The irony of all this genuflection to posterity is that reading these boyhood diaries today won’t tell you what I felt, or even what I thought. That will take some serious rebirthing. It can’t have been orange Disneyland all the way. Can it?
1. Uncle Pete and Auntie Wendy (Jones), honorary relations, and godparents to Simon. He was a bank manager for the Midland and as a result they kept moving about the country, Leicester, East Goscote, Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Calver (nr. Bakewell), Wisbech, Stowmarket, Bury St Edmunds. Honestly, they were like Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth darting across Europe in the late Forties: Rome, Florence, Venice, Naples, Capri. In keeping with most couples who have no kids of their own, Pete and Wendy seemed to treat us as little grown-ups, rather than idiots (I like to think Julie and I do this now), and I always loved visiting them. Pete also used to give me Giles annuals and had a huge old Meccano set.
2. I’m told all new mums got an ambulance in those days. These days you’re lucky if they say goodbye to you.
3. Both paps had allotments, and what a fine post-war tradition that is. Pap Collins’s was in Billing Road; Pap Reg’s in Bants Lane, on the other side of town where he and Nan lived. I’m happy to report that both allotments are still open.
4. Pap Collins never learned to drive; a moped was as far as he got. My other grandparents – younger, that bit more dynamic, flush from Pap Reg’s union gig – both drove, he well into his seventies. Nan passed her driving test first time in her late fifties but was then too anxious to ever use the car. At least she did it. When I was learning in 1982, Dad used to spur me on, saying, ‘If Nan Mabel can pass her test, anyone can.’
5. He had diabetes, undiagnosed for who knows how long. I admire his fighting spirit, and his distrust of doctors (I’m not a fan myself), but there comes a time when you have to give in, ideally when you can still get out of bed.
6. Uncle Jim to us. He and Auntie Christine are the other vital non-blood relatives in my life. We had so much fun when we visited them and their daughters Lorraine and Sandy in Coventry. They’re an awfully tall family, the Brittons. Jim was in computers at the time (he used to give us printout paper with holes down each side to draw on), and Christine was a teacher.
7. In 1967, when I was two, Hawkins appeared on Simon Dee’s TV chat show Dee Time and won the nation’s hearts all over again, gulping for air and hoarse-whispering with valiant good humour.
8. Harpole and Ecton are about as far apart as you can get in Northampton.
9. Though it would be a full 16 years before I appreciated Eliot, I got into Laurel’s work a lot sooner. Interestingly, Laurel and Hardy visited Northampton in October 1953, to play the New Theatre, their first time on stage since returning from Hollywood. Their visit coincided with Car Safety Week and the pair agreed to pose with a 1902 Wolseley to publicise it. Priceless photos were taken by the local paper and can be seen in the second volume of Northampton: Welcome to the Past published by W.D. Wharton.
10. Melissa was hospitalised with bronchitis when she was just ten months old and it was a bit dicey for a while there.
1972
Selected Extracts From My Diary
THE ORANGE DISNEYLAND – my very first – with Mickey and pals on the cover. Inside is a section called HOW TO USE YOUR DIARY, which offers this advice: ‘Every day you meet new people. Become observant and learn new things. Write them all in your diary when they happen, because writing helps you to become more observant.’ Yeah, don’t patronise me, Mickey.
In the PERSONAL NOTES at the front of the book I reveal that I am three feet eight inches tall and weigh three stone.
Incidentally, the entries in this diary dry up after 21 March. No staying power.
Tuesday, 1 January
The Double Deckers came back on TV. We all saw Play Away on Nanny’s colour television.1 Melissa can say ‘Ba-ba-ba.’
Thursday, 13 January
Today Paul Milner2 brought his ‘Ernie’ record to school. And we all heard it. And we liked it.
Monday, 24 January
Today I saw Bright’s Boffins3 on television. Mummy and I saw how many words we could get out of Constantinople.
Wednesday, 26 January
Tonight I am going to start to make a Tom and Jerry book and it is called Party Night For Puss.
Saturday, 29 January
Today I heard some records on the tape recorder and it was a bit of when I was a baby.4
Wednesday, 2 February
Today I saw The Frog Prince and Sir Prancelot and Soper At Large and Jackanory and Play School on TV.
