A couple of the more disruptive boys in the class put red laces in their Dr Martens, because someone had told them that was how you showed your support for the National Front. “Jew” was an everyday insult and the N-word was in regular circulation. There were no more than four or five non-white kids in the whole school: I can recall one Asian girl finding her art folder had been covered in racist abuse, and some adolescent desperado singling out a black boy for a spoken version of the same treatment, before insisting that his victim was in on the joke. He wasn’t: he looked at the ground and rushed away, full of the hurt he must have felt every day.
This was what it was like in a Cheshire comprehensive school in the early-to-mid-1980s. Teenage racism was there in plain sight, and there was a scattering of people who seemed to take their prejudices – presumably passed down from parents and elder siblings – very seriously indeed. In what is now known as year 7, for example, each class was given a group of “sixth-form counsellors”, meant to show up once or twice a week and encourage ambition and hard work. One of ours was a tense, soft-spoken young man who liberally used racist epithets, backed the National Front and said he wanted to be a policeman. His view of the world, as far as I could tell, was summed up in a chant that a certain sort of playground thug knew by heart: “There ain’t no black in the union jack/Get back, get back, get back.”
