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...