A Life More Ordinary

Running backwards, forwards and sideways in time.

recent posts

Writer. 52 years old with a tendency to overthink and overshare. Likes to create worlds and people. Dad. Survivor. Rubbish at writing bio entries.

  • Good as Gold (Stupid as Mud)

    A recent image of the playing fields at Devonport High School

    My first year at Devonport High School (where all first-year students were affectionately and more often than not less-than-affectionately known as ‘scruffs’) was arguably my most productive in terms of output and behaviour. I was keen to get on and experience what would be my first taste of prolonged stability in an educational establishment. I had planned to keep my head down as much as possible and try my best in all subjects and I more or less succeeded in this aim, save for a few ‘minor’ incidents. At the same time, this determination was coupled with a desire to avoid the treatment that I regularly saw meted out to other ‘scruffs’ in bustling corridors or less well-populated toilet cubicles.

    I was quick to work out which subjects interested me. English (no surprises there), Biology, French, History and P.E. all produced varying degrees of success in that first year, but Chemistry, Physics, Latin, Maths, Geography, Music and Religious Studies were tedious and in some cases entirely unnecessary in my opinion. During that first year, we were ‘treated’ to an extra lesson, once a week, where we would read classic Greek tales aloud while overseen by the school headmaster, the hour-long experience imaginatively named ‘Headmaster’s lesson’. The head at DHS at the time, Mr. Peck, was a stern, upstanding citizen of a very definite type of moral fibre while not possessing a particularly puerile sense of humour (which he had no reason to, being an adult over the age of 50!) nor an understanding that most 11 and 12-year-old boys would inevitably find something amusing among the classics. Unfortunately, I would be the one to discover this absence of compassion.

    I’ve always been a quick reader with the ability to skim ahead while taking in information as I’m going along. On this particular afternoon, early in my secondary school life, Mr Peck came gliding into the classroom, as was often his way, long, black robes trailing behind him, his silver hair following suit, catching the light of the early autumn sunshine that was shining in through the large ground-floor windows of C Block. Peck, whose quiet authority hid beneath fearsome eyebrows and an imposing stare, was not big on emotions and was clearly a believer in discipline being an effective form of communication and as such, interactions with him and instructions from him were often few and far between. A handful of us were convinced that he was a robot, put in place by the powers that be to cover up his entirely fictional classified death from perhaps a freak boating accident. But I digress.

    Sadly, time prevents me from recalling exactly what we were reading aloud from, but I was already dreading my turn, not exactly brimming with confidence in my new environment, but as sure as eggs is eggs, as the saying goes, the finger of fate finally pointed in my direction.

    I began to read, timidly, my voice laden with uncertainty, my eyes following the steady progress of my finger across the page while I also scanned what was to come. At this point, I feel it necessary to remind you that we were a class of 11-and-12-year-old boys, the reason for which will become apparent when I tell you that halfway down the page that I had recently begun reading from, the word ‘bosom’ leapt out at me. Next to me, on my right shoulder, Patrick Pollard, full of mischief and barely suppressed joy, had already clocked the impending embarrassment and mirth, attempting to hide his glee at what was inevitably going to descend into disaster. My heart sank to my stomach as Patrick, his mouth hidden behind his hand, began to excitedly whisper ‘bosom’ over and over again. By the time I reached the damn word, I had no chance, and ‘hilarity’ ensued as I lost what little control I possessed and began to giggle.

    That giggle gradually descended into chaos and spread around the classroom like a Mexican wave as I tried repeatedly to complete the sentence. Carnage ensued as everyone took full advantage of the opportunity to misbehave on the watch of the most senior figure in the school and Mr Peck decided I was ultimately responsible for it. With tears now streaming down my face, struggling to contain hysterical laughter that I was powerless to hold back, I was sent on my way to wait outside Peck’s office for the subsequent bollocking, which in hindsight probably wasn’t much of a bollocking at all, but when you’re 12 years old and feel like a tiny fish in an enormous pond, things can often seem very different. And let’s face it, ‘I’m sorry, sir, I just found the word ‘bosom’ extremely funny,’ isn’t really much of a defence, is it?

    While that should have been the end of it, a one-off, unfortunate mistake, the following week I was picked out to read again (first up at the start of the lesson and directed to read the exact same passage that had previously troubled me, which shouldn’t have been a surprise) and, seated next to Patrick once more, I discovered how exceptionally adept he was at whispering the word ‘bosom’ and remaining undiscovered as the perpetrator of my distraction and subsequent humour. I didn’t even get anywhere near the troublesome paragraph as I struggled from the off, thanks to my peer’s sly shenanigans and the almost electric air of anticipation inside the room. In years to come, I would liken these moments to the scene from the Life of Brian, where Pilate and the Centurion are discussing ‘Biggus Dickus’ and the guards are slowly losing their battle to contain their obvious mirth. This particular scene of mine would replay for a further two weeks before I finally managed to get to the end of the section I was reading without interruption and aching ribs, aided by the absence of one Patrick Pollard.

    Physics was fun, said no one, ever. We had a teacher, Mr Gibson, who was absolutely off his trolley and terrifyingly unpredictable. If in later years he’d been arrested for mass murder, I wouldn’t have batted an eyelid. He clearly loved his chosen subject (well, you’d have to, wouldn’t you?) and would randomly become over-enthused about many of the finer points in and around the physics world while his hair would mirror the wildness in his eyes. In our first lesson, he decided in his wisdom that the ‘p’ in my surname was in fact a ‘b’ and called me ‘Hebburn’. I unwisely decided to correct him and he disputed my claim that I knew my own surname better than he did and subsequently spent weeks calling me by my newfound moniker and nurturing an unhealthy aversion to me. Until, that is, I took to calling him Mr Gibbon, at which point we undertook an uneasy truce. You get my name right and I’ll do the same for you, you strangely excitable madman.

    The following year, in the same subject, I would inherit the giant of a man who was Mr Harrington, who would despise me in a similar manner while breathing coffee fumes over me and plotting my demise. Always dressed in a brown suit with a nose that would glow in varying shades of red and purple, we took an instant dislike to each other that would have two years to develop into a substantial loathing. My grasp of the finer points of Physics was feeble to say the least, but it always felt as though he would save the most difficult questions for me and then savour my struggle, feeding off my pathetic as I attempts to explain whatever it was that I clearly didn’t understand. If I asked for help, it was never forthcoming and eventually I just gave up. At the end of Year 3, I could hardly drop Physics fast enough.

    Of the three sciences, Biology was the one that appealed most to me, but even that interest was sporadic. After that relatively successful first year, I discovered that I possessed an exceptional talent for not being able to keep my gob shut and pissing off teachers with uncanny ease. Some teachers were more patient and thick-skinned than others and on the odd occasion, my attempts at humour raised a smile and an eyebrow or two. Looking back, I think that was one of my biggest issues, the fact that I loved to make people laugh and if I thought of something ‘funny’ to say, it was more of a struggle not to let it escape from my cavernous maw. Essentially, I was probably a nightmare to teach and I think I can say with relative certainty that if ever my name was mentioned in the staff room, it would have been followed by the words ‘little’ and ‘shit’. I do regret my inability to apply myself in certain situations and I’m certainly anything but proud of how I behaved at school. I was by no means the worst, but I could have been so much better and maybe if I had been, it wouldn’t have taken me forever to work out what I wanted to do.

