Why nations rise and fall on narrative, and how a story saved my life

This piece grew too big for one post, so it now runs as a series of three. This is Part One, the story of a boy and a window sill. Part Two: The Pattern takes the same mechanism through sixty years of Britain, and Part Three: What Happens Next asks who writes the next chapter.

The Window Sill

I was nine years old, sitting on my bedroom window sill, one flight up. A standard single glazed window with a large opening section to one side. I sat next to that opening, looking at the concrete below, and wondering.

I was an unhappy child. I grew up believing I was unpopular, unhealthy and unintelligent. At the time I was too young to understand why. I can only extrapolate the reasons now, and they come down to the influences I did have, and the events that follow. For my mother, parenthood was a role to be performed, not a job to be done. My father is a different story, a good one, and I have told it elsewhere.

The memories are hazy. I suppressed them for a long time, and I am working from fragments. But some fragments are solid. I was ill constantly. Throat infections, almost monthly it seemed, each one putting me in bed and on another course of antibiotics. I had more amoxicillin than Smarties as a child. I sometimes wonder if that is why I am allergic to penicillin today.

And I remember the cheese. A child with nothing to do gets bored, and I said so, often. The answer was usually a chunk of cheese. Possibly the worst snack you can hand a bored child. Boredom, in our house, was treated as hunger. It was easier to solve that way.

Unpopular, Unhealthy, Unintelligent

The unintelligent part had a simple engine. I was dyslexic and ADD, and nobody knew, because nobody was diagnosing those things in the late seventies. What I experienced was teachers who were constantly frustrated with me and never explained why. I understand it now. They could see what I was capable of and could not get it out of me, and it maddened them. Nobody said that at the time. So I was left with the only explanation a child can reach on his own. I was a letdown.

The rest had a wider cast, or rather the absence of one. Of my four grandparents, only one featured in my childhood. One died of cancer when I was very young. One took his own life not long after. One died years before I was born, in circumstances I still do not fully understand, involving mental health problems and the treatments of the era. The one who remained remarried quickly, and the woman he chose was a remarkably challenging individual who dominated his life and made sure we were not a big feature of it. The practical result was that the only adults with regular, direct influence on me were my parents. My father, one of the most wonderful human beings that ever lived. And my mother, who struggled, in large part because of her own upbringing. Her mother died when she was fourteen, and her father moved a new wife into the house almost immediately. Both of my parents were carrying things. They dealt with them very differently.

On the rare occasions we saw my grandfather, my experience was constant criticism. I call him John, because he did not behave like a grandfather. Nothing was ever good enough. I remember being seven or eight, mid growth spurt, in shorts far too tight for me. I was desperate for a wee and struggled to get them down, and a single drop landed on the toilet carpet without me noticing. I was fastidious about that kind of thing. You learn to be, around such people. Minutes later I was grabbed by the back of the neck, hauled back in, and my face was pushed into the carpet.

I know people who had it far worse, with real violence attached. But the cruelest thing about John was not that incident. It was the total absence of care. I cannot remember a single interaction laced with any affection at all. I felt surplus to requirements. An oxygen thief.

The unhealthy part you have already seen. What I have never explained is the schedule. Throat infections do not usually arrive monthly. Mine did, and they seemed to track the weather. My best guess now involves the school walk. My mother walked us to school, in all conditions, until I was fourteen. I will let you imagine what being walked to school by his mother does for a fourteen year old boy’s social standing. I was a laughing stock. I had no idea why it happened at the time. I have my theories now, and they are consistent with everything else in this piece.

Which brings me to unpopular. I am, it turns out, quite a social person. It took me years to discover that, because my self image said the opposite, and my self image was built on the data available. A couple of break times a day. The very occasional visit to another child’s house. Birthday parties were rare enough that the few I attended still stick out in my memory like jewels. I do not know whether I was rarely invited or rarely allowed to go. Possibly both.

Patterns like that persist. Even now, I have been invited to one stag do in my life, maybe two, and very few weddings. I no longer read that as unpopularity. It is the shape of how I connect. I have a small number of very deep friendships, the kind where people share their innermost secrets because I am so clearly comfortable with my own demons, and a wide sea of casual acquaintances, with very little in between. My closest friends are scattered across England and the world. That is not the geometry weddings and stag dos are built on. But the shape was set somewhere, and it was set here.

The Windows, the Books and the Films

Keeping us quiet had a tool of its own. If you were a child in Britain in the late seventies or early eighties, you might remember Medised. A syrupy medicine with an antihistamine in it that made children drowsy. Its rules of use have since been changed, which tells you something. I spent big stretches of my childhood either sedated or hallucinating off the stuff. I can still remember some of the hallucinations. I sometimes wonder if they helped wire the imagination I ended up making a living from. Maybe. It was a strange way to get one.

