1969. A Year in a Life

By Simon Andrewes

In 1969, I was working shifts with fairly irregular hours and I needed to keep track of what shifts I had on which days, so as I could then plan my social life around them. To this end, I kept a little red diary, just an appointment book, which I hung on to, with the intention of making it into a story one day. This was not a diary in the sense that it systematically recorded my daily feelings and activities. It contained only the briefest of entries: times, venues, people. Time passed, and the story never got written, and I came to forget a lot of the reality that lay behind those short annotations. So I had to invent, re-create, and make things up. So it’s a sort of a fake, or at least unreliable, memoir. I call it a memoir-based novella.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon Andrewes
• Release date: Jan 27, 2019
• ISBN: 9781370854707

Simon Andrewes

Simon Andrewes is retired and lives on his own in Granada, Spain, in a little house with fabulous views of the Sierra Nevada in front and over the Vega, the wide river plain that extends far out to the west, at the back.A good part of his life was dedicated to the teaching of English as an international language, in England, Germany, Spain, where he has lived for most of the last thirty years, and Vietnam. He speaks Spanish, German, and Norwegian well.He is a socialist with ideas aligned to the British Socialist Workers Party.

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1969

A Year in a Life

by Simon Andrewes

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2020 Simon Andrewes

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share it with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading it and did not purchase it, or if it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favourite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the work of the author.

I am particularly grateful to Tony Hale of Erdington, Birmingham for reading my manuscript so conscientiously and giving me such invaluable feedback on early drafts. His was also one of a number of final critical reviews, to which I also received useful contributions from Nigel Walkington, Alastair Gibbons, Martin Colbourne, and Kirsten Lamb.

Cover page designed: Paco Quirosa ([e-mail]) and the author

The three thumbnail images:

i. Accredited to Rafael Perez Habib, the photo represents the self-immolation of Jan Palach 16.1.1969 but is actually of an incident that took place to mark the 50th anniversary of that event

ii. Accompanying an article Bernadette Devlin: A megaphone for workers' struggle by Kelly Hilditch in Socialist Worker. Tue 4 May 2010, issue 2200.

iii. This photo has been used to illustrate articles on the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, for example in Digital History, University of Houston

Permission has been applied for. No copyright infringement is intended.

List of Contents.

Foreword.

Chapter 1 (January-February):

Moon in the Seventh House

Chapter 2 (March-April):

A Good Man, and Full of the Holy Ghost, and of Faith

Chapter 3 (May-June):

Sleepy London Town

Chapter 4 (July-August):

Like A Hurricane

Chapter 5 (September):

Time’s Winged Chariot

Chapter 6 (October-November):

My Hasting Days Fly On

Chapter 7 (December)

Is This the End?

Appendix. Playlist

About the Author

Foreword

In 1969 I was working shifts at the BOAC (British Airways) Air Terminal in SW1, London. So I had a little red diary, just 10cm x 7cm, to make a note of which shifts I was working when. And I had to fit social events and appointments around my shift hours, so that went in the little red notebook, too. I hung on to the diary, with the intention of writing it up in some kind of book form one day. But the years passed, the little red notebook was kept hidden away, and the story never got written. Until a few years ago, when I was more or less retired, and I took out the Collins mini-diary - which had miraculously not got lost during all these years and several moves of address and country - and set about the task. Some of the entries brought back vivid memories, but others I had pretty much forgotten what they meant. Some unexpected memories were evoked, though I was not always sure where they fitted. So I had to put two and two together in many cases, and I think sometimes it came out as five. Thus this novella is not entirely kosher as a memoir; it is certainly not a reliable one, in any case. So please do not assume that the first-person narrator in this story is me, the author, or that people and events were necessarily as described and named. They are sometimes, but not always.

Chapter 1. Moon in the Seventh House

When the moon is in the Seventh House

And Jupiter aligns with Mars

Then peace will guide the planets

And love will steer the stars

This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius ...

