I’m currently writing a memoir centred around my dad and me, looking at working-class masculinity with a bit of ADHD thrown in for good measure, and it led me to remember an incident at school that turned the notion of the weaker sex on its head. If you want to find out more about this, you’ll have to keep an eye out for the August edition of Ellipsis Zine. This is the second piece of creative non-fiction I’ve had accepted for publication and could possibly be the first that you, wonderful reader, will get to see.

This image of me, I’m the one on the left, is from around the time the story is set, probably slightly earlier. Looking at my hair, I’d say I’m at the tail end of my Suedehead stage and moving into full-on Mod mode. I’m wearing a Fred Perry t-shirt and my coveted red Harrington jacket. 

The guy next to me is called Rupert, which is about the best name, short of Tarquin, to guarantee getting your head kicked in at Mereway Upper School. I can’t remember how we became friends, probably a shared taste in music and clothes, but he was the first middle-class kid I ever met and became a conduit to a world I’d only seen on TV. 

Like me, he lived close to the school, but unlike me, he lived in a large semi-detached house with a huge garden and a short drive out the front, which made our two-bed council house seem positively hutch-like by comparison. He never spoke about his dad. His dad was not present, but his effervescent mother and eccentric grandmother made me feel incredibly welcome. I think his mum was slightly concerned about him hanging out with the rough kid from the council estate, but his gran spoke to me like an equal and regaled me with tales of India and the Far East.

I never really knew how he felt about me because we don’t speak about stuff like that. He often seemed aloof, acting superior when it came to matters of music and clothes, but would defer to me when we were threatened by others; he wasn’t a wimp. Fighting was best avoided as it could lead to a torn shirt or scuffed shoes. Maybe he used me as muscle, I don’t know, but I know I got as much from him as he got from me with regards to tips on music and clothing, and I think that’s pretty good for any relationship. 

I thought he was the best drummer in the world, although, to be more accurate, he was the only drummer in the world that I knew. He would calmly tolerate my discordant chord-chopping on my shit guitar and drum along perfectly to the first Specials album.

I bumped into him once in The Racehorse pub in Northampton. It was the mid-nineties, and I’d not seen him since school. I’d been away to Bradford studying Art and found myself unemployable and back home. We hadn’t spoken for 6 or 7 years. I’d embraced Acid House and Baggy culture, and my days of short hair and Harringtons were long behind me. It was early afternoon, and I’d already had a couple.

‘Betsy!’ No one used his first name.

‘Betsy!’ No one used his first name.

He flinched, as if bracing for an assault.

‘Fucking Hell, man. How are you doing? Let me get you a pint. Lager?’ Two beers into the afternoon, and I

He nodded.

‘Sit down. Sit down. I won’t be a minute.’

I placed a pint of lager and a pint of bitter on the table.

‘What are you up to these days?’

Again, that look, like I was the Stasi checking his papers at a Berlin checkpoint. I ploughed on. Asked him questions and never once thought the silence was oppressive. Eventually, three beers in, I learned that he’d sold his drum kit and now worked as a panel beater in some small industrial unit off the Welly Road.

‘You sold the drums?’

‘Yes.’

‘You sold the drums?’

‘We’ve covered this.’

As weird as his working as a panel beater was, it was the selling of the drums that floored me. Effectively, we’d swapped roles. I was working in a care home, a stopgap to build up funds and go travelling, but painfully aware I didn’t belong there, while my former mentor in music and clothes was wearing shitty overalls and hammering metal all day instead of doing the thing I’d thought he was born to do.

Rupert will feature in future writing, but to learn more about the world I grew up in, you’ll need to wait for the August edition of Ellipsis Zine.