What happened to the happy little boy?

"What happened to the happy little boy?"

It wasn't a question Mum asked me. It was a question she asked Sarah.

A couple of weeks after we'd separated, Mum had gone round to the house and refused to leave until she got some answers. She wanted to know whether it was her fault that I'd become, in her words, "angry, unapproachable and arrogant."

I wasn't there. I was about five miles away when my phone rang. It was Sarah, speaking quietly from another room because Mum was sitting in the living room.

"I don't think I have the right to answer these questions."

I remember exactly how that sentence landed. Not because I suddenly knew what Mum was asking, but because I knew what the answer was.

There are phone calls where your life changes before you've even put the phone down. This was one of them. I got in the car already knowing I was about to have a conversation I'd spent thirty years making sure never happened.

By then, I'd already lost almost everything that mattered to me. The business I'd spent eight years building had collapsed around me and I'd spent months unravelling under the weight of watching it happen. I'd drunk myself into becoming somebody who was increasingly difficult to love, and Sarah had finally, quite understandably, reached the point where enough was enough.

I was living in a mate's spare room, carrying around the sort of depression that convinces you you're not suicidal because you want to die; you're suicidal because you're absolutely convinced that everyone else's lives would simply become less complicated if you just ceased to exist.

The truth is, I was a happy little boy, as far as I can remember. We lived on a quiet suburban road in a three-bedroom, end-of-terrace house at the bottom corner of a square of almost identical houses overlooking a green, with a lay-by at the top end where parked cars formed a barrier between the road and the grass.

Mum and Dad had moved down from Sheffield in 1986 when my sister, Lisa, was about a year old. Dad worked as an engineer for a firm called James Walker and had taken the opportunity to relocate from South Yorkshire to their Woking office. In doing so, he became the first member of the family to break ranks and leave the area. Then I came along in March 1987.

The first Southerner.

A trailblazer. An exotic new breed.

The houses around us were occupied by a mixture of young families with children around the same age as Lisa and me, and older couples whose children had either grown up and moved out or had never existed in the first place. At any given time there were probably a dozen kids scattered around the square, separated by no more than eight or nine years from youngest to oldest, and that green was our Wembley, our Lord’s, our Twickenham and our Brands Hatch.

When the weather was decent, there was always something happening. Footballs flying into front gardens. Tennis balls being launched over the bowler’s head for six and disappearing into the road. BMXs and mountain bikes being entered into the same completely unregulated race class and sent careering around a jumper-marked oval circuit with absolutely no regard for braking distances, helmets or basic survival.

It was great. The early nineties in a nutshell.

If the green became boring, we expanded our territory to the block of garages that served the square and the little offshoot roads around it and played Manhunt, because Hide And Seek is for babies.

Sometimes the boys would form a temporary coalition and spend an afternoon beating the piss out of each other in a game of British Bulldog, while the girls, usually led by Lisa, collected fallen rose petals from the front gardens and dropped them into buckets of water to make “perfume”.

Coco Chanel must have been quaking in her stilettos.

If we were lucky, we'd be chucked a few coins of loose change by a parent and a few of us would wander down to “Pete’s”, a shop a couple of hundred yards away on a little parade alongside a hairdresser, greengrocer and butchers. Pete had jar upon jar of pick and mix behind the counter with old fashioned scales for weighing them into white paper bags, and a little section to the right of the till filled with penny sweets. Strawberry laces, Flying Saucers and Fruit Salads were my weapons of choice, or a Sherbet Fountain if I felt like going to the fucking moon.

It all sounds a bit twee written down. A bit Hallmark-card idyllic, perhaps, but I remember it being genuinely fun. There was always somebody outside, always something to do, and very little need to be anywhere other than the few hundred yards surrounding our front door.

And, for a while at least, I don't remember feeling like there was anything particularly wrong with me at all.