- Fifth Dimension Medley Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In. The Age of Aquarius. 1969.-

Actually, I was furious. What a way to start the New Year. I had night duty starting at midnight on 31 December 1968. It wasn’t that it was bad luck, it was downright unfair. Night duty came round about three times a year at the BOAC Victoria Air Terminal, and I had done the last of my three stints for 1968 at the end of October. But that was the trouble with working with women. They had their wily ways. One whose turn it was was ill. Another had cleverly booked a holiday at the last minute. And another had special dispensation for womanly reasons. That was the same one who could never do door duty on Departures. Door duty involved escorting passengers from the terminal building to the coach that would take them to the airport. You had to stand all morning out in a draughty courtyard, cold at the best of times and near unbearable those days, frequent, with a biting wintry wind. With her special dispensation, and being on my team, one of the few males, the chances were always high that I would be picked to substitute her. Which I would do, with an indignant toss of the head and jerk of the shoulder.

Anyway, I was the sucker who got roped in for night duty on the one night of the year that everyone hoped to get off, - and most were forward-thinking enough to make sure they did. I was determined to make the most of my misfortune. With a couple of flatmates and close friends, I set about making sure their celebration at least got off to a good start, - and that my post-midnight suffering would be borne with the least possible pain. In short, that involved quaffing a good deal and a wide variety of the highest quality alcohol over, under the circumstances, a strictly limited period of time: champagne, Tia Maria, Cointreau ... This short but intense drinking session culminated in what Tania called ‘champagne cocktails’ which consisted of two measures of Moet & Chandon and one of Remy Martin. We had a fair few of those before I left for work.

Tania was the one among us who knew most about living, high living. She was a Londoner, to start with, her family of immigrant origin, like most Londoners I ever got to know in those years. Hers came originally from Jordan, but Tania was a thoroughbred Londoner, of the more sophisticated sort. Her father was a Harley Street physician, which will give you an idea as to how different her background was from ours. He had disowned her when she started living with my closest friend, Mick, who, like me, was a northerner, provincial by birth and, we both agreed, unfortunately by mentality. Too right he was in disapproving of his daughter shacking up with a pleb, said Mick. I’d have done the same. We were both keen to overcome our birth curse, Mick and I. And had been working on it for a number of years.

A third of us council-estate provincials there that night was Roger, up in town for the occasion. He had, since we last met, become closely attached to a Czech girl he had met travelling in Italy, around the time when Russian tanks snuffed out the Prague Spring the previous summer. Although I had heard a lot about her, I met her for the first time that evening. Martta. She had a broad plump face, with two unplaited pigtails, high on each side of her head, and a wide, cheerful and disarming smile. Not very sixties-ish, we agreed.

Then there was Britt, whose father was Norwegian but who had spent most of her life living with her separated English mum in bedsits in the Victoria area. In the shadow of the cathedral. She, mother, was a devout Catholic. Britt was my long suffering girlfriend. She barely respected but certainly did not understand her mother’s conversion to Catholicism after her separation from Britt’s father. She took it as an act of retaliation, or defiance, directed at her father’s Protestant-leaning agnosticism.

And at the point when I take up this narration, I felt there was a lot about myself that Britt could barely understand or respect, too. It had started shortly before Christmas, when I phoned her at work from my job on the Victoria Air Terminal Arrivals Desk. They had there a manual with every flight of every airline everywhere in the world! Listen, I said to Britt, about our honeymoon, we could fly to, and there we could get a connecting flight to, and after that there were a couple of possibilities. All these flights for me, as BOAC employee, as well as for Britt, as my wife, would be free or nearly so. Britt was seriously unimpressed. What are you planning a honeymoon for, when we can barely afford the wedding? was her pragmatic reaction. It ended with me taking on an extra job in my free time over the Christmas period as barman in a pub called The Red House half way between Sloane Square and the Air Terminal. It bore that name, I believe, as proud purveyor of the top selling bland contemporary fizzy-frothy keg bitter classic Watney’s Red Barrel. It was not, anyway, a red house.