The other window I remember is the living room one. We were the end terrace and the TV sat right next to it. So I watched the screen with one eye and the street with the other. It was a cul de sac, completely safe to play in. Bikes, skateboards, football. There was a large car park opposite where the other kids ran go karts and ball games. We were often not allowed out to join them. Tea would be in forty five minutes, so there was no point. I spent hours watching them have fun while I sat inside, a prisoner in all but name.

The hallucinations reached that car park too. One fever dream had it flooded, my uncle ferrying me across it on a raft, sharks circling underneath. I can trace that one. He had taken me around that car park on his motorbike a few times, no helmet, when I was about eight. It looks extremely irresponsible in hindsight. It did not stand out at the time. The adults minding me were not doing their jobs.

My bedroom had a few toys and some books. I read constantly, because there was nothing else to do. Children’s books I found relatively easy. It is dense adult prose I struggle with, to this day. I inhabited the world of Sherlock Holmes in particular. I had an archaic copy of the complete Conan Doyle and read it cover to cover several times. I read the Narnia books too. I have gone off them since, having understood what they were doing: using story to smuggle Christianity into children. Decades later Philip Pullman wrote His Dark Materials partly as the atheist answer to Narnia, and the American religious right went after the film adaptation for it. Both sides understood the same thing. Stories are the delivery mechanism.

There was a second TV in my parents’ room. My sister and I were often parked up there while the TV downstairs was in use. We sat on their bed watching The Dukes of Hazzard or The A Team while my mother, occasionally with my dad alongside, worked through her homemade wine in the kitchen. It was her habit, not his. And it was not much later that I got drunk for the first time. I was about eleven. My mother got us drunk on that same wine one afternoon in the kitchen. I remember feeling extremely squiffy.

There was almost no children’s TV then. An hour or two in the afternoon, and we were not allowed most of it anyway. Grange Hill was banned. It dealt with real stories, and I suspect the fear was that it would put ideas in our heads. Rebellion is contagious. Docile children are easier to manage. What we got instead was old cinema. Black and white films, deeply romantic ones, and fairy tales.

The only activity we ever did was amateur dramatics. We did that because she wanted to, and because it gave her cover for other things. No scouts. No clubs. Rarely the street. Just the windows, the books, and the films.

Two Jobs at Once

Here is what I did not understand until much later. Those stories were doing two jobs at once. They were being used to keep me quiet. And they were quietly showing me the way out.

Every one of those films and fairy tales made the same argument. The world you are trapped in is not the only world. Circumstances can be escaped. The story you are living in was written by someone. Stories can be rewritten.

I did not jump. I thought about it, then climbed back down into a world of stories instead.

It took me over thirty years to understand that moment. In my early forties I was treated for stage three oesophageal cancer. Part of the treatment involved fitness testing for a clinical research study. The man running my tests was an anaesthetist who had spent years as an air ambulance doctor. He told me about the autobiography he planned to write, built on years of attending people whose worst moments had not ended the way they imagined. Much of his job had been piecing people back together afterwards.

That conversation reframed the boy on the window sill. At nine, I had no idea what I was actually weighing. And I finally learned it while fighting for my life in a different way. Fifteen percent survival odds. Living alone, because my wife had thrown me out mid chemotherapy. The boy at the window and the man in the test lab. Both times, the thing that carried me through was the same. A refusal to let someone else’s story be the last word on mine.

A Story Is a Vehicle

The escape route from that childhood arrived when I was a teenager. A friend of my English teacher came to give a talk at school. At eighteen he had left home for Hong Kong. He learned the language, joined the police, and spent a decade policing the triads around the harbour. Then he came home and wrote what he cheerfully called airport fiction.

I sat in that hall electrified. Not because the stories were exotic, though they were. Because he was proof. You did not have to accept the script you were handed. He had authored his own life, chapter by chapter, and there he was, ordinary and real, in a school hall in front of me.

That was the first time I understood something I have used ever since. A story is not just an escape. It is a vehicle. You can get in one and drive it somewhere.

I have driven them through a childhood I should not have had to survive. Through thirty years in an industry built on manufactured worlds. Through cancer. Through a marriage so corrosive I stayed in it for years purely because leaving would have left my children unprotected. Every one of those chapters was survivable because I held a story about where the plot went next.

Which is why, when I look at the last sixty years of this country, I do not see economics or policy or personalities. I see stories. Held, broken, stolen, and lost. That is where this series goes next: the same mechanism, applied to a nation, decade by decade.

Continue with Part Two: The Pattern, then Part Three: What Happens Next.