I’ve been thinking about the word “history” and what it really means to think about the past. People often refer to history as something that they “failed in school”. But really, history is, as Alan Bennett put it so beautifully in his 2004 play The History Boys, “just one f***ing thing after another”. Well, quite. It is simply everything that has happened before us — and to us.
In 1998, Clapton was just a place that my mother and stepfather Garfield were moving to; the year I turned 14 and we had lost everything. Our dastardly neighbour had made his final complaint against my mother and me, causing the housing trust to evict us from the only home I’d known, on Powis Terrace in west London. We didn’t have much to lose, but we were managing to keep on keeping on, until suddenly it was all gone. I was to live with my auntie and uncle in Primrose Hill with my five cousins, while Mum and Garf would be taking over a one-bed council flat.
