Teenage Revolution

by Alan Davies

  Fortunately, Botham was selected and took six wickets in the first innings of the Third Test, held at Headingley. He then scored fifty but England were skittled out and forced to follow on. With five wickets down in the second innings and close to defeat, Botham said to his partner, the young fast bowler Graham Dilley, ‘Let’s have some fun.’ He smashed the ball to all corners and amassed 149 not out. England had seemed so certain to lose that bookmakers were offering 500–1 against them winning. The Australians Dennis Lillee and Rod Marsh had a bet on England since the odds were so crazy (and seemed indicative of the English need to kick their own men when they’re down). Botham’s remarkable, thumping, swinging, battering innings, combining the power of a heavyweight boxer with the hand-to-eye co-ordination of a concert pianist, thrilled the television audience. It was easy to be lifted out of your seat in excitement. It became necessary to watch standing up, because his best blows would cause you to jump and shout out:

  ‘YES! GO ON, BOTH! WHERE’S THAT ONE GONE? LOOK! IT’S GONE MILES! MILES!’

  The next day, England bowled out Australia, with eight wickets going to Bob Willis, and the series was tied.

  In the Fourth Test Australia were back on top and needed forty-five to win with five wickets standing. An easy target, a foregone conclusion. Botham came on to bowl. He took all five wickets in twenty-eight deliveries, conceding only one run. It was the single greatest spell of bowling in living memory. He charged in and hurled the ball down and through Australians who were flattened as if he’d bowled a wardrobe at them. The Birmingham crowd roared their approval. England were now ahead 2–1 in a series that, without Botham, they would have been losing 3–0.

  In the Fifth Test at Old Trafford, England were five down in the second innings for 104, and in danger of not setting the Australians a high enough target. Botham came in and assaulted the ball and the Australians simultaneously. One of his sixes appeared to be aimed at his good mate Lillee, who was far more used to playing the fearsomely intimidating aggressor. He had to take evasive action.

  Botham scored 118, set a record for sixes in an innings against Australia, and helped England post 404, which was enough to win and clinch the series 3–1 with one to play. The last match was drawn with Botham taking ten wickets. It’s highly likely that, had he been dropped after the Second Test, England would have lost the series 5–0. It became known as ‘Botham’s Ashes’.

  Living up to those standards for the rest of his career weighed heavily but his achievements were still remarkable. In 1986 he was recalled to the team, after his marijuana suspension, needing one wicket against New Zealand to equal Dennis Lillee’s world record number of Test victims. With the crowd roaring him in once again he managed it with only his second ball and within twelve balls had broken the record. He then picked up his bat and smashed fifty in no time.

  That winter England went down to Australia with Botham back in harness and retained the Ashes. His 138 in 174 balls in the First Test in Brisbane set the tone. It was his fourteenth and last Test hundred. He finished his test career with over 5,000 runs and a record haul of 383 wickets.

  Following his retirement from cricket, he continued to inspire with remarkable feats of distance walking, all to raise money for leukaemia research. The pace of his walks was extraordinary as he ignored pain and left would-be accomplices by the roadside. News crews would struggle to film him as puny local reporters were forced to run alongside the striding, unsmiling giant, hoping for a comment.

  The millions he has raised will have contributed enormously to developments in the treatment of leukaemia patients, perhaps prolonging the life of some mother’s son. Or some son’s mother.

  Ian McKellen

  The hurricane of 1987 blew across Kent, knocking down six of the seven oaks of Sevenoaks. It woke me up by blowing next door’s chimney stack into their backyard and blocked the back road from Whitstable to Canterbury with fallen trees.

  Other than that meteorological intrusion, the campus felt cut off from reality, perched on a hilltop overlooking the town. It began to feel necessary to connect with the rest of the world. The previous summer, many of us had travelled out to Folkestone every day to teach English as a foreign language, to teenagers from Germany (generally diligent) and Switzerland (generally struggling to establish an identity to the point where one of them insisted on being called Vladimir).

