My homemade childhood: All I wanted was not to be weird!

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/may/10/my-homemade-childhood-wanted-not-to-be-weird

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In 1979, when I was nine, nylon was my barometer. If you wore it you were normal and proper like everyone else I went to school with. If you dressed in corduroy and cotton homemade clothes, then you were a little weird like me. It was the white nylon socks I envied most. I'd sit on the school wall and stare down the row of girls lined up beside me – bare, scabby knees proudly displayed above them – and I'd covet those socks.

I wanted to eat white sliced bread, I wanted a haircut with flicks instead of a wonky pudding basin.

But more than anything, I wanted a pair of knee-high white nylon socks, the kind with hexagonal holes in them, like honeycomb. My mother, cruelly, dressed me in tights, the thick woolly kind that had a tendency to slip down, gusset sagging to the knee. No one else wore tights, so I stood out with my wool-covered knees. I didn't want to stand out, I wanted to be exactly the same. Nylon possessed an elusive kind of glamour – it shone in the sunshine, it crackled when you moved – and audible clothing was the apex, the absolute pinnacle of sophistication to me.

In 1972, my parents moved from a small terraced house in north London to a farmhouse in rural north Wales. They wanted a different, simpler kind of life they say now. They'd had me and my sister was about to be born, and they wanted their children to grow up with space and freedom. My father worked in advertising in London; he ran a business in Islington part-time and wrote a novel from home – a casual, laid-back 70s kind of arrangement, the sort of thing you could do then. My mother was a silversmith; she set up a workshop and made jewellery, grew vegetables and foraged for food. We were leading an alternative lifestyle, or that's what I grew to understand, and alternative meant hippy to me.

My parents weren't hippies exactly, but to me they were worryingly on the brink. In 1970s Clwyd, land was cheap and available, the countryside wild and beautiful, so it was ideal: the perfect place for hippies to set up communes.

My parents were friends with the hippies and looked like hippies themselves, with their flowing hair and flapping trouser legs. They ate like hippies too. Everything was homemade but I wanted food from a packet, covered in orange breadcrumbs ideally: Crispy pancakes and Angel Delight. Branded, important, talked-about food. My suburban grandparents agreed. In their eyes, picking mushrooms from the fields was a desperate, shameful thing to do: "Why didn't you tell us you needed mushrooms?" my poppa said. "We could have brought you some from Liverpool – from a shop!"

I have a memory of sitting in the back of my mother's orange 2CV with my new friend Wendy on our way to the leisure centre in town. I was delighted that we were going to show Wendy our centre – she'd just moved from Manchester. It was a modern building – flat-roofed and concrete, like something you might see on television. A la mode, as our neighbour Olive liked to say. I thought Wendy would be impressed: our future friendship was in the bag.

"You're going to love the leisure centre, there's a kind of robotic machine in the foyer!" I whispered to Wendy, clutching at her Rayon sleeve, which felt enviably slippery to the touch, "It's got packets of pickled onion Monster Munch in it, and Revels and all you need to do is put a coin in and press a button and they fall into your hands! Can you believe it?"

"Vending machine. Big spill," said Wendy, rolling her eyes. "We had them in Manchester you know," she said.

It was all going quite well, I thought, until my mother ruined everything by turning a tape on. I felt the sickening lurch of embarrassment as Tom Waits's voice reverberated around the car: low, rasping and shame-makingly, horribly unusual. It was music that said: I like brown food and non-slippery clothing and I don't like to brush my hair.

"Who's this?" Wendy whispered, from behind a held-up hand.

"Elvis," I hissed back: the first deep-voiced singer that sprung to mind.

"Bugger off! No way!" she said, a triumphant edge to her voice, eyes shining. She was delightedly sure I was lying, I could tell.

"Elvis Costello, I meant," I said, desperate – at least he was in the charts.

"Liar, liar, pants on fire!" said Wendy. "Anyway. He's weird, whoever he is, and he can't sing for shit," she added. My cheeks stung – "weird" was the swearword to me.

Wendy came from a normal family. Her mother liked proper pop you could dance to, such as Abba and Dr Hook. Olive – respected and beloved by everyone, including me – listened to chart music too and loved Cliff Richard, who was so popular and handsome he even had his own calendar. Olive knew all the words to We Don't Talk Anymore off by heart: every single one. That was normal.

Now, as a mother of two children, aged eight and 10, I'm often reminded of my childhood desire to fit in, and I'm surprised – dismayed even – at the ease with which I've betrayed my nine-year-old self. These days I choose cotton over nylon. I inflict homemade food on my children and even, from time to time, Tom Waits (guaranteed to make my son mock vomit). My daughter came home from school recently pink with fury. It was my fault she said; indignant hand on hip. I wasn't a fair mother. Why did I make her wear tights? Everyone, she said, all her friends at school, wore awesome knee-high white socks.

I'm bringing my children up in the city and theirs is a very different childhood from mine: busier, more pressured and competitive, and that doesn't sit well with me. Benign neglect, that's what we had, my sister and I: space to think, fields to lie in, time to make up endless role-play games. And I think it served us well.

More and more I'm drawn to doing what my parents did: upping sticks and moving to the countryside. I'm not alone, many of my friends dream about it too. I picture us finding a house in the middle of nowhere, somewhere with a vegetable garden and overgrown hedgerows and nettles to turn into soup. I have some kind of fanciful idea that life in the country will be simpler somehow, especially for my kids: a nuttily naive notion, I see that too. They could just as well be bored out of their minds and so could we. Still, I fantasise about it all the same, as I drink my coffee in the cafe so handily sited a few metres from our back door.