1984

A short story, written for this year’s Crossing The Tees competition. About growing up in the shadow of the Cold War, about the terrors of impending adulthood, about a hallucinogenic religious experience on a suburban school cricket pitch. The songs featured were all in the UK Top 40 in the first two weeks of July 1984.

Once, I saw the face of God in a summer sky.

It think it was a Friday.

Actually, I can do better than that. Friday 13^th July, 1984 – a week before we broke up for the summer holidays, leaving the safe haven of Lingfield Primary School forever. Our teachers were already drifting into languid, end-of-term torpor: trays had been emptied, staples removed from walls. There was even a suggestion that Mrs Piper had been witnessed cracking a smile, but – forty years on – that particular rumour remains resolutely unconfirmed.

My friends were all really excited.

But not me.

I was a jangle of nerves.

You know when people say they need “a break from the old routine”? I’ve never felt like that. The old routine is comforting, reassuring, a soft blanket of familiarity. Back at Lingfield Primary School, the old routine was painting pictures and writing stories and doing sums where you “carry the one”. It was football on the field in the drizzle with Mr Banks, it was ‘Sing Hosanna’ on Mrs Pratt’s piano with Simon Tunstall singing all the rude words.

It wasn’t stripping the walls and Mrs Piper acting nice.

It wasn’t the countdown to a long, ominous summer holiday with the looming spectre of secondary school on the horizon.

“You can’t stay at Lingfield forever,” said my mam. “Sooner or later you’ve got to grow up.”

And that, essentially, was the conversation over. Kids didn’t talk to their parents in those days, at least not about their deepest concerns, about their darkest, most primal and paralysing fears. Back in 1984, I wasn’t even sure that I would grow up: the headlines every night were filled with rising tensions, with gathering portents of impending nuclear conflict. As the jaunty closing credits of Blue Peter surrendered to the austere fanfare of the BBC evening news, I pushed congealed liver and onions around my tepid dinner plate and winced at angry rumblings from the White House and the Kremlin.

I wanted to grow old, but I didn’t want to grow up.

Not yet.

On the morning of Friday 13^th July, we were all ushered into the dinner hall and shown our Sex Education film. We’d got the letters the previous Friday: parental consent had been required for all Fourth Year Juniors. My dad had laughed it off, my mam had dutifully signed the form, and the entire year (apart from Colin Watson, whose family was a bit weird) had sat cross-legged on the bum-freezing tiles of the parquet floor as the school telly in its gigantic wooden cabinet was wheeled in from our smoke-stained staffroom.

The programme itself was on a Betamax tape, clearly recorded from BBC2. It clunked and fizzled and clattered into life, and we saw wobbly diagrams of men’s and women’s bodies… and then, horrifyingly, the actual real thing. A naked family playing volleyball on the beach. Christopher Herbert nudged me and chortled, but my face was burning and I stared hard at my trainers.

I wanted to paint pictures.

I wanted to write stories and “carry the one”.

There were giggles and whispers as we filed out afterwards, but I really didn’t want to discuss the gory details. Dinner hour felt listless, subdued, and I nibbled silently on a pallid spam fritter.

And then I saw the face of God in a summer sky.

Honestly, bear with me.

It happened during the Fourth Year Boys’ cricket match. Darren Tuck’s team versus Jason Potter’s XI: a good-natured grudge encounter, a full afternoon on our sun-baked school field and a last hurrah for the sport-loving lads. It was a fixture that had been talked about for weeks. I think Gavin Pond had suggested it to Mr Banks, and the idea had quickly snowballed. Teams had been picked, bats had been varnished. Mr Morris our caretaker had even marked out a makeshift wicket with whitewash, grumbling about his sciatica while he limped awkwardly around the pitch in a rumpled brown overcoat.

And ultimately, when the moment came, everything seemed reassuringly normal. Great white whales of clouds lolloped slowly around an azure blue sky. The springy turf of our vast school field was a lush, luminous shade of green, and fat bumble bees buzzed idly around luscious clusters of milk-white clover. Mr Banks and Mr Davies were smiling and joking, while the two team captains assumed a veneer of adult authority, barking deep-voiced instructions laced with worryingly grown-up jargon.

“Maiden over!”

“Leg before!”

“Off cutter to silly mid-on!”

But then, relegated to “fielding” on the distant boundary line, I felt my mind begin to fracture and drift.

To Sex Education. To secondary school.

To nuclear war. To mushroom clouds.

To impending adulthood.

To a future I didn’t want.

They all smashed together in one appalling, morbid jumble. In those days, my thoughts were often a car crash of ideas and anxieties, a private kaleidoscope of apocalyptic nightmares and dark, imagined dystopias. These days, I suspect, help and counselling would be available. In 1984, you had to sort these things out by yourself. You took deep breaths. You counted down from ten. You thought about Nice Things: Whizzer and Chips and Star Wars and Kim Wilde.

Except on this occasion, none of these things worked.

The cricket match was rapidly receding into the void. I heard the clump of the ball, the cry of “howzat” and a wave of protest to an unmoved Mr Banks, but they all seemed to be coming from a different field entirely.

From a different school.

From a different town.

From a different plane of existence altogether.

The match now looked like a TV picture itself, a tiny window flickering with static. My heart was a pounding drumbeat in my head, and my legs began to buckle as I swayed and stumbled in a shimmering haze of afternoon heat.

And that – that – was when I saw the face of God in a summer sky.

It was a fleeting moment, not even a second. A nano-second. A fraction of that. But his face filled the firmament, and the firmament filled my head. He had a furrowed brow – intrigued, not annoyed – and dark eyes brimming over with love. He was, I instantly concluded, rather enjoying the match. His smile beamed from the bushes by the bus stop right across the sky to the roof of Becky Grainger’s house.

Why me? I wondered.

I wasn’t religious. My family wasn’t religious. Weddings, christenings, funerals – that was us. Maybe he was just passing through, and he realised I was struggling with my thoughts. Maybe he’d just had enough of my aimless, improvised night-time prayers for there “never, ever, ever” to be an actual nuclear war.

Whatever the reason, I was glad he was there. His presence enveloped me and my mind was finally stilled. Then, as Jason Potter was caught at the boundary and a polite ripple of applause echoed around the field, reality suddenly snapped back into place and I knew that everything was going to be alright.

Innings over.

It was our turn to bat.

In the four decades that have since passed in a heartbeat, I’ve looked in vain to find the face of God again. In summer skies and winter clouds, in lapping tides and rustling trees. I thought I might see him in the stippled white ceiling of the tiny hospital room where my mam died, but – even as I waited tearfully for that final, tired sigh of exhalation – he still wasn’t there.

Maybe one day he’ll appear again.

One day when I’m least expecting it.

But, for one fleeting moment on Friday 13^th July 1984, I absolutely did see the face of God in a summer sky. And when I hopped onto the school bus that night, I was filled with renewed hope. That maybe my childhood wouldn’t end in 1984 after all. That maybe the world wouldn’t end. That maybe there were more sunny days in other fields still to come: richer, stranger days, and different pairs of dark eyes, all still brimming over with love.

Sooner or later, I had to grow up.

My mam was standing in the kitchen when I got home.

“Anything exciting happen today?” she asked.

“Yeah”, I replied. “You really wouldn’t believe it”.

“Try me,” she said. She was peeling potatoes.

I took a deep breath. I couldn’t keep this in.

“Tucker knocked Potter straight over the fence, and Christopher Herbert was out for a duck…”