Where Did It All Go Right? Read online

  contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction: Ask the Family: The facts of my life 16

  Preface: Down the Welfare: In search of hardship and trauma

  1: Jack Hawkins Knew My Father Life before and just after I was born, from the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 to moving house in 1968

  Diary, 1972

  2: Cobblers Northampton!

  3: Down the Field What did I actually do with myself as a child? (mainly, ‘go down the field’)

  Diary, 1973

  4: St Francis, I Gave You the Best Years of My Life How much did attending the School of No Knocks shape the rest of my life? Abington Vale Primary and Abington Vale Middle School

  Diary, 1974

  Diary, 1975

  5: Spook and Fancy Being ‘good at drawing’ and how this ‘talent’ made me different but oddly the same

  6: Has It Got an Aspirin in It? Good health

  Diary, 1976

  7: Supermousse I was what I ate

  8: Joy Rides Going on hols

  9: A Sip of Tonic Being spoiled by Nan Mabel and Pap Reg

  Diary, 1977

  10: Big Boys Don’t Cry The Poseidon Adventure and other fears

  11: Leeds Mug The modest upheaval of starting Weston Favell Upper School and pretending to be thick, 1978

  Diary, 1978

  Diary, 1979

  12: Uncle Punk Punk rock: it arrived too late, but not too late to change my life

  13: Ma Favourite Programme Worldview

  Diary, 1980

  14: I’m Not in Love The unsavoury influence of girls on an otherwise uncomplicated boy’s life.

  Diary, 1981

  15: Alan’s Flat The gay years: how my Mum learned to start worrying and hate my new friends

  16: Wayward Up Lancaster He’s leaving home, 1984

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  WHERE DID IT

  ALL GO RIGHT?

  Andrew Collins

  To Mum, Dad, Simon and Melissa.

  It’s a family affair.

  introduction

  Ask the Family

  We shipped ’em in all the way from

  Northampton – the Collins family!

  Noel Edmonds, Telly Addicts (1990)

  Who went from the Hotel du Lac to the Bangkok Hilton?

  Come on, I’ll have to hurry you

  My family, the Collins family, appeared as contestants on Telly Addicts in 1990. We managed to reach the dizzy heights of the semi-finals and took home a Telly Addicts board game and four fleecy-lined Telly Addicts sweatshirts. This brush with the limelight may seem like the wrong place to start a book about being normal, but as much as anything it’s a sign of the times. It’s more normal to have been on a TV quiz show than not. I knew someone when I was working at the NME who’d been on Fifteen to One (as had his girlfriend), and I later worked under a bloke who’d been on Blockbusters. My sister-in-law was close enough to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire to have recruited me as one of her phone-a-friends (they callously disqualified her for taking more than the allotted time to answer the qualifying phone question about the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, which she gallingly got right). Further, my brother was on Crimewatch (as an officer of the law, I might add), my future wife could be seen dancing to Hall & Oates’ ‘Maneater’ on a 1982 edition of Top of the Pops, her brother was an extra on Grange Hill, and you could see my Uncle Allen’s head in the crowd when Jeux sans Frontières came to Northampton. (This was after he’d lost his rag with some noisy Europeans in the row behind and thrown a pair of their dustbin-lid cymbals on to the field of play.)

  So – hold the front page – Warhol was right. Tragically, the 15 minutes of fame granted by contestanthood on a TV quiz show quickly fades (even in Northampton where nothing ever happens). But let us not lump Telly Addicts in with all the other quiz shows: in those days it was special. It was about families. Most quiz or game shows want you in ones or pairs – or in meritocratic school groups for things like Beat the Teacher and University Challenge. At that time only Telly Addicts and Family Fortunes traded in the nuclear unit, and you have to admire their commitment to a dying currency.

  Of course there used to be the eugenic Ask the Family with Robert Robinson, open exclusively to the families of university lecturers, and only then if they had two sons. It wasn’t until the Eighties, when the American show Family Feud was translated back into English, that the proletariat were invited to leave the sofa en famille and flaunt their knowledge on TV. Knowledge aptly accumulated not from reading books but from watching TV – literally so in the case of Telly Addicts, where families were put on a prop sofa and given a prop remote control, to make them feel at home.

