Where Did It All Go Right? Read Free Page B

do you say to an unkind sneer like that?) I think I just continued riding in a circle and disappeared in the direction from which I had confidently come, something of a broken reed. If I was at stabiliser age I can’t possibly have been interested in girls
per se
, so it was as much the crushing blow of not impressing a schoolfriend from the next street along as anything more subconsciously sexual.
    Oh, do you still use stabilisers?
    I feel a tinge of that humiliation coming back when I recall it. I needed stabilising on the way home, I can tell you. But did this incident affect me in later life? Did I secretly vow there and then never to rely on ‘stabilisers’ again? Did it teach me always to do some background research before walking into a potentially beneficial social exchange? Does it explain why I didn’t grow into the sort of boy racer who feels his car is an extension of his manhood? (I toddled around in my mum’s Mini Metro at 17.)
    Do me a favour. The sad fact is, I don’t think the Anita Barker episode had any profound effect on me at all, other than on the day, of course. Freckly women don’t reduce me to emasculated jelly. Anita was one of the first girls I ever put my arm around, some years later, so I can only assume she didn’t hold the stabiliser
faux pas
against me. No, it was just something that happened to a kid in Winsford Way, Northampton in the early Seventies. A lot of things happened to me there. But, like my mum and dad, they didn’t fuck me up.
    Mind you, no child of mine is ever going to drink welfare orange!
    1 . Auntie Sue (Ashby) is as close as you can get to an honorary auntie. Married to Uncle Roger, she remains one of Mum’s oldest friends and until recently they lived up the road. A lovely, well-spoken woman, she has the world’s most recognisable and elegant handwriting, all swoops and flourishes. You can see Auntie Sue’s Christmas card arriving from 100 yards. Sue and Roger’s daughter Melanie was my first friend. There was a girl character in my earliest comic with blonde hair and I called her ‘Melanie’ in tribute.
    2 . What’s more, Nan Collins knitted clothes for them, including some woolly blue trousers which we talked ourselves into using as Arctic wear.
    3 . Josephine Anne Whitaker became Peter Sutcliffe’s eleventh victim on 4 April 1979 in Halifax. She was a building society clerk, and the switchboards were suddenly jammed with information from the public, ‘as if a giant, slumbering conscience had at last been prodded awake’ (
The Yorkshire Ripper
by Roger Cross).
    4 . It will tell you something about my home life that Dad rarely, if ever, drank in the Road to Morocco – a pub
at the top of our street
. (Who said crap pub names were a new phenomenon? Bafflingly christened after the 1942 Hope and Crosby caper, it had been opened by either a live camel or a live llama, and like so many purpose-built redbrick pubs, was never much of a ‘local’.) I went in there once, when Simon and I had befriended the slightly volatile son of the couple who ran it: Sean Mobley. My first pub, albeit outside of opening hours, and a garish, vinyl-covered place it was too. They had a luminous skeleton at the bottom of the stairs leading down to the cellar, as if to suggest a Moroccan jail perhaps (that was pretty cool). In later years, when I was in my mid-teens, we would go to the ‘off-sales’ door and buy crisps. I’m not saying my dad didn’t drink, just that he didn’t disappear up the pub come Sunday lunchtimes or to draw a line under arguments. Many a Party Seven was cracked open at the famous Winsford Way soirees though, oh yes.

one
    Jack Hawkins Knew My Father
    If you were in it, you knew all about it
.
    Lt. Cmdr Ericson,
The Cruel Sea
(1953)
    HOW FAR BACK can I remember? If I’m going to discover what it is that screwed me up without my even noticing – or even getting screwed up – I must dig deep. So where does my memory of me begin?
    Nothing in the womb,