When I began this book I knew its story was going to get to the last days of the 1980s eventually and here they are, turning up towards the end of this chapter and getting written about, as it’s turned out, in the same week of the year as the days themselves happened. This quiet week between Christmas and New Year. A week of thinking about the year to come and thinking back through the hardest thing I ever did.
But let’s begin with now.
December 25th 2023
It's early Christmas morning, soon after 8am, and the world feels quiet. Particularly so at home here where Sarah and I haven't been celebrating Christmas these last thirty years in any way beyond being quiet and liking the way the world around us goes mostly quiet too, if just for today. Later we might hear children in the street, with new bikes maybe. Then later still whole dressed up families might walk past our front windows together. But for now it's all Christmas quiet in here and I'm thinking about my heart. Which as I've told you is apparently not working properly.
Two weeks from now I have an appointment where some more measuring will be done. Which should provide the final information my cardiologist, Dr Verma, and I will need for a conversation he's arranged for March, where we'll talk about what's up and what might be possible. And to inform myself for that, so I'm not just sat there mystified and nodding, I've been reading. Not much, because too much detail usually confuses me. But I've found a book that's perfect for what I need. Short, well written, by a doctor and there, by chance and surprise, in Liverpool Cathedral a couple of days ago.
I'd not gone in looking for a heart book, obviously. But there it was, in amongst a more expectedly spiritual "heart-as-metaphor" selection. And not an easy read, not at all. As every time he writes "the heart" or "the aorta" I'm reading "my heart" and "my life," of course I am. But I am becoming informed. And sat here with it next to me on this quiet Christmas morning, the book has given me sufficient comfort and reassurance to start writing again after a week of worried distraction.
October 1985: A Child is Born
And so to the main story, it's now mid-afternoon on Sunday October 20th 1985. The mid-point and fulcrum of my 1980s where one of the peak moments of my life is happening. I'm in a lift at the Oxford Street Maternity Hospital, going back up to the ward with Diana and our just born baby, Clare. Writing that down even decades later my heart-as-metaphor still feels every bit of the gladness and fulfillment of such a shining moment. In a lift, with everyone I wanted to be in a lift with, right there.
The idea of Clare had come from a change of mind Diana and I had talked through, about not wanting a baby, in a Rent An Irish Cottage Ltd on the far west coast of, yes, Clare. I'd spent the decade 'til then very depressed about, well, take your pick. But especially nuclear destruction and humanity's not having enough of a future to bring children into it.1 Until we went to Ireland with Andy and Lynne, a couple of friends from the day-job, and I somehow felt a confidence there, from Ireland itself, that humanity would pull through. A confidence I'd never managed to feel back home in Thatcher-battered Britain. So we'd talked, walked out on the beach there, at Carrigaholt in Clare, and decided.
Of course we called her Clare when she arrived. And she was beautiful. I suppose they all are, but she's the only child I'd ever be part of creating. The only baby I'd ever be in a lift with, in a moment that seemed to complete the first half of my life. I'm thirty one years old and a lot of things will change from now on in this book, this story. But never the delight and the rightness of that decision on a beach in Clare, to see if we could create our baby.
Earlier in the 1980s
Until that perfect moment my memories of the earlier 1980s are difficult. Hard to think back on and of a mostly uneasy and often depressed time.
Stuck in the computer job I talked about in the last chapter I'd diverted my energies and spirit into politics more than at any time before and most of the times since. So I remember the big unemployment marches. In Liverpool, but also coach loads of us going to the ones in Glasgow, Birmingham, Cardiff and London. There also seemed to be endless repeat marches in Liverpool. Gatherings up on Shaw Street in Everton on cold winter mornings, that would slowly straggle, banner by banner, " Maggie Out" after"Maggie Out" down through the city centre to the Pier Head or the Town Hall. Many thousands of us gathered and screaming there the day Margaret Thatcher herself turned up to threaten the City Councillors direct to their faces.
It was the time of Militant, who I could never take to as individual zealots, but would mostly support politically as a union rep on both the local Trades Council and the Liverpool Labour Party Executive where they'd become dominant. Mostly voting with them despite their immediate and bullying threats every time I'd go against their no sectional diversions policies on race and women's rights. Later I'd come to appreciate how they'd pushed back on Liverpool's behalf harder than anyone else against a Tory cabinet who were discussing closing the city down.
But do you know what? Others have written better about them and the broader history of Liverpool at the time. Better, at least, than I have the will or the energy to be bothered with today.2 So let's leave Militant and the Tories there. Time passed and I'd done what I could.
Better political memories are of being part of setting up the union group at the day job, then being one of its main negotiating reps for several years. The best job, on reflection and without a doubt, that I'd ever do in my eventual twenty years at Liverpool Housing Trust.
But it was a difficult and often depressed time. Hard to write about and only relieved for most of that time by music, my own and from reading the NME every Thursday. Except that in the middle of all that, by the middle of the 1980s, Diana and I had somehow created sufficient peace, calm and confidence between us to make that decision about our baby. Decided on not to save our damaged relationship, which would too soon in Clare's life enter its late days anyway, but because for a while there we really thought we'd be forever. We'd even moved to a new and bigger house, further along Aigburth Road. Detached and with a big garden for Clare to play in. But where our final dramas would take place within two years of us moving in.
