1976

1976 is the first year of which I remember very much.

We lived at Park Flats, Hampstead Lane, London N6. Park Flats was a horseshoe-shaped structure that had once served as the stables for Kenwood House. It housed the families of men who worked for the Greater London Council Parks Department. Some were park keepers. Others were gardeners and the like. My dad helped to look after the nursery garden at Kenwood and did other jobs on Hampstead Heath. He got to drive a pale blue Land Rover, often pulling a trailer filled with fallen branches and other large items picked up in the never-ending work of keeping the heath in good order.

Sometimes I was taken up the hill to school in the Land Rover. It felt exciting and important. Most of my classmates were the sons and daughters of professional people: doctors, lawyers, politicians and the like. They lived in big houses with large gardens. But they didn't have the whole of Hampstead Heath just the other side of their fence, and they didn't get to travel in a huge, powder blue Land Rover. I suppose ours were the only council flats in what was then, and is now, one of the most expensive parts of London. The houses on Hampstead Lane seemed enormous. I would look at them from the Land Rover, from my dad's own car (a white Volkswagen Beetle, reg. MMY 350L) or from the 210 bus. 

London changes so much. If someone who'd died in the seventies were to come to life and see it now, there'd be so much they wouldn't recognise. But bus routes are strangely permanent. The more modern buses that run up that hill and into Highgate Village now still have the number 210 on the front.

In 1976 I was stung by a bee. In 1976 my favourite toy was a red Tonka cement mixer. It seemed huge to me.

In 1976, the yard outside our flats was my playground. There were only two other kids there: Michael and Sean. They were brothers but did not look alike. One was olive complexioned and dark haired. The other was pale, freckled and ginger. That only struck me as strange when I thought about it years later. We all ran around shooting each other with toy guns or sometimes just fingers. If you got shot you had to lie on the ground and count to twenty before springing back to life. Sometimes the shooter would just stand over the victim and shoot him again just as he reached the count of twenty and started to get up. That was cheating.

The yard had two giant concrete coal bunkers that hadn't held any coal for a long time. We used to hide in them and come out smeared with soot.

In 1976, we had a black and white TV set. If I was home sick from school, I would watch Crown Court with my mum. I thought about Crown Court out of the blue the other day and found a clip of the title sequence on YouTube. I felt tears coming to my eyes.

Once, I was sent to our room (I shared it with my brother) from the dinner table. I can't remember what I'd done wrong. We lived on the ground floor so I climbed out of the window, meaning to run away. Sykes the park keeper scooped me into his arms and delivered me to the front door.

In 1976 I broke my right arm. It happened on a Saturday evening and we had to wait a long time in the A&E department at the Whittington Hospital. The staff were dealing with all the people who had got glassed or otherwise injured in the tough pubs around Archway.

In 1976, my dad took me to my first ever football match at Loftus Road. We saw QPR beat Middlesbrough 4-2. I just have this sense of how overpowering it was: the noise, the number of people there and the physicality of the game. We were towards the front of the Ellerslie Road stand and I recall how huge the players looked. The only clear mental picture I have of that game is of a Rangers player going up in the air to win the ball. I couldn't believe such large men could jump so high. I couldn't believe how brave they were, risking smashing into each other and banging heads - the determination to win the header. When we got home, we were shouting and cheering as my mum opened the door. That was really the start of a long but sometimes difficult love affair with the club my dad had supported since childhood. I think it bothered him that his father had not lived to see his grandson shouting for the Rangers down at Loftus Road. I think sometimes it still does.

Then the summer came. Everyone still talks about that summer. Long, and impossibly hot. On our days out in the VW Beetle, we saw that green and pleasant England had been scorched to unfamiliar yellows and browns.

I remember my favourite t-shirt from 1976. Brent Cross Shopping Centre opened that year: the first US-style shopping mall in England. I got the t-shirt there, at a place where it was possible to have any design transfer printed onto any colour t-shirt. I had Captain America printed onto a shiny orange one. I don't have any photos of myself wearing it. But I've never forgotten it.