Books I Listened To/Read In April

Non-Fiction

'The Awful Secret' by Bernard Knight

This is the fourth book in the Crowner John series set a few months after the melodramatic trial by tournament that ended 'Crowner's Quest' (1999). Sir John De Wolfe has largely recovered from the broken leg he received at the tournament and is back investigating. There are two main stories, one about the murder of a man washed up on the northern shore of Devon and then him being pressured to help a former Templar he knew in Palestine, who himself is murdered. One might expect that whenever Templars are mentioned these days there will also be something about the Holy Grail and the descendants of Jesus Christ. 

Though this book was published in 2000, ahead of 'The Da Vinci Code' (2003) it shows people holding the same views on Jesus's bloodline as in that book. However, unlike in most books of this kind, De Wolfe being a good Catholic of the late 12th Century sees the entire idea as blasphemous. This brings in interesting tensions as to how far a man will go to aid old army comrades, ones he did not know particularly well. While he assists the first former templar, even concealing him at his family's home, he feels obliged to aid the second, despite ultimately despising the line that he preaches. In many ways, De Wolfe is tricked and this makes him seem that much more human than all the laboured philandering which fill so much of these books. There is tension as he tries to help the second templar get away from Dorset.

There is an additional sub-plot with an invasion of the island of Lundy held by pirates though promised to the Templars and in subduing another village on the mainland coast indulging in piracy. These provide action scenes that Knight seems to have felt were necessary now in each of these books. Some modern commentators feel the secret is 'dull' though I think that is because some twenty years on these speculations about Jesus are very well known and not as surprising as was the case even back in 2000. I feel, though, that despite some flaws, this is a good book. De Wolfe does blunder and holds to attitudes which are appropriate for his time and background, rather than being a sudden convert to some radical new belief. I still have quite a few of these books to read. I hope Knight kept to the more realistic approach rather than making his protagonist an action hero and also toning down the unnecessarily high number of sexual encounters.

'City of Glass' by Cassandra Clare

While there are further two books after this one in Clare's Mortal Instruments series, this one does feel like the closing of a trilogy. It comes to a big climax with the antagonist, Valentine and a lot seems to resolved. Starting in New York like the previous two books, this one soon moves to the fantastical world of Idris (capital Alicante, but not the Alicante of our world) which has a kind of Victorian bucolic setting as if envisaged by William Morris. All the main characters from the previous books end up there. Given this context it does feel, even more than the previous two books, as a branching-off from the Harry Potter series. The various debates among the shadowhunters of Idris are reminiscent of the conflicting  views around dealing with Lord Voldemort. Again it is teenagers who settle the situation and also work to bring an alliance between the shadowhunters and the 'downworlders', i.e. vampires, werewolves and fairies. There is the same kind of mixture of political debates and teenage relationship crises.

I have commented how unsettling the underage sex (the main character is 14, rather than 18 as shown in the television series) and the incestuous thoughts between a brother and sister, which though, fortunately, is revealed to untrue. I do not know why Clare felt a need to include these elements. The incest in this book is part of a very well done subterfuge by one character, but it was unnecessary and I wonder why the publishers accepted it for a book aimed at the 'young adult' audience. There is some decent writing in this book and aspects which stand above the rather derivative ones. However, it is not a book I can like due to what I feel are inappropriate foci for it. Ironically I feel curious to see where Clare went with the remaining two books since she killed the incest and effectively had the prime antagonist vanquished.

'The Concrete Blonde' by Michael Connelly

This book was published in 1994 and is the third in Connelly's Harry Bosch series. I think it is the best of those that I have read so far which seems to confirm what for me seems to be increasingly true: that you need to give a crime novelist at least 3 books for them to get into their stride with a character. The book with video cassettes, pagers and US Vietnam veterans in early middle age, feels very of its time. What is galling, though, is the highlighting of black suspects being choked to death and unarmed suspects being shot dead by police feels like elements taken from the current US news, even 27 years later. Some things never seem to change in the USA.

Unlike the previous book, 'The Black Ice' (1993), this one is very taut. In part this is because much of the action takes place in the courtroom. Harry Bosch is facing a civil case brought by the widow of an unarmed serial killer known as The Dollmaker that he shot and killed four years earlier when the man was reaching for a toupee rather than a gun. This means Bosch is kept on quite a leash at times having to rush back to court. To confuse matters it comes to light that either he killed the wrong man or there is a copycat killer who has been active at the same time. The jeopardy that Bosch faces in investigating whether he did make a mistake with his suspicions or not adds another layer to the story. There are some decent twists and it is good to see the detective as being as flawed as anyone else. There is also the extra elements of his antagonisms with both the prosecuting attorney and his own rather ineffectual lawyer. We also see the complexities that his position makes in terms of his developing relationship with Sylvia Moore, the widow of a colleague whose murder he investigated in the previous book.

