The week before last, the third and final series of 'Ashes to Ashes' came to an end. This series had run since 2008. The finale provided answers to some of the questions left at the end of the previous series 'Life on Mars' which ran 2007-8. Both of these series featured UK police detectives. In 'Life on Mars' it was Detective Chief Inspector Sam Tyler (played by John Simm) and in 'Ashes to Ashes' Detective Inspector Alex(andra) Drake (played by Keeley Hawes). At the start of the two series these characters are injured in the line of duty: Tyler was hit by a car and Drake was shot. They find themselves, as a result, sent back in time. Tyler turns up in 1973 Manchester and Drake in 1981 London.
In both cases the police team that they are assigned to, as detective inspectors, is headed by Detective Chief Inspector (Eu)Gene Hunt (played by Philip Glenister), assisted by Detective Sergeant/Inspector Ray Carling and Detective Constable Chris Skelton. In 'Life on Mars' there is also Woman Police Constable (later Detective Constable) Annie Cartwright and in 'Ashes to Ashes' Woman Police Constable (later, very briefly, Detective Constable) Sharon 'Shaz' Granger. In this second story Hunt's team have been relocated from Manchester to East London. A US version of 'Life on Mars', starring Harvey Keitel has been produced but I have never seen it; in contrast I have seen every episode of the UK 'Life on Mars' and 'Ashes to Ashes'.
Basically the stories combine standard police procedural crime solving with a more mystical element. Both Tyler and Drake receive communications from the time they left behind through ghosts or images and sounds on televisions, radios and other sources. There is also interest in how different 2000s policing is compared to that of the early 1970s and early 1980s not only in terms of technology but also in terms of procedure. The time-travelling characters also know a lot of what is going to happen which sometimes enables them to solve the crimes they face and reassure or bewilder the people around them about the future. Both Tyler and Drake encounter their parents and see themselves as children. Tyler also encounters the mother of his girlfriend back in 2006. In a couple of stories, especially in 'Life on Mars' it is implied that different actions there change the future; though later we realise it is all happening in a bubble universe based upon but only tendentially connected with our own.
Given the 'hauntings' by people and occurrences from the 2000s, both Tyler and especially Drake who worked as a police psychologist, question whether what they are in, in the past is 'real'. Tyler ultimately leaves 1974 and returns to 2006, but finding it far duller commits suicide taking him back into the 1974 he has been living in. At the end of 'Ashes to Ashes' it turns out that both Tyler and Drake were right when they first arrived, to see the setting as being a figment of the imagination. The fact that they both came to feel it was 'real' is what allowed them to 'pass over' into the afterlife, in these series represented by 'The Railway Arms' pub run by a black Rastafarian Mancunian called Nelson. (The pub name may refer to the fact that the final action we see Tyler involved with is an armed robbery on a train). However, it turns out not to be the figment of their own damaged minds but that of Gene Hunt, who it is revealed was a police constable shot dead in 1953. In fact all of the police officers seen are dead and we seen the deaths of Carling, Skelton and Granger in different eras.
There are obvious parallels to movies such as 'The Sixth Sense' (1999) and the UK television series, 'afterlife' [sic] starring Lesley Sharp and Andrew Lincoln which ran 2005-6 and featured a ghostly nurse doing much the same role as Hunt does. There are lots of questions over whether Tyler ever comes back from his coma or is just seeing a false version of 2006. At the end of the second series of 'Ashes to Ashes' Drake is accidentally shot by Hunt and ends up in a coma in 1982 which makes her think she is back in 2008 and it seemed she might be trapped in a false 2008 within the 1982, with messages from Hunt and others haunting her through televisions, etc. She is able to get back to at least the 1982 and ultimately finish off her 'passing over'. This conclusion for the dead police seems to be through them satisfactorily solving a variety of crimes, though if Carling and Skelton's time with Hunt is anything to go by (at least ten years) then for some it takes longer than others. Similarly we find out that Tyler has only passed over in 1980, seven years after first arriving in Hunt's world.
In the final series of 'Ashes to Ashes' we find that Hunt is not alone in trying to see dead police officers into the next world. A very nasty character, Detective Chief Inspector Jim Keats (played incredibly annoyingly by Daniel Mays, his baby-faced appearance made him resemble appalling comic Joe Pasquale) who seems to be the Devil, trying to tempt the police spirits to some other realm. He seeks to enlist Drake and others in his campaign to have Hunt dismissed. Finding this out leads us to reflect on similar offers to go against Hunt, on grounds of corruption and inappropriate approaches to policing, that were made to Tyler as part of the M.A.R.S. initiative in 'Life on Mars'.
Given the focus on death, there is a bitter element to both stories. Tyler has left behind his girlfriend, Maya, who had just been abducted by a serial killer when he suffered his accident and, whereas, we initally think he had changed the future by his actions in 1973, we know now he was simply in a bubble, so presumably Maya has indeed been murdered by the killer. Drake has left her young daughter behind in 2008 too and presumably she has to grow up without a mother given that Drake never recovers from being shot. Drake also finds out that her father committed suicide in 1981 using a bomb, murdering her mother at the same time.
Both series have been incredibly successful and it is not surprising that a US television company wanted to make a version. To a great extent a lot of this has to do with nostalgia. Great efforts have been made to reproduce Manchester of the early 1970s and London of the early 1980s, with all the clothes, vehicles and even shop items and posters and occasional portrayals of real life people like Marc Bolan, appropriate to the era. The musical soundtrack, featuring numerous hits from the specific year, is an integral part of the stories. The importance of the music is noted on the wikipedia entries and of cours, both of the stories are named after David Bowie tracks released in the particular year. [Back in the mid-2000s I acquired a weird phobia that if I was driving and an old Bowie track came on I was convinced I would have a car accident and would wake up in the past! I do not what you would call that, Lifeonmarsphobia!]
Many of the episodes tap into current issues of the time such as racism, the appearance of football violence, and Irish-based terrorism in the 1970s to the development of Docklands, yuppie crime and the anti-apartheid struggle in the 1980s. There are the occasional slip-ups, notably Sam Tyler's watch having a digital display, but there is also attention to detail such as the white dog faeces on streets in the 1970s and pink wafer biscuits. This allows people who lived through the eras to be reminded of them and for others to effectively see a time travel story with elements somewhat reminiscent of 'Back to the Future' (1985) combining personal and broader history. The police stories in themselves are interesting and as well written as a lot of police drama on television at the moment, typically with an effort to have an unexpected outcome. Sometimes Hunt is right, sometimes Tyler/Drake are.
The character of Gene Hunt has particularly appealed to viewers and he is another reason for the series success. Given that 'The Sweeney' (ran for 53 episodes in 4 series 1975-8; 2 movies 1977 & 1978; 9 novels in 1977), seen as the archetype, almost the stereotype of 1970s police shows in the UK is still aired regularly on UK television channels, it is not surprising that a hard drinking, hard smoking, misogynistic police officer who shouts a lot, of the kind shown in 'The Sweeney', is a portrayal that many viewers have affection for. There were intentional visual references to 'The Sweeney' especially in the opening credits. Hunt is antidote to the more politically correct police officers we have seen portrayed in UK police series, especially in 'The Bill' (1984-2010). Hunt himself draws on Western legends seeing himself as the sheriff cleaning up the town, often referencing, in particular, Gary Cooper's character in 'High Noon' (1952), which Hunt presumably would have seen shortly before he was killed.
Though the world we see is in Hunt's mind it is clear he picks up contemporary references to periods after his death, but the occasional irregularities in these can be explained by the fact that this is not the 'real' world. Notable in this respect is that the police get to tote guns far more regularly and with minimal control compared to what was in fact the procedure in the 1970s and 1980s. Hunt himself uses a magnum revolver which certainly would not be permitted as a police firearm in the UK. In addition, the world being created by Hunt's imagination, and presumably how he likes to see things, explains why when Drake first appears in 1981 she is dressed as a high-class prostitute rather than more conventionally as a police officer.
Hunt often beats up suspects, which seems to have been pretty common through the 1970s and 1980s for real, but is clearly at odds with official procedure in the 2000s. In this way Hunt is like the Jack Regan character in 'The Sweeney' who uses violence but a blind eye is usually turned to it because he catches criminals. Given current popularity, especially among the white English population of the UK for the less politically correct period of the 1970s and 1980s when violent white men were dominant in much of British society it is unsurprising that Hunt like Regan is popular. However, this is to miss much of what Glenister brings to the character. He is vane, loving his fast cars and his snakeskin boots as status symbols. He is very loyal to his staff and often has a softer side that allows him to engage with people at risk and reassure them; in such circumstances the more procedural approach of the 2000s police officers is shown as getting in the way of a human connection with people the police are trying to protect. In contrast, Hunt's prejudices especially about women, ethnic minorities and former criminals are often seen as getting in the way of an effective investigation.
Thus, it is unsurprising that a movie which pushes so many dramatic 'buttons' and encompasses ghost stories, time travel, police procedural and even, to a little extent, Westerns, and is embedded in nostalgia, should be so widely appealing. It certainly bares re-watching especially when you have seen the end, well, each end, because stopping at the end of any of the 5 series in the set will give you a different impression of what has been going on. I am glad that the BBC had these series produced and sustained them to the end. I hope that we will see such engaging and also challenging dramas in the future, but I worry not. Go out and buy the DVDs, they are well worth the investment, especially if anyone in your family has been connected with the police.
Showing posts with label 1970s. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1970s. Show all posts
Tuesday, 1 June 2010
Wednesday, 1 April 2009
Undone - Short Story
Now, I am including this story out of chronological sequence. 'Insecurity' and 'Spindrift' were written in 1993-4 and this one in 2002. They had been thinking about making 'Life on Mars' as early as 1998 so even if I had somehow could have got near a TV contract I would have been too late. However, I include it alongside those because, like them it is about my weird attachment to elements of 1970s culture. I thought about this story for years and had intended it to be a novel. However, since the advent of 'Life on Mars' first shown in 2006, this genre has probably been worked out. The location is specific, it is a road which runs by a lake in Surrey down to where my grandfather lived. He was a very unpleasant man but his house was in location of intriguing sights. It lay close to the canals that I have referred to, so the whole district to me seemed associated with walks (and not doing forced labour in my parents' garden). There is a bank beside the road which you have to clamber up to look out over the lake. Farther down the lane was a railway carriage sat in a field and that and odd things such as the little brook and the animals on the pasture and the reeds by the river all gave it a real character that because of when I went there I also always associate with the 1970s and all that canal boat-folk music-self-sufficiency axis that I have been talking about here.
