Around the houses

How many houses have you lived in? Loads I bet, you house-hopping bohemian you. I think I've lived in about eight, so far, not including student halls or places before I was sufficiently self aware to know what was going on. Is eight a lot? Or boringly few? I'm not sure. Some people I know seem to move on a frighteningly regular basis, as if determined to have a stake in every street in England. That seems a bit much to me - I like a house to become kind of, I don't know.... part of me.

The first house I remember living in was very literally in the middle of our street - a small terraced thing in Bradford on a street called, I think, Harrogate Place. I was about four, or five, and thus very, very small. I don't remember very much about the house, except that the following things probably happened there:

1. I get stung, for the first time, by wasps.

There were two of the evil little buggers living in the front hedge. Or maybe not living there, maybe just hanging out playing with their cocks. Either way, they did not make me welcome when I, being four, decided to stick my head in the hedge. They stung me twice in the neck, and it hurt like holy hell. I ran up the street, around to the back of the house, where my mum was doing... something. Gardening, reading a book, something. Whatever it was, I ruined it, by charging into her afternoon wailing like a tiny, aggrieved monster.

On that day I swore vengance upon all wasps, and indeed all of insect kind. I didn't know much about life, but I knew that wasps were bastards, and that was a start. I often wonder what happened to those wasps, so formative in my early development as a nervous, hedge fearing insectophobe. I like to think they died, horribly, and in agonising pain.

2. I dig a brilliant hole in the front garden.

Why? Not sure, but it turned out to be a great place to eat sweets. It was sufficiently deep for me to crouch in, like a miniature First World War soldier, hurling coffee flavoured Revels over the top once in a while, but it was probably, in reality, pathetically shallow.

My dad came home from work, eventually, and stood on the path, looking down at me and my hole. He did not seem very impressed. I suppose he must have been about 26, though his puzzlement was that of an older, wearier man.

3. I try to grass up some of my friends

Even as a young man, I was clearly possessed of a great antipathy towards other humans, and regarded the destruction of their happiness as an end in itself.

Two of my friends - a brother and sister who could have been called anything but lets call them John and Gillian - went playing on the building site near our house. Now this was definitely verboten, and we had all been told many times not to play on the site, or we would surely die of a digger falling on us. To my evil delight, I saw my two friends climbing up the muddy hill away from the partially built foundations. Brilliant! I could get them into trouble!

Round to their home I scuttled, giggling with malicious mirth. The second their mum opened the door I divulged my treacherous news. What I expected I don't know. Effusive thanks and monetary reward? Sexual favours? Adoption? (I was quite keen on the latter, since my mum had refused to burn down the front hedge as a warning to other wasps, and my dad had filled in my brilliant hole).

Whatever it was, I didn't get it. As I was completing my villification of her children, John and Gillian themselves poked their heads out from behind their mother. They'd been in all afternoon. It wasn't them.  Quite how my immature sense of self dealt with this collosal embarrassment at the time I cannot remember. However, the shame still pricks me now. If you're out there, John and Gillian, I hope I didn't destroy your ability to trust.



So that was my first house. I don't think we were there very long after these events. Perhaps the neighbours drove us out, shouting 'take your idiot child from this place!'