Now, if you were to drive the DeLorean into town you would notice at once the different face of the high street, which was populated with fondly remembered shops such as Ratner’s the budget jewellers, John Menzies the newsagents, Bejam the frozen food store, Tandy the electrical store, Our Price the record shop, Do It All the DIY shop, Woolworths the general store and The Sweater Shop which sold, erm … sweaters. If you wanted to buy a television you could go to Rumbelows which was very similar to Comet or Currys, and if you couldn’t afford to buy the television outright, you could always rent it, along with a Betamax video recorder, from Radio Rentals next door.
The high street appeared to be thriving, but it was already under threat from the rise of out-of-town supermarkets and popular new shopping centres that housed numerous stores under a single roof. Old Victorian buildings were torn down and replaced with modern concrete shopping centres built in a brutalist style, causing great controversy at the time and still generating an emotional response in many people today. The advantages and attraction of the new shopping centres were obvious, both for shoppers and retailers alike: all the shops were in one place so you didn’t have to walk all over town; there were no roads or cars to worry about; you were protected from the weather and there was plenty of car parking right next to the shops.
The most well known of all the shopping centres was probably the Arndale Centre which was actually a collection of twenty-two different shopping centres across the UK, rather confusingly all called the Arndale Centre. Whenever I hear the name, I remember a sketch from the TV show A Bit of Fry and Laurie, where Stephen Fry is looking to buy a get-well-soon card for his wife in a shop where the cards have curiously specific messages. He doesn’t find the card he wants but does find a card with a message that reads, ‘Sorry to hear your teeth fell out in the Arndale Centre, all my love Thomas’.
While the physical structure of the high street was undergoing something of a revolution, another retail revolution was taking place inside the shops as an exciting technology called ‘the barcode’ began to be used more widely. Although the bar code had been invented many years earlier, it wasn’t until the 1970s that it made its debut in the retail environment, and it took many more years before most retailers adopted the system since it required an expensive upgrade to their tills and computer systems. Prior to the bar code retailers used sticky price labels, marking up the price of each Mars Bar individually (10p for a Mars Bar in 1980 incidentally), but this was a laborious process and often led to errors or dishonesty, with customers swapping price stickers around for their own benefit. Most people embraced the new technology, which sped up the process of paying for their goods, but a few conspiracy theorists considered barcodes to be an intrusive surveillance technology and some Christians became concerned when they realised that every barcode contains the number 666, apparently fulfilling the biblical prophecy ‘that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or the name of the beast, or the number of his name … His number is 666’.
After having perused the pleasures of the 1980s high street you could wander around one of the many supermarkets or grocery stores of the time, like Safeways, Mainstop, Happy Shopper, Presto or Pricerite, to remind yourself of the different foods we used to eat in the eighties, and the cheesy muzak that the supermarkets played for us while we were doing the shopping. Of course, most of the essentials were just the same as the food we eat today – meat, fish, dairy, vegetables and so on – but with a bit less variety. It would have been quite unusual to see a sweet potato, star fruit or papaya in the shops and you certainly wouldn’t expect to see much in the way of organic produce.
The eighties was a time when we increasingly looked for time-saving, or convenience foods, and we didn’t think so much about what went into the food or what its nutritional value was. There was no labelling on the food to tell you how many calories were in it, no traffic light warnings printed on the pack to show you the fat, sugar and salt content, and even if there had been, we probably wouldn’t have paid much attention. The traditional stay-at-home housewife role was rapidly vanishing and being replaced by the new, power-dressing career women that didn’t have time to cook long-winded roast dinners, opting to use their brand-new, high-speed microwave ovens instead. In some extreme cases, women stopped cooking altogether and it was reported that men had to cook their own dinner.
