My Life as a Tapestry 13 - (The Art of Husbandry)

 At the beginning of 1984 Steph moved in with me in Colin’s Housing Trust flat off Ladbroke Grove (he was living with Moira in Camden by this time). She brought with her a Sunbeam Electric Frypan - the first time I’d ever seen one. It was big enough to roast a whole chicken in and we used it for just about everything. This was the first of many innovations she introduced into my domestic life, and indeed into my life generally.

A few weeks later we were in Mozambique, teaching English to electrical engineers, as part of a contract that London School had with the Swedish government. We were there for two months. It was a profound experience because of the vitality and friendliness of our impoverished students, but also because of the growing destabilisation of Mozambique by South African-backed rebels; a violent tropical cyclone named Demoina that levelled all the palm trees along the Maputo beach front and left the city without clean water for several days; and our colleague and trip organiser Terry catching cerebral malaria and having to be flown home early. 

Despite all that, Steph and I got engaged while we were there. On the day we made the decision we went for a walk along the shore and saw a huge flock of flamingos in a coastal lagoon. I sat on the beach and watched S. paddling out to try and get closer to them. I thought how lucky I was and how happy I was going to be with her, but then I was ambushed by irrational fears: what if something happened to her? Do they have salt-water crocodiles in Mozambique? Can sharks swim in a foot of water? What if she steps on one of those spiny things that are fatal? When the flamingoes noticed she was getting nearer they started to move away so she came back, to safety. I felt a huge sense of relief but had the sense not to say anything.

When we got back to England the miners’ strike was under way. The famous photograph (by the Guardian’s Don McPhee) of a confrontation at Orgreave Coking works, between a hairy miner in a toy police helmet and a fresh-face constable just up from London, symbolised the conflict for me. Unfortunately for the trade union movement it was ruling, rather than working, class coercion that got the upper hand under Margaret Thatcher.

1984 turned out to be a pretty catastrophic year for many working people all over the the world, without even needing Orwell’s Big Brother to organise it. Unemployment in Britain hit 3.25m; Union Carbide killed 40,000 Indians in a gas explosion at their pesticide plant in Bhopal; Pemex killed 500 Mexicans in a petrol explosion at San Juanico; civil war in Sri Lanka killed hundreds; 1.2m people died in a famine in Ethiopia. And the ruling classes had some nasty moments too: Indira Gandhi was assassinated by Sikhs, and the IRA blew up the Grand Brighton Hotel during the Tory party conference and almost but not quite got rid of the entire British cabinet.

On December 8th we got married - cliche it may be, but it was the happiest day of my life so far. We did the formalities with just Peter (my best man) and Carron (Steph’s best woman) at Chelsea Registry Office, then had a celebration ceremony with as many friends as we could pack into the Orangery in Holland Park. Steph and I read poems to each other (mine was Robert Graves’ ‘Counting the Beats’ - I think) and several people sang and played. We gave out red and white carnations and everyone had their photos taken, enabling me to recreate the scene 36 years later. I’ve shown Peter singing ‘The First Time Ever I saw your Face’ (Ewan McColl), Gilli singing ‘In my Life’ (The Beatles), Colin singing ‘Let it Be Me’ (Everly Brothers), and Susan’s family, Steph’s band of Kiwi girlfriends, and some of my friends posing for photos. And I’ve drawn Moira looking like a visiting film star in her fake fur coat (at least I hope it was fake), with her daughter Emma. Later we all had dinner and then a ceilidh at the London School - I’ve pictured my Mum and Dad and me and Steph, waltzing in a haze of marital bliss.

For our honeymoon we went to New Zealand and I finally got to see where Steph was brought up and meet her family and their then-current mad Dalmatian, Dominic. We got to ride across Auckland harbour in a 4-seater plane, and we got to climb down to the bottom of one of the extinct (at least that’s what they told me) volcanoes. Eagle-eyed Aucklanders will spot the anomaly in the picture: the hyperdermic-like Sky Tower wasn’t built till 10 years later - but, like mad Dalmations, its so much part of my mental image of Auckland now that I had to put it in.

Back in England, momentous 1984 was followed by an unmemorable 1985 (apart from the Rainbow Warrior outrage, the Heysel and Bradford Stadium disasters, the Brixton and Handsworth riots and the Battle of the Beanfield, the discovery of a hole in the ozone layer, and the death of Ricky Nelson).

The following year we joined the property-owning classes. As the radiation blew over Europe from the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in the Ukraine, the UK government was in the process of selling off the more profitable nationalised industries, supposedly to the public but ultimately to their cronies in the financial ‘services’ industry. My favourite cartoonist Steve Bell caught the zeitgeist perfectly with his depiction of Sid (from the government’s ‘tell Sid’ publicity campaign that aimed to get people to buy shares in newly privatised British Gas) sharing his lorry cab with Alexis from the TV show Dynasty (played by Joan Collins as a stereotypical rich witch) and worrying that he was HGV positive. 

