1972 A New Direction

1972 A New Direction

So much has happened since then and so much happened back in 1972 both for me and for the world.  Apollo 17 and man left the Moon for the last time that year; the terrorist attacks and the sad news of the Israeli athletes being murdered in that attack.  I could go on like some laborious almanac about the world back then, but I think it better I focused on my own journey; for many of the events worldwide barely touched me.  I was still only sixteen when 1972 dawned and still very much a boy.  Looking back it was during that year that so much changed for me both physiologically and emotionally.  I could no longer hide and was learning to join the real world…

I had left school the previous year and started as an Engine Cleaner (the progression route for the Footplate back then) and began my path almost literally as I progressed to the rank of Secondman ( a train driver’s assistant).  I was part of a huge diesel depot at Stratford in East London, which is now part of the Olympic Park development for the London 2012 Summer Olympic Games.  The old depot having long been closed and the entire area redeveloped. My appointment to that rank had actually happened the previous November and when I arrived to pick up my first pay packet in my new role it included over ten weeks of backpay.   I took home almost three times the wage of a Train Driver that day and my hands shook as I looked at the huge wad of cash. 

Riding in the cab of a train had been a dream since the late Fifties and I was frozen in awe and overcome with excitement.  Even commuting thirty miles to work was by train and I was in a transport heaven.  I saw parts of London I’d never seen before and many during unsocial hours.  I rose through the ‘links’  that comprised of twenty four crews each to end up with a great bloke called Johnny Bond with whom I spent the remainder of the year in Link 10.  It was during that time that I got talking to an old tramp in the café at Liverpool St Station. Thirty years later I would visit the Whitechapel Mission he used as an occasional shelter.  I told him a pack of lies that day as I boasted about the life  I had; dreams and fantasies that actually came true, but back then as unlikely as it was possible to be. I didn’t realise how accurate those lies would be, or were they visions of the future and dreams I had a chance to bring about?

I travelled abroad for the first time to Switzerland on a youth holiday.     Little did I know I was to meet my future wife there two years later, but then it was male only. I can still remember the long journey from Boulogne to Lake Thunersee in Switzerland.  Just like my first proper holiday in 1965 I was too excited to sleep and the constantly changing array of signal lights, stations etc had me spellbound.  I didn’t think about it at the time, but I was always happier on the move and I still am.

I met a girl at my local youth club and spent my very first Christmas away from home with her family in St Albans that December. Llyn was a rite of passage in more ways than one and our break up in early 1973 saw me move away to Norfolk. Yet 1972 was a year of massive change for me in most areas of my life.  That pre-pubescent boy began a journey through life.  I had no idea then just how varied and how unusual that road would be or how much change I would be looking back on today. 

What seemed a journey set in stone and not to be changed would undergo such radical transformations that shaped who I am today. Regrets?  Yes, I’ve had a few as the song goes, but I was shaped by those times. I entered 1972 naïve, excited and eager. I left it in much the same way, but I had completely changed.