‘A memoir you read with the same breathlessness as you read the most gripping of novels.’ i newspaper
‘Astonishing … a story that brims with life and hard-won hope.’ Sunday Times
Learning to think.
‘Fantastic – could have been me, could have been you, could have been anyone.’
Lee Child
Tracy King
Praise for Learning to Think
‘An astonishing account of a father’s violent death, exorcism and religious superstition . . . Learning to Think is, in many ways, a book about demons: the addiction, violence, mental health struggles and, yes, superstition, that so often accompany poverty. But it’s also the story of an extraordinary family, full of energy and joie de vivre. It’s a story that brims with life and hard-won hope.’ Christina Patterson, Sunday Times
‘A memoir you read with the same breathlessness as you read the most gripping of novels . . . An account of a family both torn apart and trapped by a broken system. A story of poverty and hardship, religion and superstition, but also an incredibly hopeful tale of how King got out of it.’ i newspaper
‘Compelling . . . a devastating yet hopeful read.’ Irish Daily Mirror
‘Reflective and compassionate, King gently reminds of the complex ways poverty wreaks havoc on people’s lives.’ Woman & Home
‘Impossible not to read in one sitting.’ Stylist
‘A powerful depiction of a challenged but enterprising, intelligent and resilient family.’ Times Literary Supplement
‘An earth-shattering, hopeful memoir.’ Woman’s Own
‘A raw and unflinching account of growing up in poverty which tackles the false narratives we tell ourselves to survive.’ Caroline Criado Perez
‘Fantastic – could have been me, could have been you, could have been anyone, so we all cheer for Tracy King’s brave escape.’ Lee Child
‘A brilliant writer.’ Adam Kay
‘King’s memoir is heartbreaking and hopeful; a devastating true story that teaches us how the pursuit of knowledge can be a path to both freedom and breathtaking grace.’ Tim Minchin
‘You won’t often read a book so driven by raw emotion. A book of tragedy, hope and ultimately of triumph.’ HH Wendy Joseph KC, author of Unlawful Killings and Rough Justice
‘I loved Tracy’s extraordinary book. It’s compelling and courageous, and it couldn’t be more timely. It’s written with such clarity and compassion, and I think it will leave every reader wiser and stronger.’ Daisy Buchanan, author of How to be a Grown Up and Sisterhood
‘Learning to Think is eloquent, brutally honest but also warm. Life and events are complicated and she unfolds this learning process in seamless prose.’ Elizabeth Buchan
‘A compelling tale of how the power of science and reality will always win. How Tracy King battled against all the odds to become a brilliant science advocate and a fantastic writer too!’ Konnie Huq
‘King writes vividly, painting her family life with colour and pathos . . . Learning to Think explodes stereotypes of working-class homogeneity whilst acknowledging the double standards and discrimination that knock vulnerable families down again and again.’ Irish Times
‘What would you do if you began to suspect the events of your childhood didn’t happen as you remembered them? In this evocative memoir, Tracy King confronts the stories we all tell ourselves in order to live.’ Helen Lewis, author of Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights
‘Reflective and compassionate, King gently reminds us how little we understand the ways poverty wreaks havoc on people’s lives.’ Woman magazine
‘A truly devastating yet hopeful read, which dives into some of the most heartbreaking experiences. Seeing King come out the other end with a new perspective on life is something we can all learn from.’ Press Association
‘A stirring account of one woman’s staggering climb through grief to independence and a page-turner to boot, King is an exciting, brave new voice in memoir.’ Courtney Maum, author of The Year of the Horses
Learning to Think.
A memoir about hardship, education, hellfire, family, finding a way to break free
Tracy
King
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First published in Great Britain in 2024 by Doubleday an imprint of Transworld Publishers Penguin paperback edition published 2025
Copyright © Tracy King 2024
Tracy King has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
Extracts on pp. 228, 229 and 233 from The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan, published by Ballantine Books.
Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.
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To my family and friends, especially Dad, and Daniel.
Learning to Think.