  Telly Addicts moved with the times in 1994 and relaxed the rules to allow workmates and friends to join in: tantamount to a requiem for the family unit in this country. Back in 1990 though it was still a place for mums and dads and sons and daughters, and we were right there, on display in the petri dish of early evening BBC1: a happy, normal family of addicts. The point is – and how unlike television as a rule – this was no façade, no lie. Although I’d left home by then and had my own sofa and telly in London, we were a happy, normal family.

  Mum, Dad, my younger sister Melissa and I really did get on famously, and when I occasioned to visit Northampton at weekends, we really might sit on a sofa together and watch telly. (It would have been a fine thing if the show had accepted five-person teams and our brother Simon could have joined us there in front of that studio audience at Pebble Mill, but he was in Germany with the army at the time, and unable to take the day off for such frippery, despite the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 and the reduced likelihood of the Russians invading.)

  I was 25, and wore the same white, oversized, partially laced hip hop trainers on all three editions of Telly Addicts, letting the side down below the ankle but otherwise very much a team player. In the first round we beat the Young family from Stevenage by a whisker, 18 points to 16. (‘There’s an atmosphere of relief, mingled with a little surprise,’ said Noel Edmonds at the end of the show.)

  In the quarter finals, we were up against the Gawthrops (Nick, Deb, Chris and Russ, all jumpers and cardigans). Another close-run, low-scoring clash, the Hotel du Lac was the last of my three individual questions in the Spotlight Round. I’d actually ‘passed’ on the first: Who presents The Late Late Show? (the roguish Gay Byrne, as any addict not under the studio lights could tell you), but I’d salvaged my reputation by correctly naming Dr Who’s robot dog from a library shot (eas-y!): K-9.

  Then …

  Who went from the Hotel du Lac to the Bangkok Hilton?

  A pretty upmarket question for a light early evening BBC1 quiz show I trust you’ll agree, and I fluffed it. They had to hurry me. ‘Don’t know,’ I said – college boy! – scoring one lousy point out of a possible three, bringing the family’s total for that round up to an anorexic four points.1 You have to bear in mind that for this decisive round the studio lights are dimmed, a clock ticks in the corner of the screen and there’s no conferring. Suddenly it’s not like sitting at home on the sofa with Mum, Dad and Melissa any more. We were neck and neck before the Spotlight, and now, having gone first, we were on 17. The stoic Gawthrops were on 13. They only needed five points – out of a possible 12! – to win.

  As you can imagine, we were willing them from the darkness to blow it. They did. The Collins family from Northampton scraped through to the next round, where we would be defeated by the Allmans. Still, it wasn’t the winning, it was the being on television three times. It made Mum, Dad and Melissa locally famous for a while, with people comi
ng up to them in shops and everything.2

  I went back to London, having quietly enjoyed playing a family again. I never wore the sweatshirt, not even in irony. The lining was too hot.

  * * *

  I don’t hold with the convention of biographies that says you must trace the subject’s ancestry back to at least the Reformation. What use is it – I mean really – to know that Clint Eastwood’s great-great-great-great-grandfather owned a tannery in Long Branch, New Jersey?3 It’s largely a fact for fact’s sake about someone long dead. Our family goes way back in Northampton – it is our heartland – but I don’t know how far back. One day I will actually use the Internet to trace my family tree and find out if I really am distantly related to Bootsy Collins (let’s hope so), but for now, here’s all you need to know.

  The Telly Addicts team:

  My dad is John William Collins.4 A voluble, witty, kind-hearted conservative with more than one chin, a fine head of hair for a sixty-year-old and a c’est-la-vie, que-sera-sera, could-be-worse-could-be-raining attitude to life, fortified by forty years in insurance, which is to my mind his greatest attribute. If I have anything undiluted of Dad in me it’s this.

