The Don't Mind Me Decade

Today’s newsletter is an excerpt from my most recently published novel, 1983. Told in the voice of one of the book’s many narrators, it’s the final excerpt I’m publishing here before I start sharing some more bits of my next novel, Everything Will Swallow You, in the run-up to its publication in March. I thought now would be good timing for an excerpt since from today until midnight UK time on Weds 18th December I’m giving away SIGNED AND PERSONALISED HARDBACKS of 1983 AND an original linoprint or linoprint bookmark by my mum, Jo, to everyone - wherever they happen to be in the world - who takes out a full annual subscription to this page. As well as a first edition book and a rare original piece of art which add up close to the price of the subscription itself, this will give you access to my entire archive of 200,00+ words of writing here on Substack and future paid-only pieces (of which several are imminent). See the bottom of today’s newsletter for a sample of some of the beautiful art on offer. (As soon as I received notification of your subscription, I’ll email you for your shipping address.)

My granddad died when I was four. There are a couple of photos of him holding me, plus a few others; one of us, probably taken by my mum, sitting together on a wall near the sea at Skegness with my nan and my aunt Sarah and my aunt Cath. But I think my memories of those times are memories of the photos rather than real memories. My mum would have been only just out of her teens when he died, my aunt Cath twenty- three, and my aunt Sarah only eighteen. With time I’m struck more and more by the raw fact of their youth. I suspect the family pulled even closer after it happened. I could not say for certain. We were all just close and that’s the only way I’d ever known it to be. In a lot of ways it was like my mum and her sisters were a single entity. They’d often end up wearing the same perfume without planning it, buying the same cushion covers or shoes. My aunt Sarah would come around and see a plant pot my mum had bought at a garage sale down the road. ‘Oh,’ she’d say. ‘I spotted that at the garden centre, then I came back to buy it, and it had gone. I might have known it was you. who bought it.’ Everyone was constantly over at each other’s houses and going camping together. My nan couldn’t often join us on the holidays, because of her health, but she was always at the centre of everything. Us kids wrangled for custody of her. Sometimes it got ugly, especially as there became more of us.

At first, though, it was just me and my cousin Benji. He was always outside, one of those kids you meet who are permanently tumbling about the place with bloody knees. He’d have barely recovered from a wasp stinging him inside a wound on his arm and he’d be falling headfirst from a climbing frame. There was a rumour children had died on the roundabout on the park up the road from his house. I don’t know if that was true, but I know that when it broke it just got abandoned, hanging half off its base, looking like a stolen car that had been driven into a ditch. In my head it was that way because of Benji. He was boisterous, hard to keep track of. Not that I am exactly one to talk: I arguably wasn’t the best influence. My dad would walk along a narrow windfallen log balanced precariously across a river and I would follow, with Ben never far behind. Then it was up to my mum and her sisters to fish us out of the water.

My dad was the daredevil of the grown- ups, but my uncles were all 1980s men’s men too, each in their own way. There was always a lot of talk of cars and gadgets, a fair bit of physical sparring. Who could chop the most wood. Who was best at table tennis. That sort of thing. My uncle Pete was the least sporty of the lot, beardier, constantly worried about people hurting themselves, the one you’d most often find with a book in his hand, but he wasn’t above all the showing off. He once told me and Ben that ‘Danger’ was his middle name.

Even when he was as young as four or five, Benji was always looking for something new to explore, especially if it involved outer space. In autumn everyone always went to Goose Fair, down Notts. One year – it was the same year a girl got killed after falling off a ride, I think – Benji managed to slip everyone’s grasp and get lost, having been distracted by a ride that looked like a flying saucer. Eventually a kindly lady in her sixties got him back to us, with the help of the Tannoy system. When she’d found him sitting on the grass behind the helter skelter, crying, she’d asked him what his dad’s name was. He’d told her it was Pete. ‘But what’s his full name?’ she’d then asked. ‘It’s Pete Danger Moss,’ Benji replied.

My dad and my uncles all had strong accents appropriate to the region. Ours are there too but it’s like somebody put them under the water butt in the garden for a while. No shampoo or conditioner, just last night’s rainwater. If it had been solely up to our dads, you’d probably hear that bit more coal and injustice in our words. My mum and her sisters, proper northerners who’d grown up in Liverpool, poorer than any of their spouses, in a big house with their own cousins and aunts and uncles, were the ones who encouraged us to speak marginally less like we’d just emerged from a hole in the ground. It wasn’t snobbery or social climbing; it came out of their natural yearning to learn and expand their horizons, and their hope that we would be able to get on quietly in the world, with as little as possible standing in our way. That ‘quiet’ part was something of a religion for them; not that they’d have ever told you that in any sermonising way, because they were too busy being self- effacing and discreet. But when you were brought up by them, you knew the importance of it, innately, and eventually it couldn’t help but become your religion too. Gardening. Ceramics. Carpentry. DIY. Oil painting. Embroidery. Do it, master it, move on. No bigheads allowed through the door because they wouldn’t fit.