Prologue
I’m tiny. A child. Twelve years old, skinny and short. My black hair is unwashed, lank and flat against my head. I’m standing in the living room of our house, a single radiator pumping out dry heat, a small floor space made bigger by pushing the coffee table to one side. It’s not really a coffee table: it’s a small round dining table with legs that my dad had shortened with a saw. Usually the table stood in front of the settee but tonight I’m standing there instead. I’m wearing blue jeans and a Garfield T-shirt, white gym shoes on my feet. I always wear shoes in the house because I’m afraid of spiders.
Someone is standing behind me, hands heavy on my shoulders. He’s a church elder, an enormous man named Bob. He smells of incense and has a very tidy house. His daughter is my age. She once gave me a foil-wrapped champagne and strawberry marzipan from a box she’d got for Christmas. It was the most expensive thing I’d ever tasted. In the too-hot living room, Bob’s deep voice murmurs reassuring words of scripture.
To my right, on the flowery settee (we called it a threepiece suite, bought on credit from DFS), sits my mom. In Birmingham we say ‘mom’ instead of ‘mum’. No one knows why. My mom looks like me, except her black hair
is very curly where mine is dead straight, and she’s wearing a 1970s dress, left over from the previous decade. We both wear small silver crucifixes on chains. I like that we match. She’s also thin, and also afraid of spiders.
My heart is beating so hard I can hear it through my cartoon T-shirt. My palms are sweating and my stomach is full of something dreadful and alive. It’s like the school musical a year earlier, performed for an audience of earnest proud parents at the local town theatre. I had one of the first lines and remember walking past the stage lights towards the auditorium, knowing that somewhere out there my entire family was watching, expecting me to be brilliant, willing me not to fail.
I glance at my mom and she smiles from the settee but I can tell she’s nervous too. She’s been smoking more than usual. The air is heavy from her multiple cigarettes, extinguished thriftily in the glass ashtray she used to share with my dad.
In front of me is another man. Another beard too, but golden this time. The minister of our church, a handsome charismatic American named Adam. His shoulder-length hair and blond beard make him look like the Jesus depicted in my Bible, an illustrated children’s edition I’d won at Christian Youth Club. That’s part of Adam’s charm – he’s a convincing stand-in for Jesus, a man with a direct line to God. I think everyone fancies him a bit. He’s from America, and he’s in charge. He’s also young, and fun, with a wife named Denise and two small children. They moved to Britain in the early eighties to preach the truth, or the version of the truth represented by our church, his employer. As we dropped fifty pence we couldn’t afford
into the collection plate every Sunday, I used to think, This money pays your wages. As a salaried representative of the church, it was his job not just to preach on Sundays and run prayer study groups from his own – much larger – living room, but to administer pastoral care to his small but dedicated congregation made up mostly of council-estate tenants like my mom and me. Poor people. We’ll get to the poor people later. Right now, I’m a little girl, standing between two bearded men, about to be exorcized.
I’m possessed by demons and Adam and Bob are going to remove them, right here in my own home. Adam asks us to pray with him. It’s beginning. My mouth is dry. I close my eyes and clasp my hands, fingers folded together. It’s briefly comforting, to hold my own hand, but now we’re asking God and Jesus to help us with the forthcoming ritual and the fear, and the demons are real. I can hear my mom’s voice murmuring. I’m moving from nervous to terrified. The thing that’s alive in my stomach reaches up into my throat. What if the demons don’t want to come out of me? What if they hurt me? What if they leave my body and possess my mom instead? The demons are inside me, to blame for all of my problems. Perhaps they are also to blame for my fear. If I close my eyes tighter and squeeze my hands together harder then surely Jesus will notice me and come to the rescue.
Adam is performing the words of the rite, and Bob is behind me, a solid wall of prayer. He needs to be close because when the final dramatic words of exorcism are spoken, ‘I cast thee out!’, Adam is going to strike towards my forehead with his palm. Not hard, it’s not an attack on me – more a sort of symbolic gesture of casting out, like
he’s slapping the air between him and the demon that lives in my brain. I know this is coming and I know that to be properly exorcized I should fall backwards as the demon is expelled. I hold my breath and open my eyes, waiting for my cue. The room is suddenly very bright. Adam shouts, and as he strikes the demon from my body, I choose to fall.
