Even to someone as preternaturally immune to shame as my father, this episode was a bit embarrassing. But as time has passed and it’s been established that this was a minor blip in an otherwise crime-free life, he’s been more willing to open up.
‘You were really unlucky to get caught the first time you did it,’ I said to him recently.
‘Oh no, it wasn’t the first time,’ he said laughing. ‘I did it ten or twelve times. And I wasn’t the only one.’ (To this day, I’m not sure if he was joking). No wonder Britain was struggling in the late 1970s. The threat of terrorism was real enough without idiots phoning in non-existent bomb scares just to get the afternoon off. If you had trouble receiving your post around that time, this may have been a factor. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that my father and his workshy mates were a small part of the reason why Margaret Thatcher got elected. I can only apologise.
He told me that he had a bomb threat routine. I guess when you do something as often as my dad phoned in bomb threats, it becomes routine. He’d work in the morning in his normal fashion. At least as normally as anyone who was planning an act of terrorism can do. He’d then go off for his lunch, find a phone box, phone the office and say there was a bomb planted somewhere in the building and they had fifteen minutes to get out. I asked him why he did it.
‘I wanted to spend more time with your mother and sister,’ he said.
I seriously doubted this. Beverley was at school and even if he did want to spend more time with my mother, she certainly didn’t want to spend any more time with him.
‘Did you go home then?’ I asked him.
‘Sometimes,’ he said. ‘But on a Friday, I’d go to the pub. They had strippers on.’
This was news to me. Up to this point, I never knew that my mum and sister were stripping. I mentioned this to him. He didn’t laugh.
‘I was under a lot of pressure,’ he said.
He told me that he got caught because the Post Office, annoyed at the disruption and cost of thirty-thousand people spilling onto the streets twice a week while they looked for non-existent suspect packages, decided to act. They suspected that it might be employees trying to skive off work, so they posted lookouts around the local phone boxes, and put two and two together. He was nabbed after one phone call, marched back to the office and arrested. He confessed without much of a struggle.
‘I was sacked on the spot as well,’ he said sounding somewhat surprised.
While he was on bail, the atmosphere at home got even worse. He didn’t have a job so he was contributing basically nothing to the household. My mum couldn’t even look at him. He went up in court a couple of months later and, with the help of my auntie Irene acting as a character witness, somehow got away with a suspended sentence. I think my mum was disappointed he wasn’t sentenced to death by firing squad.
*6 Universal
*7 I went to see a West End revival of Gypsy. They sang ‘You’ve gotta have a gimmick’ and I was instantly transported back to that night.
Things We Didn’t Have in the 1970s
Part Five
Reality TV
I’m glad about this one. With all the reality I was getting at home, I didn’t need any more on my TV screen. There were one or two shows that did actually feature real people. The Up series, which followed school kids through their lives at seven year intervals, could be classed as reality television but it was really more of an anthropological study. What we didn’t have was beautiful but talentless wannabees cluttering up our TV screens on Love Island and Big Brother. Sometimes, it really was better in the old days.
Chapter Six
You can smell the fear and hate, generated by all around
The line ‘you can smell the fear and hate, generated by all around’ is from ‘The Combine’, an album track from This is The Modern World. It’s nowhere near my favourite song, not even the best song on an album that The Jam themselves said was rushed out. But it stayed with me. It was an idea that Paul revisited with ‘“A” Bomb in Wardour Street’, where ‘fear and hate lingered in the air’.
Whatever fear and hate it was that Paul was sensing, a lot of us sensed it too. It’s hard to comprehend from our oasis of liberality (Donald Trump and Brexit notwithstanding) in the third decade of the PC twenty-first century but racism was very popular in the 1970s. The Irish were ‘Paddies’ or ‘Micks’ and were considered fair game for jokes about their perceived stupidity. The Chinese were ‘Chinkys’ (as in, ‘Do you fancy a Chinky takeaway tonight?), people who came from any of the countries on the Indian sub-continent were ‘Pakis’, black people were ‘coloureds’ or ‘sambos’ or ‘wogs’ or ‘coons’ or ‘darkies’. A black friend of mine told me that when he was ten years old, he was walking down Fulham Broadway and a taxi driver slowed down to tell him he was a black bastard. When he was ten! People would often claim that some of their best friends were black and that they weren’t ‘a racialist’. They generally were.*8
Mainstream TV did not help. It was only up until the year before that BBC1 had broadcast The Black and White Minstrel Show on Saturday nights. A white male voice choir would black up and be wheeled out to sing the hits of the day. This was what passed for entertainment; over ten million people used to watch it. Not that there was a lot of choice.
‘What’s on telly?’
‘There’s a quiz on ITV or there’s a racist singalong on BBC1.’
‘I hate quizzes. Let’s go for the singalong.’
Meanwhile, a sitcom called Love Thy Neighbour featured a white man expressing surprise that he was having difficulty getting on with his new black neighbour. The fact that he regularly referred to him as a ‘nig-nog’ may have had something to do with their strained relationship. It’s amazing they haven’t brought that back.
I was at football most weeks and that was a particular breeding ground for all sorts of abhorrent views. The National Front used to sell their newspaper outside Chelsea and there were plenty of willing buyers. Certain clubs would not pick black players although at West Bromwich Albion, their larger than life manager ‘Big’ Ron Atkinson played Laurie Cunningham, Cyrille Regis and Brendon Batson in the same team. He dubbed them The Three Degrees and got the actual Three Degrees to pose for a picture with them. It was casual racism, meant affectionately. Ron later got exposed as a less casual racist when, in 2004, long after these attitudes were meant to be a thing of the past and thinking that the microphones were switched off, said that the French footballer Marcel Desailly was ‘A fucking lazy thick nigger’, possibly the worst sentence I’ve ever heard.
It was thought that black players could only play well in nice weather. Also, black players would never be picked to play in areas of the pitch requiring a more cerebral approach. There were no black central midfield players. Black men were chosen purely for their physical attributes of speed and strength. Although apparently, they were unable to display those attributes if the temperature dropped below a certain point. It was only late in 1978 that Viv Anderson became the first black player to play for England. For a time, Everton only had white players and during a Merseyside derby, Everton fans shouted ‘Niggerpool’ and ‘Everton are White’.
Inside the grounds, there were people shouting the most awful abuse and no one lifted a finger to stop it. The stewards were terrified of them and felt that it wasn’t their job to stop racists shouting abuse. Mainly because it was so normal that even if they did, it would just start up