Where Did It All Go Right? Read Online Free PDF Page B

‘a drink’ one night, a thick fug of Northampton naiveté prevented them from reading the runes. Dad and Jim swung, but not in that direction. When the penny dropped it must have sounded like a cathedral bell falling to the ground. It was high time they got married to two nice girls from back home.
    Two nice girls both called Christine, coincidentally. Dad and Jim married their respective Christines in 1962 and dragged them both down to London where all the swinging was. They stuck it out for less than a year.
    Suburban Sutton, let me tell you, is a long way from Carnaby Street, and I don’t just meant culturally. Considering it’s south of London, Sutton’s not even that handy for South London. It’s more like Northampton than London in fact (especially today, now that everywhere looks like everywhere else). My future parents had jobs that were situated as far apart from each other as, say, Harpole and Ecton in Northampton. 8 He worked in Kingston, she in Croydon, which meant that every morning the radiant young newly-weds would stand at bus stops on opposite sides of the same road in Sutton and head off in opposite directions. To compound the situation, Jim and Christine – their only real London friends – fell for a baby early and decided to bail out.
    So, at the end of that nail-biting year of 1962, with a cosy Christmas spent back in Northampton to remind them of home, the bushy-tailed young couple swallowed their pride and, like the Russian ships, turned back. Back to the bosom of the family.
    Even when I’d successfully relocated to the capital in my twenties, I never judged Mum and Dad harshly for not being up to London life. I had three years of college to lower me gently into the moronic inferno; they spent most of their days on opposing poles of public transport, looking forward to a supper of ‘batter bits’ from the chip shop and for all they knew the end of the world. In their shoes, I think I might have gone back to Northampton to die.
    * * *
    How can I ever know what it must have been like? I can’t. All this – Guantanamo, Sutton – happened before I was born. Here’s what I know for a fact about the world into which I was painfully and noisily delivered around 9 p.m. on 4 March 1965: it was snowing. Sir Winston Churchill had not long been buried in a churchyard near Blenheim Palace after lying in state at Westminster for three days. T.S. Eliot had died that January, and Stan Laurel in February. 9 A statesman, a poet and a comedian died in the first months of 1965 so that, karmically, I might live. I almost wish I believed in reincarnation.
    In those first two pre-Andrew months of 1965 the war in Vietnam escalated and Sir Stanley Matthews retired. I arrived in a world where LBJ ran America and Harold Wilson ran Britain. ‘I’ll Never Find Another You’ by The Seekers was at Number One in what was still called the hit parade (monumentally insignificant to me, that one). Laws in this country were emerging from the Dark Ages: the death penalty was abolished in the year of my birth, and within three years it would be okay to get a divorce, be homosexual (a red letter day for Dad and Jim’s feather-boa-wearing landlords), take the pill and, if you forgot, have an abortion.
    I wish I could tell you that I remember Neil Armstrong walking on the moon in 1969 but I don’t. I sort of recall Concorde’s maiden flight the same year but only because Nan and Pap bought me a cool little commemorative model with a movable nose. Kent State and Watergate, naturally enough, passed me by. What little I knew of British politics was taught me by Professor Yarwood.
    As an insulated modern child in the East Midlands of England, the events of the world had to work pretty hard to impact upon my life. Power cuts were an invasion by greater forces into domestic sanctity but I accepted them, as we all did – Fetch the candles, Dad! – they had no wider implications than not being able to watch
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