It's amazing how much some people can remember about the early years of their childhood. I've always been slightly skeptical about the people who say 'I can remember being a baby as clearly as if it were yesterday'. Maybe their mothers just took more vitamins during pregnancy, or maybe their childhood was just more eventful and therefore worth remembering
Personally, I can just about remember yesterday as if it were yesterday. But then, I did grow up on one of the many council estates along the Thames estuary in Essex, the result of generations of good, solid, work-class inbreeding. I was probably related not-so-distantly to almost every other working-class family from Stepney to Tilbury, and from Romford down to the slimy shores of the estuary in Grays (with the exception of course of the small number of black or asian families brave enough at the time to venture into the post-war, Cockney heartlands). It would be a scientific miracle if we hadn't had at least a couple of wonky genes as a result, and a severe deficiency in something that wasn't abundant in either saturated animal fat, or Wall's Viennetta.
But hey, it was the Essex estuary, it was the 1970's. Some people still thought that the earth was flat and that if you didn't stop when you reached Southend, you simply fell off the edge of the world into a boiling vat of Spry Crisp n'Dry, one of the first 'designer' cooking oils (or 'chip fat' as it was commonly called).
Absolutely everybody thought that our council estates were somehow better than those in the rest of the country, especially those in Kent. Particularly Kent in fact, which was spoken of with the same curled lip and disdainful tone as we used when we spoke about 'The Germans'. Although the people from the council estates on the other side of the estuary in Kent weren't personally responsible for bombing our grandparents' East End two-up two-downs, they were guilty of a far greater crime....................they were almost exactly like us!.................only different!
Despite the fact that many of us couldn't actually find Essex on a map of Britain (or spell it for that matter),we had a crystal clear idea of who we were and where we came from. Our world was vast and tiny all at the same time. And seen through our eyes, we had everything we could possibly want or need.
Just a stone's throw north of the estuary out past Brentwood, we had rich green farmland with its woods and country parks. To be honest, we kids were the first ones to actually feel comfortable and really enjoy the countryside. It wasn't an obvious habitat for people like our parents who had grown up among the grey streets and bomb-craters of the post-war East End. Like rare species reared in captivity, I'm not sure most people actually knew what you were supposed to do with so much open space. There was too much of it to build a rockery, or a conservatory, and it wasn't flat enough to put down jumpers for goalposts and make a football pitch. There was even too much of it to build another council estate!
Then there were the glorious miles of stony, bottom-numbing beaches, their shoreline beautifully decorated with a vast and varied collection of plastic cups and bottles, string, plastic wrapping, and the other assorted shit which, like the people, could never bring itself to leave the estuary. So it just floated in and out year after year washing over the tar-stained pebbles and seagull carcasses. But because nobody else could see the glory of it, it had become our very own Costa del Sol, long before we discovered the real Costa del Sol and proceeded to pollute that as well. At the end of the estuary was Southend-On-Sea, the paint-peeling Saint Tropez of the Essex riviera, fish and chip capital of South Essex. It sat on the estuary, a shadow of its former Victorian, beach-resort self with a long promenade of benches which my parents called 'The Front'. My family would often drive down to Southend seafront early on a Sunday morning (going to church wasn't big in our community, two visits during your lifetime, and one at the end of it were considered sufficient) where my parents would march my sister and I along the seafront and back again with the incentive being that we could collect the pennies which people had dropped. I don't know why there were so many. It wasn't because we were all so rich that we didn't have a use for 'copper' (1/2, 1, and 2 pence coins), and it wasn't because we were generous either. But for whatever reason, those walks usually yielded enough for something nourishing like candy floss, or a toffee apple.
I grew up in a time before huge, out-of-town shopping centres like Lakeside had even been thought of. We spent our leisure shopping time, usually Saturday mornings, in the crowded, exotic souks of Romford and Basildon where you roasted in summer, got drenched in autumn, and froze in winter. The West End, or the 'Other End' as my family called it (being from the East End) was too far away, and too much trouble, for more than an annual visit at Christmas to see the windows of Selfridges. It was only 30 miles away, or half an hour on the train, but we had no need of it, you could find everything you wanted in the busy markets which could still be found in Grays, Romford, or Basildon. I remember there being what seemed like hundreds of market stalls in Romford selling everything the 1970's had to offer; from furry steering wheel covers for your Ford Capri, to twenty different types of seafood. Washing-up bowls in all the colours of the Essex rainbow, pick and mix, packs of big knickers, and cheap toys. You could spend hours being dragged around Romford Market with nothing but the promise of a 'wimpy' to keep you going.
I wouldn't say it was a sophisticated lifestyle, because it was actually quite the opposite. But looking back, it was simple and straighforward. We were working-class, our neighbours were working-class, and our friends were working-class. Kids made up games that only needed a brick, a piece of rope, and a cat, and everyone voted Labour......................and then along came aubergines and life was never the same!
