I lived through the 1976 heatwave – that was fun, this is terrifying

The UK is on the brink of breaking the record for the hottest June day in recorded history, trumping the long hot summer of 1976. Back then, the mercury hit 35C, or “well into the 90s” as we used to say when suffering in fahrenheit.

Not great, given that the planet is dying and Elon Musk wants us to decamp to Mars because we ain’t seen nothing yet. But I’m conflicted, because I was there in 1976 and I survived – and, dare I say it, in reliably damp, boring England it was actually fun.

We kids – I was a teenager at the time – were out on our bikes (including the revolutionary but hard-to-steer Raleigh Chopper) or just lazing around in our back garden, reading books and comics. Without coming over all Peter Kay, those were the days when kids could roam around freely. So, sadly, I can only conclude that while the temperatures may match the conditions 50 years ago, the freedoms we enjoyed will not be experienced by this generation of British youth.

When we were forced into school the teaching seemed to be at a slacker pace, and we were allowed to remove our blazers and loosen our ties, which at least reduced the injury rate. I don’t even regret getting heatstroke on a coach trip around Windsor Safari Park, where at least the cheetahs and the elephants were acclimatised to the conditions, and indeed given a little “taste of home” into the bargain. I had to be taken to the sick bay in the zebra-patterned Land Rover (which I now realise might have made it a more tempting target for the lions, if they could be bothered).

In my amateurish way, I like to think that the summer of ‘76 was the first time that Mother Nature made a complaint about the effect on the planet of industrial revolution. In those days, climate science was in its infancy – a fashionable fear was of a “new ice age” – but, thanks to David Attenborough, David Bellamy and others, we were acquiring some sense of the natural world around us, and its fragility (albeit Bellamy was to become a climate sceptic).

But we didn’t really know how to link the months without rain and the industrial pollution you didn’t have to go far to breathe in at that time – lead being still a perfectly acceptable additive in petrol, and buses belching sooty black smoke fumes in the face of children was a fact of life. Particulate filters and catalytic converters were decades away, and most of the nation’s electricity was generated by burning coal. I’m proud to say we even lived next door to a miner. I digress.

That was fun. Today is terrifying. Take the fact that 1976 was an extraordinary event. Now it’s the new normal. It also happened in a much cooler climate. But as global temperatures keep climbing, heatwaves like this week’s are becoming not just more frequent but more intense. New research shows that a heatwave comparable to the one in childhood would already be around 3C hotter in today’s climate.

Looking ahead, a "plausible" Met Office forecast for June 2056 paints a grim picture, predicting peak temperatures of 45C in England, 41C in Wales, 38C in Scotland, and 30C in Northern Ireland.

The real problem in 1976 was water, or lack of it. Such was the scale of the crisis that some neighbourhoods had their water rationed and had to resort to using buckets and standpipes in the street. This was long before the era of costly bottled water, an absurd idea then as it should be now, and the prime minister, James Callaghan, responded to public concern by asking Denis Howell, a rather jolly Brummie, to become “minister for drought”. He could, of course, do nothing about things except try to reassure the public (usually counterproductive), supervise the rationing, and encourage people to save water.

As many Britons still had one bath a week in those unenlightened days – showers were very much a middle-class novelty – he was also asking us if we wouldn’t mind smelling a bit worse. Howell himself said he had taken to sharing a bath with his wife, and that the rest of us should try it. There was, however, no photocall of the bathing Howells of Lozells. Howell never performed a rain dance as the tabloids demanded, but not long after his appointment, the heavens opened, and his work was done.

Aside from sparking some sympathy for the condition of the planet, the abiding impact of the drought of 1976 was that it forced the British into more adventurous cuisine. The lack of rain wrecked the potato crop and made spuds ridiculously expensive, so alternatives had to be sought, including for school dinners. It was with some trepidation, followed closely by delight, that I was introduced to both spaghetti and rice at lunchtimes, even if they were trickier to handle than mash or chips. Soon after joining the European Common Market, and at a time when Alpen was considered exotic, the British were beginning their journey to the outward-looking, inquisitive, innovative, adventurous nation that we almost became by the time of that troublesome referendum a decade ago.

Whatever the thermometer might say, these do not feel like sunnier, happier times.