1980

I don’t know if the turn of the decade had much of an impact on me. I imagine it did. I think there was a lot of talk of the eighties at the time. We were all very aware of the eighties on television for instance. Something newand shiny had been born. Something with shoulderpads and big hair, squealing synth music and to be modern meant to be futuristic in a way that already felt that it would be dated in no time at all. A time warp. The seventies were stale, with the grimness of a fried egg that had gone cold. Makeup that wouldn’t come off. The eighties were going to be as embarrassing as Babysham but at least they were new.

But these conclusions would come later. Much later.

Broom

Meanwhile, on the island of Tanna, they originally called him John Broom, or John Prum. Then John Frum. He would appear to them in visions if they ate the kava plant. When asked what he looked like, one journalist was told, “He looks like you. Tall and white.” I remember that journalist because he would become specialized in nature documentaries and be beaten up on screen by gorillas. A friend of mine would work with him on his films and become a producer. He’d remember meeting him in Ethiopia for the first time as he hiked out to the campsite, and sat by the fire, opened his rucksack to delve in and produce bottle after bottle of red wine. That’s how you travel in the field.

The islanders believed John Frum would come and get rid of the other whites and provide them with plenty when he came. They would spend their money all at once, partying, going on sprees. They built docking places on the island to welcome his return. Some believed that the name was a version of John from (America). Others said he could be from anywhere. He would bring plenty and get rid of the modernisers and the Christians. They said he was their Jesus. They had parades.

On January the first, his followers on Tanna seceded from Tafea, a province of Vanuatu, a collection of islands in the South Pacific. The name Tafea is an acronym of the islands Tanna, Aneityum, Futuna, Erromango and Aniwa. Acronyms are a red flag of imperialism. No one wants to live in an acronym. They’re the linguistic equivalent of ruler straight lines on maps.

Tanna has a volcano. It is sacred to the Cargo Cult. Volcanoes were sacred to me as a child as well. When we go on a school trip to Edinburgh I get a book from the Natural History Museum about volcanoes. Francis gets a cricket ball. The train that takes us there has compartments and a corridor down one side, like the Hogwarts Express. We get our sandwiches out before we get to Lancaster. We smush our sandwiches still in their plastic bags into each other’s faces. This gives me an aversion to egg sandwiches for the rest of my childhood. The aversion is solidified into lore when mum makes egg sandwiches for dinner and I want to watch the Batman cartoon. In order to hurry things up I exaggerate my disgust and I’m excused from the table, as they say in American films. Which means now I definitely have to hate egg sandwiches until I leave home and go to university.

Dinosaurs, dragons, volcanoes. Other planets. Stars and spaceships and war. These things fill my mind. I want to be a secret agent, captain a spaceship.

When I was a kid, I worried about how my science fiction contradicted my Catholicism. If there were all these other planets, all these aliens, what did Jesus being born in Nazareth and dying on a hill outside of Jerusalem have to do with them? Likewise what did Jesus have to do with these Melanesian people? Their own science fiction made more sense. The respect they paid to the volcano was not irrational. If I lived on an island with a volcano, I would worship it. You’d be mad not to.

I made up my own ideas. I tried to convince my friends of the validity of these ideas. I told them that the Force in Star Wars was an actual thing. I told them I could train them in it. I told them that when the Russians came, we should start an army of resistance. A Kid’s Army. I have imaginary friends. Lots of them. Harrison Ford is one. Roger Moore another. And Jesus, obviously. And God.

It’s a leap year. I am going to be eight years old in June. I like refreshers and sherbet and choc-ices. I like riding my bike, building camps and dams. I don’t like nettle stings but there are dock leaves that you spit on and stick to the nettle sting and it feels better. I don’t like standing in cow shit but I do enjoy throwing large rocks into the middle of puddles and streams. I like damming streams and then destroying the dams and letting the water flood downstream like the water at the end of The Dam Busters. In the winter, I put my hands in the mud and it is so cold it stings. When it snows, we take plastic sacks from the farm and toboggan down the hills. I go out in the snow wearing shorts. I always wear shorts. Doesn’t matter what the weather is like.

We all have wellies and to play out in our wellies as much as we do trainers. When you go to the shoe shop, they give you a paper cone of dollymixtures. I don’t like dollymixtures in particular but they’re sweets and so better than nothing. I like wine gums and pear drops, copcops and chocolate.

