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Where Did It All Go Right?

Page 34

by Andrew Collins


  After I left, Northampton town centre grew more and more violent and unwelcoming (I’m sure it’s improved since the J.D. Wetherspoon revolution) – an irony that was completely lost on Nan Mabel, who remained convinced until her dying day that London was more threatening. Even when I graduated from Chelsea in 1987 and became a freelance illustrator she whittled – was I getting enough work down in London? Yes I was. Why couldn’t I move back to Northampton and get a job here? Because I didn’t want to work in Sainsbury’s, Nan. Again, looking back, I can sympathise with her plight: she had lost two out of four grandchildren to the wider world and that hadn’t been part of the plan. Families stay close in Northampton. (Ironically, when Simon left the army he moved back to Northampton with his young family; I’m the only one still missing in action.) What Nan hadn’t spotted was that we were close. Miles on a motorway sign have nothing to do with it. I always felt close to my family – we just never said the words. (Of course I still do, and we still don’t.)

  If I am a product of my parents and grandparents, they should all be pretty pleased with themselves. I may not be in the market for supplying grandchildren but Simon and Melissa have been industrious enough in that regard. I am happy and healthy. I have what the Weston Favell careers officer would have deemed a ‘glamour’ job. London made a man and a socialist of me, and my first job in journalism showed me the world – or at least its airport lounges and hotel lobbies.

  If I was looking for a scene to tie up Act One of my story dramatically I suppose a funeral might do it. Halfway through my college years, Mick Spratt, a key figure in the sixth-form social circle, was killed in a car accident. We all assembled, Big Chill style, back in Northampton for his funeral: Craig, Jo G, the two Neils, the two Daves, Honx, Lis, Liz, Hetty. It was a happy-sad occasion, remembering this much-loved, laugh-a-minute member of our gang and lamenting his premature loss, but it was also the day we all realised we were no longer in the sixth form. Without the distinctive blazers – or even our early Eighties uniform of big coats and wedgey fringes – we had become indistinct from one another.

  It was too soon for the school reunion, that’s all. We were all still finding ourselves at various seats of learning, or in Craig and Jo G’s case, within the local job market. When the wake was over, we all returned to our study bedrooms in Hatfield and the north and moved on.

  Or there’s the funeral of Pap Reg, which occurred halfway through writing this book. For me, the star of that particular wake was Auntie Jean, Nan Mabel’s younger sister (Great Auntie Jean, strictly speaking, although we’ve never known her as such). She held court in the front room at Kestrel Close, the spitting image of Nan – broad Northampton accent, unrendered consonants, steeped in the old ways, loud and funny, intentionally or otherwise (it was hard to tell, as it had been with Nan). Jean spoke ardently about her own family, ticking off the current whereabouts of her grandchildren in the same way Nan Mabel probably used to (‘air Andrew’s in London, air Simon’s in the army …’), and when she revealed that one of them has multiple piercings while the other has ‘gone wayward up Lancaster’ everything fell into place for me – why I love Northampton and why I love my family so much.

  First of all, ‘gone wayward’ simply means he is living in sin with his partner, something still clearly frowned upon by the surviving matriarchs of the family. Secondly, this lad has committed no greater crime than to move to Lancaster, but is nonetheless considered both exotic and disloyal for it in the same breath. But most of all, it was the way Auntie Jean’s words made me smile broadly. (She really is a great Auntie.) Wayward up Lancaster! What a tragedy it will be when Estuary English and Home and Away have wiped this accent out. These, I thought, are my people. They made me; I am cut from the same shoe leather.

  I suddenly became ashamed and melancholy that I had so methodically shed the accent (now that really is wayward). Northampton, I accepted in that moment of clarity in Mum’s ‘posh’ front room, exerts just as much of a romantic, storybook pull on my heart as, say, Ireland does to its scattered descendants and Bow Bells do to all those displaced Londoners living in Milton Keynes.

  The welfare, the field, Abington Park, the market square, the Mayor Hold car park, Pap’s allotment, the Willowtree, the Bold, the Farm, Alan’s flat, Weston Mill – this used to be my playground. If I grew up normal in the Seventies, it’s because Northampton isn’t just anytown, it’s my town. My kind of town. No matter what the season, Northampton will always exist in the dull, flat colours of an Instamatic photograph, and will pulsate to the great tunes of Bauhaus and perhaps ‘In Dulce Jubilo’ by Mike Oldfield.

