Book review: The Times, September, 2006
STARS ARE STARS by Kevin Sampson - Jonathan Cape, £11.99;
246pp
and
WHEN ARTHUR MET MAGGIE by Patrick Hannan - Seren, £9.99; 196pp
Where have all the yoppers gone? - the post-punk kids of the early-1980s with wedge cuts and tight jeans who mooched around shopping precincts and job centres wondering when the bomb would drop, whether they'd ever find work.
Yoppers were school leavers on Youth Opportunity Programmes, a government initiative that saw them dispatched to factories and offices for six months and paid the princely sum of £23.50 per week. With three million unemployed, it was as good as it got. Switch on the telly any night and grimy faces were atop donkey jackets, newly redundant and spitting coal dust at Margaret Thatcher, union bosses, police, scabs, the state of the nation, the lot of it.
Economic desolation was in the foreground but it also paid to watch the skies. After Russia's invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas Eve, 1979, the Cold War was white-hot, the world seconds from midnight. People were fretful. Protect and survive. Stock up on tins of food. Stay indoors. Hide under the table. The war hadn't started but it already felt like a kind of radiation sickness. And it was relentless, suffusing you with despondency, your life placed in a polythene bag.
Distance has not lent enchantment to the period. It remains a bruise of history. Unlike the 1960s and 1970s the decade has seldom been visited by writers or abridged to a pithy slogan. Perhaps it is too wieldy, too complex, or maybe the relentless gloom imparts a natural stymie on creativity. Remember too, there was also the Falklands War and widespread rioting, IRA bombings and National Front marches.
With commendable resolve, two authors have taken on the decade in dissimilar ways. Kevin Sampson, much like in his other work, is out on the streets in Stars are Stars, telling us what shoes and coats we wore (Pods and Gloverall duffels, apparently) while Patrick Hannan in When Arthur Met Maggie adopts a forensic socio-political approach, revealing the gloved hands at work creating the mess of the times.
Sampson's story is set in Toxteth, Liverpool, the epicentre of the riots of July 1981. On a balmy Friday night the heavy-handed arrest of Leroy Alphonse Cooper formed the catalyst for unrest that would last nine days. Police arrested more than 500 people and 468 officers were injured in clashes. It followed tension a few months earlier throughout the UK but principally in Brixton, Bristol and Manchester.
''Get them in the army,'' Robin Day's panel was told on Question Time. So she did. In April 1982, Margaret Thatcher declared war on Argentina after its rag-tag army had invaded the Falkland Islands. The short but brutal war was electoral gold. A year later Thatcher was elected for a second term on a landslide. She now had a mandate to set about 'the enemy within' - the unions, the left, the mavericks - anyone who sought to dilute her vision of absolute capitalism, or, as she preferred, monetarism.
Shrewdly, she recognised the iconic status of the mining industry, the so-called aristocracy of the working-class. Break them and the resistance became a body without a heart, finished. Plans were announced to close 20 pits with the loss of 20,000 jobs. Inevitably the National Union of Mineworkers, led by Arthur Scargill, went on strike. Thatcher readily funded the battle, affording huge numbers of police to quash protest. It was a bloody battle. Ten deaths were attributed to the strike which ended a year later with the mines shut, the jobs gone, the kingdom and the culture altered, evermore.
Margaret Thatcher stands totemic above the decade, looking down, condescending. In Stars are Stars one of its main characters, Nicole, says of her: ''My God! She's…evil! Look at that hair! That voice. It's distilled arsenic!' Later she is again prescient, expounding: ''There's a whole mass of people out there who hate. They hate! They're looking for revenge. They hate all the wogs and Pakis. They hate all the punks and losers on the dole, hanging around the off-licence. They hate all the strikes and the shortages and the unions…''
Indeed, it was a time of hatred and suspicion, shorn of hope. And there was little to sweeten the grind: no iPods, PlayStations, pcs, mobile phones, multi-channel television. You could, at best, guzzle a bottle of beer from the Outdoor and watch ET or On Golden Pond on a video recorder that cost as much as a family holiday, so long as you remembered to stick a plaster over the 'on' button to make sure no one broke in and nicked it overnight. Hard times. Perhaps now the Yoppers have all grown-up and secured publishing deals we might hear more about it and rejoice that we're no longer there.