Consequently, the supermarkets of the eighties would be full of shoulder-padded women or bewildered men with trolleys full of the new and exciting convenience foods that had only recently appeared on the shelves. Take, for example, the Pot Noodle which appeared in 1979; if you could make a cup of tea, you could make a Pot Noodle – perfect for the unadventurous man whose wife had become a career woman. The manufacturers even targeted their adverts at men to show them just how easy it was to prepare their food in the absence of a woman. According to the adverts for Findus Crispy Pancakes, the pancakes were so easy to prepare that even a teenage boy could manage it while his mum was out at work. The sneaky teenage boy in the advert impressed his girlfriend by letting her think he had fantastic culinary skills and had made the pancakes from scratch, when in actual fact, he had just taken them out of the freezer and put them in the oven.
If you wanted potato with your meal, you didn’t need to scrub and peel real potatoes; you just added some hot water to Smash or chucked a couple of the brand-new Bird’s Eye Potato Waffles in the oven. For dessert, you could just add water again to a packet of butterscotch Angel Delight, or maybe, if you had guests, you could bring out the latest innovation in ice cream: the Vienetta.
What would be the perfect drink to accompany this 1980s convenience meal? Why, Blue Nun of course! Blue Nun was famously marketed as the wine that would accompany every meal perfectly, reducing the need for complicated wine pairings between courses and shaving vital seconds off mealtime preparation. If you preferred something non-alcoholic you could always open a can of TAB Clear cola, the colourless, sugarless cola that never really made it big; or maybe you could open that bottle of Corona limeade that the Corona man delivered to your doorstep every week.
Shoppers at a 1980s supermarket would take their goods to the tabard-wearing checkout assistant who would tap the prices into the till manually, fingers fast as lightning, pausing occasionally to hold up an embarrassing item which had lost its sticky price label and call out for a ‘price check’. Credit cards were becoming more widely used to pay for goods on the high street but they were still relatively new and mistrusted by many. Most customers still opted to pay for their goods with ‘real money’, like £1 notes, old-fashioned shillings, and maybe even some ha’penny coins up until 1984.
I didn’t do a lot of supermarket shopping in 1985 since I was just 8 years old and I was a lot more familiar with a different type of shop – the sweet shop. I used to be given 20p pocket money each weekend and as soon as I got it, I would rush off to the corner shop and spend the whole lot on a big bag of sweets. Items to choose from were things like Alphabet Candy, Beer Bottles, Cola Bottles, Anglo Bubble Gum, Candy Necklaces, Eyeball Gobstoppers, Space Dust, Candy Cigarettes, Bazooka Joe Bubble Gum, Skull Crushers, Flumps, Bullion Bars, Flying Saucers, Cola Roller Balls, Fireball Gobstoppers, Foam Magic Mushrooms, Gold Rush Bubble Gum, Horror Bags, Jaw Breakers, Mojos, Blackjacks, Fruit Salads, Parma Violets, Pez, Love Hearts, Pink Shrimps, Sherbet Dip Dabs or Fountains, Rainbow Drops and Wham Bars.
The corner shop also stocked a mouth-watering selection of crisps, including Ringos, Fish and Chips, Space Raiders, Scampi Fries, Piglets, Discos, Monster Munch and, my personal favourite, the highly controversial hedgehog-flavoured crisps. In 1981 a Welsh pub owner called Philip Lewis decided, as something of a joke, to invent hedgehog-flavoured crisps and was as surprised as everyone else when the crisps became enormously successful. He was also surprised when the Office of Fair Trading decided to bring a court case against him for false advertising, since they weren’t happy when they discovered that the crisps did not actually contain any
hedgehogs at all. Mr Lewis explained that he had interviewed travelling gypsies, who enjoyed the occasional baked hedgehog or two, and took their advice on the flavourings required to recreate the authentic flavour of baked hedgehog. Well, to cut a long story short, Mr Lewis simply changed the label on the packet to read ‘hedgehog flavour’ instead of ‘hedgehog flavoured’, and everyone was happy again.