    On reflection, and there has been a fair bit of that over time, I think that I was looking for positive interactions and by making people laugh, I was certainly getting that. The problem was that it was at the cost of my own education and reputation. I can remember hearing Geordie comedian Ross Noble, saying that if you thought of something funny to say but didn’t say it, it was the equivalent of committing a terrible crime. I imagine that I was subconsciously having that internal struggle without the social skills to determine when it was the right time to chip in with my observations and opinions. The surge of pleasure that I would get from making others laugh essentially outweighed any potential punishment.

    Back on topic, Chemistry bored the living daylights out of me, despite the use of Bunsen burners and various chemicals. For three years, I ‘enjoyed’ a fractious relationship with Mr Sanders, a bespectacled disciplinarian with a neat combover, who didn’t suffer fools gladly. He was swift to mete out punishment to anyone who would misbehave and his favoured method of retribution was to demand the production of ‘two sides’ of lines upon the subject of one’s transgression by the start of the next lesson. The call of ‘two sides, four sides, double it, double it,’ was often heard during our lessons and even more often mimicked as we scurried away from the chemistry lab after the bell had signalled blissful release from our temporary incarceration. If the aforementioned ‘two sides’ weren’t produced by the villainous scum of 3S (if my memory hasn’t failed me), then the punishment would be doubled and demanded by the start of the next lesson and so on.

    And so it went:

    ‘Hepburn, have you done your two sides?’

    ‘No, sir.’

    ‘Four sides, then. Double it, double it!’

    I had no desire to ‘take on’ or beat the system and realistically, this should have been the point where I accepted my punishment, however unfair or ridiculous it might have felt at the time. For some reason, however, I made a different choice. Looking back, and knowing what I now know about parenting children and young adults with autism, I wonder if there was a degree of PDA around many of the choices I made (and in some cases deliberately avoided making) during my time at DHS. I’m not sure whether or not a diagnosis would have made a rat’s arse of a difference, but it was not something that was ever discussed.

    The following week would once again see the tediously repetitive exchange take place once more, Mr Sanders slowly cranking up his levels of frustration and displeasure to the point where I thought he genuinely may have considered setting fire to my blazer while I was in it.

    ‘Hepburn, have you done your four sides?’

    ‘No, sir.’

    ‘Eight sides, then. Double it, double it!’

    It took until the point where I reached 128 sides that were by now horrendously overdue, along with several threats of missing break times, lunch times and anything else that mattered to me, before the following exchange took place at the end of a lesson once everyone else had vacated the lab.

    ‘Hepburn, have you done your 128 sides?’

    ‘No, sir.’

    A pause and a long, drawn-out sigh from Mr Sanders, who looked very much to me as though he was questioning many of his life choices. Primarily, teaching.

    ‘You’re not going to do them, are you?’

    ‘No, sir.’

    ‘Why not?’

    ‘Because I don’t want to, sir.’

    Strangely, after that, we wordlessly agreed to a truce. I’d keep my mouth shut during Chemistry lessons and he’d leave me alone. I suspect that we were both relieved when my options came around and I chose Biology as my science.

    Copyright Alec Hepburn, 2026.

  • I’ve Come for My Award

    I’ve been trying to collect my thoughts before moving on to the next part of my story. Walking through my early years has left me feeling bruised as I have uncovered more memories than I expected and reliving the times when I was on the receiving end of violence or worse has saddled me with a deep, cloying sadness that I am unable to shake off.

    The thing about the physical violence is…after a while, it loses its shock. You can begin to see it coming, anticipate it. Recognise the signals. For me, it was always a reaction to something, so I learned to watch my father and to try to keep one step ahead of his anger. There were times when this worked and many others when it didn’t. Essentially, I was a child trying to learn adult strategies and implement them into my life. To this day, I still select where I sit in rooms with half an eye out for trouble on the horizon, giving myself both the best line of sight to anticipate any problems and the best chance of dealing with them.

    Of course, I was by no means a saint and there were times when it could be argued that a ‘punishment’ of sorts was justified. Whether or not that punishment should have been physical is obviously up for debate and one particular occasion sticks in my mind to this day.

    I must have been about seven years old, still attending Inverteign Junior School in Teignmouth, so we’d have still been living at Kingsway. I was no stranger to adult life; we were regularly exposed to bad language and sexual content, some of which, the swearing especially, was often a hot topic of conversation in the playground. During one of these conversations, it was suggested that if I wanted to make my father happy, which he obviously wasn’t during this time, I should share with him a particular phrase which he would find hilarious.

    I was intrigued. Was this the much-sought-after magic solution that would lift me from those darkest of days? Could it ease my troubles and set me on the path to a ‘normal’ life?

    Well, no, it couldn’t. Because unbeknownst to me, I was being totally and utterly set up and I bought it completely. As the school day came to an end, I merrily trotted through the gates and made the short walk home. As I reached the back door, I knocked and waited, butterflies in my stomach as I prepared to solve all of the problems in my tiny, pain-filled world. My Dad pulled open the door and looked at me.

    ‘Dad,’ says I. ‘I learned two new words at school today.’

    ‘Really?’ Came the reply. ‘What were they?’

    I paused for maximum effect and braced myself to be showered with love and to be raised high upon his shoulders as some sort of saviour.

    ‘Fuck off!’ I proclaimed, proudly, and watched as his face turned slowly purple and the same fury that had led to the ‘cricket ball in the face’ and the ‘falling down the stairs’ incidents descended swiftly.

    With my heart breaking, I made the seemingly wise yet ultimately futile decision to leg it. Down the steps, up the garden path that I had been well and truly led down, out of the gate and beyond. I would probably have been better served by taking my punishment there and then. Instead, he was left with time to stew on my misdemeanour. When I finally returned home after about three hours of freedom, I was dragged up the stairs, given a hiding and had my face shoved in a sink full of water while my father shoved half a bar of Palmolive in and out of my mouth. And the worst part of all of that? I still had no idea what I’d done wrong.

    I know that it was ‘the way of things’ back then. But what exactly did it teach me?

    I think it taught me that I couldn’t trust anyone. It taught me that soap doesn’t taste very nice, either when it’s being forced down your throat or when it’s on the way back up afterwards. It left me bewildered and confused. I was told this was a good thing, but it clearly wasn’t and in amongst the shouting and the hitting, there was no explanation. So I had to draw my own conclusions and more through luck than anything, I resolved to stay away from the phrase ‘fuck off’ for a considerable amount of time.

