise itself according to television. We got home from school about 4:30 and there were the children’s programmes, Newsround, Battle of the Planets, the Red Hand Gang and a smattering of Hanna-Barbera cartoons. These cartoons had much more of an impact on me than Disney which I never saw because they weren’t shown on television. Instead I saw Tom and Jerry, Yogi Bear, Top Cat, Wally Gator, Touché Turtle and Dum Dum, and the Wacky Races with Dastardly and Muttley and Penelope Pitstop, the Hair Bear Bunch, Scooby Doo, Hong Kong Phooey, voiced by Scatman Carothers who would play Chef in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, and Wait Till Your Father Gets Home. I could probably sing the theme tunes of pretty much all of these.

Then there was the adult news and then staples of quiz shows and sitcoms, or magazine programmes like Tomorrow’s World, or Top of the Pops. Nine o’clock we usually had to go to bed. Not the Nine O’Clock News would come in later that year and was funny but in a way we couldn’t quite understand. British comedy always had this not quite safe to watch with the kids aspect. It wasn’t family friendly, the way it was in the US.

Margaret Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher won the general election. I remember quite liking the idea of her winning simply because she was a woman, an idea I would learn to regret. She was interviewed by John Craven on Newsround as were the other party leaders. Mum and dad would always talk about politics. We were always left wing. Mum had the Irishness as well, which meant rebel songs and a vague dislike of British authority. I didn’t realize that I would be living with her for the whole of my adolescence. One of the things Thatcher had done as Education Secretary had been to take away the free milk that we were given at school. I remember the little cartons we drank and break time. It was true that many of us didn’t like the milk. Maggie Thatcher, milk snatcher! It was all tied up with her being a woman in the end. There would be horrific misogyny on the left as well as the right. Maggie herself had effectively kicked away the ladder she’d climbed up on, making sure she had no other women close to her, in her cabinet for instance. She was very effective at creating a caricature of herself - the Iron Lady - who even her enemies had to admire.

All I saw was a woman with a big bouffant of hair, more like a hat than anything natural, and a voice that sounded more like someone doing an impersonation of her.

Bunk Beds

At this time Francis and I had bunk beds. Briefly. I think. I remember having them, but it was for a short time. Then he would have the back bedroom, in the corner of the house looking up towards Coniston Old Man and over the back field up to the gorse-bushed fell. I had the room between mum and dad’s room and the guest room which was always referred to as Auntie K’s room. We had a phone by now - 64100 was our number. Over the year we would end up getting an extension which was very exciting and allowed you to have a private conversation, but this was not yet and anyway I was six going on seven and had no interest in telephones. They were heavy things which you only used very occasionally to say hello to a distant auntie on your birthday. In fact, we dreaded phone calls, because they would interrupt what we were doing and mum would sit on the phone and talk to Auntie Marjorie for what seemed like hours when we were trying to watch Runaround, or Magic Roundabout.

I was always entertaining. Liked to be the center of attention. As a middle child and youngest son, I wanted to join in and had a healthy disrespect for my elder brother. Francis didn’t seem to know as much as he thought he did. He might be one of the big boys and he’d always beat me at games and sport but what was he doing anyway competing with his brother who was two years younger? This might have been something that I’m reading back, but there’s not a time I can’t remember feeling that any superiority he might rightly claim had built within it a basic unfairness. My resistance was not to care. Not to join in. You can win a game simply by refusing to participate.

Leo Ruscillo pointed out I had a knack of falling over on purpose which made chasing me no fun. Like many things, he understood.

I was no perfect golden boy, though this would be the name my mother gave me. I sulked to a depth that if it was oceanic would enter trenches. I had tantrums: rare but totalitarian. It was absolutely normal for me to break something I loved in one of these rages. Self-destruction as an act of aggression. Look how much you hurt me. You forced me to kill my Action Man. My mood was increasingly related to being bought things. I was an acquisitive lad. We’d go to ASDA and I’d find something - usually a comic or book and I’d stand in front of it until I was told to come away. Hopefully mum would take the hint and if it wasn’t too expensive I might be allowed to put it in the basket. We never had that much money, but mum and dad were always generous. If they could make us happy they would. But I wanted more. They gave us twenty pence pocket money and it was enough to buy a Beano and some chews.

