Idiot Child.
Mad Family.

Stevenage

A New Town

Tell anyone you are from Stevenage, and you are likely to encounter one of two reactions.

One is an uncomprehending blank stare. This is the response you get from foreigners. And from the middle-class Birkenstock and Almond Milk brigade to whom a council estate is a place to house cheap cleaning staff and moped riding robbery gangs.

From those who have heard of the town, the response tends to be a slight step backwards and an involuntarily fumble in their pockets to make sure their wallet is still there. Such is the reputation of the town.

The place of my birth has become a cliché of social toxicity. Teenage girls pushing double-buggies to the benefits office to complain about the lack of support from any of the fathers of their children. Gangs of feral youths wandering about in broad daylight stealing anything that isn’t nailed down. And padlocked. Whole streets of the unemployed and the unemployable spending their days smoking booze-cruise fags and swilling cheap, strong lager while watching daytime TV on wide-screen tellies of dubious provenance.

I’ve heard them all.

Stevenage's most famous son, multiple Formula One World Champion Lewis Hamilton – for long a shining light and object of pride for those of us raised in the town – has mentioned his upbringing there very little. And when he did it was in an interview in the US during which he recalled how he had worked hard to “escape from the slums of Stevenage”.

There are no slums in Stevenage. Never have been. And Hamilton was not even raised in one of the more needy parts of the town. He lived in a very nice area, with modern houses, most privately owned. It suited him to invent a kind of Dickensian nightmare estate in order, one assumes, to make even more miraculous his admittedly amazing achievements, but by doing this, he perpetuated a view of my home town as a kind of sepia-tinted hellhole of barefoot children, poverty and desperation that was not, is not, deserved.

Stevenage reaction to his use of the term was so strong, and still rankles today, because Stevenage was not created with cynicism or greed, but with optimism and positivity. It was conceived and designed to provide an escape from precisely the kind of Victorian era deprivation that the term “slum” invokes.

Society in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War was in a precarious position. Having fought a long war and made sacrifices in both living conditions and, in far too many cases, actual lives, the working classes were not going to simply tug their forelocks and return to the factories, gratefully accepting whatever was offered by a privileged ruling class. They demanded change. Before the war was even over, they turned away from Winston Churchill, the victorious leader and icon, and instead elected a reformist socialist Labour government under Clement Atlee.

This new government rapidly embarked on such a profound and immense programme of modernisation and social re-ordering that, even now, its scope is scarcely believable. Any politician suggesting such breadth of change in such a short time now would be laughed at in the street and sidelined as a lunatic.

But they not only attempted it, they largely achieved what they set out to do.

They implemented the first National Health Service, providing healthcare based on citizenship, not the ability to pay, funded by a weekly contribution scheme from all working people. So welcome was this scheme, and so necessary, that in its first year the NHS treated more than 8.5 million people for dental work alone, and supplied more than 5 million pairs of spectacles.

The NHS quickly became something of which most people were immensely proud, as well as grateful.

Most people, that is, apart from the British Medical Association, the body which represents doctors and consultants, who worried their earnings would fall to the kind of distressed level where they may no longer even be able to afford a new Rolls Royce every three years.

Their fear was that the NHS would force them to become mere employees, and they would have to wave goodbye to their lucrative private practices where they were free to charge patients what they judged they could afford, and where their pristine Harley Street waiting rooms were not sullied by working class slobs dirtying up the carpets with their hobnail boots and coughing all over the Canaletto.

They need not have worried unduly. To get them on board, the government was forced into a corner, eventually allowing them to continue in their private practices as well as working within the NHS, for which they were handsomely remunerated. So handsomely, in fact, that Nye Bevan - the effective founder and designer of the NHS - described the deal as “stuffing their mouths with gold”.

But the implementation of the world’s first national health service - free at the point of delivery and a model for many around the world - was just one item on the government’s to-do list.

They also introduced a comprehensive Welfare State, with automatic payment and financial support for sickness, maternity and unemployment, and protection enshrined in law from the excesses and greed of unscrupulous employers.

They launched a State Pension Scheme, so all people over pensionable age received a weekly payment, allowing them to live a decent life, to feed themselves, to keep warm in winter, to pay the rent – an automatic payment based on age, not social position or influence or wealth.

No longer would the sick, the vulnerable, the abandoned, be left to starve or be forced to beg for support or funds for healthcare from the worthies and well-to-do volunteers on the boards of church and philanthropic charities.

As if this convulsive change were not enough, they also instigated the nationalisation of many public utilities, from coal to electricity, steel, gas, water and the railways. The idea that the necessities of life would rest in private hands where monopolies could hold the country to ransom for the benefit of rich shareholders was no longer blindly accepted as the natural order.

Indeed, in the lifetime of the Atlee government, one fifth of the entire economy was bought effectively under state control.

At the same time as remodelling virtually every aspect of how Britain worked, the government also had to deal with the nation’s new and hugely reduced position in the world order. Gone was the Empire, and the means to maintain it. One quarter of the world’s surface no longer sat under the British flag. The Empire had been lost, sacrificed to fund the fight against despotism on the battlefields of Europe, Africa and Asia, and on the oceans of the world. The country was effectively broke.

The Empire was insupportable. The nation’s wealth, not to mention its vitality and its youth, had been spent on a more altruistic exercise – contributing to free the world of Nazism. It was simply no longer possible to govern and manage an empire on which “the sun never sets”.

So independence was granted – as a matter of necessity – to India and Pakistan, Burma, Ceylon and Jordan.

The USA – the great beneficiary of the war – was in an entirely different position. A huge population in a nation replete with natural resources, it had rapidly become the armoury of the free world, with manufacturing facilities safely beyond the range of the bombers of the Germans and Japanese. Factories were built or expanded or repurposed in order to turn out rifles, guns, tanks, food parcels, uniforms, boots and aeroplanes in seemingly limitless quantities.

Shipyards were expanded and improved to manufacture vessels in quantities and at speeds never before imagined, let alone seen.

By the last days of the war, US Shipyards could build a Liberty Ship – a 10,000 ton cargo vessel - in just 50 days. Think of that. From a bare dry dock and a pile of sheet metal and rivets, to a fully built, fully fitted out, ready to sail 440 foot long cargo ship. In 50 days. This was manufacturing prowess, efficiency and dominance unprecedented in history.

When the war was over, US factories and its infrastructure were completely intact and undamaged. So they simply stopped making tanks and started making toasters and fridges and Chevrolets.

It was a nation running at breakneck speed in manufacturing terms, its competitors crippled or ruined, in an almost perfect storm of commercial growth.

There was a job for everyone. People in Chevrolet factories earned a good wage in stable employment, supplying markets filled with pent up demand. With their wages, they could buy the toasters and fridges that the workers in toaster and fridge factories made. Who were also paid good wages, because their products were in demand. So they could, in turn, afford to buy Chevrolets. John Maynard Keynes would have been jumping up and down, excitedly pointing at the factories and shouting at passers-by “There…look…I told you so…”

The post-war US economy hit the ground not just running, but sprinting.

In Europe, it was a different story.

One of the primary battlefields of the war,it was smashed to pieces. Much of its infrastructure destroyed. There were very few factories left standing to make Chevrolets or toasters.

Austerity measures continued. Even at the height of the war, when the management of resources was a matter of survival, not luxury, bread was never rationed. Presumably not just for nutritional reasons, but for the morale-sapping effect of making people queue and provide tickets to qualify to buy this most fundamental and ancient of foodstuffs. Yet after the war was won, in 1946, bread was rationed for the first time in Britain, and stayed that way for two years.

Times were tough. Really tough.

But the government was determined to create a better country for the working class.

So, not content with changing how the entire structure of society was organised, the new government also determined that surviving in some unsanitary and cramped hovel at the mercy of an unscrupulous landlord, or living on your nerves in accommodation tied to an insecure job, was no longer acceptable. There were instead to be homes for returning heroes. New, clean, decent dwellings, built and owned by the state, and provided for the people at stable, reasonable and subsidised rents.

But this would take money. Lots of it.

Fortunately, in an almost unbelievable act of charity that is unlikely ever to be repeated, the US launched The Marshall Plan and gave billions of dollars to many European nations - including their erstwhile enemeies - in both long-term soft loans and straightforward gifts in order to rebuild their shattered countries.

The British government unleashed a positive orgy of building, renovation and development to create thousands and thousands of new homes to house the families who would take Britain forward into the future. Local authorities were given new rights and responsibilities, and told to build houses. Lots of them. As well as wholesale clearance and rebuilding in the cities, entire towns were conceived and built where none existed before. “New Towns”.

The New Towns took the idea of the earlier quaint and faintly Arts and Crafts "Garden City", and simply wrote it much larger and more utilitarian. Out went the delicate Lutyens designs, the hipped roofs and clay tiles, the bay windows, decorative woodwork and Georgian panes, the leaded glass windows and timber porches of Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City. In came whole estates of cloned, robust, squat, solid houses in long terraces with concrete floors and metal framed windows.

During the term of Atlee’s government, four out of five of all houses constructed were these "council" properties - conceived, designed, built and provided for the working classes.

Between 1945 and 1951, over one million new homes were constructed. For people just like my mum and dad.

For my parents, crammed into a privately rented bedsit in Muswell Hill in London with nothing but a radio, a one bar electric fire and a Baby Belling cooker, and no escape from the screaming of their first child, the idea of having their own home was an unreachable dream. Something for the rich. And then they were told about Stevenage New Town.

Stevenage offered a new start for thousands of young families struggling to survive in post-war London. Set in the verdant countryside of Hertfordshire, 40 miles to the north of the London, it was a planned community of modern, clean, neat houses on carefully laid out estates, each one with dedicated open spaces, shops and parks. Busy roads in a network around the town were linked with roundabouts rather than traffic lights, and separated from the houses by wide pavements and grass verges.

The new factories, springing up on a monthly basis as companies flocked to the town to take advantage of beneficial rents and rates, offering employment to one and all, were in an entirely separate industrial area, their noise and fumes and congestion far away from the residential neighbourhoods.

It was a stroke of genius.

Planning for leisure time for the new residents of the town was key to creating the community too. Every neighbourhood got its own church, its own shopping parade – the trades of which were controlled to provide a greengrocer, a supermarket, a newsagent, a chemist and maybe a chip shop. Each neighbourhood had its own doctor’s surgery, and its own Community Centre where the WI could hold jumble sales and the Philatelists Association could talk stamps.

There were Adventure Playgrounds for the kids, parks and huge wooded areas left undeveloped within the town boundaries, so kids could play for hours in a natural healthy environment away from the roads and traffic.

So well considered were the needs of both employers and employees, that the town had a huge network of cycle tracks and underpasses alongside the major roads, going from each neighbourhood to the Industrial Area, so workers could cycle to work without once straying onto a road, or indeed needing a car.

At the heart of it all was the Town Centre. In a hugely innovative measure, the enormous central shopping area of the town was completely pedestrianised and surrounded by car parks. The nation’s biggest retailers were all there, from Woolworths to Fine Fare and the Co-Op, and all set around paved piazzas with sculptures, artwork, cutting-edge street furniture, benches and lighting. It must have been jaw-dropping for those seeing it for the first time. Like those artist's impressions of the “The Town of the Future” in schoolbooks come to life. The hover boots and flying cars were missiing, but surely they could not be that far off

The idea worked like a charm.

Huge technology companies, engineering works, packaging giants and global chemical businesses all flocked to the town.

Stevenage offered opportunity, privacy, space, security and leisure of a kind unimagined by working class people before these wonderful places were conceived and built. A life-changing chance for anyone who wished to move out from the city and set up home there.

My parents grabbed it with both hands.

My dad left his job at Cable and Wireless in London, where he worked as a telegraph key operator, exchanging it for a new three bedroom council house and a job at the English Electric (eventually to be subsumed into British Aerospace) factory in Stevenage.

To my mum and dad, coming from their cramped bedsit, our blocky, squat, utilitarian three bedroom terraced house with its upstairs bathroom, separate toilet and small garden must have seemed like the height of luxury. It certainly did to my Mum - she loved that house. She lived there for the rest of her life, happy and contented, stable and secure, right up until the sad day when Dementia began to exercise its evil grip on her and she started to keep her purse in the fridge, talk to the gas cooker, and complain that the radiators were going to explode.

Built in several waves, the architectural style of Stevenage houses was refined and modernised as time passed, each new phase reflecting advances in building techniques and the lower cost of things like central heating as economies of scale could be exploited.

Our house, being one of the first built in the town, had no central heating. We had an open fire in the lounge, a coke burner in the kitchen and an electric immersion heater for hot water.

The houses were brick built, with concrete floors. Ours had a pitched roof but, rather than being tiled, it was just felted – presumably to reduce costs.

The windows were all Crittal Frames. To anybody unfamiliar with this term – one which will create feelings of both nostalgia and dread among an entire generation – they were single glazed units , with heavy steel frames. They were very airtight, so the issue of draughts was not a problem. But a consequence of this, combined with open fires, was an unbelievable level of condensation. There would be a permanent puddle of water beneath every window in the winter. Until it was below freezing, when you would wake up to an entire window covered in a 3mm layer of ice, normally encasing your mum’s net curtains.

And these houses were cold. Really cold. These were the days before insulation. To complement the steel framed single glazed windows, the walls were brick on the outside and concrete block on the inside with an unfilled, uninsulated cavity between. It was not until the late 1960s that we got loft insulation. Two council workers turned up one day and told us they were installing it and putting the cost onto the monthly rent. Around the same time, two more council workers turned up one day, unannounced, with a van and a huge hosepipe. They drilled the outside brickwork, poked the hosepipe through the outer brick skin into the cavity, and pumped in millions of tiny little polystyrene balls. This cutting-edge innovation of the insulator’s art affected the internal temperature of the house not one jot. What it did do was ensure that any tiny imperfection in the mortar or brickwork of every house down our road would for years be the source of an apparently unending trickle of tiny little polystyrene balls that would clump in corners of the garden and stick to your clothes.

Our estate was built on very sandy soil, with concrete floors covered with waxy, chocolate brown paint. If you could have taken an x-ray of the ground under our house, it would have looked like one of those ant farms that used to be advertised in the back of kids comics. We were infested with them. Leave anything sugary out anywhere in the house, and within an hour it would have generous coating of black ants gorging themselves.

Several times a year the flying ants would evacuate their nests, and when they did it was the new town version of a bibical plague. Their favourite assembly point in our house was the doorway between the lounge and the dining room. I’d come home from school and the entire door frame would be a seething, pulsating mass of insects. Ants on their own were fine. In such numbers it made your skin crawl.

And we tried everything to kill them.

There was a product called “Nippon”. This thick colourless liquid came in a tiny black, white and red tube emblazoned with faux Japanese writing so, to my naive eyes, raised on jingoistic war films it looked pretty dangerous. According to the instructions, just two drops deposited at the exit hole was apparently enough to wipe out an entire colony. I carefully deposited two drops. Then watched as the ants tentatively sniffed it, wandered around it aimlessly, took a slurp or two, rolled around in the sticky fluid, then took the poison back to their nest as the Nippon people promised, where it rapidly, lethally and efficiently did precisely nothing.

So I would add more. And more. I ended up squeezing entire tubes of the stuff. It made no difference whatsoever. I think the ants enjoyed it.

As the Nippon didn’t seem to work, my mum started buying another sure-fire ant killer product. This was a soft plastic bottle which, when squeezed, would emit a puff of apparently deadly white powder that would adhere to the unfortunate ants, who would take it back to their nest where it would, again, wipe out the entire colony in very short order. We puffed it on them. Copiously. Then puffed more. We ended up with thousands of industrious but dusty ants happily going about their business, oblivious to the claims on the bottle that this powder was deadly to their species. Nobody, seemingly, had told them.

Eventually, mum resorted to simply pouring boiling water on the ants. I don’t know why we did this - it seemed a very hit and miss method. She would boil up the kettle and pour the scalding water all over the ant holes, resulting in maybe ten or so shrivelled up ants, while the other 9 million seemed utterly unconcerned. They were probably swimming. They were indestructible.

In desperation, we called in the council. Two men in overalls arrived, looked at the holes around the door frame and tutted. They shone torches in the holes. They wrote stuff down on their job sheet. They went off into a huddle, talking urgently with each other. They returned, stared at the holes some more and tutted again before striding purposefully back to the van. They returned with their own soft plastic bottle of white powder which they then proceeded to puff on the ants. Who, as we expected, took no notice. The two council experts stood back in apparent satisfaction and left.

The ants didn’t.

So we just learned to live with them.

Instead of trying to kill them, which was patently useless, we resorted to simply vacuuming them up.

I’d come home from school and my Mum would be there with the vacuum cleaner and say “You can hoover up the ants”.

My mum never said “Please”. She always said “You can..”.

“You can wash the dishes”. “You can cut the grass”. “You can go to the shop for me”. I assume, with hindsight, it was a time thing. She was a busy woman, raising four kids - for the majority of our upbringing on her own. She did not have time for niceties - it was all need followed by allocation of task and order. No time for discussion or dissent. Or maybe she was just rude, I don’t know.

So I’d vacuum the ants up. Thousands and thousands of them. I got so proficient, I could catch flying ants on the wing. Once the vacuum cleaner bag was full, I’d empty the lot into the dustbin outside the back door. At the time, it did not occur to me that this may not have been the most effective means of permanent disposal. With the benefit of age and hindsight, it is now clear that what I actually did was give a large number of insects a rapid, probably thrilling, trip up a flexible tube, before emptying them into a dustbin which was, if I think about it, the ideal place for them to rest, recover and have a little snack before wending their happy way back to their home under our floors, eager to tell their pals about their adventure. In short, I may have spent many summers doing nothing more terminal than treating the same group of ants to a regular outing to the ant version of Disneyland.