I produced a number of versions of this story. This is just over 3000 words and is the original version. I fleshed it out to bring it up to 4000 words for a competition but feel that it was too clearly padding. I also cut it down to 2000 words to make it acceptable to read at the writers' group but that was too rushed and too many things then lacked explanation. So here it is in its original form, bringing together an element of my short story writing which was slightly less about me simply recounting my doubts about life and instead wallowing in a culture that was not appealing to me but was certainly intriguing and seemed to be a lost slice of British life of the recent past.
Undone
For the thousandth time, I switched on the light and read my watch. I wished I had my usual digital watch, but in 1975 it would have provoked questions that I could not risk being asked. The watch hand seemed to have crept just a fraction of a millimetre beyond where I had last seen it. I was bored. I groped in my pocket for the white paper bag of mints I had bought earlier that day and popped one into my mouth. I had long forgotten what Sundays had been like. I was used to twenty-four hour shops, buying online and the delights of DIY stores packed full of families. Here the newsagent was open until twelve-thirty, and then the only distraction for families had for the rest of the day was gazing into closed estate agents’ windows. ‘Closed? Don’t they realise how much business they’re losing?’ I muttered to myself. It would take them another decade to learn that.
I suppose to have behaved truly appropriately for the year I was in I should have passed the time smoking, but that is something I never really got into, even before it became illegal. The pub I had visited earlier had been thick with tobacco smoke and it took time for my eyes and throat to adjust. Despite the walk along the lake’s edge, I could still smell the stink deep in my clothes,. I had expected to while away the afternoon in the pub, spending my carefully gathered period coins on beer and peanuts, buying just enough packets to reveal the scantily clad woman on the card fixed up behind the bar. But of course, they had closed mid-afternoon and I had had to skulk around the park, reading tabloid newspapers that I found in the waste bins, waiting for night to fall before they would let me back in. Not for the first time I wondered why the youth of this time had not committed mass suicide. School must have come as a blessing each Monday. Just spending one day here was bad enough for me. I suppose that was why Patrick had drunk, he could pass many Sundays happily time smoking dope and downing whisky at his old farmhouse with Carol, Karen, Bob and Matt. Once again I moved my head to see if I could catch a glimpse of the house through the trees, but it was dark and too many leaves still clung on to give me a clear view. Anyway, tonight I knew he would not be there.
To distract me I reached for the blue-spined paperback book about the coming fuel crisis. Wedged in it as a book mark, as if to emphasise the point, was an article about the coming shortage of protein. I wanted to telephone someone and tell them, ‘It’s alright for the moment. You eat too much meat anyway. Instead get those condoms out of the pub toilets and into schools, you’ll do a lot better for mankind, listen to me.’ I ran my fingers over the paper pages and held the book close to my nose. I loved the feel of a non-electronic book. It was just an affectation, pandering to my hobby. Of course it was all wrong: the pages were dark tan and it smelt old, all wrong for a book published in the year I was now in.
I read a few pages and flicked through some more, turning the book to look at the various charts and diagrams. No-one remembers the prophets who get it wrong. They are never recorded in history, or maybe they have come to be. I thought about all the imagined histories of the third world war I had collected on my shelf at home. Every decade of the twentieth century seemed to have had its favourite doom. Idly I tried to remember what it had been in the nineties.
I yawned. My backside was getting sore. The jeans I was wearing were a touch too tight, especially following the roast dinner that I had had. It was a novelty to be dressed this way, in clothes may of animal and plant fibres. I remembered Jean Morris at the university telling me that a glut in cotton had shaped the fashions of the era, it was a ‘historical fact’ she had said. To me they looked impractical and ridiculous. I was not sure that a man of my age would have dressed like this anyway, but the only pictures we could find had shown fashions for young people and I had had to settle for that. I was grateful, though, that I had the loud red-and-white striped sleeveless sweater and the corduroy jacket, I was feeling chilly and I could not turn on the engine to warm myself up. It seemed surprisingly cold for early September, but then I supposed sitting here I was not protected from that breeze off the lake, well, the old gravel pit, to describe it accurately. It had closed down five years earlier and had already evolved into a sailing club for the suburbs, along with a spot of bird watching around the edge. I guess that is what some people did to pass the time on Sundays in the seventies. Everyone told me that television was better in then, but I only remembered dreary Victorian serials.
I did remember one time visiting Uncle Patrick’s and being lent the heavy Soviet binoculars that he had got cheap. ‘Soviet, now that’s an adjective that really dates things.’ I had had to lie flat on my belly, concealed in some rushes the far side of the lake from the club. I had felt excited, like a sniper. All I saw was seagulls skimming the lake surface. ‘Now, when was that? It had to be later, towards the end of the ‘70s.’ I had no desire to run into myself, but could not be certain that I had avoided the chance. Being in my eighties now, the past is not so much another country as somewhere in Britain you have only received postcards from, like Rye or Llandudno.
I suppose the date was well enough into September that school would have started and the next time me and the rest of the family would see Uncle Patrick would be for Christmas. He was the youngest of my mother’s brothers, and my gran had told me the rest of the family had petted him as a child, but I felt my mother had come to look down on him. She, her name was Claire, was irritated by his ways, his inability to settle into what she would call a ‘normal’ life. He never had a wife, just girlfriends and to much of the family that seemed inappropriate for a man entering his forties. My opinion had switched through my youth, at first enjoying what he represented, a place away from the more boring parts of suburbia. His house was almost rural, though in fact not that far from civilization, but it was a rambling place to which all the antiques of the Walker family had accrued. He had nice chocolates and he baked, not always successfully, but there were decent cakes, different stuff from what we had at home. Sometimes though, when I felt myself mature, I disapproved of him like my mother and would sulk until he told me a story of his travels in 1960s.
‘Fool!’ I thought, my brain must be addled. I must have come here in 1975, as we only came here once after his death and that was for the funeral. My mother spent months disposing of all the junk. I remember her looking thin and ill, her face scratched from cutting back the hedges. Those months were a heavy burden on her as she fended off Patrick’s strange friends. Carol flipped as a result of his death, and there were mutters she had gone into an institution. It was only years later I found out that was true. Matt had been beaten close to death by some thugs Patrick had been protecting him from. As time passed it turned out that Patrick’s house out here had been a kind of refuge. His sometimes nihilist attitude to things hid a real altruism. It was only when I read a line from Irini Papagos’s autobiography about the help he had given her when she fled the Colonels’ regime that I began to see more than Uncle Patrick in the late Patrick Walker.
I tracked down references to his artwork as well, just a few small exhibitions, but it made me curious as to where it had all gone after his death. I remembered the outhouse we had been forbidden from entering, that Patrick kept closed with a padlock. He would sometimes emerge from it when our car pulled up, but as a child I had always imagined he was building something like a car. Then again I always was more focused on eccentric inventions, part of what got me here.
I looked at my watch once more. It was twenty-five past. I stirred myself into action. I remembered the police report I had accessed had said death had occurred sometime between nine thirty and ten on Sunday 21st September 1975. It would have been a guess I suppose, but so far I had neither seen or heard any traffic, neither Patrick’s car nor the one he was going to crash into. I switched on the main car lights. This lane was unlit, and though the Moon occasionally cast a bright grey over things, there were too many shadows from the trees and bushes. I did not want to provide an alternative obstacle for Patrick to crash his car into.
I got out of the car, opened the boot and took out the red triangle. Realising it must be close to nine thirty and I was just two corners from where his car went off the road I hurried. My movements were mechanical, I had thought this through so many times, that it was hard to believe it was finally happening. I walked away from the back of the car, looking for a good spot to set up the triangle. My hands were trembling. To people of 1975 I would look closer to fifty than eighty, the wonders they can do these days, but physical regeneration cannot overcome the burden of all the memories, more than that, all the worries, the what-ifs that you have stored in your brain.
My stomach leapt and I looked up sharply as I heard the car’s engine. I fumbled for the small torch in my pocket. It was an original, not too powerful, but that was what I wanted, to alert Patrick, not to dazzle him. Then, faster than I guessed the car rounded the corner. I thought it was going to hit me, but it twisted to the side scraping along the hedge that edged the field opposite the lake. I thought he would power on, ignoring me, and I wondered if my delay would have been enough to make him avoid the accident. Then he stopped, almost level with my car. I walked quickly over to him, eager that he did not drive off. I could still get everything back to plan.
The engine was idling as I approached the car. It was a large two-door vehicle, wasteful of petrol, what was it? A Cortina, a Capri? I tried to remember the names. The window wound down slow and jerkily. I had to remind myself that that was how they were once operated. A woman’s face popped out. As I saw it in the weak light shed by Patrick’s car and my own, I felt as if punched. It was Claire, my mother, I knew that face so well, though not with the lipstick smeared across it as I saw it now.
“Do you need a hand?” She spoke, but her words were broken by a belch. “A hand?” She waved one at me, the nail-polish on the tips struck me as wrong too.
I coughed and made incoherent sounds, things were coming unravelled. I walked closer to the car. As I did the driver lent closer, across Claire. It was Patrick, the blond hair, the curled sideburns were just as I had seen them on innumerable holos.
“Yes, yes, the car’s, the car’s buggered.” I stuttered.
“Right. Let me have a look.” Typically, in moments Patrick had cut the engine and sprang from the car. Then he stopped and lent back in. I realised he had stopped to kiss Claire, not the kiss of brother at all.
Breathing came hard to me. I staggered a little. Patrick noticed and pulled himself away. Claire’s hand stroked his as he did.
Patrick walked briskly round to my car. I had forgotten his size, his energy, but it was clear as he moved that he was drunk or drugged or both. I did not know how he had got this far down the narrow lane without an accident already. He pulled open the driver’s door and got into my car, his foot slipping for a moment as he did. He glanced back at me, as if fearful of giving himself away. I guessed if I had met a man dressed like me in his fifties I could mistake him for an off-duty police captain too.