Tuesday, 15 February
Today me and all my school pals and chums all had a visit to the fire station and it was Pancake Day.
Friday, 18 February
Today we had a power cut and I had to write my diary by candle light and it was fun.
Wednesday, 8 March
Today I saw Star Trek on television and I went to Jeremy Skoyles’s5 birthday but there wasn’t any prizes.
Sunday, 12 March
Today it was Mothers Day and we bought Mum some walnut whips and she liked them.
Thursday, 16 March
Today Top Cat came back on television and it was about Top Cat falling in love with a nurse.
Tuesday, 21 March
Today the Budget was on TV so we had to see children’s television on BBC2.
1. Quite why Nan and Pap got a colour television before us is a mystery to me. Were they perhaps working for the KGB? Either way, it was at Nan’s that I saw my favourite cartoon Top Cat in colour for the very first time and thrilled to the revelation that Choo Choo was pink (pink!), Benny was blue, Spook was green etc. It was my version of the Queen’s Coronation and I assume it occurred in 1971.
2. Paul Milner lived two streets away in Exmoor Close. A chunky fellow with hair so blond it was white, he turned out to be a real soulmate as we entered our teens: great at drawing and with an identical sense of humour to my own. His dad – who in my memory’s eye is Prince Andrew in naval uniform – worked for Geest as the captain of a banana boat and was thus always away. (I’m sure Paul told a horror story about his dad finding a tarantula in a crate of bananas.) I remember overhearing phone calls at their house to Mr Milner when he was shipboard – they had to say ‘over’ at the end of sentences. That seemed pretty exciting. Over.
3. Bright’s Boffins is one of those programmes that will never make it on to an I Love Nostalgia show: because nobody except me remembers it. Thankfully, Mark Lewisohn’s redoubtable Radio Times Guide to TV Comedy put me out of my lifelong misery when it was published in 1998: in this children’s sitcom (which ran to an astonishing three series on ITV between 1970 and 1972), Alexander Doré played ‘a bumbling, old-fashioned (and, quite frankly, mad) scientist-inventor, leader of a team of similarly minded boffins working for an under-funded and irrelevant Whitehall ministry’. Yes, and they worked out of an old railway station. I distinctly remember the character Dogsears, played by that great British clown Gordon Rawlings, he of the hangdog expression – formerly Charlie Moffit on Coronation Street in the mid-Sixties, latterly Arkwright in the John Smith’s Bitter ads. His finest – or most widely seen – hour came in 1980 when he cameoed as a surprised angler in Superman II (34th in the cast) and then ‘Man in Cap’ in Superman III (14th). When I saw him in II, I just thought ‘Dogsears’ silently but happily to myself. He died in 1985.
4. See Chapter 1.
5. Jeremy Skoyles, or Jes. Long-term pal, if something of a softy – unless we were just extrapolating from his name. I think perhaps he wore his gloves on a string inside the sleeves of his coat.
two
Cobblers
A love affair with Northampton is a journey into space.
Rod Thompson, ‘Energy In Northampton’ (1980)
WE WERE ALLOWED to park in the Equity & Law car park on Saturdays. They were clients of my dad’s. Our family shopping trips to town involved him getting out of the car and unlocking the padlock of our own private car park,
a gravelly yard tucked away round the back of Abington Street, retail’s main drag. It wasn’t like we had the keys to the town, but it certainly felt like a civic privilege, avoiding the bottleneck (and the payment) at the multi-storey. There was even a cramped Pay and Display directly opposite the Equity & Law, which always had a queue of cars attached even first thing on a Saturday, the occupants of which would gaze at us in jealous awe as we drove past them down the Ridings and entered our own special car park.
Thus began the Saturday morning shopping ritual. It took the advent in 1976 of Noel Edmonds’s Multi-Coloured Swap Shop to disrupt it, after which Mum and Dad allowed Simon and me to stay at home alone (you’d probably get arrested for that nowadays). But in the days before Chegwin and Posh Paws, trips into town went like this. Dad would drive, even though Mum could, and, having taken advantage of our special car park, we’d set off on the same tried and tested path every week: up through the Co-Op arcade, across Abington Street to Marks & Sparks for fancy food (chunky chicken, cakes) and a chat with Nan Mabel if she was working Saturdays. Functional food (cupboard ingredients, packet stuff) came from Sainsbury’s. Then – once it was fully functioning – into the strip-lit gloom of the Grosvenor Centre, Northampton’s showcase antiseptic shopping mall boasting 300,000 square feet of retail opportunity. (Sainsbury’s later relocated there from Abington Street, but by then we were I think getting the packet food from British Home Stores in the days before ‘bhs’ rebranding, after which they stopped doing food anyway.)