  My mum is Christine Anne Collins née Ward, a small woman on a permanent voyage of discovery whose lack of academic colours at school never held her back (she is the very essence of self-taught, and not a flower whose growth has been inhibited by Dad’s formidable shadow). Blonde, trim and reliably glamorous without ever looking cheap, she is a volcano of impetuous emotion compared to Dad, and there’s your yin and yang. She pronounces broccoli as ‘broccolai’ and cereals as ‘surreals’ and I don’t know why it’s only foodstuffs.

  Melissa is now in her very early thirties, and a proud mother of three with husband Graham,5 but to me she will always be between about five and twelve, pre-boys, pre-vanity. The only sister of two older brothers, she used to annoy us gently as if it were her calling, though we rarely actually got annoyed (it was mostly sticking her head round the door with the cartoon greeting ’Cha!, when we had mates there).6 Melissa was cute, supremely aware of her own ability to amuse and she seems to have forgiven Simon and me for telling her there was a Dr Who monster living in her cupboard.

  Honorary Telly Addict:

  Simon was quite simply my best mate until puberty (mine) drove its inevitable wedge between us. We can still turn on the best-mates tap whenever we meet, and have latterly enjoyed a sporadic email correspondence, but his uniformed careers have generally kept us physically distant, especially the army, which stationed him in such godforsaken places as Hanover in Germany and Colchester in Essex.7 An unbroken succession of hat-wearing jobs – army, prison service, police – have eroded Simon’s hairline, but he always wore it short anyway so it’s not such a tragic loss. From where I’m sitting, he seems to be a model father to his two daughters with wife Lesley,8 and I admire him now as much as I always secretly have done from my unbroken succession of poofy jobs.

  The grandparent generation:

  Dad’s dad was William John Collins, or Pap Collins as we knew him (in Northampton, it’s ‘pap’ for grandpa or granddad). Pap Collins, a rotund, entertaining housepainter, war veteran and teller of tall tales, was married to Nan Collins, Winnie (née Corby).

  Nan Collins was a sweet, non-suffering woman – always, always laughing – who worked wonders with a bit of braising steak and some pastry, and put up with Pap’s stubborn idiosyncrasies (like refusing to countenance the advice of doctors), because she loved ‘her Billy’. He died first.9

  Mum’s dad was Reginald Percy Ward, or Pap Reg, an upstanding toolmaker turned shop steward who stayed in Northampton during the war (to make tools) and thus lacked the embellished romance of Pap Collins – at least as far as my militarily obsessed brother and I were concerned. The older and more left wing I got, the more I appreciated Pap Reg, pillar of the Amalgamated Engineering Union, and, post-retirement, tribunal man and Pensioner’s Voice activist. He became a belated inspiration to me,10 and was my last grandparent to die, aged 85. I cried at his funeral, as I had cried at all three others.

  Pap Reg was married to Nan Mabel (née Noble). She was the dominant figure in our family – to Dad’s occasional chagrin – though she was also small of stature, like my mum. Thursday was her day. She would come round our house without fail. A mass of anxieties who would ‘whittle’11 for weeks before going on holiday. Yet she managed to be funny and controversial along with it, and will forever remain, to me, the quintessential ‘Old Northampton’ matriarch. I was, I am embarrassed to say, always her favourite, which made it all the more difficult for me when she appeared not to recognise me (and I say appeared) after her stroke. Nan Mabel was still in there, but far beneath the broken surface. I never really knew the extent of Nan’s inner troubles while I was growing up, and given that I’ve only learned about them since, it seems inappropriate to introduce them into my story now. She was Nan Mabel, who whittled unnecessarily.

  I have three sets of blood uncles and aunties, two on Mum’s side, one on Dad’s, and various honorary uncles and aunties – in other words friends of Mum and Dad. I will introduce these people as we go along, otherwise we may drown in names (there’s a Janis and a Janice, and an Alan and an Allen).

  Mum met Dad on an office outing organised by the Atlas Assurance company in Northampton. They got married in 1962 and had me in 1965. Simon was born in 1967; Melissa in 1971, after which Dad had the operation. All three of us are now married and Simon and Melissa five children between them.12 I lived at home until 1984 when I was 19 and then moved to the capital and stayed there. (It is a rare member of my family that leaves town without eventually coming back, although it should be noted, for fear of stereotyping us as genetically unadventurous, that Pap Reg’s brother emigrated to Australia after the war, as did one of Nan Mabel’s sisters, to Canada, and they never came back.)

