Episode 2 The star that fell

And the crowd stirred restlessly in the market place. A piece of debris from the television universe had fallen in our midst, bathing the precinct in an eerie showbiz glow....It was Patrick Cargill of sitcoms, sideburns and large sheepdog renown - come to shoot a commercial. But Patrick's televisual sourcery would not prosper today. I won't believe that anywhere other than Rottenbrough, Parick's turn wouldn't have proceeded successfully, but as he paraded before the great ape gathering, there was an ominous rumble and a few minutes later, the longest drought in British history came definitively to an end. Patrick marked everything we were fashion disaster-wise at the time; all things wide and pseudo-Dickensian. Bright colours and pop art were generally more of the Sixties. Only Seventies jet-setters and rock singers really dressed Glam. From Patrick on down, everything was reined in colour-wise to beige, grey, crotch-stain and Bisto. In tandem, the unnecessary expanded and grew. Big cufflinks, bigger sideburns and wristwatches like gongs. Just over the horizon lay Patrick's descent into afternoon nostalgia programmes and panto, but as we scrambled for shelter amidst the downpour, for a moment at least, we were spared the truth of our fates.

Rot Follies

How did Shrapnel fashion us? What were its designs? Seamus saw merry, slamming his chair into Suzie Chewitt's desk in simulated sexual intercourse. Kane interrupted his 'C'mon then!! and 'Skiiilllllll!' blatherings to comment. 'Weisman's the only one of youse 'ard enough to 'ave a go at me....coz e's a maaaaaan!  Kane was somebody I loathed instinctively. I know most people didn't like him much, but on a personal level it really went deep. His ignorance, cunt-like nature and lack of need to do anything about it really rankled. He was kept in check only by the even more pyschotic figure of Shane King, and for the sake of our sanities he should really have have been excused academic duties from the start. Inspired by the burgeoning Punk movement, I penned my first pubescent protest number.

(To the tune of 'Gary Gilmoure's Eyes' by The Adverts)

We hate the National Party

And we hate the National Front

We hate the Labour Party

and we hate the Liberal cunts

We hate the Tory party

And we wish Maggie was dead

I think I'll put my DMs on

And kick her in the head...

Not the most articulate statement, I know, but politics was in a pitiful state by the mid-Seventies. Skinheads came out of nowhere and quickly dominated the streets. Looking back, it's hard to pinpoint a precise moment. The Queen's Silver Jubilee perhaps? But some boys always had crops. Borstal was probably the biggest influence: Violence was always in. The National Front came as part of a trilogy with the New Wave and skateboarding during the first eighteen months at Shrapnel, but Anti-Nazi rallies were a long way from our playground ordeals. In the natural instinct that always made me mistrust Socialist Worker types, the biggest factor was their complete failure to do anything about the fascist elements in our midst, leaving it up to a few brave or crazy boys to speak out, at immense personal risk. The extent to which these zeros were prepared to put themselves on the line was mirrored in the mob-like violence of the miners in the mid-eighties and the mindless anti-American prejudice of NME writers today.

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Episode 1

78 Crash

You were no one ‘til that moment Mervyn Peters. Another pudding basin pleb in second-hand flares and platforms until the day old Lou’s ice-cream van lured you through the school gates into the path of the speeding Ford Corsair. But twelve months on, just see how your stature has grown! Now when teachers mention your name in assembly, we must stare hard at the ground and force ourselves not to laugh. Local papers print pictures of your patched-up return to the old school yard. Some are born great. Others have it driven into them. And I hear no complaints from your quarter. Every time I see your wobbly walk and unnerving, etched on smile, it heads a gaggle of gum-chewing girly admirers, all gone doolally over their mobile cabbage-patch doll.

I’ve never actually spoken to you of course. I feel a little uncomfortable around a legend. I’d rather mock you from a distance. I can’t really see anything to be cheerful about, and I’m sure you felt the same before the Dagenham dustbin rearranged your features, so if you’ve finally seen the light, or found some comfort in the darkness, I’d rather not have the good news beamed in my direction. At least not til I'm clear of Shrapnel Park.

Give us the child

I'd never taken primary school very seriously. To me it was just a way to keep you from indulging in random or accidental acts of destruction while your parents strove to keep the domestic ship afloat, and once you'd proved you weren't a complete menace to society, there didn't seem much point in going, except of course, for the social aspects, and that's where most of us focused our attentions. Yet taking my leave of Turrets in the summer of '76, I knew I was saying goodbye to paradise. No more five minute strolls home at lunchtime, no more friendly, first name terms overseers. When September arrived, a three mile bus ride through enemy school territory would be your daily challenge. A swag-bag of hysteria-inducing homework your reward. On the first day of internment, Mr Flaherty set out our mission: the five year struggle to the top of the Comprehensive School educational tree: followed swiftly by the post-exam boot out of the nest to join the CSE pack milling around below. He meant it kindly, but he really needn't have troubled himself. I wasn't going within a mile of Fords or any Rottenbrough motor trade hell hole. Not in a million years. I'd got my sights set on white collar land where codes of civility undreamed of at Shrapnel Park had somehow taken route. My piss-take of his paternal advice did little to convince him that he wasn't in fact my worst enemy. Those I genuinely feared and detested were my contemporaries, and the superhormonal stew in which we'd been left to simmer for the last five years. After a short signing-on break, they could continue polishing their intimidation rituals at the sweatshop of their choice. I was going somewhere with sociable women office workers. That's if I was going to work at all. For while, those who read newspapers might be persuaded that riots and rising unemployment made career opportunities a rarity. It was a charter for the feckless. The always unreal horror of adulthood might perhaps be staved off a little longer. Further education as a means of postponing the inevitable still hadn't occurred to me. Perhaps it seemed too transparent a form of skiving.To refuse to participate in a system that had never advertised itself as anything other than purgatory seemed defensible. To pretend to be interested in chemistry or domestic science for another couple of years was simply dishonest.

The drought


Two others were swapping the security of Turrets for Shrapnel Park that summer. Seamus Weisman, a gnome-like Wheeler-dealer from Walthamstow, and Solomon Woodlouse, his permanently nervous eager beaver pal. Wandering through Rottenbrough, the spectre of the new term looming before us, we'd catch glimpses of others who, like ourselves, had only recently climbed to the summit of the primary school mountain. How quickly our moment in the sun had passed! That summer had defied predictions on both the sporting and meteorological fronts. As native flesh basted itself in the hottest summer of the century, we raced around the parks and recreation grounds in imitation of our Montreal Olympic heroes. Except this time we won. 1976 saw the first flowering of my infatuation with English athletics. The nobility of these unending no-hopers. Even the hotly tipped. I never believed in them for a second. Their failure was as much stamped upon their charity-funded running kit as it marked our nation's economic decline. All that sweat evaporated though, pooling somewhere above our island nation. Sooner or later, the drought had to break... 

                                                              Off-centre parting