The Summer of '76

It was the summer of 1976 and the sky was filled with sun. Every bird on the planet sang a song and water became the precious commodity it always was. A blazing sky beamed on Epping Forest and the hollow ponds were dry as the grass in Africa.

He wore a post-Bay City Rollers t-shirt and a pair of purple baseball boots his mother had found in a dress-your-son-like-a-nob outfitters on Leytonstone High Road. There was the insidious stench of fresh cow shit in the air and stag beetles mated furiously on the steaming pavements.

The Wurzels topped the charts.

Crispy Pancakes were still plump and winsome. The laws of the market had not yet thinned their sauce to the consistency of Pipistrelle vomit.  Capitalism, in essence, is miserly. Shave another centimetre off a Bounty Bar every three years and charge twice the price. Make the kids pay more for less.

1976 was the end of innocence...!

Tam Bryant was sixteen years of age and this was his first year living in England, let alone London. His mind was in a fug. Since moving from Glasgow he’d become increasingly Glaswegian though this approach didn’t help when seeking to purchase things in shops or when buying tube tickets. The amount of times he’d heard ‘sorry, mate?’ and ‘could you repeat that?’ One time when he’d asked for a Daily Mirror he’d been handed a Toffee Crisp by the shop-keeper. His natural Scottish paranoia and sense of inferiority had kicked in and he wondered if they were taking the piss.

He wore his Celtic scarf at all times. He wore his cultural identity like a badge and had begun drinking accordingly.

His guardian angel, if such a thing had existed, would have questioned exactly why he was so sorry to leave his native city for it had never been very kind to him. A gentle giant with sticky out ears and an aversion to hand-to-hand combat of any and all types, he’d been bullied for years in and out of his various schools. Even some of his teachers had bullied him. They seemed to despise his cleverness and had stepped back and watched as he’d slid from the top class down to the very bottom where the pupils had played three-card-brag and picked at each other’s plooks.

The trucks rolled by on busy Whipp’s Cross Road and the eponymous old hospital peeped grandly through the branches of the Forest Glade. Further east, a drunk man in Walthamstow was being thrown off a bus for urinating in the aisle. London was a metropolis of little towns each with their own history and character. If Leytonstone was a Dickens character it would be Mr Fezziwig with a hint of the Havisham’s. A kindly place where some of the residents had a screw loose. A modest Bohemia on the edge of a dense forest.

Someone always knew someone who’d once toured with the guy who used to be in so-and-so. Leytonstone attracted social workers and schoolteachers. It housed retired dockers and psychiatric nurses who worked at Claybury Mental Hospital. Or they may have been employed at Leytonstone House, itself an institution for the mentally bewildered. You would often see denizens and staff wandering around its proximity pointing at traffic or mouthing oaths the meaning of which even they did not understand.

Tam Bryant would watch them and wonder if the inability to think and feel clearly and rationality and have folk look after you would in any way be a good thing. It seemed to him that life was too complex and full of hurt and humiliation. Incarceration may at least save you from the bulk of it.

The bees buzzed on the cotoneasters and high above a jumbo jet was whisking folk to perhaps cooler climes. The British clamoured for summer heat but when it came it often overwhelmed them. Old biddies at bus stops would moan ‘oh this heat, I can’t be doing with this’ while dressed in roughly the same apparel as they would be in October save the rain-mates.

Around the corner from the Bryant household (a three-bedroomed terraced council house on a leafy road) was a Hindu temple. In the autumn, the summer colours would be resurrected by the hundreds dressed in yellows and greens and reds gathering on the flat fringes of the forest where a giant tent would be erected for the Diwali festival. The grazing cows there would be especially safe among such a community.

If Tam Bryant was ever teased out of his emotionally cauterised state it would be to wonder at this bovine presence which often crossed the main road and down into the road where he lived. No-one ever seemed to question this event. Whose cows were they? And who came to take them back? Sometimes, and almost like mules, they stubbornly held their ground in the face of traffic and Bryant laughed at this inconvenience to motorists. Another of his father’s influences: he disliked cars and their drivers.

Tam had become un-moored from his family in a gradual way over many years. His beatings and humiliations at the hands of his peers was a secret he kept from them and this private shame had rendered him sullen and uncommunicative. He felt deep shame about himself and by extension those that had created him. The bullies had stolen more than simply his dignity, they’d stolen any normal relationship with those closest to him and, indeed, the rest of the world. It had made him a solitary individual with dark thoughts aimed toward himself. Friendships foundered in the wake of his self-destruction. Less hurtful that he destroyed them rather than face the inevitable rejection.

His thoughts since moving south to London were obsessively about how he could return north.

For revenge!

Somewhere on these bright streets, there was the chiming noise of bells. An ice-cream van played ‘Greensleeves’, a very tinny version. The children ran out of their doors as if from a house fire. The sun shone benevolently on young Tam Bryant. He barely noticed it.