A journey back in time...

So, here we are and I should really be off doing clever Trevor type things, but actually it's late and I have done a lot already in the last 2 weeks. I have, first of all, been pretending to be a proper PhD student and that has given me time to reflect on a lot of my own history, in relation to inquiring about other people's (of which more much, much later)

I spent my first day of PhDness taking photographs of where I used to live as a kid. Naturally enough this really got me thinking. About all sorts. I went with my sister to some of our old haunts and in a sort of circling way, we went all over the place for an hour or so until we finally made it to our old house. The centre of our lives until I was 18 (and she was 19). It was a weird old day because it was bitterly, bitterly cold in the way that it only can be in Hull with the wind whipping off the North sea, and because we remembered many of the same things, and that sense of shared memory gives you a sense that in spite of what people say or imagine you are, your siblings can confirm your sense of self when you start to think you may have imagined it. This is certainly true of Kim and myself, separated by one school year and nearly always together in a way that must have been quite aggravating for her, and really quite handy for me. Because she was tough, and I most certainly was not. She is better at the detail than me, the names of people and so on, and I have the benefit of having been away, and come back, which allows me a kind of distance - something a little more in the round.

We went to the church where we spent many a Sunday arguing over who was going to carry the flag on Church Parade day, and where we found pornography, where we were chased by the Hastie family and where we used to (allegedly - you're lying about this one Kim) met so that we could deliver our difficult (mine were much worse) papers together. My paper round took me down behind the bus station, and down Coltman street where the old woman who lived there would invite you into to her cat-piss stinking house, given half a chance and on St. Pancras Close where opposite the flat I delivered to was a young man with learning disabilities who, in my ignorance, scared the living shit out of me. It wasn't a million miles away from where baby Harry used to chase us either ("It's not me you want, it's me sister!" we each used to say, and because they weren't that bright, they seemed to believe us. Once, they threatened to beat me up because they said my picture was in Jacky magazine, because I had never had a boyfriend, oh alas, as if it mattered - BUT it wasn't my picture, I swear.) Are you sensing a pattern? I was chased a lot as a young person, better, I thought, and still do, to run and live to fight another day, then have your head kicked in by baby Harry's sisters. I used to run away from the ugly girl most nights after school, and she stayed ugly and I stayed safe (ish) - another Kim thing there - telling me that I should call her ugly TO HER FACE... and I was stupid enough to do it...



Our journey back in time moved from the church then down the Boulevard (less up market than it sounds, but more up market than it used to be...) We deviated and went to my mum's old work place - a chippie down Airlie Street. Okay, let me tell you about how not to regenerate a place. Do not take the main reason for a place's existence away and leave nothing in its stead. They built a fancy dan stadium for Hull City and Hull FC on the old cricket field, and the old ground of Hull FC, down Airlie Street was left literally to the dogs (greyhounds) until they buggered off somewhere else too. Everything just looked like it had had enough. The ghost given up and gone. These streets were sagged and ragged.

The chippie was boarded up. All those nights standing in there chewing the fat and all those scraps scoffed on the way home from Guides. All of that time, and all of those people who came and went and who enjoyed one another's company in that place: dead. Okay, I accept that I am being nostalgic - and with good reason, but communities need something to centre on, and shops form part of that. In the geographical area that I was brought up my sister and I calculated that there were 10-12 shops and small businesses that we used, depended on, and that depended on us. There was precisely one left. One.



It was worse than that. My sister and I used to go into Hull FC's ground at half time for nothing, have our faces blasted with gravel from the speedway, and as we got older, join our parents occasionally in the social club that stood beside it. My sister even held her children's christening parties in that place. This is it now: a pile of rubble. Okay, nothing is forever - I know that, but there is value to understanding what these communities meant to people and why we were close-knit. We had commonality. And if we want it in the future, we'd better look at what it might look like...for I honestly believe that if there's not enough to bind us altogether in a sense of common good, we are going to Hell in a hand-cart.


A cheery thought. That's not how it started. Or indeed how it will continue...

