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.
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).