I handed Patrick the keys and he tried turning the engine a couple of times. I knew the fault. I had engineered it about thirty minutes earlier. Getting hold of dirty spark plugs in the mid-twenty-first century had been a nightmare, but they seemed to be doing their job.
I glanced over at Claire who was sipping from a wine bottle and fiddling with the car radio. She found something she liked, I was trying to remember whether it was too early for ABBA and too late for T-Rex.
Patrick had opened the bonnet and was rooting around ineffectually. “You’re right mate it’s buggered.”
“Thanks for looking, Patrick.” I almost vomited in that second. I stood shivering, fearful of what I had done. In instants all the dangers that I risked flashed through my brain, but my words seemed not have penetrated.
“I’ll drive you back to mine, it’s just round the corner, you can call from there. You’re with the AA or something?”
“Can’t I just use your...” I cut my words off, this was an age without mobile ‘phones, let alone anything more sophisticated. “No. I’ve been abroad, South Africa, only got back into the country recently.”
“You don’t sound like a South African.” Now Patrick looked dubious.
“I’m not. I’m a reporter.” I realised I had picked the wrong country. I tried to remember when apartheid had ended there, was it ‘70s or not until later? “It’s terrible what’s happening there.” I said, feeling it covered all avenues.
“Yeah, it is. You’ve seen it up close?”
“Yeah. Terrible.” I repeated.
“Well, come on, get in. There’s always room at my place to crash. Lock up and come over.”
I killed the lights and packed the red triangle back in the boot. I locked the car but knew I would not be coming back to it.
I walked over to Patrick’s car. Claire had got into the back, and Patrick shoved the door open for me. I got in. The interior stunk: it was a mix of cheap wine, cigarettes and sex.
“I’m Patrick, this is Claire.”
“Hi!” She called from the back.
“I’m Professor Adrian Elmsley.”
“Elmsley?” Claire muttered.
For an instant I cursed. I had forgotten the fake name I had been using.
“Very formal.” Patrick said as he started the car. The wheels span for an instant on the dry dusty surface of the lane before getting a grip. The car started forward with a jerk.
“Friends call me Ade.” I tried to correct my error as the car pulled quickly away.
“Good to meet you.” He said extending his hand. I shook it, but with the other was searching for the seatbelt.
I jammed the metal tongue of the seatbelt into the mechanism, it was stiff, suggesting it was rarely used. It snapped into place as the car powered away, throwing me forward against it for an instant. Claire laughed. Steering one-handed Patrick reached for the cigarette packet and snatched out a cigarette.
“It’s quite dangerous down here.” I said nervously. I tried to see what my watch said, but it was too dark. I assumed it must be passed the time the original accident had happened and the other car would be safely away.
“I could drive it blindfolded, I come down here twice a day, all weathers.”
“That’s right.” Claire said proudly. She reached forward to drape her arms around her lover’s shoulders. He touched her hands with his fingertips.
“Ade’s a nice name.” Claire added.
I looked away, embarrassed beyond belief. We were approaching the last stretch and I let out a breath as I realised we were clear of the gravel pit lake, beyond where the accident happened. In moments we would be at the short side road to Patrick’s house. Then the car appeared to slew sideways, Patrick’s hands grabbed at the steering wheel which seemed to be spinning uncontrollably. In the headlights I could see the large oak that sat beside the track to his house.
My body was wrenched against the seatbelt. Even now I can feel the sensation of the belt like a bar slammed diagonally across my chest. The sound was horrific, the crunching, the shattering, the squeal of metal. Afterwards I was astounded at how the front of the car had compressed so much.
I do not know if I blacked out, but it seemed like hours before I could make sense of what was around me. Patrick lay sprawled across the dashboard, as if he was trying to crawl out where the windscreen had been. Glass was everywhere. The engine had stopped and there were no sounds, none at all. I wondered if I had been deafened by it, but as I finally moved I could hear the noise of shards sliding off me. Then I remembered Claire, I twisted round to see where she was. I guess if she had been in my seat, she might have been luckier, but now her forehead was a bloody mass. Her body had crumpled Patrick’s seat, adding to the force throwing him forward. Her eyes were open but a thick cover of blood streaked down over them. I vomited over myself again and again. I sat dazed for how long, I have no idea. The man who pulled me out was a local farmer, it was only when I returned here that I realised he had been the victim in the previous version of the crash, so I suppose I had achieved something.
So here we are looking at ‘Woman III’ by Patrick Walker. He made a regional gallery, if nothing else, mainly because his muse was not around to destroy all his work after his tragic accident.
I produced a number of versions of this story. This is just over 3000 words and is the original version. I fleshed it out to bring it up to 4000 words for a competition but feel that it was too clearly padding. I also cut it down to 2000 words to make it acceptable to read at the writers' group but that was too rushed and too many things then lacked explanation. So here it is in its original form, bringing together an element of my short story writing which was slightly less about me simply recounting my doubts about life and instead wallowing in a culture that was not appealing to me but was certainly intriguing and seemed to be a lost slice of British life of the recent past.
Undone
For the thousandth time, I switched on the light and read my watch. I wished I had my usual digital watch, but in 1975 it would have provoked questions that I could not risk being asked. The watch hand seemed to have crept just a fraction of a millimetre beyond where I had last seen it. I was bored. I groped in my pocket for the white paper bag of mints I had bought earlier that day and popped one into my mouth. I had long forgotten what Sundays had been like. I was used to twenty-four hour shops, buying online and the delights of DIY stores packed full of families. Here the newsagent was open until twelve-thirty, and then the only distraction for families had for the rest of the day was gazing into closed estate agents’ windows. ‘Closed? Don’t they realise how much business they’re losing?’ I muttered to myself. It would take them another decade to learn that.
I suppose to have behaved truly appropriately for the year I was in I should have passed the time smoking, but that is something I never really got into, even before it became illegal. The pub I had visited earlier had been thick with tobacco smoke and it took time for my eyes and throat to adjust. Despite the walk along the lake’s edge, I could still smell the stink deep in my clothes,. I had expected to while away the afternoon in the pub, spending my carefully gathered period coins on beer and peanuts, buying just enough packets to reveal the scantily clad woman on the card fixed up behind the bar. But of course, they had closed mid-afternoon and I had had to skulk around the park, reading tabloid newspapers that I found in the waste bins, waiting for night to fall before they would let me back in. Not for the first time I wondered why the youth of this time had not committed mass suicide. School must have come as a blessing each Monday. Just spending one day here was bad enough for me. I suppose that was why Patrick had drunk, he could pass many Sundays happily time smoking dope and downing whisky at his old farmhouse with Carol, Karen, Bob and Matt. Once again I moved my head to see if I could catch a glimpse of the house through the trees, but it was dark and too many leaves still clung on to give me a clear view. Anyway, tonight I knew he would not be there.
To distract me I reached for the blue-spined paperback book about the coming fuel crisis. Wedged in it as a book mark, as if to emphasise the point, was an article about the coming shortage of protein. I wanted to telephone someone and tell them, ‘It’s alright for the moment. You eat too much meat anyway. Instead get those condoms out of the pub toilets and into schools, you’ll do a lot better for mankind, listen to me.’ I ran my fingers over the paper pages and held the book close to my nose. I loved the feel of a non-electronic book. It was just an affectation, pandering to my hobby. Of course it was all wrong: the pages were dark tan and it smelt old, all wrong for a book published in the year I was now in.
I read a few pages and flicked through some more, turning the book to look at the various charts and diagrams. No-one remembers the prophets who get it wrong. They are never recorded in history, or maybe they have come to be. I thought about all the imagined histories of the third world war I had collected on my shelf at home. Every decade of the twentieth century seemed to have had its favourite doom. Idly I tried to remember what it had been in the nineties.
I yawned. My backside was getting sore. The jeans I was wearing were a touch too tight, especially following the roast dinner that I had had. It was a novelty to be dressed this way, in clothes may of animal and plant fibres. I remembered Jean Morris at the university telling me that a glut in cotton had shaped the fashions of the era, it was a ‘historical fact’ she had said. To me they looked impractical and ridiculous. I was not sure that a man of my age would have dressed like this anyway, but the only pictures we could find had shown fashions for young people and I had had to settle for that. I was grateful, though, that I had the loud red-and-white striped sleeveless sweater and the corduroy jacket, I was feeling chilly and I could not turn on the engine to warm myself up. It seemed surprisingly cold for early September, but then I supposed sitting here I was not protected from that breeze off the lake, well, the old gravel pit, to describe it accurately. It had closed down five years earlier and had already evolved into a sailing club for the suburbs, along with a spot of bird watching around the edge. I guess that is what some people did to pass the time on Sundays in the seventies. Everyone told me that television was better in then, but I only remembered dreary Victorian serials.
I did remember one time visiting Uncle Patrick’s and being lent the heavy Soviet binoculars that he had got cheap. ‘Soviet, now that’s an adjective that really dates things.’ I had had to lie flat on my belly, concealed in some rushes the far side of the lake from the club. I had felt excited, like a sniper. All I saw was seagulls skimming the lake surface. ‘Now, when was that? It had to be later, towards the end of the ‘70s.’ I had no desire to run into myself, but could not be certain that I had avoided the chance. Being in my eighties now, the past is not so much another country as somewhere in Britain you have only received postcards from, like Rye or Llandudno.
I suppose the date was well enough into September that school would have started and the next time me and the rest of the family would see Uncle Patrick would be for Christmas. He was the youngest of my mother’s brothers, and my gran had told me the rest of the family had petted him as a child, but I felt my mother had come to look down on him. She, her name was Claire, was irritated by his ways, his inability to settle into what she would call a ‘normal’ life. He never had a wife, just girlfriends and to much of the family that seemed inappropriate for a man entering his forties. My opinion had switched through my youth, at first enjoying what he represented, a place away from the more boring parts of suburbia. His house was almost rural, though in fact not that far from civilization, but it was a rambling place to which all the antiques of the Walker family had accrued. He had nice chocolates and he baked, not always successfully, but there were decent cakes, different stuff from what we had at home. Sometimes though, when I felt myself mature, I disapproved of him like my mother and would sulk until he told me a story of his travels in 1960s.