PART ONE
As life stories go, mine feels unbelievable. I’ve had – and overcome – a great share of trouble and trauma, and I spent decades hiding a lot of it for fear of not being believed, or fear of being shunned. Underestimated. Avoided, because trauma can make you feel like a freak, and poverty is shameful. But it’s as simple as this: without resources, trauma and poverty are a chaotic maze. Because a lot of terrible things happened to me and my family we were not well-equipped emotionally or financially to navigate.
Margaret Atwood observed that a rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze. One interpretation is that the rat believes it has freedom, unaware of its limitations or status as experimental subject, and is motivated only by the reward of food. The basic drive to survive in conditions outside its control. I suspect the rat would prefer to take its chances elsewhere, but I’ve yet to hear of an experiment that asks. The chaotic maze of my early life is not entirely figurative, but also a real one of red bricks and grey mortar, an experimental labyrinth of houses and graffitied walls with something ultimately monstrous at the centre.
I’ve had to navigate mazes – physical and figurative – my whole life, overburdened but underequipped. Eventually
I found myself in a safe, secure and successful enough position to look back and examine the path I’d taken. Some of the route looked like it had been laid out for me, and if I didn’t like where it was going (particularly the dead ends), I would climb over the wall, or even smash my way through. These weren’t shortcuts – I damaged both maze and self – but it was my way of simplifying. Eventually I thought I’d draw a map (or, as I’m a writer, write a book), and that meant retracing my steps, exploring my past to fill in the gaps. I had forgotten how hard it had all been, and was shocked to discover that I knew considerably less about the layout of that maze and the identity of the experimenters than I believed. It’s very difficult to see your own parents as individuals outside their role, or understand that they were trapped too. They had lives before children, and lives outside children, and I hadn’t considered what that might mean. As I began to research my family and my life story, I found complexity that I could never have predicted.
But it starts simply enough. An ordinary family in an ordinary red-brick council house on a low-rise, leafy estate in the Midlands. For the first five or six years of my life, a formal family portrait (if one existed, which it doesn’t) would have appeared to show a happy early 1980s household.
My mom, Jackie, short and skinny with an attractive, vaguely Barbra Streisand face. A housewife with ambitious hobbies. In her own words, ‘My life consisted of cooking, looking after two children, and writing poems.’
My dad, Mike, or ‘Kingy’, also skinny, prematurely bald with an unconvincing comb-over and sometimes a bushy moustache. He looked a little like Sean Connery,
owned a collection of Ian Fleming novels, and smoked a pipe or home-rolled cigarettes.
My sister, Emily, an artistic child with jet-black, deadstraight hair at either side of a pale face. She looks more serious in photos than she was, because a school photographer once told her not to smile for the camera, as her teeth were crooked. She was a bit of a daddy’s girl but also often to be found hiding behind Jackie. In public she was shy; at home she was a fun and doting older sibling.
And me, Tracy King. No middle name. I was loud, confident and often annoying, a more button-nosed, slightly showbiz version of my sister. All-singing, acting, dancing and opinions. The usual words applied: precocious; headstrong; bookworm; know-it-all. My parents affectionately called me Rent-A-Gob (after the eighties TV show Rentaghost ). ‘She’ll be prime minister one day,’ Jackie would say, then pause and joke, ‘Or in prison.’ I was a know-it-all, even if I hated being called one. I enjoyed knowing things and believed everything I read in books. I got haughty when someone knew better than me, and if I didn’t know the answer to something, I would simply and confidently make one up.
Making things up is how children explain mysteries, perhaps the same impulse that compelled early civilizations to invent gods to explain the sun. I would construct elaborate mechanisms to account for the things I didn’t understand. When I stayed with my maternal grandparents in Birmingham, they would drive me to places and – having little experience or understanding of roads and cars – I couldn’t figure out how the traffic lights ‘knew’ when to change. I noticed that this sometimes happened
when I blinked slowly at them. Perhaps, I reasoned, it was my blinking that controlled the lights. I would sit in the car and close my eyes, opening them a crack to peek. If the traffic lights changed, I’d done it. If they didn’t, I would close my eyes tight and try again. I had a 100 per cent success rate with this method.