Four Yorkshire Men. Competitive impoverishment. Redistribution vs Recogniton

A comment on my blog got me thinking - someone wrote that her childhood had been more impoverished (than mine, presumably.) I have found this quite common - this competitive 'onedownmanship' ... "Oh you had it bad! But, I had it worse!" I am reminded of the Four Yorkshire Men sketch:

"GC: House? You were lucky to have a HOUSE! We used to live in one room, all hundred and twenty-six of us, no furniture. Half the floor was missing; we were all huddled together in one corner for fear of FALLING!

TG: You were lucky to have a ROOM! *We* used to have to live in a corridor!

MP: Ohhhh we used to DREAM of livin' in a corridor! Woulda' been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woken up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House!? Hmph.

EI: Well when I say "house" it was only a hole in the ground covered by a piece of tarpolin, but it was a house to US.

GC: We were evicted from *our* hole in the ground; we had to go and live in a lake!

TG: You were lucky to have a LAKE! There were a hundred and sixty of us living in a small shoebox in the middle of the road.

MP: Cardboard box?

TG: Aye.

MP: You were lucky. We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six o'clock in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill for fourteen hours a day week in-week out. When we got home, out Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt!"

And on it goes - reaching the heights of "lick road clean wit tongue!...and when we got home our Dad would kill us and dance about on our graves singing, "Hallelujah!"... #class matters. It matters so much that people are competitive about it. I am very curious about this, about this fractioning up of poverty. For me, the working class don't need to be divided among themselves - which of course they are. Look at the invention of the 'underclass' by the political class. There is no such thing as an underclass. They mean the unemployed. They mean people who do not work and have never worked. To call a group an underclass is to deny them any kind of status. The underclass are better called the non-working working class.
Years ago, my brother - a very articulate, capable bloke - was talking about his working class background when some guy said to him "You're not working class." His answer sticks in my mind. "I shared a bed with my younger brother for 3 years, and ate weetabix for tea, how working class do you want me to be?" Mind, he was talking to a bloke with the word FUCK tattoed on his forehead. But the point is ... how working class do you want me to be? Funny how we argue the toss about this, dividing and sub-dividing ourselves. For class read power/powerless. It's not one another we should be worrying about in the class wars - it's those who have power, wield it and continue to self-perpetuate their and their family's position. David Cameron. I am not saying any more than that.
This is also an argument about class vs identity (politics) and so far as I am concerned there is no argument. Nancy Fraser argues that the preoccupation with identity is detrimental to the redistribution of wealth (redistribution vs recognition.) Some have even called the preoccupation with identity a top-down tactic to keep the bastards down. The redistribution of wealth and power would bring real change for most - identity is a smoke-screen, recognition is all well and good but how far does that get you? Identity divides and separates, builds barriers where none were.
I make no claims to be working class now. How could I? I am a professional, and part of a professional class. But my heritage is my heritage is my heritage. My father was a printer, but he might just have easily have been a ship's rigger if his father had lived and he had followed in his footsteps. He might also, just as easily have been a grammar school boy if he hadn't failed the 11+. My mother worked in Smith and Nephew filling Nivea tubs with cream (she fell asleep doing it, too - but that is a whole other story.) Later, her working life was a succession of chip shops - wages that paid directly for my university degree, sent to me each week in an envelope. I'm not being melodramatic, that's a fact.
Harvey Gillman, a Gay culturally Jewish Quaker said that we are all "a minority of one.", and no-one is denying individual differences, that's what makes us uniquely human, and ourselves (taking full note of society's current obsession with personal fulfillment and our obsession with 'living our dreams') But I honestly believe that there is more that joins than separates us, and divisions - the poor are the poor, whatever the flavour and uniqueness of their sense of self - leads powerless. Knowing who you are, and being recognised and acknowledged doesn't mean that you are suddenly able to participate at every level of society equally, and it doesn't mean that you will reach parity with those in power (a lack of recognition is often dependent on a lack of economic power.) I'm not belittling difference, or assimilation either, I'm just not willing to give up on social politics. And I believe that true recognition ultimately requires economic equity.