Looking back at my life at that point in the eighties from now – a time when the shouters and the braggers are in the driving seat, when the praises of self-love are sung through the microphone of every other mobile phone – it’s this that seems possibly the most quaint and vintage thing of all: the philosophy of going away on your own and doing something well and not telling anybody about it. Some people called it The Me Decade, which is something someone calls every decade at some point. But for us it was more like The Don’t Mind Me Decade.

I suppose a bystander might have claimed that as a family we were in the process of graduating to the middle class, but if we were, it was in a natural and organic way, with no real aspiration behind it, or at least not the kind concerned with labels or status. The shift in that direction was a natural byproduct of easier foreign travel, wider varieties of food appearing on the supermarket shelves, job opportunities that took our parents out of the sphere of drudgery that their families had been trapped in for decades. We called our dinner ‘tea’. We accused each other of being nesh if we complained about the cold too readily. We called the big light ‘the big light’ (because that’s what it fucking is). We ate the bread while we were pushing our trolley around the supermarket then paid for the packet. But we went to Italy and learned what polenta was. We made pakoras. We looked at our wallpapered 1970s rooms full of fag smoke, stripped them down and aired them out, stencilled their edges. We overcorrected our hairstyles and quite a few other items on and around us.

The country that my mum and each of my aunts came from was called the UK, but they also came from another one, much more than they came from that one, and it was called the 1960s. That meant Women’s Lib. That meant – albeit somewhere far from here – civil rights. That meant more opportunities for young working- class people than at any point in living memory. That meant your mum, in the car, making it move, on an actual road, not just waiting for your dad to give her a lift somewhere. It meant her at home, mending a fuse or putting a broken sideboard back together, while your dad watched, looking admiring and useless. But it’s not quite that simple. You don’t all just start again and fumigate the air of the cultural past in one easy go. There’ll always be some lag and drag, a miasma here and there. Especially if you lived where we did. It was a cloudy place. ‘Glass of wine? Put it down an’ ’ay a proper drink, you big poof.’ ‘Got a problem wi’ me, or summat about me? Ger outside now and let’s see which cunt decks which other cunt and thar’ll be the end orrit.’ ‘Shall us go down t’chippy tonight, or t’chinky?’ ‘Are you sure you want to wear those, love? They don’t make you look very ladylike.’ Lamping someone outside your local branch of Woolworths was still viewed as a very normal way to settle ideological differences. A small male you knew quite well, let’s say a cousin, who wore nice shoes that could, by certain sectors of his peer group, be perceived as girls’ shoes, and who expressed a minor enthusiasm for botany, could expect to quickly become an ostracised small male human with blood seeping from his nose. Certain household duties were still not generally expected of men. A wife, even a wife with many many progressive ideas of her own and a mostly considerate husband in the top three per cent of husbands in the region, could still be widely perceived as an annexe of that husband. Behind the scenes, genuine female superheroes could frequently go uncredited, especially if they happened to be particularly self-effacing female superheroes, schooled from birth in the art of not being a bighead.

If I did not know what genuine superwomen my mum and her sisters were back then – and I think some part of me, under all the other mostly obnoxious thirteen-year- old parts, always did know it – I certainly do now. It can be quite intimidating, if I am totally honest. You’ll be in one of their houses and you’ll see a sculpture or painting you haven’t seen before. ‘Where did this come from?’ you’ll ask. ‘Oh, that’s just something I did on Tuesday,’ they’ll say. ‘I’m not happy with it at all.’ The menfolk will be there, with this look about them that says, ‘Yeah, I sometimes misbehave, but I know which side my bread is buttered.’ You sit down for a Sunday lunch, and look at the size and range of what they put in front of you, and you wonder when the other three hundred guests are arriving. You go out into the garden and realise how little distance a lot of it had to travel to your plate. You see the colours and smell the smells and everything beyond the boundary with the house next door melts away.

In my most frequent recurring dream, my mum and her sisters are all living as a family of octopuses. My aunt Cath opens the door to their lair, dressed in paint- stained eight- legged dungarees. It’s a lovely deep-red door, the one to their old house on Stringy Lane. My mum and my aunt Sarah are inside the lair, which is also an attractively landscaped garden, and they’re sitting on some rocks, and it turns out they’re all in a band, and they’re making this big orchestral sound, which they are capable of making because, being octopuses, they can all play several instruments at the same time. Benji and my nan are there too. Both of them are wearing silver spacesuits. ‘Can you see the fish dancing, in the distance?’ my nan asks me. ‘Don’t SAY that!’ I reply, wincing. But suddenly everything makes sense, all that self- effacing creativity over all those years, maintained in conjunction with the weathering of life’s tragedies, sticking out full- time jobs, child- rearing, man- soothing. It was always because of the extra limbs.

