Colleen Smith

TALKING about the upcoming Apollo 11 moon landing 40th anniversary, I’ve come to realise how prevalent the hoax theory is.

Younger generations only remember the awful footage of the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters, killing all 14 crew members.

How can it be possible, they ask, for the technologically-challenged, hippies of the sixties to safely land people on the moon?

I can see why they’d rather believe that the whole thing was stunted up on a Hollywood film set.

Most of the calculations were worked out on chalkboards. The average wrist watch nowadays has more advanced computing technology. And the only thing stopping these men from burning to death was an exciting new wonder product called Teflon (now saving your eggs from sticking to the frying pan).

Yes, it’s incredible. And maybe you had to be there at the time to believe the madness and bravery and of the space race.

The whole thing was based on the childish, competitive, brutish stupidity that was the Cold War. America and Russia took all the world’s resources and intelligence and pointed them in the same direction — for a few crazy years the only thing that seemed to matter was getting to the moon first.

If it was a stunt, it was a very long drawn out one, which lasted throughout most of my childhood.

Between 1961 and 1972 we spent weeks and weeks gathered around little black and white TV sets, or with our ears up against the radio, trying to follow the latest development.

My older brother, like every other boy of his generation, was obsessed with facts and figures about the latest Apollo mission and would bore me endlessly with every detail. He had a wall chart showing where the spacecraft was each day.

And the reason we were mesmerised was that those astronauts knew (and we all knew) that their chances of survival were based on a wing and a prayer. There was no health and safety mentality in those days.

I’m not knocking health and safety: factoring out the imminent threat of death can only be a good thing.

But back then the world was a dangerous place. My father used to have a 1960s green Austin Mini van and we would use it for holidays and family days out.

That meant mum and dad in the front, with the baby safely held on mum’s knee (no seat belts) and us older four kids all bumping around in the back.

On one memorable occasion when my grandmother was over from Ireland, she came too — along with my aunt and my five cousins, and their Corgi dog. That was four adults, 10 children, a dog, and all our picnic stuff for a day at the beach. In a Mini van (when Minis were miniscule — our van was about the same length as a Smart car). Never mind seatbelts, we were squeezed in so tightly that getting enough oxygen was more of a worry.

I think that kind of devil-may-care mentality about safety puts the Apollo missions into context.

The astronauts’ families watched knowing that the chances of them getting back alive were slim.

At take-off, the world held its collective breath. We knew that at every docking procedure things could go fatally wrong. And when we saw Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, everybody was well aware that these might be the last pictures of him alive.

It was that raw bravery and spirit of adventure that made every little boy want to be an astronaut.

And there’s another factor that moon landing doubters don’t take into account.

Our modern-day reliance on computers is actually a reason why space missions became more dangerous, rather than less.

Those nerdy-looking Houston boys had to rely on old-fashioned brain power and an obsessive, compulsive attention to detail, checking and double-checking every calculation, testing and re-testing every piece of equipment, rehearsing every moment of the mission until everybody knew their part, however small, and everything ran like clockwork. That precision is something that’s been lost.

Computers make complicated calculations so quickly that it is difficult to imagine mathematical theorists and scientists taking years with chalk and blackboards, using pen and paper to do the same job.

Everybody knew that lives would be jeopardised by even the tiniest human error. So it wasn’t allowed to happen. And computer error wasn’t even born.

They say if you remember the sixties you weren’t there. But if you were a child in the sixties, the one thing you remember above all else was the day man landed on the moon. If you don’t believe it happened, perhaps you had to be there.

TODAY is my 26th wedding anniversary.

Or it would have been, if it wasn’t for the small detail of a divorce.

I know. You’re all shouting ‘Get over it’ at me. But it’s OK. I am over it. In fact I was so over it last year I wanted to organise a Not My Silver Wedding Anniversary But Why Not Have a Party Anyway Party. And would have. But it was a Wednesday.

No, the reason I mention my very happy non-anniversary is ‘Poor Guy’.

In case you missed this Tuesday’s paper, let me explain. My colleagues this week played a dirty rotten trick on fellow columnist, poor Guy Henderson, by waiting until he’d left the office and doctoring his weekly page.

The week before was Poor Guy’s silver wedding — a real one (he’s still married, to the same wife, and everything!) — and he’d written in his usual funny, self-deprecatory style about how awful he’d looked in the wedding photos with his big 80s haircut and moustache.

He also claimed the pictures had been lost forever.

But that’s the problem with writing a confessional column. You have to be scrupulously honest.