Despite its failings, however, our house was a thing of wonder in the early sixties.

A clean, modern home. Well built. Solid. With a bathroom, a toilet, a dining room, a private garden. Owned and rented by a council we voted for, and theoretically controlled, on subsidised rents and soft rates. It was an opportunity to put down secure roots, free of the constant stress of living at the whim of a private landlord. And the town itself was an Urban Planner’s dream – the opportunity to put all their theories and research and modern thinking into a real live project.

Early footage from the sixties exists on YouTube, and it is heart breaking to watch. Clipped verges, clean, efficient public transport, playgrounds, neat lawns, all the men in hats, all the ladies smiling and fit, pushing prams on pristine pavements, signalling a future in which we would all live in comfort and security. It looks so optimistic. So assured.

The original neighbourhoods like Bedwell, where we lived, were added to over the years, and the town increased in size substantially during my childhood. Each neighbourhood was colour coded - blue for Bedwell, red for Shephall, brown for Broadwater, green for Pin Green, yellow for Chells.

I assume this was to generate some sense of identity and community for all those displaced families arriving on vast, immature estates, trying to make some sense of the town and put down roots.

By and large, this worked. We certainly had an affinity for our neighbourhoods. We were Bedwell kids – distinct from Chells kids or Shephall kids. This sense of loyalty was reinforced by the primary schools. Being filled with a growing stream of young families and little kids, the town had at least one primary school in every neighbourhood. This meant the kids you played with at school lived near you, and were the same kids you played with after school. We hung out and played around our local shopping parades, shopped at our local sweetshops and played football in our neighbourhood parks.

Until the age of around ten you stuck very much to your neighbourhood. Travelling to another neighbourhood was like travelling to another town – it was unfamiliar and unsettling. You knew nobody. Everything was different. We were like territorial cats.

But one shared area for all us feral kids was the Town Centre.

It was an incredible feat of urban design for its time.

Paved avenues of shops radiated from a central square, each one wide, airy and dotted with benches, space-age street lighting, trees and planters softening the feel of the place. The buildings had mosaic frescos decorating their flanks. Above the shops were flats and maisonettes – making sure the town centre was inhabited, a living space, not just a dead retail centre. In the Town Square - the focal point of the shopping area - was a shiny, black-tiled modernist clock tower, one face of its rectangular form artfully decorated with a stylised map of the town in ceramic tiles, another commemorating its dedication by the Queen. The clock tower itself emerged from a huge, shallow pool surrounded with a low, fat wall created to provide seating. At the opposite end of the pool to the clock tower was a tall fountain, creating a fine spray - so refreshing if you sat in the right place to get the fine spray dissipated by the breeze on a hot summer day. A few steps away was a large raised seating area decorated with a bronze statue called Joyride by Czech sculptor Franta Belsky, affording an elevated view of the town square on one side, and on the other giving access to the state-of-the-art bus station.

The Town Centre was a hugely desirable place to be for the retailers of the day, one of which was an example of the latest in retail innovation - a Supermarket. A huge, glass fronted, open, airy, bright and spotlessly clean retail space, employing the revolutionary idea of “self-service”, where the customer chose what they wanted, put it in a basket and everything was added up at a checkout at the end and put in carrier bags.

This is such a fixture of modern life, it is easy to forget how recent an innovation it is. Prior to the late fifties, anyone doing their weekly shop would have to visit half a dozen different shops. They’d have to explain to the shop staff what they wanted, who would then toddle off – often behind the counter out of sight – and retrieve the goods. Whether that was soap or mincemeat or washing up liquid. The idea that a customer could pick the goods up, handle them, decide which apple or cauliflower they wanted and discard the others was an utterly alien concept.

Called "Fine-Fare," our supermarket looked pretty much like supermarkets do today. Maybe a few more cardboard boxes and a little less in the way of display finesse, but otherwise instantly recognisable. Wide aisles, piped easy-listening music, wire trollies, everything light, brightly lit and fresh looking, with vegetables and fruit in big gondolas by the entrance, shelves of everything from soap powder to matches, crisps to baked beans, and a long line of checkout tills at the exit.

It would not raise even the most curious of eyebrows today, such is the ubiquity of the concept. You could parachute a tribe of Amazonian Indians into a shopping precinct today, and they iwould hardly give it a second look before saying “Yeah...supermarket. So what?” before running off in search of New York Yankees baseball caps and Manchester United Football Shirts like all the other tribes seem to have. But in the early 60s, a Supermarket was a really, really big deal.

Woolworths moved from their shop with its wooden floorboards and long, uninterrupted counters in old Stevenage, the quaint and tiny original town onto which the huge, brash new town was grafted, to a brand-new store opposite the clock tower in the town centre. W. H. Smiths was there too, and a huge three storey Co-Op. We rarely went in there. My Mum said it was owned by communists. For a penniless working-class seamstress from Nottingham, married to a Turkish immigrant and living in a council house, my Mum was inexplicably snobbish when it came to shops. The Co-op were communists. Tesco was for common people (I could not imagine – even then – who was more common than us, but there we go). Macfisheries was for posh people. Sainsburys was just right – not too common but not too showy either. A solid middle ground choice.

She relented at Christmas, however. The only place in Stevenage to visit Santa was at the Co-op, where he took over part of the third floor and created a grotto. As he was the only Santa in town, my mum overcame her dislike of the store’s politics for the benefit of her kids. We’d line up politely waiting for our interview with the great man, then leap up onto his knee, where we would quickly discover that, rather than a jolly fellow with a jelly belly and the faint aroma of candy canes and marshmallows, Santa was in reality a short-tempered, middle aged bloke who stank of stale cigarettes and tea and, cloaked in red and white nylon, sparked like a Catherine Wheel every time he moved with anything but glacial speed. He would listen intently as you reeled off your list of wishes, then direct you to his sack, where one of his sullen and bored looking elves, tattooed and unshaven, would let you dip your hand in for a surprise gift. These fell into two categories. It was either some piece of plastic crap that fell to pieces within minutes – a model boat, or a submarine with a plastic tube attached so you could make it sink or float in the bath. Or it was something so puzzling that nobody – even your parents - could work out what it was. Two inexplicable and unexplained metal rings, or a piece of thin red plastic film with a button.

Apart from these large retailers, the town comprised long parades of identically sized retail units which the trader could not buy, but could only rent from the New Towns Commission, the government body set up to manage the town. And each unit was carefully controlled. If you wanted to sell clothes, you had to rent a clothes retail unit. The same for electrical goods, jewellery, holidays or flowers. The Commission managed what was sold to ensure that it did not become an entire town filled with coffee shops and banks. There are towns I know that could do with a dose of this management today. Towns where you can walk for several hundred yards, passing banks, insurance companies, estate agents, building societies – not a single shop that provides a product worth engaging in a walk for. It staggers me that entire towns can be so stuffed with these bland, paper-pushing palaces whose business can be transacted just as effectively – more so – online than in a retail unit. Yet the ones which need a shop – who sell actual products – are forced to the most remote of positions – or, sadly more commonly, out of business entirely.

But in the sixties, Stevenage Town Centre catered for every need. There were toyshops, craft shops, bakers, greengrocers, butchers, sport shops, furniture stores, electronics stores, camera shops, record shops, wool shops, pet shops and gardening shops. Banks, travel agents, clothes stores - whatever you needed, you never had to venture beyond the Town Centre to find it.

More than this, in these days before online payment and credit cards, there was the central post office, and shops operated by the Electricity Company, the Gas Company and the Coal Suppliers, where you could go and place your orders and pay your quarterly bills. The Council’s Rent Office was there also, where my mum would go each month, her little accounting book in her handbag, and pay her dues.

Shopping Centres in those days were not just retail areas. They were the place where you spent time doing all the stuff we now do in isolation sitting in front of a computer or phone screen. Shopping Centres were place for social interaction and cohesion. To make and nurture friendships and acquaintances. Every time we went shopping, my mum would spend an inordinate amount of time chatting with people she knew only from her weekly visits to the town centre. I’m not suggesting that, as kids, we had any insight into this wider benefit of shopping as a physical experience. We spent most of our time rolling our eyes, pulling mum's arm and whining as she was updated about Mrs. Pertwee’s veins, or Mrs. Gee’s Yorkshire Terrier and his dodgy bowels.

Being the centre of the town, not only geographically but commercially, it was neutral ground for the kids living in the many neighbourhoods of Stevenage. And because we spent all our time – at school and after – in our own neighbourhoods, a visit to the town centre at the weekend was unusual in that we saw people we did not recognise.

At the weekend, with your mum doing the shopping, this was OK. But in most other circumstances, if you were out of your own neighbourhood you were in alien territory.

Some groups took the whole loyalty to one's area a little too literally. The Bedwell Boot Boys, for example, were a gang of skinheads who hung around our local shops and tended to kick the crap out of anyone not from our neighbourhood. In terms of expressing civic pride, this was perhaps a touch excessive, and although many of the stories that circulated about their feral activities were exaggerated, they did exist, I knew some of them, their graffiti was all over every underpass, and they were a bit scary.

But, shaven headed young men indulging in a bit of unprovoked violence apart, growing up in the early 60s in Stevenage was wonderful.

Being a New Town, and therefore a town filled with vast tracts of state owned, rent-subsidised houses, it was filled to the brim with young families all seeking a better start, and all on the same socio-economic level.

Which meant load and loads and loads of kids.

Walk out your front door, bounce a ball three times, and in seconds you’d be surrounded by twenty kids all demanding to play football and then arguing about whether to play in the neighbourhood park, on the school field or on the strip of grass next to the main road.

It was most often the latter.

I’m not sure why we always seemed to plump for this, the most inconvenient of all the choices. Perhaps it was because it was within sight of our houses and therefore more obviously our territory. But it had downsides.

The football would regularly get kicked into the road – a very busy main route into the centre of town - and often hit a car. Then we had to run the gauntlet of legging it into the road to grab the ball before running like crazy to escape the angry car driver chasing us.

Often the police would stop, tell us off, and order us not to play football where we were. We would dutifully pick our ball up and walk the twenty yards back to our houses. Then as soon as they drove off, we’d be back again. Ignoring or at best not worrying about authority started young in Stevenage.

Actually, we did not really worry about anything too much. We would climb trees to ridiculous heights. We’d pick berries from hedgerows and eat them. We’d throw ourselves about in the woods, in filthy water. We’d paddle in streams that contained leaches. And I cannot recall ever being concerned.

Stevenage was a marvellous place to grow up. I’m not suggesting for a moment that it would fulfil the modern upwardly mobile dreams of a thrusting young executive. But at the time, bearing in mind where most of its inhabitants had come from, it was a miracle.

A town designed with people in mind, not factories, or cars. Where you could live in your own home, with privacy and security, and raise your family. Where you could sit in the sun on your own patch of private garden, grow a bit of veg, and not worry about losing your home if there is a hiccup in your employment. And what employment there was. Whether you were skilled or unskilled, an engineer or a chemist, a bricklayer or a factory line worker, there was always work available.

It was a social experiment that, at the time, was a screaming success. But I suppose, over time, it became a victim of its own success. As people became more confident, more stable, more secure, they expected more. Quite rightly. It was when I got into my teens that the threads starting showing. Society was moving on, and the working classes wanted more than just an indoor toilet and a kitchen. They wanted cars. And holidays. More of everything. And Stevenage began changing.

Maybe it was people like me who were changing the town. Or maybe the town was changing us by giving us the basics so well that we could focus on wanting more. Whatever was cause and whatever was effect, the world was undeniably on the move, and the working class were driving it. Stevenage would never be as positive again. Never be held with such pride by its inhabitants again. It had started out by offering a lifestyle to the working class that they could not hope to achieve anywhere else. We reacted with gratitude. With thanks. With appreciation. We knew we were the lucky ones. The chosen.

But now we were outgrowing its modest promises.

As is the way with progress in any society - from post-war Britain, to India, to Japan and now China, after a few years of stability and security to bolster our self-respect, what we thought of as good fortune instead became the status quo. We stopped saying "We are so lucky", and started saying "Is that it?” and “What next”?

But for me, up until the age of 10, this meant nothing. I had no ambition. No wish to stride off into a glorious new future. Stevenage was just where I lived. My town. It was everything I knew, and held everyone I knew. Or wanted to know. It was Nirvana. I would not want to be anywhere else.

Our Garden

How our shameful garden upset our neighbours and disgusted their cat

The houses along our street were built in a long terrace, each one with a small patch of garden between their front door and the pavement.

But at the rear of each house, accessed via a brick-built storeroom between each house – a space for bicycles and bins – was a larger, enclosed garden.

Around fifty feet deep by the width of the house, these were much appreciated private spaces. The terrace of houses behind ours had the same garden arrangement, so the gardens of all our houses formed a huge patchwork of little private spaces – each one different, each one reflecting the pride and the taste of the owner.

Mr. and Mrs. Hales next door were an elderly couple who, by the diligent application of time, effort, love and chemicals, had created a lawn like a bowling green. Each year they would plant their borders with annuals and tend them with devotion and not a little skill. Mrs. Hales would cut the edges of her lawn, where it met the flower beds, with scissors. Their shrubs positively hummed with robust health and vigour, and every year were filled to bursting with flowers of such diverse size, shape and colour it took your breath away.

The Briggs family on the other side of us had a similarly perfect, ironing-board flat and surgically trimmed lawn, also surrounded with healthy looking, weed-free beds. Mr. and Mrs. Briggs’ annual display of roses would have graced any show garden. Huge, healthy, fat blooms in pink and red and yellow and white, all in the peak of health like something from a flower show.

Most council tenants in those early days were filled with a sense of their own good fortune in having a space to call their own that did not also have to accommodate a tin bath and an outside toilet, and the gardens and houses were built to complement each other. All the houses had french windows from the lounge into the garden, and the first home improvement most tenants made was to lay a small patio to make full use of it.

The Briggs' patio was a simple and neat patch of beautifully finished concrete with tiny stones embedded in it. A space decorated with gaily striped deck chairs and a little table, protected by a small sun shade, it provided an ideal spot for a glass of fruit squash in the evening, and the perfect vantage point to observe and admire their garden. It really was quite gorgeous.

The Hales' patio was furnished with two wooden upright chairs, surrounded by a dense forest of potted plants and flowers blending beautifully into the copiously verdant herbaceous borders. Their patio was a haven for bumble bees and butterflies.

The passion with which tenants in our subsidised housing treated their gardens stemmed from the fact that most came from the city, where they were starved of any outside space, so these little patches of garden were pounced on and lovingly exploited to create an oasis - a space to sit, to relax, and to breathe a little fresh suburban air. A place to plant a fruit tree, grow some vegetables, a few flowers to make the house look pretty, an area for the kids to play safely, to build a shed, a greenhouse, a space for a rabbit, or maybe a dog.

Our garden was not one of these.

Our garden was a scruffy and neglected piece of scrub, where the accidental seeding of thistles and dandelions and rye grass had somehow contributed to form a little green patch even my mum could not bring herself to call a “lawn”. It always simply called “the grass”. It looked like a malnourished desert. With alopicia. A repository for nettles, discarded toy soldiers, broken bits of toy and dried dog shit.

It was also a place for my father to urinate. Don’t get me wrong, we had a perfectly serviceable toilet in the house. And he did not do this all the time. But on a summer night, often and for no apparent reason, he would rise from his armchair clad only, as usual, in his pants and vest, stretch extravagantly, open the French windows then go stand in the middle of the garden and have a wee while looking around with obvious pride at his personal domain.

Around the boundary of the garden, framing the grass, was a 4 foot wide ring of organically dead, bright orange clay soil. These my mum called her flower beds. They contained a few odd weeds, interspersed with my mum’s rose bushes. These she devoted much care to, in return for which they delivered two or three limp flowers and a pound of greenfly every year.

A path ran from the house to the bottom of the garden, along which ran a washing line. Blocking the path, more often than not, were the oily remains of a motorcycle in pieces.

In the centre of the grass was an apple tree. At least my mum told us it was an apple tree. But not once did it produce a single, solitary piece of fruit. This may be because it spent most of its bleak and blighted existence fighting off the effects of dog urine. It being the only suitable tree in the garden, our dogs made full use of it.

More serious than this, it also had to battle the deleterious effects of my Mum's "pruning".

My mum did pruning like Oliver Reed did booze. She was utterly relentless.

We would come home from school to find her a little breathless, her hair wild and dotted with bits of twig and leaves, her arms covered in countless tiny cuts and grazes. "I've pruned the garden today" she'd say with pride and satisfaction.

Outside would be a scene of dystopian devastation.

She never worried or asked about the right time in a growing cycle for pruning. Her opinion seemed to be that, as the householder and therefore the boss in this particular relationship, the tree should move to suit her agenda, not the other way round.

She really didn't know what she was doing, but what she did, she did with enormous enthusiasm.

After a pruning session, the apple tree would look like some hardy survivor of Hiroshima - bereft of branches, virtually just a long, scarred trunk, thinning to a fragile point at the top.

In the rock hard, bright orange flower beds, the few lonely rose bushes looked look like a line of dead sticks randomly poked into the ground. It is a miracle of nature, and a demonstration of the hardiness of native species, that these plants continued to survive - not exactly thrive, but survive - for as long as we lived there.