Mother's culture

Here we are as children, doing as children do at parties -sausages on sticks, and cheese and pineapple I shouldn't wonder. This picture is taken on North Hull Estate. It was a long way from our house, and I was always very aware that all the house sort of looked the same. And not like ours. Even though aunt Joan had a big garden (we didn't) I knew that this was a corporation house. It was something about the colour of the doors. They were mostly the same colour. I was bandying about a theory the other day (mostly in my own head) that you learn a lot about your culture via your mother. The thought was born out of one of the respondents of my survey, who said that culturally he felt he was his mother's culture, but his class was determined by his father. Does this stem from the fact that culture revolves around food, and the things you learn with regard to it in the early stages of life - beliefs, values, attitudes, customs, institutions and social relations (and class was always your father's job)? Obviously it is more complex than that - but I am struck by the fact that the purity of my mother's class is never disputed - (and recall that if your mother was jewish for the Nazis then so were you no matter what else was thrown into the mix.) In the time this relates to - my life story anyway, the 1970s, mothers really did spend most of their time with you, choosing what you wore, what books you read (if any), and generally taking care of you, including all of your interests and establishing how things were to be and ensuring that you adopted the rules. My mother was a bit of a harridan so there was no transgressing what she said without consequence. And the consequence? Often she would say, "Just you wait til your father gets home" and this was usually enough. My mother was quite interested in us being occupied. That was why we went to the guides, and the swim club (not to learn to swim from teachers - for some random reason we went to play as part of the railway man's children's night. We weren't, and never have been railway man's children so I have no idea why this was allowed, but we certainly benefitted from it), Tuesday club and Sunday school (and because they handed out free cakes, and my sister and I liked that.) We went to the panto every year because of my dad's work. Things are evidently not this straight forward though because some people don't live with their parents, or indeed their mother... but I suppose so far as I am concerned with regard to a lot of what I learnt, my mother was central. I have often thought that my father only really came into full focus as I got older (though I was and probably still am, a daddy's girl.)
The second picture is of my grandparents, standing outside their back way. The entrance with the towel leads to the outside/inside toilet on one side and the kitchen on the other side. Their toilet always either had newspaper or izal medicated hanging behind the door - and it was freezing in there even in the height of summer. It wasn't the first choice in terms of toilet, and I think we waited until we got to Aunt Joan's (who lived round the corner) to make use of her facilities. I loved my grandmother and grandfather's house. He sat in a big chair, and beside him was the latest Guiness book of records, something he bought more regularly in the later years of his life. He loved that book. The fire was usually blazing, and above it there was a mirror, reflecting into another mirror opposite so that you head and face when you looked in one was reflected back and forth dozens of times to infinity (and beyond?) There wasn't much else in the room - a side board, a couch, and a table and chairs.
The kitchen was always dark and almost always smelt of carbolic soap; bits of it saved in a jam jar.
There was a pantry and a coal shed off this kitchen, and in the coal shed you could see my granddad's lollipop stick - he spent his last few working years as a lollipop man. I always think of him when I pass lollipop people, unsurprisingly. There was a cooker, and a small table and a table on which grandma baked cakes and buns. Nothing was fitted - they weren't those sorts of people.
They are long dead now - she died when I first began teaching, and he died many years before that - the fags that he smoked constantly finally catching up with him. He died on my older sister's 14th birthday.

Houses are not just for living in.

Here we are in Richmond, Yorkshire. A place I haven’t visited since I was 17 or 18 about 3,000,000 years ago. As we get closer, I say, ‘My memory of it is that it is very posh.’ –realising, almost immediately, that this was, at the time, because I wasn’t. It is a standard market town, much like many in Yorkshire and it is interesting going around it today to realise that I have in fact, moved on, and that it is not so much posh (although there is a Hunter Welly Shop) as different, and that for a girl from the City, that difference was a world a way from my experience. The town is a hive of activity – but there are properties, and shops standing empty, and in the half rain there is something a bit bleak here. Older women are doing lunch – and I am guessing they are making moves to put the world to rights. These are the kind of women who fix things, hold fetes and are part of the Women’s Institute.

