1983 E-Book

Tom Cox

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 379

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Benji is an imaginative eight-year-old boy, living with his parents in a mining village in Nottinghamshire amidst the spoil heaps and chip shops that characterise the last industrially bruised outposts of the Midlands, just before Northern England begins. His family are the eccentric neighbours on a street where all the houses are set on a tilt, slowly subsiding into the excavated space below. Told through Benji's voice and a colourful variety of others over a deeply joyful and strange twelve-month period, it's a story about growing up, the oddness beneath the everyday, what we once believed the future would be, and those times in life when anything seems possible. 1983 is steeped in the distinctive character of a setting far weirder than it might at first appear: from robots living next door, and a school caretaker who is not all he seems, to missing memories and the aliens Benji is certain are trying to abduct him.

Leseprobe

Also by the author

Fiction

Everything Will Swallow You

Villager

Help the Witch

Non-fiction

Notebook

Ring the Hill

21st-Century Yokel

Close Encounters of the Furred Kind

The Good, the Bad and the Furry

Talk to the Tail

Under the Paw

Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia

Nice Jumper

For Jean Penchion and all the other inspirational teachers at Claremont Primary School, Nottingham, during the early 1980s

‘We do not remember childhood – we imagine it. We search for it, in vain, through layers of obscuring dust, and recover some bedraggled shreds of what we think it was.’

Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger

1983

Benji

Do I trust my memory? I think I do. With the caveat of the small liberties it takes with chronology, the sellotaping and soldering it does when my back is turned, its occasional habit of mistaking photos for recalled events, I believe implicitly in its truth, maybe even more than I would if it was more meticulous, more of a tedious pedant. So, with that in mind, this is definitely exactly how and where it begins: a road approximately in the centre of England. Not a significant place, unless you happen to be seven years old and live in a house on it. The year is just waking up. Curtains remain closed against an overnight frost just thick and white enough to momentarily taunt any child peeking excitably out from behind them, hoping for snow.

The house is a semi, hard to heat, small but not tiny, built in the 1930s for a miner and his family. I am in the house, in the larger of its two bedrooms, the one where my mum and dad, who are not miners, sleep. I am sitting on the bed, small (but not tiny) for my age, looking at my reflection in the largest of the three mirrors attached to my mum’s dressing table, and tears are falling down my face.

Downstairs, there is a knock on the front door. My mum opens it. ‘That’s strange,’ I hear her say to my dad. ‘Nobody there. I didn’t even see anyone in the road.’

My dad’s voice: ‘Maybe it was Ethel Troutlock’s ghost.’

Outside, on the front drive, the attractive patterns in the ice sealing the five consecutive puddles leading from the pavement to the doorstep remain unbroken.

The dressing table is a Victorian one, walnut, bought secondhand by my mum for a song. My dad’s 1940s teddy bear – nameless, like most of my own teddies – sits on it, looking half-alive and asinine with his one hooded eye. Beside him are a selection of my mum’s beaded African bangles, which, along with her silk scarves and my dad’s big leather jacket, I frequently like to try on. I am wearing a sweatshirt which says SANDYHILL PRIMARY SCHOOL on the front. Or at least that is what I had thought the writing on the sweatshirt said, until a few minutes ago.

The sweatshirt is a present I recently received for Christmas: not one that my mum and dad viewed as being amongst the day’s more exciting gifts, but one I have been as pleased with as any of the others, until now.

‘Oh dear, what on earth is wrong?’ says my mum, arriving at the threshold of the room.

‘Ruined.’ I choke the word out. ‘It’s ruined. Look!’ I say, pointing at the sweatshirt in the mirror, wondering why she can’t see what I see.

‘It looks lovely to me. Really smart.’

‘The words! Look at the words!’

‘What is wrong with them?’

‘Look! LOO-HCS Y-RA-MIRP LLI-HY-DNAS.’

For a moment, my mum stares at me, bewildered, as if I have begun speaking in tongues.

‘Look!’ I repeat, pointing at the mirror. ‘LOOHCS YRAMIRP LLIHYDNAS! LOOHCS YRAMIRP LLIHYDNAS! Why? I want it to not say that. Why does it say that? Why doesn’t it say what it says?’

Unable to restrain herself, she bursts out laughing, and enfolds me in her arms.