In school, we wear normal shoes but have to also wear plimsols when we do games in the gym. These are black slip-ons with rubber soles. We play crab football which is football but you have to sit on the ground and scuttle along like that. When the weather is nice, we play outside. If the weather has been dry for long enough and the grass isn’t wet or the ground muddy, we can play on the grass. The hill slopes down to a banking, which rises up to a hedge, and on which we play “dead man’s fall,” pretending to be shot by machine guns, or killed by throwing knives and dying dramatically and screaming.

We have cap guns and we have rolls of caps that we also use in weighted plastic rockets which you throw high in the air. At the height of their parabola they turn over and head to earth with the cap in the nose cone. When it hits the ground, there’s a bang like a gunshot. We have smelly rubbers. They smell of chocolate, strawberries, or coca-cola, or orange, apple, or pears, or flowers. We spend a lot of time sniffing rubbers and passing them around. A trend arrives at school as if it’s been carried on the wind by spores. All of a sudden we’re collecting stickers, or rubbers, or caps, or yo-yoes, or gonks that you put on the top of your pencil or some other thing. Then the infection passes and we’re on to something else.

At school, in class, kids will ask me “Do you have a rubber, Johnny?” It takes me ages to realize that “rubber johnny” is something rude. Now I know it’s a condom, but it must be years that I understand this joke to be insulting without really understanding why. I understand because of the flavour of the laughter. The height of it. Its shrill triumph. It’s what Thomas Hobbes would identify in laughter as expressing “Sudden Glory,” a sense of superiority. Laughter as a signifier of power. I’m called Johnny for all my time at Our Lady’s.

I enjoy watching television and going to the cinema and I love reading. The family watches television together. I have this very clear memory of sitting upstairs in my bedroom, reading and hearing laughter from my mum and dad downstairs. It went on and on until either that night, or probably the next week I watched the same program. It was Hi-De-Hi, a typical British sitcom. It was set in a holiday camp where the staff of entertainers were trying to keep the campers happy. It was very funny and became a staple of the week. There were always these programmes we watched all together. Russ Abbot, Morecambe and Wise, The Two Ronnies. There were shows that mum and dad weren’t interested in Blake’s Seven and Battlestar Galattica. We went to see the pilot episode of Battlestar Galatica at the cinema where it was released as a film. We didn’t know we were watching TV. We thought it was a legitimate film. I’ll get the annual for Christmas or my birthday. I remember sitting in the car waiting for my mum to come back from somewhere, a shop or something and I’m reading the annual and it is Christmas Eve and that imprints as what Christmas Eve is for a long time.

I lie in bed and read at night by the light coming in from the landing. I can’t sleep without the landing light being on. Francis sleep walks sometimes and scares mum by standing in doorways when he should be asleep. He is still asleep but he’s upright, looming. He’s ten. My sister is six.

I like music but know nothing about it. This is a weird time for music. Cliff Richard and Joy Division, Kate Bush and Black Flag, the Dead Kennedys and Steely Dan all release albums. This is the last year that all the Beatles will still be alive. Queen release two albums this year. We watch Top of the Pops on a Thursday and listen to the Top 40 on a Sunday.

My mum and dad have a small unenthusiastic record collection. ABBA’s Arrival and Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall piled with a Max Boyce comedy record and Dionne Warwick. We go to Dalton-in-Furness and buy a single that my brother wants. Every time Francis wants something, he makes the argument that I want it too and so really it’s for the both of us and therefore he’s actually asking for half of what he’s asking for. Francis will later become a very successful businessman.

The single is called “My Perfect Cousin” by The Undertones, a Scottish punk band led by Fergal Sharkey. The lyrics are printed on the back of the single. There’s a drawing of a subbuteo player on the front. “My perfect cousin whatever he does I doesn’t,” the song goes. We think of Anthony Patiniott when we play it, which is unfair because I love Anthony. I can already tell they have more money than we do and we’ll have a major disagreement when he goes to see Moonraker and we haven’t seen it. I argue that I’ve seen so many clips of the film on television, I can piece it together. It is plainly nonsense and I have that painful internal sliding feeling you get when you are committed to an argument you know in your heart is wrong. It is not the first or last time I’ve had this feeling.

I love James Bond. ITV show Live and Let Die for the first time and its amazing. I love every film. I don’t understand that there could be a bad film. There’s bad television, like Songs of Praise or Antiques Roadshow, the political shows, the shows about gardening and cars. I hate the sport, except maybe snooker and some football. I like the music for the cricket, and the skiing, but I can’t concentrate on sport. My brother loves the sport. He loves all the sport.

