“Serves them right.” Someone said. A sentiment shared by all it seemed.
“Yeah, serves them bloody well right.”
It was 1977. The year of our Queen Elizabeth’s Jubilee. Celebrations would take place in the summer.
This was a different kind of participatory activity. A day of reckoning.
The Morgans were a married couple in their thirties with three children. They lived at the bottom end of the road. In ‘rented accommodation’, which, by all manner of standards, was akin to a mortal sin. From the get-go the Morgans were classified a ‘problem family’.
Soon, slanderous barbs passed from lip to pursed lip. In those days adults talked quite freely within earshot of children – as though the youngsters didn’t matter. The Morgans were a feckless lot. Not to be trusted. The father (Jeff) couldn’t hold down a job. And his wife (Brenda) was a ‘maneater’, wore her skirts too short, her heels too high, was a ‘walking cleavage’ and, allegedly, had men round on the days her husband was at work.
The Morgans were scumbags. Kim was the eldest daughter. Ergo, Kim was…
I’ve avoided syllogisms ever since.
Granted Kim’s clothes carried a musty smell, as though they’d never been properly dried and aired. Didn’t stop me walking to and back from school with her. (Lingering kisses in bus shelters). Or nipping into the town centre for a spot of shoplifting. Using a sewing needle, Kim pierced my left ear; she gave me an ice cube to numb the pain. My parents went spare, told me to stop hanging around with “that Morgan girl”. Fat chance. Kim was the best thing that had happened to me. Just turned 14 – two months my senior – she was blossoming into young womanhood. Her androgynous beauty had me spellbound. We were a British Bonnie and Clyde for a while.
Burly bailiffs came that day and loaded up a small van with the Morgans’ meagre belongings. Jeff Morgan pushed a rickety handcart piled precariously high with clothing. His wife, Brenda – for some reason barefoot – at his side. The younger boys waddled like little pigs behind them. Kim had her head bowed in shame.
And, as the good neighbours – my mum included – cheered and jeered the poor family’s piteous departure, a cloud drift massed, as if from a mountain-top where a ceaseless god gazed.
I never saw Kim again.
It was, for me, an initiation into the grown-up world of opprobrium, tacit understanding, reasonable judgement. The real stuff.
It had been brewing for months.
Was I complicit? Partly to blame?
I could have wrenched my teeth out.