Once, my older cousin disputed the meaning of a word I’d used, so I opened a dictionary to prove her wrong and, by brilliant coincidence, opened it at the exact right page. She looked at me like I’d performed a miracle, and I began to believe that perhaps I had. We (children and civilizations) are supposed to grow out of this type of fallacious thinking, but that’s not a luxury I had. While the traffic lights and dictionary beliefs were trivial, and examples of the sort of daft things most kids believe at one point or another, it’s also typical of the way I was raised.
Poverty is best friends with superstition. They grow up together, go everywhere together. Everything about poverty encourages belief in luck and mysterious forces. How else to explain why some people seem to have randomly awful lives? And superstition encourages poverty to risk what little it has. Spend your last pound coin on a lottery ticket: today feels lucky. Your lottery numbers are your loved ones’ birthdays, of course. How could love and family be anything but lucky?
When you’re really poor, superstition looks like a tiny bit of control. Fingers crossed, with any luck, knock on wood, God willing, God forbid, don’t tempt Fate. Depending on how strongly superstitious you are, you may be compelled to act it out physically, like a magic spell. Crossing your fingers or knocking on the nearest wooden object
projects the thought into the physical world, makes it real. Luck is a benevolent or cruel god, granting favour or misfortune depending on how hard you wish. That’s how it was in my house. Because of poverty, there was superstition. Without the sort of autonomy and choices that come with financial security and control, wishing was all we had. Poverty and superstition are both important to this story, and I struggle to separate the two. When I think about growing up poor, I think about my mother giving the last coin in her purse to a woman who was selling ‘lucky’ crêpepaper flowers door to door, because otherwise we would be cursed. I think about my grandmother Bernice shouting at me, ‘Don’t put new shoes on the table, it’s bad luck!’ when I was excited to show her my shiny black patent leather school loafers. I remember the panicked tears I cried when I dropped and smashed a mirror, not just because I’d broken something of value but for the seven years of misfortune that would follow. It takes more understanding, will and resignation than I had to accept my family’s fate as the symptom of a broken system and a lack of education. It was easier and better to believe that, however bad it got, there was some force in the universe that might grant us a little favour or a magic power now and again, like in my beloved C. S. Lewis or Diana Wynne Jones books.
We hadn’t always lived in a council house. In 1973, after two years of renting and saving, Jackie and Mike bought a tiny house in a Birmingham suburb. It was falling apart, in desperate need of renovations they couldn’t afford, but it was theirs, a rung on the precarious ladder of upward mobility. In December the same year, their first child – my sister Emily – was born. A year and a half later,
when the little King family was struggling badly for money, Mike was offered a two-year contract as an engineer for aeronautical giant Lockheed, to begin in February 1976. It paid well because it was in Saudi Arabia. The job would solve all of their financial problems. My dad would work overseas while Jackie raised their daughter and managed the house. He would be able to fly back every six months to visit. It wouldn’t be so bad – ‘And,’ he said, ‘just think of the money.’
But Jackie was pregnant again. An accident, but not unwanted: ‘A lovely surprise,’ Jackie said. Mike offered to turn down the Lockheed contract but she wouldn’t let him. She could manage, she said. Her twin sister Miriam was just down the road, and her parents could move in with her. And, besides, there were no other job offers. So, a month before I was due, he flew more than three thousand miles from Birmingham, UK, to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and planned our future.
But the money situation didn’t change, perhaps because my parents didn’t change. Hope is eventually trumped by reality. Mike’s blue airmail letters (first addressed to Jackie and Emily, and then, once I was born, to all three of us) are full of love but mostly concerned with the minutiae of his salary instalments and strategies for paying various creditors. In February 1976 he wrote:
I feel very useless here as far as money goes. I am trying to live on as little as possible. I feel very guilty that you are having all the work and the worry but I’m doing my best to earn as much as I can and things here aren’t exactly a picnic but I’m keeping cheerful.
Some letters from the same period are more hopeful, with the potential for promotion and perhaps even earning a bonus. They’re also full of colourful detail about his life:
Found a sweet little lime-green scorpion yesterday while I was changing a wheel on the recreation vehicle, but he got away. They are not dangerous out here but they can give a nasty sting which is very painful. I won’t tell you what the spiders are like – it may spoil your breakfast.