  This book will end when I leave home, because after that it’s all college and the media, and Northampton fades.

  My story is essentially the story of Northampton’s 1970s, or if you prefer, any provincial English town’s 1970s. It is also the story of a field – the field, where I learned to ride a bike without stabilisers, kissed Anita Barker and smoked my first cigarette, although not in the same year. It is the story of wellies, sticks, stickers, stitches, comics, cartoons, hamsters, the Alpine lorry and travel sickness tablets.

  The big question, and the one I intend to answer is: where did it all go right?

  1. It was Denholm Elliott.

  2. In the local paper, Mum, Dad and Melissa got ‘Telly watching family become screen stars’ (6 October 1990), with a hopelessly posed picture in which they are pointing at a telly. I was recognised once in the immediate aftermath. A man came to fix the boiler in my flat and looked me up and down. ‘You were on Blind Date,’ he said, confidently. No, Telly Addicts. ‘That’s it!’ he said. I then had to tell him what Noel Edmonds was like in real life (a consummate professional, actually).

  3. He did.

  4. Throughout Experience, and thus presumably in life, Martin Amis refers to his father as Kingsley. What a load of nouveau bohemian rubbish. My dad is called Dad. It is his correct title.

  5. Good, solid sort, likes a pint, Man City fan, plays football at the weekends.

  6. I think Melissa had a nascent crush on my friend Paul Garner (he was around the house most often in the early Eighties), but not one that she would have recognised or that me or Paul would have admitted to. ’Cha was an abbreviation for ‘Wotcha!’ or ‘Hotcha!’, very common salutations round Northampton way at the time.

  7. I attended a Regimental Day parade there in 1985 and tried in vain to embarrass Simon with my Oxfam mac and stupid hair. There is a classic family snapshot of this momentous day in which the pair of us are posing together, he in regimental blazer, slacks and tie, me in untucked striped shirt, Oxfam mac with sleeves pushed up and wild, dyed Eighties hairdo. But you can tell we are mad about each other: there’s no animosity anyw
here. I am holding a finger between my nose and top lip in approximation of Simon’s moustache. Most of his platoon grew moustaches when they realised they were allowed to, in order to distinguish themselves from each other.

  8. Simon met Lesley in 1987 on a training exercise (she was in the Territorial Army at the time) and they were married within a matter of months at a church in her native Taunton. I was Simon’s best man and fetched him Creme Eggs for breakfast on the day (his request). So much for anyone who said it wouldn’t last.

  9. It was one of those marriages where you imagined that one partner simply couldn’t live without the other, and yet Nan enjoyed a whole year on her own (before quietly succumbing to pneumonia), seemingly in indomitable spirits and good health, during which she saw the birth and christening of her first grandchild, Simon and Lesley’s daughter Charmaine.

  10. I was proud to dedicate my only other book, a biography of Billy Bragg (Still Suitable for Miners), to Reginald Ward ‘for political inspiration’ in 1998. I’m glad he saw that.

  11. The Cassell Dictionary of Slang: ‘Whittle v. to talk emptily, aimlessly, to chatter.’ That’s as maybe, but in our house it means to fret, to worry, to agonise out loud (esp. before going on holiday to Minehead). Cassell also notes that the original sixteenth-century definition is to ‘confess on the gallows’. There’s something of Nan Mabel in that.

  12. Simon and Lesley’s: Charmaine and Natasha. Melissa and Graham’s: Ben, Jack and William. Not a bad apple among them, yet.

  preface

  Down the Welfare

  We have nothing to lose but our aitches.

  George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)

  I can still taste welfare orange. It has to be at least 33 years since I last drank any, but there it is, in some intuitive corner of my memory. I must have tasted a hundred different kinds of orange juice in my lifetime, and yet I can evoke the powerful intensity of welfare orange as if it were only yesterday.