‘Fool!’ I thought, my brain must be addled. I must have come here in 1975, as we only came here once after his death and that was for the funeral. My mother spent months disposing of all the junk. I remember her looking thin and ill, her face scratched from cutting back the hedges. Those months were a heavy burden on her as she fended off Patrick’s strange friends. Carol flipped as a result of his death, and there were mutters she had gone into an institution. It was only years later I found out that was true. Matt had been beaten close to death by some thugs Patrick had been protecting him from. As time passed it turned out that Patrick’s house out here had been a kind of refuge. His sometimes nihilist attitude to things hid a real altruism. It was only when I read a line from Irini Papagos’s autobiography about the help he had given her when she fled the Colonels’ regime that I began to see more than Uncle Patrick in the late Patrick Walker.
I tracked down references to his artwork as well, just a few small exhibitions, but it made me curious as to where it had all gone after his death. I remembered the outhouse we had been forbidden from entering, that Patrick kept closed with a padlock. He would sometimes emerge from it when our car pulled up, but as a child I had always imagined he was building something like a car. Then again I always was more focused on eccentric inventions, part of what got me here.
I looked at my watch once more. It was twenty-five past. I stirred myself into action. I remembered the police report I had accessed had said death had occurred sometime between nine thirty and ten on Sunday 21st September 1975. It would have been a guess I suppose, but so far I had neither seen or heard any traffic, neither Patrick’s car nor the one he was going to crash into. I switched on the main car lights. This lane was unlit, and though the Moon occasionally cast a bright grey over things, there were too many shadows from the trees and bushes. I did not want to provide an alternative obstacle for Patrick to crash his car into.
I got out of the car, opened the boot and took out the red triangle. Realising it must be close to nine thirty and I was just two corners from where his car went off the road I hurried. My movements were mechanical, I had thought this through so many times, that it was hard to believe it was finally happening. I walked away from the back of the car, looking for a good spot to set up the triangle. My hands were trembling. To people of 1975 I would look closer to fifty than eighty, the wonders they can do these days, but physical regeneration cannot overcome the burden of all the memories, more than that, all the worries, the what-ifs that you have stored in your brain.
My stomach leapt and I looked up sharply as I heard the car’s engine. I fumbled for the small torch in my pocket. It was an original, not too powerful, but that was what I wanted, to alert Patrick, not to dazzle him. Then, faster than I guessed the car rounded the corner. I thought it was going to hit me, but it twisted to the side scraping along the hedge that edged the field opposite the lake. I thought he would power on, ignoring me, and I wondered if my delay would have been enough to make him avoid the accident. Then he stopped, almost level with my car. I walked quickly over to him, eager that he did not drive off. I could still get everything back to plan.
The engine was idling as I approached the car. It was a large two-door vehicle, wasteful of petrol, what was it? A Cortina, a Capri? I tried to remember the names. The window wound down slow and jerkily. I had to remind myself that that was how they were once operated. A woman’s face popped out. As I saw it in the weak light shed by Patrick’s car and my own, I felt as if punched. It was Claire, my mother, I knew that face so well, though not with the lipstick smeared across it as I saw it now.
“Do you need a hand?” She spoke, but her words were broken by a belch. “A hand?” She waved one at me, the nail-polish on the tips struck me as wrong too.
I coughed and made incoherent sounds, things were coming unravelled. I walked closer to the car. As I did the driver lent closer, across Claire. It was Patrick, the blond hair, the curled sideburns were just as I had seen them on innumerable holos.
“Yes, yes, the car’s, the car’s buggered.” I stuttered.
“Right. Let me have a look.” Typically, in moments Patrick had cut the engine and sprang from the car. Then he stopped and lent back in. I realised he had stopped to kiss Claire, not the kiss of brother at all.
Breathing came hard to me. I staggered a little. Patrick noticed and pulled himself away. Claire’s hand stroked his as he did.
Patrick walked briskly round to my car. I had forgotten his size, his energy, but it was clear as he moved that he was drunk or drugged or both. I did not know how he had got this far down the narrow lane without an accident already. He pulled open the driver’s door and got into my car, his foot slipping for a moment as he did. He glanced back at me, as if fearful of giving himself away. I guessed if I had met a man dressed like me in his fifties I could mistake him for an off-duty police captain too.
I handed Patrick the keys and he tried turning the engine a couple of times. I knew the fault. I had engineered it about thirty minutes earlier. Getting hold of dirty spark plugs in the mid-twenty-first century had been a nightmare, but they seemed to be doing their job.
I glanced over at Claire who was sipping from a wine bottle and fiddling with the car radio. She found something she liked, I was trying to remember whether it was too early for ABBA and too late for T-Rex.
Patrick had opened the bonnet and was rooting around ineffectually. “You’re right mate it’s buggered.”
“Thanks for looking, Patrick.” I almost vomited in that second. I stood shivering, fearful of what I had done. In instants all the dangers that I risked flashed through my brain, but my words seemed not have penetrated.
“I’ll drive you back to mine, it’s just round the corner, you can call from there. You’re with the AA or something?”
“Can’t I just use your...” I cut my words off, this was an age without mobile ‘phones, let alone anything more sophisticated. “No. I’ve been abroad, South Africa, only got back into the country recently.”
“You don’t sound like a South African.” Now Patrick looked dubious.
“I’m not. I’m a reporter.” I realised I had picked the wrong country. I tried to remember when apartheid had ended there, was it ‘70s or not until later? “It’s terrible what’s happening there.” I said, feeling it covered all avenues.
“Yeah, it is. You’ve seen it up close?”
“Yeah. Terrible.” I repeated.
“Well, come on, get in. There’s always room at my place to crash. Lock up and come over.”
I killed the lights and packed the red triangle back in the boot. I locked the car but knew I would not be coming back to it.
I walked over to Patrick’s car. Claire had got into the back, and Patrick shoved the door open for me. I got in. The interior stunk: it was a mix of cheap wine, cigarettes and sex.
“I’m Patrick, this is Claire.”
“Hi!” She called from the back.
“I’m Professor Adrian Elmsley.”
“Elmsley?” Claire muttered.
For an instant I cursed. I had forgotten the fake name I had been using.
“Very formal.” Patrick said as he started the car. The wheels span for an instant on the dry dusty surface of the lane before getting a grip. The car started forward with a jerk.
“Friends call me Ade.” I tried to correct my error as the car pulled quickly away.
“Good to meet you.” He said extending his hand. I shook it, but with the other was searching for the seatbelt.
I jammed the metal tongue of the seatbelt into the mechanism, it was stiff, suggesting it was rarely used. It snapped into place as the car powered away, throwing me forward against it for an instant. Claire laughed. Steering one-handed Patrick reached for the cigarette packet and snatched out a cigarette.
“It’s quite dangerous down here.” I said nervously. I tried to see what my watch said, but it was too dark. I assumed it must be passed the time the original accident had happened and the other car would be safely away.
“I could drive it blindfolded, I come down here twice a day, all weathers.”
“That’s right.” Claire said proudly. She reached forward to drape her arms around her lover’s shoulders. He touched her hands with his fingertips.
“Ade’s a nice name.” Claire added.
I looked away, embarrassed beyond belief. We were approaching the last stretch and I let out a breath as I realised we were clear of the gravel pit lake, beyond where the accident happened. In moments we would be at the short side road to Patrick’s house. Then the car appeared to slew sideways, Patrick’s hands grabbed at the steering wheel which seemed to be spinning uncontrollably. In the headlights I could see the large oak that sat beside the track to his house.
My body was wrenched against the seatbelt. Even now I can feel the sensation of the belt like a bar slammed diagonally across my chest. The sound was horrific, the crunching, the shattering, the squeal of metal. Afterwards I was astounded at how the front of the car had compressed so much.
I do not know if I blacked out, but it seemed like hours before I could make sense of what was around me. Patrick lay sprawled across the dashboard, as if he was trying to crawl out where the windscreen had been. Glass was everywhere. The engine had stopped and there were no sounds, none at all. I wondered if I had been deafened by it, but as I finally moved I could hear the noise of shards sliding off me. Then I remembered Claire, I twisted round to see where she was. I guess if she had been in my seat, she might have been luckier, but now her forehead was a bloody mass. Her body had crumpled Patrick’s seat, adding to the force throwing him forward. Her eyes were open but a thick cover of blood streaked down over them. I vomited over myself again and again. I sat dazed for how long, I have no idea. The man who pulled me out was a local farmer, it was only when I returned here that I realised he had been the victim in the previous version of the crash, so I suppose I had achieved something.
So here we are looking at ‘Woman III’ by Patrick Walker. He made a regional gallery, if nothing else, mainly because his muse was not around to destroy all his work after his tragic accident.
Insecurity - Short Story
After I left Norwich and struggled in two civil service jobs interspersed with an attempt at becoming a teacher, during which time my writing efforts were spent on producing 'His Majesty's Dictator' I did no more short stories. It was only when, living in Oxford, and well established in my long-hours civil service job (which made me stooped and so stressed that I acquired a facial twitch) that I got to writing this kind of fiction again. I loved living in Oxford, despite the fact that I was witnessing its mundane side rather than simply on golden afternoons of daytrips, but I felt content there. There was lots to do, nice cafes and restaurants, live music, debates and cinemas. I got back into cycling the Oxfordshire countryside in a way that I had not since I was a teenager. Anyway, in many ways life did not change and I continued to fail to have a relationship. I was a bit bolder than I had been but it seemed that as a consequence the knock-backs were harder. One woman rejected me because of the job I did (she was an assertiveness trainer) and another was so offended that I could consider myself worthy of asking her out that she demanded an apology. I had hoped that I had shaken off that situation where I was seen as naive and lacking in world knowledge, but even in the clubs I joined I was seen in this way. Some people would be flattered to be considered younger than their years, but for me it seemed to still exclude me from the truly adult world. I only really realised how far this assumption had gone when a colleague I had worked with for many months said they thought I was 19 and were surprised to hear that I had a degree and was a failed schoolteacher. This was 1993 and I was 26 going on 27 and the bulk of my friends were married; by 1996, 95% of my friends were.
