Slum's The Word (1988)

I grew up in Newton Aycliffe.

I always thought it was a complete shit hole but to be honest, I never really got to know the place. Most of the time it felt like I was under house arrest. 

My family moved there in 1975 because my Dad was a Policeman. We'd moved around quite a bit, living briefly in lots of places around County Durham - Thornley, Peterlee, Darlington and finally Newton Aycliffe. I've always assumed it was because Dad was being promoted and having to work at different Police Stations but I honestly don't know. 

I was only two when we moved into Arncliffe Place. We lived right on the edge of a huge council estate and close to a tiny trickle of a stream called The Burn. One of my earliest memories is of watching some workmen building the climbing frame in the little play-park near to where we lived. It seemed to sink a lot further into the ground than they were expecting. 

At that time, all of the council estates were designed to include communal areas and play-parks. Not many people had cars and none of the houses had driveways or their own parking spaces. It's crazy to think play areas and public green spaces were prioritised over cars. 

Over the years each climbing frame, swing and slide gradually fell into rusty disrepair and were removed by the council. On my last visit to Aycliffe I wasn't all that surprised to see many of the old play-parks now being used as car parks. Is that progress or just surrender?

The council estates were known as the 'Agnews'. As kids we named the three main estates by the colour of the bricks used to build them. We had the 'black houses', the 'white houses' and the 'red houses'.

Once my folks got divorced in 1977 we ended up staying in Aycliffe (on the 'black houses' estate). In one way, Dad was lucky - he didn't get a choice about it, but he did get to move out and away. 

I'm still not sure why we stayed in Aycliffe. Mam always wanted to move somewhere 'nicer', like Durham (where her snooty older sister lived) or South Shields (where she'd grown up). She'd complain about the town, she'd complain about the people - but she never really did anything about it. She did do her best to frighten us, describing Aycliffe as 'rough', full of sweary teenage gangs and scary adults who did unforgivable things like smoking, drinking and socialising. 

I still can't work out how Mam knew so much about Aycliffe - she rarely left the house and didn't really make friends with any of the neighbours. How did she know the place was so rotten? As a kid I just accepted what she said. I didn't go much further than our front door. On the few occasions I did go into the town centre I was always on high alert - expecting to get beaten up, abducted or murdered at any moment.

Mam never went out to work - apart from a few days stacking shelves at Fine Fare. She quit after a handful of shifts because she was sick of a 'daft young lad' (the assistant manager) telling her what to do. Even when I was a kid I thought it was odd - surely that's what your boss is supposed to do? 

Mam hated not being in charge. She always had to have the last word and always insisted she was right about everything. Maybe it was a hangover from her youth - she wanted to take control because up until that point, she'd never had any. Her father had died when she was very young. Her step-dad had been a bully and there were vague hints that he'd been violent towards her and her Mother. 

Mam had gotten pregnant in her teens - possibly as an accident, possibly as a way to escape a troubled home life. She'd 'had' to get married and 'had' to move in with my Dad's parents. That's an awful lot for a young woman to go through. By the time she was 24 she had two kids and was a divorcee. I can't begin to imagine what that must have been like.

When I was really young, Mam refused to let me 'play out' with Jeffrey Tate*, not because he was a little shit (he was) but because both of his parents worked in a factory. She said his family were 'too common' and he'd be a 'bad influence'. Jeff and his older brother would sometimes go home from school to an empty house. Mam assumed Jeff would be smoking, drinking or hosting wild parties because his parents weren't there to watch him. That was when we were about 8. 

As well as deciding who I could and couldn't be friends with, Mam wouldn't let any other kids into our house. Even if it was raining we had to play in the garden because Mam didn't want any 'rough' or 'common' kids messing up her little palace. I ended up getting a tent - not because we ever went camping, we'd just put it in the garden for me and my friends to sit in when the weather was bad.

Mam always seemed to look down upon our neighbours. She didn't like the way they spoke, she didn't like how they dressed, she didn't like people who smoked or drank... It didn't seem to take very much for Mam to decide that people were 'rough' or 'common'. She always wanted to live somewhere where people were more 'refined'.

We moved house every couple of years - but it was always to a different part of Newton Aycliffe. By the time I was 15 we'd lived in 5 houses in the same town. Arncliffe Place, Sampson Place, Guthrum Place... We never stayed in one house for too long but we always stayed in the same bloody town. 

Looking back at it now, I can see the pattern and I think I understand why. I think Mam suffered from very severe depressive episodes and maybe thought a fresh start with a new house and new neighbours would make everything better. 

Maybe this was happening before we'd ever moved to Aycliffe - had we moved so many times because of Dad's job or because Mam was always looking for a 'fresh start?' Did people talk about depression in the early 70s? Was there any counselling or medication? Did you just have to get on with it?

 Perhaps she didn't want to admit she was depressed so she looked for an external factor - and our surroundings fit the bill. She wasn't ill, it was the awful, common neighbours making her feel bad! She wasn't sick, she was just fed up of looking at the same rotten black brick houses! 

But moving house never solved anything. After a couple of years she'd find a reason to dislike the new place (and the people) and we'd be packing up again.

