Where Did It All Go Right?

by Andrew Collins

  But was it Northampton that I missed? Or just 19 years of familiarity? Northampton was, after all, the back of my hand. Like Woody Allen’s Manhattan, it was my town … and it always would be.

  So how did it shape me? Am I a product of Northampton? A victim of geography? Yes, in the sense that I felt neither northern nor southern when I arrived in the capital; neither posh nor poor. I was always glad not to be hidebound by all that geographical pride shit. I know grown men now who seem to think that coming from either Yorkshire or Lancashire makes a difference. Because I never supported the Cobblers7 I don’t even have that kneejerk, residual local allegiance that ties you to a place each Saturday teatime by the football results. I don’t know what league Northampton are in today.

  What are Northamptonians like? What are our civic traits? Are we bluff like Yorkshiremen? Do we have an innate sense of humour like Liverpudlians? Is the man who narrates the tremendous Bygone Northampton video right when he states, ‘If there’s one thing that has always united the people of Northamptonshire it is the love of a good parade’? Or is he just reading what’s on the sheet of paper in front of him? I know we pulled together during the war, and we’ve always turned out in respectable numbers when royalty have visited (‘Northampton? Yes, I think one was driven through there once’), but again, that’s anytown. There was a carnival every year when I was growing up – a town tradition that dated back to the Thirties – and we always went, to throw pennies from the first-floor window of Pap Reg’s office into the buckets of bank managers dressed as women below. A marvellous evening was guaranteed and we were, I suppose, united in our love. But is that it?

  Being from Northampton is good if you want to start a new life. Like so many artificially expanded new towns, it does a nice line in blank canvasses.

  The Northampton accent may be regarded as something of a handicap out there in the sophisticated world, but it doesn’t quite carry the stigma of a Birmingham or a West Country. It’s nothing like as recognisable for a start. The Northampton accent is – whaddya know! – a sort of cross between half a dozen others: a heavy dose of West Midlands, a dash of Nottingham, Derby and Leicester, and the cretinous-sounding twang of the country. In 1933, an editorial in the local paper complained, ‘In Northampton we suffer, largely, from a lazy lower jaw which drops in the pronunciation of vowels and does not rise to clear-cut rendering of consonants.’ People in Northampton, especially the older generation, pronounce ‘going down town’ as gooing dane tane, and ‘our old car’ would come out as air uld cah. I would be referred to by my grandparents as air Andrew. Yes is yis and yet is yit, and ‘this afternoon’ is streamlined to sartnoon. They might also call you m’duck as a term of endearment. You are their duck.

  The first thing I did when I got to London was work on a London accent. I didn’t want to be exclaiming God blarmey! all my life.

  My wife, who was born in London, calls me northern, but when your home town is only 60 miles by road or rail, it hardly feels like dark, satanic mills and black pudding. As far as I’m concerned, Northampton is up the road. And that simple proximity was, I’m sure, a calming influence on my college years as I adjusted to life away from everything I knew. Like being a student with stabilisers.

  There’s something primal and necessary about leaving your home town, even if only for a spell like my mum and dad. Having said that, I totally respect Melissa for staying put and sending her boys to the very schools we went to. After years in Colchester and Germany with the forces, Simon and his family were drawn back to Northampton too. There’s something poetic and circle-of-life about that. I have no contempt for people who choose not to leave. Northampton’s development was all about welcoming people in, not driving them back down the M1 to clog the south-east back up again!

  Northampton didn’t drive me away: it raised me, it shod me in Doc Martens, it took my virginity, and it prepared me for my own journey into space. That’s why I’m so keen to record my 19-year love affair with the place and ‘put it all in’, as Raymond Carver once wrote. As a home town, it was big enough to get lost in and small enough to have a local rock scene. Urban enough to have jobs and rural enough to have country pubs. Conservative enough to have engendered a modest goth community in the Eighties and tolerant enough to let us occupy the bar of the Berni Inn with our big hair. Even the ugly place names stir my bones: Lumbertubs, Lings, Jimmy’s End, Moulton Park, Billing, Ecton, Harpole, Weedon, Brackmills.8 I still love everything about this place.

