Leaving Home

 

The memoir Talking to Myself covers a self-contained period of my life up to age twelve. The next similarly identifiable finite period to deal with would be my teenage years in Staffordshire up to age nineteen when I left home. But a vexing question nagged in my mind: do I really want to engage with those years, with their largely repetitive experience of daily school and the awkward, acne-ridden processes of creeping towards late teenage? I had enjoyed writing the memoir tremendously but, although I could produce enough relevant material, would examining the next phase of my young life give me  as much pleasure? However I posed the question, the answer was No.

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I knew there was plenty to write about describing and reflecting on my early years in London, which I would certainly enjoy doing and I wanted to get going on that period. Eventually I realised that wrestling with this uncomfortable question was pointless and that London should be next. The few close people  who discussed this with me all agreed. And yet I still felt there should be something to give my teenage years some context instead of just leaving a gap which might raise unwanted questions. So the job of these few Staffordshire pieces is to provide brief glimpses of that context and contribute to the continuity of the whole endeavour, casting at least some light on the home territory I was leaving.

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(Incidentally, anyone wanting a full treatment of that phase of a person's life that I’ve avoided should read the late Lorna Sage’s superb autobiography Bad Blood (2000).