Where Did It All Go Right? (46 page)

5.
We played the Black Lion a great deal, but it was one of the only halfway decent live venues in Northampton at that time. It was all function rooms and pubs. For the record – and this means a lot to me – Absolute Heroes also played the Marina Bar, the Sturtridge Pavilion, the Paradise Club, Dallington Squash Club, the County Ground and the Five Bells. And Daventry Youth Centre, our only out-of-town gig. Thanks for letting me share that with you.

6.
Some hard kids actually punched me in the side of the head for looking a poof on the racecourse after a party in 1984. I was with the distinctly heterosexual-looking Simon that night, who, like the good infantryman he was, suggested we run like hell. I can only assume he thought I might fight like a girl and didn’t fancy the odds.

7.
He wasn’t called Hepworth but that’s what we called him (after learning about the sculptress Barbara Hepworth). This was art school, you squares.

8.
Power, Corruption and Lies
(Factory, 1982).

9.
Computer Games
(Capitol, 1982), Clinton’s first solo album, the one containing ‘Atomic Dog’. It was a new boy called Dave ‘Newboy’ Payne, from the white socks heartland of Essex, who introduced me to funk.

10.
The Beginning of the End
(Bridgehouse Records, 1982). Who remembers Wasted Youth? They were The Strokes of their day, albeit not American or successful. They weren’t local and yet nobody outside of the Alan’s flat scene seems to have heard of them (they’re not even logged in Mick Mercer’s book
Gothic Rock)
. This album was reviewed in
Sounds
and described by a man called Jim Reid as ‘quite possibly the worst record released this year. If you like your juvenile rock obsessions cloaked in New York leather … then, mate, Wasted Youth are the boys for you.’ Where do I sign?

sixteen

Wayward Up Lancaster

I wish
you
were going away, not Simon!

Mum to Andrew after a row, Sunday, 13 February 1983

Didn’t really mean it – your loving Mum xx

Written without my knowledge in my diary on the same day

I’M NOT A
parent and have no plans to be one, so I can never really know the clawing, bittersweet pain of seeing your children grow up and leave home. I was emotional enough when our two cats were spayed and had to stay at the vet’s overnight, so I can at least hazard a guess at what it must be like. In 1983, aged 40 (funny age), Mum lost Simon to the British Army, and a year later, aged 41 (funnier age), she lost me to the weird and frightening world of art school. (So did Dad of course, aged 42 and 43, but as we’ve established he’s a stoic individual with constant recourse to the bigger picture.) Her two boys, gone.

She and I had a row on the day I left. It was only right and proper that we did. We’d been at loggerheads ever since July’s house-move. We lived in the genteel Weston Favell village now,
where
Mum foolishly imagined a better class of neighbour to be twitching the net curtains. If I may say so, she developed ideas above her station the moment her feet hit the gravel drive. She made the commonest of errors – equating money with class. In fact, the residents of Kestrel Close were just like the residents of Winsford Way: white-collar wage slaves made good. (If ‘good’ can be measured by length of gravel drive.) These weren’t posh people, and nor were we.

Of course, reactionary relatives like Nan Mabel would say, ‘Ooh,
very
posh!’ when they saw the new house, in the same way that Cilla Black says, ‘Ooh
very
posh!’ when a contestant on
Blind Date
reveals that he or she works for a PR company. I’m afraid Mum took the ‘very posh’ literally. And because she was now apparently landed gentry (even though she worked as a school secretary), my ever-worsening appearance became an unbearable thorn in her side. It wasn’t what
she
thought of the army trousers and Oxfam macs I wore to Nene College, or the fingerless gloves I wore at the dinner table, it was the barons and baronesses with the binoculars who lived either side of us.

I sympathise with Mum now of course. I looked quite dreadful in 1983–84, although not as bad as Paul Garner who often came to call for me in the mornings (he had effectively adopted the ‘look’ of a Vietnam war veteran combined with werewolf Eddie Quist from the film
The Howling)
. I have no idea what the residents of Kestrel Close actually thought of me, or him, because these people didn’t exactly spend a lot of time chitchatting over the garden fence, forming Young Wives groups or accompanying each other down the welfare. Unlike the good folks of Winsford Way and Ashbox Close, they kept themselves to themselves.

So, this final school year was agony for Mum, and as a result, second-degree agony for Dad. When it came to taking sides in a domestic firefight he rightly took Mum’s and backed up her hysterical all-out attacks with more restrained low-level cover. But he and I had some important bonding sessions that year – he accompanied me on the train to London to look round Chelsea (the only parent there that day), and he drove me back to the college
with
my bulging portfolios for the interview. Mum wouldn’t have been seen in public with me. Thus she and I grew detached in our new detached house, and when Kevin Pearce – a schoolfriend of Simon’s at a loose end after he’d joined the army – filled the vacancy left by long-term girlfriend Jo in October, a regimen of furtive hairstyling took hold.
¹
At weekends I would drive to Kevin’s parents’ house and in his bedroom – to the sound of Death Cult, SPK
²
or the Bunnymen’s ‘Killing Moon’ – we would backcomb our hair into rock-hard Robert Smith haystacks using gallons of Boots hairspray.
³
Kevin’s mum turned a blind eye, even though they too lived in a cul-de-sac.

Off we would go into town, fully sculpted, to hang out at whichever wine bar allowed in weirdos that week and drink blackcurrant and lemonade (me, because I was driving, and Kev out of moral support – and because it seemed like a very gothic thing to drink). Our hair would not move. It was fixed. And by the time I rolled in, Mum and Dad were in bed. In the morning it would be flattened by sleep and they were none the wiser. I had no wish to cause trouble you see.

The row we had on the day I left home was about clothes. Mum forbade me from packing some item of clothing – it could have been my army trousers, the dirty blue mac with the ripped lining, or just something second-hand and painty – and I touchéed her. ‘As of tomorrow,’ I said. ‘I can wear anything! You won’t even
know
what I’m wearing!’

She withdrew in tears. Not because I was right and could indeed from then on wear a clown costume and a Carmen Miranda fruit hat, but because she was heartbroken that I was leaving home. She was about to relinquish her maternal role irrevocably, and effectively cut out a part of her own femininity, casting it
aside
for ever. One of her chief functions on earth – one to which she had devoted 19 of her 41 years – was over, done with, gone. I was too fat-headed to see it. (I think I understand women better now, but it took another ten years of pain to get there.)

Dad set me straight and I felt bad. (I already felt bad but for different reasons.) I packed the offending piece of rag anyway and Mum gave me a kiss on the doorstep when I left. It was probably our first mother-and-son kiss since 1978 (kissing Hayley had made kissing Mum seem all wrong so I stopped). The whole unnecessary blow-up was a learning experience, and a healing one. After my first homesick week of college I put Mum and Dad at Number One in my People Charts.
⁴

Morrissey only got to Number Four.

* * *

So that was the end, beautiful friend. I was no longer resident of my mum and dad’s house or a citizen of Northampton. They kept my bedroom for me, left the Smiths pictures Blu-Tacked to the walls like the grieving parents of a murder victim, and I duly returned every holiday (because the halls of residence chucked us out), and played at being my pre-college self, hitting the town with Kevin and going to the Bold, and occasionally, if our leave coincided, seeing Simon. But I was, as predicted, a visitor. Overspill.

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 Rockets
⁵
so memorably sang, ‘There is nothing less amusing than the amusement arcade.’