  This happy childhood I keep fretting about – Northampton did that.

  And you are my duck.

  1. Published in serial form in 1990 by Mad Love, a local publisher who acknowledge the assistance of Northampton Borough Council, Northampton Transit and the Northamptonshire Police at the back of issue #1. Although drawn by American artist Bill Sienkeiwicz, he’s clearly worked from photographs of Northampton locations such as the railway station and what could be the Black Lion pub where our band played so often. It’s a stunning piece of work by the way.

  2. Given to my dad as a prize by Northampton Grammar School in 1953.

  3. Given to me in the form of a seven-inch single as a light-hearted gift by Danny Kelly, my former mentor and editor (he frequents car boot sales). From the back sleeve, a eulogy worth printing in full:

  ‘Northampton has had many love affairs. After all, it is like a human being, having evolved, matured and developed its character with passing years. Succeeding generations of lovers established its importance, traditions, employment, social, recreational and cultural amenities and a strong sense of community. Experience has proved how necessary these qualities of life are.

  ‘But, of course, these qualities take generations to mature. In Northampton we are fortunate. We are able to harness all the advantages of an historic and well-established town of regional importance, with those of an expanding town and major growth point, providing new opportunities for a total population of 180,000 by 1990.

  ‘Add to this – Northampton’s location, little more than 60 miles from London, on the M1 motorway with 50% of Britain’s industry and 57% of its population within a 100 mile radius; the immediate availability of factories, offices or sites; a workforce of some 87,000; a wide choice of homes to rent or buy – and it’s easy to see how love affairs begin …’

  I know what you’re thinking: where do I sign?

  4. HRH Princess Benedikte of Denmark flew in to open the Carlsberg brewery. There was a civic ceremony on a devilishly windy day: when she pulled the string on the plaque, it continued to be obscured by a flapping curtain as the dignitaries applauded and a marching band tramped up and down the concrete. For royal glamour it ranks only behind the day our own dear Queen Elizabeth attended the official opening of the Express Lifts testing tower in 1982. (Yes, the one Terry Wogan nicknamed the Northampton Lighthouse with typical irony on his Radio 2 show.)

  5. It seemed glamorous at the time, ‘the Saxon’ – I think they held dinner-and-dance things there, and I’m certain my hedonistic Uncle Allen and Auntie Janice frequented it. It was always tainted somewhat by its convenience for the local red-light district. Alright, less of a district, actually just the car park and a notorious pub called the Criterion, which was spoken about in hushed tones at school: ‘The Cri’. When I hear the word ‘criterion’ spoken to this day I still think of the oldest profession.

  6. Actually, they spent two seasons in Division Three on the way up between 1961 and 1963, but let’s not spoil the ultimately humiliating story.

  7. I supported Liverpool through most of the Seventies, then Leeds from 1978 onwards. That can’t be good, can it?

  8. I’m being unfair. Northampton’s place names aren’t all ugly. Round Spinney has a touch of the Beatrix Potters, as do Weston Favell, Wakes Meadow, Briar Hill, Blackthorn, Kingsley Park and Far Cotton. There’s even a place to the south called Camp Hill. Wouldn’t you just love to have that on your envelopes?

  three

  Down the Field

 
; There was a time when meadow, grove and stream,

  The earth, and every common sight,

  To me did seem

  Apparelled in celestial light.

  William Wordsworth, ‘Recollections of Early Childhood’ (1807)

  THE CLOSEST WE came to sexual interference as kids was in 1977 when a man turned up at the field in a blue van and invited Simon and me to join in some organised ball games with three others kids we didn’t know. He even offered us a drink of ready-diluted squash at half-time from a plastic bottle which he kept in the van.