I don't know where it came from but Mam always behaved as though she was terribly important - and everybody else was stupid for not realising it. It was almost as if she was expecting the Queen or the Prime Minister to show up at any moment and tell her that there'd been a terrible mix up on the maternity ward and she was the rightful heir to the throne.

Mam was also constantly trying to compete with her sisters. She wasn't competing to be happier or healthier - it was always all about money and status.  Both of her sisters worked and they'd both married blokes with well paid careers. There was a lot of envy. 

Mam started pushing her second husband to get a better job. When they met, he'd been working on a production line in one of the local factories but Mam found an advert for jobs in the Middle East. It meant he'd be overseas for 10 or 11 months of the year, but the money was loads better and they'd be able to buy their own home. It was a sacrifice they both seemed prepared to make - living apart the vast majority of the time just to get on the property ladder.

It seems stupid now - if they had the money to buy a house why did they stay in Aycliffe? They could have moved away but chose not to. She wanted change but not too much change. 

I have to admit, I wasn't keen. The council houses in Aycliffe had been designed as decent sized family homes - they all had 3 or 4 bedrooms, two bathrooms and loads of walk-in cupboards. They were also close to my school. The builders of the new private estates were trying to cram as many houses onto the land as they possibly could. When we first moved to the 'private' estate our home was suddenly half the size and I had to share a bedroom with my older brother. I also now had a 45 minute walk to school every bloody morning.

And of course it still wasn't good enough for Mam.

Our new, 'posh' house was only semi-detached and Mam's sisters both had much bigger, detached houses. Within 3 years we were moving again! This time to a detached house on an even posher estate - but still in Newton Aycliffe! The town was expanding rapidly in the mid 80s - a dozen or more housing estates were springing up under the umbrella name of 'Woodham Village'. 

Maybe moving to Woodham made Mam think she didn't live in Newton Aycliffe any more - but I still went to the same school and still had to do Mam's shopping in the same crappy town centre. None of it seemed to make her any happier. She'd often stay in bed for weeks at a time and my Nanna would have to look after us. I used to ask what was wrong but the grown ups wouldn't tell me anything.

  Our lives were turned upside down in early 1988. It had something to do with my Step-Dad working in the Middle East and being paid in American dollars... when the exchange rate favoured the pound his salary was worth a lot less. Like a lot of people they'd overstretched the family finances in the 80s and it only took a couple of ropey months to push them into hardship/bankruptcy. 

All of a sudden we were moving out of the big, posh, detached, private house in Woodham and back onto a council estate. All those months of living apart, all those years of her husband working overseas... Had it all been for nothing? 

After we moved into one of the 'white houses' Mam's moods were lower than ever. She started saying we lived in 'a slum'.

Was it a sense of despair? She must have thought everything was going so well with her second husband - they had a new baby, a big house in Woodham... and then all of a sudden she was having to ask the council to be re-homed. One step forward and two steps back... 

But Mam didn't see it as a setback, she saw everything as a complete catastrophe. Her moods could be very volatile and she'd explode with anger over the slightest problem.

If there were dishes in the kitchen sink she'd say; "it's bad enough we have to live in this slum without you leaving a mess in the kitchen!" If anybody left a wet towel on the bathroom floor it'd be; "you can't treat this place like a doss house just because we live in a slum!" If one of us spoke with a mouth full of food she'd yell; "kids with no manners - you'll fit right in round here!" Every single thing we did wrong was a sign of how awful our new home was. It was actually no worse than any of the other council houses we'd lived in, but now she'd experienced a more 'refined' life in Woodham Village the Agnews seemed so much worse.   

Even if I got a bad school report (and I quite often did) she'd tell me I'd "better stick in at school or get used to living in a bloody slum!" It was awful but also ridiculous. I'd get the giggles whenever she started ranting about the 'bloody slum'.

School was particularly difficult once the other kids found out about our move from Woodham back to the Agnews. Jeff Tate thought it was hilarious. But my walk to school was back down to 15 minutes and maybe that was the only upside.  

Mam really needed counselling or a decent psychotherapist but she'd react with venom whenever a Doctor (or family member) suggested it. Maybe she thought everybody was having a good laugh at her expense, I don't know. Would it have helped if her husband had been at home? She had to take the brunt of the upheaval. 

We'd always lived in a council house - apart from those few years in Woodham Village - but Mam behaved like we'd been condemned to a Victorian workhouse. 

She'd keep the blinds closed all day - as if not being able to see the council houses outside somehow made them disappear. On the rare occasions Mam left the house she'd travel by taxi. 

Most of the time I only really remember leaving the house to go to school or venturing out to the bigger shopping centre in Darlington at weekends.

Maybe we were pretending we didn't live in Aycliffe any more; keeping the blinds shut, travelling by Taxi, staying off the buses and out of the town centre.

Eventually, Mam went to live in the Middle East with her husband. I'd started at University and Mam told me I'd have to find somewhere else to stay during the holidays. She didn't want me to live there so our council house was left empty for up to eight months at a time. 

I'm pretty sure the council would have asked for the keys back if anybody had noticed, but I doubt the neighbours realised we weren't still living there. They probably didn't even know what any of us looked like.

*Name changed, as ever.