I think what Guy meant to say was ‘I wish they had been lost forever’. And having now seen the offending pic, I can see why.

He looked like a cross between a bent copper in Life on Mars and one of the Village People.

So of course, certain evil (male) colleagues and family members did everything in their power to unearth one of the offending photos and, in the true spirit of journalism, publish it for the world to see.

As a fellow columnist, who identifies with the perils of baring your life and soul weekly, my sympathies are all with Poor Guy, who is now plotting his rightful revenge.

And as today, June 11, would also have been my anniversary, I thought I’d dig up my wedding photos before anybody else does.

One of my main memories of my wedding day was how much I hated my hair (silly really, when you compare it to Guy’s).

The problem was that a friend, who was a hairdresser, had kindly offered to do my hair for free.

She curled it and lacquered it hard like a helmet and stuck on the silly head-dress thingy. I felt like a Lady Di impersonator (I have just been told that the French call her Lah-di-Dee, which is great and how I shall pronounce it from now on).

But this was an hour before my wedding and too late to change the horrible, not-me hairdo. So I politely thanked her. I was a sweet, well brought up young lady in those days.

What I really wanted to do was burst into tears and rip out her eyes, screaming that she had ruined my special day.

I want to say that as I’m all grown-up and in touch with my emotions and trained in the art of self-assertiveness, things would be different nowadays.

But I know that really I’d still smile and say nothing.

The thing which strikes me most, looking back at those photographs and the memories they bring back, was how terribly sensible I was then.

Nowadays I tend to think of myself as a bit of a dipstick. And most people seem to agree.

Yet I had decided at the age of 23 that it was a good time to buy property. And because of that I decided it was also a good time to get married (not exactly romantic, but we’d already been together for seven years by then, so I kind of thought I might as well get on with it).

I was right about the property (if not the marriage bit). We bought a three-bed semi for £27,500 and sold it three years later, after a few licks of paint and with new central heating, for just under £60,000.

Long before I was 30, I (well we, strictly speaking) owned a detached house at Maidencombe with a third of an acre and a little orchard.

Nowadays your average 23-year-old is more likely to have a £25,000 student loan and overdraft than a mortgage and their own home.

And one of the reasons for the bad hair day on June 11, 1983, was that I was determined to do the big church white wedding thing (off-white — not brilliant, virginal-white, obviously) on a small budget.

Almost everything was home-made or donated (dresses, cake, photos, car, hair). And students did the catering at a big old house which we rented on Dartmoor for the day.

Coincidentally, the same house — Colehayes Park, at Bovey Tracey — was in the news last year when more than 2,000 teenagers turned up there after a teenager advertised her party on Facebook. And even more coincidentally, one of my own children was among the fancy dress partygoers.

And even more coincidentally, the photographer was a young Herald Express trainee called Martin Keene, who left us to go off and work for the Press Association, where he spent a good part of the next few years trailing around after Lady Di (or Lah-di Dee, as she’s now known).

Now looking back at the wedding photos I realised my hair wasn’t so bad after all (although it looks more normal in the going-away pics, after I’d brushed all the lacquer out).

And what also strikes me about this photo is how devilishly handsome my father looked. I’ve worked out he would have been almost exactly the age I am now when he gave me away.

I remember just as he and I got into the wedding car, a little girl passing in the street made my day when she grabbed her mummy’s hand, pointed at me and said, ‘Look — it’s a real princess like Lady Di’ (Lah-di Dee).

I eventually cut up my wedding dress and made two identical little party dresses for my daughters, complete with matching blue sailor collars and sashes.

The girls were about six and four, but when I tried to dress them for a Christmas party, my eldest daughter steadfastly refused to wear hers.

I was going to say she had a tantrum over it, but that would be a lie.

I had a tantrum over it. The dresses had taken me weeks and weeks to make. I had cut up and sacrificed all the John Lewis silk taffeta in my beautiful Lady Di (Lah-di Dee) wedding dress to make them.

For once I decided I was not going to back down. We had such a horrendous, stand-off, screaming match that both of us still remember almost every word 15 years later. I’m sure that everybody who lived in Maidencombe at the time still remembers it.

She tells me now that when we got to the party she went straight to the toilets with all her friends and they all stood and looked at the offending dress and agreed it was disgusting.

It took me a long time to learn, but eventually I realised that it’s not worth fighting with kids about what they wear.

For one thing, they may turn out to be right about our dodgy fashion sense — as anybody looking back at photos of themselves from the 70s and 80s now knows!

I’M ON holiday from work this week and can’t believe my luck — it’s been hotter here than in Barcelona.