    What was beyond my father at that time was the ability or perhaps the inclination to educate me. Would it have been more effective to sit me down and discuss what I had done and why I shouldn’t have done it? I don’t think that I was unreasonable as a child and I honestly believe that I would have responded far better to reason than I ever did to his more ‘traditional methods’.

    On reflection, however, at least I knew where I stood with the violence. It was straightforward, even if I didn’t always understand why I was taking a pummelling. It was obviously because I’d done something wrong, I just had to work out what that was and not do it again.

    The other stuff was far more confusing because it wasn’t so easy to anticipate and sometimes it came from nowhere. Or worse, it came out of love. Or what we thought was love back then and let’s be honest, it wasn’t like we were inundated with good role models in our family.

    I think that I must have spent a large part of my childhood silently raging at the injustice of my world. I was always a thinker and, I suspect, always a worrier, but I worked out very early on that there was something very wrong about the way that I was being parented and that if I ever got the opportunity to be a father myself, I would never repeat those mistakes. Of course, I say that I was silently raging because there was no benefit to voicing my anger and my frustration, as it would only provoke the inevitable reaction. I wonder if that’s why I’m vociferous against perceived injustice these days, having been so quiet for so long; it’s quite the revelation when you finally learn to make a stand. And I can still remember the day that I made a stand against my father and strangely enough, I’m reasonably sure that it was around the time that I became a father myself. Twenty-six years ago.

    We were visiting my Dad and Brenda at their house in Plymouth and he was trying to wind me up to get a reaction from me. I think we were watching something on television that I was interested in, but he wasn’t and he kept prodding and poking my leg. Small-time stuff, but it was really irritating. Eventually, I got to my feet and stood over him.

    ‘If you do that again, I’ll fucking lay you out!’ I said, having to check that it was my voice saying those words. I braced myself, suddenly seven years old again and waited for his response. He tried to make light of it, saying that he was just messing about, but the Universe shifted in that moment and I would never be made to feel the way I did when I was a child again. I had made my stand and that was enough. If only it were that easy to exorcise the ghosts of my childhood.

    Copyright Alec Hepburn, 2026.

  • I Don’t Like Cricket…

    At a guess, eight-year-old me as a right-handed slogger.

    For as long as I can remember, cricket has been a massive part of my life. Watching, playing and finally moving into coaching the game has presented me with many memorable opportunities that I look back on with fondness, pride and occasionally, a little regret. And now, as my cricketing journey begins to come to an end, I find myself reasonably content with my lot. There were more good days than bad, which I suppose must count for something.

    The infamous Test at Headingley in 1981 was the first ‘jumping on point’ that I remember, although prior to that, my love affair with cricket was very nearly ended before it had properly begun. In our tiny back garden in Teignmouth (I would hazard a guess that it was barely ten yards in length), we would occasionally have small, family games. The only one that sticks in my mind, however, is the one where I received a frightful injury at the hands of my father.

    Picture the scene, a short, rectangular garden with a shabby lawn on the right and an uneven concrete path running down the centre as the wicket. Three steps doubling up as ‘stumps’ at the end of the path (down the slope, a little like Lords!) leading up to the garish, yellow, back door and a coal bunker at short fine leg. A tricky deck to bat on, no doubt and dad was first up, a not unusual occurrence. I bowled the ball, in all likelihood with a suspect action at the age of maybe seven, proper cricket ball mind, no tennis balls allowed. The ball hit a crack in the path at no great speed but jagged off at an angle into my father’s shin. Did it hurt enough to warrant what followed? I doubt it, but as was often the case at 178 Kingsway, reason and logical thought scurried for cover and shepherded in rage and fury as their substitutes.

    The minute that the ball had hit Dad, I knew I was in trouble. That was the way of things. I apologised immediately, aware of the futility of my protestations as he hopped around the garden as though Dennis Lillee had just snuck a vicious inswinger through the gate and caught him on the crease minus pads.

    Eventually, the dust settled, Dad’s face resolute, his jaw set sternly as he pointed the bat at me.

    ‘Come and stand here,’ he said, indicating a position that even silly mid-off would baulk at. Suicidal mid-off more like.

    I shook my head, butterflies blooming in my stomach and the palms of my hands beginning to sweat. He ordered me into position again and once more I refused. One more demand and I was left in no doubt what my punishment would be if I refused. My three older sisters watched on in silence, perhaps grateful that they hadn’t suffered the misfortune cast upon me by the crack in the path. I shuffled slowly to the spot that he had indicated, my feet like lead and tears pricking at my eyes. He threw the ball to one of my sisters, I couldn’t tell you which one and told her to bowl the ball.

    You probably know what’s coming. I thought I did, but for whatever reason, I don’t think that what happened next was what my father had planned. Even now, I feel like I’m making excuses for it, trying to make it seem that it wasn’t that bad. But it was. What fills a grown man with the need to hurt his own child after he has been accidentally hurt by them still escapes and haunts me in equal measure to this day. He did have a difficult life and upbringing, and his actions were often a consequence of what he suffered as a child. But there is always a choice, isn’t there?

    The ball was bowled slowly and I watched as my dad raised his bat to strike the ball. I tell myself that his intention was merely to replicate the injury that I had inflicted upon him, that maybe the ball hit the same crack in the path that mine had and caused him to hit it differently. The ball thumped into the middle of his bat and ricocheted off into my face, smashing into my nose and right eye socket.

    Cue an intense, searing pain, the seeing of stars and the pouring of blood as I fell to the floor. I have no memory of anything immediately after the impact but I’m told that I couldn’t see out of my right eye for a couple of weeks and that the swelling and bruising was what they termed as ‘severe’ even back in the late seventies when nothing hurt anyone by all accounts and life was ‘so much better’.

    So, realistically, I shouldn’t love this daft, old game that can see five days of play with no winner. The sport where you can take part, do nothing or worse, do something and fail abysmally yet still come back the following week for more. It’s a game where one will fail far more than they will succeed, but the highs, those ruddy glorious days where fortune favours the brave, the edges race to the boundary and the one-handed, diving catches stick make every bad umpiring decision, every mistake and every soggy afternoon sheltering from the elements worth it. I can’t explain why. I just find it’s best to believe it.

    Copyright Alec Hepburn, 2026.

  • A Good Day is Hard to Find

    With my mother at Kingsway, Teignmouth.

    Well, then. We’re now into what was Chapter Two of the book before it became a blog. So far, so good.

    Now we come to one of the things that I’m most afraid to share. So, why share it on a public blog, you may well ask? Justifiably too, because I’m not sure that I can give you an answer. Perhaps it’s because I’ve committed to telling my story that I feel it should be an honest account of who I am. Warts and all, so to speak. And I’m certainly stubborn enough to stick to it if that is the reason. Perhaps, in trying to make sense of who I am and where I’ve been…perhaps I’m hoping that you might do a better job of making sense of it than I am or have done. Allow me to ask a favour before you read any further, though. Please tread gently.

