The Day the Bungalow was Struck by Lightning and the Commotion that Followed Monday, 14th July 1975, started off just like any other school day. I had breakfast with my parents, did my paper round and then took Patch, my lovely black and white cross Alsatian/Labrador for a walk while my parents were getting ready for work. It was a slightly overcast morning but it was quite mild. I returned home after about 20 minutes to witness my parents setting off for work. My mum drove the three miles to the Firth Company at Howley where she worked as a …
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70s Lad Struck by Lightning
Gazza Finally Gets The Girl?
Pandemonium in an Art Exam and Gazza Finally gets the Girl, I think!! Friday, 11th June 1976, started off like any other day. I left my home at the usual time of 8.18am meeting up on the way with my friend Anthony Rae for the usual two mile walk to school. In the afternoon I was to complete the first of a two part paper of an O Level Art exam. This exam would take six hours and was divided into two, three hour parts over two days, the first part being this afternoon. I had with me my preparation …
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Cool Among The Flames
Noel Bailey is a world re-known film critic currently residing in Australia You are lucky enough to have a sneak preview of this cynical, abrasive and devastatingly frank account of a life in progress, set to a nostalgic time-line of major news headlines and rock ‘n’ roll history. “It wasn’t that I resented authority particularly, I simply could not condone the rude interruption to my daily routine. Getting up when I felt like it, playing with my train set, jumping off the garage roof into the sand pit by which time, all things being hunky dory, breakfast should be just …
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Things that go bump in the night
Things that go bump in the night Written by Imp The school summer holiday of 1970 I remember it so well, weeks and weeks of endless days stretching before me, no school, not that I minded school it was fun to learn all the new things they showed us. School at 7 years old was so different to what it would become at 11 or 15 and of course I knew nothing of it, that was the future and I never gave it a single thought. I was 7, I’d always been 7 and I always would be 7, and …
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The Things We Do For Love
The Things We Do For Love Written by Nix “Get up.” “What?” My mother asked groggily, staring at me through half-opened eyes. “Why?” “I need a ride. I have to go to 7:30 Mass,” I answered, bouncing from foot to foot, my eyes darting to the time on my parents’ bedroom clock radio. “Huh? Are you kidding? Why?” “Because,” I stammered, “I…really, really…love…Jesus?” The truth was I really, really loved Danny O’Reilly, a boy one year ahead of me at our Catholic grade school and he was the altar boy for that week’s 7:30am Mass. I would—and did—lose sleep over …
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A Place of My Own
A Place of My Own Written by Gail Walter Imagine a place where the kids could sleep and live, a sort of wing addition on the house with partitioned sleeping quarters and a large children’s lounge for kidding around in. This was my mom and dad’s dream, to build their own home, designed on the back of a cigarette box and rationalized over a couple of bottles of red wine with a friend who was also an architect. It was 1974 before it was ready. I was sixteen and somewhat torn by the design of the place. I liked the …
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Parental Influences
Parental Influences Written by Gail Walter When people think about the seventies they don’t generally think about parents, and yet we all had them. In some shape or form! I was born to a pair myself. And they were an inextricable part of my memories about those years. I came from a conventional family, in some ways. My dad devoted himself to his work as an international journalist and my mother concentrated on bringing up what she thought of as three budding “Shirley Temples”. We had two prevailing planes of reality in our family. Our intellectual, political and hypothetical world …
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The Opposite Sex
The Opposite Sex Written by Gail Walter It is impossible for me to separate the era of the seventies from my transition from girl into woman. I was thirteen in 1970 and suddenly so aware of the difference between myself and the opposite sex who were just coming into vivid and irresistible focus. I was one of three sisters and the daughter of a loving but distant workaholic of a man. Boys were something exotic, so exotic that I couldn’t string two words together in their glorious company. All of this interfered with my possibilities of actually getting one of …
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The Music of the Seventies
The Music of the Seventies Written by Gail Walter Sometimes you could tell who a person was by sidling over to their rack of albums next to the record player and checking out the titles. My boyfriend lugged his LPs around with him. It was worth it. Nothing could speak more eloquently for you then the musical company you kept. And music was not languishing in the seventies. It was bursting with a frenetic energy that gave birth to some of the most popular and powerful music of the century. It was this decade that saw the rise of musical …
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Love in Autumn Colours
Love in Autumn Colours Written by Gail Walter The sixties was the official era of peace, love and understanding but that doesn’t mean that love wasn’t alive, well and living in the seventies. I know. I was there. More specifically I was in a garage converted into a cool teenage pad. The floor was covered in brown shag carpet and the bed was a box directly on the shag carpet and covered in a fabric of geometric design in beige and brown. There was a record player on another box style table also covered in a fabric, this time a …
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