Those letters subtly reveal a truth. There are some problems that money makes worse.
Mike’s drinking had started young. Residing in south Birmingham, his wasn’t a close family, and he and his sister were raised without the affection and heartfelt ‘I love you’ that later characterized my own home. His mother worked full time, so Mike was largely raised by his maternal grandmother, Harriet, whose husband, William, worked in the sweltering, polluting heat of the local waste incinerator (known as the destructor). William had a side hustle making and selling bootleg alcohol, and spent his days battling the furnace temperature by drinking. He taught Mike how to distil alcohol and turn fruit into wine. He also taught him how to drink.
Mike’s father, my granddad Edward, was a survivor of Dunkirk, about which he never spoke. ‘Shell shock,’ Jackie would say, to explain Edward’s brittle, authoritarian attitude. He was as unlike Mike as two dads could be. Where Edward had been uncaring, strict, even violent, Mike was loving, attentive and nurturing, and it’s perhaps no wonder the boy preferred spending time with his grandfather.
I was always afraid of Edward, on the very rare occasions we met. He had none of the warmth and love of Jackie’s parents, and he and my paternal grandmother, Dorothy, seemed to dislike children. Edward and Dorothy were old-fashioned, buttoned-up English Christians of the sort that was as much about tradition and reputation as religion. There were very few adults I was shy around, but the two or three times they visited us, I tried to avoid Edward, picking up on my parents’ own wariness. Jackie said he was ‘a megalomaniac’.
Some of his mood might have been down to pain. After the war he had gone to work in a factory where an explosion caused severe injuries to his legs from which he never fully recovered. After that, he and Dorothy became managers of a post office in Birmingham. His spare time was spent on butterflies. Edward’s interest in the natural world was one of the only things he had in common with Mike. ‘He’s a lepidopterist,’ Jackie would say, enjoying the grandeur of the word. I understood this to mean he studied butterflies and helped with conservation efforts, but I didn’t understand why it also meant he enjoyed them dead. There were rows and rows of once-beautiful butterflies, including rare species, with tiny pins skewered through their fragile dusty bodies, in special drawers in his study or framed on the wall of their seaside retirement bungalow. I was attracted to the colours and patterns but repulsed by their deaths and the brutality of the displays.
Mike was popular at school, if mischievous, and was intelligent enough to pass the eleven-plus exam and attend a local grammar school. University was expensive and not something his family did. After a deeply unhappy period
as an apprentice at a steel-tube manufacturer, he joined the air force, which became his life. He trained as a telecoms engineer, his sparse military records showing his entire service conduct as ‘exemplary’. He was promoted five times, but the records are otherwise uninformative. Several years of his service history are missing, including 1963 when he was stationed in Cyprus during the ‘Bloody Christmas’ civil war in which hundreds of islanders died and thousands more were displaced. Like his father and Dunkirk, Mike simply never talked about it. Whatever happened in Cyprus exacerbated his drinking, and haunted his dreams. He left the RAF in 1970, became engaged to Jackie, and they married two years later. ‘He never adapted to Civvy Street,’ she says, to explain some of his problems. By the time he was working in Saudi Arabia in 1976, the sharp claws of alcoholism had him in a grip with no easy means of escape. His environment was not conducive to saying, ‘Help me, I have a problem,’ and he likely didn’t yet realize he had one.
His letters show a man trying very hard. He hit on a scheme to change from twice-annual leave to tri-annual. In a letter dated 12 April 1976 he writes:
I will be home on Thursday 3rd June for about 2½ weeks’ leave (subject to confirmation of aircraft flights etc.). Does that cheer you up as much as it cheers me? I still get me bonus but instead of waiting until August I get it in June –
I also get an airfare rebate which can go to the Bldg Society so this will drastically reduce all the problems you have to contend with, and I will be happier knowing that you aren’t getting nasty letters.
Most importantly, can you book a table for us for anywhere you like for our wedding anniversary, yet another good reason for coming home in June. I expect you would prefer Hillfield Hall but the choice is entirely yours. We also need a lot of babysitters for the time I am home so can you take care of that too. You had also better warn your parents that they will have to evacuate the place temporarily.