    If you’ve read this far on my blog, you’ll be well aware that there were numerous incidents in my childhood where I was on the receiving end of some particularly unpleasant, violent abuse. I don’t really like to call it that, but let’s be honest, it’s what it was. My father also suffered horrendous abuse as a child, far worse than anything that I went through, but that shouldn’t diminish the impact of the events that took place. The ones that I’ve shared so far. What I will say is that, for all of his faults, what I’m about to share had nothing to do with my father. Not the other stuff. I have long since accepted that there are many things that I will never uncover about my childhood. Too many people are missing and too many rivers have flowed under far too many bridges. And I have blotted many things from my memory. Some things really are best left alone.

    The problem with reflecting on one’s life and digging for memories is that it can unearth some truths that were not meant to be remembered. We’re encouraged to talk these days, aren’t we? Some of these truths were unearthed a long time ago, yet they were impossible to resolve. Even less chance of that happening now, but…this comes back to me wanting to understand why people do the things they do. There are memories that I am still discovering to this very day, some of which I have never shared with anyone.

    And now I have a choice to make. How exactly do I share this? I’m not going to give many details; I don’t feel it’s necessary. I’m pretty sure that everyone can paint their own pictures.

    There were times during my childhood, numerous occasions, where the abuse was not just violent. As I said earlier, I’m not sharing details, not because I don’t remember what happened. Much of it is as clear now as it was back then. I just don’t think it’s necessary. Some of these incidents are also as confusing now as they were all those years ago. Some of them are not. Some of them are easier to understand, some are painful and shameful. Some people should have known better. Some, arguably, did not. I also know that I am not the only one in my family to have gone through this. It doesn’t make it any easier, but it definitely makes it worse.

    On a fairground ride during a holiday in Selsey. My stepfather is in the background.

    Here’s the thing. When you are starved of affection, you can believe that any sort of attention is good. When you are vulnerable, when you believe that you are nothing or nobody…when someone ‘sees’ you or makes you feel something, anything, then you’re already at risk. Reading that back, it sounds a bit like I’m victim-blaming myself, except I don’t think of myself as a victim. I try to avoid doing that.

    As a child, you are taught to respect your elders. Respect adults. I appreciate that we’ve moved on from the likes of ‘speak when you’re spoken to, ’ and when I say that I appreciate that, it’s because a large part of my early years were lived under that exact mantra. Or perhaps ‘do as I say, not as I do’ would be nearer the truth. Adults are supposed to be…our protectors? Our teachers, our guiding lights. But what happens when they are not?

    When I consider the things that happened to me, I suspect that I’ve just picked at the scab. It’s still there and it hurts. I’m afraid to look at it, it makes me feel…sad and ashamed. And I don’t know for sure what’s beneath it. I don’t want to remember, which I suppose is new territory for me. Some things that happened were ‘low level’, I suppose. Some things were less so.

    And suddenly, I begin to understand why I find social situations difficult, why I struggle to maintain friendships and relationships. My trust is easily won because I want to think the best of people, but it is also easily lost. I am defensive and prickly and I will stand up for what I believe in. Not because I think it makes me a better person. Not to impress anyone. Not to be awkward. But because I refuse to let anyone make me feel as though I only deserve the worst that life has to offer.

    I refuse to let anyone make me feel the way that some people did when I was a child. Unimportant. Lonely. Insignificant. Abandoned. Unloved.

    In my fifty-odd years on this globe, I have overcome a destructive, jealous streak. I have loved and I have lost, many times. I have hurt and let down those dear to me. I have made so many mistakes. I have self-harmed and I have contemplated ending my life. I have been kicked when down, been hurt more than I thought was possible and I’ve been betrayed by people whom I thought I could trust, time and time again.

    So if I am combative, brusque, opinionated and forthright, it’s because of all of those things. If I can’t quite hide my disappointment or my sadness at the way that events transpire, it’s because of all those things.

    If I am distant and I hide away…if I think that people don’t like me. It’s because of all those things and more. I am complicated. I am hurting, still. I am ashamed because I don’t feel as though I deserve to feel pride or happiness. I feel underappreciated, I feel unseen. I feel alone. I am 52 and I am eight. I am moving forward one day at a time, yet I am trapped in the prison of my past. I am nothing, I am nobody. I am afraid.

    But I am me.

    Copyright Alec Hepburn, 2026.

  • Strange Glue

    The football pitch at Bishopsteignton Primary School.

    Football at Bishopsteignton was a big thing for me. I suppose that I was a bit unusual in that I could use both feet, so would often be employed at left-back in the absence of anyone else who was genuinely left-footed. I was stronger with my right, but was comfortable enough with the ball at my feet to not need to just use the one foot. We took part in a number of six-a-side tournaments, winning a couple and I think I’ve still got one of my medals somewhere among the multitutde of boxes of paraphernalia that I’ve collected over the years. We had a decent team, with Christian Cook in goal, I think Justin Bannister in defence and Cameron Groves in midfield/attack. From memory, Cameron was a very talented young player but sadly, I have no idea what happened to any of my teammates after I left.

    I’ve never been very good at keeping in touch with people, something I’m told that nowadays suggests that I have issues with object permanence, a more concise way of saying ‘out of sight, out of mind’. This has continued to plague me throughout my adult life. I’m quite a solitary person and it doesn’t take much for me to convince myself that if I don’t hear from people, they probably aren’t that interested in spending time with me or communicating with me anyway – I mean, I’m me, so why would anyone want to socialise with me and my associated issues (horrendous overthinking and social awkwardness while keeping a constant vigil anticipating the next sign of trouble). Even though I know it’s illogical, it’s so deeply rooted inside me that it’s one of the few habits/issues that I’ve really struggled to overcome. It could easily be solved by just messaging friends, couldn’t it? Even more so in this day and age, but when you’re convinced that you’re not worthy or even likeable, it’s a very slippery slope to attempt to surmount. I suppose in some ways that it’s partly tied up to that loneliness I felt during those long evenings in pub gardens or any number of similar incidents that I experienced as a child and I find it difficult to talk about because I feel that it makes me appear needy or as though I’m searching for attention. Nothing could be further from the truth. But once again, I digress. Back to the football.

    There was one game that stands out in my memory, a home game up on the pitch that sat atop quite a steep hill, which made it ‘fun’ when the ball got kicked out of play on one side of the field. During the game in question, we were attacking but I was hanging back on the halfway line when the ball was cleared up field in my direction. I waited patiently as half a dozen or so boys ran en masse towards me, bunched together as was often the case in primary school football. As the ball dropped, I swung my right foot at it, lashing it skywards more out of hope than anything else and watched in stunned silence as it arced up and away, clearing the opposing goalkeeper and sailing into the net. I didn’t score too many goals in my time, but that was probably the most memorable.

