It was a very strange decade. The fear that something bad was going to happen to you was omnipresent but just accepted. The cold war was very real and frightening, IRA bombings and feeling terribly sorry for the people of Northern Ireland, the IRA trying to kill Maggie, riots and of course AIDS. Then further afield, famine, epidemics and war, Saddam Hussein and the Anfal genocide. It was a time of feeling very impotent... part of that will have been as I was an older child / young teen.
Television for children was so sparse and so few channels (3 then 4 by the end of the decade) that if you wanted to watch tv, you watched adult stuff. The news was on at 8 or 10 pm and we all watched the news. And this is why we all knew what was going on in the world unlike the majority of kids of today, who spends their time streaming Netflix and so forth. This is why the world seemed so very frightening to me and the house pricing boom led me to fear that I would never be able to afford my own home even before I had left school.
There was a drive to get kids into YTS schemes and apprenticeships because going on the dole was more of a life choice for many (not all) in my relatively wealthy southern town. It was a place, where you could walk out of a job one day and be in one the next. There was a massive north / south divide on this front and London centric Maggie was busy decimating industry. The government even threatened to make YTS compulsory, a lot of employers were exploiting youngsters then getting rid of them after 2 years. As a result, on Thursday 25th April 1985, a lot of school kids went on strike over it. There were over 1000 of us at school and one day, we all sat in the playground and refused to go to lessons. I just looked up the date and the numbers involved, an estimated 250,000 went on strike that day. You imagine organising that with zero social media!
Whatever happened to me, I couldn’t talk to my parents about. I was very disconnected from them, which wasn’t uncommon at the time. We were very much left to our own devices. Mental health really wasn’t a thing. I was one of the kids, who rang and told my mother where I was... I had to ask to use the phone to make a quick call from people’s houses. But by 13, I was going off on long walks through the countryside to villages miles away for hours. Maybe that was normal, I know my 12 yo dd is starting to want to do the same...
Everything was far more expensive because a lot was made in Britain and imported goods from China wasn’t yet a thing. Japan was the up and coming tech country at the time with a lot of electronics coming from there and Japanese labour costs were / are a lot higher. Our first VHS video recorder cost £400! That was in maybe 1984.
We started secondary in the equivalent of yr 6. At that time, loads of kids piled on the school field behind and building and to smoke at break and lunchtime and some of the older girls smoked in the loos, sitting on the massive sanitary bins. It was a scary time to be a yr6 or 7. By the time I’d left, it had been all but stamped out. Fights were common at lunchtime and you'd head the cry ‘fight, fight, fight’ and everyone would pile onto the field. Kicking someone’s head in meant literally that.
Teaching was diabolical at my school. It would have considered failing even in those days had such benchmarks existed. The top set maths teacher spent more time talking about his wife than teaching and gave the more sensible kids the dubious pleasure of walking to the bank with bagfuls of petty change from about 14 during the lesson. I got to do that one twice! I later heard he’d been promoted to head of maths. 🤯 Kids in my English class decided to make it their mission to get the lovely old lady, who couldn’t control us to cry one day. From the equivalent of year 10, we were allowed to leave school at lunchtime and go for walks. We often used to go to town and sometimes buy our lunch from the chip shop. I remember buying bags of crisps from M&S. If we didn’t want to go further afield, we’d sit in the cemetery and there were local complaints, which pissed me off because we would just go and sit on the bench and bask in the sun and took our rubbish away.
You’ve heard loads about the brilliant and diverse music and dandruff lighting, hair (I don’t think anyone mentioned the new invention of hair mousse and even better, coloured hair mousse) and going out. It was no different for me except that I became one of the depressed ones mid teens and went full on goth. As we were allowed out at lunch and no one stopped kids from buying booze, a friend and I sometimes would buy a can or a couple of times, two cans of the highest strength bitter we could find and we’d return for the last 2 hours of lessons half cut. By 15, nights out consisted of buying litre bottle of bitter, drinking it with a straw, walking to town and having a few pints in the pub. I was stick thin and hardly ate. Then to make matters worse, amongst all of this, one of my parents died.
By the end of the decade, I was at university. Life became much easier in some ways. But I went north and none of the places I could afford had central heating or double glazing. Some had a coin meter. I was one of the lucky ones to have a car that I’d save up to pay for. When I first arrived at university, I didn’t seem finding car parks and parked under, what I thought was the council offices, ignored the no parking signs and went to join the 2 hour long queue to register. Anyway, a senior lecturer came and found me in the queue. The bomb squad were there and had evacuated the building. It was actually big block of flats. The shame. The residents heckling me. The lecturer told me the bomb squad were around doing exercises so not to worry too much. Idk if that was true or not. All I got told by the bomb squad was they would have blown my car up had I not returned in the next hour and a telling off thank goodness! But just to show you the reaction of people today to back then....