Seventy Six '76

'76

'76

This story goes back over twenty years, to a time when people still
cooked long hand, a time before the marvel of microwave ovens, and two
minute chips which taste as cardboard as the box in which you cook
them. Binatone Tennis the brand new electronic game was the innovation
of the decade, and couples sat enthralled by the dot that bounced off
the stick 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 our more
affluent living rooms and people were complaining that the relatively
new fangled colour television was still giving them headaches. Her
father was mistrustful of this and was quite happy to stick with the
old black and white television for another three years.
We go right back to the summer of seventy six, the summer of the great
heatwave, a summer that was uncommonly good, for the children of
Britain, a nightmare for the garden proud, a disaster for the farmers,
and death for the third world. For her it was the best summer ever. A
time of penny ice lollies and sunshine. Annie at the corner shop used
to break the sticks getting them out of the lolly makers, sometimes if
the boss was out she'd throw them into the paper bag for nothing.
She'd sit by the beck with her friend dangling her legs in the water,
sucking noisily on her ice lolly and watching the minnows swim by. Each
day the beck became a little more shallow until the minnows were
stiffened like jerky on the furrowed dry beck bed.

She was thirteen years old, and it was a hazy holiday of perspiring
brow and budding breasts, the realisation of awakening sexuality. The
year of trainer bras, and purple velvet hotpants, 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 silent drums. She was
headstrong and wild, a vixen sure and confident, yet still with the fox
cub's innocence, which leads it headlong into trouble with the certain
knowledge that life is kind, and harm only befalls those who deserve
for it to embrace them. The world owed her protection, and curiosity
drove her to stretch the limits of her worldliness. She smelled for the
first time, the musk of Brer Fox, and became excited by this new
aroma.
The storm came late, after weeks of drought, she danced in the rain, a
sultry, liquid, feline striptease, a shedding of the layers of
childhood. The fat, wet droplets of water falling from her slender
nose, to sit dew like on the bud of her lips. The legs browned by the
torrid sun throughout these long days, no less long or slender, but
stronger now, more defined after a summer of running through the
fields. The Base ball boots replaced by razor sharp stiletto heels, the
click, click click announcing the imminent arrival of the She Cat.
Weather bronzed grin and sparkling eye gone, lost beneath a painted
mask of blue eyeshadowed perfection.
The Summer of '76 was finished and so was her childhood. That was the
last year she gathered the freshly cut grass, spending hours shaping it
into a den, building the walls two foot high, and then expanding her
empire to add "rooms" and tunnels a plenty. She never sat again making
daisy chains with her best friend, and discussing what it would feel
like to be kissed by David Cassidy, or for that matter to be kissed by
anybody, even if it was just by Pizza Face Freddy in the third year. It
was to be another fifteen years before she went to the pictures to
watch Bambi again, and then she cried at the death of Bambi's mother
with the next generation of innocence.
The Summer of '76 was finished, and so was her childhood.