Читать книгу Under Pressure. Living Life and Avoiding Death on a Nuclear Submarine онлайн

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‘Mum and Dad are up the road at the neighbours,’ I told him bashfully.

I may have been very young but I knew immediately who he was – I’d seen him on the TV – but of course I didn’t know about the general furore he’d caused in the country as a whole. At this point my elder brother Chris joined me for moral support, so Powell doffed his trilby hat, wished us good luck and walked off at a gallop to Number 6.

Wolverhampton in the 1970s staggered along with rising unemployment and seemed to me to possess an underlying threat of violence. The place was suffering – economic death by a thousand cuts – and by the time the Tories came to power in 1979, hell-bent on changing the social and economic outlook of the once-great industrial heartlands of the Black Country, most of northern Britain was finished; the collapse of the industrial working class and the north–south divide of Thatcherism had well and truly begun.

As a six- and seven-year-old, I’d watch the news of factories shutting, car plants closing, the oil crisis and the first miners’ strikes. Even at that age I was aware that this wasn’t business as usual, but it didn’t give me sleepless nights. I was too busy with my newfound love of sport. Whether it was football, rugby or cricket, it all came fairly easy to me, and I guess that sport was also an enjoyable release from overly zealous, annoying teachers. Football was my obsession; morning, noon and evening I’d be out in our road, in the park, or driving my parents mad, hammering the ball against the garage door. Slightly introverted and on the shy side, I was wary of people until I got to know them, and was not much of a conversationalist. Instead, I lost myself in sport and my other passion – music.