77 Summer of Slam
Martin McKay
1977
These days, working full time as a nurse and trying to entertain two young sons in my spare time, I can often find my memory less than reliable.
However, if you were to ask me for a day that never fades or plays hide and seek with my cartoon-cheese memory, then I will easily roll out a bone-rattling, knee-trembling, down-hill rush of a day.
1977 was a big year, ask any punk or pottery collector. Punk had kinda reached the satellite towns around Glasgow for the big kids but if, like me, you were 9 or 10 then there was only one cultural watershed that summer. The big deal had four wheels and the sound, that sound urethane rubber on concrete, ball-bearings rattling round still makes my heart pound and I have to crane my neck to see. Summer 77, the skateboard had crash landed. I was desperate but cash was tight.
Keith was a little younger than me and his auntie had a pair of old flyer senior roller skates in her shed. Together, we hatched the plot. One: get the skates, two: erm? Well, wed figure out two later. Main thing was to get the skates.
Like a pair of Philadelphia lawyers, we charmed the birds out of the trees and the skates from his auntie.
The chancers now had to become skilled tradesmen. We had the necessary raw materials:
1. Rusty skates: two of,
2. Plank of wood: one of,
3. Nails: half inch (or half-inched!)
and the universal tool of all kids, the half brick.
Fool-proof, well-oiled, half-arsed, but we were ready to rock and roll!
We split the skates, cut the plank, battered and buckled the nails and eventually we had produced two (im)perfect, brick dust covered, classic examples of the worlds greatest invention. I remember the day clearly, building the boards, all the while knowing we were in so much trouble for breaking the skates.
All we had to do now was ride them. The first steps, finding your feet or rather which foot went where. The wobble, the trapeze-like balancing act then: pain, skint knees, elbows, nose! I was scarred. I still am, but it was all good. It was summer, it was hot, it didnt rain; it never did, well except for the following year on the opening day of the World Cup, but thats another story. All Keith and I knew was that a new world had opened up to us. We were rolling and falling and laughing.
And then came the hill. Between my home, in the flats, and Keiths house there was the lane. This name did not adequately describe it. All year round it was there quarter of a mile of slabbed concrete: scheme divider, young team boundary and in the winter the longest, fastest ice slide in the world. That summer brought the lane a new identity. It became the skateboard hill. It had never looked so steep. We had lived all our lives at either end of the lane but never had we viewed it with so much fear, respect and sheer delight. Ice was nice but cmon!
There was a choice to be made before we took the great leap downward, however. Did we have the bottle to stand up or was it to be bum-boarding?
To my recollection, I took the hill like Ingmar Stenmark on Ski Sunday - and this is my story. Memory is your image of perfection as they say.
If I was still 9 or 10 I would surely describe the feeling of skating down that hill in simple terms of joy and pure buzz. I am no longer 10, or 20, or even 30. Dude Im forty-one this year but that lane, that summer, if it was there I would have the exact same emotions well up. If I could stand at the top waiting to push off in to the total rush of it. Fast, scary and sore heaven.
Its all gone now: the lane, my flats, the garages that you got chased off of by the polis for watching the downhill and slalom competitions. Keiths house is still there; his mum still lives in it. He is 40 this year and probably doesnt remember that summer in quite the same detail, I expect. So why do I?
Well, thirty years later you cant walk in my front door without tripping over several skateboards, at least one of which will be mine. My two boys have skateboards and my wife has kittens regularly!
