The move to Northampton

After my dad’s passing my mum was left with nothing, no house, no money, no career, kids to feed,…how would she cope? Oh no, wait, that’s not what happened at all: my dad’s insurance covered the remainder of the mortgage, paid for his own funeral and had enough left over to keep my mum going for a good couple of years! A far cry from having to use jumble sales and charity shops to help clothe us just a year or so before (I still remember my tracksuit having “Jon” written on the front!)

So my mum’s life had just changed dramatically – she’s lost her husband, she has a (near) abundance of money; she’s also now single and – to repeat – an abundance of money.

It would be fair to say that my mum has a fascinating relationship with men, it’s probably also fair to to say that my mum has had a relationship with most of the men who frequented our house up until this point. How my dad never knew what she was up to, I will never know. My guess is he did know, but ignored it. Besides, I doubt my mum would have ever realised that her “being clever about it” was really all that clever (yep, those were her words!)? He must have known. Even the ‘pools man would bring my sister and I a Kitkat each week – surely that would have led to him asking “why does he bring my kids a Kitkat every week?!”

The confirmation he really needed must have come when my mum declared the happy news of her third pregnancy and somehow convinced my dad that it must be his. Pregnant by the man who had to resort to sperm donation for his first two offspring?! My mum was (and still is) not the brightest spark in the engine, that’s for sure.

Surely a woman with 3 kids at home, approaching her thirties, would be allowed to hark back to her more youthful days – no one would ever begrudge that to anyone? But to my mum that would mean going up to the local working man’s club, flirting with whichever man would show her the tiniest bit of attention, and then taking them back home. These men would be in addition to: Bill, the family-man two doors down who she’d been having an affair with for several years already; the Pools Man who only needed to buy Kitkats to get what he wanted from her; Ricky, the young teen who lived down in Paslows (a road around the corner, and also the most likely candidate to be Barry’s biological dad); followed by Lord-knows who else.

A few months into my dad’s passing and my mum would start repeating the lines: “this house just has too many memories of your dad” and “I can feel your dad watching down on me all the time” so therefore we needed to sell-up and move out. I doubt I’ll ever know the truth of whether the memories & watching thing was true or not; the real truth was that Bill was convincing my mum that he’ll move in with us – but only if we moved away from near his current family home – you know, so it doesn’t upset his kids seeing him leave from their new mummy’s mouse…those reasons, you know? We did only live a few doors down after all! The whole house-moving decision just seemed rather quick, even to the standards of a ten-year-old like me.

Bill had very kindly (!) driven us to a few properties for viewings and the one we all agreed on was a fantastic detached house down in Canvey – a huge step-up from the ex-authority house we currently lived in (and there’s nothing wrong with that – it just would have been a move from a council estate to one…less councily).

Not very long after viewing the Canvey house it was decided that were going to move to Northampton. Bill (again, very kindly) drove us up there to view some houses. The reason for Northampton? Bill used to be a delivery driver for one of the shoe manufacturers up there and he’d made a phone call and would be given his old job back when we moved up that way. So that’s decided then! My mum would sell her house and we’d all move to another town 100+ miles away, all because the man with a family living two doors down said he’d move in with her if she moved sufficiently far away enough so as to not upset his kids. I kid not – my mum got sucked into his bullshit lock, stock and barrel. Once again (it’s worth repeating), not the brightest, my mum.