There is that green/brown woollen jumperness to it. The Barbour Jacketness of the place just rings out, so far as it is possible for Barbour Jackets to ring. In essence the difference is not in monetary terms (although it is richer here, and I am certain there is also poverty), but the real differences lie in class, and in terms of politics (William Hague) and in terms of expectation as to what you do. (There are no factories here, and no fishing industry.) It is not like Hull. People do not come from generations of unemployment. (They do move out to find things to do, and I can and do accept that that is a difficult thing to have to come to terms with. This is not better or worse, necessarily, but it certainly is different.)

As we walk back to the car (we are those sort of tourists) we notice an enormously large house. It is a huge mansion of a place, with Virginia creeper dying back, with something slightly unkempt about it, and yet it is singing money, and it reminds me of something that happened years and years ago after returning from a Rangers camp in Durham.

We were travelling back on a mini-bus, and dropping off young women as we got closer and closer to the centre of Hull. This was not my first trip to places like Cherry Burton, and Swanland, and Willerby and so on, after all I had been cycling for a number of years through these places and onto other equally exotic places like Welton, Malton and Wetwang for years and years, and yet somehow, this was the first time I had ever really noticed that people lived there. It was, as we dropped off each of these lovely, well-spoken girls, the first time I realised that people lived in the whole of these houses. And it was the first time I noticed just how big they were. And how they were not joined together, with shared back alleys and ten-foots. It was the first time I really noticed how different the world was from this angle. I’m not suggesting, either, that we lived in a minute, shrunken property by comparison (although, in comparison to these properties we did), only that it was evidently a different kind of world.

Looking towards the houses, as girls carried rucksacks up their paths, it occurred to me that they did not share bedrooms, did not have to go to the park to get some space, or buy the opportunity to ride a horse (although, to be fair, I would rather have eaten my own head than ridden a horse). These girls did not have to run the gamut of the Tilsons, or the Fureys to get to their house, or pick their way through wild running dogs and their shit. These girls’ mothers did not, I was guessing, go out of an afternoon and wash the step and/or windowsills, or sweep the front yard. I realised that quite probably these girls’ mothers did not pick up the gossip in this way. I sensed their fathers did not cycle to and from work, either. And I noticed there were no bloody shops. Where did they do their paper rounds from? Where did they run to if they’d forgotten something? How did it work? No one was playing in the streets. No one was in the street at all – it was like a ghost town. How then did news travel?

The world is different now of course, but those girls’ mothers, like the women doing lunch, did not let the news come to them, but affected it where possible. They did not wait for the world to change around them as bystanders, but found ways of developing a commentary, or manoeuvred themselves into positions that enabled them to support their communities in ways that mattered. And they drove cars, and had a freedom mothers like my mother did not enjoy. And I was guessing, they did not work in Smith and Nephew putting the lids on Nivea, or serving fish and chips.