I chuckle in amazement now too, at the recollection, especially with the knowledge that I spent a lot of time reading in the earlier part of my childhood, but I genuinely don’t think I’d owned a top with a visible logo on it until then. My parents enjoyed choosing clothes for me, but most of these were bought at the factory shop near my school, knitted by my grandparents or handed down from the slightly older children of my mum and dad’s friends. The sweatshirt – part of a one-off batch for kids to wear or not wear voluntarily, printed by the school, which was vehemently anti-uniform – was, if not unique, definitely an anomaly for me in having been purchased new, at full price. Those mirrors on the Victorian dressing table were the only ones in the house beside the bathroom mirror – which was still a little too high for me to see myself in – but it still strikes me as curious that a whole week could have elapsed between me receiving this cheaply made yet hallowed item of clothing and first properly checking myself out in it. I loved my school, which was also where my mum was employed as an English As A Second Language teacher, and I would have felt proud to have worn its name across my chest. This further accounts for the level of distress I felt until, sitting beside me on the bed, she gently explained the rules of mirrors and reverse images. The idea of me wearing a sweatshirt saying LOOHCS YRAMIRP LLIHYDNAS amongst all my friends wearing theirs that said SANDYHILL PRIMARY SCHOOL was deeply upsetting, especially when I was looking forward so impatiently to seeing everyone in Mr Stone’s class, and Mr Stone himself, and talking about what we had all got for Christmas, and maybe playing on the new ZX Spectrum computer which Mr Stone might have bought by now with his own money to replace the one that was stolen last half-term when somebody broke into the school.

Was it definitely a knock on the door I’d heard downstairs, not the sound of a doorbell? It was. Several years would pass before we moved to our first doorbelled house. In fact, having gathered little empirical evidence to refute it, at the dawn of 1983 I held the belief that doorbells were something only posh people had on their doors. The door itself, however? That did look quite posh, especially during the warmer months, flanked by the rose and wisteria my mum had planted nearby. Thinking back now, to that house, on that lane, various images quickly arrive, all astoundingly high definition, through the smog of four entire decades: my tyre swing on the apple tree at the top of the back garden, the piss-yellow asbestos garage that my dad told me would kill me if I touched it, the obstinate blocky roofs of the piggery across the road. But what always arrives first is that front door. It had been a naff peeling turquoise when my parents had bought the house, seven years earlier, and the lovely shade of burgundy they chose to replace it seemed like the beginning of a warmth that radiated through the house as soon as you stepped over the threshold. It’s a warmth so prominent in my mind, it tends to blot out memories of the actual temperature of the place which, in winter, four years after my parents had central heating put in, remained extremely chilly. It wasn’t like the doors of other houses on the road. We weren’t like most other people on the road. But at the time, I didn’t quite realise that. I just thought we had a nice front door.

The road was called Stringy Lane, which in my head always seemed a good fit. It had a fibrous sort of quality, stretching out like an umbilical cord from the main body of our village, Tapley Woodhouse, connecting it to a couple of farms, a dozen or so houses, the colliery up the hill, and, finally, Petalford, a neighbouring village which sounded significantly more fragile than it was, being generally perceived as Tapley Woodhouse’s roughneck younger brother. Not that Tapley itself was any gentle flower. Pit country. Undeniable. Smellable on the faintest of breezes. Two of them – one still active, the shafts of the other closed fourteen years earlier, but the headstocks still standing – could be found within less than half a mile of the house and several others not far over the brow of every hill the eye could see.

My dad possessed a medium-strong Nottingham accent, often addressed people as ‘yoth’ – the Nottinghamese for ‘youth’ – and had grown up in a council house only seven miles south of here, but the Tapley Woodhouse natives soon sniffed him and my mum out for outsiders, what with their Penguin paperbacks, art nouveau posters and cosmic jazz albums.

I remember music being ever-present in my childhood but my only recollections of it playing anything like loud are from occasions when we visited my aunts or uncles or my parents’ friends. This apparently was because Barry, the electrician who lived next door, had once heard an Ornette Coleman LP coming through the walls and threatened to kick my dad’s teeth in if he ever played it again.

In a decade of living there, I do not remember seeing one non-white face in the village, with the exception of those belonging to my friends Dalton Mellors, Taj Mukherjee, Paul Hashimoto and Errol Watts when they came up from the city to stay for the weekend. These visits marked me out as different amongst the other kids in the village, along with my home-knitted jumpers and the fact that, although I pronounced Tapley as ‘Tapleh’, I didn’t linger quite as long on the ‘eh’ as they did, with my mouth quite as wide open as theirs. One Monday evening, when I was in the front garden examining some woodlice under a log, directly after Errol had been staying for the weekend, an older boy called Lee Barrowcliffe from down the road stopped his bike at the end of our drive. ‘Been playin’ wi’ coons again?’ he shouted, before riding away, cackling.