An original packet of hedgehog-flavoured crisps from 1981. This packet dates from just before the court case which resulted in the name of the crisps being changed ever so slightly to ‘hedgehog flavour’, instead of ‘hedgehog flavoured’. (Public Domain)
Once we had stocked up on our sweets and snacks, my brothers and I would head back home in silence, unable to speak thanks to the giant gobstoppers crammed in our mouths. At the weekends we would usually meet up with our friends and spend the whole time playing in the street on our skateboards, setting up makeshift ramps and using them to jump over brave ‘volunteers’ (usually me) lying on the ground underneath. This was no sissy 1970s skateboarding, where the tricks involved girly handstands and stationary acrobatics while flare-wearing onlookers declared your tricks to be ‘wizard’; no, this was 1980s street skating and we weren’t ‘wizard’, we were ‘radical’. We were part of a new movement of gritty, urban skaters popularised by skateboarding magazines like Thrasher and R.A.D. (Read and Destroy). We would ollie, grind and rail-slide around the streets emulating our heroes, the famous skaters Tony Hawk, Steve Caballero and Rodney Mullen. We watched skate videos together, we read skate magazines and we even played skating computer games like ‘Skate or Die’ on the ZX Spectrum. The only problem was that I was no good at it. I couldn’t ollie to save my life and when I was towed behind a bike on my skateboard I got the speed wobbles, fell off and ended up in hospital.
When a friend of mine brought a skateboard into the office recently, all the excitement of the eighties came flooding back to me and we decided to take it for a whizz down the hill nearby. I’d completely forgotten that I was no longer a child and that I was never much good at skateboarding anyway, and so it came as something of a surprise when I came flying off the skateboard at great speed, landing on my face and ending up covered in bandages once more.
Me getting totally radical at the local skate park. (Author’s Collection)
A marginally safer activity was riding our bicycles, although we still received our fair share of cuts, bruises and crossbar-induced testicular concussions. My brother had a bright yellow Mongoose BMX and I had a Raleigh Grifter that was so heavy that it felt like it was made of lead. The Grifter was the younger cousin of the Raleigh Chopper, a seventies cultural icon, and it looked like the sort of sporty BMX bike that would be ideal for performing stunts and tricks. However, it weighed in at around 35lb making it far too heavy for any child to ever do any jumps on it, which was probably just as well with my safety record. Instead of attempting to get airborne on the bike, I would Sellotape some Brooke Bond PG Tip tea cards on to the frame, sticking into the spokes, so that as I rode along, the cards flapped against the spokes and made a kind of ‘vroom’ noise like a motorbike. At my request my dad bought me a rear-view mirror for the bike and, when combined with the ‘vroom’ noise from the spokes, the twist shift gears and the excessive weight of the bike, I was able to pretend I was one of the motorbike-riding characters from CHiPs.
My younger brother would join in and pretend he was on a police motorbike as he rode around on his Raleigh Bluebird, a younger child’s bike that had a sky-blue frame, white tyres, a white saddle and white handle grips. It came equipped with stabilisers and a little carry box mounted on the rear mudguard that came in handy for transporting our toy handcuffs and revolver.
Sometimes we would head up to the woods on our bikes where someone had made a kind of dirt racetrack with hard-packed mounds of earth that acted as ramps and obstacles. My brother, on his lightweight Mongoose BMX, would speed around the track clearing every obstacle with ease, soaring gracefully through the air over the various ramps. I would follow on my super-heavy Grifter, ploughing through the obstacles with sheer, unstoppable momentum before attempting one of the ramps; my weighty bike always remained firmly rooted to the ground while I soared gracefully through the air, just like my brother, except without a bike.
Just next to the dirt track in the woods was the local Scout hut where my brother and I went once a week for Cub Scouts. We would dress in the traditional Cub’s uniform of grey shorts, green jumper, green cap and a striped neck scarf, with a red ‘woggle’ to fasten the scarf. We also had to wear green-tabbed garters around our knee-length grey socks.