Directly by the wall against the house was another bed. This was the crowning glory of the garden. About ten feet wide and three feet deep, it was my dad's vegetable bed where he grew his tomatoes and cucumbers. Being Turkish, he ate these in prodigious quantities, hating the watery, bland taste of those we would buy in the supermarket. And he was right. The smell and taste of a tomato, pulled off the vine and sliced immediately into a salad, drizzled in olive oil and lemon and sprinkled with salt was a real taste of my childhood. My mum would give us half a cucumber, straight from the garden, it's skin thick and tough and spiky, and a teaspoon of salt on a saucer, and we'd happily eat it as a snack, dipping the cool flesh into the salt and chewing it like a lollipop. We would eat fresh tomatoes like apples, straight from the vine. My mates thought we were very odd.

To make sure we could grow these essentials, dad actually fed the earth in this bed with some horse manure he bought from someone he knew. It stank the place out for weeks but it produced soil which could actually grow something.

The garden was, primarily, a space for us kids. It meant my mum could work in the house and leave us to our own devices in the garden, relatively safe in the knowledge that there was only so much stupidity and mischief we could get up to in a 50 by 30 foot enclosed space.

You would imagine, therefore, that when my dad announced he was going to build a patio just like the neighbours had – a place to sit, for us kids to play when the mud got too much – we would be happy.

For us, it was a reason to worry. Our concern when my dad announced his intention was not without foundation. He was a man blessed with unlimited confidence in his own ability, and very little in actual talent to back it up. Combine a shocking level of arrogance with a groundless faith in his own genius, a congenital refusal to ask advice and a temper bordering on psychotic, and you have some idea of the trepidation we would feel whenever he considered doing anything remotely connected to practical home improvement.

And our concerns were not just about ability. Temperamentally this was not a man suited to tasks equiring patience and application. My dad spent virtually every waking hour at home struggling to contain his rage. At us, at my mum, at his life in general - pretty much everything.

This was a very angry man.

His needle permanently waving about in the red zone, he was ready to pop at the slightest event – his shoes not being clean, his dinner not the correct temperature, running out of lemons, one of us kids talking audibly – anything was material for a complete, loss-of-all-control tantrum.

These could take many forms - from beating seven bells out of my mum in front of us kids, to throwing his dinner up the wall, to throwing things against the doors (a huge 1950s Olympic typewriter was the most impressive – that one left a hole in the door that stayed there my entire childhood). But regardless of tantrum type, they would always end with the most impressive feat of door slamming imaginable. This man slammed doors so hard it would make your eyes spin. He slammed doors like he was born to it – and my goodness he liked to practice and keep his skills honed. My mum used to have a collection of Horse Brasses which were hung on small nails tapped into the 3mm of plaster which covered the impenetrable concrete around the chimney breast. You could judge the depth of my dad's anger by how many ended up on the floor after a really good door slam.

Luckily, this being an older, utilitarian house, our doors were pretty robust. But we had a problem with the front door. And this was to prove his nemesis.

Heavy and solid, for as long as I could remember it would stick. It would open about 8 inches, then suddenly jam. But it would not do it every time, so you could go several days rushing out the door without a problem, then, when lulled into a false sense of security, you'd grab the door, pull it open as you move forward, and the door would suddenly jam fast, trapping and twisting your hand in the Yale latch, while your body, already moving forward, would collide with the doors leading edge which had stopped dead. If you were in a rush, it could be quite painful.

This went on for years. We just kind of put up with it, mainly because any injury sustained was going to be infinitely less painful - and dangerous - than my father attempting any kind of repair.

Then came the fateful day when he blew a gasket. He'd had a really good wig-out, a real eye-swiveller. He'd enjoyed a very energetic and comprehensive throw around of anything he could get his hands on, slapped my mum a few times, then stormed out the house in a fug of bad language and old spice. But as he was sweeping majestically through the door, ready to give it a really, really good slam, it jammed. He collided with the edge of the door, ramming his shoulder against it, banging his head into the solid wood with a satisfying and surprisingly loud thok. And that was it - he lost the plot. Completely.

"Get me the saw and the screwdriver" he shouted at me, his eyes wide and wild.

Like most people at the time, we did not have the kind of tool array most people have now. What we had was "the saw", "the hammer" and "the screwdriver". The saw was an old rip saw with a broken wooden handle, a blade so rusted it was permanently dark brown, and teeth that could not remember what sharp meant let alone when they last were. We used to keep a tin of Three-in-One oil next to it, and you'd get through half a can continually dribbling it on to the blade while sawing to prevent it from sticking.

I gave him the tools and beat a hasty retreat to be with my sister in the kitchen, closing the door and leaving him alone with his anger.

Denise and I stood behind the door listening to the frantic activity going on in the hall. He was mumbling loudly to himself as we heard him remove the door from its frame. Then we heard him start to saw. There were four or five "zzzzrrr" noises, then a "twaangg" as the saw blade stuck and his continued sawing motion caused the blade to bend almost double before springing back violently with a loud "twang". There was a loud "You bastard". Then four more "zzzzrrrr" cuts, then a "twaanng" and a louder "You BASTARD". Then five or six more cuts, then a "twaaanngg", and a shrill "FUCK YOU". This went on for a few more minutes, during which the old fool became increasingly hysterical by degrees. After another four or five repeats and more foul and shrieking swearing he was, literally, screaming at the door, hurling a stream of unintelligible but violent and high-pitched insults at it, the saw continuing to stick every four or five cuts. He was speaking in tongues he was so angry "Zzzrr, zrrrrr, zrrrr, TWAANG". "YOUFUCKIINGCUNARSRBASTARSHITTFUCKERFUCKFUCKING".

After a while, we heard the front door slam, then slam again, and again, then a very loud "YOU FUCKER", followed by a slam so loud the plastic framed picture of horses riding through the surf fell from the wall in the hall on to the floor. Then all was silent.

We went into the hall. There were bits of wood all over the floor. The front door was now back in its frame, but with a radically reshaped bottom edge. He had started off at the edge near the hinge, but his cut had started to go up at a quite severe angle very quickly. This departure from the level was remedied with a vertical cut, before starting another horizontal one. Unfortunately, this also went up at a loping angle before being stopped and another remedial vertical cut made. The final horizontal cut was still not level, and ended at the opening edge of the door about an inch above the floor.

We tried the door. It required a very hefty tug to open it, but it swung back on its hinges without the jamming we had become used to. But then it didn't shut. He had put the thing back in the frame slightly off from its original position, so now the door caught on the frame as you closed it, and you needed to give it a heavy barge with your shoulder to push it home. My mum had to roll up an old off-cut of carpet and bind it with insulating tape into a cylinder shape. This was placed at the bottom of the door to limit the mistral level draught which whistled through the gap left by the old man's handiwork. This stayed there for another ten years until the council replaced all the front doors on our street with plastic ones.

So, with this level of expertise at hand, you may understand our natural concern when he decided he was going to lay a crazy paving patio.

At the time, you could buy broken paving slabs from the council. These were the off cuts and smashed up bits of slab returned by the crews installing pavements all round Stevenage, and were battleship grey with a kind of pimply, non-slip surface. They were every bit as attractive as that description suggests. But they were cheap, and my god my dad was mean when it involved something not directly for his own pleasure. Which is why, one day, the council came and tipped a huge pile of grey rubble on the road outside the house.

My dad, armed only with a hammer and his encyclopaedic knowledge of construction, simply laid them out on top of the grass. No hard core, no base, no drainage, nothing. Just plopped them onto the grass. Then he mixed up some mortar and filled in the joints and gaps between the randomly shaped shards of council paving. He spent just a little bit more than no time at all trying to match them into a pleasing crazy paving pattern. He pretty much just put them where they fell, and filled in the resulting spaces with a greyish mortar.

Where the paving met the lawn, he stood and scratched his head for a moment. Then simply spread a wedge of mortar from the top of the paving slabs into the grass.

The whole job took him an afternoon.

The following day, we stepped tentatively onto the surface. Each slab we trod on moved slightly, crunched a bit, and detached itself from the sea of concrete separating it from the other pieces of paving.

Nobody mentioned it to my dad, and it was never spoken of in his company, but from that day on, we had a crazy paving patio that could snap the ankle of an uninitiated guest in the blink of an eye.

The wedge of mortar providing a pleasing and gentle transition from the paving to the grass simply came away in foot long wedges of powdery concrete, which we hastily threw in the long grass at the bottom of the garden.

Despite such exercises in landscaping lunacy, I was quite happy in the garden. I tried to grow my vegetables, I kicked a ball against the house, or I used to throw a tennis ball onto the roof and try to guess where it would come back down. But one order I dreaded was "Mark, you can cut the grass".

We had a very old metal lawn mower. But its blades were so blunt, and its mechanism so rusty, that to get the blades moving at any speed likely to damage grass, you needed a run up. If you pushed the handles way down, lifting the cutting cylinder high above the grass, you could get some forward momentum and get the blades spinning, but as soon as you dropped them down to a cutting height, the mower would lurch to a stop after 18 inches, the dull, rusty blades wrapped in a cocoon of long, tough grass still attached to the lawn. You'd have to jerk the thing back and forth until free, tearing the grass out by the roots. It did not so much cut the grass as bruise it.

You could, of course, discard the mower and use “the shears”.

These were dark brown with rust and had smooth, worn wooden handles. The blades were slightly bent, so when closed, the tips would meet but there would be a quarter of an inch of light between them for most of their length. Needless to say, cutting the grass with these was a challenge.

If the grass was particularly long, and my Mum was out, I would raid the kitchen drawer and use the bread knife, grabbing bunches of grass and sawing through them. It did not give the nicely striped finish she secretly hankered for.

My mum, faced with this problem, had what I can only imagine was a mental aberration of some sort. I don't know what she was thinking, but she went out and bought a Flymo. She'd seen the Hales, our next door neighbours, gently guiding this bright orange machine around their perfect lawn, its electric motor buzzing like a hair dryer while it accurately trimmed a millimetre off the very tips of the bowling green flat grass, and she concluded that this must be what we needed for our grass. A goat would have been more appropriate.

The Flymo was the very latest in lawn mowing technology – a device with a pathetic little plastic blade, on which were fins that produced a downdraught and allowed it to "hover on a cushion of air" as the adverts would have us believe. And it did. If you had a level, flat lawn with closely clipped, quality grass. We had the Somme, covered in grass so thick and tough and long we could have sold it for rush matting.

Still, she gave it to me and said "You can cut the grass".

I tried. I really did.

I started the thing and it began with a satisfying and purposeful whizz.

I slid it onto the grass. It made a kind of grunting noise, squeaked a bit, stopped dead and blew the fuse in the house.

After replacing the fuse wire in the bakelite box in the hall, I tried the Flymo again, but more slowly. Same result.

I then tried starting it with the base at an angle, then lowering it down slowly into a patch of grass. It simply grabbed a handful of long grass, wrapped it around the spindle on which the blade was mounted, then stopped and began smelling like rotten fish. Then it blew the fuse in the house again.

After much experimentation, and replacing the fuse wire in the hall cupboard several more times, I worked out a method.

My technique was to hold the Flymo up in the air above shoulder height then turn it on. When it reached maximum speed, I would bring it down vertically onto a patch of unsuspecting grass. The motor note would go from a pleasing hair-dryer whine to a kind of stuttering grunt, eventually stopping and releasing a tiny but pungent whiff of blue grey smoke. I'd then raise the thing back up above my head, exposing a circle of s horter grass - not so much cut as torn - the remaining stalks now flattened into an attractive spiral pattern about eighteen inches in diameter. I'd take half a step forward and repeat the process, until the entire garden not only had shorter grass, but a pleasing alien-crop circle type design.

Each Flymo we had lasted for about four weeks during which it did sterling service in overheating and turning dried dog crap into a mist of foul smelling dust and, almost as a by-product, cutting a few patches of rye grass, before expiring in a dramatic finale of smoke and sparks. My mum would take it back to the shop where they would scratch their heads, and eventually replace it. My Mum couldn't understand it - these were supposed to be a quality product - a good brand - yet we had three on the trot which went wrong before the shop ran out of patience and suggested that perhaps a hi-tech product like a Flymo was not for us.

Another victim of our inability to provide a decent garden space was our neighbour's cat. The Hales' next door had a big ginger tom cat. He would spend hours lazing in the sun in their garden, surrounded by butterflies and bees and blooms, spread out on a carpet of finely trimmed and springy grass.

His charmed life, indulged by loving owners, was perfect apart from one thing. He lived next door to us.

He would, on occasion, become bored with his life of bucolic splendour and, seeing our other next door neighbours, the Briggs', perfectly manicured and maintained garden, decide to wander over and lie on their gorgeous lawn for a while. Unfortunately, in order to do so, he had to cross our disgusting property.

Which meant he had to escape the murderously anti-social attentions of my dad.

My dad had, for some inexplicable reason, developed an intense hatred of this gentle, innocent animal. And his ambition - his obsession, really - was to hit it with a gob of his spit from the French windows. Really. I don't know why.

We would be sitting in the lounge watching telly, dad lying back in his armchair in his standard comfort kit of baggy underpants and string vest, when he would suddenly tense up. He would slowly, silently, turn his head to look out into the garden, every sense awakened and set to maximum.

The Hales' cat would be half way across our garden, disgustedly picking his way across the uneven hard ground, through the discarded toys, balls, lolly sticks and bits of litter, one eye guardedly watching the house, his little cat face a picture of revulsion as he picked his paws high in the air to avoid the dog shit and other detritus, like someone walking across a minefield.

Dad would ease himself very slowly and fluidly out of the chair into a standing position, glide noiselessly to the French door and silently turn the key in the lock.

In the garden, the cat would start to move slower, more cautiously, sensing a minute change in atmosphere - a crackle of tension.

Then, the tiniest metallic click of the key in the lock.

The cat's head would jerk instantly in the direction of the French windows.

At the same moment, the old man would throw open the door, whilst hawking up a ball of phlegm and spittle into his mouth.

The cat would leap in the air, panic turning his little legs into a blur of movement, all thought of keeping himself clean now forgotten in a headlong chase for survival

The old man would arch his back, judge distance, trajectory and intersection points, and let forth with a slobbering "fffffffttt" whilst jerking his head forward like a striking cobra

The cat would be at maximum speed, launching itself at the fence and the sanctuary of the Briggs' garden.

The spittle would miss. It always did. Not once did the old man hit that cat, yet I saw him try countless times.

Within seconds, the cat would be safely sitting in the Briggs garden, staring disgustedly at our French doors and cleaning himself.

My dad's vendetta against this cat took an inevitable turn when the Briggs next door decided enough was enough.

Presumably tired of enduring the unavoidable vision of a hairy Turk either urinating in full view, or if not, spitting at domestic pets, they erected a six foot high panelled fence on the boundary between their garden and ours.

It says much that our reaction was to put on squeaky, sarcastic voices and say "oooooooohh… look at them. We can't see your horrible garden any more. We've got a fence" My god but we were awful. They were a decent family, house proud and considerate of others. Why on earth would they wish to see a gang of feral oiks shouting and spitting in their garden? But we didn't see it that way at the time.

Mind you, we were no better with the other neighbours really.

The houses in our street were built before plasterboard and lightweight building materials existed. Made with solid concrete blocks and brick, their sound insulation was pretty good, so in any normal circumstance, the fact that the lounges of two terraced houses backed on to each other with a shared solid wall between them would not be a problem.

Mr. and Mrs. Hales were an elderly couple. They kept themselves very much to themselves, maintaining their gorgeously pristine garden and, apart from getting the hump when one of our balls went into their garden, they were no bother at all.

But the Hales' were deaf. Deaf as posts.

We would sit in our lounge, and when the Hales watched telly, we would hear a constant bass note coming through the wall and floor – enough to make cups rattle on saucers. It wasn't too bad if you were watching the same channel – indeed, it was a sensation I recognized immediately the first time, as an adult, I encountered a sub-woofer.

Us kids and my mum just put up with it. We would watch our programmes happily ignoring the "Mmm Hmmm Fmmm Mmmm" coming through the walls.

My dad was less forgiving. One fateful Sunday evening he was deep in a particularly engrossing episode of The World About Us, probably enlightening viewers about the life cycle of the Crested Grebe, when he flipped. He launched a five minute tirade about how it was ruining the only bloody programme he watched, then he went menacingly quiet.

The following evening when he arrived home, he unloaded a record deck, an amplifier, and two of the biggest speakers I have ever seen from his van and put them in our lounge.

We settled down for the evening – nobody mentioning the fact that there appeared to be the material for a pop concert in our lounge. The old man said not a word about it.

Sure enough, a little later on, the inevitable "Hmmm Frmmm Bmmm Thmmm" bass notes began drifting in from next door's telly.

The old man stood up, pulled his Y Front pants up to full working height, and told us to get out of the lounge.

He turned the speaker cabinets around, and positioned them so the speakers themselves were touching the wall between our lounge and the Hales’. Then he put a James Last LP on the turntable, then turned it up to full blast.

I have never – and I truly mean never – heard anything so loud. It was beyond the pain threshold. We were in the kitchen and could not hear each other's voices.

After ten minutes of this, James Last put his baton down and the old man turned the hi-fi off.

You could have heard a pin drop.

It was unnatural. Not a single decibel from anywhere. Nothing. No birdsong. No happy sound of kids playing drifting in from outside. Even the dog seemed to be holding its breath hiding under the kitchen table. All was weirdly silent. And not a sound emanated from the Hales' house. I wondered for a while if perhaps they had died of shock.

The old man cocked his head to one side, listening carefully, then sat in his chair, turned the telly on and started picking his feet.