Overall, the novel manages to balance having twists and various layers without losing the reader. It gives what feels like a decent picture of Los Angeles, both the upmarket and seedy sides of it and in showing how dangerous it is for citizens at risk for their lives both from criminals and the police. Unfortunately in almost three decades, that situation has not changed. However, it does mean that Connelly's book has a currency rather than beginning to feel entirely like a historical crime novel.

Non-Fiction

'My Favourite People and Me, 1978-1988' by Alan Davies

I saw the documentary programme, 'Alan Davies' Teenage Rebellion' (2010) in which Davies went back to where he grew up in Essex and met with people he had known in his youth as well as celebrities he had followed, notably Paul Weller. I imagine a lot of that is based on this book published the previous year. It is a kind of free-flowing autobiography in sections concerning a single year in this period, but with chapters using people that Davies was interested in as the hook. Often, though, he does not really come to the individual until the end of the relevant chapter. 

Davies is less than two years older than me. He went to a private school, his mother died when he was young, he was abused by his father (the focus of his most recent biography but there are shadows of that in this book) who remarried a neighbour and they were much richer than my family, e.g. having fly-drive 3-week holidays in the USA; he was bought both a motor scooter and a car as soon as he could have them; I did not have a car until I was in my mid-30s. Davies was far more successful with women than me and far more into sport, especially football, but also tennis and motorbike racing, so those celebrities mean little to me. However, pop stars, the people in the news and what he thought about them, campaigns of the time, such as around nuclear weapons and animal rights, are things I know about. He tells his involvement in these things and what he thought about these people I can understand them. Though we were poorer than his family, we still felt ourselves in the middle class milieu and I knew people like him.

As you would expect from his TV performances, Davies recounts the topics he focuses on with wry humour than made me laugh out loud occasionally.  If you are interested in him as a person this is a good read and is very accessible. It would particularly appeal if you remember the era yourself or if you are interested in how (relatively well off) young people survived in an era before smart phones and social media and what issues concerned many of them, some of which now seem pretty forgotten. It would be nice to see more autobiographies using this approach which I find very refreshing and engaging.

'The Spanish Civil War' by Hugh Thomas

I was advised that as the years progressed from the first publication of this book in 1961, that Thomas revised it to move increasingly towards sympathy to the Nationalist side in the civil war. The edition I read was published in 1965 and though he had corrected some errors from the previous two, it did seem that his sympathies while supportive of the Republican government side are actually pretty balanced. He does not hold back from criticism of the Republicans' multifarious divisions that so weakened them and the vacillating attitude of the Moscow-backing Communists. 

Thomas really benefited from the fact that he was writing when many of those who had been involved in the war from both sides, let alone eye-witnesses, were still alive. He is very good at balancing up the different perspectives, especially when it is difficult to know the truth and giving the reader a fair impression of what happened.

This is a comprehensive book, my edition was 911 pages long. Thomas gives background going back into the 19th Century and making it clear that the violence of the 1930s was part of a long history of such occurrences in Spanish history. He also shows how the fact that Spain had not been involved in the First World War had left many in the country ill-informed of the nature of war. Coming at the end of the 1930s, it was to experience all the horrors of the latest military technology, especially in terms of the aerial bombing of civilians. Before discussing the war itself, Thomas goes through the different political groupings. While the divisions on the Republican side are well known, he shows those among the Nationalists too, given the range of groups which joined what had been primarily a military uprising.

The book is good on the social and economic aspects of the war, yet also provides detailed accounts of the various battles, aided by dome simple but informative line-drawn maps. It makes clear that those who somehow pretend that General Franco, progressed slowly to avoid damaging so much of Spain are mistaken. He stated this but it is clear that even with massive support from Italy and Germany, his soldiers were often struggling to make advances but when they entered towns they carried out massacres which Spain had long become accustomed to. I had not realised how close the Nationalists came to grinding to a halt. Even in 1938 if the supply of German war materiel had dried up then, the war most likely would have come to a stalemate.

