Low Expectations

I was born by lamplight in my parent’s bed. I apparently tried to resist entering the world by thrusting my head backwards. My mother believed this caused some brain damage explaining my subsequent dysfunctional behavior and problems with reading and writing. Like Dickens’s Pip my name was shortened and I became Seb, which my childish dyslexic brain and dominant left eye reversed. The resulting gender reassignment gave my siblings much sadistic delight.

It is now difficult to imagine that a village, only fifty miles from London, on the Great North Road, in the middle of the twentieth century, had no mains electricity. It was also without a modern sewage system. A tall laconic man called Vim, I thought after the cleaning product, would empty our chemical lavatory each week. Every Saturday he would arrive grinning and stand awkwardly on one leg at our back door in a grubby collarless shirt and suit, shiny from use. Half a century later, wandering through the village churchyard, I came across the gravestone of Vincent ‘Vin’ Eliot. Alas poor Vin I did not know him well enough to get his name right.

Ours was clay country. Down by the brook that ran through our village I made my