Where Did It All Go Right? (2 page)

The grandparent generation:

Dad’s dad was William John Collins, or Pap Collins as we knew him (in Northampton, it’s ‘pap’ for grandpa or granddad). Pap Collins, a rotund, entertaining housepainter, war veteran and teller of tall tales, was married to Nan Collins, Winnie (née Corby).

Nan Collins was a sweet, non-suffering woman – always, always laughing – who worked wonders with a bit of braising steak and some pastry, and put up with Pap’s stubborn idiosyncrasies (like refusing to countenance the advice of doctors), because she loved ‘her Billy’. He died first.
⁹

Mum’s dad was Reginald Percy Ward, or Pap Reg, an upstanding toolmaker turned shop steward who stayed in Northampton during the war (to make tools) and thus lacked the embellished romance of Pap Collins – at least as far as my militarily obsessed brother and I were concerned. The older and more left wing I got, the more I appreciated Pap Reg, pillar of the Amalgamated Engineering Union, and, post-retirement, tribunal man and Pensioner’s Voice activist. He became a belated inspiration to me,
¹⁰
and was my last grandparent to die, aged 85. I cried at his funeral, as I had cried at all three others.

Pap Reg was married to Nan Mabel (née Noble). She was the dominant figure in our family – to Dad’s occasional chagrin – though she was also small of stature, like my mum. Thursday was her day. She would come round our house without fail. A mass of
anxieties
who would ‘whittle’
¹¹
for weeks before going on holiday. Yet she managed to be funny and controversial along with it, and will forever remain, to me, the quintessential ‘Old Northampton’ matriarch. I was, I am embarrassed to say, always her favourite, which made it all the more difficult for me when she appeared not to recognise me (and I say
appeared
) after her stroke. Nan Mabel was still in there, but far beneath the broken surface. I never really knew the extent of Nan’s inner troubles while I was growing up, and given that I’ve only learned about them since, it seems inappropriate to introduce them into my story now. She was Nan Mabel, who whittled unnecessarily.

I have three sets of blood uncles and aunties, two on Mum’s side, one on Dad’s, and various honorary uncles and aunties – in other words friends of Mum and Dad. I will introduce these people as we go along, otherwise we may drown in names (there’s a Janis and a Janice, and an Alan and an Allen).

Mum met Dad on an office outing organised by the Atlas Assurance company in Northampton. They got married in 1962 and had me in 1965. Simon was born in 1967; Melissa in 1971, after which Dad had the operation. All three of us are now married and Simon and Melissa five children between them.
¹²
I lived at home until 1984 when I was 19 and then moved to the capital and stayed there. (It is a rare member of my family that leaves town without eventually coming back, although it should be noted, for fear of stereotyping us as genetically unadventurous, that Pap Reg’s brother emigrated to Australia after the war, as did one of Nan Mabel’s sisters, to Canada, and they never came back.)

This book will end when I leave home, because after that it’s all college and the media, and Northampton fades.

My story is essentially the story of Northampton’s 1970s, or if you prefer, any provincial English town’s 1970s. It is also the story
of
a field –
the field
, where I learned to ride a bike without stabilisers, kissed Anita Barker and smoked my first cigarette, although not in the same year. It is the story of wellies, sticks, stickers, stitches, comics, cartoons, hamsters, the Alpine lorry and travel sickness tablets.

The big question, and the one I intend to answer is: where did it all go right?

1
. It was Denholm Elliott.

2
. In the local paper, Mum, Dad and Melissa got ‘Telly watching family become screen stars’ (6 October 1990), with a hopelessly posed picture in which they are
pointing at a telly
. I was recognised once in the immediate aftermath. A man came to fix the boiler in my flat and looked me up and down. ‘You were on
Blind Date
,’ he said, confidently. No,
Telly Addicts
. ‘That’s it!’ he said. I then had to tell him what Noel Edmonds was like in real life (a consummate professional, actually).

3
. He did.

4
. Throughout
Experience
, and thus presumably in life, Martin Amis refers to his father as Kingsley. What a load of nouveau bohemian rubbish. My dad is called Dad. It is his correct title.

5
. Good, solid sort, likes a pint, Man City fan, plays football at the weekends.