    There was another game where we were battering the opposition and we won a corner on the left. I’d been told that I was on corner duty, so I swung the ball into the middle of the penalty area and stood watching the melee that followed until one of our players scrambled the ball over the line. The whistle blew, which at first I thought was to indicate that a goal had been awarded, but our teacher and referee, Mr Dunn, with his tufts of fluffy, white hair sat either side of a bald patch the size of Bulgaria (I offer my humblest apologies if my memories of Mr Dunn’s appearance are misplaced, it’s been an awfully long time and so much has happened), instead chose to give offside against me as I hadn’t moved from the spot from which I had delivered the cross and by the letter of the law back then, I was offside, despite the fact that I could hardly be deemed to be interfering with play from where I stood. I wonder if the game had been a tighter affair whether or not he would have made the same decision.

    Around the time of that game, along with Christian and Cameron, I was invited to play for the county side. I was reliant on a lift but we got delayed on the way and when I arrived at the game we were already losing and it was approaching half-time. I had little time to warm up and prepare before being thrown into the fray and while I didn’t have a bad game, I obviously didn’t do enough to warrant being selected again. Had I not turned up late and been able to prepare properly things may have been different, but ultimately I was never much more than a useful player, certainly not a standout, but I loved the game and that was good enough for me.

    We did make it to a couple of county cup finals and I remember the morning of one game where I had spent the previous night throwing my guts up with a raging temperature. I was never allowed days off school, but even if it had been on offer, I wouldn’t have missed the final for anything. I somehow dragged my body off my sick bed and played three quarters of the game before being subbed and promptly vomiting at the side of the pitch. We lost 4-2 and I was absolutely gutted when I was told by the teacher that I shouldn’t have played because I was sick. It was the only time that I was ever disappointed in Mr Dunn but on reflection I suspect he was as disheartened by the defeat as we all were. I think it also reflected my own frustration as I felt that I had let him down.

    My time at Bishopsteignton came to an end around eight months before I was due to head off to secondary school, I think. By this time, Dad, who was back in work at a nursing home in Newton Abbot, had started seeing Brenda, who would go on to be his second wife. Things were changing at home and a far bigger shift to our circumstances was on the horizon.  I think that he was offered a job in Plymouth by an old friend of his, Alex Campbell, so we packed up our belongings and we said goodbye to the village of Ideford (even writing about it now makes me feel sad). One thing that didn’t properly register until many years later was that we left Korky behind with our former neighbours. She was in her twilight years by then and the new flat that we were moving to didn’t allow pets. I hope that she was happy during the remainder of her life and that she managed to avoid particularly woolly and hazardous jumpers.

    My new school, Pennycross Primary School seemed nice, although it took me some time to settle in. It was here that I finally learned how to swim, by no means an easy task given my previous troubles in water, but with the aid of several floats and an understanding teacher, I somehow managed to complete 25 metres of the school pool, crawling along with the equivalent of an aqua Zimmer frame and not a little humiliation before finally managing to progress to 50 metres without the need of flotation devices.

    The pool at Pennycross Primary School.

    I went straight into the school football team upon my arrival and in my first game I managed to score a spectacular own goal, putting in a full-length slide in a watery puddle to intercept a through ball only to divert it past my own goalkeeper and watch in horror as it trickled over the line, sodden shorts riding up my arse crack to complete the somewhat pathetic scenario.

    Following my move to the new school I took and passed my 11 plus, which gained me a place at Devonport High School for Boys, news which thrilled my dad far more than it did me. Having already studied at four schools by this time, the prospect of another ‘fresh start’ wasn’t really doing much for me.

    After a couple of months in a flat at Mount Gould, we moved into a house opposite Pennycross Primary in Springfield Crescent – adjacent to the place where dad would be working, a home for mentally handicapped children that the kids in my year at school had ‘affectionately’ and horrifically nicknamed ‘The Mongol Mansion’. The house was nice enough and the big green opposite was useful for games of football and cricket. It was also a relief to be living so close to school after the endless bus journeys to and from Ideford. It took some adjusting to living in a city and once again having to try and form new friendships.

    By far my most exciting discovery at Pennycross, was the fact that there were girls at the school and some who were occasionally mildly amused by my irresponsible and immature shenanigans. Neither did they seem to find me as repulsive as I thought I must be, which opened up a vast and daunting landscape to traverse. There was one girl in particular who I took a shine to, Joanne Kenny (time has dimmed my faculties in the last 41 years, the Joanne may have been missing an ‘e’ and her surname may have been Kelly but I’ve gone with what my instincts tell me is correct). In my mind’s eye, she was slim and of a similar height to me with long, brown hair and an intelligence that burned fiercely behind keen eyes. I feel reasonably safe in the assumption that she probably remembers little to nothing of these events, but they stuck with me because again, I look back disappointed in the way that things transpired. I think we had arranged a date, which for two eleven-year-olds back in 1985 probably involved going into Plymouth City Centre and generally mooching about the place. To say that I was inexperienced in such matters would be a huge understatement, but nevertheless, I was excited by the prospect of taking a real, live girl out for the first time.

    Before the prearranged date took place, however, fate intervened, in the shape of one of my few friends at my new school. I’m not going to name him, but he took me to one side to share some ‘important information’ with me ahead of my keenly-anticipated rendezvous with Joanne. He told me, in the strictest confidence of course, that Joanne had epilepsy (foreshadowing one of my darkest days in the future). Despite being the child of parents who worked as nurses, I had no idea what this was or how it presented, so my friend kindly gave me the details as best as he knew them, asking if I’d considered what would happen if she had a fit while we were out together, which might lead to serious injury or worse, death. Obviously, I hadn’t and my normally loquacious self was stunned into ponderous silence. If I’d possessed even half a brain cell back then, I would have asked Joanne about it, but in my perceived wisdom, coupled with a resurgence of crippling self-doubt, I decided that it would be rude and disrespectful to seek such information and by far the best way of dealing with any potential danger or discomfort for either myself or Joanne, was to simply not turn up to the date.

    I can almost hear you, dear reader, calling me a prize twat as you take this in. I think it myself. Joanne was inevitably furious and it was only after a robust exchange of views, mainly hers, that I realised quite how badly I had fucked up. There I was, socially awkward, lonely and misunderstood for much of my life and the first time that someone had given any inclination that they might like me, I’d acted like a complete knob. In fact, I’m not even sure that Joanne did have epilepsy and somewhere deep in the furthest, most repressed corners of my memory, something lurks to say that she didn’t and that my friend had advised me so readily because he was also carrying a torch for her. In the grand scheme of things, these fledgling flutterings of romance likely amounted to nothing other than a distant memory for me, who spends far too much time recalling such events and a random story told in a book that the other two protagonists will probably never read anyway. Which probably sums up my life in a very complicated and misshapen nutshell.

    Aside from the previous incidents, I remember so little of my time at Pennycross, save for a rather strict teacher named Mr Barrett, whose wrath I recall incurring at some point, probably due to my inability to keep my cavernous gob shut. What didn’t help, was that Mr Barrett looked a little like the American actor, Geoffrey Lewis, who played Mike Ryerson in the 1979 miniseries of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, which I saw on first broadcast in the UK in 1981 (I think!). It terrified the shit out of me but instilled in me an absolute love and fascination with horror.