I have seldom seen him so happy.

The Trespasser

The only exciting sunday night of my childhood

Sunday nights were unfailingly awful. Apart from the one when my dad decided to tackle a peeping tom in our garden

"I think there's someone in the garden" I said.

We lived in a row of council houses, whose gardens all backed on to each other, and I'd heard some movement in the fifty feet by thirty feet patch of clay and scrub grass that was our little piece of England.

My dad, slouching in an armchair clad only in his underpants and a string vest, ignored my comment.

This was nothing new. It was Sunday night.

Sunday nights were purgatory. It was the one evening when my dad was home before about 10pm. And when he was home, he expected to be treated like a dictator. He wanted his dinner when he came home – regardless of what time that was. And it better be hot too. He wanted his children to be, if not actually absent, then certainly as quiet as if they were. He wanted no disturbance from us, the dog, or my mum.

We were not allowed to eat in the same room as him. He could not stand the noise we made. If you wished to eat an apple, you had to leave the room.

He also allowed no strangers in the house. Although there was no explicit ban, there was most certainly a restriction in practice. As soon as my dad came into the house, he would take his trousers off and sit in his baggy underpants and undershirt – or in the summer, a string vest. He would eat his dinner on a small table in front of the TV in the lounge. Then he would sit back and pick his teeth with small, menthol impregnated toothpicks he bought from his dentist in Harley Street. As a special treat, he would often take the time to paint iodine on his feet to treat the rampant athlete's foot infection he suffered from throughout my childhood.

The winters were especially frustrating.

Our house had no central heating, and no insulation.

The only heating downstairs was a coal fire in the lounge, and a coke boiler in the kitchen. These were removed by the council, who installed a chrome and teak gas fire across the fireplace instead – presumably to justify a rent increase. The gas fire, while convenient, was a heat source barely deserving of the name.

We no longer had to have coal delivered by thick set blokes from the back of a flatbed lorry. I no longer had to sweep out the coal bunker for my mum, or enjoy the sensation of blowing out black snot for three days afterwards.

It was cleaner, and it started with the turn of a knob. It was supposed to ignite with a high tech, cutting edge piezo crystal, but this never worked from day one. We had to roll a piece of newspaper into a cigar size and shape, light this on the gas stove in the kitchen, walk round to the lounge without it blowing out or dropping flaming paper on the carpet, then stick it through the gaps in the front of the fire, turning the gas on and waiting for the "whump" as it ignited

Cleaner. More convenient. More sixties. Less Edwardian. But it sadly did not remove much in the way of cold. You had to close every door from the lounge to retain any heat in the room.

What it did remove, in copious quantities according to my dad, was humidity.

He would arrive home, stride into the lounge and turn the TV over, whatever you were watching, then turn the gas fire off, regardless how cold it was outside.

This was because he would complain that it "dries out the air".

And you didn't want him drying out on a Sunday night. That was his top night for getting the hump, and if he was going to throw his dinner up the wall, which he did with monotonous regularity and apparent glee, then Sunday night was always an odds-on favourite. He really was a man with a lot of pent-up anger he just couldn't wait to share.

If the gas fire had been used before he sat down, he would start coughing and rubbing his temples, whining about fumes and the lack of humidity giving him a migraine. He really was the most appalling drama queen, and it seemed not to concern him that we had been sitting there quite happily in that atmosphere for hours before he came home without apparently falling into an oxygen derived coma.

To remedy the dangerous nature of the gas fire, he insisted that we keep a cereal dish filled with water in front of it at all times, telling us that the evaporation of this water would replenish the vital humidity that made the atmosphere less harsh on his throat.

Being a curious child, I monitored the water in the dish, and found it took several days for the water to evaporate. I could not grasp, at that tender age, what effect adding one cereal dish of water to the atmosphere of the room over three days would have. To be fair, I still don’t. But this fact I kept to myself. Which was what you did with any thoughts which ran counter to any of my father's opinions – it was healthier that way.

What the dish of water did do – rather successfully - was trap a lot of ants.

Now ants we had no shortage of. Indeed, we had huge colonies of these creatures living under the concrete floors of our house. We would regularly find little pyramids of sand at the base of the door frames where they exited their subterranean world and entered ours. The ants became part of our lives, and we learned to defend ourselves from their regular invasions. Any spilled drinks had to be cleaned immediately. Drips and rings left by mugs of tea or coffee had to be wiped straight away. If the sweet residue from any drink was left on any surface, within an hour there would be a healthy and growing crowd of ants enjoying the sugary treat.

The worst thing, though, was when the ants exited en-masse. Several times every summer we would arrive home and find the door frame between the dining room and the lounge a seething black mass of insects. Every square inch of paintwork would be obscured by a moving, pulsating carpet of the things, most of which were flying ants. There were far too many to do anything other than vacuum up, and I would spend ten minutes happily sucking them into the Hoover, five minutes emptying the fabric vacuum cleaner bag out in the garden, then an hour scratching my arms and neck red raw with imagined ants crawling over me.

My Mum used to buy bottles of a white powder which one was supposed to spray around the exit holes of their nests, the theory being that they would take this poison back to their nests, where it would turn their little bit of earth under our floor into a kind of ant ghost town and lay waste to a generation of creepy black insects.

The problem with this scenario was that they didn't seem to mind getting covered in the stuff. Dusted liberally, they just carried on going about their business – seemingly unaware and unconcerned.

Faced with a poison which the ants simply ignored, we would instead try to boil them to death by pouring kettles of scalding water over them and their nests. It really was most ineffective. Sure, there would be a few ants transformed into tiny black balls of scalded ant flesh, but for the most part, they seemed to take it as an inconvenience and that is about all.

We never reduced their numbers, let alone got rid of them, so out of necessity we just learned to accept the occasional inconvenience of their presence. Which was, coincidentally, pretty much how I think my dad felt about us.

The main problem with Sunday evenings though was not the oppressive presence of a psychopathic nut job who felt that grubby pants and a vest were suitable attire for lying around in one's home. Nor was it the creeping realisation that in mere hours we'd have to go back to school. It was the fact that our final hours of freedom were to be suffered in intense, inescapable, unutterable boredom.

The depression would start at about 6pm, after the religious service transmission "Songs of Praise" had finished, with a programme called "News Review". This was a summary and repeat of the entire weeks news, regurgitated for the deaf, and was every bit as exciting as listening to week old news sounds when endured with some bloke in a kipper tie and tank top in the corner of the screen doing sign language and making exaggerated facial movements. Week old news stories for the deaf. That is what passed for Sunday evening entertainment in the late sixties.

The programme after this was the highlight of my dad's week - "The World About Us". Never, in the history of artistic endeavour, has a series of programmes been so utterly boring, so bereft of entertainment, so staggeringly, head-slappingly, spirit-suckingly dull to kids. The subject matter and its presentation, with the endlessly monotone, Oxbridge accented narrators, was the antithesis of what a youngster would crave. There would be droning documentaries about wildlife on the Savannah, or river communities in the Amazon basin, or life under the sea with Jacques Cousteau. For a 10 year old boy from Stevenage, you may as well have given me a lecture on Applied Mathematics. What we craved was a bit of liveliness, some laughs, some colour and action. The Goodies, F-Troop, Hogan's Heroes or Hawaii Five-O - anything with a bit of humour or glamour. What we got instead was slow motion footage of a lion ripping an Antelope's organs out through its arse, or close-ups of a Turtle laying eggs (disgusting) or, the supreme irony, entire programmes about the life cycle of ants - which in our house was one of the few things we certainly didn’t need the TV for.

It was a programme guaranteed to suck any colour, and glamour, and shine or glitter from the world and replace it with dull brown and beige.

So, if you want to apportion blame for Strictly Come Dancing, Big Brother, Simon Cowell and his vacuous and manipulative X Factor or any of the countless, derivative, moronic but halogen-lit, energetic, primary coloured reality TV programmes, loud game shows, or the endless procession of documentaries about men with testicles the size of footballs or hoarders living in flats filled with old pizza boxes and newspapers that my generation have foisted on the viewing public, don't blame us. Blame The World About Us.

And it got worse. If you could make it to the end of The World About Us without trying to bite your own face off, you'd be treated to the double-whammy of Horizon. Sometimes you'd get a good one about Space Rockets. But as likely as not, you'd get an hour on advances in polymers and their impact on the Plastics Industry of the Future.

And we'd have to watch them all in complete silence. It must have looked like Village of the Damned – four kids staring wordlessly, silently, blankly, unblinking and unmoving at the glowing tube, uneaten apples in hand.

Sundays were a drudge. Until the night I saw the trespasser.

I was sitting in the chair by the metal framed French doors to the garden. My dad was in the chair next to me, entranced by the latest advances in container ship design or the impact of the latex extraction industry on indigenous tribes or whatever titillating treat The World About Us was serving up that week – I really wasn't paying much attention.

The rest of the family were on the sofa and the floor, imagining what was happening on The Goodies whilst watching in excruciating boredom as some dull bloke with terminal dandruff droned away on the TV.

I moved the heavy curtains to one side and stared into the darkness.

"There IS someone in the garden" I said – more stridently now.

I saw, through the gloom, a figure casually wandering about in the garden.

This seemed to break through the shell of detached disdain my dad surrounded himself with while at home, and the Turk part of his character burst to the surface, utterly overwhelming the British reserve and logic he strove to cultivate. Someone was encroaching on his turf, his domain.

He leaned over me, pulling the curtains to one side and peering out, then he jumped up and rushed to the kitchen. We all rushed after him excitedly. It was Sunday night, but something was finally happening!

He ran to the drawer by the sink which contained "The Sharp Knife". Most families these days have a range of knives, each suitable for a highly defined and specialised purpose. Carving knives, paring knives, grapefruit, steak, fish, filleting, boning knives – the list goes on. In those days, we had two: "The Bread Knife" and "The Sharp Knife". It was a simple system. One was serrated and would cut crusty loaves. The other was the one knife we possessed that, if not actually finely honed, was sufficiently keen that it could, eventually, cut through rather than simply squash a Tomato. Eager to engage meaningfully with our trespasser, dad whipped open the cutlery drawer with some force.

Being as sensitive and deft of touch as one would imagine an angry Turkish man desperate to stab someone to be, he only succeeded in pulling the drawer completely out of the cabinet. The entire drawer emptied its contents on to the lino floor with the kind of crescendo normally reserved for the last night of the proms cymbal player.

He stood, the broken drawer hanging from his hand, and looked blankly for a second at the floor, as if trying to work out who to blame. Then he bent down and picked up "The Sharp Knife".

The kitchen had a window into the garden which was directly over the sink. I assume it was designed in this way so that when one was washing the dishes, one could gaze with pride at one's herbaceous borders. Or, in my mum's case, cast a rueful eye over one's rye grass and dog shit strewn garden as a distraction from the task of laundering one's husband's disgusting Y Fronts.

The kitchen also had a side door, which opened into a side passage and then to the rear garden where our trespasser was apparently enjoying a private, fact-finding tour of our property.

I would guess that almost anyone with the most basic grasp of logic or reasoning would, through experience, determine that a door from the kitchen to the garden would serve as the ideal portal for an over-excited Turk with a knife and murderous intent seeking to engage with an intruder for the purpose of stabbing him.

Sadly, my Father chose instead to try to get into the garden through the kitchen window.

I have no idea why, I truly don’t. And my father was not the kind of person one could interrogate as to the reasons behind his decisions. He expected you to accept that he was correct in everything he did, or he would lose his temper in the most spectacular – and generally violent – manner.

The window he chose to use to try to gain fast access to the garden was small, metal framed and above a sink, and had a low lintel. It was, on the outside, immediately above a muddy bed of earth used by my dad to grow cucumbers and tomatoes, within which was the drain from the kitchen sink surrounded by a six inch high concrete upstand around its perimeter. In short, it offered more as an assault course than as a means of access.

But this was the route he chose to enter the garden.

String vest rippling majestically, he leapt athletically up onto the draining board section of the stainless steel sink unit, which immediately bent under his weight, deforming it in such a way that never again would water flow into the sink from the draining board without being assisted by some concerted and vigorous hand sweeping.

He swept aside the cheese plant my mum had in a pot on the window ledge. Everybody had cheese plants in the late 60s. I think there was a law about it.

He threw open the window and launched himself powerfully up and out into the cold night air.

Or he would have done, had he not misjudged the lintel height completely.

There was the most profound, sickening, hollow thud as his head whacked straight into the concrete lintel - I swear the concrete actually rang for a second or two - then he kind of rebounded backwards, tumbled back on to the sink, before flopping back to the linoleum floor with something of a muffled slap.

This seemed to really get the adrenaline coursing through his veins.

He jumped back to his feet like a coiled spring, shaking his head, an impressive and livid red line already appearing across his forehead, and gripped the knife with renewed determination.

Swaying slightly, he steadied himself for a second by holding on to the work surface, gathered his wits, and seemed to decide to take another run at the window.

However, rather than achieve the desired forward momentum, quite surprisingly both to us and, it seemed, to him, and despite having his eyes locked firmly on the kitchen window directly in front of him, he took off sideways at quite a lick, lurched six feet to the left and careered clumsily and rather wobbly-kneed into the gas stove, knocking the grill pan to the floor with a crash and adding a cocktail of old bacon fat and breadcrumbs to the collection of cutlery already there.

With almost superhuman effort, feet now coated liberally with bacon grease and puncture wounds from the cutlery on the floor, he waited for a few seconds and collected his wits again. This time he made it up onto the sink once more, and finally, with a good deal of relief on our part, successfully launched himself through the window.

Almost immediately, we heard a loud muffled squeal, followed by some loud and highly inventive swearing, as he landed awkwardly on the concrete surround of the drain under the window, badly twisting his ankle – an injury that was to last for several weeks.

By now, unsurprisingly given the distinct lack of stealth used in my dad's approach, the peeping tom, or whatever he was, had long gone. Dad spent five minutes exploring every inch of the back garden, looking behind bushes and under flower pots, staring for long moments into the gloom of our neighbours’ gardens and calling out a few choice threats, warning any intruder still within earshot what would happen were he to return. then he came back to the kitchen, this time via the more sensible half-glazed kitchen door, his chest puffed out with pride at protecting his castle.

Unfortunately, the back door was still locked. He stood looking through the window of the half-glazed door, pointing down at the lock and miming unlocking motions.

But the key wasn't in the door.

We started scrabbling around looking for it below the door and among the assorted cutlery and kitchen utensils still spread about the floor.

Tiring of this, his adrenaline still clearly not back to normal levels, he then disappeared from the door, and we heard him outside the kitchen window again. There was a fair bit of grunting, and we watched as his hands appeared from outside the window and gripped the frame. His fingers clenched, and we heard another grunt. His hands went a little whiter, shook a little, then they disappeared suddenly and there was a dull thud.

A minute later he reappeared at the kitchen door, this time with some muddy stains on his chest and hands. He seemed a little calmer now as he waited for us to find the key and unlock the door.

We opened the door, and he strode back through the kitchen, limping quite badly, but head held high, not making any comment, or indeed any eye contact, leaving a trail of muddy footprints in his wake as he took his seat by the TV once again. Just in time to watch Horizon.

Broom Barns School

Stories of life in my first school

The school I attended until the age of eleven was situated just across a busy road from our house.

Called Broom Barns School, it was a bright, modern building, low rise with large window areas, well equipped and clean. Comprising an Infant School and a Junior School, providing education for kids from age five until they moved on to secondary school at eleven, it was a fine example of state investment in education, and a demonstration of the renewal and social change prevalent in the country in the optimistic and forward-thinking days of the 1960s. No more soot stained and intimidating, red brick and dour education establishments – this was the concrete constructed, expansive, open plan, primary coloured future.

The Headmaster of the junior school was Mr. Glaze, a genial, warm and kindly man with a prematurely receding hairline. The infant school was run by a calm, soft voiced woman, Helen, who would later become Mr. Glaze's wife.

It was a protective, encouraging and comfortable place in which to begin an education, and central to its atmosphere were the teaching staff, who were young, positive and seemed to really care for us kids and our development. There was Miss Simons - a petite lady with short dark hair who was gentle, calm, warm and kindly. A wonderfully protective and comforting figure to have as a teacher. And there was Mr. Simpson, another of my class teachers, a charming and funny man who at the time felt like the caring father figure I was lacking, yet was probably only in his late twenties himself at the time. Far too young for the tweed jacket, leather elbow patches, and highly polished but well used brogues that were his uniform. They were very much teachers in the new, sixties mould it seems to me now – open to new ideas, ambitious for their kids, and seemingly keen to kick against the staid and restrictive, pre-destined and stifling systems of the past.

In fact, the only teacher I recall who elicited any feelings of concern on the part of us kids was Mrs. Else. She was rumoured to be something of a disciplinarian, and not averse to pulling errant boys around by the short hair above their ears as a remedy to misbehaviour. But that was the worst fate that could befall you at Broom Barns. What a wonderful place.

Each day started with an Assembly in the hall, which also doubled as our gymnasium. A tall, large room, flooded with light from the full height windows along one wall framed by garish 60s abstract print curtains, it was open and airy with a highly polished parquet floor.

We would all enter to a record playing on a turntable built into a wooden cabinet on castors, sit on the floor, then Mr. Glaze would address us all, delivering a brief talk, after which we would say a prayer and then go off to our classrooms. In those days, all schools started with a Christian assembly. Which I didn't really hold with if I'm honest. Not that I was against religion as a concept. My mum was religious - or at least she admitted to believing in God, although she never went to church or gave any outward sign of being Christian. I don't recall my dad ever expressing a religious thought – Moslem or Christian – so I can only assume he was an Atheist. We never discussed religion as a family. Mind you, we never discussed anything really. We watched telly, argued, fought, shouted at each other and, when my dad was out, laughed. But nobody ever expressed any real opinions on anything of any great import.

