'76

‘76

This story goes back over forty years, to a time when people still cooked long hand. We travel back to a time before the marvel of microwave ovens, and two minute chips, which tasted as cardboard as the box in which you cooked them. Binatone Tennis, the brand new electronic game was the innovation of the decade, and couples sat enthralled by the dot that bounced from one stick to another across an otherwise empty screen. Space Invaders were still three years away from invading our eager world. Eight track tapes were the norm, and Cine film was running scratchily through affluent living rooms. People complained that the new-fangled colour television was still giving them headaches. Her father was mistrustful of them and was happy to stick with the old black and white television, for another three years. Children sucked on spangles and wore corduroy jeans, usually brown or dark blue.
We’re in the August of seventy six, the summer of the great heat wave. This year was uncommonly good for the children of Britain, a nightmare for the garden proud, a disaster for the farmers and it spelled death for many in the third world. But, for her, it was the best summer ever, a magical time of penny ice lollies and sunshine. Annie, at the corner shop, used to break the sticks getting them out of the lolly makers and sometimes, if the boss was out, she’d throw them into the paper bag and give them away for nothing.
She’d sit by the beck with her friend, dangling her legs in the water, sucking on her ice lolly and watching the minnows swim by. Each day, the level of water in the dirty beck became lower until the minnows were stiffened like jerky on the furrowed, dry, beck bed.
She was fourteen years old and it was a hazy holiday of perspiring brow and budding breasts. It was the realisation of awakening sexuality, the year of the trainer bra and purple, velvet hot pants. She had legs like a gazelle tapering from baseball boots and hips that were learning, all by themselves, how to sway to the beat of a million drums. She was headstrong and wild, a vixen, sure and confident. But she retained the fox cub’s curiosity and innocence. She still believed that life is kind. Harm only comes to those who sing for it to embrace them. The world owed her protection, and curiosity drove her to stretch the limits of her worldliness. She had smelled that season, for the first time, the musk of Brer Fox and she became excited by this new aroma.
The storm came late after weeks of drought. She danced in the rain: a svelte, liquid, feline striptease, a shedding of the layers of childhood. The fat, wet droplets of cleansing rain fell from her slender nose to sit dew-like on the bow of her lips. Her legs had been browned by the torrid sun throughout these long days, no less long or slender, but stronger, more defined after a season of running through fields. The Baseball boots, now replaced by razor sharp stiletto heels, the click, click click announcing the imminent arrival of the young she cat. The weather bronzed tomboy grin and sparkling eye’s had gone, lost beneath a painted mask of blue eye shadow. Her forest of freckles were hidden beneath a shore of sandy foundation.
The Summer of ‘76 had waned and so had her childhood. That was the last year that she gathered the freshly cut grass, spending hours shaping it into a den, building the walls two foot high and then expanding it to add ‘rooms’ and connecting tunnels. She never again sat making daisy chains with her best friend, and discussing what it would feel like to be kissed by David Cassidy. It was to be another fifteen years before she went to the pictures to watch Bambi again, and then she still cried at the death of Bambi’s mother, along with the next generation of innocence.
The summer of ‘76 was over, and so was her childhood.