    The actor, Geoffrey Lewis, as Mike Ryerson from Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot.

    A few months later, I saw Mr Barrett on a bus into Plymouth city centre and we had a conversation that changed my opinion of him. It’s so easy to just see teachers as professionals in education and I wish that I’d thought more about this during my schooldays. I would imagine that I was probably quite difficult to teach and my time at Devonport High School did little to dissuade me of that notion even to this day. I was by no means the worst behaved in any class but I had developed a simple approach to each subject that I studied. If it interested me, I would work hard and if it didn’t, then frankly I couldn’t be arsed. Sadly, I didn’t possess the skills to keep a low profile and do what was necessary to avoid getting into trouble. I was easily bored and loved to make people laugh, so whenever the opportunity arose to entertain my peers, I generally seized it.

    Sometimes I would get away with it and teachers would be momentarily amused and other times my mouth and glib sense of humour would bag me a detention or two. Looking back, I could and should have done more and worked harder, although I’m not convinced that I would have ended up anywhere else other than where I am now. Ultimately, I think that I was always supposed to either end up in sport or become a writer and I believe that I’m fortunate to have found myself with the opportunity to dabble in both areas! Whether or not I’ve been successful is for others to judge, but both career paths have given me moments of happiness. For someone who is not blessed with confidence or self-belief, that’s generally as good as it gets! However, now that my time in cricket has come to an end, I look back with mixed emotions, hoping that in time the good memories will outweigh the bad. If nothing else, that time has given me more stories to tell.

    Copyright Alec Hepburn, 2026.

  • There is Always Something There to Remind Me

    Bishopsteignton Primary School, Devon

    School days, we are often told, are the happiest days of our lives. I hope you’ll forgive me if I disagree!

    Primary school, to me, was an endless stream of navigating mini-popularity contests while trying to work out what the fuck was going on with myself and the world in general, a harsh lesson on the fallibility of human nature and the innate tendency in a percentage of the population to attempt to impose their opinions and restrictions upon others. I wouldn’t say that I was ever one of the popular kids, always worried about being wrong so I would never raise my hand to answer a question in class, which probably said more about the fact that I was continually led to believe that I was either stupid or worthless than it did about any actual ability that I may have possessed. Break times were generally spent playing football and avoiding anyone who looked like they might be trouble. The constant threat of being on the receiving end of an unprompted wallop refining my instincts to spot any potential issues from several miles away to an almost supernatural level.

    My memories of Inverteign Junior School, scene of my first foray into the education system, are more than a little hazy. I have vague recollections of a girl called Emma, who came round to Kingsway after school one afternoon, where we spent a good half an hour sliding down the back of the sofa onto the cushions below and laughing uncontrollably at the fact that we were being allowed to do so – normally any such behaviour would have elicited a hefty clip around the ear (for me, obviously, not my guest). By all accounts, I often cut a forlorn figure in the playground, avoiding crowds and instead preferring to sit by a flight of steps, watching all of the drama unfold before me while wishing that I was somewhere else. I remember nothing of the lessons, but one lunch time, while standing in the dinner line, a girl called Sarah, who had short hair and a round face, pushed me out of the way and took my place in the queue. I pushed her back and thought nothing of it until I felt myself lifted off my feet by the collar of my shirt and found myself levitating backwards, zooming further and further away from my much-needed lunch and down corridors towards the headmaster’s office. However minor my misdemeanour had been, I had made the fatal mistake of transgressing in full view of Mr Last, the aforementioned headmaster, who might not have ruled with an iron fist, but pretty close to it. In my memory, he looked like a younger, slimmer Ricky Tomlinson but was far less avuncular than the popular Scouse actor.

    Once in the office, I was deposited upon the floor and told to stand in silence as he looked me up and down with an icy stare. He pulled open the drawer of his desk and took out the cane, laying it carefully and precisely down on the desk in front of him. No stranger to pain or violence by now, my stomach lurched in an all-too familiar way and tears sprang to my eyes. I knew better than to protest my innocence, it was pointless.

    Whether or not Mr Last took pity on me I’ll never know. Perhaps he knew of my situation at home, my older sisters were or had been in attendance at the school. Or maybe the stars just aligned in my favour for once. But whatever the reason, I escaped physical punishment by the skin of my teeth. I was, however, left in no doubt as to what would happen if I were to behave in such a manner again, especially towards a girl.

    Thinking back now, that must have confused me. We’re taught that physical aggression is wrong and that violence towards women and girls is rightly unacceptable. So how did that square with what I witnessed at home? For clarification, I’m not excusing what I did and it was totally right that I got pulled up on it and neither am I suggesting that aggression towards women or girls is acceptable in any situation. Perhaps confused is the wrong word because I knew that my father’s behaviour was unacceptable. Anyway, it was a harsh lesson, but an entirely necessary one, especially given what I would regularly witness or be on the receiving end of.

    Our move to Ideford would see me leave Inverteign and head to Bishopsteignton, which sounds not unlike the title of a new Sunday night period drama on the BBC. By this point, I had already had a short spell at Colgate Primary School after Mum’s initial aborted attempt at leaving the family home and I wonder if chopping and changing schools at this point in my life made it difficult for me to establish and maintain friendships, something that I’ve always struggled with.

    At Bishopsteignton, things were arguably much smoother than they had been previously, although the long bus journey to and from school meant that I was having to get up even earlier, tricky during the summer months after evenings in the pub garden and the subsequent late-night conversations.

    My memories of the actual school itself are patchy, vague recollections of queueing for thin and watery semolina with a blob of strawberry jam floating in the centre swim among half-remembered conversations and the occasional misdemeanour. What I do remember is that I had an affinity with books and was good at spelling, while plenty of time on my own nurtured my love of writing stories.

    P.E. was generally fun, although I remember one ‘gym’ session where we had to vault over the long ‘horse’. I’m sure those of you of a certain age will remember it, it was always put out ‘lengthways’ and would essentially lead to young boys attempting to clear it with a jump off a badly placed springboard and more often than not end with them squashing their knackers as they landed with a thump on the padded top.

    The vault, my nemesis at Bishopsteignton

    There I was in my ill-fitting kit and black pumps (which, believe me, was a blessing in those days as the punishment for forgetting one’s P.E. kit was to do the lesson in one’s pants – boy or girl, they didn’t tend to discriminate when shaming kids), staring nervously at the springboard and the seemingly enormous obstacle in front of me. I’d previously struggled to get anywhere near the end of the horse, let alone completely over it. On this occasion, filled with a mixture of fear, hope and resignation, I charged off towards the springboard and timed my jump perfectly, riding a wave of elation as I soared into the air like a scrawny eagle, almost clearing the vault. Almost. I caught my arse parts on the back end of it and felt an intense stab of pain shoot up my cheeks and spine before landing flat on my face on the floor beyond, unable to do anything but roll around and wail in agony for a good two minutes. Eventually, I was helped up and guided towards the school office, my face streaked with tears and what little dignity I retained shattered into tiny pieces.