  This was good fun. A couple of the Swiss kids were into bike racing and wanted to go to the Grand Prix because a Swiss rider called Jacques Cornu was racing in the 250 cc class. I said if they wanted we could go to watch speedway. So we did. It was a four-team tournament, hosted by the Canterbury Crusaders, which included the Hackney Kestrels, who I saw win the British Cup in 1984. The Swiss kids loved it, as did I.

  In the classroom, I found it difficult to keep control unless I was talking, so I told them stories to entertain them. They said they loved my funny stories. Of course they did, while I was talking, they weren’t having to write or speak any English. Furthermore, while they were in the classroom they weren’t being chased all over Folkestone by local youths, who could easily identify them, since they all had the same bright blue EFL bag.

  During term-time by far the best way I found to remove myself from the university life I was beginning to hate was to go on demonstrations and the late ’80s were full of them.

  An anti-nuclear rally was held in Hyde Park to commemorate the first anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster in Ukraine. At the time of the accident, Ukrainians were not told about it, since there was only one week to go until the May Day celebrations and to cancel those would have been an indicator that something serious was happening. Which it was. The heat of the meltdown was detectable by satellite and radioactivity was picked up in Sweden, which was how the West became alerted. After the May Day parades Ukrainians were told to go inside and shut their windows. Hundreds of firefighters lost their lives at the plant but more cataclysmic loss of life was averted by the wind taking the cloud of radioactive material away from Kiev, which is only sixty-five miles from Chernobyl.

  Since Arsenal were playing away on the day of the anniversary rally, I went on the march from the Embankment to Hyde Park. Later I made a note in my diary for 25 April:

  Another demonstration was held in opposition to what became known as the Alton Bill. This was Liberal MP David Alton’s Private Member’s Bill introduced in an attempt to reduce the number of weeks into a pregnancy a woman could legally terminate. For the left, the matter was simple, the woman’s right to choose was being attacked and mass demonstrations against this retrograde step were organized.

  We boarded coaches outside the recently renamed Nelson Mandela Building on campus and some hours later were sitting down on Westminster Bridge, with mounted police looming over us.

  ‘What do we want?’ someone yelled.

  ‘ABORTION RIGHTS!’ we yelled back.

  ‘When do we want em?’

  ‘NOW!’

  It may have been more effective had we chanted:

  ‘What do we want?’

  ‘ABORTIONS!’

  ‘When do we want them?’

  ‘NOW!’

  We didn’t think of that, though, and given the majority of those blockading Westminster Bridge were young men it would have been an un-serious choice.

  That evening the women on the demonstration held a women-only candlelit vigil on the Embankment, while all the men went to the pub until they were done. Reconvening later we asked how it had gone. The women all agreed that it had been moving and peaceful. They looked tearful.

  ‘What did you do?’ asked one of the men.

  They said they’d sung some songs and were, frankly, vague about their oh-so-special candlelit carry-on, which, frankly, sounded a bit feeble and hardly likely to break down the barricades and persuade the powers that be to change! The coach journey back was a little quiet. It seemed odd that men should be campaigning for abortion rights and absurd that other men had a say in making
laws about it.

  Other demonstrations were easier to join in. Such as the one held when Margaret Thatcher came to Canterbury Cathedral to meet President Mitterrand of France in order to sign the Channel Tunnel accord.

  The posters went up all round campus:

  THATCHER IN CANTERBURY

  That was it. Nuff said. Anyone who didn’t want to go down into town, find her, and string her up, clearly hadn’t been listening these last few years to the arguments!

  Of course, not everyone on campus was on the left. The Kent University Conservative Association were as far from the left as it was possible to be, without reporting for duty with the National Front. KUCA had been formed after the student Tories had been thrown out of the Young Conservatives for behaving over-exuberantly at a Tory ball in London. At least that was what we on the left had heard. It seemed impossible that a Tory could be thrown out of the Young Conservatives for having too much shampoo at a do, but there it was. I hoped they’d actually been thrown out for wearing their ‘Hang Nelson Mandela’ T-shirts.

