1975

Well that is it for the diary entries for 1975. Obviously couldn’t be bothered keeping a diary.
I do recall on or two things from the summer, one of which changed my life.

Being brought up in a one-parent household with hardly any money I quickly realized that if I wanted stuff I had to get a job. So with 6 weeks holiday stretching ahead of me I put on my best orange trousers and white seersucker blouse (I must find that photo of the orange trousers!!) and off I went around the village asking for summer work. I resisted calling at Pontin’s for a Chalet Maid job because the thought of cleaning up after folk just did not appeal to me. I recently had a girlie weekend with one of my school pals and she worked there for a bit as a teen and she told me you would turn up and they would say ‘you, you & you’ and send the rest of them home!
So I tried every hairdressers, the chemist, the newsagents (all they could offer was being a paper girl….. now calm down Daddy Papersurfer!!), stopped short of the butchers and the other chemist in the village as my brother worked there (he hated it), Steve Heighway’s sports shop (managed to get his autograph whilst I was there) but alas there was nothing.

A mate of mine had a job in a café/ice cream parlour in Southport and she managed to get me a job there. Oh fabulous time to earn some money. I have just realize that in the back of the diary there are some figures
9.45 – 7.15 = 9 ½
9.30 – 5.30 = 8
10.00 – 7.30 = 9 ½
= 27 x 3.80
So I must have got paid £3.80/hour .. hey that is not a bad wage back then !!! Did I really get that much?? (re looked at the diary this morning with my reading specs on, it was concerning me £3.80 obviously that can't be right ...........of course it is 38 pence per hour ..... oh DOH (my defence Your Honour is that it is written in pencil which is faded) !!!!!.....

Anyway this café was in a time before Cappuccinos/Lattes certainly there were no ‘skinny’ ones. We served full cream milk frothy coffees from stainless steel machines that were obsessively cleaned with water and polished with soft cloths. Woh betide you if there were any finger marks seen. It was darned hard graft I can tell you!

To fill the coffee machine you would take a gleaming clean stainless steel bucket down to the basement, open the milk churn and fill the bucket with milk and slosh it back up to the shop floor and then somehow, on tip toe, fill the coffee machine.

I can’t recall how many times I did this but one day I tipped the milk churn and … OMG … it felt like someone had fired the biggest elastic band ever between my vertebrae. The pain was excruciating and I was sent home.

That one day did changed the rest of my life. I had a very poorly, prolapsed disc between C5 & C6.
I was then subject to lots of x-rays, a most painful injection in my spine (one of which I had not so long ago) and I had to wear a corset for years. Not one like these so beautifully displayed by Domestic Minx but an NHS one that was off white, had one inch thick elastic straps each side and old women’s suspenders hanging from it (oh and a lumber support pad!), god I was 13 for heavens sake. It had steel supports and a million hook and eyes down the front. Can you imagine being a young teen and having to strap yourself in this everyday? …. it wasn’t like the brace to keep my teeth straight, I had to wear it or I couldn’t even walk without pain.

What does amuse me is when back at school a lad tried to smack my bottom in the locker room and went off yelping nursing his hand as he had hit a metal ass!!
Also a boyfriend I had at 15 (who is still a good friend) reminded me about his dismay at the times that I wore that darned thing when we went out!!!

The most upsetting thing, however, was that I never got the chance to run for Lancashire nor could I take part in all the sporting activities I really loved, I managed a bit later on but with care and nowhere near competitive status. But I suppose at least I did double art (always a silver lining somewhere)

I have had a few flare ups over the years when least expected the 'elastic band to be wielded'. The things where I thought ‘oops I am pushing it’ the old back turned out fine, pregnancy was a doddle but running for a ball playing cricket laid me up for a month, reaching down to fish washing out of the linen box was another month and bending down to feed the cats left me on the floor with no feeling in my left leg so I couldn’t get up that resulted with 3 months off work (had to watch Liverpool’s European victory in Istanbul on all 4s that night with frozen sweet corn on my back). Vacuuming the other day has flared it up again.

So my quest for finery and teen spends did not go quite as I had planned.