My son’s Torquay primary school last year introduced a fortnight’s holiday, rather than the usual week, during this spring bank holiday half term.

In theory it means you can take a holiday at a different time to everybody else and not have to pay the vastly inflated school holiday rates.

But we can’t go away as my older daughter is studying (or trying to, rather half-heartedly in the heat) for A-level exams, which start next week.

So we’ve had a week of day trips, mostly down to the South Hams.

In my holiday mood I decided to buy myself a good book, and rather optimistically picked up a 941-page translation of Cervantes’ Don Quixote.

So far I’ve skipped through the intellectual translator’s notes, got bored with the heavyweight academic introduction, been puzzled by the prologue and unable to fathom the poems and sonnets.

Finally I sat down on the beach at Blackpool Sands, under the sun brolly, about to read Chapter One, Part One of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha.

I read two lines and my son interrupted me. I was glad of the interruption. It was too hot for reading (we couldn’t even walk over the shingle without our shoes on).

So when he asked about my book, I did one of those parent things of using it as an opportunity for an educational discussion while he sat patiently pretending to be interested.

We’ve recently been reading his Shakespeare for kids books at bedtime and I started telling him Shakespeare was writing in England and Cervantes was writing in Spain at the same time (did you know that, spookily, they died on exactly the same day?) and that they are considered to be the founders of all modern fiction, and that some people still think they are the two greatest writers of all time.

“Really,” he sounded surprised. “But what about Dr Seuss?”

I forget he’s only eight some times.

But we got into another discussion about how Dr Seuss really is a literary genius and about how boring children’s books were when I started school in the mid-60s.

I blame my early dyslexia on Janet and John.

I can clearly remember that during my first few weeks at school I loved the Janet and John books.

What I loved about them was the artwork.

These two children lived in a wealthy parallel world, where the sun always shone and the parents were both happy and everyone dressed in a different primary colour.

It somehow made you feel nostalgic for the present, while you were still living through it.

But my love affair with Janet and John didn’t last.

The thing nobody thought to explain to me about books was that you had to look at the words.

I looked at the picture of Janet and they said ‘Janet’ and I said ‘Janet’.

Basically I thought you were supposed to look at the picture and memorise a phrase. And since they were all profoundly boring phrases, like ‘Janet has a ball’ or ‘John has a ball’ it was easy.

This went on for a few months. My memory was great. I was doing really well at reading until somebody covered up the pictures.

It took me about two years to catch up. And that meant going back to the beginning and having to learn letters and re-reading those horribly boring stories about stuck-up, middle class, goody-goody kids, in their big sunny garden, with their glossy-coated Labrador who never did anything.

Not even fighting each other or scrumping for apples or getting flashed at in the park.

I could see that the Janet and John books made for a mildly entertaining memory game, but as far as storytelling went, they were a disaster.

I was only five and they bored me to tears. Where was the plot? What was the motivation?

When I first saw a Dr Seuss book, with its lovely cartoon pictures and funny, easy-to-read rhyming story, I too thought the man was a literary genius.

If I’d started out with Dr Seuss I wouldn’t have all this middle-aged bottled-up anger to deal with. Possibly.

I’m hoping that I will be a late starter with computer technology in much the same way as I was with books as a child.

My problem is that I need to see the whole, big picture in order to understand the simplest little thing.

So, as my new love is a bit of a technical whizz, I have decided to try to reclaim the missing chunks in my IT knowledge by asking him a continuous stream of ridiculous questions every time I have to use any piece of modern technology.

So far he’s been very patient, but I fear his patience may be wearing a little thin.

This week he’s been in seventh heaven because he’s got himself a new iPhone and after three or four days I cuddled up in bed and said: “I’m jealous of your new iPhone.”

And he replied: “Yes, it’s amazing isn’t it.”

“No,” I said. “You don’t understand. I’m jealous of it. I’m starting to think you love it more than me.”

Alarmingly, he didn’t dismiss the idea.

He takes it to bed! He’s constantly playing with it. On the beach, in the pub, first thing in the morning, last thing at night.

He knows what’s happening everywhere in the world, all the time.

The iPhone can tell me the weather in Barcelona, if there are any late trains arriving at platform two at Taunton station, who’s winning the Grand Prix and if his guitar is out of tune.

Every conversation starts with the words: “Do you want to see my newest application on my iPhone?”

Isn’t it clever? Isn’t it beautiful? Isn’t it useful?

Now he knows I’m jealous, he’s started kissing it goodnight.