  Many of the university’s young Tories were enthusiastic participants in Thatcher’s great public utilities sell-off. If you befriended one, he or she would lend you the money to make a share application, as Thatcher’s dream of making everyone shareholders was brought to life. Once you had received your shares they would immediately buy them from you. I wrote an irate letter to the brilliant campaigning journalist Paul Foot (nephew of Michael Foot), whose columns in the Daily Mirror were consistently excellent. I was excited when he wrote back immediately, thanking me for writing to him and urging me to find some written proof, but there was none. It was an easy scam to pull off. That was the point.

  Thatcher swept through Canterbury in a black limousine and we caught only a glimpse of her, which was disappointing as we’d waited half the day. How much of ‘Maggie, Maggie, Maggie! Out, out, out!’ she heard, behind her bullet-proof glass, is questionable.

  The biggest campaign across the country at the time though concerned section 28 of the proposed new Local Government Act. Clause 28, as it became known, was intended to prevent the ‘promotion of homosexuality’ in local authority schools. In response, Labour councils began campaigning to oppose discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

  The battle lines were drawn, between the liberal left and the conservative right, over whether or not, fundamentally, homosexuality was contagious. A new book, Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin, depicting home life for a child with a gay couple as perfectly normal, had been made available in London schools by the Labour-run Inner London Education Authority (ILEA). The Daily Mail was incensed and determined that its readers should be too. In fact, it was knowing that their readers would be incensed that possibly motivated them to create a fuss in the first place.

  The issue of AIDS had been hugely prominent in the news since 1981, when what was to become an epidemic began to take hold. While some people’s understanding of gay culture had been enhanced by the subsequent publicity, others had hardened their anti-gay prejudice, as what was perceived by many as a ‘gay plague’ impinged on sexual practices amongst straight people.

  At the Royal Court in 1986, Martin Sheen gave a remarkable performance in Larry Kramer’s funny, defiant and profoundly moving play about the effects of AIDS, The Normal Heart. Sitting by myself in the pub across Sloane Square from the theatre after the show, I became aware of many small groups of people who were quietly holding hands, some weeping, others just staring outwards. I’d been moved by the play but these people had clearly lost someone to this frightening new disease.

  Gay people were being portrayed as abnormal, undesirable and a menace to children. The next week a large meeting was being held in the Cornwallis Lecture Theatre, the biggest on campus, as part of the campaign against Clause 28. The guest speaker was to be the Shakesperean actor Ian McKellen. Badges with a pink triangle, the symbol given by the Nazis to identify homosexuals, were distributed.

  McKellen had come out as gay, largely in response to Clause 28. He campaigned widely even though to come out as homosexual was really seen to be sounding the death knell for a career in Hollywood. The drama teacher who had invited him was so excited to receive McKellen’s call on his answerphone, accepting the invitation to speak, that he vowed never to erase the tape.

  The lecture theatre was packed to the rafters. McKellen was charming and funny. He began to speak about Shakespeare and in particular the sonnets that famously have given rise to speculation about the bard’s sexuality. All of this was eloquent, witty and received in good humour by an audience who had come to praise McKellen, not to bury him.

  We were all quietened though, when he began to deliver Shakespeare’s verse. As soon as the first line he had chosen left his lips, the room fell to pin-drop silence. He held us transfixed as his sonorous voice, slightly amplified, seemed to flow towards us as if around our feet at first, before rising up through our motionless bodies, through the heart, before delivering its message to the last organ, the brain. He was entrancing.

  We were asked if anyone had any questions and I asked what I should have said to the angry gay boy in Whitstable who had demanded that I take off my pink triangle since I’d never shown any interest in gay rights before. McKellen asked us all to be undeterred and to wear our badges. Later one of the gay kids in the drama department said he was surprised I’d asked a question since he didn’t think I’d be interested. When I asked him why not, he said:

  ‘Well, you go to football and stuff, don’t you?’

  Later still, the angry gay boy collared me again. He’d heard about my speaking at the meeting.