    Dignity at primary school is, in my opinion, highly overrated. School discos were the perfect environment to suffer both shame and embarrassment. I’ve never been a dancer but have always been reasonably happy with my lack of rhythm and co-ordination, settling instead for looking ‘thoughtful and sophisticated’ while cradling a pint on the outskirts of the dance floor. I love the thought of dancing, of being able to express oneself with finely timed and co-ordinated movements but I just can’t do it and am convinced, probably with good reason, that any time I attempt to move around in time to music that I look like a poorly co-ordinated twat suffering random body cramps.

    But once, in my innocence and naivety, I decided to give it my best shot. I couldn’t tell you for one minute what I was wearing to the aforementioned disco, but aside from a time that I will come to later, I’ve never really been blessed with sartorial elegance and neither were we particularly well off as a family. In all honesty, I was probably still in my school uniform, but with Adam and the Ants blasting out of the DJ’s speakers I was enthused enough by the rhythm of Goody Two Shoes to ‘throw some shapes’ if I may be permitted to use the slightly more modern vernacular. Quite what those shapes were is anybody’s guess, but I suspect that they were being thrown along with a healthy dose of undiagnosed autism and probably appeared more than a little camp. Undaunted by my lack of skill and rhythmical co-ordination, I continued to whirl about like a boy possessed, who had just been plugged into the mains, careering into two nearby teachers and catching two plastic cups full of squash with my flailing arms, sending them soaring into a nearby crowd of girls who were shuffling about in a far less enthusiastic but ultimately more graceful and attractive manner than I had been managing. Soggy screams cut across Adam Ant and his ponderings about exactly what we did if we didn’t drink or smoke and once again I found myself dragged from the scene of the crime, my shoes sliding forlornly through the trail of spilled squash and my dancing career entering a pretty permanent hiatus.

    One other thing that I discovered at Bishopsteignton was that I had a natural propensity for finding trouble. There comes a time in the life of every primary school child where they make that wonderful discovery that their teachers are real people and as such, have real names. Those of us who are or were deficient in the social skills that seem to come so readily to the ‘confident, symmetrical geniuses’ that all classes have would inevitably come a cropper when making this discovery. Whether that be falling out of reality upon seeing a teacher out of their natural environment and doing something mundane like the weekly shop and being unable to complete a coherent…whatever or worse. And I’m sure that you can guess that I inadvertently took the path marked ‘Here be Dragons’.

    We’ve all had those horror moments in class, haven’t we? You know the ones I mean, when you accidentally call your teacher Mum or Dad or a variation thereof. We had a new teacher arrive at the school, Mr Glenny, who took over the football team from lovely, but elderly, Mr Dunn as well as some of his classes. One morning, after being entrusted with returning the register to the school office after registration, I handed over the manilla folder, which in my head contained top secret documents, as one of the office staff was talking to the aforementioned suavely attired Mr Glenny, with his immaculately coiffured side-parting and his softly spoken voice.

    ‘Morning, Dave,’ said she, full of the joys of spring and perhaps with a slightly flirtatious tone in her voice. That last part might be completely untrue, but it reads a little better and all good stories need a love interest.

    I gimbled in fascination at the discovery of my teacher’s first name. This was incredible. This was bigger than finding The Ark of the Covenant, more wondrous than the treasure of Sierra Madre and second only to finding white dog poo in the playground. I was Indiana Jones without the whip and fetching hat. I was suddenly in possession of information that might make me cool.

    Cool has always been overrated and ultimately unattainable in my book, but in that moment this previously unheard knowledge made me king of the school. I strutted back to the classroom, if such a thing is possible at the age of ten, down corridors that glistened in glorious sunshine and I’m pretty certain that somewhere a crowd roared in celebration at the gladiator’s return. This was A MOMENT! A moment not to be wasted. Of course, that information was eager to escape from my tightly pursed lips, keen to be set free to be whispered in cloakrooms and giggled at beneath the basketball posts. But this wasn’t just a moment, this was MY moment, so the timing had to be perfect. Somehow, I held on to this forbidden gem until that afternoon, I navigated the treacherous territory of break and lunch time to get to the afternoon lesson.

    Homework had been submitted a couple of days previously and as was the case when it had been marked we were called up to the front of the class to collect our books. I sat in silence as those with surnames beginning with the letters A-G were called up ahead of me, a confident smirk upon my lips, content that I was about to wow everyone with my secret intelligence on the relatively new teacher…

    ‘Groves…’ My friend, Cameron, trotted obediently to Mr Glenny’s desk to collect his book before turning on his heel with a quiet ‘thank you, Mr Glenny’ and returning to his seat.

    ‘Hepburn…’ I was out of my seat like a shot, feet gliding across the thin, brown carpet, certain that I was about to be lauded among the hallways of Bishopsteignton forever, that this moment of mine would be the talk of the town forever. I reached out to take the tatty, pink book, butterflies bursting into existence in my stomach.

    ‘Thank you…Dave…’

    Silence fell in an instant where there should have been raucous laughter. If the absence of grinning faces and excited murmurings didn’t instantly tell me that I had massively fucked up, the hand on my collar dragging me out of the classroom did. The lesson was short and sharp but the punishment was effective. No football training after school and I missed the next match a week later. But I swear that as I looked down at my shoes, my shoulders slumped as I issued a mumbled apology that Dave Glenny had a smirk and just the tiniest trace of admiration on his face.

    Copyright Alec Hepburn, 2026.

  • Strangeland

    The church in Ideford

    I mentioned in ‘Living a Boy’s Adventure Tale’ my fear of water. From memory, I was always quite cautious as a child. Nervous, timid. During the summer holidays, we would regularly visit the beach at Teignmouth, both when we lived in the town and in Ideford. I found the beach a bit of an ordeal. Always have done. I’ve never been a fan of sand in my shoes and neither do I really enjoy sitting around doing nothing.

    As a young child, I couldn’t swim and at no point had I shown any inclination to attempt to do so. I didn’t like getting my face wet and certainly didn’t like going underwater, finding the process completely overwhelming and disorientating. During the mid-to-late seventies, there was a Lido in Teignmouth and I also think I remember a smaller pool on the seafront, along from the pier (which fascinated and terrified me in equal measure). It was at this smaller pool that my dad and a friend of his, who we knew as ‘Uncle Joe’, who certainly wasn’t our uncle, decided that they would ‘teach me’ how to swim. Part of the problem with Joe Kennedy, a gruff, handsy Yorkshireman who regularly smelled of beer, was that he was neither a particularly thoughtful nor sensitive person and even after all these years, I harbour a distant sense of distrust of the man. Something I can’t put my finger on, but something unpleasant beneath the surface.