I have gone from being totally depressed a week ago to being on top of the world now – 36 days to go!
I have no doubt that you are wondering all sorts of things about my sudden decision to change over but there are no problems here and it was mostly based on missing all of you, our wedding anniversary and the possession of some new information about airfares, rebates and bonuses etc.
I shan’t be going mad lugging many presents this time around as we can’t afford a lot yet but there will be 3 times a year when I am coming home with goodies for all.
A few months later, all his careful planning was ruined. Along with his letters, I have Mike’s pocket diary from 1976, bound in green leather and smaller than my palm. It has four entries of note.
15 March, TRACY BORN
9 August, INCIDENT
10 August, NO WORK – SACKED
11 August TICKET – FLY HOME
Incident. Something bad enough to end his well-paid engineering career and send him home. I don’t know why
he chose to write it down in an otherwise mostly empty diary, or why he kept the diary thereafter, but it is chilling and sad to see. For many years Jackie was evasive about what the ‘incident’ had been, but eventually admitted perhaps he was caught selling home-brewed alcohol. In Saudi Arabia. Certainly it’s the case that at the time alcohol was tolerated within work compounds, but outside could mean severe punishment. Whatever Mike’s ‘incident’ was, it was enough to get him sacked and rushed out of the country.
Once home, he struggled to find work. Already heavily in debt, he was unable to pay the mortgage. Jackie had once been a secretary, but with a toddler, a baby and a belly full of anxiety, she wasn’t able to return to work.
With debts and no income, and my dad’s alcoholism unchecked, my parents had to sell their house. There was no one left to borrow from. At the time, the government was looking for families to populate a brand-new ‘overspill’ council estate. While the new estate was not local, and would therefore leave my parents isolated from their families and support network, it had no waiting list. In 1977, when I was eighteen months old and Emily was almost four, we moved. A brand-new three-bedroom home was an incredible stroke of luck.
Thehouse was on an estate far away from Birmingham. It might as well have been a thousand miles, because we often didn’t have a car to go anywhere. There was no nearby rail station, although trains were prohibitively expensive anyway. It would have taken hours to get to Jackie’s parents’ home in Birmingham by public transport. To me, Birmingham City Centre seemed as far away, exotic and intimidating as London. The rural estate provided a new life for my family, and we rarely needed to leave it.
The image that ‘council estate’ summons to those who have never lived on one is of high-rise grey concrete tower blocks, graffiti, and nowhere to play. Ours was quite different, although graffiti and broken windows would appear and disappear with regularity. In the mid-1970s, the local council had built a huge, experimental cul-de-sac maze of red-brick houses known as a ‘low-rise estate’. It was part of a flurry of British council-house developments, instigated by the outgoing Labour government, that peaked around that time. Impossible to navigate, full of dead ends and narrow paths, this brand-new twentieth-century council-housing estate was developed around green spaces and trees.
Beyond my back door was my very own enchanted
wood, with a bubbling stream snaking through the trees, and the promise of the kind of adventure I would read about in The Hobbit.
In hindsight it wasn’t a wood, but a skinny copse at best, and the stream was more of a murky brook, but it was a wonderful playground for children with imagination and sticks for swords. The council estate was my whole world, or would have been if I hadn’t had a library card and encouraging parents.
Our house was a small but sufficient red-brick threebedroom mid-terrace, with a tiny front garden and a slightly bigger patch at the back overlooked by the kitchen. The rent was paid weekly at the post office, reduced during the times Mike was out of work but always a worry. My parents had already lost one property. It would kill them to lose another, even if they didn’t own it.
When I was very small the back garden seemed huge, and I was a dot on the grass, picking daisies to make a bracelet or leaving acorn-cup saucepans among the stones as a present for the fairies I was sure lived there. As I got older and stopped wanting to play, the garden shrank and became a neglected chore.
Our front door had a blue wooden frame, but the bulk of it was reinforced glass, large dappled panes with diagonal mesh embedded in them. A council-house door. The mesh provided extra privacy but also made the glass shatterproof, should someone kick it in or slam the door too hard. It let in a lot of light but also showed silhouettes of residents within, so almost everyone covered theirs with a net curtain suspended across a door-width piece of plasticcovered wire. If I visited a neighbour’s house and they
hadn’t covered their glass, their house felt naked. The glass was a vulnerability, and a curtain kept out the bad things – or people.