It was not the idea but the logic of religion that bothered me. I would sit in the Assembly Hall, surrounded by 300 kids, imagining all of them asking God for different things, and this scenario being replicated in thousands of schools all across the country, and it all became a little unrealistic. The idea that one being – even the all-powerful man in the clouds with the wispy beard we saw in our books – could keep track of all those individual pleas just seemed ludicrous. And, to compound the silliness, apparently He was not just listening, but watching all of us too. All the time. Millions and millions of us. In a world filled with atom bombs and bank robbers, and one where my dad would beat my mum up in front of his kids, apparently, God spent his valuable time keeping a beady eye on me and my mates just in case we said "Oh God" or swore or told a lie, in which case he would not only spot it, but also mete put some form of punishment too. I just didn't buy it.

Not that I ever said this of course. I wasn't that stupid. I put my hands together, closed my eyes, and asked for Johnny Seven or a new bike or some marbles like every other kid. Just in case.

Apart from introducing me to mercenary religious practices, Broom Barns also has the dubious honour of being the place where I learned how to be embarrassed.

My dad was still living at home at the time of this cathartic experience. Although he was my dad, he was no provider. He gave my mum a set "wage" each week to feed and clothe herself and us four kids, from which she was also expected to cover every household expense, from rent to gas and electricity, to saving for Christmas gifts. The level of this wage was not based on how much all these things cost either, but on the minimum my old man thought he had to stump up to prevent actually being arrested for neglect.

So my mum had to watch every penny. And she was permanently broke. She made her own clothes on a pedal operated Singer sewing machine. She made dresses for my sister that way too. She took menial jobs part time to supplement the meagre amount paid by my dad – who never once asked, or presumably thought about, why we were all wearing each other’s clothes and why we only had one bath a week on a Sunday.

I was about eight years old when my Mum received a parcel from her family in Nottingham, who knew the desperate financial straits she was often in. In the parcel were some men's shirts. I remember them well - thick, heavy, hard-wearing cotton, a kind of raw, cream colour, they had collars which could be removed from the shirt and washed separately or replaced when worn out.

My mum must have been going through a particularly tough time, because one morning when I did not have a shirt to wear to school, she dressed me in one of those sent from her family. As it was a man's shirt, and I was not a big boy, it was enormous on me. It had old fashioned tails at the front and back, which hung down far below my knees. The collar, which my mum buttoned up, dangled gapingly about three inches below my Adam's apple. Being something of a smiling idiot, I trudged off to school, happily oblivious to my sartorial shortcomings.

Our school uniform required short grey trousers which finished half way down my thighs, and as I was walking through the underpass under the main road to school, I suddenly felt the tails of the shirt unravelling from the tight balls my mum had screwed them up into under my trousers. They unfurled rapidly and completely, the cream tails of the shirt hanging out the bottom of my trousers and flapping around below my knees.

Not quite knowing what to do, I stuffed my hands deep into the pockets of my trousers and began pulling and bunching the shirt material, hoisting it all back up the legs of my short trousers and holding it tightly in balls t hrough the pocket lining. To maintain my grip on the folds of fabric, I had to walk with my legs dead straight, pivoting at the hips and marching stiffly with my arms clamped to my sides, hands thrust deep in my pockets. I knew this made me look bizarre - striding jerkily like Frankenstein's monster – but I had no choice. I could feel my face growing hotter and reddening as I approached the school gates where there was a teacher and a gaggle of other kids. I steeled myself and strode purposefully through them. Beetroot red to the tips of my ears now, and thoroughly shamed, I glanced back to see their faces, some puzzled, most smirking, and behind them, across the main road, I saw my dad pull on to the main road on his way to work, driving his e-type Jaguar. I remember thinking – even at that tender age – that something wasn't quite right with my dad.

But this was just my introduction to what life had in store for me, embarrassment-wise. I would soon endure greater shame not only in front of my peers, and my teachers, but also in front of a large invited audience.

There was a very popular sit-com on TV at the time called Please Sir, in which a bumbling but terribly well-meaning young teacher takes over a class of inner-city delinquents – all with hearts of gold, naturally.

The cast was a fabulous collection of stereotypes, from the Headmaster, an absent minded, befuddled older gent, to the assistant head, a terrifying and domineering, no-nonsense middle aged woman who scared the hell out of everyone at the school – teachers included. This actress reappeared years later playing, as far as I could tell, the same person in an episode of Fawlty Towers where she appeared as a very demanding guest who refused to turn her hearing aid on because it flattened the batteries. And then there was the school janitor, a man with a military gait who adored the Deputy Head and spent most of his time telling the kids "I was in the desert rats you know".

The pupils were just as cliched, and just as brilliant. On the girl’s side, there was the pretty, vain, slightly dim and perennially mini-skirted Sharon, and Maureen, the plain and serious girl, constantly quoting and misquoting the bible, who mooned over "Sir" and had ambitions to be a nun. The boys were led by Duffy, a wise-cracking hard nut, with Craven, an impeccably dressed mod, Dennis, a gentle and loving simpleton, and leather jacketed Frankie Abbot, who acted like a tough guy, referred to himself as "F.A.", but was in reality a remorselessly henpecked mummy's boy and coward.

Each Christmas our school put on a play, which was performed in front of all the parents. And one year, the teachers decided to forego the usual Nativity story, and in a fit of right-on rule breaking instead present our version of Please Sir.

I got the part of Mr. Price – a blunt, no-nonsense Welshman and maths teacher with a strong accent. My sports teacher at school was Mr. Griffiths. A supremely fit man with a ginger goatee, he was also Welsh, and one of my favourites. I think he liked me because I was a decent, natural sportsman. He decided that to add veracity to our performance, and help me, he would coach me in how to deliver my part with a real Welsh accent. We went through my lines for several weeks, repeating them over and over and perfecting my accent.

I had the honour of speaking the last line of the play. For this, I had to step forward from among a group of my fellow performers and shout "Never mind the flippin' bell, grab your cup of tea!" at which point I was to kick a football over the heads of the watching parents and the play would be over. Footballs in the mid-sixties were not the glossy, feather light, scientifically designed things we see today. Back then, they were heavy, hard brown leather, had a thick, internal rubber bladder, and when wet felt like you were heading a bag of flour. For safety reasons, therefore, it was decided that I should not use a real football, but just the rubber bladder alone. This, although much lighter, still had impressive heft.

There were to be two performances of the play on consecutive nights, and tickets sold out quickly. The first performance went perfectly – not a single hitch, and despite a few first night jitters, nobody forgot their lines. We delivered the play with gusto and energy, and the parents all laughed in the right places. When the time came for the last line, and my solo moment under the spotlight, I marched boldly forward, chest puffed out, and tried to project myself and speak clearly just as Mr. Griffiths had taught me.

"Never mind the flippin' bell, grab your cup of tea", I said confidently, and not without some pride. I felt pretty chuffed with myself. I had given a good performance, remembered all my lines, and got a few laughs. I was good at this. I launched the ball in a high toss and took a great swing at it with my right foot, hitting it hard on the volley.

The ball left my foot at huge speed, travelled all of ten feet perfectly horizontally and cannoned directly into the face of a large middle-aged lady sitting in her coat on the front row. As it happened, and with a quite unfortunate twist of irony she seemed neither to recognise nor appreciate, she was just taking a sip from a school supplied cup of tea when the ball arrived. It hit her fair and square, with considerable force. The saucer dropped to the floor, the teacup span in the air, spraying its contents on the unfortunate woman's face. She sat there in shock, glaring at me with a look of hurt disbelief as tea dripped off her nose and onto her coat which was, I noted, buttoned right up to the neck as if against an arctic wind. I stood, my mouth hanging open, thinking "I am in so much trouble…".

Taking the initiative, Mr. Griffiths bounded over and thanked the audience, while other teachers fussed around this poor lady, her face turning redder and redder with hot tea, and I was bundled off to the changing rooms in a horrified trance.

The following day, the teaching staff were very kind and comforting. They counselled me, reassured me, and gently rebuilt my confidence. It was an accident, and accidents happen. They worked hard to make sure this terrible event did not affect my performance for the second and final night and, their support ringing in my ears, I soon felt I was ready to try again.

As a gesture of goodwill, the school persuaded the unfortunate lady to return on the second night to see the play again as a special guest of the staff, to make amends for this unfortunate accident. She was given a reserved seat next to the teachers at the back of the audience as a mark of respect. Or perhaps for her own protection given the previous night's action.

The evening passed well. If anything, better than the first performance, as we all got more into our roles, knew where the audience reactions would be, and started trying to milk the laughs wherever we could. It was going down a storm. The teachers looked proud, and we were having huge fun showing off, the audience lapping us up. Come the final line, I pushed forward again, energised and refreshed with the confidence instilled in me by my teachers and the reaction of the audience that night, and again loudly and confidently said "Never mind the flippin' bell, grab your cup of tea".

I tossed the ball lightly in the air. I recall deliberately concentrating on kicking the ball high, so as not to repeat the previous night's error. I connected perfectly, and the ball took off beautifully. Much to my relief, it sailed easily over the front rows of parents. I began to hear the beginnings of appreciative applause. I felt great.

I worked out the ball's trajectory long before anyone else.

As it dipped viciously, I had the perfect view. I watched, horrified but powerless, and stood dumbstruck as it sailed down in a perfect arc and smacked the same lady fair and square in the face again.

She looked at me aghast with an expression I will never forget. It said "Again!" It said "What have I ever done to you".

There was a second or two of absolute silence. Nobody moved as the horrified teachers realised I'd done the same woman again. Mr. Griffiths looked straight at me and I swear to this day he had the ghost of a suppressed laugh on his face. He jumped up, dashed over and bundled me off stage. For the second time in two nights.

I was never invited to take part in a Christmas play again, although to be honest, I did not volunteer either. I felt that perhaps acting was not my forte.

Despite these setbacks, my early school life was enjoyable. We were all council estate kids, we were all from the same kind of background, so I went to school with the same friends I would play with after school finished.

I was a reasonably bright kid academically. I latched onto things quickly, and it used to drive my sister to distraction. Denise was always a grafter. She would revise and revise - study like a maniac for exams. I would go out and play football instead. Then I would breeze through them. Din would achieve good results too – she is as smart as hell - but she'd work so hard for the exams. She would get pretty angry with me sometimes - at the unfairness of it all. And I don't blame her.

But my relative academic ease flattered to deceive. Despite appearing naturally quick-witted, most of the time I acted with breath-taking feeble mindedness.

To get to school, I had to go through an underpass under the busy main road which passed between the school and our house. This was part of the cycle track network which criss-crossed Stevenage, and at its entrance was a large round metal sign, strapped to a pole about 8 feet high, indicating that the cycle track was for mopeds and bicycles only. I told my friend Glyn that if we hit the sign enough with stones, it would spin on the pole and end up facing the wrong way – with presumably hilarious results. I'm not sure what these would be, but in my defence I was about ten years old, and an idiot.

We began with much enthusiasm. We launched wave upon wave of rocks at the sign with deadly accuracy. It did not move one millimetre. Just stayed there, silently mocking our efforts. Once we had exhausted all the stones in the immediate surroundings, we went further afield to find more ammo. We raided the front gardens of close-by houses for more stones, and subjected the sign to barrage after barrage. It did not budge.

Frustrated by our inability to achieve my aim, and clearly experiencing my first vandal blood lust, I went angrily off in search of larger ammunition. Rummaging around at the edge of some woods about a hundred metres away, in the long grass I came across a lump of concrete, peppered with bits of flint. It had seemingly been the concrete base into which a fence or sign had been set at some point as it still had the broken stump of a small wooden post sticking out of its centre. It was sharp, uneven, rough and of sufficient weight that I struggled to carry it back.

Standing beneath the sign, I took a moment to catch my breath and give my arms a rest. I adopted as wide a stance as I could, picked the concrete lump up by the bit of post conveniently sticking out from its centre, and began swinging it back and forth between my legs to get some momentum going. I arched my body back and forth to increase the swing, and when I felt like I could hold it no longer, I gave one final huge lunge and launched it skyward. It left my hands and sailed up, straight and true, right at the sign.

It hit it dead on, with some force. And moved it not the tiniest little bit. Instead, it bounced smartly off the metal sign with a bell-like clang, and plummeted back to earth, landing on my head as I stared stupidly upwards. I do actually have a hazy recollection of seeing the lump of concrete heading back down towards me at speed, and thinking "Duh?", before everything went black.

I came round about ten seconds later, laying on my back with a lump the size and shape of a ping-pong ball on my forehead and Glyn staring down at me, his face a blend of fear, shock and panicky giggling.

Not only did I not succeed in getting the sign to spin round, I didn't even get any time off for my injury. When I came too, I simply stood up and we carried on walking to school. Nobody took any notice – or even mentioned - the angry purple lump on my forehead. And it had reduced a lot by the time I went home, so my Mum simply thought it was yet another of the many cuts, lumps and bruises that boys collected in the normal course of life in Stevenage.

Sadly, as you may judge from my mum's reaction – or lack of reaction – such idiocy on my part was not unusual.

Indeed, it was just another in a series of head injuries which I incurred so often it was almost as if I were pursuing them as a hobby.

Once a school light fell on my head. For those reading quickly, may I repeat that just for purposes of clarity. A school light fell on my head. A whacking great, two foot diameter, heavy glass lamp fitting. I was just sitting at my desk, happily doing my work, when it just fell from the ceiling, hitting my head a glancing blow and smashing on my desk.

I think most people will accept there is little I could have done to cause, or indeed prevent, this event. I was, I am sure any right-minded person would agree, a completely innocent party in the whole affair. One minute I was reading the exciting tale of Janet and John going to the seaside, the next minute, a huge lump of white glass smashes on my head and my desk.

The school, recognising their duty of care, assumed my mum would wish to be bought into the matter, so they sent someone running to bring her to school urgently. It says much about my mum – and probably a lot about the times – that when she arrived, her reaction was to grab my head quite roughly and have a close look at the cut and the lump. Then to accusingly demand to know what I had been up to. Ignoring my protestations of innocence, she tutted loudly and told me to run my head under the tap and hold a hanky on it until it stopped bleeding. Then she told me to be more careful in the future and not mess about in class. And that was it. Nothing more was said. She went back home, my head stopped bleeding after a while and things just went on as if nothing had happened. I still have a scar on my eyebrow.

I was cut badly on the other side of my forehead a few months later when I was hit with a bottle – an event in which I was, once more, entirely innocent. We were playing football on the strip of grass in front of our house, when an argument broke out between some of the boys who were a little older than me. One of them picked up a bottle which was lying on the grass, and launched it at the rest of us. It hit me just above my eye and smashed. I put my hand up, immediately felt a lump and saw blood on my hand. I can remember with perfect clarity noticing a kind of shadow in my vision out of my left eye which was the rapidly expanding lump growing into my peripheral vision. I ran to my house, where my mum washed out the cut, put on a huge lump of sticking plaster and immediately sent me back out again.

In the light of all this, I don’t wish to suggest that my mum didn’t care for us. She did. Unconditionally and deeply. It was just that she saw wounds like this simply as part of the process of growing up, and she had an inherent belief that everything would be fine, so there was no need for a fuss. We never had any worries about serious illness. Meningitis, septicaemia and the like didn't exist. Or rather they did, but they happened to someone else. Somewhere else. Anything that befell us could be dealt with by the application of soup and a Beecham's Powder. My mum took no prisoners when it came to being ill. My sister and I often joked that, were we to actually break a leg, we may get a morning off school to have the plaster put on, but we'd be expected to go in for the afternoon.

And because we were never exposed to what might go wrong, we didn't think anything could. So we would take huge risks without fear of consequence. Hang out of trees fifty feet in the air. Walk and run over garages with fragile asbestos roofs. Make rope swings that suspended you in an arc tens of feet from the ground. Build karts with old pram wheels, sit in them and careen down the steepest of hills with no brakes or control, surrounded by cars, kerbs and trees all queuing up to bash your brains in.

What this blend of ignorance and blind optimism meant was that most kids I knew were a positive riot of bruises and cuts, most of the time.

I do, however, lay claim to one of the more unusual wounds among my peers. Indeed, so spectacular and unusual was it, that it remained a conversation piece for weeks. It was caused by our autumnal pursuit of the conker. Conkers were a very big deal when we were kids, and we would travel far and wide to collect them. The main problem was that so did every other child. As a consequence, trees were quickly denuded of conkers at anything like normal heights, so one had to find ever higher trees, and ever more inventive – sometimes violent - ways to knock the conkers down.

This meant lobbing increasingly unwieldy and heavy stuff up into very high horse chestnut trees, and running like hell when it came clattering down, hopefully with a load of conkers.

There was a particularly huge tree on our list – our mother lode. It stood in a mature, quiet and elevated copse by a large roundabout close to the railway tracks. I loved this little outcrop. It was little known and visited by other kids, yet was home to a huge horse chestnut tree. The copse was eventually cleared to make way for the eagle-shaped headquarters of the Confederation Life insurance company.

It was deep into the conker season and, having visited our tree several times and stripped the lower branches of any fruits, I was becoming ever more desperate for fresh supplies.