Anyway, aside from the two women who spurned me, the first and strongest focus of my affections in Oxford was on Kate, a colleague. Perhaps I misread her signals, but she took me to lunch on my birthday and we seemed to hit it off. I struggled to find the right occasion to ask her out. I do not know if she was simply being friendly, looking back I guess she was. Knowing she spoke French I sent an anonymous Valentine's card with a French poem, 'L'Amoureuse' (translated as 'Lady Love' or 'The Beloved') by surrealist poet Paul Eluard (1895-1952) a copy of which I found again when seeking out my stories. I found an online translation and am quite chuffed that I translated it pretty well. It runs (Samuel Beckett's translation next to it)
Elle est debour sur mes paupières (She is standing on my lids)
Et ses cheveux sont dans les miens, (And her hair is in my hair,)
Elle a la forme de mes mains, (She has the body of my hand,)
Elle a la couleur de mes yeux, (She has the colour of my eyes,)
Elle s'engloutit dan mon ombre (In my shade she is engulfed)
Comme une pierre sur le ciel. (As a stone against the sky.)
Elle a toujours les yeux ouverts (She will never close her eyes)
Et ne me laisse pas dormir. (And she does not let me sleep.)
Ses rêves en pleine lumière (And her dreams in the bright day)
Font s'évaporer les soleils, (Make the suns evaporate,)
Me font rire, pleurer et rire, (And me laugh, cry and laugh,)
Parler sans avoir rien à dire (Speak when I have nothing to say)
As often happened with anonymous Valentine's cards I sent the woman in question usually (well in fact almost always) assumed it was from someone else, in this case a French client of hers. It did impress the staff of the office where we worked which was some consolation. When I did finally ask her out it was almost a year later and she was despairing of the civil service and probably like those other Oxford women, thought little of the men who worked in it.
Kate lived on a canal boat and with another colleague who was training to be a clinical masseuse, produced hats and bags from left over rags they picked up from some clothing manufacturers'. These sold incredibly well, and just before I left Oxford, Kate designed to resign her post and began travelling Britain's waterways in her canal boar (equipped with an Aga wood burning oven on board) selling her bags and hats. It was a hard decision for her to make, to through in the regularity of the civil service and I knew (as I had explored in earlier stories) that I could never do anything like that even for a woman I loved. Partly this is because I have no skills beyond working in an office, I cannot even teach, so I am shackled to offices however insecure that environment post-1979 has been.
This story was originally entitled '30 Years On' and it envisaged the paths that my and Kate's lives were likely to take from that point onwards. I last saw her in 1994 so thirty years would make this story be set in 2024. However, really it is set in the 1990s, perhaps even earlier. Like a number of my stories of the time, it has a nostalgia for things of the 1970s an era when self-sufficiency was popular along with folk music and the reconstruction of much of Britain's canal network often by volunteers. It also reflected the country fetes I would visit when living in Oxford which showed that some of those 1970s fads had been far more enduring that I had realised and Kate could easily slip into a world that would suit her mode of life.
This story reflects the physical damage I was doing to myself in the post I had in Oxford and fortunately I was able to get away, move to London and earn a better salary for working shorter hours and my health improved. My muscles can still remember how stiff my shoulders got from sitting huddled over a computer for around 9-10 hours per day. When I left the job I still had 86 hours of flexi-time accrued and I had never taken a day of annual leave, we were that overworked. I used to lie on my bed and try to stretch myself as if on a rack to try to get the stiffness out of my shoulders and wished I had someone, anyone, to be able to massage my stiff shoulders. Just a brief mention of the room I rented. It was as wide as the spread of my arms, so 1.86 metres (so narrower than Kate's 'narrow' boat 2.13 metres, the standard UK size), I paid £170 per month to live in it and the lock had been put on the wrong side of the door, so it was as if I was outside the door. It was in a shared house with four other people and a chinchilla. I will have to recount more of it another time. Anyway, on with the story of how I saw my and Kate's different lives turning out.
Re-reading it, the clothing reminds me of what Kate wore especially the waistcoats and the pumps. The other thing I had forgotten is the reference to the television. My salary was such (£8,500 in 1994) that I could not afford a television and I rented one, but was in utter fear that I would fall behind on the payments and get into legal difficulties. I was still renting the television in 2003 when I was earning triple what I had been earning nine years earlier. The rental company must have done very well out of me!
Insecurity
Alan turned from his bicycle and surveyed the fete in the field before him. He wandered through the ranks of parked cars. The grass was lit brightly on this clear afternoon. Only occasionally did a swathe of shadow sweep across the land as a cloud passed in front of the sun. As he walked to the body of the fete, around him Alan could hear the bubble of conversation, little bursts of it distinct as people went by close to him. He wandered idly, not really paying much attention to the stalls. He did pause at one selling second-hand books. He looked down at the creased spines, he bent his stooped body over the rows of paperbacks. His shoulders were hunched and his gaze narrowed by years of staring into a computer screen. He stretched slightly straighter as he moved on, but his heart was not in it, too much damage had accrued for any change now.
He reached the side of the field farthest from the road, where it ran down to the canal. A row of narrow boats was moored along the bank. In this stretch of the fete were clothes stalls, the usual hippy stuff he told himself. The rainbow colours, the floppy velvet hats of purple and red, the patterned waistcoats and the striped baggy trousers contrasted with the faded tweed jacket he wore, already too hot for him on this afternoon.
Alan’s eye was caught by the quick movement of a child at the foot of a stall She sat on the hem of a woven blanket draped over a table holding hats and bags. She was probably three or four. The little girl wore a miniature outfit to match that of many of the stallholders. The black velvet hat had been plonked on her head to protect her from the sun. Her dungarees, striped shirt and canvas shoes had been made for her alone, with love and attention.
Then the helium balloon she was playing with came free. Instinctively Alan snatched at it as the girl watched it helplessly drift up away from her. He caught the end of the string, and then took a firmer grip.
“Thank you.” Alan heard the voice of the stallholder, a woman he had not even noticed. He did not have to recognise her to tell who she was, but the way that she rolled her eyes skyward as she lightly joked about keeping her attention on a child and a business just confirmed his instincts.
Alan crouched down to the girl and handed her back her balloon. He was self-conscious, though he liked children, he always feared coming across as weird. He looked at the woman carefully as he stood up again. He half expected her to have changed, that on the second viewing she would be revealed as no-one he knew, and the first face he had seen would turn out as only an image from his wishful thoughts.
It was her and he felt a constricting excitement well within him. He drunk in the sight of her. Much was the same. Time had lined the enthusiastic face but the round glasses were familiar. The dark hair was tied back in the old way, but now it was tinged with grey. She walked around the edge of the stall to check on the child. As she bent over to pick the girl up, he studied her hard. Her body was slim if fuller: free in a loose white blouse and that old waistcoat, and below that a long patterned skirt fringed with tassels. Her feet wore soft leather pumps.
“Jaynie.” Alan said quietly as she stood up straight, the child in her arms.
The woman looked startled. Her eyes locked on Alan’s.
“Alan.” She said simply.
Alan blushed and looked away. In an instant his feelings thrust deep away within him, but not destroyed, burst into his mind. His memories compressed the years between and he felt that no time had passed since she had hugged him farewell in the bar so many years before.
“Yours?” Alan stuttered indicating the girl.
“No. My daughter’s, her name’s Eleanor.” Jane explained. She bent over to look into her granddaughter’s face. “That’s right isn’t it, Ellie?”
The girl smiled, and snapped back a bold answer. “Yes.”
“So. How is life?” Jane asked warmly as if it had been only a few months since they had last met.
Alan shrugged his tight shoulders. “Much the same.” His mind struggled to say something. He knew from experience that he would mourn a missed opportunity. “I’m here on holiday. I’m staying at the ‘Rose and Castle’.”
“Oh yes. I know it, we passed there yesterday. We come this way every year, well for the past eight years anyway.” Jane spoke almost distractedly. Alan knew that she was dealing with her own memories, though he had never been able to tell what she had truly thought.
“Why don’t you join us for dinner? We’re moored only down there.” Jane said suddenly, she had always been the braver one. She waved an arm in the direction of the river but kept her gaze fixed on Alan.
Alan shuffled awkwardly. “I couldn’t,” was his only reply.
“Nonsense, Helen and Jack would love to meet you. You can see where we all live.”
She had hit on a point that had always attracted Alan to her. The unfettered life on the water. How many times had he wanted to visit that boat, the one that he had never seen but had imagined himself waking up on, with her, a thousand times.
“Jack’s Helen’s man.” Jane answered the unasked question. “The four of us, but there’s room for more.” She let it hang, not wanting to press him too hard. She remembered he never could make a decision on anything.
Alan said nothing in reply. Before the pause lengthened too much, she spoke again.
“I think they’re over at one of the boats. Jack does painting on them.” Jane said, returning to her social tone, yet again concealing what they were thinking. “What about your painting?”
“Don’t get much time for it.” Alan said, his voice sounding wistful.
“It’s a pity.” Jane meant it.
“God, Alan, I can’t keep this up.” She put Ellie down on the stall. “What have you done with your life? Are you still tied up in your little worries, still bound by the fears that one day you might end up broke, so you have to work and save so hard? So timid that you cannot even accept the praise, the affection people show you?” Jane’s voice rose as she lay the charges against him. Alan shuddered and seemed to be trying to fold in on himself to shut out the words.
“You would not throw up some pathetic job for the fear that you couldn't meet the payments on the television. Christ! What the bloody use was a television anyway? There’s so much more you could have done, like sleeping with someone, anyone.”
Alan blushed deeply, Jane was too painfully perceptive. Despite the discomfort, he felt fixed to where he stood.
“I bet you still work for the same people, live in the same small room. It’s not even the low wages that have done it to you, it, it ...” Jane struggled for the right word in her frustration. “It’s that you just let people use you, crush your spirit. I’m not rich but I live the life I want. Things get difficult but I face them when problems appear, not hide from ones that might just turn up. You do not change anything unless you challenge it.” Jane’s voice calmed and she let out a sigh. Alan glanced around nervously but no-one seemed to have noticed what was passing between them.
“Look there’s only an hour or two of this left. Come back here then, come for dinner, come for the week, finish your holiday with us. Live some.” Though her voice was calmer, her tone was almost beseeching.
Alan looked at her tearfully. Jane took him in her arms and rested his head against her warm shoulder.
