Back in the Daze
We couldn't afford emotions. Well not complicated ones anyway. A friend of mine was wistful for a couple of days, but both his parents were lawyers. I remember being unhappy but that was only for a day and I had to scrimp for months. As for complicated crap like feeling "conflicted", forget about it. We just didn't have the money. My parents had to save up for ten years just to be in debt. You lot have got no idea what it was really like: long brutal hours in the coal mines, little kids forced to clean chimneys, orphans dying in the street - reading Dickens was pure hell. No-one talks about it anymore but there was bugger all gravity around until about 1957. True. My mother spent half her time running around glueing us to the floor . The fact is that the space race was mostly about getting out there and bringing back some gravity. We didn't want the Russians to have it...