The Mandy Yearbook for Girls lit the way in the 1970s - Susan Morrison

The miners hadn’t seen their pay rise for years. They went on strike. Edward Heath, the prime minister, brought in the three day week. Sitting in the dark was no longer just something the blokes underground did.

The miners had a lot of sympathy in that 70s strike. Who’d be a miner? We knew how dangerous it was.

We geared up for going dark. Mum bought in loads of tinned stuff and dad confidently told us he knew how to operate a highly dodgy camping stove he had acquired from somewhere. He didn’t. Not actually knowing how a thing worked never stopped my dad.

For my part, I laid out my Girl Guide uniform ready for action. I would feed my family by creating a fire in the back garden to roast a rabbit, which I would snare and skin with my bare hands.

The instructions were in my “Mandy Yearbook for Girls”. I’d won my Signallers badge the week before and had my flags handy for emergency semaphoring if needed.

My mother gently reminded me that the only rabbits in our neck of the woods belonged to the Gillespie brothers across the road and Agnes Gillespie was not a woman to see her boy’s bunnies roasted. And the phone still worked. I was crushed.

We bought Monopoly. Everyone had board games. No batteries required, and anyway they were all going into the huge rubber covered torch sitting in the hallway. The candles were on stand-by and there were blankets on the couch. We were lucky we still had a coal fire, and a full bunker out the back.

Yes, there was ice on the inside of the windows when we woke up. There always was.

Joe Gormley led his union to victory and the lights came back on. The only people who made money out of that blackout were the miners, and looking back, that seems like a price worth paying.