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Doncaster, romance and heading south Doncaster, romance and heading south
(5 months later)
"Romance is alive and well and living in Doncaster" is not a sentence I'd ever envisaged myself writing, but an Amazon report this week named Doncastrians the biggest consumers of romantic fiction in the country. Yet some of the most romantic moments of my life were spent holding a boy's hand on a Friday night at the ice-skating disco in Doncaster Dome. At 14, you'd think that the danger of toppling over and breaking your face in front of all your peers would be a mood killer, but it just added to the frisson of teenage lust that hovered over the place."Romance is alive and well and living in Doncaster" is not a sentence I'd ever envisaged myself writing, but an Amazon report this week named Doncastrians the biggest consumers of romantic fiction in the country. Yet some of the most romantic moments of my life were spent holding a boy's hand on a Friday night at the ice-skating disco in Doncaster Dome. At 14, you'd think that the danger of toppling over and breaking your face in front of all your peers would be a mood killer, but it just added to the frisson of teenage lust that hovered over the place.
Janice Turner, fellow Yorkshirewoman turned southerner, doesn't see it (paywalled link). She reacted to the news by collating 228 of the English language's most withering words into a newspaper article about the town in which she (and I) grew up. The words "monstrous" and "lewd" both feature. She argues that people in Doncaster read romantic novels to escape their cripplingly unromantic lives, while her own escape is made bodily, on a train, although by the sounds of it, she'd walk if she had to.Janice Turner, fellow Yorkshirewoman turned southerner, doesn't see it (paywalled link). She reacted to the news by collating 228 of the English language's most withering words into a newspaper article about the town in which she (and I) grew up. The words "monstrous" and "lewd" both feature. She argues that people in Doncaster read romantic novels to escape their cripplingly unromantic lives, while her own escape is made bodily, on a train, although by the sounds of it, she'd walk if she had to.
I don't blame her, really; it wasn't an easy place to grow up if you had artistic sensibilities and, like her, I made my escape, aged 18. Unlike her, however, leaving hasn't made me think of it as some hellish backwater where hope goes to die.I don't blame her, really; it wasn't an easy place to grow up if you had artistic sensibilities and, like her, I made my escape, aged 18. Unlike her, however, leaving hasn't made me think of it as some hellish backwater where hope goes to die.
Don't get me wrong: my memory is full of bands of children roaming the "backs", the tarmacked alleys between rows of terrace houses, warring among themselves with stones and sticks and swear words they didn't understand. And sleepy-eyed teens smoking weed on recs or shagging at abandoned-house parties or kicking glass from smashed bus stops at passersby. Doncaster is the birthplace of MC Devvo, David Firth's satire on the northern asbo-teen. His YouTube videos, which feature Firth in character as Devvo rapping about drinking cans of Kestrel, went viral locally, and are so darkly reminiscent that most people thought Devvo was a real person.Don't get me wrong: my memory is full of bands of children roaming the "backs", the tarmacked alleys between rows of terrace houses, warring among themselves with stones and sticks and swear words they didn't understand. And sleepy-eyed teens smoking weed on recs or shagging at abandoned-house parties or kicking glass from smashed bus stops at passersby. Doncaster is the birthplace of MC Devvo, David Firth's satire on the northern asbo-teen. His YouTube videos, which feature Firth in character as Devvo rapping about drinking cans of Kestrel, went viral locally, and are so darkly reminiscent that most people thought Devvo was a real person.
Nestled into a bend of the M18, the village I grew-up in is midway between Doncaster and Rotherham. It is an former pit village, where people are born and bred and die, and where the community is banded together by more than geographical proximity: there were 1,500 kids in my comprehensive and everyone was someone else's cousin, in some way. Apart from me. I was born in Romania but moved to South Yorkshire as a five-year-old, when my mother married my English stepfather. My outsider status, then, was set from the start.Nestled into a bend of the M18, the village I grew-up in is midway between Doncaster and Rotherham. It is an former pit village, where people are born and bred and die, and where the community is banded together by more than geographical proximity: there were 1,500 kids in my comprehensive and everyone was someone else's cousin, in some way. Apart from me. I was born in Romania but moved to South Yorkshire as a five-year-old, when my mother married my English stepfather. My outsider status, then, was set from the start.
