Knock down ginger & kidney stones.
Life as a 10-year-old had been pretty swell so far, bar the odd parental beating. Weekends and holidays were filled with bike rides, football and climbing trees. Afternoons after school were spent playing with my fellow kids in the street, knocking on people’s doors and running away. All pretty normal things.
Slough, partly due to John Betjeman would often get a bad rap but I loved it.
The vision I had being much more akin to David Brent’s song “Slough” than JB’s unfair poem. It felt like I could roam for miles without going near roads or at least the main ones, there was almost a rurality to it.
Though the area we lived in was in no way desirable it was almost the last hurdle before reaching Eton. A sparsely populated area of incredible wealth. The opposite of where we lived yet less than 1 mile away. We had all the benefits of living there without actually doing so. Roaming the Eton College fields following their P.E. lessons we’d find discarded trainers and footballs just left by the kids of a £30k a year education.
It was a different world, a parallel universe.
One morning whilst pouring my cereal into my favourite bowl in our tiny kitchen I started to hear bear-like howls from upstairs just as the milk began to spray off the orange flakes in all directions. At first, I thought possibly one of my brothers had just discovered some freshly grown pubic hair but I quickly realised it was something much more serious.
Reluctantly leaving my cornflakes to their soggy fate. I raced upstairs to investigate the commotion. I was scared. I could hear my dad groaning in pain from behind the door. “Are you ok Dad?” I managed to yelp. “Fine, I’ll be out in a minute” he groaned through gritted teeth. He wasn’t though and the howling continued. Like every child whose father was born in the 50s, I had never seen any real exert of emotion from him other than anger and rage. So, this situation was somewhat disconcerting to say the least.
Fuck it. I’m going to call an ambulance I thought. He half pleaded with me not to but didn’t put up much of a fight. What kind of demon poo was this!
From around this time, things started to go fairly rapidly downhill. It turned out Dad only had kidney stones which was a relief so he was out of hospital within a day or two and told to drink water. But it was the first of many things that would happen over the next year or two where innocence was very-much lost.
My time at Eton Porny was coming to a close and it had been proposed I went to my dad’s school in Reading, some miles away (he was the head teacher). I think the idea was born from a combination of it being easier for my parents due to not having to collect me from Windsor and not having been accepted to the choice school the first time around.
Strangely, I was not that opposed to the idea. There seemed to be one of two schools where my peers would be going, the reason for this, I imagine is that you grow up with people you’ve known all your life. For me, there were only a handful of kids I wanted to see again anyway. Intimacy is not something I had been able to spread thinly. Along with this, the adventure around the change excited me. I thought this was something I developed from later traumas but maybe the sense of adventure was there all along. This was to be the second of 6 schools I would attend before I was 18. School wasn’t one of the constants I needed in life. If I had a choice I wouldn’t be going to any. As long as I had my family and our house in Slough, I’d be fine…….