Each week we would solemnly declare our oath to Akela and give a three-fingered salute as the Union Jack flag was raised on a piece of string indoors (we didn’t have a flagpole to use outside). Aside from the weekly meetings where we learnt to tie knots, start fires and practise basic first aid, we would occasionally be taken on special outings or would take part in activities that earned us badges that we could proudly stitch onto the sleeves of our jumpers. Once a year, we would take part in ‘Bob-a-Job’ week which involved knocking on the doors of neighbours and asking if they had any odd jobs we could do to earn some money. Bob-a-Job week started just after the Second World War and the participating Scouts would be paid 5p per job (‘bob’ is the old name for a shilling, now 5p), but in the 1980s inflation meant that I could charge up to 50p per job. This was no easy money-making scheme, though, and I would be expected to work hard for my 50p. I remember weeding an elderly neighbour’s garden for over an hour to earn 50p, washing my dad’s car to gleaming perfection for another 50p and cutting another neighbour’s enormous lawn with a heavy old-fashioned mower for another 50p. Frustratingly, all the money I had worked so hard to collect had to be given to the Scouts for their fundraising collection and I never got to keep a penny of it. I think the idea was to teach young boys the value of voluntary service and community spirit, but it taught me a different lesson: that hard work was futile and that community spirit meant giving up your weekends so that elderly neighbours could take advantage of your good nature.
I worked pretty hard over the years to raise money for the Scouts as I would also go door-to-door each week with a wheelbarrow collecting stacks of old newspapers to take to the Scout hall so they could sell the paper for recycling. I reckon the Scouts did pretty well out of me.
Well, it’s been a real pleasure showing you around my home town of the 1980s and I hope it has brought back as many good memories for you as it has for me; but now it’s time to move on and take a look at what it was like going to school in the eighties.
Ten
SKOOL DAZE
Remember that old ZX Spectrum computer game ‘Skool Daze’ from 1985? Well, I never really figured out what I was meant to be doing in that game – I guess I just never read the instructions – and so I spent many happy hours guiding my character Eric aimlessly from classroom to classroom with the vague feeling that I was probably in the wrong lesson at the wrong time, and occasionally getting told off by teachers whose names I didn’t know. And in this respect ‘Skool Daze’ bore a remarkable similarity to my own, real-life experience of attending school in the 1980s.
I should preface this chapter of nostalgic school day ramblings by acknowledging that school in the 1980s was undoubtedly a different experience for every child and that each person will have a unique memory of their student years. I would be mightily surprised, however, if you don’t find my memories of school life awakening recollections of similar teachers and incidents in your own school days. Of course, many elements of school life will always be the same and children of any generation will share similar experiences, but schooling in the eighties brought with it some unique technologies, trends and events that set it apart from any other decade. I’d like to share with you my personal experience of being a school child in the eighties.
My first day at school is etched indelibly into my memory: it was a sunny September morning in 1982 and my mum h
eld my hand as I walked into the classroom, satchel on my back. Much to my embarrassment, as I walked in through the doorway I tripped on the threshold and landed flat on my face in front of all the assembled children. Not a great start to my school days, but it makes quite a good chapter-opener. Had I known then that I would someday use this experience in a book I was going to write, I might not have cried so much.
My first school was a typical 1970s-built, grey brick box with a large playground and even larger playing field. The playground was split on two levels with a lower playground that was just a rectangle of tarmac and an upper playground that featured a tantalising array of climbing frames and play equipment. I say ‘tantalising’ because we were never actually allowed to play on the equipment during the whole time I was at the school. Every break time all the children would file past the play equipment looking longingly at the ladders, monkey bars and climbing frames as they made their way to the lower playground. On one occasion, the temptation became too much to resist and a spontaneous rebellion broke out among the children as they rushed on to the play equipment, screaming and shouting with joy. I was among those sent to the headmaster for illegally playing on the climbing frames and to this day I have no idea why we were never allowed to use them.
I’m sure, at some point, someone must have explained to me what school was all about and why I was there, but for some reason it never sunk in. I simply followed my instructions and did what the grown-ups told me without questioning anything. I dutifully made crocodiles out of egg cartons, painted pictures of my parents and glued glitter on to an array of household objects, and for all I knew or cared I could have been part of a child slavery production line manufacturing goods to be sold on the black market.
A 1980s Childhood Page 14