As a digression, let’s delve into my mum’s intelligence with a side-story: Bill and his family owned a chalet in Leysdown (Isle of Sheppey, Kent). We’d been invited to stay with them this very same summer (literally a few months after my dad’s passing). And it probably would have been a relatively benign affair if him and my mum weren’t…you know…having an actual affair. So there we all are: my mum, me, my sister (Barry might have been staying elsewhere whilst he recovered from his head injury), Bill’s family: his two daughters and his wife; all in the living room eating our buttered toast (except Deborah – Bill’s daughter, a year older than me – because she preferred margarine on her toast). Bill’s proclaims “I’m off to go and lie down for a while” and off he goes into his bedroom. Shortly thereafter my mum says “I’m going to go and annoy Bill and disturb his sleep – because that would be funny [insert stupid giggly schoolgirl giggle]” and so, off she goes. “[whispering] Mum, you can hear them kissing” says Deborah to her mum. You read that right, my mum was so “clever” that in her mind loudly saying what she said absolved her of any indiscretion: “Carol, I’m not having an affair with your husband, I’m just here in bed with your husband because I’m trying to annoy him and stop him from trying to sleep” being the likely thought process she processed. [And that – ladies and gentleman, is why we have emoji’s nowadays so that writers (that’s me, I guess) don’t have to write this sort of shit to help drive home the vision of the writer rolling their eyes (loudly)].

If it wasn’t obvious from the above, yes, we all could hear my mum and Bill kissing – kissing is pretty loud and carries quite sufficiently through rooms – particularly rooms inside a small chalet. I asked my mum later that night if her & Bill were having an affair. I don’t know what I could have expected as a response but a simple “no” is all I got.

Now back to the main story…

Enter stage left a man who goes by the name of John. Remember my mum going out and enjoying the remainder of her youth? So John was one of these guys who showed my mum attention at the local social club, using his fortnightly dole money to buy her some cheap drinks. John was about to strike it rich!

My dad passed in April and in less than 12 months my mum had sold up, promised us a new life in Northampton with Bill, and then a new life in Northampton with John. Yep, that’s right: Bill was bumped and John took his place. To be fair, at least John wasn’t:
a) the result of an affair, and;
b) wasn’t leaving kids of his own behind

They’re the only two positives. It’s only downhill from there.

So April ’89 roles around and we say goodbye to our friends. One lucky shining light was my girlfriend who just happened to be moving to St Neots only a month or so after us – which meant she’d be close enough for us to visit often. Lisa (my gf) was the person to introduce me to rave tapes from around the summer of love period (story for another time). Anyway….John drives us all up to our new home to NN3. Moving day was fun – the previous owners of the house my mum had just bought had been given the wrong date and hadn’t moved out when we arrived; the removals van got lost somewhere along the M25 and ended up in London (I kid you not); even when they did arrive they couldn’t unload so had to come back the day after; a quick scramble for the kettle off the back of the removal van and that’s all the comforts we had for our first night in our new home.

School was interesting. I’d come from the typical primary/secondary system so when we moved I was in the final year of primary and ready to move on up to “big school”. The move to Northampton scuppered that – it had a lower, middle, and upper system – which meant I had to wait another two years before “big school”. I’d gone from one of the oldest in the school (4th oldest, if I recall correctly) to somewhere average. My first lesson was an eye-opener as well. I know (and was taught) the alphabet with letters pronounced how we say them. Northampton was taught this alien (to me, at least), almost child-like pronunciation I’d never heard before. A was pronounced “ah”, B was “bh” and not “bee”, C was “kh” rather than “cee”. Great, so now not only was I denied my 11+ because “people like us don’t go to those schools” but now the education system I was thrown into was teaching something which seemed geared towards four-year-olds. Northampton cemented my disillusionment towards comprehensive education and was the catalyst for my “why bother trying” mentality.

One year had passed and I don’t think we even went to my dads grave on the anniversary of his death. My mum was also pregnant with baby number 4 (conceived in March – around the time she first met John). The house we’d just moved into was very quickly about to become too small (3 boys to one room – my sister getting to keep her solitary room to herself, lucky). It was also around this time that my mum’s twin-tub washing machine finally gave up on her; she struggled to find a suitable replacement (mainly because they stopped selling them for at least ten years prior at this point); and with some convincing, we finally got a “proper” washing machine. And yes, I sat there for it’s inaugural first wash, watching the clothes spin round and round, and round, and round…