Thomas is good on all the various individuals who were involved and highlights things such as Irishmen fighting on both sides and the black American soldiers and commanders who fought in the Republican International Brigades, fighting alongside white comrades when the US Army was still segregated. Someone needs to make a movie about ex-Corporal Oliver Law, the black commander of the Washington Battalion. The age of the book is shown up by how Thomas feels to seem physical details such as how fat someone was or whether they had a lot of sex, are important for ascertaining their character.

The British come out of the story very poorly. I know some wanted the Nationalists to win, on the basis that while democracy was fine for Britain other countries were better under dictators. However, a lot of the British policy, blocking the elected government from buying arms and yet introducing a non-intervention policy so poor that tens of thousands of Italian troops fought for the Nationalists, just seems to be incompetence. It is only in the light of Neville Chamberlain's utter failings as prime minister that his predecessor Stanley Baldwin could seem even mildly competent. In many ways Britain's actions ensured that the Nationalists won, especially in the context of how close the fight was throughout, contrary to what now tends to be the popular view of it.

Overall, despite its age, this is a very good book if you want to really get into seeing what happened in the Spanish Civil War in detail. It remains a good counter-balance to rather lazy assumptions about the war which have slipped into popular history portrayals. It certainly shows that there are many more stories to the story of the war than is commonly recognised. Americans in particular seem to be missing out on the role which their nationals played in the conflict, at a time when, in other historical aspects, the role played by black people is being highlighted.

Audio Books - Fiction

'The Da Vinci Code' by Dan Brown; read by Jeff Harding

It is ironic that I ended up listening to this at some of the same time as I was reading 'The Awful Secret' (2000) as they feature the same theory about Jesus Christ being married and having children. When this novel came out in 2003, I was irritated at the efforts that people went to prove how 'wrong' Brown was, down to minute details about where a particular stone is in a corridor at the Louvre gallery in Paris as this somehow 'proved' he was something - lazy, misguided, trying to trick people - I am not sure. They seemed to forget that he had written a work of fiction and if they had dug into the details in a Jack Reacher novel, let alone a James Bond one, they would have found much the same. Listening to the book - having seen the 2006 movie years ago, in part, I realised why they felt compelled to set up such 'uncovering' of the book.

While there is chasing around Paris, London and parts of Scotland, the book is less an adventure and more a lecture. There are huge sections of exposition by one or more of the main characters to others. Fortunately, at least it is not all mansplaining as Sophie Neveu, police cryptoanalyst, is knowledgeable in her field and about Paris. However, what tends to happen is the characters go to a location, decipher what they find there and then talk at length about how the story of Jesus's wife, Mary Magdalene was suppressed, especially after the Council of Nicea which decided that Jesus had been a son of God and not entirely mortal. Added to that, down the centuries, the Christian churches, in this case primarily the Catholic Church saw benefit in underplaying or even dismissing the role of women in early Christianity so ensuring an entirely male Christian priesthood until recent changes in some Protestant churches.

There are some reasonable set pieces of action, escaping from the authorities. The role of Opus Dei looms large with a monk-assassin, Silas, aided in hunting down the protagonists and an Opus Dei member, Captain Fache, leading the French police investigation and granted great powers in doing it. There are a couple of twists with people not being who they seem which are fine. However, I would not say that the book gripped me. The exposition is interesting enough but in the years since the book was published, it has become common knowledge so it probably a lot less surprising than it might have been back then. I had always thought it a surprise that Jesus, as a 34-year old Jewish workman of the 1st Century CE, had not married. I did wonder if he was a widower, so the fact that he had a wife at some stage or another was never really a surprise to me. The fact that he was supposed to have come from a Jewish royal family as Brown states, seems more surprising as, surely, then he would not have spent his life working as a Nazarene carpenter. Anyway, overall the book is not bad, it is more that it is an adventure story used as a basis for delivering a series of lectures.

Jeff Harding is an American and has that rather breathless narration that seems so common with US audio book readers. His French accents do rather sound as if they are from the comedy series, ''Allo, 'Allo', but maybe that is what a lot of listeners expect. He does the female voices surprisingly well.