In The Roscoe
Breaking from the hard-facts and hard to write story of the 1980s I’m remembering that, as well as Clare getting born and being such a joy of a child, other good things did happen in the too often unhappy decade. Mostly with friends and almost always those from the day job. Diana and I, as always, still had separate social lives. So I remember holidays, days out, nights in the pub, often after union meetings, and also the Bruce Springsteen concert in Sheffield that began this book, always with my own friends. Often they’d be Janet Barnes, Andy Snowden, Diane Henderson or dear, gone now Phil Macaulay. All of whose love and friendships definitely saw me through. As did the job, to be fair on it. Little though I want to write about Liverpool Housing Trust these days there were many worse and few better places where I could have been working back then. Given I wouldn’t know what I really wanted to do for a while yet.
Thinking about those friends though, and like magic, has brought them all here round this late 2023 table where I'm writing. As if we’re all back in the back room of the Roscoe where we'd so often go. Laughing, plotting and being happy together. Because even the 1980s weren't all bad. And it's good for me to sit here this evening and remember that. Before I pick up the story of how the decade ended, tomorrow morning.
1989: The Slow Untangling
It's just before seven on the following just after Christmas morning. I'm back in my writing place at the corner of the kitchen table and the world is still quiet outside. No cars setting off for work, no delivery vans up and down the road and not yet any train sounds can be heard from the West Coast line across the big wide field of The Mystery. All is quiet.
And I'm not going to spend too long over what this morning's writing is about, the end bit of the 1980s. That was the the problem with how this was done back then, over the last slow six months of 1989. The time it took Diana and I to end our time together. Done carefully and supposedly tenderly because of our little child, it was actually done agonisingly and very badly by both of us adults, as Clare well recognised and has told me recently. How she still remembers the poisonous atmosphere she had to live in for all those months. With parents completely at odds but both pretending to her that everything would be all right, really. When everything so obviously wasn't going to be all right, ever. And her, small and bewildered in between us. Four years old and suffering. I’ll be sorry about that forever Clare.
So here's the slow untangling, done as a short version. To get it said.
The plain fact being that Diana and I wanted different kinds of lives and probably had for a long time by then. She wanted a settled life of family events, a steady job and guaranteed regular holidays. And I absolutely didn't. My refusal to take part in family events ended up getting listed in the divorce papers and seemed petty at the time, even to my solicitor. But it was perceptive evidence from Diana and her own solicitor of the depth of our difference, and even showed up in the slowness of our untangling when I agreed to Diana's request, late in that autumn of 1989 "to stay until after Christmas," Maybe so’s my going wouldn't spoil the festive family events. But it did anyway and I remember a photograph of how Clare looked at that year's Nursery Nativity Play. Like the loneliest and most forlorn Angel Gabriel you ever saw.
Here's the end.
On one of the quiet days after Christmas, while Clare and Diana were out on a family visit, I went on a last long "should I or shouldn't I" walk round and round Sefton Park. Thinking one more time through the leaving or not. Until I was sure.
Later that evening I remember as very civilised, considering. Diana and I sat together with a last bottle of wine and watched our final film together, "The Name of the Rose" I remember. And when it finished, before we went up to our separate beds, she cut up the only joint credit cards we'd ever had. And our afterwards had begun.
The following morning, when they'd gone off on another post-Christmas visit, I packed up some clothes, some records and my guitar. And drove away.
My 1980s were over.
December 27th 2023
Before I press “Publish” and send this out I’ve been thinking. Mainly about why we took so long, how hard it was for Clare and shouldn’t we have both been adult enough to end it all back in the summer of 1989? So that by these dark days at the end of the year we could have all moved on to whatever was next? And thinking through that early this morning I’ve remembered a song and a moment. To end this with and because the song is what these end of the 1980s months sounded and felt like to me.
The moment happens on a roundabout where you come down from the M56 to go onto the Runcorn Expressway, the road back to Liverpool. It’s a late June evening and I’m on my way back from seeing my therapist over near Altrincham. I’d got in touch with her to talk about these frequent periods of depression I’d been having and to see if she could suggest some techniques I might use to help me cope with them. “Well first I think we need to talk about the kinds of things that are making you depressed” she’d said. Which began all this untangling. And the realisation that had me, an hour or so later, driving round and round that roundabout on the Runcorn Expressway crying, because I knew then what was coming. While the cassette in the background played this song where The Blue Nile sang:
“It’s over now,
I know it’s over,
But I can’t let go.”
It took so long and it was done so badly because we cared so much and we’d never done so awful a thing before.
Read all the chapters before this one here*
A Beginning: “Do You Like Soul Music?”
1, 1954: Being Born, Walton
2, 1955/58: To Maghull, via Bootle
3, 1958/69: The 1960s, When We Were Boys
4, Still 1969: The Other Songs On The Wireless
5, An interlude: Maybe We Could Organise Hope?
6, In the early 1970s: Up The Hill
7, The Middle 1970s: Decisions
8, An interruption: About My Heart
9, A Reconsideration 1976: About Liverpool Housing Trust
10, Days In Public 1979: Dreaming Dreams In Stolen Moments
* A paid subscription will get you to all of them, and the others still to be written.
“The Fate of the Earth” by Jonathan Schell informed and haunted me
“Militant Liverpool: A City on the Edge” by Diane Frost and Peter North. See also my own “Liverpool in the 1980s” article and review, with more of Dave Sinclair’s photographs from his book, reproduced with his publisher’s permission.
A beautifully written, moving telling of something so personal and intimate. Sending you and Clare my best wishes. Opening up hard truths can also in time be therapeutic. Love Ann Clare x