School was twelve literal miles, and a few more cultural ones, away, in central Nottingham. My dad drove my mum and me there on his way to other schools where he taught or, if the car broke down, which it often did, my mum and I got the bus: a red double-decker that always smelt overpoweringly of stale cigarette smoke and on whose upper floor I always insisted on sitting, all the way up at the front, so I could pretend I was steering us steadily to our destination from a great and imperious height. I was nearly always pretending I was driving some vehicle or other at this point in my childhood: the muscle cars the male duos in my favourite American TV shows appeared to harmoniously co-own; the Ford Capris and Opel Mantas that broke the speed limit directly outside our living-room window every day; the Morris Marina my dad had bought secondhand to replace the crap half-timbered Morris Traveller he’d bought secondhand before that and the underappreciated Morris Minor he’d bought secondhand before that and the crap Renault 4 he’d bought secondhand before that; and the miniature versions my nan had purchased of them for me from the toy shop in Ironfield, the town a couple of miles to the south where most of our family lived. In my most epic adult fantasy, a recurring dream that I could stop and start at will, I owned a car, which I drove all over the country, purely for the sake of driving it.

Back in the real world, I learned to ride my first bike quickly and impatiently, dispensing with my stabilisers in little more than a weekend, taking grazed shins and knees in my stride and returning instantly to the saddle. My early travels sometimes took me almost a mile from home, which my parents permitted with the proviso that I stayed on the pavement of our lane and entirely away from other arterial roads. Already frustrated by the limitations of even this, I had begun to fold the bike’s mudguards against its tyres in order to produce a noise that allowed me to fantasise I was at the helm of a far more powerful machine that could take me to distant places, such as my nan’s house in Ironfield, or the farm in Hazzard County where Bo and Luke Duke lived on TV with their cousin Daisy and uncle Jesse.

Christmas had been exciting, especially the day itself and Boxing Day at my aunt and uncle’s, when everyone had sprayed their hair with some pink hairspray my cousin Donna had received, then posed together for a family photograph, but to my mind that had been quite a while ago and every one of the seven days since then had been most centrally characterised by the fact that it wasn’t Christmas. For me, school could not restart quickly enough. As a rurally situated only child, however, I was adept at amusing myself, especially in the six months since I’d become the proud owner of a bike. Typically, on one of my adventures I would turn left out of the driveaway and head north, past Ethel Troutlock’s house, which actually wasn’t anyone’s house now Ethel had died, then past the Chudleys’, then left up the unmetalled pit road. Today, wearing my once-again untainted Sandyhill Primary School sweatshirt and a couple of other layers to protect me from the cold, even though I wasn’t nesh like my cousin Donna said I was, I took my usual route, disembarking about halfway between the main road and the colliery at the foot of the gob pile and hiding my bike in the undergrowth. That was what my dad called it, ‘the gob pile’, but my mum said the proper name for it was a spoil heap. Until she’d told me that, I’d thought it was just a normal hill, but she said it wasn’t like real hills because it hadn’t been there forever and didn’t have nice stuff inside it like soil and worms and seeds but instead contained all the things from the pit that weren’t coal and nobody had any use for. Behind the mine, and our house, there was a much larger gob pile. If you used your imagination, this second, more commanding gob pile made it seem in a way like we were living in the Peak District, where my mum and dad often dragged me on walks at weekends, except the gob pile didn’t have any ruined barns or rocks or stone crosses on it like the hills in the Peak District. There were trees and bushes on the smaller pile but there wasn’t much of anything on the bigger one, especially the back of it, which was a vast and quiet place that I couldn’t have reached unless I’d abandoned my bike, climbed a big fence at the back of the colliery, or trespassed across the farm fields behind our house, which contained a scary horse that my dad told me not to mess with.

It was in this quiet spot on the back of the bigger gob pile, I had decided, where the alien spaceship would land.

I was always finding interesting things around the base of the smaller gob pile when I played there: old car seats and bar stools and mattresses and saucepans and once even a car registration plate. I didn’t understand why people left them there when there was a tip with lots of room for them only a short distance away in Ironfield, but some of the things came in amazingly useful for the work I was doing in a spinney towards the far side of the gob pile. One night quite a long time ago I’d not been able to sleep and went downstairs for a drink of lemon squash and saw my mum and dad watching a programme on TV about a war that was going to take place quite soon. This war wasn’t going to be like the other wars that had happened and wouldn’t have soldiers and tanks, but when it was over the only people alive would be the ones who had built shelters for themselves. I didn’t see all of the programme because after a few minutes my mum and dad realised I was there in the doorway and told me that it wasn’t for children and that I should go to bed, but I saw enough to learn that the best shelters had walls made of old mattresses, ceilings made of doors, bags of sand and lots of tinned food. The war hadn’t happened yet, but I was glad to know that when it did I would be protected by my shelter, which had all the things it was supposed to have in it. I might even let my mum and dad stay in it too when the war happened, if they were nice to me, but I hadn’t told them, or anyone else, about it because it was a secret. Every time I left the shelter I was careful to cover it up with plenty of leaves and branches so nobody would know it was there. No one ever suspected anything, and I assembled my provisions gradually, so if my mum noticed there was one can of baked beans or rice pudding fewer than she thought she’d bought from the Co-op, it would seem insignificant, and she could blame the mistake on the holes in her busy mind. The Figshaws, who lived across the road, also did not seem to have been missing the bag of sand I had appropriated from their front drive and laboriously dragged up the pit road under the cover of dusk.

