LIFE NOTES: 1968

 

I started primary school on Tuesday 6 February 1968. From then my memory becomes rather more formed, since my days are now structured, and I can remember things and people more readily. Specifically I remember my nice, middle-aged headmistress who took me in hand and started giving me piano lessons, using the Ministeps to Music series of book tutorials. She lived well into her nineties and to the end always remembered me with fondness.

 

Dissociated images of popular culture; Thunderbirds on television, Tintin’s Destination Moon. Apollo 8 just after Christmas. I remember the deaths of Martin Luther King (but not that of Robert F Kennedy) and Yuri Gagarin being reported on ITN as they happened but the celebrity death which probably saddened me the most was the Scots motor racing driver Jim Clark, killed in an accident on the track in what was then known as West Germany that spring, aged just thirty-two. One of the other kids in my class was called Jim Clark – and I don’t know what happened to him* – so it hit a wee bit deeper with me. So people die? Who knew? Oh, all of you did…

 

(*if I’m going to proceed with this impromptu memoir, I’m afraid I’m generally going to have to avoid naming names, since there is a high likelihood that many of those who attended school/university/work with me are still alive and are almost certainly now the parents of grown-up children, and very likely also grandparents. I don’t think they need reminding of these times, or that weirdo classmate/fellow student/work colleague they barely tolerated)

 

I remember my mother taking me to Maryville Park, our transistor radio playing loudly (in those days nobody objected and everyone welcomed it, even on the bus, because it represented a common vocabulary), ice cream lollies (FAB, perhaps?), spinning on the roundabout in the park to the strains of Everlasting Love, the first pop record I remember being something called “number one” in a thing called the “charts” with Love Affair’s slightly resentful-looking lead singer on Top Of The Pops. The future felt good at such times, even if the DJ playing the Love Affair song was, more often than not, Jimmy Young. Playing mini-golf on the range just behind Tunnock’s biscuit factory.

 

A scorchingly hot July spent on holiday in Blackpool. It was so hot on the beach my mother had to visit the local branch of C&A and buy me a whole new outfit. I rode right up to the top of the Tower and stared in moderate wonder at the Irish Sea. We saw Ken Dodd at the Opera House. Can’t remember who else was on the bill, but his closing act went on for quite some while. Got taken to the cinema one afternoon to watch a film called Custer of the West. I don’t remember anything about it or even who was in it. In our self-catering boarding house, run by an extremely nice old Welsh fellow and his family, I watched a programme called Danger Man. The title sequence was all linoleum diagonals. I remember jumping at the closing motif of the lead actor's face suddenly zooming towards the camera and a set of bars clanging shut on it. Maybe that was another show the actor was in; I didn't know the difference at the time.

 

I also remember a very angry, bearded man bursting into our house that year who wasn’t my father and shouting furiously at my mother. He was wearing a suit. Was this a bitter ex? He lived down Spindlehowe Road, near my school. My mother advised me to go nowhere near his place. She got rid of him and we didn’t see him again. Unless he returned fourteen years later but that’s another story.

 

I remember the weird and frightening old man in the flat cap with a walking stick who would always laughingly hit me with said stick as we passed him in the Main Street. I quickly learned to avoid him as well.

 

I remember my father doing the football pools. I was fascinated by all the “X”s he put in on his form and by the design they created. One idle weekday afternoon I looked at the form and without thinking filled up the entire form, every box, with an X. When Saturday afternoon and the results came, my father was furious as to what had happened with his forecast. He hurled me onto the carpeted floor and whacked me repeatedly and viciously with his belt, with my shorts pulled down. Hence my curiosity about the world was snuffed out almost at the point of its conception.

 

I learned over the years that my father was pathologically unable to control his temper with either my mother or myself, and expressed his rages in gestures of violence. Perhaps he blamed us for “stealing” the life he felt he might once have deserved. Hence I have great difficulty with songs of masculine domination popular at the time, such as Delilah or She Wears My Ring, because they remind me directly of those things I have described above.

 

The year became darker for reasons I couldn’t quite fathom, and so did the music. My mother and I were sitting in the Vale Café on Tollcross Road one Wednesday lunchtime, probably around October. The place had a jukebox. When we went in it was playing Mony Mony. I conflated Tommy James with Tommy Cooper and assumed this was a group who wore comedy fez hats and did rubbish magic tricks. Then Hey Jude, which I saw on Top Of The Pops, and at the end it was as if the whole audience had invaded the stage. Someone dressed up as Napoleon was waltzing with someone else. I was immensely impressed, although the song and performance struck me as something of a celebration in defiance of I didn’t yet know what.

 

Then someone else in the café accidentally dropped some money into the slot at the wrong time and Hey Jude abruptly gave way to Fire, by Arthur Brown. Now, that thing scared the bejesus out of me. I had also seen this on Top Of The Pops – both Hey Jude and Fire were, as I found out a long time later, promotional films rather than TOTP performances as such – and at the end of the song it looked as though the stage was on fire and all the musicians were burning to death.

 

(although I also recall a miserable episode of the measles around March when I was confined to bed, watching the little auxiliary television set in my bedroom and Dave Dee cracking his whip to The Legend of Xanadu. What was THAT all about, I weakly asked myself)

 

But the songs were becoming longer, and darker. MacArthur Park. Those Were The Days. Eloise by Barry Ryan, which I saw on a Saturday teatime ITV pop show called Time For Blackburn, with the great Tony sitting in a mocked-up radio studio pretending to play records, before the camera suddenly cut to the actual artists miming (I think?) to them (they had tried the same format earlier in the year with Alan Freeman, on a show then called All Systems Freeman). That Eloise was a particularly dramatic moment. The singer ended up kneeling on and pounding the studio floor, and screaming over and over about this woman Eloise. HUH?

 

My father hated it, just as he hated the Beatles (though I do recall being very reluctantly given a toy Yellow Submarine – Dinky or Corgi? Can’t remember now), and Mary Hopkin, and Richard Harris and Hugo Montenegro and All Along The Watchtower – This Wheel’s on Fire, THAT was also scary – and especially Lily The Sodding Pink, which I saw imperiously vaulting up the charts, week after brisk week. towards number one with some dread, as it incurred my father’s mounting fury. Mind you, he liked the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band – he’d get very impatient at people dropping the “Doo-Dah” tag – because they were always on a wacky kids’ television show called Do Not Adjust Your Set and reminded him of the Goons. He liked Urban Spaceman and I don’t think cottoned on who produced it.

 

I watched a bit of DNAYS on YouTube a couple of years back. Leave some memories where they can remain untarnished.