The Kill Call

24

Journal of 1968

Well, it was quite a year, 1968. It was all Dr Strangelove and the Prague Spring – Soviet tanks crushing Czechoslovakia, the USA getting a kick up the arse by the Viet Cong, and Enoch Powell making his Rivers of Blood speech. In Londonderry, it was the start of The Troubles. In Paris, students thought they were starting a revolution. That summer, the two best-known people in the world were Sirhan Sirhan and James Earl Ray. Famous because they’d killed the right people.

But most of the time, we were too busy listening to the Beatles’ White Album, and watching Hawaii Five-O on TV. Trying to shut out reality, some might say. And that wasn’t the same after 1968, either.

Some people talk about the sixties as if it was nothing but sex and drugs, and love and peace, the decade of liberation. Well, that’s a pretty bad joke. It might have been all free love and Carnaby Street down there in London, but things take a bit longer to change in these parts. Here, we still had narrow minds and twitching curtains. There was no Technicolor in Birchlow back then, just the same old black-and-white grimness, the dyed-in-the-wool, stuck-in-a-rut, holier-than-thou hypocrites whose disapproval ruined people’s lives. If you took one wrong step, then everyone knew it. The Swinging Sixties? Here, it was still the fifties. In some ways, it was still the Dark Ages.

But if you were young in 1968, you could sense the world changing. Every day, you felt things shifting under your feet, as if the whole of existence could tip in one direction or the other at any moment. We might shake off the old ways, or we might all be destroyed. It was hard to tell. We didn’t know what the future looked like, but we knew it would be different.

It’s strange how the mind works. For me, bits of music used to pop into my head all the time, as if every thought and feeling I had was connected to a tune playing somewhere, like a soundtrack of my life. In 1968, you never knew where you stood with pop music. One week it was the Rolling Stones at the top of the charts, the next week it was bloody Des O’Connor.

Just thinking about threes reminded me of the Three Degrees, even though I never really liked them. They would have been one of Jimmy’s favourite groups, if he’d lived a bit longer. He was mad on the Supremes and the Four Tops, all that Tamla stuff. I thought of him often in the months after it happened, the fact that he never heard the Supremes sing ‘Love Child’, and completely missed ‘I Heard it through the Grapevine’. He died too young. We heard that a lot, in those days.

No, me and Jimmy saw eye to eye on a lot of things, but I never got into Motown myself. Give me the Stones any day of the week. ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ had come out just about then. Now, that was music. With half a chance, I’d like to have turned it up loud in that hole, let it bounce off those bloody concrete walls until my ears ached. It’s a gas, gas, gas.

But not down there, not while the mad people ran the world. And Les would never have let me do it, anyway. Because Les was number one.

For hours on end, it seemed my world revolved around the pee pot and the pump. Bloody strange way to save the world, I always thought. The stink of Elsan and Glitto, the bad air you had to breathe until you got back up into the daylight. Why some blokes put up with it, I couldn’t tell you.

Me, I just reckoned I was doing something for my family, and for my village. But, you know what? I was never too sure what I would have done, if the call had ever come for real.

And I was never sure – not really sure – whether I was capable of killing a man.