I don’t know where that whole ‘in the distance’ thing started. I do remember that it went right through me like a rusty nail when anyone said it. It was one of those weird inexplicable childhood phobias or obsessions, like Benji hating miniature dining forks or going around for a while telling people he was from outer space. But on second thoughts, perhaps there was a little more to it than that. Where we lived was unextraordinary, the most middle of places, but there was also this darkness to the rim of everything while you were there. We’d be playing in our gardens and you’d look over towards the spoil heaps at the far point of your eyeline and wonder what was beyond them and you couldn’t help being a bit afraid. I’m sure what I knew about my other granddad, my dad’s dad, and his brother, must have contributed. Both of them died in a tunnel fire in one of the mines, before I was born. I heard some ponies died in the same fire. I always avoided the pit road when I was out on my bike or my rollerskates. I’d been there once and it resembled the end of world. Actually, no, more like the end of another world: what everything looked like when the evil lord in one of those fantasy games that Ben played back then had vanquished all the forces of good. Of course, in reality, it, along with the other mines nearby, was the lifeblood of the region, and many would say that the truly scary time came directly after it got closed by the government.

How do you accurately shade complex events half a lifetime in the past when you’re running out of ink? What I could do with right now is one of those fancy pens our friend Jane Fennel used to have, where you clicked a button on the side and it changed to a different colour. It was the darkest of times, it was the lightest of times. We all dressed in brighter clothes that year. I got my first deely boppers and fluorescent legwarmers. My dad drove us all the way to Italy in his new bright red car, with my aunt and uncle and my cousin behind us in their older much less bright one, which somehow didn’t fall to pieces. In the gelaterias, we chose from a rainbow of ice-cream flavours, our brains almost exploding at the realisation that we could even have several of them in the same cone at the same time. In our bright-striped swimming costumes and clean white t-shirts we went to the beach with our multicoloured boules and our bright orange tennis balls and, as we played with them, tried to avoid the piles of litter that people had flippantly left in the places where they’d been sitting, which seemed shocking and awful to us, although not shocking and awful in the same way it seems now that we know what we know, now that we live an era of ecological enlightenment, an era when we don’t any longer believe in the magical curative powers of the pedal bin, an era that is the lightest and the darkest in totally different ways.

Even our birthday presents seemed to give off more light that year. It didn’t matter if you didn’t come from a well-off materialistic family; you became aware of the availability of a growing number of objects that might temporarily enhance your life. The greater number of these objects meant a greater number of older objects could be found on kerbs, in gardens, in woodland. A widespread faith in the new had emerged, seemingly overnight. Even the most thrifty of us were converted. Antique shops sat on dark streets with downturned mouths, bemused by the plastic promise in the air, biding their time until their day came again.

But the casting-off of the old objects that the new objects replaced made the world darker on its margins. Far more arcane pieces of machinery could be found on the average street than today. Far more chairs. Far more car parts. Automobiles passed into the official ranks of the elderly as quickly as dogs. In their death they piled up, as common as hills. My mum and her sisters went to the tip and, with their creative eye, took away old chairs and hot-water bottles and hairdryers and cupboards; selected them in the way that they might have been selected by knowledgeable magpies from the future who’d passed through a curtain in time. A large hairy man, covered in apparent soil, jumped from skip to skip, sorting a river of rubbish that was constantly in spate. You sometimes saw him at the swimming pool, too, and everyone would get out when he got in. ‘Is that a real gorilla?’ I asked my mum, the first time I saw him. But no actual gorilla could ever have been as busy as him. The old toasters and fireplaces and Sindy dolls and sofas and plastic dinosaurs and Action Men and asbestos dressing tables and Bakelite hairdryers and rusty scissors and bags of shitcaked cat litter and fridges and newspapers and rusty scissors and shredded wallpaper kept arriving.

The tip smelt bad, but not vastly worse than most areas directly beyond the tip. The new brightness we had embraced was not generally reflected in the air we breathed. Cars belched past us and left us temporarily invisible to our companions. We were good at holding our breath while under water because we’d had plenty of practice in public toilets. The odour of pet food made no attempt to disguise the unfortunate journey that had led it to our dog’s or cat’s dish. The fart of the boy who sat next to you in Maths could put you into a brief coma. Silent had never been more violent. The aggregate smell of the places where we played and walked was a threat and an enigma, always with us.