We didn’t have a doorbell. A friendly visitor would rap the letterbox a few times, maybe even lift the flap and shout, ‘Coo-ee, Jackie.’ But an official, like a social worker or debt collector, would knock hard with their knuckles on the glass. All the council houses had these front doors, a sort of ‘tell’. Tenants were not allowed to replace them. Those who eventually bought their properties from the local authority would immediately change the front door for a nicer one and the black plastic house numbers for a fancy metal plate.
But when we moved into the house in 1977, all the front doors were the same. Inside, however, the estate was unusual in that every house was different from the next. No two houses had the same floor plan or layout, which made everyone else’s home somehow inferior to mine, the ‘correct’ one.
I was aware that technically it wasn’t our house, but it was every inch our home, and I loved it. Between the living-room wall and the kitchen was an airing cupboard, and in the early eighties Mike took it upon himself to defy council rules about modifying the property and use that space for a fish tank. He knocked a hole six feet long by two feet tall into the living-room wall, encroaching on the cupboard space, and installed a huge fish tank that had been built for free by his brother-in-law. Jackie had always wanted to keep tropical fish.
The obvious question here (apart from ‘Why would anyone do that?’) is, how could we afford such a bizarre
luxury? How could a family who frequently had no electricity or phone and lived on luck and benefits possibly afford to run a huge fish tank? It’s hard to explain. When you’re poor, it’s either feast or famine. The times when you have a little bit of money, you feast. You spend it. In our case, it was usually because Mike had got a job, so my parents would assume our fortunes had changed and it seemed okay to start splashing out a little, investing in lifelong ambitions, like tropical fish. One weekend afternoon he produced several buckets of Artex, a thick plaster-like paint into which patterns could be scraped.
‘We’re going to Artex the fish-tank wall!’ he said, gesturing at the empty space above and below the glass. This was tremendously exciting. ‘What pattern should we make?’ Jackie sacrificed her comb and we took it in turns to make lines in a test patch of wet Artex. Emily drew a diamond. I drew a wobbly flower. Jackie drew a basic fish, like the Christian symbol, and under it a wavy line to depict water. We agreed this was the best design. Mike applied a patch of Artex, Jackie quickly scraped in a fish before it dried, and Emily or I added the wavy water line underneath. A few hours later the entire wall was covered with Artex fish. Ultimately these would prove to be a dust trap, but for a while it was the best wall in the world.
These financially carefree times were rare, with disappointment not far behind because Mike lost jobs more easily than he found them. Unemployment was at a record high and the new government doubled the rent. But the dream of a better life was always there, and spending beyond our means sometimes was a way to solidify that dream. The fish tank was proof that we could, like other
people, have nice things. I loved that fish tank. It was accessed via the airing-cupboard door in the kitchen. Inside, the space was cool and dark and filled with the humming of the tank’s electric filter. I would open the top of the tank and sprinkle a few flakes of fish food from the tub into the water, and a few onto my tongue, where they dissolved quickly. They tasted like Marmite.
Years later, when the tank had been standing empty for a long time, just before Jackie and I – the only Kings left – moved out, she sold it to a neighbour, who turned up with a mate strong enough to help him extract it from the wall and carry it away. They chipped the glass on the way out and it felt like a terrible omen.
Lack of money marked my childhood deeply, although I never resented my parents for it. It was what it was. There was no heating upstairs, so we’d gather, shivering, in front of the single white radiator in the living room on cold mornings to get dressed. Jackie would also dry our clothes on that radiator when it was too cold or rainy to use the washing-line in the back garden. Breakfast in the winter was hot Ready Brek, a type of porridge marketed as ‘central heating for kids’, with a thick topping of white sugar. I’d wait for the sugar to turn brown and eat it in layers, adding more sugar as I went.
There wasn’t usually an abundance of food, and certainly not the regular supply of snacks, crisps and chocolate to which other children seemed to have access, but a bag of sugar and a tub of margarine go a long way. For my eighth birthday, Jackie promised me a party. We made invitations together and I distributed them among my friends and