NOTES
In fact, the strike lasted for only five or six weeks in January and February. One reason that it had such a rapid effect was that the miners picketed the power stations to prevent coal mined before the strike from being delivered. Mass picketing to physically prevent the movement of goods is no longer legal. |
Soon after the departure of Barry, the miners went on strike. In stark contrast with the more famous strike of twelve years later, this one had an immediate effect. Coal stocks at power stations were low, and soon began to run out. As a consequence, electricity was rationed to eight hours a day, on a rota basis. One day, your area would have electricity in the morning, the next day in the afternoon and the next day, only during the night. It was the middle of winter, so the effects were dramatic. I loved to walk down the Kentish Town Road, enjoying the total absence of street lighting, illuminated advertising signs and traffic lights. Buses and commercial traffic kept running, but few private motorists ventured into the town centres. Some shops and pubs were lit by candles, others just closed. There was just one little beacon at the northern end of the town. This was the red-and-yellow roundel of Kentish Town Tube station (London Underground had its own power station, presumably running on oil rather than coal). The atmosphere of society on the brink of collapse, made even more tense by media hyperbole ("GRAVE CRISIS" screamed one issue of the Evening Standard) was right up my street, so to speak, and I was actually hoping it would go on for longer than it did. |
| It was against this tense and exciting background that Angela made the momentous announcement - she was pregnant! This, of course, threw us into a completely different gear. Neither of us knew anything at all about babies, but we were going to have to find out as much as possible - in a hurry! This turned out not to be easy. There was certainly no lack of advice, printed or verbal, but it was just a mass of contradictions. No doubt it's much the same today. Then there was the need to collect all the necessary baby items. Also, we now had to be sure that we could carry on paying the rent in Barry's name - no more moving on and drifting into the next adventure. Obviously, we couldn't apply for benefits, as we weren't living there legally. |
| So, how to get hold of the necessary money? Well, we walked into one of the hundreds of little 'temping' agencies that were springing up all over the place and asked to be on their books. They gave us a typing test, which was a complete farce in my case. The full extent of my typing experience was the painfully slow two-finger typing I had done in order to do those reports on Arch 167 in Brighton (see Chapter 52), but it was obvious they were prepared to send almost anyone to any job, as long as they got their ten per cent. They sent us both to the London Electricity Board offices in the West End. This resulted in an even bigger farce. With no questions asked, I was placed in the accounts department! |
| The area of London I had to deal with was Hampstead, land of the super-rich and famous. I was surprised by the number of big names - politicians, actors, etc, who were under threat of disconnection for non-payment of bills. | Now, if there was any area in which I was a definite 'learning difficulties' case, it was maths, including arithmetic. Even using the big old comptometers that were the calculators of the time was a challenge. With no training at all, I was given a desk, a ledger, a stack of hire purchase agreements, bills and payment details, and left to get on with it. It was my first (and my last) office job. In order to keep up, I tended just to put rough guesses in the ledger, but I doubt that the figures would have been any more reliable, had I made the effort to calculate them precisely. When the documents were finished with they had to be rolled up, secured with an elastic band and put on a shelf. There were huge dusty piles of these scrolls, and they were occasionally nibbled by mice. This constituted the data back-up, the ledgers with their hand-written entries being the primary storage system. |
| In the basement, a computer had recently been installed. It was the first computer I had ever seen. It filled a large room and had gigantic reels of recording tape to store data. The only way the data could be viewed was in the form of a barely legible print-out on great rolls of computer paper. Any suggestion that people would one day have computers in their own homes would have been dismissed as utterly absurd. Apart from the impossible size, what on Earth would we want them for? The London Electricity Board had apparently had their computer for a few months, but it was still not in use, as no-one could get the hang of it. They were therefore keeping to their scrolls and ledgers for the time being. |
| One thing about the late sixties that survived - in fact, continued to gain ground for a little while well into the seventies, was a certain amount of freedom of appearance for men (well, in London, anyway). I took advantage of this to go to the office in a floral jacket (possibly made from curtain material) and red flares, or sometimes in a kaftan covered with little mirrors. Yet no-one, not even my perpetually indignant female co-workers, Daily Mail devotees every one, who declaimed the contents of their right-wing opinion kit at full volume from nine till five, seemed particularly scandalized by my appearance. I'd be interested to know if one would get away with it in the average office now. |
| One day, after the quarterly audit of the books, it emerged that a former temp had made some minor error, resulting in a discrepancy of £9. This caused turmoil. Hundreds of scrolls were unrolled and several people were detailed to go through them, in an attempt to track down the missing amount After a couple of days, it had still not been accounted for, to the great consternation of the office manager. It seemed to me that if they could get so worked up about £9, they would probably hang me from the nearest lamp-post when they discovered the discrepancies in my accounts. I therefore left as the next quarterly audit was getting under way. Angela, who worked in a different department, stayed on for a bit longer, but eventually got fed up with the place and left. We then managed to get jobs of a very different nature, in an old people's care home in Hampstead. Angela was a care attendant, I was a dishwasher. Although I can't remember the details now, I know we were appalled at the treatment of the residents. I carried on working there for a bit longer than Angela, but it seems I must have left well before the arrival of the baby, because I remember accompanying Angela to the antenatal clinic several times, and to University College Hospital, where she would be having the baby. |
| UCH was (and is) a major teaching hospital and was experimenting with new techniques and ideas. For example, Angela was one of the first expectant mothers to be scanned with ultrasound, so we were among the first couples to be presented with a photograph of the baby in the womb. They were also keen on the then revolutionary idea of allowing fathers into the labour room to watch the birth. When the great day arrived, I accompanied Angela to the hospital (in my flowery jacket, etc) and spent many hours pacing up and down before she was taken into the labour room. As arranged, I followed her in. I was instructed sternly not to faint. At that time, nurses and midwives clearly didn't share their superiors' new-found enthusiasm for having the father in on the act. I certainly didn't faint, but I have to admit that I was left wondering about the point of being present. Angela was much too occupied to notice my presence, and there was far too much of an atmosphere of what, to me, seemed like confusion and panic, for me to be able to enjoy the wonder and mystery and all those other well‑advertised sensations. You kept thinking that something was going wrong all the time. But at last I could see, through the crowd, that we'd got a very impressive-looking boy who looked as though he meant business. A nurse looked at me sympathetically and said "I'm afraid he's got your ears". Fortunately, she was only joking. |