I'll take that one! Politeness/truth

When I went to University, I very quickly learned to keep quiet about a number of things. This wasn't a new experience for me -you don't mention at your nice well brought up school that you eat cereal for tea, for example, or the sex abuse scandal kicking off next door and you do not mention money. Never that. It's vulgar. Just as well my parents never had any. So far as I could tell, at university and at school, you didn't talk about anything that really mattered, and you absolutely were not allowed to suggest, even for a second, that you were in anyway different. I have encountered recently similar attempts that people have made to assimilate me into a carbon copy of their life experience perhaps because any hint of difference pulls them out of their comfort zone. (I like to think of it as the "You're like me" syndrome, and I don't like it. In much the same way that I don't like it, in equal opportunity terms, when people say, "I like to treat everyone the same." Well don't. I'm probably not the same as you, and you're probably not the same as me, and that's fine.)
Anyway, polite conversation has never been something I've excelled in, finding it awkward and silly. At 18, I had seen a lot of things and I quickly realised mentioning them in passing was the equivalent of throwing a hand grenade at a plate of vol-au-vents.
For some reason, I am reminded of a TV programme called Dear John. The conceit of this programme was the continuing life story of a man, called John, who had received a Dear John from his wife. To counter this, John had joined a lonely hearts group. The group, en masse, had attended a social event. One of their group members had an unfortunate flatulence problem. Out of politeness, each member of the group took it in turn to cover for the poor unfortunate woman by saying, "Excuse me!" or "I do apologise" as if they'd been the one who had broken wind. A crass, uncouth man from the lonely hearts group got that they were being discreet and kind, but not fully understanding how to protect her, shouted out after she had machine gunned a fart somewhere in his vicinity, "I'll take that one!" - the studio audience erupting with laughter at his (and not her) faux pas.
I mention this here because I have lived the life of this man on occasion, never quite understanding fully how to negotiate the line between politeness and truth (a line that seems to run like a fault line across the class system.) For my money, in working class culture there are two choices - a heavy, unforgiving denial or a full-frontal tits out approach that takes no prisoners. There is no room for subtlety.
My mother, for example, used to ask me what I thought about how she looked. When she asked me, she required me to tell the truth. She did not ask me because she wanted me to lie or bolster her ego. She did not want to look like mutton dressed as lamb and she did not want to get it wrong. In the first term at university, a young woman called Alex (the clues are there) asked me how she looked. Not knowing any better, I told the truth. "Terrible," I said, silencing the room in a moment. Looking round, I saw pinched faces sucking lemons, and got it immediately. I'm not an idiot.
The interesting thing is that Alex never held this against me (she was really very posh indeed.) It was my uptight, middle class peers who had the problem, berating me at length after the episode. And, funnily enough, most of them were training to be teachers. Alex, on the other hand, was doing something mickey mouse because she'd flunked her private school. And she went out in the dress anyway. What did my opinion matter to her, after all?

A note about the blog

This is the working title of my PhD. In this blog my intention is to create a series of stories where my sense of class came into focus. I also think that moments of 'transgression' may occasionally blur into moments of a dawning realisation of 'difference' and I hope to unpick and evidence that here, and then develop a more refined version of this for the narrative inquiry stage of my PhD. The key to that is the development of a piece of narrative work and some commentary, and this seems as good a place as any to do it.

Oh yeah, I'm new to this.

First Day At School

It is April 1969. I am walked at speed by my mother who is in a hurry to have no children at home for the first time in 8 years. She is walking faster than my feet can move. I want her to stop - tip-toe instead to our destination. I am stepping towards an execution of sorts and want the last moments of freedom to be lived more slowly. I am at odds. My feet move like rotating comic feet, my body behind the pace, tilting backwards. It is amazing that I have not fallen over. My brain is in slow motion.
The business of the day, ongoing moments in the street, bear witness. Someone is sweeping their front, the brush, rhythmically beating the dust and dirt into the gutter. Another woman has hoisted her bosom to her chin, while she nods in a agreement about a piece of received gossip. Her companion moves closer, and both women whistle out a long, "She didn't!" as we pass. The milk man and his Lassie dogs are finishing their round - he pushes the trolley of milk towards St. Matthew's Street with the expertise of a man who does it every day. We reach the butcher's. The Butcher is hardy and pink like the sausages he folds into threes. He whistles and waves, and the rich smell of blood fills the air, acrid and heavy. It congeals in globules in sawdust beneath the carcasses of dead pigs. We pass the house of the lady with the purple hair and the blue shop I am not allowed to go to because my mother has fallen out with them over some long forgotten matter. I determine that rushing this way is the not the best way to go. I want to raise an objection, but my mother is tall and I am small. I debate tugging on her yellow dress but do not.
"Awright Joyce?," someone salutes her but my mother is not to be waylaid. She waves quickly and keeps up the pace. She drives on. She pulls my arm, and then, after Charlie Lollipop has let us cross, we've arrived.
The building is imposing, Victorian. The entrance is a dark archway like something from a Dickens' novel, cavernous and sinister. Children are swallowed in small gulps, pulled into a secret world I am yet to join.