Beano had Dennis the Menace and his dog Gnasher. The Bash Street Kids, Billy the Whizz, Minnie the Minx. It was all about mischief and I had a badge with googly eyes of Gnasher as well as a wallet that came when I entered the Dennis the Menace fan club. The Dandy with Desperate Dan I never liked. Whizzer and Chips was okay, but Beano was my go to, my regular.

I’d become an avid voracious, precocious reader. Mum was always reading. She’d bake and do housework in the morning and then sit in the afternoon and read big books by authors with exotic names like Leon Uris and Colleen McCullough. I sometimes studied these books, their covers particularly. I was drawn to book shelves. This was a period when mum would buy joint presents for me and Francis. Usually to Francis’ specifications. See the great Scalextrix scandal of 1978. Sometimes she bought something she wanted “for the family” - which is why she bought Michael Jackson’s “Off the Wall” album which we all liked. I played this a lot. It had a gatefold sleeve similar to my War of the Worlds album though it wasn’t a double album. Inside the gatefold it had all the lyrics so you could follow the songs like you did the mass in your missal on a Sunday. God, mass was boring. It was so boring. And yet you had to go. And you had to pretend you didn’t hate it. You had to pretend you liked it. But it just hurt to be in that room, with the flock wallpaper and the uncomfortable chairs. And everyone was soooo bad at singing.

But I remember her coming back from somewhere once and she had a copy of The Lord of the Rings. Lord knows what possessed her. Probably it was because Jackanory, the BBC storytelling program, had just done The Hobbit with Bernard Cribbens reading as Bilbo Baggins. For the next ten years or so there would hardly be a month in which I wasn’t at some point reading or rereading Lord of the Rings. Dune and Lord of the Rings orbited constantly.

The Lord of the Rings was a big, one-volume edition with yellow trees framing the front illustration by Pauline Baynes. I’ll see if I can dig it out. Just seeing the cover made me feel excited and comforted. It also was the first time I got that strange magical idea that books were time machines. You see you could hold one in your hand right now. But to read them you had to spend weeks going through them page by page following the words line by line and the magic of the voices and images coming alive in your head. But there they were again once you closed them, a physical object that smelled - wonderfully. When I was this age reading was difficult for me and reading a book right to the end was a real achievement. I tended to cheat. There were so many books I would stop reading twenty pages from the end. That was the point that the lure of reading another book would become too much. I’m not sure I ever made it all the way through to the end of Lord of the Rings while I was a child. To complete it wasn’t important. It was just reading it in the moment.

Weddings

We had three weddings that year. Uncle Brian and Auntie Vera’s daughter Julie married Derek in May. Then their son Paul married Lesley in August. And then Auntie Joan and Uncle Sam’s daughter Gillian married Harry in September.

I wore a dickie bow tie, new shoes and a velveteen zip up top. I had a bowl cut. We went to the barbers on Barrow Island or the one in Dalton which was Unisex and made a big deal out it. I think it was called His and Hers. I was beginning to realize I looked like something but was not sure what. I had bucked teeth and this made me feel bad also because I slurped my words when I got excited which was often. A chatterbox, they said.

We would go down south for the first two weddings and stay in strange places. Hotels or with the family in guest bedrooms. The towels smelled different. Streets were unfamiliar. We went to see The Cat from Outer Space at a cinema in Biggleswade.

Weddings were long days of best behaviour and no doubt too much giddiness. Church services with flowers. Adults smoking and drinking and eating. Ribald jokes to hoots of laughter. Music and balloons. Adults might dance but we would find some sort of game to play, some version of tig. Until we fell asleep on a pile of coats.

I asked my cousin Gill about these weddings and she called them a conundrum of cousins. Because my dad was the baby of the family, our cousins were always older than us. I couldn’t believe that Pauline, dad’s niece, was actually older than mum but delighted in calling mum Auntie Rosaleen, loudly and frequently.

The Rubber Shop

Voyager 1 reached Jupiter, passing it at 172,000 miles and photographing its rings. It will also reveal the existence of active volcanoes on Io, one of Jupiter’s moons. Io is slightly bigger than our Moon and was discovered by Galileo Galilei. It has more than 400 active volcanoes and lava flows hundreds of miles wide. This is caused by the interference of Jupiter’s massive gravity on its sulphate crust which is being pulled into a tidal motion that way our moon affects the oceanic tides. Voyager 2 would pass by in July and even though only a couple of months since Voyager 1, it would record that large physical features had changed and some eruptions were still ongoing.

