Running Free
Just sixteen, a pick-up truck, out of money, out of luck / I’ve got nowhere to call my own, hit the gas and here I go.
- Running Free - Iron Maiden (from the album Iron Maiden, 1980)
I had the most ordinary childhood imagineable. That’s not to say it was boring or dull - it wasn’t - and I was grateful both then and now for the privileges I enjoyed. Which is just as well, since my mother was inclined to meet the slightest hint of ingratitude at having been born with the observation that there were children starving in Africa.
So, even the guilt trips in my house would have been horribly familiar to every other teenager round our way.
It occurred to me, as I sat down to write this opening context-setter, that the only thing that still defines me now as much as it did back in the early 80s is my unconditional love of hard rock and heavy metal music. It has been the unremitting soundtrack to the largely uneventful life I’ve led and music, whether driven by screaming guitars or not, is stamped on almost all of my memories.
That’s why every entry you’ll read in these journals starts with a lyric from a song that is in some way linked to the events recounted in them. I don’t plan on going into minute details about the merits or otherwise of AC/DC, Y&T, Motley Crue and Ratt (among many, many others) but I hope you’ll forgive the references to them that you find strewn in the dark corners that litter the highways and byways of my memory.
My life as a teenager, then, was unremarkable and has remained pretty unremarkable ever since. There have been highlights along the way, of course, but these are of the variety that most ordinary folk would recognise: a marriage (one, so far), children (two), some blinding holidays, a promotion or two, a few changes of job and/or career (some of which are included in the Diaries), a moped and some cars that ranged from super cool (a 1978 Sahara Yellow MKII Ford Capri) to fucking horrible (a 1982 Talbot Horizon GL, anyone?). So far, so run-of-the-mill.
There’s no rags to riches (or even rags to rags or riches to riches) angle here. I was an ordinary kid growing up in an ordinary small town (or large village - take your pick) in an ordinary family. I went to an ordinary state school, which you’ll come to know well enough as we canter through the 34 months between September 1980 and June 1983, had ordinary friends (well, mostly ordinary) and did ordinary things.
Even my vices were ordinary. I discovered smoking at the age of 13 at a time when smokers still outnumbered non-smokers in society. I used to sit for hours in the toilet cubicle at Stevenage railway station, studying crude etchings of hairy cocks and even hairier fannies rendered with pleasing detail on the back of the cubicle door and wondering endlessly whether the telephone numbers given for the various girls who might be available for a ‘good time’ were real or not (ordinary and sheltered, that was me). And I played with my willy. A lot. Though not whilst sat in the toilet cubicle at Stevenage station. There are at least some depths of criminal behaviour I will not plumb.
In September 1980, when these diaries begin, I was 15 years and 9 months old and just entering the 5th Year which, for younger readers, is Year 11 in today’s money. We did O Levels, also known as GCEs, not these new-fangled GCSEs.
If you were thick in a subject - and I was as thick as pigshit when it came to Maths and Biology - you weren’t allowed to do an O Level and instead had to sit a CSE, which stood for Certificate of Secondary Education. These were really nothing more than documentary proof that you had at least bothered to turn up to some of the lessons in order not to learn anything.
My exams take up very little time in the diaries. In fact, more time is taken up with the extraordinary prevaricatory lengths to which I would go in order to avoid any sort of revision or, indeed, work of any description.
I had only two friends at school when the Diaries start - Dave Wilson and Kev Daines - though I got along perfectly well with most of my peers in the fifth year. But Kev and I were best mates and swore allegiance to one another long before the ‘bros before hoes’ mantra of Zac Efron’s character in Bad Neighbours entered the lexicon of pop culture.
We liked Dave a lot, but most of my memories from 1980 and much of 1981 until he left school to work with his Dad as an insurance broker are of spending all my spare time with Kev.
All of which is a long way of saying that everything you’ll read in the Diaries wouldn’t have been out of place in your own life if you were a similar age.
I hope they prompt pleasant ghosts from your own past!