I READ ONLY three books in 1978 but one of them was War and Peace, which counts as at least four. I was reading it in February when inflation dropped to single figures (9.9 per cent) for the first time in five years and still reading it in September, when the Labour prime minister, James Callaghan, surprised everybody by announcing that he would not be calling an autumn election.
Tolstoy could have made much of the political drama around that declaration and all that followed. The Conservatives, under the leader of Her Majesty’s loyal opposition, Margaret Thatcher, had seen an 11-point poll lead evaporate and, although Callaghan was at the helm of what was effectively a minority government (kept in power by a pact with the Liberals, which had just ended), in September all the signs were that Labour would have won an autumn election.
As a member of the Labour party keen to see my excellent local MP, Joan Lestor, retain her seat and Labour remain in power, I took a deep interest in these machinations.
‘Sunny’ Jim Callaghan was an avuncular figure who came from a trade-union background and had never gone to university. The only politician ever to hold the four great offices of state (he had been chancellor, foreign secretary and home secretary before becoming prime minister), he would also be the last party leader to have fought in the Second World War.
Callaghan’s trade-union credentials couldn’t prevent the industrial action that erupted a few months after his announcement and culminated in the ‘Winter of Discontent’. It turned the polls against Labour to the extent that even a majority of trade-unionists voted Conservative when the general election was eventually held the following year.
I couldn’t even follow these events in the newspaper I’d been buying every day since leaving school in 1965. The Times ceased publication on 30 November 1978 due to industrial action and their presses lay dormant for a year.
My union, the Union of Post Office Workers (UPW) never became embroiled in the Winter of Discontent. It had negotiated a reasonable pay deal and was, by temperament and history, loyal to the Labour leadership. In terms of industrial relations we were for peace, but it was war that prevailed, and it put Labour out of power for almost two decades.
By now I was the assistant district organiser of the South East No.5 District Council of the UPW. The title was more fulsome than the work it required of me. It was a lay position, the principal function of which was to pay travel expenses to those delegates coming to the monthly District Council meetings from Slough, Reading, Newbury, Maidenhead, Bracknell and Henley-on-Thames.
On my appointment union headquarters provided me with access to some funds to pay out expenses, a typewriter, a large shiny black briefcase and a lapel badge that I never wore (I have an inexplicable aversion to badges of any kind). But the best thing about the job was that I was expected to wear a suit on union business.
I still liked to think of myself as a Mod, having been converted to the cause by a Mod friend of my sister’s, who explained their philosophy as ‘You may be poor, but don’t show poor.’ It may have been an ungrammatical motto but, to an impressionable thirteen-year-old, it conveyed the strong message that I was as good as anybody else and should express that in the clothes I wore. It was a lesson that remained embedded in my approach to life.
As so often, Shakespeare captured the sentiment perfectly. In Hamlet, Polonius, as part of his inventory of sage advice to his son Laertes, tells him:
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express’d in fancy; rich not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man.
When I bought my first suit as a sixteen-year-old I proclaimed myself in Donegal tweed. It was a cheap suit (gaudy, not rich), purchased off the rack at C&A. It made me look like a migraine attack. Things improved sartorially through the seventies, though I did stray from the clean-cut Italianate path of the Mod towards the rougher ground of the Jason King look: flared trousers, pinched shoulders and wide-peak lapels.
By 1978, there was a Mod revival in full spate, spearheaded by bands like the Jam who mixed the musical and cultural influences of 1960s Mods with elements of the punk genre. True to my roots as an original Mod, I remained in love with the suit, though I’d had enough of Jason. Too old to get down with the kids, but not yet at the age where it would have been difficult to get back up again, I was keen to set my own style, to pre-empt fashion rather than slavishly follow its latest trend. I decided that I could achieve this by wearing a double-breasted suit.
By this point in the 1970s, I would discover, I was so ahead of the times, or perhaps so behind them, that it was impossible to find a double-breasted suit ‘off the peg’. Undeterred, I had one tailor-made at Burton’s in Slough High Street. That suit remained virtually unworn in my wardrobe. While I had no desire to follow the herd, I found I lacked both the courage and the unconventionality to be a fashion trend-setter, either.
