The Summer of '76

[keslake]

Bill said:

Huh? Indeed. I was questioning your maths when I should have double checked my own.



And now you've quoted me I can't quietly delete it and pretend it never happened.

Have to admit i did a quick check at my original post:-)

[GOG440]

I was 6
My memories of it are of the stand pipe at the end of the road for water, and going on holiday to Cornwall just before the heatwave and getting soaked to the skin for 10 days before my parents gave up on camping in the rain and took us home.

[Morningside]

Remember it very well. I broke my arm and wrist and spent the whole of the summer in a plaster cast.

But it was quite cool as I was only 11 and all the other children waited on me

[Honk]

O Levels dispatched
Heat haze
The Royal Scam

[anonymous-user]

I was 13. Used to fill a litre bottle with squash and freeze it overnight to take to school. Played footy every lunchtime at school and that drink was my saviour!

Ah, great times.

[karona]

I was an apprentice at RAF Cosford. The day the heatwave broke I was at the Wrekin Gliding Club hangar, showering in the run-off from the overflowing gutters, then rode my motorbike, stark naked, over the airfield to the CADF building in the middle, with lightning crashing all round.
Oh to be nineteen again!

[Ari]

I remember leaving a grey Lego brick out in the sun and it melted (not completely, but it deformed).

[motco]

I had an MG Midget and the top was down continuously for weeks at a time. We had a holiday in Bournemouth with our 2 year old little girl and the sea was warm like a bath - and flat calm. Great year...

[Watchman]

I was 8 (nearly 9) and spent the entire 6 weeks with my parents in their caravan in Wales. I was a deep shade of brown with almost white hair. Spent a lot of it in the sea with our inflatable dinghy.

I have loads of pics that Dad took. It was one of those idillic times I'd give anything to relive.

[NoNeed]

Oh yes I remember the good old 70's with my dads Hillman Hunter that we couldn't use at weekends because that is when he was fixing it. I also remember those real itchy blankets in winter with frost on the inside of the single glazed wooden framed glass. Th toilet was down the garden so t night you either froze, well actually you wouldn't freeze because you would always tread on something in the garden that made you dance or you used the bucket. Come to think of it I also remember the tin bath that got put in front of the fire where you would quite literally be burning on one side while freezing on the other, oh those were the days.

[can't remember]

Us kids dug a hole in the tarmac on our avenue, using lolly sticks, so we could play a game of marbles. My mother went crazy when I went home with tar on all my clothes.

The hole was there for years. It was like a monument to that summer.

[2 sMoKiN bArReLs]

Hose pipe ban..


..but the car wash that I operated was allowed to open.

Spent all summer washing wheels, enjoying the sun & earning plenty. (Well, 45p per hour + tips )

[plasticpig]

E31Shrew said:

Got posted to RAF Brawdy for the whole summer. Had to lie around on the airfield all day taking airframe numbers for a FOD. Survey ( Foreign object damage! )
18 years old and not a a care in the world

Six year old and spent the summer keeping cool in the sea at Newgale. IIRC 76 was a bad year for Brawdy as they lost 3 or 4 Hunters. I saw one of the crashes but I think that was in the autumn half term rather than the summer.

[selym]

I was four. I remember moving from what was a grotty ground floor flat to a housing estate. It seemed like a massive place.
No outside loo at the new house was a let down though. Saying that, with the weather like it was, an outside loo might not have been ideal.
One legacy of the summer was all the kids being banned from playing on some derelict ground due to a massive rise in the amount of Adders seen there. That ban stretched for years, until they built on it!

[chucklebutty]

Ladybirds.

[woodypup59]

T'was the year I "came of age" .................

[NDA]

I was 15.... Not a great time at home, but I recall the summer.

Just a couple of years later was The Picnic at Blackbushe which I remember very well.

[TheProfessor]

12 years old, but remember 1976 with vivid memories

2 weeks holiday in a caravan on the River Blackwater, spent every day fishing without a car in the world.

Trip down in the family VW Beetle was fun, as every time we stopped it ended up with a serious fuel evaporation issue, and the old man had to get out and suck fuel up to the carb.

Also recall it bought parts of the rail network to a halt with buckled rails.

Used to stand by the side of the road and wait for a lorry or bus to pass by just to get a bit of a breeze!!!

[2 sMoKiN bArReLs]

TheProfessor said:

without a car in the world.

Well, you were a bit young to be driving

[Garvin]

The summer of my 'A' levels! I remember doing all the exams in, what felt like, an oven! Great summer before Uni - borrowed the gf's parents caravan to go bonking . . . . . err . . . . I mean camping for weeks on end! GF's Mother was so naive but her old man wasn't so. Just as I left for Uni at the end of that summer my old man said his farewells and finished off with the following words I'll never forget - "I'm amazed you've got any energy left to make it to University". Brilliant days.