In 1987 I turned 40.
When I was growing up, 40 was considered the prime of life for men and over the hill for women. I remember Mum in a parish review singing ‘Nobody loves a fairy when she’s 40’ in a tutu.
When I hit the big 4 I still thought I was quite a way off my prime. But I was feeling prematurely middle-aged and a bit unsettled, mainly because of Dad’s operation (for colon cancer) a couple of years earlier. He, and all the family, had been worried that he might either not survive the op or else be condemned to wearing a colostomy bag for the rest of his life. In the event he came out of it with nothing worse than a loss of confidence. A loss I shared. I was suddenly aware that I had been taking his existence down there in Purley for granted, for years – available for Christmas and the occasional family party but otherwise irrelevant to me – but he was not going to be there forever. As soon as he was able to get out and about again we started meeting up from time to time for lunchtime beers and chat, usually at some pub in London that one of us knew. I briefly considered doing the right thing by his values and settling down to a respectable career at London School.
But TEFL was getting tedious and Margaret Thatcher won her 3rd election and I was feeling bolshie. The Right thought they were riding high but us lefties could see the writing was on the wall for their yuppie nonsense. What was the name of the Townsend Thoressen car ferry that rolled over in the sea just outside Zeebrugge killing 193 passengers and crew after leaving port in a hurry with its bow doors still open? The Herald of Free Enterprise. That election also produced the British parliament’s first ever black MPs: Paul Boateng, Bernie Grant and Dianne Abbot, so change was in the air.
I urged the change along by becoming MATSA (white collar trade union) Staff Rep and Branch secretary – they gave me a badge and shelf-full of ledgers to record subscriptions in, not exactly the barricades as far as I was concerned.
I formed a band with some friends at the London School of English and we wrote and sang political songs. We were called Mad Hazel (Spencer’s nickname for Harriet). Spencer could play anything provided he had the music in front of him, Harriet played flute and a gutsy tenor sax. We sang ‘Took the country for a grand/Took me for a business man/Blew it on a one night stand/That’s free enterprise!’ which was about the Government’s futile efforts to get the unemployment figures down by giving people £1000 to start their own businesses.
In late ’87 a great wind blew up, flattening 15 million trees across the country and killing 18 people. Steph and I weren’t directly affected, except that she had to make her way to her OU exams through streets full of fallen trees. During the several days of heavy rain that followed, however, our bedroom ceiling developed a large blister which sagged downwards around the light fitting. Curious, I took a screwdriver and poked it. Next moment we had a torrent of dirty water pouring down the flex onto the carpet. We turned the light off and in the dark improvised a water chute out of bin liners. For twenty minutes I stood on a chair and held one end under the waterfall and Steph held the other out of the window. Eventually the flow stopped and I went up onto the roof to find it missing a large number of slates – presumably distributed across North Kensington by the storm. The roof was mended by the Freeholder, who owned a cafe next door, but redecorating the bedroom set us back a few hundred pounds.
Hot on the heels of the ‘hurricane’ came Black Monday – a financial crisis that wiped £150 billion off the FTSE. It was the end of Thatcher’s popular capitalist boom, the end of yuppies, the end of champagne sharedealing, and eventually the end of her. How we laughed.
The following year it was the end of London School for me too, as I took up a place on a Government-funded (the irony was not lost on me) 1-year course in Artifical Intelligence at Kingston Polytechnic (later University). We borrowed £3000 against the mortgage to support me and I bought a bicycle to get me down to Kingston every day. The route took me across Richmond Park - during the winter of ’88 I was rewarded with some magical encounters with deer in the frosty early morning landscape. I got fit too and felt years younger. Also on the route was the little hamlet of Strand-on-the Green in Chiswick, where there were a couple of real ale pubs on the riverside. In the summer of ’89 Dad and I met there a couple of times to drink pints of Youngs and talk about his childhood, his army life, his work life, and his retirement.
Then the Berlin wall fell, and there was a new sense of hope.
Steph won a scholarship to spend her last degree year studying fulltime at Cambridge and I started taking the train up from Liverpool St. to stay with her at weekends. We walked round the ancient city and through the Backs discussing our academic work and feeling like proper scholars on the verge of recognition.
