53 years ago, in my parents' bedroom on the first floor of a ramshackle Victorian house in Hertfordshire, I was born a blue baby. Almost strangled by the umbilical cord. my mother told me that my finger nails went black before the midwife saved me. I was a lacklustre child with spindly legs and whitewashed skin.
The experience must have left me defiant and stupid. I remember being four and bravely chucking the last of a thousand dummies that had dangled slantways from my mouth like a drooly pipe, into the coal-fired oven. And rushing down the cellar stairs to stand directly under the shute as the coalman tipped a black landslide of stinking, dusty rocks into the gloom.
When I was 7, I announced I was leaving home. I tied one of my dad's large white handkerchiefs to the end of a stick, filled its billowy insides with an orange and other life-saving necessities and set off down Church Road. I got to the Snow's house and turned back exhausted and frightened.
Once, possibly aged 6, I found a toddler wandering in Elton Road. She was plump, with golden hair and squashy legs like a cherub. I carried her home, which took a great deal of effort as she was heavy, and sat her on my bedroom floor. I showed her my dollies and set out a china tea set as she beamed and waved her fists. My mother appeared, was horrified and went mad. She gathered up my new baby sister and together we marched back to the spot where I had found her. There were some adults chatting lazily in the sunshine and mum asked breezily if the child was theirs. 'Oh Yes!' they said. And that was the end of it.
Boris was a young man probably in his twenties with Down's Syndrome, who lived further along Church Road with his father. I forget his father's first name now but rumour had it he was highly educated. Boris would drop his trousers and piss in the old red phone box opposite our house, or wander naked along the road carrying a handbag. Sometimes he would be smiling gaily, others in a fearful rage, shaking his fists and spitting into his beard. His dad wore a shredded, brown tartan dressing gown and would often hurry along the road searching for Boris with despair on his face. The father died one night and my brother and I watched his lifeless body, a bag of bones, being brought out in a green blanket and bundled into an ambulance while Boris cried uncontrollably on the pavement. I don't know what happened to Boris after that.
Those first ten years of my life in Hertford, when the summers were endless, the winters cruel and the rows between my parents interminable, gave me a slew of memories that seem medieval in comparison to my own son's current childhood. I and my brothers and sisters roamed the streets looking for action: hiding between potato sacks on the farmer's tractor trailer, (he delivered fresh from the fields back then,) throwing vegetables off the back and scattering when he chased us. Helping dad carry out rusty wheelbarrows and old spades for the rag and bone man who called out for business as he clattered along in his horse and cart.
Once, I ventured as far as Farquhar Street and went inside the house of a young woman who had a baby called Charlotte. She called the baby Lottie which I thought was very exotic and it did liquid green poos in a cloth nappy. Her house had barely any furniture and no carpets. Our voices echoed in the hall as she changed Lottie's nappy on a wooden telephone table.
53 years isn't really so long ago. But when you consider, for example, that the contemporary child support system only came into existence in 1993 - by which time I was 29 - it was a very different world. That single mother I stumbled across as a child was quite probably lucky to have a bare house and a telephone table to change her hungry baby on; there must have been thousands without even those benefits. I don't get child support from my son's father, as the law still hasn't evolved enough after 24 years to take to task fathers who choose to relocate to a country with which there is no 'reciprocal agreement' for the collection of maintenance (he did his research!) but perhaps in another twenty years this will have changed.
Thank God then, for Tax Credits, state childcare, partial parity between the sexes which means I have a job, and the wonders of twenty-first century healthcare which a) helped me have my son at the ripe old age of 43 and b) cured him of a cancer which would have killed him 53 years ago.
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