  The man came back every week with his boys in his van and it became a kind of date in our diary, every Friday, with other kids from the estates like Soardsy and Taff joining in. One of the games we played, made up I suspect, was a variant on French cricket called ‘Puttocks’.1 One week Mum overheard Simon and me innocently joking about Mr Atkins and his Puttocks, and she misheard, believing he had shown us his buttocks. He hadn’t, but panic set in and she started to ask us a lot of uncomfortable questions. We stopped playing with Mr Atkins after that, even though he had in fact only been recruiting for a Christian youth group. (Oh that’s alright then!)

  It’s almost as if everything of import that happened to me as a child did so down the field. We practically lived there during the school holidays, and spent every evening there or thereabouts in termtime. It was a good place, verdant and varied, where time stood still (I don’t remember any of us wearing watches – we just went home when it felt like we ought to, and usually got it spot on too). They talk of ‘dog years’, well these were ‘field hours’, amorphous units of time that stretched all summer long some years, whether I was playing French cricket with potential kiddy-fiddlers, smoking with Pete Thompson or catching sticklebacks in bandy nets. I remember learning the word ‘wanker’ down the field, and, savouring the way it felt in my mouth without having a clue what it meant,2 I shouted it out at the top of my lungs all afternoon. They must have heard me right across the allotments and halfway up Milverton Crescent.

  * * *

  The field was a miniature socialist utopia, a place where all economic groups were welcome and the only social stigma was not wanting to join in. Unless I’m romanticising, as long as you joined in the ad hoc games of football or Stony or Tiggy Off Ground you were alright. A straightforward meritocracy held sway when we picked teams. The team captain was bound to favour anyone who by reputation could thwack a tennis ball – likewise, height and age were a consideration – but selection never hinged on whether or not your dad did something indistinct in an office. It simply wasn’t an issue.

  All the dads in Winsford Way did something indistinct in an office – except Jack at the top of the street, who was something high up in the police (and as such probably spent as much time in an office as any of our dads). At least we knew what Jack up the road did. He was a policeman. We didn’t know or give much of a toss what other kids’ dads did. Apparently, Geoff Edwards from next door organised the refurbishment of pubs. (I only found that out retrospectively so it doesn’t count.) I doubt any of my mates knew or cared that our dad was in insurance. He had a company car: Vauxhall Viva most of the time and a Cavalier when his circumstances improved, and we parked in the Equity & Law. So? It didn’t have any bearing on our elaborate games of combat down the field. The field was a great leveller. The field was neutral. It was no-dads-land.

  When I was at Chelsea School of Art many years later, I heard that St Martin’s, where all the good-looking, posh girls went, asked what your father did as part of the induction interview. Not being a good-looking, posh girl I was never St Martin’s material anyway, so it’s all hypothetical, but what a bloody liberty.

  Life was so much simpler down the field.

  Kids are truly classless little human beings anyway. The education system valiantly endeavours to smooth everyone out, socially and demographically, by dressing them in identical uniforms (I was used to that of course), but even that doesn’t quite work, because the shoes are a giveaway – just like large hands are on a male transvestite. And there’s a big difference between a brand new school blazer and a worn-in second-hand one. No wonder state communism was doomed.

  When I started Abington Vale Middle School, my parents packed me off with my first briefcase – none of your Adidas bags for me. Talk about spot the kid with the white-collar dad! The irony is, it was second-hand; an ancient, falling-apart, hand-me-down, though such thrift did little to disguise those lofty parental aspirations.

  When we first moved into Winsford Way it was still under construction and Dad used to take us on early evening building site raids for firewood. I don’t want you to think of me as one of those sad middle-class people who finds vicarious romantic thrill in Ken Loach films (in much the same way sad middle-class Ken Loach does), but there was something vital and lawless about sneaking inside a house with no doors or windows and nicking offcuts. Simon and I used to love creeping up the echoey, wooden stairs and finding just beams instead of floorboards where ‘upstairs’ should be. Heady times. And I bet those Brideshead boys never half-inched timber.

  Coincidentally, when Mum and Dad moved upmarket to Kestrel Close in ‘the village’ in 1983, much of that was still under construction too. But we no longer needed firewood then.

