LIFE IN A NORTHERN TOWN… RUNCORN

The first time I heard a version of the song was in P.E when I was seven or eight or nine, I can’t be sure. It wasn’t how most people would hear it. It wasn’t through the famous elegy to Nick Drake (an artist my partner loves) written by the Dream Academy (a band my dad loves); it was when it was sampled in Dario G’s track “Sunchyme“. Dario G are a group of DJs originally from Cheshire, which is where I grew up and went to school. From time to time the whole class would dance along to this song. I say whole class, there were only 14 of us in my year. It was a very small school in a very small estate in a very small town.

That memory is one of my fondest of going to school in Runcorn in the mid-noughties. Either that, or when this elderly lady (I forget her name) would visit us and bring in this Mary Poppins-esque bag of supplies for us all to use for an afternoon of arts and crafts. I love arts and crafts and I’m grateful to say that’s what I do for a living now. I’m sure she was from Chester or somewhere similar, because I never saw her around in town, where you’d see the same faces a lot. Runcorn is definitely the type of place someone would say “everyone knows everyone” about. My mum worked at the local hospital, better known as the “Ozzy” and my best friend’s mum from high school worked at Asda, better known as “The Asda,” so between them you pretty much knew all the gossip. Most of my immediate family on my mum’s side lived on our estate and I’m fairly certain my nan was some kind of cigarette king-pin because she would go round the estate selling huge boxes of the Lambert & Butler she’d buy cheap from duty-free abroad. My grandad was Greek and did too much chain smoking to ever make a business from it. He was very loud yet hardly spoke, when I think about it. Me and a few mates would go round trick or treating at Halloween or carolling at Christmas and when we’d knock at their house, I could hear him shouting and swearing that we were disrupting the football or something. Still, my nan would always give us some sweets or a couple of quid to split between the six or seven of us.

Small towns have this special ability to mould memories on every street.

When I got to high school, I remember feeling terrified at the thought of being too old to play out. No more knocking for friends to go den-making or playing man-hunt in the Shopping City car park. One thing that saddens me about kids these days is that they all have iPhones and might never know the feeling of going downhill on a bike really fast. Seeing the setting sun flicker through the trees, their faces and hands cold against the breeze that sets in as the summer holidays come to an end. I sometimes think about the last time I did that myself.

Small towns have this special ability to mould memories on every street. The roads become familiar and second nature – like lines on the back of your hand. Every roundabout where you’d meet your friend halfway to walk to school; every bus route that got you to your first part-time job (and of course, out of town as well). I regularly took the 43A to my college outside of Runcorn. It was always packed. Luckily my stop was early and I always had a seat. Most people have only heard of Runcorn because of the train station they pass on their way to another destination, but I spent 18 years of my life there and in all honesty, I wouldn’t have rather grown up anywhere else. I was lucky to have such a supportive network of family, babysitters, friends and friend’s mums who brought me up and continue to bring me back.