Where did it all go right?

There was a brief vogue, five or six years ago, for memoirs of miserable childhoods. Dave Peltzer, Frank McCourt, Paul Morley and others competed to out-do each other with tales of abuse and deprivation like so many Pythonesque Yorkshiremen, and co-incidentally forged lucrative literary careers at the same time. Reading these books feels a little bit like emotional voyeurism, vicariously experiencing the suffering of others.

Where did it all go right? by Andrew Collins, a memoir about everyday childhood in the provincial England of the 1970s, is the book for the rest of us. It’s not just the thrill of nostalgic recognition – welfare orange, childhood toys and comics, playing out in the field without the ever present fear of traffic or predatory strangers – but it is also the rhythms of childhood, school, friendships, holidays and birthdays as charted in the various diaries kept (more or less) faithfully by the young Collins from 1972 though to 1981.

Andrew came from modest roots in Northampton, with loving parents who were neither poor nor outrageously affluent. He chronicles the times and mores with an engaging wit, although this is not primarily a humorous account poking fun at things from the 1970s that you thought you’d forgotten, but hadn’t. Perhaps it is because his life so closely mirrors mine, both being born in 1965 as the first son of a traditional nuclear family, with many points of coincidence -although in my case I substituted the world of fanzines and Dungeons and Dragons for being in a band – that I found so much to appreciate in this account.

They tucked him up, his mum and dad …