preface

Down the Welfare

We have nothing to lose but our aitches.

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)

I can still taste welfare orange. It has to be at least 33 years since I last drank any, but there it is, in some intuitive corner of my memory. I must have tasted a hundred different kinds of orange juice in my lifetime, and yet I can evoke the powerful intensity of welfare orange as if it were only yesterday.

Contrary to the name, welfare orange wasn’t actually free, but it was state-subsidised in order to ensure that young mothers could afford a fix of vitamin C for their children. My mum used to walk ‘down the welfare’ every Monday with Auntie Sue¹ to pick up orange for me and powdered milk for Simon, then my baby brother. The pair of them would just have enough housekeeping to buy a small, medicine-sized bottle of orange each, although the drink was sufficiently concentrated to last a week when diluted. When we moved house in 1968, from Duston to Abington Vale – on the developing side of Northampton – Mum stopped getting it (the new house in Winsford Way was no longer within pram-pushing distance of the local welfare centre). I missed the vivid, sticky stuff.

Welfare orange is pivotal to my memory of childhood in two ways. First, the very thought of it gives me a Proustian rush. I love those. Secondly, the fact that it was tantamount to a state benefit paints a picture of something I hadn’t really given much thought to: the hand-to-mouth financial circumstance of my parents in the early years of their marriage, which certainly makes me feel more vital and real as I sit here in the pampered environs of my adult life. I generally consider myself the product of a middle-class upbringing – things certainly looked that way when I finally left home in 1984 – but you see I was really a child of family allowance, a distant benefactor of Beveridge. Simon and I were suckled on welfare milk, our teeth set on the road to ruin by welfare orange (with a superfluous spoonful of sugar in it, I’m told). We had it hard, we lived on the breadline, we couldn’t even afford full-price squash.

Except, of course, life wasn’t so bad. In fact it wasn’t bad at all. There was little social stigma attached to being ‘on welfare’ in Duston, because everybody was. We had an indoor toilet, a Ford Anglia and a garage to put it in. There’s cine film of me chasing Pap Collins with a water pistol into the garage at Duston, and it doesn’t look much like Angela’s Ashes. (Well, somebody had a cine camera, for a start.) And because my dad worked for an insurance company he was eligible for a competitive mortgage, which is how come we moved when I was about three to the new house – as in newly built – in a new suburb. Not quite Brideshead Revisited, I know, but we hardly lived in a box.

This is why I have often wondered about my upbringing over the years. Was it too comfortable? By which I mean was it too comfortable ever to make a decent book? Who boasts of attending the School of No Knocks? My mum’s own modest working-class childhood was far away from the breadline (indeed, the family on her father’s side were considered ‘upper crust’ round Northampton’s no-nonsense Jimmy’s End because their income came from an office job within London Midland and Scottish Railway), and yet she loves reading about those who had it hard: Catherine Cookson and the like. It is a vicarious pleasure, just like watching the super-rich suffer on Dynasty or Dallas used to be, superceded these days by criticising the wallpaper of some Spanish princess in Hello! or footballers’ wives in OK! magazine. If for convenience we categorise the middle classes at the time of my childhood as the semidetached, then my parents were middle class, but that’s an incomplete picture. Talk of upper- and lower-middle class smacks of moving up and down the football league tables, but you might say that by the time I left home, my parents were closer to upper-middle than lower-middle. Indeed, the home I left in 1984 was fully detached, with all the implications of that word.

I think I’m right in generalising here and saying that only the middle classes truly romanticise poverty and hardship. There was little of either in my early life, and yet like any family of five with only one breadwinner and a mortgage, we did not have money coming out of our ears. We did not holiday abroad, we never ate out – although that has as much to do with the unenlightened times as with Dad’s take-home pay after tax – we enjoyed neither private education nor private healthcare, and my brother and I shared a bedroom. Our Action Men rode in a second-hand armoured car.² It was a bread and butter upbringing, with most mod cons, and nobody had consumption.

But while the extremes of abject poverty and aristocratic riches make better fiction, a cosy, middle-class equilibrium can be just as effectively shattered by tragedy. You read about it in the papers every day. It was only when the Yorkshire Ripper stopped attacking prostitutes and killed a ‘respectable’ girl³ in 1979 that the general public really sat up and took notice. ‘Respectable’, semi-detached homes are ideally appointed, dramatically speaking, for a knock on the door bringing terrible news, or institutionalised abuse veiled by net curtains.

So where was mine? I want my money back.

The veneer of my ‘respectable’, semi-detached home in Winsford Way did not mask a cesspit of secrets and lies. Behind that metaphorical picket fence – actually, we had an unlovely, standard-issue wire mesh fence – lurked a family of five who largely ate together, played together and stayed together. No wicked uncle ever sat me on his knee in the tool shed, and the only deaths I had to cope with while growing up were of a succession of hamsters called Barnaby, who officially belonged to my sister Melissa anyway. (One of them died while we were on holiday, in the care of Jean and Geoff from next door. They considerately replaced it with one identical, which bit Melissa’s finger when she gaily took it out of its cage on our return – understandably, not having ever set eyes on her before. Though bleeding, she was too innocent to twig the deception.) Death was brushed under the carpet.

I refuse to believe that I am not emotionally scarred in some way. What a swiz it would be if I’d turned out a well-balanced adult as a result of good parenting, a happy home life and a fairly uneventful passage through the education system. Something damaging must have happened to me in those first 16 or so years of my life; some rejection, crisis or disappointment that left its mark on me deep inside, the sort that stalks your adult life until you dredge it up, face it and achieve what the Americans irritatingly call ‘closure’.

* * *

I guess I was pretty mortified by Anita Barker and the stabiliser incident. I’m estimating that my age was about seven. Ever opportunistic, I rode my new bike up to the top of our street to the empty car park of the Road to Morocco pub,⁴ with the sole intention of ‘bumping into’ the freckly Anita from Bideford Close, whom I knew to be sitting on the wall up there. It was my street she was in, my manor, my radar, my Way, and so surely she would respect my patrol, and admire my bike. Unfortunately, as I rounded the corner into the car park, her first words were …

‘Oh, do you still use stabilisers?’

Ouch. I did still use stabilisers, but unselfconsciously. I was even on the cusp of casting them aside like a cripple’s crutches at Knock, but until that moment I hadn’t regarded them as the mark of a cycling leper. Unfortunately, my memory of this incident does not include any kind of sharp riposte from myself. (What 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.