After checking on the shelter and seeing that it was just how I’d left it last week, I climbed to the summit of the gob pile and surveyed the landscape. From here, I could see everything I needed to, with the exception of that secret unexplored part of the bigger gob pile where the spaceship was going to dock, or might even have already docked. To the immediate west there were the huge functioning headstocks of the Naghill Colliery, to the south the defunct ones of the old Tapley Woodhouse pit – both of which looked like something from another planet, which I decided would probably make the aliens feel comfortable and even more likely to land their spaceship nearby. Between the headstocks were the farm fields, where I could see the scary horse eating from its trough. Panning around to the north east from there, there was the big pond across the road from our house, the farm where Mandy and Kate Figshaw and their mum and dad lived and its adjoining half-built piggery, and, right at the top of Stringy Lane where it intersected with the road to Ironfield, the bus stop and the Miners’ Welfare. Swinging my line of vision back around to Petalford, I could see Lee Barrowcliffe making his way down the pit lane on his bike, so I darted into the trees until he was gone.

I felt pleased with the architectural merits of my shelter and proud that I had done the work all myself, without any help or advice. Last year, for my seventh birthday, my mum and dad had bought me some balsa wood and I’d tried to make a fully functioning two-seater aeroplane for me and my nan to go flying in and that had not been a success, but this was a much better effort. Danny McNulty from school had told me that his mum had said that when the big war came the only survivors would be cockroaches, because of something called radiation, and his mum knew lots about wars because she’d camped at Greenham Common, where they stored what Danny called ‘big fuck-off missiles’. But Danny wasn’t always as right about things as he thought he was. Last month he’d told me that Santa didn’t exist, so on Christmas Eve I’d stayed up almost all night to find out if he was lying and, magically, when I woke up, my stocking had some satsumas, a pair of fingerless gloves, a Beano and the latest issue of Smash Hits magazine in it. Also, I didn’t see how radiation could possibly get into my shelter when I’d built it so well, even adding, with the help of my mum’s gardening trowel, a kind of sunken conversation-pit area in the middle to allow me to huddle further still from harm.

When I was sure there was no longer any danger of an encounter with Lee Barrowcliffe, I collected my bike from the bottom of the gob pile and rode back home. Mr and Mrs Chudley were in their front garden, which in a few weeks would be a riot of daffodils. As I cycled past, Mr Chudley asked me if I was practising for the Tour de France. I squeezed the brakes and asked him what the Tour de France was and Mr Chudley said it was a very big and long bike race. Mrs Chudley nodded, to reassure me this was correct. Both Mr and Mrs Chudley were wearing white boiler suits stained with this winter’s soil and last summer’s pollen. Sometimes I went into their house for a cup of tea but decided not to today. Their tea was always extremely strong, but not as strong as my nan’s, which everyone knew was the strongest tea in Nottinghamshire, and probably the entire country.

I liked the smell of Mr and Mrs Chudley’s house, which was a combination of pipe smoke and compost and gas-fire gas, but it was also full of old clocks and paintings and ancient deranged-looking porcelain dogs and it scared me a little bit. Also, the only biscuits they ever had were digestives, which was a crushing disappointment. Unlike my mum and dad, the Chudleys never interrupted each other when they spoke, as if everything they said had already been rehearsed and they always agreed on everything. Once, while Mr Chudley nodded, Mrs Chudley had told me about some boys who were buried in the cemetery up at Petalford: one, my exact age, who had died from swallowing chewing gum (I had been chewing some Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit at the time the Chudleys were telling me this), and the others, only a little bit older, who had died in a fire in the Naghill Colliery. I had asked my dad if it was true about the fire and he said it was, but it had happened a hundred years ago, which was a detail that Mrs Chudley had omitted. I wondered if Mrs Chudley and Mr Chudley would be buried in the cemetery soon too, but tried not to think about it because I liked them a lot. Also, even though they were very old, they were not as old as Ethel Troutlock had been when she died. When my dad told me Ethel had died, and I told my dad I was worried about dying too, he had told me that, even though Ethel knew it was about to happen to her, she had laughed about it and told him that when she did die, he could chuck her in the pond across the road and she wouldn’t mind. I was fairly sure that my dad hadn’t followed Ethel Troutlock’s instructions, but every time I rode past the pond, such as right now, I always thought of Ethel Troutlock as being under the water and got the clear image of my dad walking over there with Ethel Troutlock slung over his shoulder, lifeless but with a contented grin on her papery, bespectacled face.