The Grosvenor was – and is – a dark, stale-aired time tunnel linking the ‘old town’ Abington Street and the ‘even older town’ Market Square. Therein, we would dutifully trudge round Beatties department store, where Mum would look at clothes or buy some cotton for the sewing machine or a birthday card. If we were lucky we’d loiter with Dad at the tiny toy department while Mum went to the loo. (She always seemed to need the loo at this point, and Beatties had one.) If we needed felt-tips or a compass for school we’d get them in WH Smith’s, and here I would graze, every week handling the Pythonesque Rutland Dirty Weekend Book and knowing I would never get it as it had a ‘rude lady’ on the cover. I could but dream.
Like any child, Saturday shopping was a chore leavened only by the possibility of getting a toy or a comic or a sweet. Simon was paid off with a detour to Millets to check out the crampons and jumpers, I was kept quiet with a spin round Universal Stationers to look at pads and paint-by-number sets. This was a trade-off for the times we had to go and try on shoes, or worse, clothes.
Once we had all that we needed from Abington Street, the centre and the market it was back to the Equity & Law and off to Mum’s favoured ‘local’ shops, which were out of town but nowhere near where we lived: Highgrade the greengrocer’s and Masson’s the high street butcher. We stayed in the car while Mum and Dad did this bit. It seems quaint now that Mum used to shop around so much for her food, but that’s progress. The town centre itself has long since been pedestrianised and castrated; they’ve got HMV and Gap and McDonald’s and beggars and everything now. What used to be the Mounts Swimming Baths up by the fire station is now the Mounts Health Suite.
But that’s not my town. My Northampton is Seventies Northampton. You knew where you were then.
* * *
My proud birthplace. A place right out of histor-ee. Best known for being junction 15 off the M1 (and 15a and 16 actually, but I generally come at it from the south), Northampton is every-town and anytown. The sort of place you tear past at high speed. ‘Northampton? Yeah I think I drove through there once,’ say outsiders, as if once was enough, and it is.
There’s no outward mythology to the place. Nothing to remember it by or plan a return visit for. Unless you live somewhere that hasn’t got a Comet and a bowling alley in the same car park. With the notable exception of the graphic novel Big Numbers, written by Northamptonian Alan Moore (in which the town is fictionalised as ‘Hampton’1 ) and Bridget Jones’s parents (who live in rural Northants), books, films and culture pass it by. It’s just one of those towns.
In his 1979 book A History of Northamptonshire, local historian R.L. Greenall describes the county as ‘unknown England’ and is perceptive in doing so. In the marvellous old volume Northamptonshire (first published in 1945 and part of the King’s England series2 ) Arthur Mee concurs:
This thousand square miles in the middle of England is as completely representative of our green and pleasant land as Shakespeare’s Warwickshire; but it is all too little known.
Never fares well in comparisons, Northampton. It could’ve been oh-so-different if Shakespeare had been born 40 miles to the east but he wasn’t. His granddaughter Elizabeth Nash died in Northampton, and that just about sums it up. See Northampton and die. I mean, where is Northamptonshire? Is it in the East Midlands? The South Midlands? The Eastern Counties? It was part of Mercia in Saxon times. Since 1964, it’s been in the ITV region of Anglia. Meanwhile our old pal R.L. Greenall notes that ‘developments in national communications have drawn it inexorably southwards’.
Certainly Northampton’s biggest selling point during the development years of the Seventies and Eighties was that it was ‘60 miles by road or rail’ from London. That was indeed the refrain on a curious little promo single released by the Development Corporation in 1980 – ‘Energy In Northampton’, sung by Linda Jardim and written and arranged by Rod Thompson.3 The uplifting little number’s lyrical conceit is that aliens in a flying saucer need somewhere to relocate. They choose Northampton, as well they might, with its ample spaceship parking.