“How ever much you wanted me, you were tied to something stronger long before we met.” She whispered in his ear. “But it’s never too late to change, take early retirement. Get some decent clothes.”
Jane seemed enthused, excited but depression drowned Alan’s elation at seeing and feeling her again. Her words, her suggestions had stripped away so much of the protection that he had put up over the years. He knew that she was right about his fears, the ones that made his life so constrained, so wedded to the routine that gave him some sense of security. For a second he was glad somehow that he had kept it to himself and had not dragged someone else down with his worrying, his fear of living life. He made his way through it, taking what he saw as the safest option at each turn.
Jane kissed him on the cheek and on the lips as she pulled herself slightly back from him. Alan relished her kisses, for an instant they burned away the discomfort. Her body was firm and reassuring between his arms. He knew that this was a security he had never known and would never do so. For those seconds there was no-one but them, the full extent of his senses, the whole world of his concerns.
“So you’ll come.” Jane said, feeling that she was winning.
“Vegetarian food.” Alan replied, but Jane knew it was without malice.
“Ha, all the better for you.” She laughed.
“Good,” was all Alan said.
“Later.” Jane said cheerfully, believing she had won the first stage on the road to Alan’s redemption.
“Yes, later.” In this instance, Alan preferred the word to goodbye. He looked back for a moment to take in her and a few details around her, like a snapshot. He raised his hand and waved slightly but turned away before she responded.
The shadows were beginning to lengthen and the sun would be soon taking on the golden hue he loved so much. He glanced at his watch and hurried his pace across the field to the gate. He had to hurry if he was to cycle back safely. He bent down to fix his cycle clips around his trousers. As he left the field, he calculated the time it would take him to reach the pub. He reckoned if he was able to eat his dinner in thirty minutes he would be in time to see that documentary on the Roman empire. He fretted. He would have to pedal quickly and be lucky that that fat woman was not in the dining room before him. Alan reached his bicycle, still resting against the fence. He unlocked it, mounted and cycled away, off into his old life.
Anyway, aside from the two women who spurned me, the first and strongest focus of my affections in Oxford was on Kate, a colleague. Perhaps I misread her signals, but she took me to lunch on my birthday and we seemed to hit it off. I struggled to find the right occasion to ask her out. I do not know if she was simply being friendly, looking back I guess she was. Knowing she spoke French I sent an anonymous Valentine's card with a French poem, 'L'Amoureuse' (translated as 'Lady Love' or 'The Beloved') by surrealist poet Paul Eluard (1895-1952) a copy of which I found again when seeking out my stories. I found an online translation and am quite chuffed that I translated it pretty well. It runs (Samuel Beckett's translation next to it)
Elle est debour sur mes paupières (She is standing on my lids)
Et ses cheveux sont dans les miens, (And her hair is in my hair,)
Elle a la forme de mes mains, (She has the body of my hand,)
Elle a la couleur de mes yeux, (She has the colour of my eyes,)
Elle s'engloutit dan mon ombre (In my shade she is engulfed)
Comme une pierre sur le ciel. (As a stone against the sky.)
Elle a toujours les yeux ouverts (She will never close her eyes)
Et ne me laisse pas dormir. (And she does not let me sleep.)
Ses rêves en pleine lumière (And her dreams in the bright day)
Font s'évaporer les soleils, (Make the suns evaporate,)
Me font rire, pleurer et rire, (And me laugh, cry and laugh,)
Parler sans avoir rien à dire (Speak when I have nothing to say)
As often happened with anonymous Valentine's cards I sent the woman in question usually (well in fact almost always) assumed it was from someone else, in this case a French client of hers. It did impress the staff of the office where we worked which was some consolation. When I did finally ask her out it was almost a year later and she was despairing of the civil service and probably like those other Oxford women, thought little of the men who worked in it.
Kate lived on a canal boat and with another colleague who was training to be a clinical masseuse, produced hats and bags from left over rags they picked up from some clothing manufacturers'. These sold incredibly well, and just before I left Oxford, Kate designed to resign her post and began travelling Britain's waterways in her canal boar (equipped with an Aga wood burning oven on board) selling her bags and hats. It was a hard decision for her to make, to through in the regularity of the civil service and I knew (as I had explored in earlier stories) that I could never do anything like that even for a woman I loved. Partly this is because I have no skills beyond working in an office, I cannot even teach, so I am shackled to offices however insecure that environment post-1979 has been.
This story was originally entitled '30 Years On' and it envisaged the paths that my and Kate's lives were likely to take from that point onwards. I last saw her in 1994 so thirty years would make this story be set in 2024. However, really it is set in the 1990s, perhaps even earlier. Like a number of my stories of the time, it has a nostalgia for things of the 1970s an era when self-sufficiency was popular along with folk music and the reconstruction of much of Britain's canal network often by volunteers. It also reflected the country fetes I would visit when living in Oxford which showed that some of those 1970s fads had been far more enduring that I had realised and Kate could easily slip into a world that would suit her mode of life.
This story reflects the physical damage I was doing to myself in the post I had in Oxford and fortunately I was able to get away, move to London and earn a better salary for working shorter hours and my health improved. My muscles can still remember how stiff my shoulders got from sitting huddled over a computer for around 9-10 hours per day. When I left the job I still had 86 hours of flexi-time accrued and I had never taken a day of annual leave, we were that overworked. I used to lie on my bed and try to stretch myself as if on a rack to try to get the stiffness out of my shoulders and wished I had someone, anyone, to be able to massage my stiff shoulders. Just a brief mention of the room I rented. It was as wide as the spread of my arms, so 1.86 metres (so narrower than Kate's 'narrow' boat 2.13 metres, the standard UK size), I paid £170 per month to live in it and the lock had been put on the wrong side of the door, so it was as if I was outside the door. It was in a shared house with four other people and a chinchilla. I will have to recount more of it another time. Anyway, on with the story of how I saw my and Kate's different lives turning out.
Re-reading it, the clothing reminds me of what Kate wore especially the waistcoats and the pumps. The other thing I had forgotten is the reference to the television. My salary was such (£8,500 in 1994) that I could not afford a television and I rented one, but was in utter fear that I would fall behind on the payments and get into legal difficulties. I was still renting the television in 2003 when I was earning triple what I had been earning nine years earlier. The rental company must have done very well out of me!
Insecurity
Alan turned from his bicycle and surveyed the fete in the field before him. He wandered through the ranks of parked cars. The grass was lit brightly on this clear afternoon. Only occasionally did a swathe of shadow sweep across the land as a cloud passed in front of the sun. As he walked to the body of the fete, around him Alan could hear the bubble of conversation, little bursts of it distinct as people went by close to him. He wandered idly, not really paying much attention to the stalls. He did pause at one selling second-hand books. He looked down at the creased spines, he bent his stooped body over the rows of paperbacks. His shoulders were hunched and his gaze narrowed by years of staring into a computer screen. He stretched slightly straighter as he moved on, but his heart was not in it, too much damage had accrued for any change now.
He reached the side of the field farthest from the road, where it ran down to the canal. A row of narrow boats was moored along the bank. In this stretch of the fete were clothes stalls, the usual hippy stuff he told himself. The rainbow colours, the floppy velvet hats of purple and red, the patterned waistcoats and the striped baggy trousers contrasted with the faded tweed jacket he wore, already too hot for him on this afternoon.
Alan’s eye was caught by the quick movement of a child at the foot of a stall She sat on the hem of a woven blanket draped over a table holding hats and bags. She was probably three or four. The little girl wore a miniature outfit to match that of many of the stallholders. The black velvet hat had been plonked on her head to protect her from the sun. Her dungarees, striped shirt and canvas shoes had been made for her alone, with love and attention.
Then the helium balloon she was playing with came free. Instinctively Alan snatched at it as the girl watched it helplessly drift up away from her. He caught the end of the string, and then took a firmer grip.
“Thank you.” Alan heard the voice of the stallholder, a woman he had not even noticed. He did not have to recognise her to tell who she was, but the way that she rolled her eyes skyward as she lightly joked about keeping her attention on a child and a business just confirmed his instincts.
Alan crouched down to the girl and handed her back her balloon. He was self-conscious, though he liked children, he always feared coming across as weird. He looked at the woman carefully as he stood up again. He half expected her to have changed, that on the second viewing she would be revealed as no-one he knew, and the first face he had seen would turn out as only an image from his wishful thoughts.
It was her and he felt a constricting excitement well within him. He drunk in the sight of her. Much was the same. Time had lined the enthusiastic face but the round glasses were familiar. The dark hair was tied back in the old way, but now it was tinged with grey. She walked around the edge of the stall to check on the child. As she bent over to pick the girl up, he studied her hard. Her body was slim if fuller: free in a loose white blouse and that old waistcoat, and below that a long patterned skirt fringed with tassels. Her feet wore soft leather pumps.
“Jaynie.” Alan said quietly as she stood up straight, the child in her arms.
The woman looked startled. Her eyes locked on Alan’s.
“Alan.” She said simply.
Alan blushed and looked away. In an instant his feelings thrust deep away within him, but not destroyed, burst into his mind. His memories compressed the years between and he felt that no time had passed since she had hugged him farewell in the bar so many years before.
“Yours?” Alan stuttered indicating the girl.
“No. My daughter’s, her name’s Eleanor.” Jane explained. She bent over to look into her granddaughter’s face. “That’s right isn’t it, Ellie?”
The girl smiled, and snapped back a bold answer. “Yes.”
“So. How is life?” Jane asked warmly as if it had been only a few months since they had last met.
Alan shrugged his tight shoulders. “Much the same.” His mind struggled to say something. He knew from experience that he would mourn a missed opportunity. “I’m here on holiday. I’m staying at the ‘Rose and Castle’.”
“Oh yes. I know it, we passed there yesterday. We come this way every year, well for the past eight years anyway.” Jane spoke almost distractedly. Alan knew that she was dealing with her own memories, though he had never been able to tell what she had truly thought.
“Why don’t you join us for dinner? We’re moored only down there.” Jane said suddenly, she had always been the braver one. She waved an arm in the direction of the river but kept her gaze fixed on Alan.
Alan shuffled awkwardly. “I couldn’t,” was his only reply.
“Nonsense, Helen and Jack would love to meet you. You can see where we all live.”