Facing something of a critical shortage, and finding a huge lump of broken tree branch on the ground, I decided to push the conker envelope by attempting to throw a branch I could hardly hold up. I took up position below a particularly tempting bunch of conkers maybe fifteen feet above my head.

I always had pretty good hand/eye co-ordination, which was why I found sports quite easy, and having seen Hammer Throwing on TV, I thought I would try to copy the technique. I grasped the branch in both hands and began spinning my entire body round. I span round several times, faster and faster, feeling the pull of the branch on my arms as I built up speed until, with the vocal encouragement of my mates ringing in my ears, I released the log.

It left my arms at an impressive velocity, flying upward into the canopy. Where it immediately hit one of the tree's more solid branches with a dull clonk, bounced straight back at incredible speed and landed on top of my head, knocking me down like I'd been shot. I lay there, conscious but stunned, feeling a slight dampness on my head, which I would soon discover was blood.

As I lay looking into the clear blue sky through the branches of the tree, trying to collect myself, all was silence. Until I heard a clattering noise, like the sound of wooden balls on skittles. Staring harder, puzzled, I realised with some surprise and not a little concern that it was the noise of an impressively large shower of conkers in their spiky shells raining down through the branches.

They landed on my prone form with some force, their spikes digging deep into my skin resulting in a liberal peppering of puncture wounds on my chest, arms, face and legs.

For two weeks, I was covered in swathes of tiny, red pimple-like scabs. I looked like I was suffering from some hideous and exotic skin complaint. People would guide their kids surreptitiously away from my path, presumably fearing I was carrying Measles or Chicken Pox.

The things which made life at Broom Barns so agreeable were also the things which made life in Stevenage as a kid in the sixties so good. The sheer number of young children was a factor. The town was full to the brim with t hem. Bounce a ball three times outside your house and within minutes there would be a gang of a dozen kids lining up to pick teams. And the fact that all families shared pretty much the same circumstances helped too. We all lived in rented council houses. Most of us had dads working in one of the many factories and engineering works in the town. Some of us had working mums too, doing part time hours in shops and factories while trying to raise us kids. Perhaps the most important factor was that, this being a new town, we were all new arrivals. None of us had roots here. We were all just trying to work out where we were, where we were going, and what this town was all about. How it all worked. To a large extent, we were all, parents and kids, the new kids at the big new school where we knew nobody and had to start from scratch.

Broom Barns holds such happy memories for me. I had a huge circle of friends, all of whom went to the same school and lived near me. We were happy in our own environment. All the people I knew were like us, more or less. M y mum loved us, we were fed and clothed – even if it was sometimes in wholly inappropriate sizes - and once my dad went to work, our house was a fun and safe place to be.

But at eleven years old, I had to leave the comforting confines of Broom Barns for Bedwell Secondary School, several miles away. Here the kids were big, often seemingly unhinged, regularly angry, and came from all over the town and from a variety of backgrounds. Was I in for a shock.

Bedwell School - The Early Years

The Lunatics have taken over the Asylum

Just before I reached eleven, the age at which it was my turn to move from junior to senior school, the new Labour Government, in a fit of idealistic and egalitarian fervour, changed the education system in England.

Under the old system, all kids took an exam called the Eleven Plus. The results of this exam would enable the education authority to identify the brightest children and send them to a Grammar School. Other kids would go to Secondary Modern Schools. The exams open to pupils to sit at the end of their school life were no different whether you went to a Grammar or a Secondary Modern – you still took either O Level or CSE depending on academic level - but the system allowed educators to nurture and challenge kids appropriately.

The incoming Labour Government, having sucked its pencils, sighed a few times and looked around for something to socially engineer, decided that it would be better to abandon this system and instead launch "Comprehensive" Schools.

In this new system, pupils went to a school selected for them, regardless of ability, based on location. The theory was that if you fill a school with kids of all ability ranges then somehow, presumably by osmosis (the actual science was less clear than the political doctrine), the brighter kids would make all the other kids bright too. Just like if you lock Professor Stephen Hawking in a room for 8 hours a day with, say, a Basset Hound, you would end up with two world-changing Physicists, rather than one world-changing but frustrated Physicist and a perfectly pleasant but now rather confused dog.

To the surprise – one would hope – of the bright eyed and terribly eager social engineers, at my school it did precisely the opposite of what was intended. The very clever kids, with no challenge to occupy them, got terribly bored with the entire concept of education, disengaged, and became disruptive and unfulfilled. The less bright, confounded and frustrated with work beyond their capabilities, also got terribly bored with the entire concept of education, disengaged, and became hugely disruptive and unfulfilled. Still, I suppose the new system was at least egalitarian - it fucked everyone up.

Like many fine and admirable ideas, it was conceived and promoted by very clever people. People with vision and dreams. People who had ambition and a desire to engineer society. People who could relax in the comforting knowledge that they were in no danger of ever having to suffer any effects of the experiments they were implementing.

The politicians who championed the system and spoke so passionately about the equality it offered to all, continued to send their own children to private, fee-paying schools just as they had always done. Equality was fine - as long as it only applied to those below oneself in the pecking order. For us, the great unwashed, comprehensive schools were like holding pens for the feral. Huge sites filled to bursting with roaming hordes of kids who were either challenged too much, or not enough, and who as a result channelled their boundless frustration and youthful energies away from self-improvement and education and into making mischief.

They were not educational establishments providing fair, unfettered access to higher education regardless of background, although that was certainly the aim. In practice, they were day camps with sufficient warders and overseers to ensure the kids did not actually kill each other. It was madness. Bedlam. It had the sense of a system teetering on the edge of riot, trying desperately to retain control through violence and threat. The teachers were often as brutal as the worst of the bullies – the only difference being they beat you with the benign and forward-looking blessing of the state. Corporal punishment was part of school life. It was a kid’s prison that let you go home at 3.30pm. If you want to know what it was like, watch One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.

I saw mathematical geniuses fervently hiding their intelligence for fear of attracting the attention of bullies. I saw kids for whom Science was as natural as breathing end up working in a warehouse lumping boxes about. I do not know of a single, solitary person from my year at school who went to University. Not one.

That is not why these schools existed. They did not exist to unearth undiscovered jewels of talent, and groom them for university life. They existed to turn kids out who could read enough to stay alive in the engineering works and factories of the town. If they could do more than that, it was a freak accident and the school wanted nothing to do with it.

These were not places in which you could admit to having artistic tendencies, or a wish to act or dance or take photographs for a living. Not unless you wanted to spend an inordinate amount of time being suspended upside down by large boys with tattoos and unnaturally hairy knuckles in such a position as to allow a microscopic examination of the inside of a toilet bowl. But they did offer some rather esoteric instruction which could prove useful in certain circumstances. Any kid who went to my secondary school was always very handy to have about if you locked yourself out of your car. Or your house. My sister still tells the story of when I phoned her from outside her house having turned up unexpectedly when she was at work. She said she would drive home and let me in. I phoned her five minutes later and told her not to bother, I was sitting in her lounge watching telly and waiting for the kettle to boil. She had left a first floor bedroom window on its security latch – which was all a Bedwell School pupil needed.

Despite the earnest theory of the new Comprehensive system, in practice its promised egalitarianism was something of a mirage. For the upper levels of society, it had little effect. This was because if you could show some past connection with one of the better schools, you could by-pass the whole distasteful geographical lottery and avoid the dreaded chance of ending up at some dodgy school on a huge estate filled with boys who looked like the cast of The Shawshank Redemption. If Daddy or Mummy, or a sibling, had previously gone to one of the old Grammar Schools, or I guess if they were luminaries in the local Round Table, then your little Toby or Tamsin was safely granted access to the right school, no questions asked. The only difference being that, in the new system, neither Toby nor Tamsin now needed to take the Eleven Plus exam to get in because it did not exist. They could have the intellect of a fish finger and they would stroll right in. In this world of supposed equality, therefore, it was in practice even easier to fill what were, to all intents and purposes, grammar schools with the "right" kind of children.

The new system consequently affected the best schools in the town not one jot. These remained grammar schools in everything but name. Their teaching methods, teachers, and to a very large extent the pupil profile, did not change, and they continued to push out successful kids, and university candidates, just as they had always done.

For the vast majority of us, however, it was a complete balls up.

Now, I do accept there is probably an element of envy in all this. I was a bright kid and, with parents who took even a passing interest, I may have gone to a better school. But the fact was I had a father who possessed not the slightest interest in what school I went to, what subjects I studied or exams I passed. My father never – not once – saw or commented on a school report. Not for any of us kids. He never once discussed anything about my school. He did not give the tiniest of shits. School was something that kids just went to. It made no difference to his life, and in my father's world, if it had no direct impact on him, it was of no importance. And my mum was too busy trying to bring up four kids on next to no money to worry too much about what school I went to, as long as I went to one. My Mum came from a world where people from our backgrounds got an apprenticeship, got a trade and a job, and generally stayed in the same profession – and if possible with the same employer - for our entire working lives. That was the way to contentment. Happiness was about stability. That was the limit of her ambition.

So, as nobody else seemed particularly bothered, at the age of eleven, I did my own school application.

I checked into each school and its reputation. The form allowed for three choices. The one school I did not want to go, and would never put on my list, was the school my older brother had been to and my sister was attending - Bedwell School.

Bedwell was generally accepted as the worst school in the entire town. And to be the worst school in Stevenage really was an achievement. It was the sump on the engine of education. It was where kids were sent when they were expelled from other schools. It was awful. Simply awful. Its mission statement was to educate kids to read the sign in the factory saying “Don't stick your hand in here” and that was pretty much job done.

Having done my research, and full of youthful naivety, I put Alleynes (an ex-Grammar School) as first choice. Second I put Barclay, a very good school in the old town of Stevenage. My third choice was Nobel School - again one of the ex-Grammar Schools. I filled in my details, got my mum to sign the form and sent it off.

A few weeks later, we got a letter saying I had been allocated a place at Bedwell School.

I was disappointed. What was the point of offering a choice when in reality they took no notice and sent you to a school you didn't even put as one of your choices? But, being eleven, I had no idea about appeals processes. I simply accepted the situation and started investigating if I could buy body armour in the school colours.

The school was maybe a four mile cycle ride from my house, so on my first day I turned up on my bicycle, resplendent in a new blazer, nylon shirt and polyester trousers, out of breath and shiny with perspiration. Although the tough, cheap but entirely unabsorbent man-made fabrics did not help, the sweatiness was mainly because of my bicycle.

You see, I had wanted a Raleigh Chopper. This machine was an object of desire for all boys at the time. Based loosely on the hugely desirable "Schwinn Cruiser" type bikes that appeared in the back of American magazines like Mad, it was designed and built by Raleigh in Nottingham. With a large, fat wheel at the back, and a much smaller wheel at the front, it was fitted with high, wide handlebars and a long seat with a backrest like a custom chopper motorcycle. It also had three gears which were selected using a gear stick mounted on the crossbar, rather than the traditional, dated little thumb lever on the handlebars. And it was bright orange. It was a ray of brilliance and inventiveness in a sector which had provided just two choices up to that point – a large wheeled racing bike, or a bike that looked the same as the one your mum or dad would have ridden.

I lusted after a chopper. My days were filled with imagining what it would be like to ride one. To own one. How cool I would look, leaning casually on the backrest, flared jeans flapping in the breeze as I regaled girls with stories of my cycling prowess.

I went to Boorman's in Stevenage. This was a traditional bike shop that smelled of oil and leather with a wooden floor and a counter backed with a wall of tiny little drawers containing circlips and washers and brake blocks and cogs and valves – anything the cyclist needed to keep his bike on the road.

Mr. Boorman gave me a brochure for the Chopper. I read and re-read that thing a thousand times. I knew it word for word. I would casually leave it on the table, nonchalantly opened to the double-page picture of the bike in its bright orange livery, where my dad would see it, and I assumed become entranced by its beauty and want to buy it for his son. I would engage my mum in conversation about it, going through all the bikes details with her, and she would nod appreciatively and make the right noises in the right places.

The bike cost 35 pounds new. Far too much for my mum. But it was my birthday coming up, and I was about to start senior school. So, I was pretty much convinced that this was to be the "Chopper Birthday". I ramped up the propaganda campaign, wittering on about the benefits and the genius of the bike until everyone in my family could bear it no longer.

On the morning of my birthday when I came downstairs, my mum told me that there was a surprise for me in the shed that she thought would help me when school started.

The shed was not actually a shed. It was a passageway between the kitchen and the garden in which we stored coal for the fires, garden tools, bikes, the lawnmower and any other old tat that mum would not allow in the house but would get nicked if we left it outside.

I excitedly threw the kitchen door open, and there in front of me was a bike. My brother Roger’s old bike, which he no longer used. The bike was enormous. It was called a Hercules and had huge 26" wheels mounted in a charcoal grey, heavy, utilitarian frame. The thing weighed as much as a small car. It was eminently practical. Totally indestructible. And completely out of date. Like something you’d see in the war. It lacked any style, romance or cool. It was the bicycle equivalent of a pair of hobnail boots.

And it was far too big. I was not a big child, and I was not even 11 years old. This was an adult’s bike. Even with the saddle as low as it could possibly go, I could not touch the ground. To come to a stop without falling over, I would have to slide off the saddle, and off to one side so I could plant a foot on the floor, the other leg crooked over the crossbar. The other kids on my estate used to shout "wiggle bum" at me because I could not sit on the saddle when riding the bike as my legs were not long enough to reach the pedals on their down stroke. And the weight of the machine was such that you needed thighs like a footballer just to create forward movement on the flat. Uphill, I think I dismounted and pushed more than I pedalled. It provided as much freedom of travel as a wheelbarrow full of rocks. Riding it, I looked like I belonged in a fucking Hovis advert.

Fortune smiled on me though. My father must have had some kind of seizure, and in his addled state inadvertently opened his wallet, because before starting at Bedwell my mum told me she had the money for my chopper. And it was to prove a real lesson in life. I loved that bike. Adored it. I could sit and stare at it for hours. I had wanted one for so long, and here I was, finally, the proud owner of a bright orange model. I polished it until it gleamed. I treated it with reverence. Then I started to discover it had some disappointing qualities. Mainly that it weighed as much as a small car. I guess this should not have been a surprise. Although it was based on the glamorous and trendy Schwinn Cruiser, and looked like something from the future, it was manufactured in the English midlands in a factory which had only just switched from making war munitions and bicycles for factory workers that would last a lifetime. The chopper really was enormously heavy. And with its tiny front wheel and huge back wheel, and all the rider's weight situated above the rear axle, it was also seriously unstable at anything above walking pace. And the gear stick – the real wow factor to any small boy – being a short, metal stick situated right where your crotch would end up if you slipped off the saddle, probably reduced the birth rate in the UK by a measurable percentage.

So, the sheen on my face as I arrived at school that first morning may have had something to do with nervous anticipation and my utterly non-absorbent man-made fabric attire, but equally had just as much to do with the effort required of a tiny 11-year-old boy to lug a seventy-pound bicycle four miles across town and uphill to school. Strapped behind me on the chopper seat was the tan vinyl leather-look brief case my mum bought me, which smelled so strongly of plastic that opening it and inhaling deeply could produce hallucinations in boys unaccustomed to the fumes. I think she thought it would make me look scholarly and professional. It nearly got me beaten up. Within the first week it would be torn to bits by feral kids - and me – to be replaced with a cheap duffel bag from the town's open-air market.

I parked my bike in the bike sheds, put on my combination padlock and, coughing lightly in the plumes of cigarette smoke from the many kids indulging their habit before starting their day, entered the main building of this august seat of learning.

It was a revelation. An open mouthed, wide-eyed, what the fuck, shock to the system revelation. I had never before seen such lawless bedlam. Everywhere I looked, everywhere I went, there was a permanent, low-level, youth riot taking place, with no apparent effort on the part of any adult to control or calm it.

Boys in Dr. Marten boots and trousers hoisted up to mid-calf were swearing, spitting, shouting, smoking, jostling, fighting. Exciting, dangerous looking girls in mini skirts and extravagant eye make-up, carrying packs of Players No 6 cigarettes openly in their hands, stared at you with real challenge and threat in their eyes.

Kids were taking precisely no notice of the teachers, who either looked beaten and dispirited, or just as malevolent and aggressive as the boys.

It was appalling. And brilliant. I have never been so terrified and excited at the same time before or since. This was going to be wonderful. And scary. Dangerous and exhilarating. It was like Lord of the Flies. But with added girls.

The Headmaster, Mr. Donson, was a softly spoken and gentle soul, possessing an enlightened and modern outlook with regard to teaching methodology. He clearly believed in the idea that treating children as adults would produce a responsible attitude and engaged pupils eager to contribute and learn. I don't know how the experiment fared elsewhere, but I do know our school was proof that such a theory was not always successful. Kids at Bedwell viewed such ideas as a weakness and attacked.

In my first few weeks at the school, I opened a classroom door and took two steps in before realising this was not my class. In front of the blackboard at the other end of the room was a bearded teacher wearing an oatmeal coloured suit with wide lapels stretching to the tips of his shoulders, a polo necked jumper and thick black framed glasses of the kind employed by beatniks and hepcats doing angry poetry readings in sixties coffee bars.

This teacher was firmly in the "Listen you guys, it's cool to call me by my first name" camp. The kind who would ask the older kids if they wanted to come on an anti-war march with him at the weekend. He looked at me blankly. There were a couple of kids next to where I now stood, brazenly smoking and half-heartedly concealing themselves behind their upturned desk lids. Most of the class turned round to stare at me, and I was subjected to a volley of such startling abuse it struck me dumb. I'd grown up on a shitty council estate, running semi-wild with gangs of other kids, so I was not, it must be said, a beginner when it came to foul language and insults. But this was of a different order of magnitude, made more shocking by the fact that it was delivered in front of a teacher whose only reaction was to smile rather wanly at me. I beat a hasty retreat. This was an insane asylum, not a school.