Not that family was any guarantee that you were an insider – or safe. Once, in my junior school, a girl came in completely bald. She was nine years old and her father had shaved her head; she said that she didn't know why. More than once I remember children being hurried into school by a teacher during playtime because a parent had turned up, drunk, at the gates. So many families had issues: alcohol, drugs, depression, unemployment, abandonment. It was a mash of poverty and small prejudices and – probably worst of all for me and my friends, who lived, like Deborah Orr, sheltered by our "respectable working class" families – a chronic rejection of anything considered "pretentious". So all-pervading was this wariness that when I told the school careers lady that I wanted to be a journalist, her response was "OK. Well, have you thought about teaching?" A few weeks later, a careers prediction test told me I was destined to become either a cloakroom attendant or a lorry driver's assistant.Not that family was any guarantee that you were an insider – or safe. Once, in my junior school, a girl came in completely bald. She was nine years old and her father had shaved her head; she said that she didn't know why. More than once I remember children being hurried into school by a teacher during playtime because a parent had turned up, drunk, at the gates. So many families had issues: alcohol, drugs, depression, unemployment, abandonment. It was a mash of poverty and small prejudices and – probably worst of all for me and my friends, who lived, like Deborah Orr, sheltered by our "respectable working class" families – a chronic rejection of anything considered "pretentious". So all-pervading was this wariness that when I told the school careers lady that I wanted to be a journalist, her response was "OK. Well, have you thought about teaching?" A few weeks later, a careers prediction test told me I was destined to become either a cloakroom attendant or a lorry driver's assistant.
So, I get it. The urge to escape where you're from, to expand beyond those confines and, like Orr said of Lanarkshire, reject "that passive acceptance" of previous generations, can be irresistible. It's about finding freedom by defining yourself as something opposite to the attitudes that constricted you as a child and teenager. For Orr, this meant following her dreams into academia, despite her parents' reticence. Similarly for me, this has meant overcoming (something I'm still trying to do) my fear and distaste of appearing "pretentious", of appearing to have desires beyond my station.So, I get it. The urge to escape where you're from, to expand beyond those confines and, like Orr said of Lanarkshire, reject "that passive acceptance" of previous generations, can be irresistible. It's about finding freedom by defining yourself as something opposite to the attitudes that constricted you as a child and teenager. For Orr, this meant following her dreams into academia, despite her parents' reticence. Similarly for me, this has meant overcoming (something I'm still trying to do) my fear and distaste of appearing "pretentious", of appearing to have desires beyond my station.
I'm just not sure if I believe in Turner's brand of freedom, where leaving your home town also means turning against it. What purpose does it serve to knock and deride a place publicly that you know is blighted by poverty? As well as further highlighting how London-centric the media has become, Turner ignores the fact that Doncaster is surrounded by some of the most beautiful, wild countryside in England and populated, in the most part, by people who smile at each other in the street and say thank you to bus drivers.I'm just not sure if I believe in Turner's brand of freedom, where leaving your home town also means turning against it. What purpose does it serve to knock and deride a place publicly that you know is blighted by poverty? As well as further highlighting how London-centric the media has become, Turner ignores the fact that Doncaster is surrounded by some of the most beautiful, wild countryside in England and populated, in the most part, by people who smile at each other in the street and say thank you to bus drivers.
For every unruly, vile-tempered kid who called me a boff and a snob for going to the library to do my school work, I now know at least one self-important private schooler, slurping on a flat white, bemoaning their bad luck at being born a few years too late to make it really big in the City and going to work coked-up twice a week. And I'm guessing, in a few years, their kids will be the ones ensconced in steamy romances, desperate for an escape from the militant learning of numbers and charts as their parents prepare them for lives in offices on the Square Mile.For every unruly, vile-tempered kid who called me a boff and a snob for going to the library to do my school work, I now know at least one self-important private schooler, slurping on a flat white, bemoaning their bad luck at being born a few years too late to make it really big in the City and going to work coked-up twice a week. And I'm guessing, in a few years, their kids will be the ones ensconced in steamy romances, desperate for an escape from the militant learning of numbers and charts as their parents prepare them for lives in offices on the Square Mile.
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