I Don't Love the 1980s

Back in July 2007, I did a posting which sought to counteract the popular television series 'I Love the '70s' (2000) and its follow-ups, 'I Love the '80s' (2001) and 'I Love the '90s' which I believe was broadcast in 2002 so with its final programme about 1999 was talking about events of only three years earlier.  These programmes looked back in particular at popular culture in one year of each of the decades.  Whilst they did cover some of the political issues of these years it was much more about the upbeat or quirky aspects of pop music and culture of the times and talking to the people involved, though even then selection was careful, for example, the paedophile Gary Glitter (real name Paul Gadd) who had been incredibly successful pop star in the mid-1970s, with twelve consecutive top ten hits in the charts 1972-5, was not featured at all due to his later convictions for abusing children.  Consequently these programmes tended to give a rose-tinted picture especially of the 1970s and 1980s.  As someone who lived through those years, I wanted to counter-balance that perspective.  My view of the 1970s can be seen at: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2007/07/i-dont-love-1970s.html

My intention then had been to follow it up with a 'I Don't Love the 1980s' focusing on the decade which in many ways was even worse than the 1970s and yet almost had instant nostalgia about it, and an 'air brushed' history which focused on the extreme fashions and lively if rather artificial music culture.  Back in 2007, however, I had no inkling that we would be thrust abruptly back into a replica of the 1980s, in fact, with many of its worst aspects compressed into months rather than years.  At the moment we have the cut-backs and privatisation, the unemployment and the racism which took some years to unfold in the 1980s.  Interestingly, I do not seem to have been the only person alert to this, anyone who lived through the 1980s recognises the similarities and knowing what we are going to face in the months and years ahead makes it worse than when we did not know quite what to expect and the full horror was only revealed as the months passed.  Just surfing the television channels in recent weeks I have seen the movie 'This is England' (2006) set in 1983, the follow-up series 'This is England '86' (2010) and the 3-part documentary series 'Alan Davies' Teenage Revolution' (2010).  All of these focus on the nastier side of the 1980s which tends to be forgotten in the nostalgia, especially when it emerges from the USA.

Alan Davies's programme is really an autobiography (which to some degree 'This is England' is for director Shane Meadows, though with more fictional elements included) as he looks back at his teenaged years and how he interacted with the cultural and political trends of the time.  Though Alan Davies is less than two years older than me he was two years ahead of me in terms of schooling so went to university in 1985 whereas I only got there in 1987.  Being older in the early to mid 1980s he was active politically at the time when nuclear weapons were a real issue and the Miners' Strike 1984-5 was a key aspect of British life.  Davies came from a far more privileged background than I did.  I grew up in the Surrey suburbs but our house could have fitted into his at least twice.  I went to a comprehensive school that had been a secondary modern school until  four years before I had attended it whereas Davies went to a public school (i.e. an elite fee-paying school).  However, to the people who faced the blunt end of Thatcherite Britain, for example miners and their families, I lived a privileged life.  My father was never made redundant and my mother found work throughout the period; we never had our house repossessed.  We did know people who suffered these things but were spared them.  I felt hard done by in the 1980s because I was marginalised with my parents treating me as if I was mentally disabled (though ironically not detecting the Asperger's Syndrome symptoms which now seem so apparent) and by friends who looked down upon my family because we lived in the 'wrong' part of town (still leafy suburban roads that most British people would love to live in) and we did not have the consumer items that they felt were necessary for happiness.  My family were also distinct in being Socialists at a time when that belief seemed to be dead or perversely a complete threat to personal liberty.  I was patronised terribly by people who told me that I 'had to accept the need' for Thatcherite policies as if one day I would 'see the light' of how good they were.  I saw them as simply selfish and greedy as I still do today.

It was later than I realised how privileged I had been, when I spoke to man none of whose family had worked since ten years in 1987 and the only people in his village in Scotland who had a job were the man who engraved the gravestones and a gangster.  He moved to Botswana because he could earn a better wage (he earned £7000 per year there, which was ten times the national average salary of Botswana and better than claiming the dole back in Scotland).  Another woman, a white Englishwoman whose family had moved to Scotland where she faced constant prejudice as her father tramped from town to town trying to find work as a teacher.  Even these people did not have their lives wrecked by heroin or had to live in bed and breakfast accommodation.  We all have 'referents', people we compare ourselves too.  Everyone in Britain knows we are better off than most people in Afghanistan or Ethiopia, but when we lose our job or our house, we do not think 'well, it could be worse, I could be starving to death', we look at our referents and see how much worse than them we are.  Thus, I accept that my life in the 1980s was far better than millions of people in the UK, but I felt that I was unfortunate and, anyway, I felt angry for all those without jobs and being hassled by the police.  I suppose that is what being a Socialist is about, having an affinity for other people and striving to make the lives of all people not luxurious but at least decent and importantly, secure.