The old town was a beneficiary of the pioneering New Towns Act of 1965. By 1968 the ink was dry and its fate was sealed: it would expand to help reduce pressure on the spiralling population of London and the south-east (and outer space, if Rod was to be believed). We let in 70,000 Cockney refugees, basically, except they were prosaically referred to as ‘overspill’. Expansion quickly became Northampton’s middle name. See a field, build a house, fill it with spivs. Better yet, in the spirit of suburban sprawl, build a Close or a Drive or a Way. As you know, we lived in one such freshly built Way in Abington Vale, and we got in before all those southern chancers with their fancy London ways.
While 19,952 designated acres of green were ploughed up and planted with new houses, my beloved Northampton town centre was also enthusiastically redeveloped. I watched it evolve as I grew up. The twin focal points of the great civic facelift were the Grosvenor Centre and Greyfriars Bus Station – a cathedral-like terminus with the look of two giant upturned skips. The shops and the bus station were joined and served by a brand new multi-storey car park, where we would never need to park, but where I would later work. As a Sainsbury’s Saturday boy I had to brave carbon monoxide poisoning and collect trolleys from all levels of the car park, wearing brown flares and a clip-on brown tie for protection against looking good.
The Great Expansion served up other new landmarks: Barclaycard House, one of the then-largest office blocks to be built outside London (230,000 square feet), the Carlsberg Brewery, which has nestled on the banks of the piddling River Nene since 1974 (imagine having your town characterised by probably the worst lager in the world4 ), and a tissue box-shaped hotel called the Saxon Inn, opened in 1973 and since renamed the Moat House.5
The developers of the Seventies left the old cobbled Market Square alone, which was thoughtful of them. As Robert Cook writes in A Century of Northampton (I’ve got all the books, you know), the Development Corporation ‘uncovered much of antiquity’ when they tore up the town, ‘and unhappily removed much of it’.
* * *
Not that I gave a flying fig about the history of my town then. As long as there were shops I could buy felt-tips from and somewhere to ride my bike, I was the same as any other kid in any other town: no civic pride, no sense of place, and no interest in the decline of the boot and shoe trade.
Northampton used to be emblemised not by lager but leather. Shoe leather. Hence Northampton Town Football Clu
b’s nickname, the Cobblers. It’s a shoemaking thing, like pots in Stoke and fish in Hull.
Here’s a surprise – even the Industrial Revolution saw fit to pass Northamptonshire by. They used to make a bit of cotton and worsted and lace round here, but it was essentially a market, not a manufacturing town – with ample cart parking no doubt. However, the one thing we did make was shoes. Plenty of cows nearby, see – plus, labour was cheaper than in London (Northampton put women and children to work long before it was the done thing). And, just as British Aerospace cry crocodile tears whenever there’s chance of an air war today, so Northampton benefited from the glut of armed and booted conflict in the seventeenth century. Northants stabbed and stitched and cut and tooled most of the French boots in the Franco-Prussian War. Made in Northampton, worn in Sedan (not that it helped).
By 1850, there were reckoned to be about 13,000 shoemakers in the county. Now that really is a load of cobblers. Nowadays, they all work in call centres or River Island.
So the town is known for something, albeit something long downsized. And the Cobblers themselves entered the annals of football history in the Sixties by climbing from the fourth division to the first and then dropping right back down to the fourth again in consecutive seasons.6 Joe Mercer, then manager of Manchester City, said, ‘The miracle of 1966 was not England winning the World Cup but Northampton reaching Division One.’
Another proud story about my home team: in 1970, having miraculously reached the fifth round of the FA Cup, they let eight goals in against Manchester United, six of them from the boot (not made in Northampton) of George Best.
It would be disingenuous to say I couldn’t wait to leave. After all, I waited 19 years to leave. Most of my sixth-form mates left town a year before I did to go to their exotic universities in Hatfield and the north. To tell you the truth, I had no idea how humdrum and monocultural Northampton was until I got to London in 1984. And even then it took time to sink in – I was dreadfully homesick during my first term at college. I went home at weekends far more than I actually stayed in London.
Where Did It All Go Right? Page 4