There were three more people there that night: two of my flatmates, Bob and Brad, and Brad’s girlfriend Jan. Bob had just got back from Singapore, where he had flown to meet up with a woman he was in some kind of relationship with. She had recently gone back home to Australia after completing her two-year stint in SW5. They agreed to meet over Christmas at roughly the midway point between them. Bob was also a BOAC employee and so eligible for standby passenger seats at give-away prices, and he had just literally flown ten thousand kilometres for a dinner date. Well, a dinner and bed date.

Meanwhile, Jan, we learnt that same night, had just dropped a bombshell by telling Brad that she had arranged for an interview at Canada House and her plans to emigrate to Canada were advancing steadily; she reckoned she would be welcoming spring across the pond. Jan’s bombshell was clearly a gauntlet thrown down to Brad, but he shrugged it off, took it in his stride. He boasted how, whenever he got to know a girl he would always go out with her even if he didn’t find her particularly attractive. That way you get to meet her flatmates. That’s how I started going out with Jan, he told us all. Jan grinned ruefully in acknowledgement of the truth of Brad’s swaggering confession. He seemed to be implying it was a policy he would continue with, post-Jan.

Jan was a tomboyish sort of girl, with short naturally blond hair and a sort of natural low-key bisexual charm. Brad was a bold and brash Eastender with a loud voice and bushy eyebrows. A car salesman. A man from the motor trade, as he liked to call himself. And very masculine, with a strong jawline. A macho, an alpha male, in his self-ironising way. They made an odd couple on first impression.

None of us gave Jan much encouragement with her emigration plans. Apart from its cold climate, Canada was a country that somehow fell between two stools. The Americans considered Canadians as little more than sub-standard Brits, while to us they were failed Americans.

Jan, though, had been devouring the propaganda. The great job opportunities. The lifestyle and standard of living there for people like us was so far superior to ours that it was hard to imagine. Then there was the stunningly grandiose scenery of mountains, pine forests, lakes and raging rivers. Think of the Prairies, and the Canadian Pacific, crossing a continent. The Great Lakes, and the Rocky Mountains. All this conjured up visions of a vast and extensive sparsely populated geographical area, welcoming immigrants from an overcrowded island like ours with open arms. And with the best standards of affordable healthcare and education in the world, to boot.

And if winters in Canada were on the chilly side, so what? said Jan. There was also spacious and comfortable housing that was designed and well-equipped for dealing with those low temperatures.

Well, Jan had obviously done her homework, - or been brainwashed. We would wait and see what happened at her upcoming interview. Maybe she would not be accepted. Maybe she would not go through with it. It was only a dream.

In spite of Jan’s bombshell, Martta was more the centre of attraction that evening, because she was new in our circle, and because of her status of being recently exiled from her home country. Involuntary political exile was not something we had much experience of in our circles. She told us her story. She had finished her secondary education the previous summer and was enjoying the period of relaxed political controls in her country to travel abroad, through Europe, before returning to Prague to study languages at university. She was going back to major in English, she said, the language that for her seemed to encapsulate best that all-pervading spirit of freedom and opportunity that infused the life and thinking of her generation. Something like that. She had been in Italy on 21 August when the tanks rolled in to crush the unwittingly innocent attempt to construct socialism with a human face.

She had at first just postponed her return to Prague and then she had met Roger who persuaded her to visit him in England. It was a totally unexpected opportunity for her to improve her knowledge of the language prior to university. Did Roger persuade her, or did she herself come to the conclusion that returning to Czechoslovakia was not the best option, at least for the time being? The answer to that question was left open, but either way the new year started with her still in England and sharing her life with an Englishman, another provincial northerner, albeit another one with still intact cosmopolitan aspirations.

