LITMIR.BIZ

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the local newspaper. It must have lived in the sealed-up dock for decades, feeding off eels and rats.

      The only thing I ever fished out of the docks was Robin, who would always end up falling in—usually because I pushed him. One summer he got a second-hand bike for his birthday, a yellow Raleigh Boxer, and we cycled down to the docks so he could show it off. When he wasn’t looking, I tied a piece of old rope to it, attached the other end out of sight onto a rusty iron bollard by the edge of the drop, then, shouting, ‘Hey Robin, watch this . . .’, I chucked it in. Unfortunately, before I could haul it back up again, he burst into tears and ran off home. Twenty years later he still can’t see the funny side of this.

      One of our most popular, and hazardous, pastimes was swimming in the docks, something that generally ended up with somebody getting hurt or almost drowning. You would strip down to just your shorts, then line up along the rounded stone edges and try to find someone brave enough to jump in first. It was never me.

      Taking a running jump, the first boy would launch himself out into the water, disappearing with a loud splash and a cheer from the onlookers, who would then remain silent for a few moments until he bobbed up from the blackness.

      Eventually it would be my turn and, trembling a little with fear (fear of the cold water, fear of what lay beneath it, fear of not coming up), I would step forward. Those who had already done it would stand shivering as well, arms crossed, watching until everyone else had jumped. You knew you had no choice, you were going in one way or another.

      Taking a few steps back I would do the running jump and launch off into space with a scream that was half bravado, half fear, shooting out high over the water, eyes closed. The drop was several metres and you seemed to be in the air an impossibly long time. As you fell down towards the water you would feel that thrill of the freedom of the choice being made, there was no way back, you were committed to fate. Then you would hit.

      The impact was hard, the cold stunning, the water so black you expected to bounce, but down you would go, deep. There was always the anticipation of hitting something, until finally you stopped and, following the sounds of your friends, swam upwards towards the surface, where you would climb out via a ladder and stand, arms crossed, dripping dirty oily water like the rest.

      Of course, the trick to swimming in the docks was not to swallow any water, or get entangled on anything below the surface, or bump into a dead dog or worse. I would often imagine the zombied bodies of dead tramps or murdered prostitutes crawling along on the bottom, trying to catch my feet—perhaps more of an indication of my video choices than of a vivid imagination.

      Every summer, kids would drown, and the headmaster would give a stern warning in assembly about not going near the docks. The worst thing that ever happened to me, and the last time I jumped in the docks, was when I landed on something very sharp and cut my feet so badly I couldn’t walk, and had to be pushed home on someone’s bike, blood dripping out of my Dunlop trainers all the way. Up until then, whatever the dangers, these things never stopped me. After all, it was an early lesson in life, that games without risk are just that—games. Anyway, the local swimming baths had been bulldozed to make way for a new bypass. For us it was the docks or nothing.

      Someone once told me that a wilderness was an area of several thousand miles with no infrastructure or human impact. They were wrong. Looking back I think the docks, Little Switzerland, and the bombed-out buildings gave me something immeasurably valuable as a child, something that I would hang onto for the rest of my life. These industrial wastelands of cut stone and dank water were a wilderness as precious to us as any tundra. They were where we explored both without and within ourselves.

      The early years of my life in Hull seemed to be one long hot summer: the roads were always quiet, and weekends and holidays never seemed to end. We were poor, but so was everyone else, so this never seemed much of a problem. Mine was probably the last urban generation to have an old-fashioned childhood fairly free of consumerism save for the odd Star Wars figure. It was consumerism that later created real poverty and, worse still, the realisation of how poor people were. Back then, everyone on the estate was hard up, so we were all equals. Having a TV that was rented, and required you to feed it 50p coins to make it work, was normal, as were free school dinners and clothing grants. Nowadays I reflect on the fact that I still get free clothes—only now they are from outdoor companies and I get paid to wear them.

      Unlike the mothers of most of my friends, my mum would always try and save enough money to take us to the seaside for the day at least once a month on the train, our family British Rail railcard making it possible. I used to wonder how we could be a family, without our dad, but obviously BR was pragmatic on such sticking points. We would arrive in Scarborough on the earliest train possible, and disembark carrying everything we needed for the day. ‘Now,’ my mum would say as we walked towards the beach, ‘we have £5 to spend, and when it’s spent that’s it.’ It was amazing how far that money could go.

      She once said that we were never poor, but that she was poor, and it’s true that she kept many of her hardships secret, well apart from the need to make ‘hen’s meat’. Nevertheless, growing up I was aware that life for her was a juggling act between paying bills and having money for trips to the seaside, toys or little luxuries that made the flat a home for us. Her life was full of small disasters, unexpected bills, lost or damaged clothes she had to replace, and I would often see her despair, only to rally later and fight back. One of her most common sayings was, ‘If that isn’t the story of my life!’, used whenever something went wrong. She seemed to have so much bad luck, with life constantly making her tough life even tougher. It was only later that I understood that poor people tread such a fine line that even the slightest thing can push them over the edge, yet each time she climbed back and carried on. ‘Never mind, it’s the story of my life’ became so common that it seemed like an automatic defense, an acceptance of what life threw at us. One such occasion was when, on our way to Scarborough, the train began sounding its horn, then slammed on its brakes, eventually coming to a sudden stop, depositing the passengers on the floor. ‘I’m very sorry,’ said the guard as he walked through the carriages. ‘We seem to have hit a cow on the line.’ Our nice day out ruined, Mum just looked at us. ‘Well, if that’s not the bloody story of my life.’

      If my early memories of Hull seem to be captured in rays of summer sun, then the years that followed are cast in autumnal gloom, beginning when I moved up into senior school. This was an all-boys’ school, the classes packed tight, the atmosphere tense. Its hallways and balconies were like a prison wing. It seemed as if I had been taken from a small, hard-working and positive school, where children felt special and valuable, and then poured into the grinder of a factory for the disillusioned and bewildered. A school system should attempt to bring to life that special gift each of us is given at birth, to blow on that ember of skill and help you to realise something you perhaps could be. This school, and many like it, simply tipped the lot of us into a bucket and stirred for five years.

      Overnight I went from being a happy child who had a few problems with writing and reading, to a ‘REM’. I was stuck in remedial classes where teaching was simply about containment. Kids ran wild. They pushed teachers out of their classrooms, they set fire to desks, threw their books out of windows. The threat of physical violence hung in the air. All you could do was hide behind bluff and show, or slink to the furthest corners at break time. No one could show any interest in learning for fear of being labelled a swot and ostracised by the pack. We were all going to hell.

      At the end of our time there, it was decided that our failing school would be amalgamated with another failing school, thus doubling the problem and halving the resources to deal with it. Many teachers were just seeing their time out, ineffectual, exhausted and plodding. You felt they hated teaching us just as much as we hated being taught by them. What was lacking was passion of any sort, but then, with three-and-a-half-million unemployed, they knew they were serving out a sentence just like us and thought they weren’t paid enough for passion. They went on strike for more pay, and soon the kids joined them, the local radio station coming down to interview them standing at the gates, not realising the strike had in reality already been going on for years on both sides. With so many unemployed, there was an air of pointlessness about the whole thing. Why weren’t we learning? No one gave a fuck.

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