6
. I think Melissa had a nascent crush on my friend Paul Garner (he was around the house most often in the early Eighties), but not one that she would have recognised or that me or Paul would have admitted to. ’Cha was an abbreviation for ‘Wotcha!’ or ‘Hotcha!’, very common salutations round Northampton way at the time.

7
. I attended a Regimental Day parade there in 1985 and tried in vain to embarrass Simon with my Oxfam mac and stupid hair. There is a classic family snapshot of this momentous day in which the pair of us are posing together, he in regimental blazer, slacks and tie, me in untucked striped shirt, Oxfam mac with sleeves pushed up and wild, dyed Eighties hairdo. But you can tell we are mad about each other: there’s no animosity anywhere. I am holding a finger between my nose and top lip in approximation of Simon’s moustache. Most of his platoon grew moustaches when they realised they were allowed to, in order to distinguish themselves from each other.

8
. Simon met Lesley in 1987 on a training exercise (she was in the Territorial Army at the time) and they were married within a matter of months at a church in her native Taunton. I was Simon’s best man and fetched him Creme Eggs for breakfast on the day (his request). So much for anyone who said it wouldn’t last.

9
. It was one of those marriages where you imagined that one partner simply couldn’t live without the other, and yet Nan enjoyed a whole year on her own (before quietly succumbing to pneumonia), seemingly in indomitable spirits and good health, during which she saw the birth and christening of her first grandchild, Simon and Lesley’s daughter Charmaine.

10
. I was proud to dedicate my only other book, a biography of Billy Bragg (
Still Suitable for Miners
), to Reginald Ward ‘for political inspiration’ in 1998. I’m glad he saw that.

11
.
The Cassell Dictionary of Slang
:
‘Whittle
v. to talk emptily, aimlessly, to chatter.’ That’s as maybe, but in our house it means to fret, to worry, to agonise out loud (esp. before going on holiday to Minehead).
Cassell
also notes that the original sixteenth-century definition is to ‘confess on the gallows’. There’s something of Nan Mabel in that.

12
. Simon and Lesley’s: Charmaine and Natasha. Melissa and Graham’s: Ben, Jack and William. Not a bad apple among them, yet.

preface

Down the Welfare

We have nothing to lose but our aitches
.

George Orwell,
The Road to Wigan Pier
(1937)

I can still taste welfare orange. It has to be at least 33 years since I last drank any, but there it is, in some intuitive corner of my memory. I must have tasted a hundred different kinds of orange juice in my lifetime, and yet I can evoke the powerful intensity of welfare orange as if it were only yesterday.

Contrary to the name, welfare orange wasn’t actually free, but it was state-subsidised in order to ensure that young mothers could afford a fix of vitamin C for their children. My mum used to walk ‘down the welfare’ every Monday with Auntie Sue
¹
to pick up orange for me and powdered milk for Simon, then my baby brother. The pair of them would just have enough housekeeping to buy a small, medicine-sized bottle of orange each, although the drink was sufficiently concentrated to last a week when diluted. When we moved house in 1968, from Duston to Abington Vale – on the developing side of Northampton – Mum stopped getting it (the new house in Winsford Way was no longer within pram-pushing distance of the local welfare centre). I missed the vivid, sticky stuff.

Welfare orange is pivotal to my memory of childhood in two ways. First, the very thought of it gives me a Proustian rush. I love those. Secondly, the fact that it was tantamount to a state benefit paints a picture of something I hadn’t really given much thought to: the hand-to-mouth financial circumstance of my parents in the early years of their marriage, which certainly makes me feel more vital and real as I sit here in the pampered environs of my adult life. I generally consider myself the product of a middle-class upbringing – things certainly looked that way when I finally left home in 1984 – but you see I was really a child of family allowance, a distant benefactor of Beveridge. Simon and I were suckled on welfare milk, our teeth set on the road to ruin by welfare orange (with a superfluous spoonful of sugar in it, I’m told). We had it hard, we lived on the breadline, we couldn’t even afford full-price squash.