  I don’t believe in God, but I believe that God is in the details.

  I didn’t lose my innocence in Northampton, I left it. Even North Wales, my geographical significant other, felt like Northampton with extra sheep because I experienced it with Mum, Dad, Simon and Melissa – and sometimes Nan and Pap – and anywhere we went, we always took Northampton with us. It rained in Wales just like it rained at home, we still ate sausages and fried potatoes and Mini-Rolls for tea and the whole fortnight smelt of Dad’s Viva.

  Although this book ends in 1984, my childhood ended in August 1980 when we set sail for Jersey on the Earl Godwin. (Lovely on the wa-ter!) That upturn in Dad’s finances spelled the real end of innocence: from then on holidays meant posing at discos, family membership at the Fort Regent leisure complex and eating soup de jardinier. Wales meant having fun against all odds. In Jersey fun was part of the package. As Love And Rockets5 so memorably sang, ‘There is nothing less amusing than the amusement arcade.’

  Denholm Elliot went from the Hotel du Lac to the Bangkok Hilton. We went from Mr and Mrs Williams’s farmhouse to a Jersey hotel named after a borough in South London.

  It may seem perverse to say it, but my Seventies ended in 1980. I think they must have started in 1970 too. Oh well. You can’t force these things.

  * * *

  You’ll remember that Mum dressed Simon and me as twins when we were growing up. It didn’t work. You can’t force these things. They encouraged me to take English A-level so that I could always become a journalist. That worked. They brought me up to look after my things and be nice to those around me and come home for my tea. That also worked.

  Mum tried to indoctrinate me with mispronunciation of foodstuffs but I chose my own path. Dad tried to indoctrinate me with Thatcherite self-interest – for my own good, of course – but I failed him there, just as I had done by taking no interest in cricket. At the end of the day, my parents did very little moulding, allowing all three of us to follow our instincts – Simon into khaki, me also into khaki but as an art fashion statement, and Melissa into the bank. I’ll bet they wouldn’t do anything differently if they had the chance to go back and do it again – except perhaps Ilfracombe.

  1. Having resisted Mum’s attempts to turn Simon and I into twins all my life, I saw no irony in the fact that Kevin and I wore exactly the same clothes and had exactly the same hair when we went into town.

  2. Minor industrial noise band, most famous for ‘Metal Dance’ and not being Einsturzende Neubaten.

  3. Also Harmony, Country Born, Bristows and Sunsilk.

  4. ‘For being there.’

  5. The band that rose from the ashes of Bauhaus and enjoyed moderate success in America. This line is from ‘Dog-End of a Day Gone By’ a song on their first album, 1985’s Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven.

  acknowledgements

  Everyday People

  It’s not practical to thank all those who have written miserable memoirs about their terrible childhoods, but collectively they inspired me to write this book with their redemptive and more importantly best-selling tales of woe: abuse, death, deprivation and the search for love among the wreckage. The aim of Where Did It All Go Right? is not to belittle their suffering, or to mock the therapeutic qualities of externalisation, but simply to provide an alternative view.

  Shit happens. But sometimes it doesn’t.

  Th
e degradation endured by the young Dave Peltzer (A Boy Called ‘It’ and numerous sequels) may in fact be the polar opposite of my childhood, but I started to think in mid-2000 that, hey, perhaps my voice should be heard too. Then I read Paul Morley’s elegant book Nothing and my mind was made up. Perhaps then I should single out Paul Morley for sincere appreciation above all the other whingers.

  It almost seems indulgent to thank my family when the book is dedicated to them, but clearly I could not have told my story without their blessing, as it is their story too. While writing and researching it, I spent valuable quality time with them, sorting through boxes of memorabilia in Mum and Dad’s loft and sorting through events in our minds. Of all my grandparents, it was only Pap Reg who looked likely to see the book’s publication but sadly he died while I was writing it. That’s a mortal watershed for any grandchild, and it was for me, but it made the book seem more important to finish. I hope I have done a halfway decent job. I like to think that my late father-in-law, Sam Quirke, would have enjoyed it too.

  I read two very different autobiographies during the writing of this one that fed directly into it: Experience by Martin Amis and Frank Skinner by Frank Skinner. One gave me the conviction to run footnotes on the page, the other made me feel a lot better about the occasional coy reference to a teenage girlfriend (if you’ve read it you’ll know exactly what I mean). I also found inspiration in the first published diary (1660) by Samuel Pepys – the guv’nor! – and in Gavin Lambert’s memoir Mainly About Lindsay Anderson, in which he quotes from the great British director’s first diary (1942), aged 19. ‘Its purpose is both to remind me in after years how I felt and what I did, [and] to give me literary exercise.’

