How strange and unnerving to find that television is now being made about times I can actually remember. This week, Channel 4 will screen the final part of its excellent series Miners’ Strike 1984: The Battle For Britain, and, though I’ve seen it once already (critic’s perks), I may have to watch it all over again, the better to match up the fuzzy home movies in my head with the footage its director, Tom Barrow, has dragged from the archives.
It was a painful year, grey and sad. But my memories of 1984 are also, at a distance, slightly comical. On our side of Sheffield, famous for its trees and big Victorian houses, solidarity with the men was outwardly sincere – until, that is, a wild rumour went round that the president of the National Union of Mineworkers, Arthur Scargill, was house-hunting in the area, at which point some people had a bad attack of the vapours. Our teachers, no strangers to strikes themselves, were totally on board, of course. Even before the miners walked out, their idea of a really good school trip was to a pit shaft – and, frankly, we agreed: the cage that took us down, our helmets and lamps at a (we fancied) fashionably jaunty angle, combined with the near-darkness below to facilitate the best flirting opportunities we’d ever had while under their supervision.