"Come on then," My mother manages, addressing me directly for the first time. I can sense her enthusiasm for moving on, for moving me on. We are to step into the playground and I know that from that moment, everything will be changed.
In the hall, I have a badge pinned on me and I am led away. My mother leaves. I do not cry and nor does she. We are not those kind of people.
It is a few hours later, the morning having passed in a blur of rooms and paints and water tables, that I am back home from school at lunch time. I have been bamboozled by finding I do not really exist at all. All morning, I have been called a name I have never heard before, a person I am not. I know it is not my place to mention this, so I have gone along with it. The kindly older woman who I take to be my teacher keeps calling me Amanda. At least I think that's what she's calling me, and a nod of acknowledgement from me seems to have satisfied her for the time being, seems to have kept her from shouting it across the room.
I eat quickly because something I do not fully understand has happened and my mother is suddenly pacing up and down our kitchen. It is a big kitchen, and it needs to be. She is like a dinosaur in need of prey, caged and ready for attack. Before I have fully finished she is pushing me back towards school, saying over and over again that she's going to kill them. I have no idea what is motivating her to push me like this through the streets, as if her newly found freedom is under threat, but I am being propelled quicker than my t-bar sandals have ever known. They slap the pavement and echo around the now deserted street (as though all in it know Joyce is on the rampage and have hidden.)
My mother is an enigma to me - shy and furious by turns. There are many moments when I do not recognise her, do not know the storm of rage that overcomes her. This is one of those moments. This is not the woman who sets up the sleeve board on the table and lets me iron with her, or who makes me a bacon butty in the middle of the night when I cannot sleep. This angry, spitting wild woman is an imposter.
The head teacher is in her office. My mother, uninvited, throws open the door. She is suddenly a fish wife, throwing out swear words like confetti, the last one barely formed before the next spills from her. The head teacher looks visibly shaken. I know how she feels.
"Take this bloody thing off!" she yells, standing toe to toe with the head, whose brown brogues are so shiny I can see my face looking back at me. I have forgotten to breathe. I look like a ghost. The world, which has changed beyond all recognition since 8:30 am is surely going to end. "I mean now," my mother yells, "I take it there are children in this school who can read?"
"Mrs Precious," the head teacher gets a word in. "Mrs Precious it is really important that the teachers know."
It is now that I realise that the lable says Amanda and that this is somehow a terrible mistake because I am not her at all. This is a proper name. A posh name. A name that school have given. It is the name I am to be known by even though this is a name I have never heard before. It is school given and I must accept it. In my child logic, I can see why this might be a problem for my mother and why she is so cross. She of course she has called me Lou, Lou for so long it's hardly surprising that she's miffed. I am Mandy to her, not this.
"Please remove it NOW" she says again. Her anger has barely subsided which surprises me because even though I don't like it much, it's not the worst thing in the world.
"What were you thinking of?" My mother asks, a hint of weakness coming into her voice, "It's probably already too late."
Sensing a change of tone, Mrs Dosser, the head, is suddenly on the offensive. "Amanda does have fits, Mrs Precious?"
"Yes. She. Does. But does the entire school need to know?"
"This is a matter of safety. We wouldn't want Amanda to have one of her fits and for people to not be aware."
I am looking between the two of them understanding that Amanda is not the issue after all. I am Amanda and this is the school name that I am to use. it is proper and the name I am to be known as. I am sure of only one thing. School is not at all like home. School is different.
The offending badge is removed.

Later that afternoon, two things happen. Firstly, Mrs Dosser comes into the reception class and pins another badge onto me. She is not gentle and I sense the start my mother and I have made is not a favourable one. I determined to disappear. Secondly, at playtime Wiggy, a bald girl who some days wears an ill-fitting wig, and others a blue knitted bonnet, and her cousin Dee Dee, corner me in the outside toilet.
"Go on," Wiggy says looming over me, like a half finished monster.
"What?" I ask, aware suddenly that the toilets smell.
"Go ON!"
Dee Dee is tough, a hard girl who grows up into a recidivist prisoner, and who, 15 years later, I witness getting arrested in Bransholme Shopping Centre - rugby tackled by a police officer, the biscuits she'd nicked to feed her children spilling out of her jacket in a million crumbs.
She moves closer in. "Have a fit!" Dee Dee says. I can see the spittle spraying from her mouth. She is animal.
"A fit?" I ask.
Dee Dee has 23 brothers and sisters, including bone fide lock-awayable-madman who everyone crosses the street to avoid, so I knew that it was not wise to argue.
"Now!" She shouts.
And finally, the penny drops. My mother hadn't noticed my name had changed, she hadn't even noticed that Mandy, the real me, did not belong here...her despair had been about something much more tangible. What had bothered her was a deeper pain - the shame I would be made to feel for fits I had so infrequently I did not remember the last one.
"Now?" I ask, buying a bit of time.
I looked at Dee Dee, her unsmiling face without a hint of humanity, and Wiggy's moon head, impossible to read.
I lay down on the hard, concrete floor and shook a bit. And that seemed to satisfy them.