The one thing I feel that most programmes about the 1980s neglect is how much fear there was.  I do not remember a time when I was not fearful that my father would lose his job, that we would lose our house and anyway that we would be destroyed by a nuclear explosion.  In terms of politics I lived in a very Conservative area, well, that is how most of Surrey is, so rarely found people around me who had even a marginally similar perspective on the world compared to me.  Friends who constantly anticipated a Soviet invasion (the conviction of the reality of this was incredible, even a teacher of ours seeing a group of helicopters flying over the school which was near a NATO base, for a few moments really believed the invasion had come), bragged about how they would fight a guerilla war as they had seen on trashy US movies.  I never expected it to come to that, I anticipated nuclear armageddon.  We knew we had our own Soviet missile as we were near the base and any loud bang at night made me wake thinking the first warheads had hit London some tens of miles away.  That terror was always with us, fuelled by teachers who seem to love showing you movies like 'Threads' (1983) about the outcome of a nuclear war and all the books you would see on the shelves of W.H. Smith outlining similar things.

Another fear towards the end of the 1980s was around AIDS.  It was presented to us not really as a Biblical plague but more as one of those manufactured viruses gone mad that had featured in books, series and movies in the 1970s.  It seemed unstoppable and it also seemed dangerous in the way that it allowed people to be prejudiced, against gays, against people from Africa, though US cities seemed to be the main breeding ground of the disease at the time.  Growing up in suburban England it did seem very much to be 'someone else's' problem and adults around us blamed others.  Schools were rather torn, not wanting to be seen to promote teenagers having sex and because of things such as Clause 28 of the Local Government Act (1986-2002/3) which banned the positive portrayal of homosexual relations in lessons talk around any sexual issues now seemed prescribed.  We were warned about the risks of drug addiction though, and I remember pretty graphic stories clearly aimed at pupils from the sort of context I lived in, about 'nice girls' getting hooked on drugs and ending up as prostitutes and HIV-infected.  The bulk of us not being drug users of any kind (and even under-age binge drinking had yet to be invented) it made AIDS seem still like something that Americans would suffer or homeless people in London.  In addition, the popular cultural coverage, movies like 'Long Term Companion' (1989) and later 'Philadelphia' (1993) seemed to suggest it was something that rich Americans suffered from.  AIDS was not featured in the grim British soap opera, 'Eastenders' until 1992 and in the similar children's series 'Grange Hill' until 1995.

Reaching university welfare officers of the Student's Union seemed to be fired up by the fact that they could not give demonstrations about the use of condoms.  I think it was a good step that condoms were now much more readily available.  However, the UK still has a long way to go before a teenager can by them from a dispensing machine on the street as I saw in West Germany in 1989 (ironically sold from a cigarette machine) or was to see in Belgium subsequently. 

I suppose there were students in the UK who were going in for promiscuous, dangerous sex, it was just that I never seemed to encounter any and AIDS remained simply a subject for people to cover in 'alternative' fiction anthologies that were popular in universities of the time, though the stories I remember were as lurid as those in the tabloid press the authors supposedly loathed.  I found out subsequently that 40% of students leave university without having sex and you have to bear in mind that many arrive already having had it (and when I was at university there was an increasing number of mature students in the mix who had children and even grandchildren).  I was lumped in with a very puritan crowd which might reflect where I went to university or just fate.  One man I knew, even once in bed with a woman turned to her and said he could not go threw with it because he did not believe in pre-marital sex.  Apparently she took it very calmly.  A woman living on my corridor would sleep on the floor of her room from Wednesday when the sheets were changed so that when her boyfriend arrived on Saturday he could sleep alone on clean sheets.  To me there seemed to be something going wrong with feminism let alone sex.  In such a context it appeared that even those in relationships were not having sex.  No wonder AIDS seemed to be very far away.

