WE CAN ALL divide our lives into various phases. I have a pre-diary phase and a post-diary phase. For Christmas 1975 Judy bought me three presents: a watch, The Oxford Book of English Verse and a Boots page-a-day diary for 1976.
I’d been banging on for ages about the Victorians’ fascination with keeping journals and how intrigued I was by their dictum that a day unrecorded was a day not lived. These not-so-subtle hints had the desired effect and I got the Christmas present I wanted.
Judy also bought a diary for herself, but the historical novels she read at bedtime soon regained ascendancy over the chore of writing up the events of the last twenty-four hours. I don’t think hers made it to the end of that year. By contrast, her gift to me was the start of a pursuit that has lasted to this day, although the gaps between entries have become progressively longer. The habit is now so entrenched that I doubt if I could stop even if I wanted to.
In 1976, every day is recorded meticulously, together with contemporary jokes that took my fancy (Question: Who was born in a barn and had millions of followers? Answer: Red Rum) and snatches of original doggerel:
There was a young chap named Perce,
Who just couldn’t finish a verse,
He’d start many times,
Complete four lines,
And end with …
Coincidentally, another new chapter of my life began at around the same time. As a result my transition to union official is fully recorded at the start of my 1976 diary. I was already on the Postmen’s Committee, and had been for two years, but as no meetings were held, apart from my intervention on behalf of the ‘rurals’ the previous year, there had been no representative functions to perform.
My diary entry for Friday, 2 January reports one of my Asian colleagues, K. K. Sharma, imploring me to put my name forward for the post of branch chairman at the AGM to be held in a few weeks’ time. Evidently I followed his advice, because on Sunday, 8 February I record: ‘Victory in the union elections.’
I was now responsible for protecting the union rights and privileges of the 700 postmen, clerical staff, telephonists, cleaners and catering workers in Slough, Gerrard’s Cross and Iver, as well as being (with the branch secretary) one of the two principal negotiating officers of the Slough Amalgamated Branch of the Union of Post Office Workers. I was twenty-five years of age and from that moment on would be subject to election and re-election in one form or another for the rest of my working life.
I’d already decided to give up playing Sunday league football, as union meetings were held on Sunday mornings. My diary tells me that on the first Sunday of 1976, my team, Astra Independent, beat Sunway Blinds 9–2 in the fourth division of the Slough Industrial League, which sums up the loss to football represented by my premature retirement.
While I religiously listed in the back of my diaries the books I’d read, I never catalogued the music I listened to or the records I bought. None the less my musical memory of 1976 is crystal clear as it is entwined with that incredible summer – the hottest since records began.
As luck would have it, this was the year of our very first family holiday. After almost eight years of vacation-less family life the five of us, Judy, Natalie, Emma, Jamie and I, went to a caravan site in Sandy Bay, Devon for a week. Holiday entitlement at the Post Office, both in terms of duration and when it could be taken, was, like progression through the ranks, governed by seniority. Now that I’d been a postman for eight years I was entitled to two weeks’ leave in the summer and a week in winter. I still had no chance of taking my summer break in August to coincide with the school holidays. That would take another decade of creeping up the seniority ladder. But at least I now warranted a week in June, a proper summer month. Up until that year my ‘summer’ allocation had been restricted to May or September because all the popular weeks had been snapped up by men who’d joined the Post Office before me.
We couldn’t have picked a more flaming June. We set off for Sandy Bay in our blue Ford Escort just as the long, hot summer of 1976 began. The heatwave would eventually build into one unbroken stretch of sunshine, right through July and August.
Having explored Dartmoor and found our way to Jamaica Inn during the first few days of the holiday, by day four we were ready for the beach. Except that I wasn’t. Foolishly, despite Judy’s constant warnings as she smothered the kids in suntan lotion, I exposed my fair body to the sun without protection. It demonstrated how stupid I was, for sure, but also how unfamiliar most of us were, in those days, with the power of the sun.
I paid a high price in pain and disfigurement. I felt like a man who’d been condemned to burn at the stake and then reprieved halfway through the execution. For the rest of the holiday I drove my tender carcass to Budleigh Salterton, Drewsteignton and Widecombe, wincing every time the sunlight glanced on my skin through the car window.
The car radio played Abba incessantly, along with Tina Charles, Candi Staton, Billy Ocean and Demis Roussos. But the record that made me reach to turn up the volume was ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ by Thin Lizzy. Phil Lynott’s narrated vocal, sung over those massive guitar chords, made it the perfect antidote to the tepid tunes commandeering the airwaves that summer. I guess I must still have been heavily under the influence of my great guitar hero, Jeff Beck, because what I liked best about ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ was that amazing twin guitar lead on the instrumental break that turned a good record into a great one.
Back at work, being outdoors through that sublime summer made me realise just how much I liked being a delivery postman. So I resigned from the PHG ‘acting list’ and signed up for the most rural delivery in the entire office – Littleworth Common.
Anyone passing through that part of Buckinghamshire would have seen the local postman with the sleeves of his lightweight summer uniform jacket rolled up, sporting a pair of trendy sunglasses and enjoying to the full what felt like the best job in the world. The only downside was the overtime I still had to do to make ends meet, most of which was based indoors, where the sun didn’t shine and air-conditioning had yet to disturb the thick sorting-office atmosphere of heat and dust.
So I also remember 1976 as a summer of Tartan shandies gratefully gulped down at the bar of the Rose and Crown or the Slough Supporters’ Club, to which a bunch of us would gravitate on our evening break, like Bedouins heading for an oasis.
Judy’s seventh wedding anniversary present to me in July, 20 Golden Greats by the Beach Boys, was the perfect complement to the kind of day-in, day-out sunshine Californians took for granted but which I had never experienced before, and never have since, come to that. For a brief moment in time, their music and my environment were in true harmony.
It couldn’t last for ever, but it was wonderful while it did. The rain finally brought an end to the heatwave in August – just after the government appointed a minister for drought.