When I got home, my mum and dad were both painting. My mum was painting the kitchen wall and my dad was upstairs with a much smaller brush, painting some paper. On the table in front of him were two cold almost-full cups of instant coffee and a photo my mum had taken of twenty-seven sheep in the snow in front of a barn in Derbyshire. The coffee in the cups was black because my dad hated milk, ever since he’d had a job delivering it from the back of a scooter.

When they weren’t out at work, my mum and dad were often painting. My dad painted walls too, but in a different way to how my mum did. In the flat in Nottingham where they used to live before I was born, he’d painted a nude lady who was totally blue and didn’t have a face whose name I thought I’d heard my dad say was Matisse and on my bedroom wall, when I was very little, he’d painted some of the Mr Men, Winnie the Pooh and Rupert the Bear, then, last year, when I’d become too grown-up to have Mr Men, Winnie the Pooh and Rupert the Bear on my wall anymore, he painted the Bash Street Kids and Minnie the Minx from The Beano over them. This was his early Christmas present to me but also to himself. I knew my dad got sad sometimes, even though nobody talked to me about it, but painting made him feel better. While he painted, he usually listened to the radio, but not too loud, in case Barry next door came over and hit him in the teeth with his fist. Sometimes the radio played The Archers, which made my dad swear sometimes and had a theme tune that made you think lots of fast and exciting things would happen in it even though nothing ever did. Other times it was the news, or the shipping forecast, which I didn’t understand but made me think of the sea as a deep and dark and frightening place of complex and nightmareish weather, very different to what I’d seen when I’d crossed the Channel on a ferry with my parents.

I went into the kitchen and made myself a glass of lemon squash. My mum asked me not to put the glass down on a patchwork quilt she’d been making. I worked the arm on the metal coffee grinder while I talked to her, even though there were no coffee beans in it. She had paint in her hair and on her dungarees and there was the smell of crumble, made with the last of autumn’s apples, baking in the oven. I asked her if I could enter the Tour de France and she said I’d probably have to wait a couple of years.

School finally began again two days later, and the big news was that over the holiday Taj Mukherjee’s mum had bitten her boyfriend’s willy and he’d had to go to hospital to get it repaired. Jess Bonner and Paul Hashimoto and I couldn’t understand why anyone would bite someone’s willy, especially hard enough to injure it, and Taj Mukherjee said he wasn’t sure either, but Danny McNulty said he knew about these things and women often bit men’s willies when they were especially angry with them. Last year in Miss Buttons’ class, Miss Buttons had sat us all down and told us that she wanted all the talk about willies and johnnies to stop, but Mr Stone heard us talking about Taj Mukherjee’s mum’s boyfriend’s willy and didn’t tell us off. I told Taj and Danny McNulty and Jess Bonner about part of a magazine which had been ripped and left in the trees on the gob pile which was a photo of a man’s willy quite close to a woman’s face and said that maybe she was about to bite it, too. Then we played on the new ZX Spectrum Mr Stone had bought for the class with his own money to replace the one that was stolen, which was especially exciting for all of us, since none of our parents could afford to buy us our own ZX Spectrums. We had all enjoyed being in Miss Buttons’ class but agreed that Mr Stone’s was the best class ever to be in.

I used to view my memory as a sealed metal box of images in my mind. In reality it’s a colony of ants, off doing their own thing in a back room while I am busy elsewhere. Also, as everyone knows, sometimes you think an ant is just an ant, but it’s actually a flying ant, waiting to sprout wings. Why do I have a recollection of Taj Mukherjee’s mum’s boyfriend returning from hospital, limping from a car, along a dogshit-flecked pavement, up to the Mukherjees’ front door? Perhaps it is because that story Taj told is so fertile, it inevitably tends to breed other images in the mind to back it up. But that particular memory is false: I definitely did not see Taj’s mum’s boyfriend limping or even walking anywhere after his visit to hospital. I’m not sure I met Taj’s mum’s boyfriend, even though I certainly met Taj’s mum several times, and visited their house: a redbrick Victorian terrace on Priory Drive which was the closest to school of any of my friends’ houses.

