I want to assassinate Arthur Scargill. Twenty five years after the miners strike, where the Iron lady’s intelligent, if brutal force, met in battle with the Hammer and Sickle ideals of the National Union of Miners (NUM), I am still bitter with the left wing union leader Scargill.In the summer of 1984, I turned six and I remember that summer with nothing but fond memories. Walking in the West Yorkshire countryside with my father, gathering blackberries and rosehips, constantly wearing shorts and in the evening listening to the radio whilst my mother knitted and my father made home made wine. It sounds like a summer from the fifties rather than the eighties.
Unlike that home made wine however, I matured and read about what happened during 1984, and what hell my parents went through. In the early eighties Margeret Thatcher, mindful that the trade unions had brought down Ted Heath’s government six years previously, passed an act that stopped the dependents of strikers receiving ‘urgent needs payments’, and realising that the miners were going to be to her what the car industry was to the previous administrations, started stockpiling coal. When she announced that 20,000 miners were going to be made redundant to save 30,000 other jobs, the NUM called a strike. But Mrs T had, some would say viciously, the families of the strikers in her artillery. By preventing them getting emergency hardship payments, she hoped to put pressure on those striking by making their families starve.
Realising this, militant unionists started attacking the homes, pets and families of men who broke the picket line, which resulted in those wanting to work staying at home for fear of their family’s safety. This bolstered the number of official strikers, and meant that my father was forced to stay away from work, which meant we fell foul of Thatcher’s act and we too went hungry.
So my summer with my family was due to my parents going through the most difficult times imaginable. Looking back I realised that we gathered wild plants for food because we had no money, hell, I was eating nettle soup twenty years before celebrity chefs made it trendy! My mother knitted because we needed warm clothes for the winter, because we couldn’t afford heat and I wore shorts because I was six and, like every six year old, I would fall over a lot and skin on your knees was cheaper to fix than long trousers.
Although I loved 1984 and remember it fondly, my experience of that year has been influenced by my subsequent education of the factors that caused my dad to be off work. Now, instead of me looking back on that summer with the childlike bliss of a summer with my family, I see it as an adult filled with anger for what happened to his parents.
Which is why, at a recent lunch, was confused at, but full of admiration for, a general manager from an antipodean vineyard. This man was very likeable and quite a character, so all the guests took a shine to him. We tasted through his wines and some were good, some not so, but one wine stood out from the rest as everyone in the room, unfortunately, hated it.
He explained that this was a labour of love for the company, that they enjoyed making it, enjoyed drinking it and that it brought them all pleasure, as did the summer of ’84 for me. However our visible dislike for this wine showed him the grim reality of the situation, in that they had produced a ghastly product. We tried to put a positive spin on things with comments like “it is better with the food” or “it is opening up well”, but he knew that we were sugar coating the truth, trying to protect him from the unpleasantness that we were experiencing. All of a sudden I, and my fellow diners, were my parents, building a wall of defence around a person, and in this case a company, that we didn’t want knowing the truth.
But then he said something. “this wine is not commercially, or critically, successful”. He knew that this wine was hated, and not just by us, but by everyone. The whole company knew that this wine that they loved was rubbish, and they didn’t really care, and still gained joy from it. And this is something that hit home, hard.
It has always been in the back of my mind that my parents may have felt some sort of guilt for that summer twenty five years ago, and that although they tried to cover things up for my brother and I, the reality was that I knew what was going on, even at six years old. I may not have known the facts that led to the miners strike, but I knew we were poor, and why, I knew that food was scarce and I knew my parents sacrificed a lot for us. But I still consider that summer as the best one of my life.
I got to spend two whole months with my entire family and we struggled together but we took joy in each other’s company, and who nowadays can say that? People barely have two weeks a year for their family, but I had them twenty four seven, for eight weeks. Things may have been totally crap, but I gained joy from spending time with my parents, just like this other family, thousands of miles from where I type this, gain joy from this terrible wine. I wouldn't change that year for anything, and I hope, even though I'll never buy a bottle, that they keep making this wine.
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