Ah, those army trucks
Adam Ant
This comment (see below) on somebody’s Facebook wall really brought back some lousy memories.
I was at St Aloysius College at the time and during the three months that the bus-drivers were on strike against Mintoff’s attempts to reform the bus service (Gatt managed it and he singularly failed to do so), my friends and I would hang about in The Stagecoach bar (now closed) waiting for an army lorry to pass by.
Then we would pile in.
If there were little old ladies in the queue, we would help the soldiers lift them up.
But most of the old ladies were pretty large and couldn’t be hauled in, so presumably they were left stranded with no Facebook wall to gripe on.
When no lorries turned up, we walked home to Sliema from Birkirkara, down Valley Road and up Rue D’Argens, or via Naxxar. Then we got dolled up in our Adam Ant gear, played Duran Duran and Depeche Mode, and pretended that we didn’t live in a sad black hole.
As with young people who then lived behind the Iron Curtain – in fact, exactly like them – the clothes we mocked up and the music we listened to were our salvation and our links to the civilised west. Thanks to Adam Ant we could pretend for the duration of an LP that we didn’t live someplace where we had to hitch a ride on an army lorry to get home from school.
And thinking about all that hanging around we did at The Stagecoach on Birkirkara’s Valley Road, now a main artery where the traffic just doesn’t stop, made me remember something else. I have a visual memory, you see – when I call up a memory it’s like a film or photograph, which is how I can even picture what people were wearing during a particular incident years ago.
In my memory-photographs of waiting for those army lorries, Valley Road, Birkirkara is empty and quiet. That’s right – no cars, bar the occasional one clunking through.
You’d think that with a three-month bus strike on, that main road would be clogged with cars, right? Wrong.
The one family car which households owned – and I knew many households which didn’t even own the one – was driven to work by the breadwinner every morning, and would remain parked outside his office or workshop for the rest of the day, hence the car-free roads.
Ah, it was a different world and thank God it’s over, even if I do have to put up with the internet bleating of idiots as a side-effect of being shot of all that.
Ray Buttigieg
I would like to remind our socialist friends that the last time a socialist government attempted to reform the public transport in the heydays of ‘is salvatur’ we ended up with a bus strike that lasted 3 months. The army trucks where the only means of public transport and the end result where ‘new’ (sic) buses imported from england with no windows opening and no a/c and fabric covered seats. Back in those good old days, that everybody seems to have forgotten, no one dared ask for a minister’s resignation from within the party in government, no student dared confront a minister at university, and no mass public demos where held. Thank you PN, Thank you Lawrence Gonzi and yes Thank you Austin Gatt. You have really brought change
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Some things haven’t changed much since the army trucks. You can’t say that Franco Debono was not adamant.
You seem to be making capital of the fact that 31 years ago (that bus strike took place between December 1980 and January 1981) there were less cars on the road than now, and the one family car was owned by the breadwinner.
[Daphne – Oh yes, of course. I forgot to mention that it was winter, and that when we walked home to Sliema from Birkirkara we generally did so in the wind and rain. Or that when it started raining as we travelled in those army lorries, we were fully exposed to the downpour in the open ones and completely enclosed in the pitch darkness in those ones which are covered in canvas with a flap at the back that goes down against the rain. Thank you for bringing it up, as you also brought up the fact that this was yet another of Dom Mintoff’s December battles – the Scrooge who always sought to ruin Christmas and who tried every December to find something to do it with. The shops were in an especially bad way that year: nothing to sell, people with no money to buy, and no buses to get to them. Lovely. Viva l-Labour. You have a damned nerve, Albert, criticising the way things are now when you voted for that crock of shit and are still defending it today. Tell me, what went so bloody wrong in your childhood that you are unable to think clearly?]
Big deal! So was the situation all over Europe in those days. We are talking of a third of a century ago!
[Daphne – Our problems had NOTHING to do with the oil prices that caused the recession in Europe in 1980-1982, Albert, and you know it. They were entirely self-induced. So much so, that when the markets became bullish later on the 1980s – giving rise to the era of bling and shoulder pads and Porsches – we were still living in exactly the same sordid misery.]
The truth is that while today in, 2011, in deepest Eastern Europe (under rigid Communist governments in 1980) they have bus systems using the latest technology, which run on time and which satisfy the demand, here we have a service which…ok never mind.
[Daphne – Done a lot of travelling in eastern Europe, have you? I have, and I always took taxis, because you have to.]
Weevils in the flour – those were the days.
Just read this, and you will see that there was a worldwide recession in the early 80s.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_1980s_recession
[Daphne – I distinctly remember going through this with you some months ago, Albert. I don’t need to read Wikipedia for references to the 1980s recession. I have just explained to you briefly that the early years of the 1980s were recessionary, caused by the spike in oil prices (caused in turn by the turbulence in Iran). But the rest of the 1980s were legendary boom years, so much so that the attitudes of the time were encapsulated in this seminal film http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094291/ And how were we living in Malta in the mid-1980s? ]
Dead sure that only the breadwinner (and not all) owned a car.
Have you forgotten that one had to have friends and wait his turn for a lousy Skoda ?
Look around you now, just about a car on the road for every adult, near to full penetration in mobile phones, more than one TV (and what TV’s) in every house, laptops, netbooks, e-pads etc, etc, etc.
I think that (with hindsight) the new buses should have been given the old routes and, little by little, change the system gently- but Austin Gatt resigning? Forget it!! Real tough and good man.
You’re overlooking the fact that that would have left locations with little or no service exactly as they were.