If you were a working-class teenager in the 1980s, the thing most expected of you in the family home was that you would soon be leaving it. There were imminent romances to be imagined, but few of them burned brighter in the two-bar fire of the soul than the notion that you might soon have keys to your own front door. I think I dreamed about it, the Hoovering whose frequency I could personally control, the music at full volume, the sleep-overs that would never turn into psychodramas involving Bell’s whisky and the police – my own flat, where all the grief could be left behind and tins would be banned from the fridge.
Back in the late 1950s, my parents hadn’t done “single life”. They were “married out of the house”, as they used to say in Glasgow, my mother at 19. “You’ve made your bed, so you can lie in it,” was one of my grandmother’s favourite phrases, as if looking after yourself wasn’t a fledgling activity but a moral imperative carrying a high price for failure. The ability to “stand on your own two feet” (another favourite) went along with the expectation that you wouldn’t let the grass grow under them, a directive to pastures new, one street over perhaps, with a spouse, children and a washing machine of one’s own. “In 1961,” writes the British historian David Kynaston, “only 98,466 houses were built in the public sector, compared to 170,366 for owner-occupiers.” My parents were suddenly in a world where progress meant leaving home and getting a mortgage. As it turned out, they were bred-in-the-bone tenants who shared a heartstopping fear of debt; their kids, on the other hand, each had a flat before they were 30.