  Two people were instrumental in helping me treat a labour of love as a literary exercise: firstly my great friend and agent Kate Haldane, who read the sample chapters and laughed (I can’t believe it – I’ve just thanked my agent!), and secondly the man who turned out to be my publisher, editor and pal, Andrew Goodfellow at Ebury. He phoned Kate seemingly out of the blue and asked if certain of her clients were interested in writing a book. I was; she quickly arranged the lunch at a restaurant that stupidly serves wine but not beer, and thanks to Andrew’s long-sighted vision – and his Seventies childhood – a deal was struck.

  Only one person read the book before these two did (apart from my mum), and that is Julie Quirke, who wisely kept her own name when she married me. I have taken her advice on style and ethics throughout, and do nothing without seeking her approval, except buy John Wayne DVDs.

  Life would have been a lonely writer’s hell were it not for the good people who continue to populate the rest of my life: Adam Smith, Frank Wilson, Gary Bales, Jax Coombes, Julie Cullen, Mark Sutherland, Stuart Maconie, Simon Day, Alex Walsh-Taylor, David Quantick, John Aizlewood, Rob Mills and Jessie Nicholas, Lorna and Peter, John and Ginny, Howard and Louise, Eileen Quirke, Mary and Steve Rowling, the combined Quirkes, Collinses, McFaddens and Joneses; all at Amanda Howard Associates; all at the mighty 6 Music, not least Jim, Adam, Mark, Miles, Gid, The Hawk, Mr Tom, Tracey, Jupitus, Wilding, Claire, Gary, Jo, Mike, Mike, Webbird, Joti, Lauren, Sarah, Jon, John, Antony and everyone else who knows me; all at BBC Radio Arts including Stephen, Sarah, Paul, Toby, Mo, Zahid, Elizabeth, Mark, Francine and all the Johns; Gill, Sue, Colin, Shem, Flynn, Ruth, Philip and all at Radio Times; Sarah, Rachel, Hannah, Jo, Di, Jake and all at Ebury; Jim and Lesley for altering the course of my life; and, while we’re in the corridors of power, John Yorke and Mal Young, without whom …

  Name-dropping: thanks to Richard Coles for geographical support, Billy Bragg, Juliet and family for continued inspiration, and to Mark Radcliffe and Marc Riley for laughing out loud at my diaries on late-nite Radio 1: you are honorary ‘dirt collectors’.

  Respect to those writing peers who said nice things: Mil Millington, Augusten Burroughs, Rhona Cameron, Richard Herring and Danny Wallace.

  Hats off to Friends Reunited, the website that reached its tipping point at just the right time for a book about old schoolfriends, and to all those who got in touch: Paul Milner, Paul Bush, Anita Barker, Catherine Williams, Alan Martin, Dave Griffiths, Craig McKenna, Jo Gosling, Jackie Needham, Kevin Pearce, Wendy Turner, Sue Stratton, Lis Ribbans, Louisa Dominy, Dave ‘Newboy’ Payne, Gavin Willis, Ricky Hennell, Mark Crilley, Rebecca Warren (via Tim Clubb), Andrew Sharp, Jo Flanders, Neil Meadows and Andrew Hoskin. Also to Steve and Julie Pankhurst and Jane Bradley themselves, the smiling face of the nation’s favourite website.

  Cheers to Stuart, Vanessa, Becke, Jamie and Gareth for the short holiday at Virgin Books.

  Goodnight, sweet Tessie. We should all have such spirit.

  This book was brought to you in conjunction with Clipper, Able & Cole, Ingmar Bergman and The Temptations.

  Andrew Collins, November 2003

  www.wherediditallgoright.com

  Keep reading to enjoy a sneak preview of Andrew’s sequel to Where Did It All Go Right?

  HEAVEN KNOWS I’M MISERABLE NOW

  My Difficult Student 80s

  Four Lovers Entwined

  Well, somebody was bound to leave me a voodoo doll eventually.

  It was waiting for me on the floor outside the door of Room 317 when I came home from college this afternoon. A five-inch-high black figure made from soft material, sitting there dressed in a little black hooded coat, with a safety pin prised open to form a vicious spear and thrust portentously into its belly. No note, no clues, nothing. Just this gloomy, monkish effigy.