Martta’s story was hard for us to take in, even though it coincided quite closely with the news we had seen and heard and read in the course of the previous year. Before the clampdown, she had just been getting accustomed to what it was like to be able to think and speak and breathe freely, as she put it. But while she had been away from home, hundreds of ordinary people just like you and me had been killed, among them people she knew by sight or by name, maybe not intimate friends, but brothers and sisters in struggle. Liberal-leaning politicians, Communist Party leaders by necessity, had been arrested and carted off to Moscow, where who-knew-what fate awaited them. Thousands had resisted with passion and anger, but within a short time a ban had been imposed on all parties and organisations which, in officialese, ‘violated socialist principles’. In other words, the dictatorship of the state Communist Party had been restored and the struggle for freedom temporarily defeated. Martta would go back when the time was right to advance that drive for liberty and human dignity that she knew was not to be held back.

The events that Martta had lived through were barely imaginable for us, expressed in a language we were not accustomed to. It seemed to us unfair that the totalitarian regime in Russia would not let Czechoslovakia be free and it touched us in as far as it affected Martta so directly, but we had our freedom, and London, as everybody knew, had been swinging for the best part of a decade now, and we were sure we could carve out our future for ourselves pretty much as we liked, socialism or no socialism. Anyway, my concerns were rather more immediate that night.

I left the flat in SW5 far too late and reluctantly at about twenty to twelve, leaving my companions in high spirits and raring to go. I had realistically no chance of getting to work by twelve, but, it so happened that I walked out of my front door and stepped straight into a passing taxi. At twenty to twelve on New Year’s Eve! That made me feel hysterically euphoric. On account of my state of inebriation, no doubt. Within the circumstances of my misfortune, everything went right for me, everything that happened in my little world was revolving around me at its centre. With perfect timing, I swept into the air terminal in Victoria and took up my post on the dot of midnight. By accident or design I had rather a cushy job for the first part of the evening: giving out announcements over the tannoy, mostly about the arrival of coaches bringing in passengers from the last of the evening’s flights that had landed at Heathrow. This was the BOAC Air Terminal, you know, across and down the road from Victoria Coach Station. Later in the year we would go up on the roof of that building to see the supersonic airliner Concorde fly over London for the first, maybe only, time.

Thus the New Year started with me feverishly high on the effects of some magical chemical combination of alcoholic treats. I cockily believed I could dissimulate it well, but looking back I doubt very much that could have been the case. I imagined I was earning heaps of admiration from my fellow workers by addressing the public over the tannoy one moment and then switching the switch to off while I poured abuse on my superiors and mocked them mercilessly with a wit I sadly lacked when sober. Did nobody out there notice anything, a slur in my speech, as I read out the announcements? At one point the duty officer came into the office we called the control room and gave me a long hard piercing look. But I was unbreachable and she neither said nor did anything more.

Within an hour or so the arrival coaches were all in and our job was to prepare the flights for the following morning. It was boring paperwork and gradually my elation wore off as I dealt with the grim routine of office duty in the duty office. From then on it was just a question of getting through the night. We had the chance to sleep for a while before preparing for the morning shift take-over and at seven we were released into the chilly early hours of the New Year, 1969.

When I got back Britt was already asleep, the revelries had ended for her quite early. She was not at the peak of health, I knew. But I was alarmed when she asked me to accompany her to Westminster Hospital the following day for a chest x-ray.

Why? I asked helplessly.

Why do people go for chest x-rays? I can still hear the exasperation in her voice. She was more than usually irritable, irritated by me, as she so often seemed to be of late. I remembered once how she got extraordinarily angry with me when I didn’t take her question about the right way to treat frostbite seriously. Warm the affected part, of course, but how? Rubbing? Are you crazy? Rubbing is likely to make it worse! Rubbing can cause ice crystals that have formed to do irreparable damage to the tissue. So what would you do? I was losing my patience, we were both losing our patience, and I was also