As the media clamoured for everyone to get rich and live like yuppies Steph and I allowed Abbey National to sell us one of their new foolproof endowment mortgages and we bought our first flat, in Golborne Rd, on the 4th floor above a Moroccan cafe. ‘Hypotheca’ in the fake Latin title means mortgage. I now had a wife and a mortgage. I had officially arrived at maturity (just in time for my 40th birthday). 

My Life as a Tapestry – 12 (Grownup Life Begins)

The period from autumn 1982 to Spring 1984 was a watershed in my development – the beginning of my growing up in fact. As the bad Latin title has it, ‘Here at last one becomes adult’. During this time I got my first proper job in 7 years (monthly salary, national insurance, pension, holiday pay, works canteen, union membership etc. etc), found a direction for my future career, and met the person who would become my life partner.

The job was at a prestigious EFL (English as a Foreign Language) school in West London. I walked up the imposing front steps in my newly-bought-for-the-purpose cream suit (builders made ‘ducky’ noises at me as I passed) and entered a world of Cambridge First Certificate, Swiss Bankers, high tech listening library, rich Iranian refugees from the revolution, free photocopying, high fashion Italian divas, boardroom role plays, Japanese rock guitarists, the digital revolution, and free lunches and morning pastries.

The photocopier was kept running 12 hours a day. My colleagues and I queued up to make teaching material out of anything that caught our eye, with complete disregard for the laws of copyright. The only thing that constrained our reproductive enthusiasm was an ex-actor called B., whose effectiveness as a teacher had been fatally undermined by his eccentricity and who was instead kept busy with a variety of support tasks, which he hated. One of these was to clean the photocopier every day. The time of greatest demand was just before start of the afternoon teaching session, so, naturally, that was when B. chose to start cleaning the photocopier.

I’ve depicted a few of the colleagues who I best remember from those early days: big T., responsible for technical innovation and general weirdness – he introduced me to micro computers (as they were then called); little M., initially staffroom pet, later Director (or Fuhrer, as she was known) of Studies – she acted dumb but managed to elevate herself to a high status role on the national TEFL stage; out-of-the-closet R., funny and acerbic – his later death from AIDS made the sensationalist media coverage shockingly real and tragic. 

T. brought little computers called Newbrains into the school and encouraged me to learn BASIC so I could make digital teaching material. I took to it like a born anorak and began to spend much of my non-working time crouched over a little keyboard writing routines that ran to hundreds of lines and executed in half a millisecond.

Steph came to teach at the school in spring 1983. By summer we were walking together in nearby Holland Park, which was a magic garden of woods, lawns, Jacobean mansions, Japanese gardens and other pastoral delights, patrolled by peacocks, Rheas, Cockerels and other exotic birds (one night a couple of years later, two dogs got into the park and killed the lot of them). The park bordered on the Commonwealth Institute, where Steph took me to show me the landscape model of Auckland, her home town (there was also a transparent working model of a cow, but it wasn’t switched on while we were there).

In the world at large, the UK was being turned into Airstrip One. The Greenham women’s peace camp led the resistance, 30000 of them joined hands to encircle the American base in protest against the siting of Cruise missiles there. My friends Peter and Colin and I made our own protest, as part of a CND demonstration in London. We dressed up as characters from the Great War – Peter was Kaiser Bill with a brass coal scuttle on his head, I was Percy Topliss ‘the monacled mutineer’, Colin was Tommy Atkins (singing ‘Bye Bye Love’ by the Everly Brothers!). We carried a copy of a German communist propaganda poster that I painted on a bedsheet hung on the wall of my (Colin’s) flat. (The black paint went through to the wall and I had to spend several days cleaning it off).

Ronald Reagan announced that the US military had orbiting space satellites that could shoot down Russian missiles in the stratosphere. The media inevitably dubbed it Star Wars. No Russian rockets did get shot down but the technology was to come into its own 30 years later, helping car drivers to find their way through unfamiliar city streets (and in some cases blowing them up). 

Not much to laugh at in Thatcher’s Britain, but the Comic Strip alternative comedians gave us some relief with their satiric TV takes on Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and other icons of our lost innocence.

On Christmas Day 1983 Steph and I met for a midday walk along the South Bank. As I remember, it was almost deserted, unbelievably. Since then it has continued to be one of our favourite London places, although it is rarely less than thronged these days. Early in 1984 she came to live with me in my (Colin’s) housing association flat in W10. Our bedroom window on the 4th floor looked out across communal gardens. We suspended a plank in front of the window and grew spider plants on it.