The street was one I knew well as it was also where my mum and dad’s best friends, Deborah and Richard Fennel, lived with their daughter Jane, who – unlike many children a few years my senior – never appeared even for a second to resent being left in my company, and had become a de facto big sister for me, not to mention font of stationery wisdom and music guru, having introduced me – via her bedroom and the shiny, thrilling pages of Smash Hits magazine – to the Teardrop Explodes, the Human League, Echo & the Bunnymen, ABC’s Lexicon of Love album and a variety of excellent pens. I loved going to see Deborah and Richard and Jane, not just because of Jane’s coloured fineliners and burgeoning record collection, but because funny things always seemed to happen to them. Once when we went on holiday with them in the Forest of Bowland, they took off for a walk in the snow and returned home twenty minutes later being trailed by a flock of sheep, three of which followed them into the kitchen of the cottage where we were staying. This, I sometimes think, was the same holiday when Richard sat in a chair that was hanging from the ceiling and broke it, but that was in fact a different holiday. Another time, they drove more than 200 miles with a loaf of bread on the roof of their Ford Escort. Deborah read the Beano every week, even though she was nearly thirtysix. Like me and my nan and my cousin Donna, she was also a member of the Dennis the Menace fanclub, which meant she possessed a googly-eyed badge in the image of his dog, Gnasher.

The Fennels’ house had a smell that I liked, a wholesome one not totally unlike the health store on Mansfield Road where my mum scooped lentils and beans out of big sacks to take home, but also not a foody smell. It is quite hard to pinpoint; I think the closest I can come is to say that it wasn’t quite of towels but that I thought of it as being unequivocally under the heading ‘Towels’. The smell could also be faintly detected on the hand-me-down jumpers and t-shirts of Jane’s that I received. Taj’s house smelt not dissimilar. Perhaps it was unique to buildings on Priory Road between 1978 and 1986 because I don’t remember smelling it before then and haven’t smelt it since

I apologise. Am I going too fast? Are there too many people? Kids tend to know a lot of kids. It happens. They go to school and they inevitably meet them there. But, in case it helps, a brief recap, plus some extra facts:

Lee Barrowcliffe: lived down the road, rode his bike along the pit road a lot, didn’t like that I had Black friends, once beheaded my Rupert the Bear teddy.

Dalton Mellors: stayed at my house a bit, once held the coach up with me by getting lost in the woods on a trip to Newstead Abbey, had moved schools by now, briefly had scabies. Lee Barrowcliffe didn’t approve of me playing with him because he was Black.

Errol Watts: stayed at my house a lot, pulled loads of excellent faces that made us all laugh, lived in a house where there was a big trunk with lots of shoes in it, had a nice adoptive mum who once woke me up at his house to reassure me that even though I was in a strange place, there was no need to worry and I could soon have some breakfast, co-owned not one but two fully operational space hoppers with his three siblings. Lee Barrowcliffe probably didn’t approve of me playing with him because he was Black.

Jess Bonner (he doesn’t play a huge part here): wore a lot of stripy tops, always had an asthma inhaler in his hand, didn’t understand why a woman would want to bite a man’s willy, lived about a mile from school in Mapperley Park.

Paul Hashimoto: didn’t understand why a woman would want to bite a man’s willy, had a Betamax video player, had really nice hair that I used to like to twiddle in class before I gradually grew out of the habit.

Taj Mukherjee: lived on Priory Drive near school, smelt of something that was a bit like towels but wasn’t towels, was taller than he seemed, had a mum who bit her boyfriend’s willy, possibly but not definitely because she was angry.

Danny McNulty: knew lots of stuff about life and the galaxy as a whole, had long ginger hair, always brought the thickest brown bread to school, had a mum who had protested the big fuck-off missiles at Greenham Common.

Jane Fennel: transcendental guru of edgy electropop and themed notepads, was already heavily into The Teardrop Explodes before her ninth birthday, all-round lovely person, had an even more reassuring smell than Taj Mukherjee.

My cousin Donna: owned some pink hairspray, used to wrestle me to the floor and pin my legs behind my head when grown-ups weren’t around, had all the best bright clothes and toys, sometimes stole Jane Fennel from me and talked about girl stuff I didn’t understand, was well known to get irrationally and mysteriously upset when she heard people use the phrase ‘in the distance’.