Machines looked at you with happier, more open faces than before, but what lurked behind them in their wires remained a dark mystery: a jet-black tunnel, inaccessible, full of fuck knows what. One day, my mum picked the phone up to hear my aunt Catherine’s voice, telling her, ‘Everything is going to be ok.’ As she listened, she watched Catherine through the window in the garden, talking to my nan about the most effective way to tie tomato plants. She puzzled over the incident, especially when she discovered that my aunt Sarah had received an oddly similar phone call on the same day. But, being pragmatic women, they found some way to rationalise it. It sort of made sense to everyone, since they were more or less psychically connected anyway and the language they spoke was nearly always one of soft reassurance. Also, maybe it was easier to accept the inexplicable, in the era we lived in. As far as technology, and its concomitant flood of information, was concerned, we were the savages, muddling through the Before Time, telling ourselves stories in the dark. We flicked off the TV at night and a white dot sucked all the glamorous people on it back down into the tunnel behind the wires. We switched on the Top 40 with our finger hovering over the record button to capture a song and make it ours. We pleaded with our mums not to use the vacuum so the song was captured without interference. But then, when we had captured the song, what could we do with it, apart from listen to it again and again until it was burned into our brain? The personalities behind the songs often remained impenetrable. It was all in that black tunnel in the wires. I pictured the voices who sang to me from that tunnel, trying to imagine their lives. Many of them, particularly the men, sang like they were being lightly strangled. That made sense to me because I imagined the tunnel as a scary place where robbers and muggers might lurk on every bend.

You might be forgiven for imagining that, as far as information was concerned, school was a little less opaque. I don’t remember that being the case. I brazened it out, fell in with the popular crowd, found that a bit too exhausting, slept through the remaining years in the company of nerds. School gave me no sense of how many people and places there were in the world. If I had any sense of that, it came from my family, from TV, from what little I managed to find out via magazines and record sleeves about those people who sang my favourite songs. I remember a general outlook, coming from the teaching staff, of ‘Ok, if you’re lucky, and you work hard, you might one day get to work part time in the post office.’ Maybe a full- time job as a plumber or an electrician, where the boys were concerned. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a plumber or electrician. It pays bloody well. Better than any job I’ve ever done. I remember there was one kid in my class, extremely gifted and ahead of us all, who wanted to be a diplomat. The careers advisor told him to join the army.

Those kids who went to Benji and Cath’s primary school, though: you got the feeling that all of them were going to follow their own weird little path, and nothing was going to get in their way, even if secondary education was going to do its best to shake the inviduality out of them. I hope my kids feel the same. I think they do. It’s so different now. No barrier between them and the true size of the world, the true extent of the opportunities it could still contain, despite the people in power’s attempts to make them ever more inaccessible to those without inherited wealth. They only have to look down at the device in their hand to realise the state of play. Which is a good and bad thing. Dark and light, once again.

You can’t grow up around the women I grew up around and not have the creative bug. I print, I paint, I make. I forage in the same meadow my mum and her sisters took me to forage in as a kid. I write, too, although that’s just for my eyes at the moment. ‘You should try to get this published,’ a couple of friends have told me. Are they just being kind, saying the stuff friends are supposed to say? It’s hard to tell. Whatever the case, that level of potential public scrutiny is not for me, much as I admire those brave enough to put themselves through it. I’d rather just go quietly about my business for now. I surprise myself with how eerie some of the stuff I come up with is. It gives me a chill. I make myself a bit nesh, just from typing words. I wrote one story about a man who dies then realises he’s not actually dead but locked in a giant container full of everything he’s ever put in a bin. It’s all there, like a rancid archive of his life as a consumer: ring- pull Pepsi cans he drank out of while he was on holiday as a kid, half a plate of mackerel from the hot summer of 1989, sellotape ripped off forgotten birthday presents from long-dead relatives, a computer keyboard with a faulty space bar stuck to a Findus crispy pancake that didn’t quite taste right, and a mouse that his sister’s cat half- ate in 1997, every crisp packet, every old perforated sock and teabag. I would not say that I wrote it so much as it wrote me. The process was more a matter of exorcism than anything, since it was inspired by a real nightmare that I kept having, for many years, and I decided that if I wrote it down maybe I could make it stop.

I didn’t succeed, but I do only have the nightmare occasionally now. I’ll be in there, in that container, crawling slowly over the mounds of rubbish, confronting hard the facts of a reality beneath everything, the underside of some of my happiest memories, but then, just sometimes, a door will open at the back of the container. A lovely deep red in colour. I’ll sigh with relief, because I’ll know that, behind it, I’ll find three octopuses, ready to welcome me into their lair.

If you’d prefer not to take advantage of today’s offer, you can of course order 1983 from many places, including Blackwells UK, Amazon UK, Bookshop.org (UK or US), Amazon US, or Barnes And Noble.

More about 1983.

Just some of my mum’s art that’s up for grabs and piece about her and my dad’s work, for those who haven’t read it…