Laethanta Saoire: Losing My Religion - The Summer of 1980, by Graham Allen

In the last of our summer-themed reads, Graham Allen recalls a period of youthful rebellion when he found an escape in the thriving youth culture of the post-punk era 

Graham Allen in his Salvation Army days; right, a more recent picture of the Cork-based author.

England, back 40 years ago, had a model of generational rebellion and severance. If you wanted more than your domestic sphere provided, you had to find your way out. Go into exile. Put on your walking shoes and create new footprints. Most seriously for me, at the age of fifteen, was the emergence of a studied detachment, a requisite indifference to the values of my parents. A kind of domestic terrorism, really, a kicking over of every family statue.

My only excuse for such behaviour is that my family was a Salvation Army family. We were uniformed members of the Barking Citadel, our involvement the legacy of my mother’s parents, especially her father. On one uniquely confessional evening, a night I associate with the blackouts of 1974, mum let out that her father put aside his previously dissolute ways when he met Jesus, and my Grand-mother, on the same, glorious, never-to-be-repeated day.