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Things We Didn’t Have in the 1970s
Part Two
Much in the Way of Entertainment
I realise things are relative. When my parents were growing up, there was almost no entertainment at all. People would have had to ‘make their own entertainment’. What that consisted of I have no earthly idea, but no one looked particularly entertained. By the 1970s, things were marginally better but the paucity of decent things to watch on TV or listen to on the radio was still bordering on criminal. For kids, the most wholesome show was Blue Peter. I recently watched a clip from the early 1970s and it featured a woman wearing a football kit (including boots) whistle a song. She was a very good whistler. Why she was wearing football kit was never mentioned. Later in the decade, the most popular kids’ show on BBC TV was presented by a paedophile who made children’s, and no doubt his own, wishes come true. All three TV channels stopped broadcasting around midnight. Most evenings, it was a relief.
We had board games, although the idea of my mother and father playing Cluedo (a popular Whodunnit game) does not bear thinking about. I think even the thought of murdering someone with a lead piping in the kitchen might have given my mum too many ideas. Sometimes we went out. Living in London, there were choices. There was theatre and opera and ballet and probably modern dance if you looked hard enough but we never went to any of them. We went to the cinema once or twice but as my parents couldn’t go five minutes without screaming abuse at one another, we’d barely get through the trailers.
Chapter Three
David Watts
I attended JFS (the Jewish Free School), a co-educational comprehensive secondary school with 1,500 kids in Camden, North London. My parents wanted me to go to a Jewish school, so it came down to a choice between that or the much more religious Hasmonean High School in Hendon. Our family had recently moved into a housing association flat in West Hendon, a non-descript area off the Edgware Road. (Two thousand years before-hand, the Roman army would’ve marched almost past my house). My mother had very sensibly turned down the chance of living in a slightly bigger place on one of the most violent estates in London, Chalkhill in Wembley. It would’ve been handy for cup finals but I may not have made it to my eighteenth birthday. West Hendon was a brisk forty minute walk to Hasmonean, but our religious beliefs, never strong to begin with, dissipated through the 1970s and so my parents opted for me to take the bus, train and bus journey to Camden. It was one of the few decisions they made that I agreed with.
Camden was not the entertainment hub that it’s become in the last twenty-five years. Like most of Britain in the late 1970s, there was an air of sleazy decay about the area. The market was vaguely trendy, but this was before enterprising hippies started flying off to India and coming back with cheap trinkets they could sell for 1,000% mark-up to unsuspecting tourists. Mainly because there were very few tourists.
The residents were a motley collection of Londoners. There were four men who lived in the streets around the underground station entrance. We would’ve called them tramps, which at that time described a very particular type of person. (Although there are a lot more homeless people now than there ever used to be, one sees very few 1970s ‘tramps’ any more but they were a regular feature of London life back then.) Men (and it was always men) with matted hair, wearing clothes that they’d not taken off for several years and giving off an odour that would stop a train. Which presumably was why they weren’t allowed on the platform. They didn’t even beg. Most people wouldn’t (and because of the smell, couldn’t) go anywhere near them. I have no idea how they fed themselves but they didn’t seem to be emaciated so they must have been eating. Although it might have been the eight layers of old newspapers they used to keep themselves warm. For amusement, they used to drink heavily and bark – actually bark, like big Alsatian dogs – at schoolchildren as we walked past them. You’ve got to have a hobby. I guess when people look back to days gone by and talk about having to make our own entertainment, this is what they mean.
I never mentioned it to my mother. She may well have regretted sending me to JFS if she knew I’d have to run the gauntlet of barking tramps. The first time it happened, I almost wet myself. The tramps’ barks were very realistic. I honestly felt like I was about to be attacked by an enormous and incredibly malodorous Alsatian. They laughed their hearty tramp laughs and from then on, I was fair game. It happened so often, I was crossing the road to avoid them.
*
Our school was next door to Camden School for Girls, a grammar school that was slowly transitioning into a comprehensive. It was full of impossibly tall and willowy middle class girls with double-barrelled surnames and first names like Vanessa or Chloe or Virginia. They all had cheekbones and good teeth and looked healthy and well-bred and no doubt took part in eventing competitions at weekends. They looked upon us, running around in our playground, with our outsize noses and Coke-bottle glasses, as the aristocracy look upon people who do manual labour. They paid us absolutely no attention whatsoever.*2
Further up the road was Holloway Boys School, a famously tough inner city comprehensive whose alumni include one Charlie George, bad boy striker for Arsenal and one of my earliest heroes. The Holloway boys were a fearsome lot. One imagines that their school reunions would have been decimated by enforced absences due to the actions of the criminal justice system. As well as terrorising any kids who had the temerity to walk past their school just because they happened to live near Holloway, their regular lunchtime entertainment was to wander down the road to our school, stand in the street where we could see them and make gas noises and Nazi salutes. Even writing this sentence is shocking to me. Nowadays, I could see it happening perhaps once or twice before the authorities got wind of what was going on and firmly put a stop to it. This abuse went on for years. It probably went on longer than the Second World War. It happened so often, I think it became part of the curriculum.
‘What have you got today?’
‘Geography, chemistry and double anti-semitism.’
We didn’t take it completely lying down. There used to be abuse flying back and forth across the fence and the teachers would shoo us over to the other side of the playground. They should probably then have had a word with the hooligans, but they were more terrified of them than we were. Except for our history teacher, Mr Waterman. He was already a legend after one fantastic incident during one of his lessons. We were in a classroom on the fifth floor of the main building. He crashed in. He was not in a good mood.
‘Sit down everyone.’
We sat down.
‘I’m going to turn round,’ he said in his distinctive Welsh accent. ‘If I turn back and there is a bag left on the desk, I’m going to chuck it out of the window.’ He then turned round.
Now all teachers have their own eccentricities. Some detest chewing, others cannot stand even the merest hint of talking in class. PE teachers don’t like children. Mr Waterman was famous for having an irrational revulsion for anyone who kept their bag on their desk, so even though we were five floors up, we thought he actually might do something that crazy. We cleared our remaining stray bags from our desks.
He turned back, saw a bag on a desk and stared at us.
‘Whose bag is this?’
No one answered. There was a heavy silence in the air. He picked it up and without a moment’s hesitation threw