As we speak right now, I am happy because I am looking at a photo taken outside Sandyhill Primary School about eight months before the events I have been describing on these pages: spring 1982, I would guess, although the clothes in it are what many people would probably now think of as more redolent of spring 1979. The photo features a total of twenty-six children – my classmates and me – lined up in three rows in front of a wall covered in legal, encouraged graffiti. I am on the back row in light blue dungarees, being strangled firmly but unperilously by a boy called Aseef who is wearing a tank top boasting a striking geometric pattern reminiscent of the TV Test Card. On my other flank is Errol, who is pulling his customary, painstakingly calibrated googly-eye face, therefore actually does look like he is being strangled by someone, even though the only people touching him – me, and, on the other side of him, a miniature blonde hedonist biker named Barnaby Clough – appear to be doing so quite gently.

On the second row can be found Holly Potter, who by my seventh birthday I had come to think of as very pretty but a little dangerous and would think of in a not dissimilar way eleven years later when I encountered her smoking in the corner of a nightclub down by the Nottingham & Beeston Canal. Taj is two boys to Aseef’s right and looks like he has run screaming into the shot from a house on the opposite side of the city where he has briefly abandoned a party that he now wants us all to attend. I don’t remember the gawky, tall kid on the far right of the second row with the black flares, polyester shirt and diamond sweater but I very much want to. Danny McNulty is front right, kneeling, grinning, his hair not yet quite grown to the length that made us start calling him ‘Neil’ after the peace-loving hippie on The Young Ones, the most anarchic new TV show of the time. His arm is around Miss Buttons’ daughter Emma, who I hung around with a lot directly after school and who, perhaps without properly realising it at the time, I always felt, if push came to shove, and no adults happened to be available, could herself more than adequately take over and steer the class in a direction beneficial to our collective future. If you look carefully, you can see that in her left hand Emma is holding a kaleidoscope.

Not everyone is here. Is that Paul Hashimoto’s shiny, beautiful jet-black hair I can see hiding in the second row? Perhaps, but I think not. Where is Jess Bonner and his asthma inhaler? Where is Penelope Myles and the blonde boy whose name currently escapes me who always seemed to trail worriedly in her wake like a lilliputian ecclesiastical husband? I don’t know. But nobody here looks unhappy, or shepherded, or reluctant. There’s so much energy and colour in evidence. The question is not so much ‘Were we wearing school uniforms?’ as ‘Did we even know what school uniforms were?’ The photo is an explosion of colour and life: a small, happy, egalitarian middle-English riot.

That small riot was a result of a moment in history in a particular kind of city, at a particular time in the evolution of pre-teen education, with a particular kind of aroma wafting around that was half post-punk, half post-hippie. But it was also the result of a particular collection of people chosen by another person, and all those people’s visions working in harmony under – actually, no, that’s not correct: not under, alongside – the authority of that person’s vision. Not a vision under any official educational banner – and definitely not one of those self-consciously ‘alternative’ schools – but a vision nonetheless.

Sandyhill’s headmistress, Evelyn Wishbone, saw her position less as a job and more as an entire philosophy: the creation of an atmosphere of child-centred learning, encompassing freedom and passion and fun. So, just as kids like me looked forward to going to Sandyhill every day, relished our Towards Mathematics textbooks (I voluntarily finished mine five weeks ahead of schedule, and Maths was one of my least favourite subjects) and impromptu pottery workshops almost as much as we relished the free time we were given to play Dungeons & Dragons or reenact scenes from popular anarchist sitcoms we were supposedly too young to appreciate, teachers like my mum and Miss Buttons enjoyed the freedom they had to teach what they wanted to teach, and decorate classrooms the way they wanted to decorate classrooms.

While they stayed long after home time wielding their staple guns and putting more love into their jobs, Emma and I amused ourselves in the building’s vast echoey corridors and stone stairwells, telling each other ghost stories related to its past as a hospital during the First World War. I wonder: does Emma, like me, now look for elements of that building when she is seeking a house to move to? Does she try to find its high ceilings, its industrial radiators, the covered walkway leading to its nursery, the dented oak herringbone floor of the hall where a screening of Watership Down via the school projector terrified the life out of us? Does she too, when back in Nottingham city centre, find herself leaving her family to shop while she nips off to do what she calls ‘getting a few things’, then set off on a secret pilgrimage of the extensive oeuvre of the building’s architect, beginning in the Lace Market and ending at the fitness club that now occupies half of the city’s majestic original railway station?

It was about two weeks into January, one of these late afternoons in school, alone with Emma, that I told her my biggest secret.

‘I’m from another planet.’