She had hit on a point that had always attracted Alan to her. The unfettered life on the water. How many times had he wanted to visit that boat, the one that he had never seen but had imagined himself waking up on, with her, a thousand times.
“Jack’s Helen’s man.” Jane answered the unasked question. “The four of us, but there’s room for more.” She let it hang, not wanting to press him too hard. She remembered he never could make a decision on anything.
Alan said nothing in reply. Before the pause lengthened too much, she spoke again.
“I think they’re over at one of the boats. Jack does painting on them.” Jane said, returning to her social tone, yet again concealing what they were thinking. “What about your painting?”
“Don’t get much time for it.” Alan said, his voice sounding wistful.
“It’s a pity.” Jane meant it.
“God, Alan, I can’t keep this up.” She put Ellie down on the stall. “What have you done with your life? Are you still tied up in your little worries, still bound by the fears that one day you might end up broke, so you have to work and save so hard? So timid that you cannot even accept the praise, the affection people show you?” Jane’s voice rose as she lay the charges against him. Alan shuddered and seemed to be trying to fold in on himself to shut out the words.
“You would not throw up some pathetic job for the fear that you couldn't meet the payments on the television. Christ! What the bloody use was a television anyway? There’s so much more you could have done, like sleeping with someone, anyone.”
Alan blushed deeply, Jane was too painfully perceptive. Despite the discomfort, he felt fixed to where he stood.
“I bet you still work for the same people, live in the same small room. It’s not even the low wages that have done it to you, it, it ...” Jane struggled for the right word in her frustration. “It’s that you just let people use you, crush your spirit. I’m not rich but I live the life I want. Things get difficult but I face them when problems appear, not hide from ones that might just turn up. You do not change anything unless you challenge it.” Jane’s voice calmed and she let out a sigh. Alan glanced around nervously but no-one seemed to have noticed what was passing between them.
“Look there’s only an hour or two of this left. Come back here then, come for dinner, come for the week, finish your holiday with us. Live some.” Though her voice was calmer, her tone was almost beseeching.
Alan looked at her tearfully. Jane took him in her arms and rested his head against her warm shoulder.
“How ever much you wanted me, you were tied to something stronger long before we met.” She whispered in his ear. “But it’s never too late to change, take early retirement. Get some decent clothes.”
Jane seemed enthused, excited but depression drowned Alan’s elation at seeing and feeling her again. Her words, her suggestions had stripped away so much of the protection that he had put up over the years. He knew that she was right about his fears, the ones that made his life so constrained, so wedded to the routine that gave him some sense of security. For a second he was glad somehow that he had kept it to himself and had not dragged someone else down with his worrying, his fear of living life. He made his way through it, taking what he saw as the safest option at each turn.
Jane kissed him on the cheek and on the lips as she pulled herself slightly back from him. Alan relished her kisses, for an instant they burned away the discomfort. Her body was firm and reassuring between his arms. He knew that this was a security he had never known and would never do so. For those seconds there was no-one but them, the full extent of his senses, the whole world of his concerns.
“So you’ll come.” Jane said, feeling that she was winning.
“Vegetarian food.” Alan replied, but Jane knew it was without malice.
“Ha, all the better for you.” She laughed.
“Good,” was all Alan said.
“Later.” Jane said cheerfully, believing she had won the first stage on the road to Alan’s redemption.
“Yes, later.” In this instance, Alan preferred the word to goodbye. He looked back for a moment to take in her and a few details around her, like a snapshot. He raised his hand and waved slightly but turned away before she responded.
The shadows were beginning to lengthen and the sun would be soon taking on the golden hue he loved so much. He glanced at his watch and hurried his pace across the field to the gate. He had to hurry if he was to cycle back safely. He bent down to fix his cycle clips around his trousers. As he left the field, he calculated the time it would take him to reach the pub. He reckoned if he was able to eat his dinner in thirty minutes he would be in time to see that documentary on the Roman empire. He fretted. He would have to pedal quickly and be lucky that that fat woman was not in the dining room before him. Alan reached his bicycle, still resting against the fence. He unlocked it, mounted and cycled away, off into his old life.
Tuesday, 31 July 2007
I Don't Love the 1970s
I have to apologise to non-UK readers as this posting views the 1970s from very much a British perspective. In many other countries I am sure the decade was quite a bit better. As I have noted in previous postings the British public lives in the past and having moved on from the 'good old days' of the 1950s, the 1970s seems to be the focus of nostalgia, in my mind, very wrongly. There were things going on across the world that made the 1970s less than rosy for many people. The Vietnam War did not finish until 1975. The Vietnamese had been fighting the Japanese from 1941-5 then the French until 1954, then the Americans 1965-73 before the Chinese then got a look in by invading in 1979. The Vietnamese in turn invaded Cambodia which had been under the control of Pol Pot since 1975. He carried out the murders of about 2 million Cambodians and an attempt to return the country to 'Year Zero'.
Afghanistan was invaded in 1979 by the USSR and Iran went from a royal dictatorship to a fundamentalist one in the same year. The Middle East which had been plagued by fighting from 1914 onwards saw another round of the Arab-Israeli conflict in 1973; the Arab response to this was an oil embargo stronger than that imposed in 1967, then the more effective tool of simply quadrupling oil prices, which led to inflation across the World and the end of what is seen as the post-1945 economic boom. Chile's elected government was overthrown by American backed rebels and the President Allende was assassinated. Peru, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia, Ecuador all faced guerilla wars and dictatorhips, something which alsco came to Brazil and Argentina. South Africa remained under apartheid; a war which ran for more than a decade started in 1975 in Angola and similarly in Mozambique, in Uganda Idi Amin came to power in 1971 and lasted until 1979 instituting a horrific regime and leading to the ejection of Ugandan Asians; in the Central African Republic a similarly insane and brutal dictatorship under 'Emperor' Bokassa I ran 1972-9. In total 20 African states were under military dictatorship in the 1970s.
Once the USA had finally left Vietnam, maybe the 1970s appear reasonable for Americans, in the narrow window of detente in the Cold War and before AIDS began to bite. Even with inflation and even in the UK, in the 1970s there seemed to be some prosperity. Despite the petrol price increase 1975 saw the peak in car sales. Clothes were loose and jeans flared, partly stimulated by a glut in cotton production. Yet, even in the prosperity of which some of the world's citizens were benefiting from, there were concerns. There was the worry that we were going to run out of oil and yet no-one really commited to any other fuel. The French went ahead with nuclear power as did the British and Americans to a lesser extent. The accident at the USA's Three Mile Island nuclear station in 1979 was a foretaste of what would come from Chernobyl in the USSR in 1986.
So globally the World was in a mess. However, everyone these days seems to look through all of this to disco and glam rock. These were brash hedonistic cultures mixing fashion and music and a sexual freedom, if you were lucky. As with the 1960s when only a fraction of the population of any country, even in the West, let alone elsewhere, actually experienced the hippy movement, so in the 1970s. I suppose fashions such as flares, tanktops and platform shoes did penetrate to the high street, but you were hardly going to experience glam rock or disco culture to any meaningful level at a dingy local disco or nightclub. The UK in the 1970s and it had been since the 1830s onwards was dreary, drab and only functioning once in a while.
The closest reflection of this rather bitter side of the 1970s seems not to come in documentaries, but in the series. 'Life on Mars' which is about a 'time-travelling' policeman from 2006 who ends up stuck in 1973. The ugly bedsit where he lives and the threat from IRA bombs sums up the experience of the bulk of the UK population far more than renditions of 'Dancing Queen' or 'Ride a White Swan'. Not only were the 1970s drab, something that the brash acid colours of interior design could not conceal, but they were boring. As an aside, you can see two clear segments of the 1970s, probably pivoting around 1975 when the glam of the first half of the decade slowed down, worn out by its excesses and shaded into the lower key second half, for which the faeces-brown shade of Austin Allegro (I kid you not, see if you can find an image online of this appalling car) seemed to sum up the last five years of the decade and began to prepare us for the comfiness of 1980s domestic styles.
The 1970s were boring as the UK only had 3 television channels. These went off during the middle of the day and rarely stayed on as late as midnight. The viewing figures for popular shows topped 20 millon (i.e. about a third of the entire population) indicating how little there was to do. On Sundays no shops were open bar newsagents that closed at 12.30 and pubs which closed 15.00-19.00 and then again at 22.30. The prime entertainment on Sunday afternoon was to walk around towns of closed shops looking in estate agents' windows before coming home for a dreary serial, religious programmes and if you were lucky a nature programme. People turned up their colour televisions (not a universal luxury, many still watched in black & white) so red that blood looked like strawberry jam when it came out of a seal on one of these nature programmes. There were no home computers, music was on records or cassettes, both prone to damage. Music is a matter of choice, so if you like disco or funk or '70s soul or ska or punk or progressive rock or folk, all popular in the 1970s, fine, but in fact much of the music that the bulk of the population in the UK heard was very naff child stars like The Osmonds or Our Kid or singers like Dana and Gilbert O'Sullivan singing sickly sentimental stuff. Though children were given a freer rein to go to the park and run around and vandalise, they were no safer than they were today. The television schedule was filled with warnings to children about how they could be run over (graphically illustrated by a hammer smashing a peach), electrocuted on electricity pylons, drown in canals, drown in manure even, get run over by tractors, be abducted by strangers and so on.
Life in the 1970s was unhealthy. Now smoking is banned even in pubs in the UK. In the 1970s it happened everywhere: in cinemas, shops, on public transport (including underground trains until the Kings Cross station fire of 1987 which killed 31 people) even in the workplace. Everywhere you went in the 1970s stunk of tobacco smoke; cigarette advertising was everywhere. Dog faeces were not picked up in the way owners have to these days and walking down a suburban street was a real hazard; you were lucky if the dog had had a typical canine diet of the time and had white faeces, these were hard and did not squidge when trodden on - these days they eat better. In the shops nothing was sugar-free or contained bran, there was minimal indication of what it actually contained. Bread was snow white and chewy as rubber; cereals were jam packed with sugar and advertising to children was unregulated, no wonder tooth decay in children was so high. The quality of food and drink was appalling from disgusting UK made sherry to whipped up desserts full or artificial colours you had to put up with food that these days would turn your stomach. Driving was equally a danger. Wearing seatbelts was not compulsory and you could drive at 90mph (144kph) on motorways until 1974 in an era when no car had a crumple zone, ABS or airbags.
