Two stories about Reading (Part 1)

I only really remember two big occasions where my parents sat me down and made an announcement, and both of them changed my life beyond recognition.

One came when I was around sixteen, the weekend after I had finished my GCSE exams. On the Saturday, my father took my brother and me to Glastonbury for the day. We pottered round the shops, took in the Tor and enjoyed a rare day of company together without bickering or falling out. Excursions like that virtually never happened and nor for that matter did harmonious days, but at the time I didn’t really even think about why he was making the effort. I wasn’t too bothered anyway; all the stress of the exams was melting away and I had a whole summer of loafing to look forward to. This was just going to be the first in a series of lazy days. A lot of things only make sense with hindsight, and this was no exception, though normally they don’t become clear quite as soon as the following day.

This one, however, did; my parents sat their two children down on the charmless velour sofa and told us they were divorcing, and nothing was the same after that. It wasn’t helped by the fact that the four of us had an uneasy year ahead of us, forced to continue cohabiting because the house proved almost impossible to sell. Every night, sitting either side of the line between the tectonic plates in our front room, we would niggle and gripe at each other before going upstairs to our bedrooms where, I imagine, my mother and father would lie there, either side of the line between the tectonic plates on the mattress.

The previous announcement changed my life every bit as much, if not more. When I was about eight years old, my parents sat my brother and me down and told us we were leaving Bristol. My dad had got a new job, and we were going somewhere new and exciting that I’d never heard of. It was called Reading.

“It’s next to the M4.” said my dad, by way of explanation. All that conjured up to me was a tiny house tucked under a flyover, walls constantly shaking from the continual throb of traffic.

In reality, we moved to the suburbs and I don’t really remember Reading very much at first. It was a place you went to buy your school uniforms rather than somewhere to soak up the bright lights. And in any case, back then there were no bright lights. This was before chain pubs invaded the high street, when the poshest restaurant in town was the Berni Inn on the corner and the pubs were called The Boar’s Head and The Tudor Tavern and were full of bikers. In the case of the Tudor Tavern there were at least a couple of regulars who might well have remembered the dissolution of the monasteries.

It was only in the summer before university that I started to fall in love with my adoptive home town, mainly because of Hannah. In some ways, it was all her fault. Hannah was one of the first girls I made friends with from school. She had a full length purple coat, small John Lennon spectacles, short hair, a pair of colossal jugs it was difficult to take your eyes off and a tiny mole on her chin which I happened to find quite enchanting. She was sharp, smart, funny and totally convinced that there was nothing she didn't know (in the time since then, I've come to realise that a useful shorthand for that particular collection of adjectives is "my type"). It’s safe to say that everybody fancied her, but I was the one she was friends with.

I used to spend happy evenings round at her house, sitting out on the patio drinking or walking her dog with her in the park after nightfall. I’d have dinner with her and her family, and I always felt welcome. She had a bearded socialist dad who she worshipped. He had a slightly lazy eye and used to fall asleep in his study while listening to Tom Waits. Her mother looked a bit like Maggie Smith and was always lovely to me - I used to be quite well-behaved and shy, back then. I always got the feeling she would have loved her daughter to fancy me but knew perfectly well, because her daughter was just like her, that Hannah never would. The looks she gave me were a complex mixture of sympathy tinged with a suggestion that I might have got off lightly.

Hannah was my induction into Reading life. She and I would catch the number 65 into town and go drinking at the 3Bs, a cellar bar just off the market square. She had gone to Henley College, out of town and an exotic bus ride away every day, and fallen into a new crowd of pink-haired, Doctor Martened women the likes of whom would never have featured at our safe suburban comprehensive. They were a circle of lively, opinionated women, and I was more than happy to go along with her and join in their discussions.

I was Duckie rather than Blane to her, the funny platonic friend, but it was good enough for me. It was one of my first experiences of trying to fit in in surroundings far more sophisticated than me and the eighteen year old me, all bad t-shirts, dodgy trainers and pints of cider and blackcurrant, wouldn’t have realised that it was probably always going to feel a little like that. It was also by no means going to be my last experience of being pigeonholed as the funny platonic friend.

After closing time, Hannah and I would walk all the way home from the centre of town, past the library, down the long road past the technical college, over the junction and past all the gaudy flashing lights of the golden mile of kebab joints, grotty pillars of gristly meat revolving in window after window, along the perimeter of the cemetery and out to the edge of the motorway, next to the industrial parks.

There seemed to be more fields, less flats and less industrial estates back then, because although it ostensibly looks similar, the world was a very different place twenty years ago. And then, gone midnight, in the still of a summer evening, we would climb one of the ladders by the side of the quiet dual carriageway and sit up on one of the signs above the road, feet dangling over the edge, talking for what seemed like forever about all the things we were going to do when we got out of this town. When you’re eighteen, you believe all that Moon River stuff.

Reading only plays a supporting role in this story, it is not the central character. What I really learned from all of this is something different; some friendships last forever, some friendships don’t. And for the ones that don’t, even if you can’t necessarily trace their decline you can usually point to their apex. Ours was that summer - those walks in the park, drinks in the cellar, cups of tea on the patio and climbs up that ladder. Our friendship lasted several years after that, but it never again reached those literal or metaphorical heights. I learned one other thing from Hannah: because I fancied her, I used to borrow records from her. But because I knew she would never fancy me, I only pretended to listen to half of them.

She was true to her word - she eventually got out of Reading and I imagine, like some I went to school with, that she only comes back now at this time of year. She’ll probably step over the tinselled threshold in the next week or so to visit the bearded dad and the fierce, funny mum that I tried so hard to charm half a lifetime ago, husband and kids in tow. I am quite the opposite; no family visits for me this year, just a taxi to an airport and a Christmas Day spent waking up somewhere new with the call to prayer echoing from the minarets. But the rest of the year, I’m still here in Reading. I kept coming back and never quite escaped the way I thought I would, but that’s a different story. Maybe next time.