We were in Mrs Callidora’s classroom at the time – a youthful-looking teacher, who many children cheekily spoke to using her first name, Georgina – which was on the first floor. The evenings were already perceptibly longer than they had been a few weeks ago, the last of the day’s sun was peeking over the redbrick terraces of Priory Drive where Taj Mukherjee’s mum and Taj Mukherjee’s mum’s boyfriend were nursing his penis back to health, and I was sitting warming my bottom on one of the gigantic heating pipes beneath the window ledge. Emma was in Mrs Callidora’s chair, which felt somehow entirely normal and correct. I hadn’t really been intending to say anything, but I’d not told anyone yet, and Emma seemed trustworthy, and it just sort of hopped out of my mouth. She took the news calmly, chewing it over for a few seconds before she spoke, and examining the kaleidoscope in her hand. She seemed distracted.

‘Which one?’

‘Which what?’

‘Planet.’

‘I don’t know. I just know it’s true.’

‘Oh. But I was wondering, because I like Saturn. It’s a very interesting planet. It has rings and several dozen moons and you can stuff the Earth into it 760 times.’

‘I don’t think it’s that one, or one of the other ones you would have heard of.’

‘Oh, ok. That’s a shame.’

‘Do you promise you won’t tell anyone?’

‘Ok, I promise.’

The following Saturday, quite early in the morning, my mum and dad and I travelled into Nottingham city centre in the car. My dad parked in the Victoria Centre’s underground car park, right at the far end, directly beneath Safeway supermarket, in a part that he seemed to prefer, which was strikingly dark, with stained walls that looked like they’d been hewn from pure coal. We walked back to the main part of the car park and took the lift, which brought us out in Jessop’s department store, which was full of intriguing lights and buttons, including the ones on the lift itself. The most intriguing lights of all were in the café at the top, but we never went in there because my mum and dad said the food was too expensive. On the way to WHSmith I climbed inside the metal grasshopper, which, like the metal snake on the other side, had been in the Victoria Centre for as long as I could remember, and often appeared in my nightmares in a portentous way, but not as portentous as the wooden frog and caterpillar in the Broadmarsh Centre, on the other side of the city, which I genuinely believed would swallow me forever if I climbed into them.

My dad asked my mum if she had the house keys and reminded her not to drop them, because if she did, someone would know they were the keys to our house and burgle it, even though it was eleven and three quarter miles away and the burglar would have to try the keys in thousands of other houses before they reached it. After that my mum and dad said they would split up, which worried me for a moment because their friends Sheila and John had split up then never seen each other again, but then I realised that they only meant for two hours, until they’d finished their shopping. I went to Sainsbury’s in the Broadmarsh Centre with my mum and we ate bread while she did the rest of the food shopping, then paid for the empty packet of bread, then she tried on some boots and a skirt in a shop called Chelsea Girl which, like all women’s clothes shops, seemed much more interesting than men’s clothes shops, but not as interesting as it had been a year or two earlier, when, like everything, it had been darker but more colourful and more mysterious and full of women with fringes. On the way back to the car, my mum and dad went to Habitat, the furniture shop, and talked about some of the things they’d like to buy if they could afford them. In the car, my mum told me that we were going on holiday next month, in a county called Cumberland. ‘Technically it’s called Cumbria now – they changed it a few years ago,’ said my dad. ‘Oooh, thank you, sir. Not many of us left!’

‘Not many of us left!’ was what my dad said when he was driving the car and anyone else driving a car did something kind. When he said it, I always assumed that perhaps he already knew the person driving the other car; maybe they had worked together once, in the fish market or one of the schools where my dad had been a teacher, or last year when he’d become a postman and then driven the milk scooter. I then wondered why there used to be more people like that person and my dad. What had happened, to make them begin to die out? The phrase was – along with my experiences of travelling in my paternal granddad’s car – something which formed a picture of an earlier, more selfless age of traffic in my mind, where everyone waved to each other from their cars with gloved hands, stopping from time to time to present their contemporaries with bouquets of flowers or hot drinks from Thermos flasks like the one my dad’s mum and dad always took with them on their walks in the Peak District. What was so wrong with the new kind of drivers? What had they done to ruin everything? At the time, my mum was learning to drive. Was she part of the problem, too? I wondered.

We took a long route home, so long that it wasn’t a route home at all, past a house in Derbyshire that was for sale, which my dad wanted to look at the outside of, but which he told me wasn’t going to be our new house because it was well out of our price range. I was glad it wasn’t going to be our new house, because it was even further from school than where we lived now and there was a cemetery behind the garden, and some of the graves were scarily near the back fence. In the car after that I told my mum and dad that the other day my cousin Donna had zipped me into a sleeping bag and briefly shut me in her walk-in cupboard because I’d annoyed her by saying ‘in the distance’ over and over again and my mum said I’d probably brought my problems on myself.