  * * *

  It’s become a knackered old cliché now – ‘It was all fields round here when I was a kid.’ But actually, since you ask, it was all fields when I was a kid. Go for a nostalgic drive through the old neighbourhood now – Abington Vale, Weston Favell village, out to Little Billing – and it’s all houses where the fields used to be. What kind of adventure playground is that for the youth of today? No wonder they’re all high on crack and toting a machine gun.

  But while the overspill-frantic planners bulldozed the face of central and suburban Northampton, they never touched the field. The field remained as green and pleasant as Shakespeare’s Warwickshire and held its ground throughout the Great Expansion, as did Pap’s allotments. In fact, the central playing area of my youth was basically unchanged from the late Sixties when we arrived in Abington Vale to the early Eighties when we moved up-village. And it’s all still there today. The field is still a field. The climbing frame and swings which were always there are now set into that spongy rubber tarmac – and there’s a dogshit bin – but it’s essentially as it was, except the trees are taller. A total nostalgia oasis.

  It was the outer edges of our childhood world that gradually changed, especially due south, where all the green bits were. It wasn’t exactly rolling hills and fragrant meadows apparelled in celestial light as far as the eye could see, but beyond our field there were other fields, significant patches of undevelopment between the estates. Long grass to hide in. Sticks to find. Tunnels to venture down. Trees to climb. Streams to wade through, or, if you had a paper round, dump undelivered copies of the Mercury & Herald into.3 I may have had a fundamentally urban childhood, but I spent an awful lot of it communing with nature. I am, of course, grateful for that particular accident of birth.

  It will always be the culture of wellies that best evokes my childhood. (Apt really for a footwear town.) Levering our boots off by the heel on the front step and finding our football socks halfway down our ankles; the adrenalin rush of feeling the water pressure on our calves as the stream got deeper beyond Billing Road; getting a leak mended by Dad using a bike puncture repair kit; emptying stones out of them; hiding ‘guns’ from the Jerries inside them overnight. Try getting that degree of romance out of a Nike trainer, kids today!

  Wellies. We were always in wellies, until self-consciousness set in during our early teens and then it was trainers. But that was a sad day – wellies were the best. Wellies were a foot prophylactic; they meant safe wading; communing with water. The stream.

  Simon and I knew every inch of the stream that ran through the field. We never physically mapped it but it was all in our heads: where the easiest jumps were, where the current ran fast enough to be called – ha! – ‘r
apids’, where the soil beneath turned to treacherous, slippery clay, where the mythic water rat had been spotted. But by far the most important intelligence was where you could safely wade without water going over the top of your boots.

  If it did, this was called a ‘soaker’: the unforgivable act of misjudging the depth and letting water inside your wellies. The very thought of it brings back a knot of dread to me, because if you got a soaker, Mum would kill you. That was it. No prisoners. Coming home with wet socks was akin to losing your bike or weeing in your pants. I’m really not sure why such an innocuous and mundane aquatic accident carried such a penalty in our house. As I’ve said, Mum was no tyrant – but something about a soaker aroused her ire and put the fear of God into us. To Mum I guess it was a signal that we’d literally gone out of our depth; it also meant we had to get out of our wet socks and change into a new pair in the middle of a day, thus creating extra washing for her. If it was a major soaker, the tracksuit bottoms would have to come off too – the stream was, after all, brown. (Dad played no part in this kangaroo court – he was always at work when it happened; this was between Mum and us. I fancy he would have been able to put damp socks into perspective – but then he didn’t have to peg them out to dry.)

  We were such obedient, fatalistic kids though. If either Si or I got a soaker, what did we do? We trudged straight home! With stream water sloshing about in our wellies! We turned ourselves in! Only once do I remember us doing the sensible thing and staying out until our socks and wellies had dried out in the sun.

  But then, apart from the reign of terror that was soaker justice, Si and I had little need to deceive our parents. They let us get on with it. We had total right to roam between mealtimes. But we knew our limits. We could – and did – venture as far afield as The Dual Carriageway, which was in fact the A45. It sweeps east from the M1 past Northampton and Wellingborough to Rushden and Higham Ferrers and then fizzles out through sheer lack of interest.