Where Did It All Go Right? Read Free Page A

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 …
    ‘Oh, do you still use stabilisers?’
    Ouch. I did still use stabilisers, but unselfconsciously. I was even on the cusp of casting them aside like a cripple’s crutches at Knock, but until that moment I hadn’t regarded them as the mark of a cycling leper. Unfortunately, my memory of this incident does not include any kind of sharp riposte from myself. (What