I like sticker albums. I have football sticker albums from Panini and I’ll support Nottingham Forest for a few years only because I like the badge. And you have to say you support someone. They wear red and win a European cup this year. I also like Trevor Francis, a player of theirs, because he has two first names for his name. Later I’ll switch my allegiance to Liverpool who win the league this year. Emelyn Hughes, a Liverpool football player, actually comes from Barrow-in-Furness and is nicknamed Crazy Horse. He is one of the Captains of the sports quiz show: A Question of Sport.

Although I love films, I don’t get to go and see them frequently. This is because we live so far away from the cinema. Everything we want to do requires lifts from our parents. There’s a film called Hangar 18 that I see the trailer for and I would love to see but never get to see so it haunts my dreams. UFOs are a big topic this year. These are the years of UFOs and Big Foot, ghosts and telekinesis, the Bermuda Triangle and ghosts. I want to go and see Herbie Goes Bananas but again I can’t and instead I read the book. It has pictures in the middle: 16 color pictures from the motion picture. I can imagine the film. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it though I feel like I have. I directed it in my head when I read the book.

Auntie Maureen, or auntie Mo, sometimes turns up with books from the library for us to read. She hates Enid Blyton. Sometimes we go for trips with her, to Lancaster, Preston or Carlisle. I begin to build up ideas of these towns, via their shops and car parks. The roads we take to get there. Lancaster has a British Home Store with a canteen where we’ll stop for lunch. There’s a WH Smith where I’ll linger in front of a book that I want, or a toy, but usually a book. I sometimes like magic tricks. But books are my usual thing. I’m given a point or two pounds to spend. I always spot something that is fifty p more.

We get regular pocket money and I buy a Beano and a chew. That usually wipes me out. There’s a bubble gum that comes with a transfer that you lick and stick to your skin and it becomes a temporary tattoo.

I don’t know exactly when I first started to want to kill myself but it was about this time. Before we got rid of the Triumph Herald and bought the Renault 16. I remember leaning my head on the door of the car and feeling it was loose and wondering what would happen if I were to tip out onto the road and I started pressing my head against it with more force. Maybe a bump in the road would jar it open and out I’d go, to be crushed under the wheels of a hurtling juggernaut going in the opposite direction. I imagined leaping off high buildings as a number one way to do it. I reasoned this was because I’d never get the opportunity to do this and so it would be a new experience. Whereas poisoning yourself or bleeding to death just felt like an extension of the something already done.

Suicidal ideation in an eight year old is probably rare, I don’t know. I wasn’t miserable - far from it. The urge came from the lust after dramatic change. The idea would go from self-slaughter to the less radical running away. These were fantasies, but I made plans. At some point I started to put together a suitcase, a go-bag if you will, of supplies, including my Professionals Survival kit which included a water canteen and a compass. I had a pen knife and I could put in some spare clothes and old coins, green with age that I’d found in the garage. My idea was Frodo leaving Bag End. Except I’d be alone. The part of the fantasy I most lingered on was the aftermath. The search parties in the case of running away; the funeral in the case of the successful suicide.

I occasionally announced my intentions to my closest friends at school and then had to shamefacedly return to school the next day, still alive. And not in Lancaster. Or wherever it was I imagined I would get.

Voyager 1 confirms the existence of the moon Janus orbiting Saturn. The moon is small - about 150 km in diameter and orbits closely with another moon called Epimetheus, which is even smaller. Saturn and Jupiter have lots of small moons some less than three kilometers in diameter. There’s an asteroid called Apollo that also has a small moon orbiting it. The largest moon in the Solar System is Jupiter’s Ganymede, followed by Saturn’s Titan and Jupiter’s Callisto and Io. Then our moon. Ganymede is bigger than the planet Mercury and is made up of an almost equal combination of ice and rock. There is an underground ocean and many believe that life could well exist there.

I have books on astronomy and a sticker album of space rockets. The cards for the album come with packets of cigarettes. There’s another book with stickers of vintage cars which Francis has. One day when we’re watching television, they interrupt the programmes because something exciting is happening in London. Terrorists have taken hostages in the Iranian embassy and a policewoman has been killed. The SAS throw grenades and jump from one balcony to the next and there’s an explosion and the noise of gunfire and it’s reported that one hostage has been killed but the others have been saved. Everyone is incredibly excited and happy and we all want to join the SAS now. Their motto is: “Who Dares Wins.” A film will be rushed into production and star Lewis Collins from The Professionals. In the films, the terrorists are CND supporters which doesn’t exactly make sense. The SAS means the Special Air Services. We spend a lot of time playing Iranian Embassy Hostage Seige in the playground.