The double-breasted suit made a comeback in the 1980s, albeit in an unappealingly shapeless form. These days, apart from brief appearances in the fashion pages where the style writers attempt to convince the consumer that it is the look of the season, it seems once more to have become the preserve of pea coats, Royal Navy uniforms and our future king. I feel my interest in reviving it beginning to stir again.
Kate Bush entered my life in 1978 and has been there ever since. The description ‘unique’ has been devalued through overuse, but she is one artist for whom it is entirely appropriate.
Kate has divided opinion among music fans ever since the release of her debut single, ‘Wuthering Heights’, that January. Its originality was beyond dispute but many of my friends couldn’t stand it. It had enough supporters to take it to Number 1, in the process making her the first female artist to reach the top spot with one of her own songs, but even those of us who loved the record wondered if she would turn out to be the stereotypical one-hit wonder. As soon as I listened to her first album, The Kick Inside, which was in the shops the following month, I knew she wouldn’t be.
All the tracks are great and show an astonishing musical maturity for one so young – she was only nineteen when she made that album. But one song made me her devotee for ever. ‘The Man with the Child in His Eyes’ has a haunting beauty that has defied the years, sounding as fresh and magnificent on its fortieth anniversary as it did when I first heard it.
We Kate Bush fans are not exactly spoiled by the volume of her output. Kate could never be accused of being prolific and has always marched to the beat of her own drum. After the release of her seventh album in 1993 she would drop out of the public eye altogether for twelve years. But what we have been treated to is all the more precious for its rarity.
Linda rang me at Slough sorting office around the time I was eulogising ‘Wuthering Heights’ to tell me about another record she’d just heard, which she was burning to bring to the attention of her little brother.
A lot had happened to my sister since she’d been widowed at the age of twenty-nine. She had met the man who would become her second husband, Charlie Edwards. The following year, after they married, they would move together to Hockley, Essex, to a house they had built to their own specifications which was big enough for their combined family – they had six children between them.
Essex was where Charlie came from and where he’d sung in clubs and pubs when he was younger. He was a big music fan and had one of those stack hi-fi units that became so popular in the 1980s, from which I remember first hearing Clifford T. Ward, Laura Branigan and the Bat Out of Hell album by Meat Loaf (‘the artist formerly known as Mince’, as one wag dubbed him).
The record Linda was raving about in her phone call was another immortal from 1978. ‘Baker Street’ by Gerry Rafferty has, in my view, the best introduction to any pop song ever recorded. It tingles and tantalises before bursting into life with Raphael Ravenscroft’s magnificent, soaring saxophone riff. Ravenscroft was then a little-known session musician and Rafferty was known to me only as one of the founder members of Stealers Wheel. That record assured the fame of both men.
As Linda bubbled with enthusiasm for ‘Baker Street’, it was as if we’d suddenly gone back twenty years to the days when we argued at Southam Street about which records to buy. I took my big sister’s advice, but with my singles days behind me now, I invested instead in Gerry Rafferty’s album, City to City.
Whenever Judy and I visited Linda and Charlie it was obvious that she was feeling her way back to happiness after all the trauma she’d suffered before and after Mike’s tragic death. She always loved having lots of people around and, after the move to the new house in Hockley, in the organised chaos of a family of eight (which increased to thirteen when we arrived) she was in her element. As well as children of all ages there was a dog to be walked and fish to be fed, although, thanks to me, the latter task was rendered obsolete after our first overnight visit.
Linda and Chas’s collection of exotic tropical fish was displayed in two large tanks built into the wall of their living room on either side of the fireplace. As all the bedrooms were full, Judy and I had to sleep on a mattress in the living room. In order to ensure I turned off all the lights, I pulled out the many plugs from their various sockets before retiring. One of them turned out to have been powering the essential air supply for the fish. By morning the entire collection had perished.
This disaster failed to cause a family rift, and Linda continued to ring me with record recommendations. I still consider her tip to buy ‘Baker Street’ to be one of the best pieces of advice she’s ever given me.