I was 16 before I had the courage to call myself the name I thought myself. The name my family called me.

An exceptional day

Here's the first exceptional day I can remember clearly. I am wearing shorts, t-shirt and black plimsoles with white ankle socks and it is three days before the end of the summer term. It is also three days before the end of my time at Primary School - before I leave for good in fact, although in the end, I never do. And part of me stays arrested in that place, on that day. Part of me perpetually eight.
I must have asked if I could play out but I don't remember it. I remember colours: the sky blue, cloudless and the stark white of Googey's teeth as she played with her yellow train in the sun. Tracey must have been there as well, but memory blurrs her face. It was their yard after all.
My focus was on good deeds, a kind of Brownie Guide lunacy that had invaded my psyche. I can't think of another reason why. Oh, I was a good girl. A really, really good girl - but still, risking life and limb? In truth - that didn't come into it.
Googey - 6 or 7 - in a fit of piqué threw the train onto the greenhouse at the bottom of the yard.
"It's fine," I said, "Don't fret, I'll get it."
It was easy to get up, three simple steps and there I was - plonked on the wall behind the greenhouse surveying the rough ground of acos behind. I remember thinking, why would you put glass on the top of a wall? Made it tricky to find a safe footing, or sit without getting cut.
Still, that was the least of my problems. I could reach the yellow train without any difficulty at all - and throw it back to Googey without killing her although I had a pretty good arm and the sadistic part of me wanted to. I really hadn't given getting down any thought.
That was my mistake.
The next few minutes in my memory is a whirl of red-tomato, blood, blood, tomato, the splatters of each indistinguishable. I didn't fall, rather leaned into the glass but the details don't matter. Looking down there was a cavernous hole on my leg. A crater of blood and flesh, cut through almost to the bone...
Tracey leapt into action. She ran across the road shouting, "Mandy's broke her leg!" which I suppose in the strictest sense, I had. Things were moving fast and slow. My journey back across the road to my own house in interminable, whilst the noise ahead went faster. I could hear my mother laughing in the distance A big raucous laugh-she won't be laughing soon, I thought.
And she wasn't. She said, "Come in" but I knew it was more than my life was worth to get blood on her floor. She ran off, grabbed a towel and then left again.
Was she not thinking straight? I couldn't use this towel - it was the one reserved for guests.
I could hear her talking into the phone. Luckily, we were one of half a dozen families in the street who had one. And then I heard the ambulance off, a ghost.
Around my ankle now the blood congealed like jam, thick and deep red, starved of oxygen. It was hard to believe the state of my leg. Hard to credit I was still standing at all.
The ambulance man ran in, and wound a bandage tightly round the open wound. He kept telling stories, trying to make me smile - but I wasn't fooled. I knew that he didn't want me to fall asleep, even though every part of me screamed to give in to something deep and animal.
I was bundled into the ambulance, and since a crowd had gathered I felt obliged to wave.
Later, as I waited for the effect of sweets to wear off, I told my mother I wanted dad - something I regretted for many years to come. That hurt. That pain in her eyes. She smiled some, but I knew it was just a brave face she'd put on.
The next day, after a few hours in theatre being stitched up and someone else's blood pumping through my veins, I woke up with 84 stitches in my leg. 23 outside and 61 in, and the news that I'd missed the main artery by two millimetres. And a scar that looked like jaws had got peckish over night.