The WHO declares that smallpox has been eradicated globally; Pac-Man is released and the word “yuppie” appears for the first time in print. CNN is launched and Peter Sellers dies. I know Peter Seller as a talk show guest and Inspector Clousseau. I also recognise him from the films in which he plays lots of different people. He pops up in films like The Mouse that Roared which seems to be on in the Summer in the morning.

JR is shot on Dallas. He is the villain that everyone “loves to hate”. It is a huge mystery and the whole summer people will wear “Who Shot JR?” t-shirts and there was a song by the Wurzels. “I shot JR,” the lyrics went. “I wanted to be a superstar.”

The Hills of Tara

It’s July and Dad is back from Sullum Voe and he has hurt his arm which is bad news because we’re supposed to be going to Ireland on holiday to visit Uncle Patsy and the whole family, so now mum is going to have to drive. Granddad doesn’t want to go because he feels he’ll be intruding. The night before we’re due to go, dad goes round to ask him if he’s sure and granddad, on hearing it from dad, says okay, if dad’s sure it won’t be an imposition. It’ll be a surprise for Uncle Patsy and the others. No one knows he’s coming but us. We drive down to the car ferry at Liverpool and go across on the B&I line. I remember being excited all the time, but it took seven hours so we must have had colouring books and something to eat. We would’ve been very excited by the sea and especially the churning engines at the back.

When we got to Ireland, we were supposed to meet at a pub outside of Dublin. Granddad went and hid somewhere and then only came out when Patsy and the others arrived so that he could surprise them. Everyone was happy and there was lots of joking. I loved their accents and the way they would joke. There was this feeling of at once being included and ignored. We were looked after and made much of but we were never the center of attention. We drove up to a little coastal village called Clogherhead where we had a caravan that was in a farm yard.

Mum put us on the chairs that folded out into little beds, but when she came to wake us in the morning we were all sleeping on the floor. I remember coming out in the morning to go for a walk and there were some cottages in the first street and they all had thatched roofs and were different colours - blue and pink and yellow, and the sun was shining. We went down to the beach where there was an amusements arcade and you could go in the sea. We had a rubber dinghy. Uncle Patsy and Aunt Phil were in another caravan near ours and other members of the family came like Nuala and Melissa, Donal and Emer. Tara was there as well who was a girl around Francis’ age who we all decided was spoilt. She probably was, but nothing brings siblings together like a common enemy.

The Olympics were in Moscow and Steve Ovett and Sebastian Coe were competing together and I preferred Steve Ovett because he looked more ordinary. Coe looked like a swot. We watched some of it on a small TV in the caravan. The Irish didn’t care for them. It being a different country and all. Something I barely understood. I didn’t really understand how Grandad came from a different country either. And mum for that matter, though she’d been born in England. She liked Irish music and had a book by Leon Uris called Ireland which had lots of photographs of thatched cottages in the blue twilight with fire lit windows.

There were one-armed bandits at the amusements and a game where you roll pennies into a machine which has piles of money in it and two shelves moving so that you think any moment the shelves are going to push the money down into the chute where you can collect it. It never does. It’s always just about to.

Still, I hit the jackpot on the bandit and it pays out a whole load of coins spills out onto the tray. A little boy runs up and grabs a handful and dad has to chase him to get it back. I think dad calls him a thieving little bastard, but I might be filling that in. I was surprised how angry dad was. I carry the coins back to the caravan pooled in my jumper, which I have to hold up to stop the coins spilling over the top.

We go to Drogheda where there is a famous saint whose head has been preserved in the cathedral. Oliver Plunkett had been an Irish clergyman accused of high treason by the English Protestants, who said he wanted to facilitate a French invasion and a Popish takeover. He was hung, drawn and quartered in 1681, the last catholic to be martyred in England. Drawn could mean he was tied to a scaffold and dragged to the place of execution, or it could mean he was disembowelled. The hanging was often intentionally not fatal but a half strangulation so that the disembowelling and the quartering could occur while the victim was still alive. One such punched his executioner while being disembowelled which incensed the man enough to behead him instantly. Some victims were emasculated, castrated - they had their penises cut off and waved in the air.