  ‘That was a lame question, wasn’t it?’

  Billy Bragg singing ‘Which Side Are You On?’ came to mind.

  Shortly before Christmas, for reasons long forgotten, some of the campus lefties decided that the university registry building should be occupied. Having recently become single again, I spent long hours lying under a desk trying to persuade a beautiful radical leftie girl to maybe go to the Neptune with me, obviously only once our demands, whatever they were, had been met. Some time later, she told me that she had decided against going out with me because of my trainers:

  ‘I couldn’t go out with someone wearing trainers like that.’

  ‘I’d have changed trainers for you,’ I told her, but she knew I’d never be cool enough for her. White trainers with velcro straps were fine in Essex, but only in Essex. Fortunately, I did not write a love letter to her on the wall of any of Canterbury’s numerous subways.

  The week before Christmas a minibus was organized to go down to Deal where Billy Bragg was going to play at the Deal Miners’ Welfare Club. All three of the Kent pits had been closed with thousands of jobs lost. Although the strike had finished in 1985, continuing efforts were made to provide for the families of ex-miners who were out of work, especially at Christmas. Bragg was on good form, making light of the tiny stage he was standing on by saying they’d asked Paul Weller to come but there wasn’t enough room ‘for all his suits’. He played all his best and most rousing songs and then broke off to pay tribute to those comrades present who were engaged in ongoing struggles. These included some local nurses involved in a dispute, plus one or two other groups, and then a mention was given to students at Kent university:

  ‘… who are occupying their registry build – is that right? Yeah? Yes, occupying their registry building!’

  We all cheered and smiled at each other. Later the Deal miners presented Bragg with a commemorative brass miner’s lamp as a token of their appreciation. They expressed regret that they could offer no more. There was barely a dry eye in the house and the seriousness of the situation for the families was brought home to the bunch of tipsy students at the back, whose ‘occupation’ seemed less important somehow.

  Bragg then sang ‘Which Side Are You On?’ which fortunately ended to rapturous applause, allowing those of us who had been welling up to hide our emotions in a flurry of clapping and c
heering.

  It was good to leave campus sometimes.

  1988

  Kylie Minogue

  This year saw the beginning of the end for me and Kylie Minogue. The pint-sized star of addictive Australian soap Neighbours had branched out into pop music and in the three short minutes of her number one single, ‘I Should Be So Lucky’, lost her devoted student fanbase.

  It’s one thing to watch a soap knowingly and ironically, but music, that was beyond a joke. I was still of the opinion that if you hadn’t written the song you had no right to be singing it, though this was not a hard and fast rule, since my love for The Velvelettes singing ‘Needle in a Haystack’ knew no bounds. Most of that year though I was listening to ‘George Best’ by The Wedding Present.

  Neighbours was on twice a day on BBC1, at lunchtime and teatime. If you missed the new episode they repeated it the following day. It meant it was difficult to fall behind and easy to catch up. Besides, characters were forever finding excuses to recap the plot, by going to the coffee shop and finding a character who hadn’t heard the latest on Ramsay Street. We knew what we were watching was so bad it was beyond parody, since it was eerily reminiscent of Victoria Wood’s spoof soap opera Acorn Antiques, with Julie Walters as Mrs Overall.

  Ramsay Street was named after a family who were in a long-running feud with the neighbouring Robinson family. The family elders took it all very seriously. It was joyously absurd nonsense and quickly became an established favourite amongst the student population of Whitstable. It’s fair to say that Neighbours episodes comprised at last half of the drama I watched in the final year of my degree.

  For that final year I was sharing a flat with the super-bright Frances, who could be found re-reading Jane Eyre for pleasure in her spare time. A clean two-bed flat with central heating, a witty flatmate, with none of the pretentious excesses of opinion that some were capable of, I’d fallen on my feet. Across Canterbury Road from us, living in a shop window, was our mutual friend Richard, and elsewhere on those premises, in a more conventional room, his cohort Gary. They were both devotees of Neighbours, their pub-singer version of the theme tune putting the original to shame.