I have not mentioned the industrial action in the UK. The attempts by the Conservative government (1970-74) and the Labour government (1974-79) to reduce inflation by limiting pay claims led to rising industrial action. The most notable outcomes were in 1974 with the three-day week and in the so-called 'Winter of Discontent' of 1978/9. 1973 had already seen the reduction of motorway speed limits to 50mph (80kph) to conserve fuel and electricity was only made available for 3 days during the 5-day working week. This bumped up unemployment and left household subsisting on cold food and candles for many nights from January to March of that year and limits on industrial use of electricity for even longer. In December 1978 similar issues over pay arose leading to strikes by lorry drivers and local authority staff meaning that refuse was not collected and people were not buried. The cessation of many deliveries meant panic buying of things like sugar and flour, hiking inflation even more; also many petrol stations closed as they ran out of stocks. Railway workers, nurses also went on strike and the Army had to step in to provide emergency cover. The government did not use the powers under Acts passed in 1964, 1973 and 1976 which would have allowed it counter the strike. Though in 1948-9 the Labour government under Clement Attlee had been happy to declare states of emergency and Conservative Edward Heath did on a number of occasions 1972-4, the Labour prime minister in 1978-9, James Callaghan felt inhibited from doing so. The unrest ended in February 1979 but had wrecked Labour's chances of winning the forthcoming election, a 5% lead in the polls had turned into a 20% lag by February and the election in May 1979 brought the Conservatives to power until 1997. [For more on why I consequently don't love the 1980s, see a future posting].
Unrest was not limited to the industrial scene, though it was not until the early 1980s that the UK saw race riots on a scale not witnessed since the 1950s, the 1970s set out the groundwork with the rise of the National Front (NF) and thousands of incidents of racism (seemingly condoned by television comedies which often raised 'humour' from racial differences, especially the series 'Curry and Chips' [shown in 1969 and cancelled fortunately after only 6 episodes] and 'Love Thy Neighbour' [which shockingly ran 1972-6; 8 series]) affected people across the UK, not least the refugees escaping Idi Amin's horrific regime.
So next time suggests you attend a '70s party and dress up in glam or disco fashions, remember that that style was as much a fantasy for the people of the time as it is for you. Whilst the 2000s are not that wonderful, I am certainly totally unwilling to trade them to experience the 1970s.
Afghanistan was invaded in 1979 by the USSR and Iran went from a royal dictatorship to a fundamentalist one in the same year. The Middle East which had been plagued by fighting from 1914 onwards saw another round of the Arab-Israeli conflict in 1973; the Arab response to this was an oil embargo stronger than that imposed in 1967, then the more effective tool of simply quadrupling oil prices, which led to inflation across the World and the end of what is seen as the post-1945 economic boom. Chile's elected government was overthrown by American backed rebels and the President Allende was assassinated. Peru, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia, Ecuador all faced guerilla wars and dictatorhips, something which alsco came to Brazil and Argentina. South Africa remained under apartheid; a war which ran for more than a decade started in 1975 in Angola and similarly in Mozambique, in Uganda Idi Amin came to power in 1971 and lasted until 1979 instituting a horrific regime and leading to the ejection of Ugandan Asians; in the Central African Republic a similarly insane and brutal dictatorship under 'Emperor' Bokassa I ran 1972-9. In total 20 African states were under military dictatorship in the 1970s.
Once the USA had finally left Vietnam, maybe the 1970s appear reasonable for Americans, in the narrow window of detente in the Cold War and before AIDS began to bite. Even with inflation and even in the UK, in the 1970s there seemed to be some prosperity. Despite the petrol price increase 1975 saw the peak in car sales. Clothes were loose and jeans flared, partly stimulated by a glut in cotton production. Yet, even in the prosperity of which some of the world's citizens were benefiting from, there were concerns. There was the worry that we were going to run out of oil and yet no-one really commited to any other fuel. The French went ahead with nuclear power as did the British and Americans to a lesser extent. The accident at the USA's Three Mile Island nuclear station in 1979 was a foretaste of what would come from Chernobyl in the USSR in 1986.
So globally the World was in a mess. However, everyone these days seems to look through all of this to disco and glam rock. These were brash hedonistic cultures mixing fashion and music and a sexual freedom, if you were lucky. As with the 1960s when only a fraction of the population of any country, even in the West, let alone elsewhere, actually experienced the hippy movement, so in the 1970s. I suppose fashions such as flares, tanktops and platform shoes did penetrate to the high street, but you were hardly going to experience glam rock or disco culture to any meaningful level at a dingy local disco or nightclub. The UK in the 1970s and it had been since the 1830s onwards was dreary, drab and only functioning once in a while.
The closest reflection of this rather bitter side of the 1970s seems not to come in documentaries, but in the series. 'Life on Mars' which is about a 'time-travelling' policeman from 2006 who ends up stuck in 1973. The ugly bedsit where he lives and the threat from IRA bombs sums up the experience of the bulk of the UK population far more than renditions of 'Dancing Queen' or 'Ride a White Swan'. Not only were the 1970s drab, something that the brash acid colours of interior design could not conceal, but they were boring. As an aside, you can see two clear segments of the 1970s, probably pivoting around 1975 when the glam of the first half of the decade slowed down, worn out by its excesses and shaded into the lower key second half, for which the faeces-brown shade of Austin Allegro (I kid you not, see if you can find an image online of this appalling car) seemed to sum up the last five years of the decade and began to prepare us for the comfiness of 1980s domestic styles.
The 1970s were boring as the UK only had 3 television channels. These went off during the middle of the day and rarely stayed on as late as midnight. The viewing figures for popular shows topped 20 millon (i.e. about a third of the entire population) indicating how little there was to do. On Sundays no shops were open bar newsagents that closed at 12.30 and pubs which closed 15.00-19.00 and then again at 22.30. The prime entertainment on Sunday afternoon was to walk around towns of closed shops looking in estate agents' windows before coming home for a dreary serial, religious programmes and if you were lucky a nature programme. People turned up their colour televisions (not a universal luxury, many still watched in black & white) so red that blood looked like strawberry jam when it came out of a seal on one of these nature programmes. There were no home computers, music was on records or cassettes, both prone to damage. Music is a matter of choice, so if you like disco or funk or '70s soul or ska or punk or progressive rock or folk, all popular in the 1970s, fine, but in fact much of the music that the bulk of the population in the UK heard was very naff child stars like The Osmonds or Our Kid or singers like Dana and Gilbert O'Sullivan singing sickly sentimental stuff. Though children were given a freer rein to go to the park and run around and vandalise, they were no safer than they were today. The television schedule was filled with warnings to children about how they could be run over (graphically illustrated by a hammer smashing a peach), electrocuted on electricity pylons, drown in canals, drown in manure even, get run over by tractors, be abducted by strangers and so on.
Life in the 1970s was unhealthy. Now smoking is banned even in pubs in the UK. In the 1970s it happened everywhere: in cinemas, shops, on public transport (including underground trains until the Kings Cross station fire of 1987 which killed 31 people) even in the workplace. Everywhere you went in the 1970s stunk of tobacco smoke; cigarette advertising was everywhere. Dog faeces were not picked up in the way owners have to these days and walking down a suburban street was a real hazard; you were lucky if the dog had had a typical canine diet of the time and had white faeces, these were hard and did not squidge when trodden on - these days they eat better. In the shops nothing was sugar-free or contained bran, there was minimal indication of what it actually contained. Bread was snow white and chewy as rubber; cereals were jam packed with sugar and advertising to children was unregulated, no wonder tooth decay in children was so high. The quality of food and drink was appalling from disgusting UK made sherry to whipped up desserts full or artificial colours you had to put up with food that these days would turn your stomach. Driving was equally a danger. Wearing seatbelts was not compulsory and you could drive at 90mph (144kph) on motorways until 1974 in an era when no car had a crumple zone, ABS or airbags.
I have not mentioned the industrial action in the UK. The attempts by the Conservative government (1970-74) and the Labour government (1974-79) to reduce inflation by limiting pay claims led to rising industrial action. The most notable outcomes were in 1974 with the three-day week and in the so-called 'Winter of Discontent' of 1978/9. 1973 had already seen the reduction of motorway speed limits to 50mph (80kph) to conserve fuel and electricity was only made available for 3 days during the 5-day working week. This bumped up unemployment and left household subsisting on cold food and candles for many nights from January to March of that year and limits on industrial use of electricity for even longer. In December 1978 similar issues over pay arose leading to strikes by lorry drivers and local authority staff meaning that refuse was not collected and people were not buried. The cessation of many deliveries meant panic buying of things like sugar and flour, hiking inflation even more; also many petrol stations closed as they ran out of stocks. Railway workers, nurses also went on strike and the Army had to step in to provide emergency cover. The government did not use the powers under Acts passed in 1964, 1973 and 1976 which would have allowed it counter the strike. Though in 1948-9 the Labour government under Clement Attlee had been happy to declare states of emergency and Conservative Edward Heath did on a number of occasions 1972-4, the Labour prime minister in 1978-9, James Callaghan felt inhibited from doing so. The unrest ended in February 1979 but had wrecked Labour's chances of winning the forthcoming election, a 5% lead in the polls had turned into a 20% lag by February and the election in May 1979 brought the Conservatives to power until 1997. [For more on why I consequently don't love the 1980s, see a future posting].
Unrest was not limited to the industrial scene, though it was not until the early 1980s that the UK saw race riots on a scale not witnessed since the 1950s, the 1970s set out the groundwork with the rise of the National Front (NF) and thousands of incidents of racism (seemingly condoned by television comedies which often raised 'humour' from racial differences, especially the series 'Curry and Chips' [shown in 1969 and cancelled fortunately after only 6 episodes] and 'Love Thy Neighbour' [which shockingly ran 1972-6; 8 series]) affected people across the UK, not least the refugees escaping Idi Amin's horrific regime.
So next time suggests you attend a '70s party and dress up in glam or disco fashions, remember that that style was as much a fantasy for the people of the time as it is for you. Whilst the 2000s are not that wonderful, I am certainly totally unwilling to trade them to experience the 1970s.
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