  I’ll be honest, I was spooked all through dinner. What had I done to deserve this macabre scare?

  I sort of knew.

  My decisive second term had since Valentine’s Day been loaded with incident, much of it romantic, most of it complicated. A Ray Cooney farce played out with trousers around ankles between floors and now, of course, a Bergerac-style mystery with me playing both John Nettles and the accused. If the first term had been about wiring up speakers and putting things away, the second was about painting the halls red and notching the bedpost. Getting things out.

  There was something about the New Year. Just as I’d excommunicated myself from the town that had raised me, I was forced back there for three weeks at Christmas as some form of humiliating penance. (The halls turfed us all out during holidays, enabling them to power down the generator, rest the laundry service, lower the canteen shutters and recharge Ralph’s batteries.) Exile in Northampton simply served to galvanise my conviction that I just wasn’t made for this town. Not any more. And I couldn’t wait to get back to London.

  I was able to affect the detached tourist around the old haunts, the Berni and the Bantam and the Black Lion and the Bold. The old magic was gone and I felt like Banquo’s ghost at someone else’s table. It wasn’t just me who felt disenchanted about the place. The latest craze among my old set – those who’d stayed behind – was to head off in convoys to Nottingham and Rock City to get their kicks. I saw no need to feel guilty for wanting to get out of town if they did too. Life for all of us had moved on.

  I resented being back with Mum and Dad for three weeks, living under what I saw as their almost Chilean jurisdiction of repression, regularity and rules. I saw not a shred of irony in the fact that mealtimes at the halls were far more regimented than those under Mum’s roof, and that after lights out a night porter roamed the corridors to tell us to keep the noise down. Dad had written me a benignly threatening letter in early December which in précis said, ‘Get a haircut or you won’t get a Christmas’. I didn’t fully appreciate the portent of this proposal at the time, but once through the front door, with a reflexive, put-upon sigh, I booked myself in for the afternoon at Catz in town and had the worst excesses of my first term at Chelsea artfully lopped off for the sake of peace on earth and goodwill to Mumkind.

  ‘Happy now?’ I said, as I walked in the front door.

  Actually, they did seem to be happy. In return, they gave me a car.

  They gave me a car.

&nbs
p; I had yet to become belligerently and intractably leftwing, so the perfect Christmas gift came wrapped with not a whiff of middle-class guilt. That followed later. By the time the NME and Sir Keith Joseph had turned me into a bellicose, barricade-storming socialist in the summer term, I grew self-conscious about having my own set of wheels. I would make much of the fact that my parents hadn’t actually given me a car – it was merely my Mum’s old Metro handed down when she upgraded to a Vauxhall Nova – but there was no talking round the fact that a student with a car is a rare thing indeed. You only had to look at the size of Ralph West’s car park to know that.

  Maybe I could give people a lift to the barricades.

  I christened my secondhand car Shake – in honour of the Cure song ‘Shake Dog Shake’ and the fact that it did just that on the M1 over 40 miles an hour, as if perhaps it was, in Star Trek argot, ‘breaking up’ – and I glued cut-out letters announcing its name on the blue sunstrip Simon had bought me for Christmas along with a furry steering wheel cover.

  So I travelled back to London in January not by cut-price rail but hazardous, icy road, my portable tape player on the front seat stoked with The Art of Noise and Lloyd Cole & The Commotions (Kevin’s opinion of whom I don’t think I need to relate), plenty of Ritz crackers and clean underpants in the hatchback, and at least one sexual misadventure to regale Rob with when I got there. A regrettable quickie with a girl I met in the Bold on New Year’s Eve called Sandy who said I looked like Tom Bailey out of the Thompson Twins (this was deemed a compliment) and from whom I never heard again.

  I joined the AA on Sunday January 6, 1985, a deceptively mundane act of form-filling that was loaded with significance – I was a big boy now. To borrow the association’s own tagline: it’s great to know you belong. It’s also great to be able to charge your friends petrol money for a lift to college every day: 20p each for the return journey (which worked out at almost £2 a week, the price of a gallon of four-star in 1985). This entrepreneurial spirit, which went down well with my Dad and would have earned me a proud pat on the head from Norman Tebbit, was no doubt stimulated by the experience of freelance work, which David Williams continued to put my way, preventing me from becoming a drain on my parents’ finances and in a roundabout way, paying them back for the car.

 

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