The teaching staff at Bedwell School really did leave something to be desired.

I often read and listen to successful people who, when quizzed about their lives, identify a teacher or teachers who were inspirational. Someone who engaged their attention, recognised a natural ability and nurtured it. An archetypal role model, whose only reward was to know they had set a young mind free and on its path to fulfilment.

Bedwell didn't really do those teachers.

What it did were teachers who were nasty and violent. Or disengaged and going through the motions. Or distracted and pretending to be elsewhere. Or neurotic. Or a combination of one or more of these conditions. Not one teacher had any impact on me. Well, any positive impact at least.

We had a maths teacher, grey haired, short and wide with a military bearing, blazer and regimental tie. He used to smoke a pipe in the class as he was teaching. We discovered very early on that if we got him on to the subject of pipes and tobacco, he would leave the mental confines of the lesson and wander off for half an hour reminiscing and lecturing in a distracted fashion about some aspect of his smoking hobby. He also had a shocking temper, and when aroused was terrifying.

We had a Physics teacher who must have been six feet four inches tall, and wide, with an extravagantly broken nose. This thing did not have so much a kink in it as a chicane. Perched on top of it was an enormous pair of glasses with thick black frames. He would spend most of his time in the "If you don't want to learn, I can’t be bothered to teach you" teaching camp, then, without warning, would embark on a wild but surprisingly energetic foray into the land of "You have driven me too far and I am going to rip your face off".

We had one female teacher who was what passed for attractive in a school half of whose pupils were frustrated and stroppy young boys. She really wasn't, but in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king and all that. The fairer sex she may well have been, but in Bedwell, being female in no way guaranteed a more nurturing and maternal countenance.

One of my mates came into class assembly late one morning. Not badly late – just a few minutes after our teacher had started calling the register. He opened the door and walked in, without knocking first. Our teacher, distracted from her task by his entry, was clearly not in the frame of mind to accept this minor infringement of her rules of politeness. She stood up, strode the four paces over to meet him as he walked in, and without hesitating or even saying a word, punched him full in the face. I shit you not. This was not a slap. It was a full-on closed-fist punch in the face. There was a dull thwacking sound, like when you smack a large joint of raw meat, and he looked at her in shock. She stood in front of him shouting in his face about his rudeness, and then pushed him toward his desk.

And the only surprising thing about this whole outburst was that it is only in later life that I find it surprising. Back then, it was just another day in paradise.

Among the subjects taught at Bedwell, Art was one of the few where I actually enjoyed myself. The three teachers making up the Art Department comprised a husband and wife team and a lunatic. The couple were real hippies. She was frizzy haired, gaunt, spoke with a soft earnestness, and had an apparently endless wardrobe of voluminous, intricately patterned long skirts, which she only ever wore with open sandals.

Her husband was very tall and very skinny. His thin frame was topped by a mop of tightly curled but frizzy blonde hair. He also only ever wore sandals.

They were the archetypal peaceniks – they spent most of their time seeing everyone's point of view, getting upset at the rules imposed by the school and understanding us kids. Until they lost their tempers. She was frightening when she did. I only ever saw it once, and it was awesome – she turned from the kind of lady who would put daisies in then ends of rifles, to the kind of woman who may well use the butt of one of them on you for fun.

The other art teacher, Mr. Bramley, was one of my favourites. He was my art teacher for the first three years of my school career. He was a loony. And I liked him. Thinning dark hair, cut short, and a dark beard, he was a man who adored his subject. To him art was not just something to be taught, but a mainstay of life itself.

I was quite a creative kid, and excelled at art, so he liked me. Right up until the end of the third year. In those days, after three years, you chose your "Options". This meant dropping subjects that were no use to your intended career and concentrating on those which were.

I had a wild idea that I may one day become an Architect. I was, at this time, labouring under the comically ludicrous notion that it may be possible for a Bedwell kid to go to University, or to have a career not dependent on one of the factories or building sites in the town.

In order to pursue this dream, I would have to give up Art as a subject. It says something about Architecture, and those who practice it, that students were not permitted to take both Art and Technical Drawing. You had to choose one or the other. The creative kids were supposed to choose art, while the kids who could draw accurately, but presumably without artistic flair, would choose Technical Drawing. It may explain why so much architecture is creatively bereft when you know this little fact.

I duly completed the form listing my choice of subject options, dropping Art in favour of Technical Drawing. Again, this was something I did on my own, so in this instance, I could not blame my parents who had no input into my subject choices at all. They did not know the subjects I chose, or why I chose them.

During my first art lesson after handing in the options form, Mr. Bramley asked me to stay behind after class. This was normally not good news, but as I had committed no major infringements that he could have been aware of that week, I was more curious than concerned.

As the last pupil left the classroom, he closed the door and turned to face me. Then he launched into a ten-minute tirade about my stupidity, crassness and dumb judgement. He was angry – and I mean incandescent – because I had dropped his subject and taken Technical Drawing instead. I recall very little detail of his rant, other than its heartfelt venality. I did not contribute a solitary word. I do remember him at one point leaning right into my face, locking my eyes with his – big, almost black, irises with tiny pin-prick pupils – and saying with controlled rage, his voice trembling with anger, "You dropped Art for drawing little fucking boxes…."

Ironically, rather than put me off the man, it made me like him all the more. He was not to know that, with a father like mine, being in close proximity to a screaming man on the edge of violence was quite normal for us Selwood kids. So instead of being intimidated, I thought here was someone with a real passion for his subject. Most of the teachers at Bedwell really couldn’t give a stuff. They were collecting a pay check for teaching ungrateful little shits how not to kill themselves. That was the limit of their commitment and involvement.

But Mr. Bramley was incensed by my betrayal of a subject that he held dear, and I was filled with respect for him. With hindsight, I suspect that he was the first adult to give me an inkling that I was important to him as a pupil. I didn’t get the chance to tell him that his anger with me actually improved my self-esteem and ambition in ways that he could not imagine. I didn't get the opportunity to thank him because he never spoke to me again for the rest of my time at school. Which is a shame because he made such a positive difference to me – the only Bedwell teacher to do so. So, as “inspirational teachers” go, mine was a barely lucid man, trying desperately to stop himself from committing physical violence, screaming in my face calling me an idiot for wanting to draw little fucking boxes. Which says a lot about my school.

Our games teacher was Mr. Cook. He was a nice enough chap, always to be seen wearing sports clothes. Track suit bottoms, sweatshirts, trainers. I never saw the man in anything that didn't have an elasticated waist. Despite this outward adherence to a sporting image, he had one glaring incongruity for a sports teacher. He smoked more than any man I have ever encountered. His fingers were stained a livid yellow from nicotine. That man liked a cigarette like the rest of us liked breathing. It was not something he enjoyed, it was something he needed to do to survive. Like eating.

Sports were something of a hit and miss affair at Bedwell. Where the school had been funded well as a construction project, the ongoing finances were obviously not generous. We had three hard tennis courts surrounded by high chain-link fencing. They were fine courts in black tarmac, with fresh white lines marking out the courts. But we did not have any nets. Or racquets. Or indeed tennis balls. So, in my five years at the school not once did I see the tennis courts used for their intended purpose. We used them for football. For netball. We used them to play shockingly violent games of British Bulldog. But never tennis.

Being a sporty kid, I was in the football and cricket teams, and we played other schools at the weekends. We pretty much always lost. Which was embarrassing enough, made more so by our means of transport. The school had purchased a minibus to transport our glorious sporting teams to away matches in the town. Sadly, their finances could only stretch to a very old Bedford Dormobile, hand painted in battleship grey. This vehicle had seen better days. It had a sliding door next to the driver, which meant he could, should he wish, drive with the door fully open. The choice in this affair was largely taken out of his hands, however, because the door would simply slide open in transit at arbitrary moments, to such a degree that most of the time it was simply wedged open in all but the most inclement of weather. As a nod towards branding, some bright spark at the school had sign written the bus with the school’s name. Which would have been better were it not done using self-adhesive, pre-cut plastic film letters from the local stationery store. It took all of a couple of weeks for these to start dropping off, with the result that our minibus would arrive at better funded, more successful schools with the words “Bed choo tevenage” plastered on the side. We were not, it must be said, very professional. An impression highlighted by the fact that the van was so unreliable that in at least half the away games I played in, we had to push start the thing after the game, enduring cat calls and laughter from our victorious opponents.

It is only with hindsight that I can sympathise - just a little - with the local education authority and the school for their lack of interest and investment. Because we were a bunch of shits. We truly were. In those early days at Bedwell, the teaching staff had no support from the Headmaster who was, it has to be said, out of his depth. Nobody ever got expelled, but anyone expelled from another school would come to ours. We were the sinkhole. A brutal, chaotic home for delinquents, hooligans, misfits, the untrainable and the unteachable.

And I loved it.

By most measures – discipline, education, results, attendance – it was a disaster. But by the most important measure for kids – was it a laugh – we were top bloody drawer.

Once you worked out who the complete loons were, and either avoided or befriended them, life was pretty good.

I made friends the like of whom I had never experienced before. Kids with no boundaries. Kids who just said "Ah, fuck it" and did what they wanted. Kids who took no shit – from other kids or from adults. We had everything there – posh kids, kids who smelled, kids with embarrassing haircuts, psychotic kids, anti-social kids, funny kids, scary kids.

It was like being in a youth club every day, where the leaders were only nominally in charge. We didn't so much have lessons. What we had were different rooms at different times of day in which to misbehave as a procession of harried and defeated adults simply gave up in front of us.

But this adolescent nirvana came to a sudden and shocking halt in my second year.

Mr. Donson, the charming, avuncular and entirely ineffective headmaster was replaced by a new man.

Mr. Wallace was drafted in to wrest control of the establishment from the kids. He had previously been in charge of an Approved School – a kind of prison for young men. He was stick thin, six feet six inches tall, with a huge, booming, commanding voice. To hear him bellow "You, boy" was enough to turn your blood to ice.

During the first two months or so of the new regime, when us kids were not quite aware of the psychotic nature of our new headmaster, half the boys were caned for various offences – serious and trivial – to send the message out that things were different.

I was caned for wearing red socks. And for smoking. You could pretty much be caned for anything.

I understand that there was a need to regain control of a feral school. I also get that to do so, one had to send a clear message that the rules had changed. But it made your arse hurt, that is for sure. And it seemed to be done with such gusto by the teaching staff.

I had not been caned before. And it was a surreal experience. To have a grown man wield a long piece of wood, swish it about for a few seconds to really get himself loosened up, then whack you across the behind with it several times with undisguised enthusiasm was a new experience. The welts on my buttocks lasted for two or three days, and it was painful to sit down for a while. But, as quite rough kids, we just took this unforeseen change in our circumstances with alacrity. It didn’t change what we did or how we did it. It just changed where we did it.

We would now no longer light our cigarettes on the way out of school. Now we waited until we were out of sight of the school windows. Fights were now arranged to take place out of sight of the school. The big lads now demanded your lunch money with menaces on the way to school, rather than doing it in the dining hall.

It seems to me, even now, that the measures employed to gain control were overly harsh. Apart from a few complete nutters, we were not bad kids. Not evil. We were just naughty. Not burn your house down naughty. Just do anything for a laugh naughty.

As Stevenage kids, we were pretty inured to a lot of the stuff that would have educationalists these days calling in teams of counsellors. We were coarse, uncultured, unrefined. We were a bunch of shits. But a very funny, inventive, energetic and virtually indestructible bunch of shits.

Our lack of refinement, and our robustness of spirit, were bought home to me when the school, in a moment of apparent lunacy, decided to arrange a cultural exchange programme. We were to be unleashed on another, unsuspecting, country as representatives of our generation. God help them.

Culture as we understood it at our age in Stevenage amounted to drinking cheap cider, smoking Players No.6 and playing football with two teams of 20-a-side on a patch of stony grass between two main roads. This seemed not to bother the organisers unduly. We were to travel to a small town near Frankfurt by coach, where we would be collected by German families who would welcome us into their homes for two weeks, exposing us to new experiences, alternative world views and many different kinds of sausage.

The trip cost £35. A staggering sum, which to my mum was more than an entire week's housekeeping, but she scraped it together somehow and I was in. This may have had something to do with me badgering her every waking moment, telling her all of my mates were going, and if I didn't go too, it would be the end of my life at Bedwell School.

Waiting for the coach in the pre-dawn darkness outside school, I could hear anxious parents talking quietly as their loved ones fidgeted, waiting to go. I had arrived alone on my bike, my clothes flopping around in the bottom of a simply enormous rucksack my older brother bought when he had a keen, but short-lived, hankering to embark on the life of a scout. It was made of heavy grey canvas, with thick leather pocket straps and a bulky metal frame and was almost as tall as me. Even empty, it took some strength to hoist it on my back. I stood waiting for my mates, on the periphery of the crowd so I could casually work my way through a 10 pack of Embassy Regal, a bag of Woolworths broken biscuits, and a bottle of milk which it is entirely possible I may have found on a doorstep on my way to school in the very early hours.

When the coach which was to take us all the way to Germany arrived, it became immediately clear that this was not to be a luxury trip. There was a deep roaring sound, mingled with the kind of high-pitched whine that gearboxes make when in their death throes, and from within a cloud of heavy black smoke and choking fumes, there emerged a battle-scarred 1960s boneshaker in green and black with polished chrome wheel trims.

Sign-written "Reg's Coaches", it was a testament to the motor mechanic's art of keeping a wreck on the road against all the odds. With an ear-piercing hiss, it came to a halt and the driver emerged - a chain-smoking middle-aged man with pock-marked skin, greasy jeans whose waistband rested just below his nipples, thinning, slicked back teddy-boy hair, and the kind of eyes that said "I will kill you and bury you in the woods if you give me any shit". He was the perfect driver for a Bedwell School trip.

We were to be accompanied on this trip by two teachers, Mr. Gordon and Miss McCafferty. He was a forgetful but genial chap in his forties with dandruff and egg in his beard, who wore tweed jackets with elbow patches and those shoes that you wear because they are comfortable, but look like you're walking around with each foot stuffed in a Cornish pasty.

She was a single female teacher who was not completely hideous to behold and weighed less than a mini. Following the rules of the time, this made her an object of desire to the teenage boys in her charge.

We drove to the ferry terminal, where we were, surprisingly, allowed to leave the country. This was the first time many of us had been on a ship, and it was to be a memorable trip. The sea was pretty rough, and within a short time, half our number began a long and committed programme of vomiting on every surface available. Tables, chairs. Their own clothes and shoes, in bags, in the toilets which were, frankly, awash with sick, even off the side where the wind blew it back in their faces. It was a staggering festival of vomit.

Me and my mates were fortunate in that we did not suffer the effects of seasickness. So, we tucked into our packed breakfasts, ignoring the bile and retching surrounding us – drank our milk and smoked our cigarettes.

After a short stop in Belgium to stretch our legs, buy flick knives, lighters and cheap French cigarettes that smelled like smouldering lino, we arrived in Germany and were delivered to a huge hall where we were fed Pea and Ham Soup, a slice of gammon, boiled potatoes and some sauerkraut.

We reacted as if we were being force fed sawdust and loft insulation, whining about the lack of chips, the fact the "bacon" wasn't crispy, and that the cabbage was "off". We really were staggeringly ignorant, breathtakingly ungrateful philistines.

That trauma over, we were handed over to the families with whom we would be living for the next two weeks.

My new, temporary family were delightful. A man and woman, perhaps late-thirties, impeccably dressed, cultured and charming, with two boys - one my age, one slightly younger. The Mercedes in which we travelled to their house was like a leather trimmed, subtly lit space ship. Which was quite fitting as it turned out, because the house was like something from the Jetsons - all brushed steel and rosewood and glass. It smelled fresh and crisp, with no hint of the doggy smells and forgotten sports kit and plimsolls I was used to. There were no carpets, just highly polished wooden floors, and every room was maintained at the same temperature with neat, white radiators. It was like living in an educational film entitled "House of the Future".

The garden was neat and simple – short, clipped grass with a patio outside the sliding, double glazed glass doors at one end of the combined lounge and dining room.

After the briefest of introductions to my home for the next two weeks, it now being very late, my new Mum showed me to my bedroom and then left me to get some sleep.

My bedroom in Stevenage was all of ten feet square. This cramped area served as bedroom for three boys - bunk beds for me and my little brother Barry, and another single bed jammed in between the bunk beds and the wall for my older brother. Stuck to one wall were two huge posters - one of Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda on their choppers in Easy Rider, the other an enormous colour blow-up of Raquel Welch in a fur bikini from the film One Million Years BC.

Also crammed into the room was my brother's record player. This was a very old wooden cabinet with a turntable in the lid. He had obtained it from a friend whose dad was taking it to the dump, painted it lime green, and installed it in our room.

Nobody was allowed to use it. Ever. He guarded it with fanatical jealously and threatened me with severe injury, or death, if I ever even thought of touching it let alone turning it on. Which meant I had to wait for him to go out before I could play all his records.

My new German room was therefore a long way from what I was used to. It was light, airy, spacious and beautifully fitted out with solid wood wardrobes, the walls crisp, clean and smooth white plaster. Beside the bed a chrome table lamp and a “digital” clock which didn’t tick with an echoing metallic noise like mine at home, but hummed almost imperceptibly, the numbers flipping over with a soft click every minute. This was like the places I saw in the Sunday supplements in the waiting room of our sadistic dentist, Mr. Bergman.

