As we get older we tend to remember and categorise everything by decades. I wonder if that’s meant to camouflage something or merely a way of enveloping experiences and events so that they fit, prim and proper, into the letterbox of time.
There is also always the temptation of making comparisons between decades, discussing continuity in all its aspects, from politics and sports to family and fun, and finally deciding on an order of merit that will not necessarily follow the ABC sequence. Germaine Greer, the great Sixties feminist writer, for example, had this famous quip on the earlier decade: “The Fifties were 10 years of foreplay.”
One’s Sixties are, of course, no one else’s Sixties, but people who grew up during that eventful decade will tell you it was as exciting as the modern history books depict them to have been. But for many of us they were still a part of mama and papa’s territorial limits, and it was only in the following decade, the no less exciting Seventies, that we honestly and truly shed our last toehold on Planet Family when we started to express our views and introduced our methods in a concrete manner, that is through new, more practical lifestyles and ambitions, new horizons and opportunities.
On the international front, for those of us who were youngsters at the time, the Seventies started with the sad demise of The Beatles, with most of us either blaming Yoko Ono for the split-up or Paul McCartney for the inevitable, but on the local front we finally had the pleasure of voting (the vast majority of us for the first time) back into power the Malta Labour Party after its many years of turmoil against the congregated forces of the meddling British colonial office, the local Catholic Church with its hideous mortal sin tactics and a decadent Nationalist Party that had sucked the nation’s coffers dry. Back to the future? But that’s another story.
There was hardly any time to think anymore after that sudden shift of the metaphorical continental plates. The world had been head-butted into accepting change in the late Sixties, and now in the Seventies it was affecting it with an ease and a speed that left many of the unprepared gasping for a gulp of air.
It was when America and the Americans finally realised that war was never and could never be the solution. I was running the Night Desk at the old Malta News when the last vestiges of the US military and political machine in Vietnam gave up, literally rushing up the stairs of the once fortress embassy to catch the last helicopter flights out of Saigon. My gleeful 72-point front page headline in the following morning’s edition remains deeply etched in my memory: US FLEE VIETNAM. The war was over and the world was indeed giving peace a chance, however temporary. Thank you, John.
It was also at this same time in the early Seventies that young couples in Malta were given the opportunity to buy their own State-built modern homes in the many new housing estates being built all over the island. In my eyes, the small new flat in Ta’ Paris, Birkirkara, had all the proportions of a villa. At my mum’s place in Kalkara I used to sleep in a below-the-stairs space that supposedly stood for a single bedroom. Now my wife-to-be and I had a two-bedroomed apartment with two bathrooms, combined space and other precious measurements and perimeters to meet the demands of all the Seventies’ gadgetry, from Japanese hi-fi equipment to groovy Italian ceiling lamps hanging from coiled, elastic cables, for a mere Lm72 annual rent!
It was when the economy was slowly but surely picking itself up. Mass tourism came in with a bang, though one has to admit it was substantially assisted by the big hotel investments carried out in the earlier decade. Malta’s social and political calendar seemed to have come off the wall to dance for us and the rest of the world. In 1974 we became a Republic. I rejoiced, as it had been, honestly, a personal dream, ever since as an elementary schoolboy I had run away from the flag-waving antics on the Valletta pavements on the occasion of the Queen’s visit, only to find neither of my parents had been too amused by my bravado. Ironically, I still have the medal they gave us that day.
It was when the State, not only in Malta but all over the civilised and democratic world, was not afraid to take on responsibilities and run its own show if the private sector hesitated for its own financial and political reasons. Official independence now gave way to real independence as banking, broadcasting and other important sectors were finally and happily taken over from foreign, albeit the old familiar ruler of 200 years, ownership. The stamp of our national identity was further emphasised in the hazardous foreign policy field. The UK and Nato’s Lord Carrington had to accede to the demand for more funds as rent for the military bases on the island and, even better, the reality that the future of those same bases was one: closure.
This of course took place in 1979 when the last British soldier marched out of the island to the sound of his own army’s drums. But he did so peacefully. Never had an event of such historical magnitude anywhere in the world been achieved at no cost, that is, with not a single drop of human blood being shed and, really, against no background of political instability. Yes, there were the doubters both inside and out. The Cubans, the Libyans, the Soviets and the Chinese, all possibly in turn, were supposed to be waiting to land on our shores overnight. Cartoonists of the time in Fleet Street intimated the hammer and the sickle were to take the place of the eight-pointed Maltese cross. And even worse, the economy was depicted to be on the point of collapse as thousands of former British Services employees found themselves on the list of the unemployed.
That nothing of the sort happened is part of Malta’s remarkable post-war history. The last year of the decade in fact was to prove many of the prophets of doom wrong. Until the Eighties. But that’s another story.
Of course there were bound to be hiccups. As proud young parents in those same late Seventies, I remember us trying to convince our offspring that locally produced “Desserta” chocolate was exceedingly good when it really tasted more like cheap soap. We only managed to hoodwink them until I was able to bring in some hidden Mars bars for them to eat! But there is no forgetting the embarrassment of the chocolate scrambles at London’s Heathrow Airport with every Malta flight hour on the schedule.
I got my first car, a Datsun the colour of mustard, also in the Seventies. My brother-in-law drove it out of the showroom for me exactly a week before the great oil crisis hit the western world. That’s how many days I enjoyed the benefit of cheap petrol.
It was when terrorists were still freedom fighters who hijacked planes and were happy to get a few days of tabloid coverage for propaganda. I remember having Leila Khaled as my PLO guide in Beirut in the early Eighties, only to realise it (when told at the airport) before my departure. She had been the unexpected darling of the UK papers for several weeks during the late Seventies, but was, by my Lebanon trip, playing hostess to foreign journalists as reward for her revolutionary work. On average, none of this frequent suicidal stuff that we sadly get today when the world is supposed to have grown wiser. But then, there were no Bush and Bush stooges stoking the fires of illegal war with their evangelical humbug in aid of their industrial and ideological purses.
For US Presidents there were Nixon and his Watergate Affair downfall and Gerald Ford who often fell in different ways – going up and down Air Force One. Then Jimmy Carter straight off the peanut plantations before the satin-voiced, second-rate actor Ronald Reagan introduced government by omission. His team chosen, he followed with the sugarcoating.
After Dylan and the Beatles, the Seventies gave us the disco scene and Punk Rock. We tried, somewhat successfully, to switch with the mood as hairstyles go. Most of us still had enough at the time to let it grow wild. Parents sometimes needed to listen to the voice underneath the hair to make sure it was who they thought it was. But life went on at a brisk pace, so brisk in fact, that it was bound to provoke a backlash in the years ahead. It did so very early in the Eighties when corporate greed, self-indulgence, I’m-alright-....-you-Jack attitudes and the harsh reality of yuppy power came on the scene with a vengeance. Oh no, another story?
But That Seventies Show was great indeed. Watching its popular parody on Cable TV today certainly gives one a nostalgic kick. In retrospect, though, it all seems to have since spun the world a few times and we are now re-entering an old familiar groove – that of repair time. Before it is all too late, boyo.