Plunkett’s head seemed small and it was brown. For some reason I thought of vinegar. Was that what it was preserved in? Dead things fascinated us because I had never fully got the idea of death as a thing. How it works. 2001: A Space Odyssey was a moment I struggled with death. When Frank Poole is killed by HAL and David Bowman rescues him but of course he’s not really alive and he has to let go of the body before trying to re-enter the spaceship himself. I didn’t get it. How could he be sure he was dead? Maybe Frank was holding his breath. When I read about conditions on Mars and other planets, I’d confidently think to myself that I would survive. I nurtured the ambition of never dying. Maybe that’s why I could so blithely think about suicide. In my heart, I knew I was indestructible. But other people died with remarkable ease. When the Pope visits Brazil, the crowd that greets him in Fortaleza becomes a crush and people are killed.

While we’re in Drogheda we go and see The Empire Strikes Back, the second Star Wars film and the cinema is packed. When Darth Vader tells Luke that he’s his father, I assume that Darth Vader is lying. It won’t be until I see the next film that I realize he’s telling the truth.

We spend a lot of time in cars, driving from one tourist site to another. We visit the Hills of Tara. And the site of a battle that happened four hundred years ago that begins with a B. We go to Dublin, leaving Catherine behind because she’s too small and won’t like all the walking. Then mum and dad go to Belfast, and we all get left behind because we’re too small and won’t like all the terrorism. At some point the holiday is over and we’re on the ferry back to England.

The Death of John Lennon

Back on television we find out who shot JR. I’ve misunderstood something again and apparently JR is still alive. I assumed, having been shot, he’d be dead. Suddenly, the whole dilemma seems much less important. It turns out his sister-in-law/mistress shot him. Kristen Shepherd to be precise. There is a definite anticlimax to the resolution. At least for me because I’m not even following Dallas. Once the great theme music and the title sequence is over, my attention drifts. There’s too much kissing for one thing (yuk!)

The sunsets are glorious, the skies enormous and the trees turn every colour in the autumn. We pick chestnuts off the ground, peel their spiky husks off and make conkers. Drill a hole and then thread a knotted shoelace through and let battle commence. It upsets me, in a way, these games of destruction. Once you have a decent conker someone’s bound to brutalize and destroy it. The worst way to go is for your conker to becom entangled with your opponent’s lace and then they can just yank it out of your hand and stamp on it when it hits the ground. What’s that about? Some people apparently soak their conkers in vinegar to make them rock hard.At bonfire night there’s a big bonfire in the village, a Catherine Wheel is nailed to the washing line post and flies around in sparking circles. Roman Candles go up and there are fountains of sparks. Bangers whizz and crack.

We have treacle toffee, and toffee apples.

We’re far away from any street light and so if there are no clouds the stars come out so bright that you feel that we’re on board a spaceship, floating through the galaxy. As indeed we are. You can stand outside, gazing up, your face cold, your breath a whisper of cloud that touches your face before it disappears with a departing heat.

Ronald Reagan is elected President of the United States of America. Like Maggie Thatcher, I probably like him initially because he’s an actor and squints which is all you really need from an American. Lee Majors squints, as does Clint Eastwood and John Wayne. One of the great squinters, Steve McQueen dies. He of the failed jump over the barbed wire fence in The Great Escape, the most magnificent of The Magnificent Seven.

We spent all summer worrying about who shot JR and we should’ve been worrying about who was going to shoot JL. 1980 among everything else is the last year that The Beatles are all alive. Mark Chapman shoots John Lennon late one night in early December, as he returns with Yoko Ono to their apartment in the Dakota Building in New York City. It is a death I remember. I remember it being on the news, being on the radio. The music of the Beatles and John Lennon, being everywhere. It’s like when Elvis died but now I’m more aware. We talk about it in school. The Beatles do songs that everyone likes. Everyone recognises. The Man with the Golden Gun and Digby the Biggest Dog in the World were on television at Christmas. I remember the Christmas decorations. The neat little santa baubles to hang on the tree and the tinsel and streamers to weave across the ceiling. Mum liked the Christmas tree to be a) real and b) look like all the deocarations had just been thrown up in the air and allowed to land where they would. We sprayed artificial frost on the windows from a can.

I have a feeling this was the year we all got bikes. Catherine’s needed stabilizers. I had a Commando which had high handlebars like a chopper. Francis had a Grifter which was similar to a BMX bike. My saddle had a split on it and mum said that the delivery man had done that, getting it out of the truck. It turned out this was a lie and the bike was second hand. I wouldn’t know the difference and would never have cared. That bike was amazing. Also I remember hearing mum talking on the phone to one of the aunties about us getting bikes for Christmas before Christmas. So I already knew what we were going to get. I had to pretend surprise as well as pretend that Santa still existed, for Catherine’s sake.

Guilt was gently moving in and staking his territory amidst my joy.