I think my science fiction fixation was beginning. In fact this was the year Francis and I made a momentous swap. Swapping things wears a big deal and something that was constantly going on. At school it was like a medieval form of barter. You didn’t necessarily want to get something better than what you already had, just different. Novelty was the value that was added. We were encouraged by the Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, of course. We had Warlord comics, Battle comics, and lots of AirFix soldiers. Bags of them. I swapped all of mine for all of Francis’ space stuff. Which I doubt amounted to much.

The big film I remember going to see this year was Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which I still think has to be one of the best titles ever for a film. In those days, cheap TV knock offs were made of big movies. There was M.A.S.H. But that actually became a very popular series. Others were either based on a trend in movies or were direct adaptations from films. The adverts for Star Trek: The Motion Picture were constant. It was everywhere on television. I got a Star Trek: The Motion Picture Annual for Christmas. It was amazing because Voyager 1 was in Star Trek The Motion Picture as the villain. Or at least we think it’s the villain until in the end, as with many Star Trek episodes, we realize that the villain is really our own misunderstanding of its true nature.

I loved the Star Trek series as well. The episodes seemed to be on constantly throughout my childhood, moving time slots and channels, but always on the BBC. I had the books by James Blish which basically anthologized the series as short stories.

I remember the film being long. I’m not sure if I lost track of it at points but I also got lost in it. It was also weird considering that the people in the TV show had aged. I didn’t really know what age was or how it worked when it came to TV. Dr McCoy began the film with a beard, but he was always pretty old, even in the TV show. Kirk was the one who seemed the most different. He had those tight curls on his head and he’d lost the 60s shine of new youthfulness. He probably wasn’t that old. Not even fifty. The way Paul McCartney wasn’t that old, but seemed old to me simply because he had a history that I hadn’t been there for.

Adam and the Ants were new. I remember them being on the cover of Look-In. Look-In was the comic I’d end up going to around about this time. As I was leaving the Beano. It was supposed to be a TV Times but for kids. It gave you addresses of famous people for you to write to. I wanted to write to Harrison Ford but they didn’t have a page with his address on. Timothy Hillman whose father owned the Rubber Shop, a toy shop in Dalton, had a whole bunch of Look-Ins that he gave me in exchange for something, I can’t remember what. I found David Prowse’s address. As he’d played Darth Vader, I wrote to him asking if he had Harrison Ford’s but didn’t get a reply. The same thing with Anthony Daniels who played C3-PO. Nothing.

Look-In featured comic strips based on popular TV shows, including CHiPs. The covers were also beautifully painted by the Italian movie poster artist Arnaldo Putzu, who’d been brought in from Rome to create some of the best poster art which was often better than the movies they advertised. His posters advertised such films as the Carry On series, many Hammer movies as well as the beautiful posters that announced Get Carter and The Wild Geese. We had the book of The Wild Geese, with Putzu’s art on the cover. It might have seemed like a step down to paint acrylic paintings for the cover of a comic like Look-In but he was happy with the regular pay day and the offices of the magazine weren’t far from his own, so it was easy to walk across if they needed to meet him for a discussion. He did a cover featuring the cast of Star Trek The Motion Picture in December to celebrate the film’s release. When he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, he found that painting could temporarily help with the symptoms. He died in 2012.

Eddie Kidd was in the new Harrison Ford film, as his stuntman. He doubled for Ford leaping over a railway cutting on a motorcycle with a dummy tied to his back. Blue Peter did a whole film about it, even though the movie itself wasn’t really suitable for children. Eddie Kidd was often on television jumping over things on his motorcycle. He was the British version of Evel Knievel. Everyone had an Evel Knievel motorcycle and rider. You wound him up on his little red ramp and he would set off and ride away at great speed.

Harrison Ford hated the film and has never seen it. I would meet Harrison Ford. It was a very exciting moment for me to talk to him and shake his hand. He was a very courteous and funny man. It was a dream come true quite literally. If I could go back in time and tell seven year old me that I would meet Harrison Ford he might be a bit stroppy that it took me so long, but he’d also piss himself with excitement.

Such is the capacity to feel strong emotions in the young.