I use the word sadistic advisedly. And without exaggeration. Mr. Bergman's practice was in Stevenage Town Centre above Halfords. And I think, with hindsight, it may have been preferable to have gone to Halfords for our dentistry needs.

As a kid you did everything in your power to avoid having to go to Mr. Bergman's. This was not because he was a dentist. It was because he was a dentist who dismissed the need to use novocaine for anything but amputation. It was not until I was around thirteen and had to go to a different dentist to have some work done to allow my wisdom teeth to come through, that I realised you could have a drug which made dentistry painless. Bergman would do fillings - multiple fillings – without the benefit of anaesthetic.

As a ten-year-old, there was little so terrifying as lying back in his plastic covered chair as he started that high-pitched drill and started pressing down into your tooth. I still recall the exact wallpaper he had in the waiting room, so deeply are visits to his surgery burned into my brain. It had a creamy white background, and was covered with repeating impressionistic views of Paris – the Eiffel Tower, Montmartre, the Sacre Coeur, the Arc de Triomphe – complete with groups of people enjoying an aperitif in pavement cafes. It provided a tiny bit of escapism from the horror which was to come. The smell of burning mixed with Mr. Bergman's halitosis. The squealing drill bit pressing down into the enamel, vibrations echoing in my head, until the whirring tip burst through into the soft pulp within and hit the nerve. You could scream, cry, struggle – it made no difference. Nothing could make this man offer a simple injection to lessen he pain. I still have no idea why. Leading me to the inevitable conclusion that he was probably just a bastard.

Anyway, back to the safety of my temporary German bedroom.

My bed at home in Stevenage was the top of a pair of bunk beds. The mattress was a simple slab of foam, and this was sat on a kind of web of interlocking metal wires attached to a steel frame by small springs. It was like sleeping on a sponge laid on some chain-link fencing. On top of my mattress were brushed nylon sheets. These were purchased for their ease of washing and drying, and because they were warm when you got into bed in unheated bedrooms. But these benefits had to be measured against their shortcomings. Wearing nylon pyjamas, you would erupt in a pyrotechnic riot every time you moved an inch. And they were so slippery. Regardless of how you went to sleep you would wake up curled in a ball at the bottom of the bed, hair standing on end and fairly humming with static electricity.

It could take whole hours to discharge yourself and get your hair to lay flat. Or you could just take the fast option and discharge yourself in one fell swoop by touching an index finger onto your brother's sleeping face. This generated a fat, blue spark and an unexpectedly lively introduction to the day for him.

On top of the nylon sheets were two blankets – musty smelling and rough to the touch. In winter, when these weren't enough to keep us warm, my mum would empty the hall cupboard of coats and spread these over the top of the beds. This could result, on colder nights, in having about 15 pounds of parkas and overcoats pushing down on you, and it took some effort to maintain breathing through the night.

Far from being a lump of unforgiving foam, the mattress on my German bed was an item of unimaginable, spectacular softness and luxury – a mattress to end all mattresses. A good twelve inches thick, yet amazingly light, fluffy and springy – like a giant marshmallow. It was the softest thing I'd ever laid on.

It was covered in crisp, white cotton, and although this did limit one's options when it came to electrocuting siblings, it did offer the promise of a gloriously cool and non-slip sleeping experience.

It was while evaluating this thing of wonder that I became aware of a problem. Other than the mattress, there was nothing. No blankets. No bedspread. No nylon quilt. Nothing at all.

I looked in all the cupboards and in the wardrobe - all were empty of blankets. Eventually, after a contemplative Embassy Regal consumed while hanging respectfully out of the bedroom window, I decided that this was obviously a natural facet of the famed Teutonic toughness I had seen in black and white war films. Blankets were obviously deemed unnecessary in a house. So, I'd just have to tough it out and sleep with my clothes on.

In the morning, the Mum softly knocked then opened my bedroom door.

I blush even now when I picture the look on her face. The puzzled shock as she saw me lying on top of her immaculate bed wearing a tartan Harrington jacket and a bobble hat, the bed covered in a colourful jumble of jumpers, pants and tee shirts. She moved her mouth wordlessly a few times, before coming in and closing the door behind her.

She gently showed me that what I thought was the mattress was actually a Duvet. This was an item I had never in my sheltered life come across before. She held it up - I could not believe its light weight - and explained that it was for sleeping under, not on top of.

This kindly, gentle woman realised at that point she was dealing with something of a dullard who needed full instructions for any device more recent than, say, the Davy Lamp.

Still, although my German trip had got off to a shaky and slightly embarrassing start, I like to think my friends and I made up for it when it came to leaving our mark on the nation and its outstretched hand of friendship and camaraderie.

We had bought copious amounts of condoms in the UK, and proceeded to inflate and release them at every opportunity. At every stop, out the coach windows, in museums, off river boats, our small but dedicated party left a trail of birth control devices the length and breadth of The Rhine and The Black Forest.

We travelled to Heidelberg. We were introduced to its ancient buildings, its gorgeous pink hued stonework. We were taken to see the largest wine barrel in the world, the top of which is accessed by climbing a ladder to a viewing platform built on to the top of the barrel about twenty feet off the ground. We were taken through the ancient town, past houses overhanging narrow cobbled streets worn smooth with the footsteps of countless people and centuries of use. We went to the museums. We visited public buildings unchanged, carefully and loving maintained, since medieval times. We visited and crossed the world-famous stone bridge over the Rhein – a glorious, beautiful survivor of two world wars.

And we draped them all with inflated condoms. My God we were awful.

If it offers any comfort to my teachers, as I have got older, I now realise the opportunity we were given. The chance to see another life, another world. To expand our view beyond Stevenage and our council estates. I wish I could spin the clock back and do it all again. The least I would have done is leave the condoms at Dover.

But expanding our cultural sensitivity was not just about buildings. Many of us found entirely innocent (we were 13 remember) “holiday romance” girlfriends, who did much to teach us that kids are kids, regardless of language or history, and helped explode our prejudices about Germany and the Germans. It is my experience that, in terms of establishing cultural links, eroding prejudice and reinforcing a concept of universal humanity regardless of politics, religion or history, a slow dance to “Seasons in the Sun” with a pretty German girl is a more profound and compelling lesson than any visit to a cathedral for a teenage boy.

So I did benefit from my early years at Bedwell. It took the widest spectrum of kids and taught us to exist in the same environment without actually killing each other.

It was a side effect of the comprehensive system that kids at the school came from very diverse backgrounds. Certainly, the majority were just your average council estate kids like me. But there were all sorts mixed in amongst us. In my class was a maths genius. Not just bright, but a true mathematician. In five years at school I never knew him to get less than 100% in any maths exam. Needless to say, this being Bedwell, he didn’t go on University. Probably ended up working in a betting shop, or operating a lathe. I really don’t know.

We also had a little clique of scientists too. They took to science subjects as if they were born to it, and played with electronics in their spare time. I know one of them ended up working in the warehouse of Dixon's, the electrical retailer.

We had a couple of lads who had learning difficulties too. Us kids made no allowances for their disabilities. They were treated just like any other kid by and large, and I never saw them being bullied or singled out. They were just part of the mix.

But the teachers were perhaps a little less aware of their needs than the kids in some ways.

I recall a particular Technical Drawing lesson. The teacher was Mr. Sleeve. He was a young man with an elderly wardrobe made almost entirely of tweed and corduroy, and a strong Bristolian accent. It will come as no surprise that it took us kids all of ten minutes to christen him Wurzel.

It was a really hot day, and Technical Drawing was the first lesson of the afternoon. We had all just sat down and started our work, when Graham, one of the kids with slight learning difficulties, put up his hand.

"What do you want Smith"?
"Can I go to the toilet, Sir"?
"No, Smith. We've only just started, you should have gone during your lunch break"
"But I need to go Sir"
"And I said no, Smith"
"Yes sir"

Five minutes pass, and Graham's hand goes up again.

"Yes, Smith"
"Please can I go to the toilet Sir"?
"I told you Smith, you had an hour to go to the toilet. We're working now, so the answer is no"
"Yes Sir"

Another five minutes. Graham's hand goes up again, A little more urgently this time"

"Sir, I really need to go to the toilet"

Wurzel was angry now. This man did have a vicious temper. He would be all west country soft one minute, then the next he would be throwing set squares or blackboard rubbers across the room at people.

"Well you should have thought about that before the lesson shouldn’t you Smith. Now you’ll have to wait. If your hand goes up again, if you interrupt my lesson once more, there's going to be trouble. Do you understand?".
"But sir…"
“I said, do you understand Smith. Now get on with your work”
“Yes sir”

Five minutes pass. Graham's hand shoots up again. He was smiling slyly now.

"Sir”
“You better not be asking me to go to the toilet again, Smith"
"No sir"
"Well what do you want then?"
“Sir, I've shit myself"

If the first three years at Bedwell were educational – not in an academic sense, but in terms of survival - the next two years were about being a kind of adult. About realising the world was not entirely about fun. Indeed, on occasion, the world may be out to get you. It was about learning that girls could be fascinating and fun, but equally could break your heart. It was about learning about the dangers of drugs. And how much fun learning about the dangers of drugs could be. It was not going to be an easy journey.

Criminal Mastermind

A spectacularly unsuccessful attempt at a dodgy insurance claim

My Dad's career in dodgy insurance claims was short, and rather unsuccessful. He used to own a TV aerial installation business with half a dozen vans. The blokes who worked for him seemed to have been selected for their idiosyncrasies. Tim was rail thin, from Tottenham, and always smoked his cigarette between thumb and forefinger. Mick the Grit was a Stevenage boy, wiry and tough. Pete was a young lad from a very dodgy background, who used to go to Portsmouth at weekends to fight “the seaweeds” as he called them. That was when he wasn't in Aldershot fighting “squaddies”. My that boy liked a scrap. He also had a real thing about Traffic Wardens – absolutely despised them. I remember being in a van with him, driving through town in torrential rain. We happened to pass a Traffic Warden, minding his own business, trudging along looking miserable and saturated. We stopped at a junction, and as we did so, the warden reached the nearside of our van. Pete leaned over me, opened the window, leaned out and shouted “Oi, warden...I hope you get fuckin' wet”. The warden stopped dead in his tracks and just stared back, open mouthed at the venom directed at him for no reason, as we pulled gently away into traffic.

Jill was my dad's secretary, and the most stuck up woman I have met in my entire life. She treated us kids with undisguised disgust – particularly my sister Denise – and any interaction with her was responded to as if we had just defecated in her handbag.

This was a surprise really, because far from being aristocracy, Jill's husband, Owen, was a labourer at our firm.

It is entirely possible, however, that her attitude toward me and my sister had less to do with us coming from what she considered the wrong side of the tracks, and more to do with the fact that she had been shagging my dad for years. Just a guess.

Despite her animosity and self-regard, her husband Owen was an absolute diamond and was great to us kids. We all loved him. A charming man, he was the king of paperwork. No government department ever got the better of him. He knew every benefit, every clause there was to know, and he was organised. As only an obsessive compulsive could be. And this man used to iron his pants and socks. Really. His favourite catchphrase when taking on the council – one that passed into our workplace language – was “OK, you get your papers, I'll get mine, and we'll see where you’ve gone wrong”.

This all came in handy when he divorced Jill and set up home with a delightful lady called Allie, who was a serious epileptic. Owen became her carer, and no government department or doctor ever got the better of them or refused her the latest and best medicine – Owen saw to that.

Del was our Welshman. A huge man with curly black hair, a blue/black chin and hands as big as shovels, he never used six words when one would do. He was breathtakingly, eye-poppingly, blunt.

His crowning achievement was the handling of a new trainee. Young Jim had joined us to learn the aerial trade. It was not long, however, before a more pungent issue came to the fore. Jim had a rather ripe aura. These were the days when wearing anti-perspirant was highly suspect, and washing more than once a week using anything other than coal tar soap or Swarfega, was considered effeminate. Moisturiser could have got you reported to the police. But in a group of blokes doing physical work, a smelly colleague was not welcome, and eventually, the problem was reported to my old man.

My dad decided this would be a chance to develop Del's career as one of the senior riggers – to start to groom him for more managerial duties - encouraging him, by experiencing a sensitive situation, to adopt a more politically adept and considered approach. He asked Del up to the office for a chat one morning, and explained that Jim needed some gentle handling. Del should explain that part of the lad's work was to deal with the customer, and that personal hygiene was consequently very important. He should sit the lad down – maybe over lunch – and gently introduce the subject. He may want to mention that we all know it's a manual job, and climbing ladders and roofs was hard physical work and that it was even more important therefore to make sure that we showered every morning as we would be sweating during the day. Del sat and listened, nodding sagely at the right moments. It finished with my dad thanking Del for doing this – he recognised it was a difficult issue and he welcomed Del's help in dealing with it so calmly and assuredly.

The old man shook his hand, and Del went downstairs from the office into the yard. The boys were loading up the vans for the days work, and Del spied young Jim across the yard. “Oi, Jim” he yelled.

Jim looked up, “Yeah Del”?

“Ave a fucking bath son, you stink like a fuckin' pig isn't it” shouted Del.

My dad hated paying out for anything that was not for himself. Wages, Christmas Presents, Safety Gear, my mum's housekeeping money. All of these were a real struggle for him to hand over. He clearly felt as if he were being robbed. Meanwhile, he drove an e-type Jag, went to a Harley Street dentist and had a cupboard full – literally – of new boxed shirts and hand-made shoes. Saying he was selfish is like saying Oliver Reed enjoyed a tipple.

His tight-fistedness knew no bounds. I have seen him walk across the yard in his hand-made shoes to where he had parked his jaguar, then abruptly stop, bend down and pick up one piece of a coax aerial plug. These little aluminium plugs, comprising four pieces which screwed together, fixed to the end of your aerial cable and plugged into your TV. They cost less than an old penny – we used them by the hundreds in the business. Holding it above his head, he then proceeded to go completely ape-shit at the blokes loading the vans. And I mean foamy-mouthed mental. Yelling about the waste and how they had no idea about money or how to save it. How they were all just piss-takers. The blokes were in holed jeans, had no safety kit, and provided their own clothes, boots and gloves. And they were all paid the absolute minimum possible.

They stared at him in his hundred pound shoes and tailor-made jacket, open-mouthed. How they didn't just lynch the fucker is beyond me.

I recall once broaching the idea of an incentive scheme so the lads would get a bonus if they bought in additional work. This made sense to me – an aerial rigger would often get asked by a neighbour of the house where he was working to do some work on their aerial “while they were up there”. I thought this was a good way of trying to keep hold of this extra work for the business and discourage the lads from doing it for cash and pocketing the money - which, I hasten to add, I didn't blame them for doing, such was the paltriness of the salaries they were paid. So, I worked it all out, how much it may cost and the benefits it would bring to the business. The old man sat patiently as I explained it all to him, nodding at the proper times. Once I had finished, he said “Yes, very interesting, but you do realise they already have an incentive scheme”? I didn't. Shocked, I said “I didn't know that” “Oh yes”, he said “I've been running it for years. How it works is like this. If they do as they are told, and don't rip me off, they get to keep their fucking jobs. That's the incentive”.

My idea went no further. But his arrogant meanness sometimes got repaid.

One day, Tim arrived back at the yard with a dent above the rear wheel arch of his van. The van Tim drove at the time was a huge old Austin Cambridge – the oldest on the fleet. It had massive high sided tyres, and a rusty body which had been hand-painted with silver so badly the brush strokes were visible from some distance. It looked like something out of Dad's Army.

Tim knew what to expect. He went upstairs to the old man's office and told him he had been hit by a bloke who pulled out of a side road.

As we all knew he would, the old man went ballistic - yelping on about how nobody gave a shit about the business or costs except him. Tim waited for him to calm a little, then handed him a piece of paper. He explained to his purple-faced boss that the other driver had written his name and address on a sheet of paper and handed it to him. He had told Tim that, as it was a small dent, he would prefer to pay cash for the repair rather than put it through the insurance. All Tim had to do was to get a quote, pop round to the blokes house and he would pay him cash.

The old man went quiet as an idea formulated in his mind. He asked Tim if the Police had attended, which they had not. And now the plan came together. Here was a knackered old van, due for the scrapheap, and a man who had admitted liability for causing an accident in which it had sustained damage. Most importantly, that damage had not been witnessed by anyone but the two drivers – one of whom was his employee.

He walked purposefully down to the yard and looked at the damage. It was a crease about six inches long high over the wheel arch, but it was shallow and would easily push out. Not a serious thing.

The old man went rummaging in one of the store sheds, then came out with a sledge hammer.

He then proceeded to beat that poor van to shit. He smashed every panel all along one side. So extensive was his work, he actually stopped, rested for a minute, then started again. By the time he had finished, the van was clearly a write-off. One entire side had been destroyed. He even dented the steel wheels.

Once he had finished, he turned to Tim and said, panting, his face flushed, “Now I'm going to the police station to report the accident. Where's that piece of paper?”

He grabbed the vital document from Tim without a word and, still panting from his exertions, got into the van and trundled off, the poor old Austin scraping, banging and squeaking its way out of the yard.

He returned an hour later in the beaten up Austin, and went directly upstairs to his office without speaking to anybody. Tim had a new van within a week. And as it turned out, it didn't cost the Insurance Company a penny. My Dad paid for the new van.

The Police said the address on the piece of paper did not exist.

Karma.

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