Except, of course, life wasn’t so bad. In fact it wasn’t bad at all. There was little social stigma attached to being ‘on welfare’ in Duston, because everybody was. We had an indoor toilet, a Ford Anglia and a garage to put it in. There’s cine film of me chasing Pap Collins with a water pistol into the garage at Duston, and it doesn’t look much like
Angela’s Ashes
. (Well, somebody had a cine camera, for a start.) And because my dad worked for an insurance company he was eligible for a competitive mortgage, which is how come we moved when I was about three to the new house – as in newly built – in a new suburb. Not quite
Brideshead Revisited
, I know, but we hardly lived in a box.

This is why I have often wondered about my upbringing over the years. Was it too comfortable? By which I mean was it too comfortable ever to make a decent book? Who boasts of attending the School of No Knocks? My mum’s own modest working-class childhood was far away from the breadline (indeed, the family on her father’s side were considered ‘upper crust’ round Northampton’s no-nonsense Jimmy’s End because their income came from an
office
job within London Midland and Scottish Railway), and yet she loves reading about those who had it hard: Catherine Cookson and the like. It is a vicarious pleasure, just like watching the super-rich suffer on
Dynasty
or
Dallas
used to be, superceded these days by criticising the wallpaper of some Spanish princess in
Hello!
or
footballers’
wives in
OK!
magazine. If for convenience we categorise the middle classes at the time of my childhood as the semidetached, then my parents were middle class, but that’s an incomplete picture. Talk of upper- and lower-middle class smacks of moving up and down the football league tables, but you might say that by the time I left home, my parents were closer to upper-middle than lower-middle. Indeed, the home I left in 1984 was
fully
detached, with all the implications of that word.

I think I’m right in generalising here and saying that only the middle classes truly romanticise poverty and hardship. There was little of either in my early life, and yet like any family of five with only one breadwinner and a mortgage, we did not have money coming out of our ears. We did not holiday abroad, we never ate out – although that has as much to do with the unenlightened times as with Dad’s take-home pay after tax – we enjoyed neither private education nor private healthcare, and my brother and I shared a bedroom. Our Action Men rode in a second-hand armoured car.
²
It was a bread and butter upbringing, with most mod cons, and nobody had consumption.

But while the extremes of abject poverty and aristocratic riches make better fiction, a cosy, middle-class equilibrium can be just as effectively shattered by tragedy. You read about it in the papers every day. It was only when the Yorkshire Ripper stopped attacking prostitutes and killed a ‘respectable’ girl
³
in 1979 that the general public really sat up and took notice. ‘Respectable’, semi-detached homes are ideally appointed, dramatically speaking, for a knock on the door bringing terrible news, or institutionalised abuse veiled by net curtains.

So where was mine? I want my money back.

The veneer of my ‘respectable’, semi-detached home in Winsford Way did not mask a cesspit of secrets and lies. Behind that
metaphorical
picket fence – actually, we had an unlovely, standard-issue wire mesh fence – lurked a family of five who largely ate together, played together and stayed together. No wicked uncle ever sat me on his knee in the tool shed, and the only deaths I had to cope with while growing up were of a succession of hamsters called Barnaby, who officially belonged to my sister Melissa anyway. (One of them died while we were on holiday, in the care of Jean and Geoff from next door. They considerately replaced it with one identical, which bit Melissa’s finger when she gaily took it out of its cage on our return – understandably, not having ever set eyes on her before. Though bleeding, she was too innocent to twig the deception.) Death was brushed under the carpet.

I refuse to believe that I am not emotionally scarred in some way. What a swiz it would be if I’d turned out a well-balanced adult as a result of good parenting, a happy home life and a fairly uneventful passage through the education system. Something damaging must have happened to me in those first 16 or so years of my life; some rejection, crisis or disappointment that left its mark on me deep inside, the sort that stalks your adult life until you dredge it up, face it and achieve what the Americans irritatingly call ‘closure’.

* * *

I guess I was pretty mortified by Anita Barker and the stabiliser incident. I’m estimating that my age was about seven. Ever opportunistic, I rode my new bike up to the top of our street to the empty car park of the Road to Morocco pub,
⁴
with the sole intention of ‘
bumping
into’ the freckly Anita from Bideford Close, whom I knew to be sitting on the wall up there. It was my street she was in, my manor, my radar, my Way, and so surely she would respect my patrol, and admire my bike. Unfortunately, as I rounded the corner into the car park, her first words were …