For me, I was very conscious that I had come to university as not only a virgin but a man who had not had a girlfriend since he was 10.  My parents had done a wonderful jump in utterly crushing my self-confidence by repeatedly portraying me as looking as if I was mentally disabled and I was self-conscious about getting naked from the bodged operation which had left me with a 12cm scar.  I did ask women out, nine in three years, but was always rebuffed, and in some cases, as when taking my 'A' levels I seemed to be always pursuing a disinterested woman when one who had some interest in me was growing impatient at my lack of response.  My understanding nature soon made me one of those men that women pour their hearts out to about how badly their boyfriend is treating them, when in fact, I wanted to be their boyfriend.  My parents, despite having stripped me of the confidence necessary to strike up an intimate relationship, now seemed bemused, at times even angry, that I was not having sexual encounters.  Having been young in the 1960s and in industries which saw quite a lot of promiscuity, but not actually having been to university, they did not understand the puritan environment I was living in and that no woman was in fact particularly interested in me as a sexual partner.  It was not to be until the following century, more than fifteen years later, that I actually had sex. Thus, seeing myself as a liberal Democratic Socialist, I supported safe sex campaigns and events to educate people about sexual health.  However, in terms of myself and how I lived my life it had as much impact as lesbian rights did.  As with the nuclear war issue, I did worry I would be one of the survivors of the post-apocalyptic environment when so many people had died of AIDS that society would break down.  Thus, while not worrying about how it would impact on my health, AIDS was another terrible aspect of the 1980s that added to my overall level of terror for the future.

Unlike Alan Davies, I had never been a great 'joiner' of clubs and societies.  I had been in a judo club for some months as a child and that was it.  Partly that was because of my condition, I see now.  I much preferred to stay in my room and design 'dungeons' for the game 'Dungeons & Dragons' or write fiction, the classic geek.  For me the inner world was the greatest escape.  I had friends, but would have to face up to lectures from their mothers and fathers about how deluded my politics were.  Perhaps if my parents had remained living in London, I would have met more people who thought like me.  I used to fantasise about meeting a radical girlfriend, but it never happened.  Partly because I was useless in social circles and because the only radicals in my district were those who felt that Margaret Thatcher was not going far enough in her policies and were not afraid to say it.  For some reason these were usually girls rather than boys who tended to stick to their post-armageddon fantasies.  Of course, when you are a teenager girls want older men anyway and given that I was patronised, looked as ugly as I do now, except with added acne and adhered to geeky hobbies, I was hardly an attractive proposition.

I did join the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), but almost immediately regretted it.  For some reason I had gone to a CND meeting, probably in 1984, in a neighbouring town and for the first time after numerous invitations the local (Conservative) MP decided to turn up and debate, in a pretty civilised way, with the local group.  Heady from that achievement and seeing some attractive girls from my school in the audience I agreed to join the local party and as a consequence received a newsletter on a green piece of A4 pushed through my letterbox every month or so.  Being fearful, however, I instantly anticipated that I had now wrecked my chances of ever getting a job.  I think this stemmed a great deal from my parents.  My mother had marched with the original CND in the 1960s and whilst pleased the movement had been reinvigorated in the 1980s instilled a real fear in me of the consequences of being involved in radical movements.  My father had been an active trade unionist in the 1970s and growing up I was used to hearing the tapping of our telephone, a fear my mother continued even into the 1990s when I imagine MI5 had long lost interest in my father and the equipment was far more sophisticated.  My mother, when not reminding me how much I looked like someone who was suffering from Down's Syndrome, told me the danger of being lured to join the Communist Party.  As a result, every time the CND letter arrived I was worried that the police would be close behind it.

It took me two attempts to get to university which I managed to do in 1987 after having retaken my 'A' levels and inexplicably the grades jumping far higher despite me writing much the same as I had the year before.  By that stage the Thatcher regime was so ensconced, that, being interested in history, I feared that to get into my chosen career (working for the civil service), I would have not only to disengage from any radical groups but also actually become a member of the Conservative Party.  I believed that democracy would soon be at an end and that as under the Nazi and Soviet regimes only party members would be permitted to have a career in public service.  I had never paid any fees to the CND group since that first evening and yet they had not stopped sending me the newsletter.  I was sure that meant I was on their list and so would be on MI5's.  I saw the only way was to break very clearly from the group and I wrote to then pretending that I had been foolish, having mistakenly believed they supported multilateral disarmament (which was supposedly the Thatcher government's line that they would get rid of nuclear weapons if everyone else did; I doubt their sincerity, I do not believe they ever intend(ed) to get rid of them) but to my horror had found out that they were unilateralists (the Labour Party's approach in the early 1980s, that the UK should get rid of nuclear weapons no matter what anyone else did) and felt I had been deluded by them and that they should not only stop sending me their newsletter but remove me from any list or I would take legal action against them.  I met the member who had signed me up originally at a party and he scowled at me, but that was it, fortunately, and I never saw him again.

By the time I reached university when I did begin to encounter people with similar views to me (in very small numbers and certainly very rare in my student hall which seemed to be full of Oxbridge failures who wanted to live 'Brideshead Revisited' at a modern university), I was afraid we would be doomed to a life of unemployment if we expressed political views not in accordance with the government.  I had intended to join the Conservative Party as I felt it would be the only way to secure a job, but ulitmately could not bring myself to do that.  Unlike Alan Davies, and many people I met myself, by 1987, I had no belief that any action by ordinary people could effect the course of the government's policies.  Having seen the miners broken in 1985, I felt we were on course for a full-blown dictatorship by the 1990s.  I did become a bit radical towards the end of my time at university, ironically, when Thatcher was running out of steam.  I joined the Anti-Apartheid Movement and helped arrange some events; I even occupied a university library.  I think my late found radicalism only came about after I found I had developed diabetes and, in a self-destructive spiral, was drinking far too much alcohol and eating tons of chocolate, assuming I would be dead by 1991 and so would not suffer the consequences of any youthful rebellion.  However, I missed out on the excitement of being radical, the heady rush of for some moments believing you could actually change things.  Maybe I am a natural cynic, but I had the worst of both worlds hating the system but having no faith that I could do anything about it.  Looking back, of course, the protest movements achieved nothing (maybe that is harsh: fortunately no nuclear war yet but still nuclear weapons in the UK; but no more apartheid; better rights for gay people, marginally better for women and disabled people; still policies damaging the environment; still Thatcherism), but I wish at least I had had sufficient hope to have tried, to have been among that number.  Instead, I have seen my expectations mainly realised and yet am burdened by the guilt of not helping those who fought for what I believe I believe in.

Looking back at the programmes of the 1980s, I still get a feeling of awe when I see Tony Benn, Michael Foot and Billy Bragg speaking/singing back then, but I feel I betrayed them.  I was untrue to my beliefs and in the fear or what damage it would do to me personally bottled out of demonstrating or becoming truly involved.  Part of the problem, I think was that my parents had been radical in the 1960s and seeing how little they had achieved and the cost it had imposed on their lives, I was very cynical that anything could be changed with a far harsher government, eager to use the police to suppress protest than had been the case in the 1960s.  My parents did not fill me with radical fervour just additional fear about how my life turned out.  Looking back I realise I feared the wrong things.  I should have been more active which would have relieved me of my current burden of guilt, but ironically should have studied to be a lawyer or an accountant, so would not be now facing losing my house because I am unemployable now that Thatcherism is back.

That was my 1980s: fear.  Fear of nuclear armageddon, fear of never working, fear of being arrested for my views.  Of course, though, in fact I was in a privileged position (in those days only 6% of 18-year olds went to university it is now 42%), those fears and realities affected millions of people.  Unemployment was around 3.4 million in 1986 and was, in reality, far higher.  Thousands of people lost their houses, thousands did not work for years.  Nuclear war was a constant shadow over everything.  No-one I knew, and probably only one person I ever me, ever lived the 1980s 'dream' of champagne, fast cars and jobs in The City and even he may not have got there.  The 1980s had some decent television dramas; it had the Goth movement the greatest gift to culture of the decade; it had the music of Billy Bragg and The Jam which remain timeless, it also had terrible television programmes and trashy pop music. 

More importantly, very deliberately in the 1980s, the last sense of community was destroyed by Margaret Thatcher's declarations that there was no such thing as society and that we were always under threat from those supposedly trying to undermine our way of life, whereas, in fact, it was her who was wrecking it from the foundations up.  Selfishness and greed became engrained into British society and we are still paying the price for that with massive imbalance in incomes, in insecure jobs and even reckless driving.  Thatcher made these things not only seem acceptable, in contrast to the striving for a more equitable society in previous decades, but almost something we should all be striving for if we did not wish to be tarred with the brush of being Socialists.  That is the reality of the 1980s.  I lived in well-off southern England, it bit far harder elsewhere in the UK wrecking millions of lives with poverty, crime and addiction.

I am glad some people are reminding they youth and older people how bad the 1980s were and how bad the 2010s are going to be.  Constant fears and being told you did not even deserve what you had worked for, were the reality of the 1980s and this is why I can only loathe that decade.  If you were too young to experience the 1980s, know it is coming to your street this very day.  Be afraid, be very afraid.