    So, in brilliant sunshine and scorching heat, with me in my little spotted trunks at the age of maybe five, screaming my head off once I realised what they had planned, I suddenly found myself launched into the air by Joe and my dad from the side of the pool towards the centre. They reasoned that if I needed to learn how to swim to survive, I would do so. Well, somewhat unsurprisingly, I didn’t. As I landed in the pool, I sank straight to the bottom, cold water flooding into my open mouth and up my nose. Distant, muffled shouts and screams from other nearby swimmers filled my senses among the forest of legs and the taste of chlorine. The cold water inside me felt decidedly peculiar as I thrashed about trying to locate the surface, my heart beating wildly as I swallowed yet more water and I suddenly realised that I was going to drown. People say that your life flashes before you when you are about to die. I can neither confirm nor deny this statement and can only assume that I must have passed out, because I have no memory of being dragged from the pool or any subsequent events immediately following my narrow escape.

    Because of that moment, I still have a fear of water. I did learn how to swim in my last year in primary school, clinging to a polystyrene float and creeping my way along the twenty-five-metre length swimming pool with my neck stuck out of the water to keep my face dry looking, I suspect, a little like a paddling giraffe. Even as an adult, I despise going underwater. I have twice managed to swim in the sea, in Malta and Cyprus and I have loved the experience. But it has always been accompanied by that one memory and that fear. I’m not a strong swimmer, but I’m glad that I can swim. The irony of that whole incident in Teignmouth is that I’m not even certain that my dad could swim and may have been equally afraid of water, so whatever possessed him to try and ‘teach’ me in such a way is beyond me. One of many mystifying decisions from my childhood.

    Back in Ideford and the even smaller village of Luton, many evenings were spent at The Elizabethan public house, or to be more specific, the garden of The Elizabethan for me. Having been barred from The Royal Oak in Ideford (I have no idea why, but John, the owner, still allowed me to buy dad’s cigarettes for him and would occasionally give me a bar of chocolate along with the strict instruction to eat it before I got home, acts of kindness that have never been forgotten). John seemed very much to me a ‘gentle giant’ of a figure and from what little I recall, he couldn’t have looked any more like a publican if he’d tried. I would later base the character of Arthur, landlord of the Ivyford village pub in the early chapters of Stand Against the Dark, on John. A lot of my past has gone into my books so far.

    As a consequence of his exclusion, Dad had relocated to nearest alternative drinking hole, probably at least a mile from home, where he would spend the evenings drinking while I was abandoned in the pub garden with a coke and a bag of crisps for the whole evening, running around and kicking an imaginary football or sitting at a wooden table waiting for eleven o’clock to finally come around. It seems crazy these days to talk about a child being left alone in a pub garden for five hours or so and if anyone had taken me, he would have been none the wiser until closing time. If anyone ever wonders why I have such a vivid imagination, it’s likely the result of those soul-crushingly tedious nights when I was sat freezing on my own on a wooden bench – I had to do something to entertain myself and dreaming up stories was a necessary means of escape.

    The Elizabethan Inn, Luton

    There was one evening in particular that stuck with me, after my Dad had told me that he’d given up smoking. I had timidly pulled open the door of the pub (despite having been told not to do so) and saw him sitting at the bar, happily puffing away on a Rothmans. I don’t know why that moment broke my heart more than some others, but I suspect it was the deceit, the fact that he’d promised me something and didn’t seem to care when I discovered that promise was broken. It was at a time when I think we had learned about the dangers of smoking at school and, because of my mental state at the time, I was terrified that he would get lung cancer and die, leaving me alone.

    After closing time, we would walk/stagger home and once finally back at number one Church Road, I would be told to sit down on the sofa while dad told me how much he regretted things about his life and essentially, he would pour his heart out to me. He’d cry and lecture me on a multitude of things that I didn’t understand before, eventually, I’d have to help him up the stairs to bed and undress him, tucking him in and making sure that he was ok before I could then hit the sack myself. I’ve often thought that during those times, there was an awful amount of role reversal and I arguably had to parent way before I should have had to do so. It must have been very difficult for him too. Looking at it now, it’s obviously quite a complex relationship. He was so closed to me most of the time and only when he’d been drinking would he allow himself to be vulnerable, while any sign of vulnerability on my part would be dismissed. Those late night conversations were only ever a one-way exchange of views and experiences. Obviously, I had to grow up very quickly and I lost a large part of my childhood during this time and while the things that I went through made me the person I am today, it’s hard not to feel that I was robbed of something.

    The Royal Oak, Ideford

    Fortunately, during the winter, visits to the pub were less frequent. I guess it was a step too far for me to have to sit out in the garden in the cold and the dark! I was still expected to go out on the ‘cigarette run’, but on such occasions, I discovered a new form of entertainment. The village church was on the way to the Royal Oak, but I had no need to go through it; I could just as easily have made my way to the pub by staying on the main road, such as it was. However, with my love of horror and the paranormal already well-nurtured, it was far more entertaining to go via the poorly lit graveyard. I would push open the rusty gate, wincing as it screeched out in protest before slipping into the darkness beyond. Looking into the alcove at the church entrance, I cast a wary eye over the scene, hoping that nothing was moving in the shadows, enjoying the feeling of not-quite-terror yet not-quite-excitement crawling across my skin! Then, as fast as I could, I would charge along the path, gravestones flashing by in my peripheral vision, accompanied by imaginings of skeletal hands pushing up through the earth and fruit-soft flesh peeling from blood-stained bones while spirits of the long departed snapped at my heels all the way to the lych gate, which I would bolt through and slam shut behind me. Having survived the ordeal, I would then make my way to the pub, pay for dad’s cigarettes and make the four-minute walk home, sometimes brave enough to traverse the graveyard once more, but more often than not giving it a wide berth, reluctant to taunt any ghosts and demons a second time.

    Saturdays were my favourite days in Ideford but they could go one of two ways, depending on the result of the Sunderland game during the football season. We’d get the newspaper (Daily Mirror) and my copy of ‘Champ’ comic delivered around 8 o’clock, so breakfast was spent with me enjoying the latest instalment of ‘We Are United’ and ‘The Sinister World of Mr Pendragon’. During the summer, I’d then be out in the garden until the start of play in the Test Match and most of the day would then be spent watching Fowler, Gower, Botham et al in action against whichever side was touring at the time. Around three o’clock, the ice cream van would pay its weekly visit to Church Road and I’d get my usual order (spot the autism) with my fifty pence pocket money before returning to the cricket. At the close of play, I’d be back in the garden either bowling at the sticks that doubled up as stumps or kicking a ball around whilst pretending to be Bryan Robson (this was pre-Argyle for me!). I’d be out there until dark and that was pretty much every Saturday. In the winter, the television took a back seat in the afternoons, and dad and I would sit and listen to the football commentary and scores on the radio with me desperately hoping that the Mackems would at the very least avoid defeat and that Manchester United would win, except when playing Sunderland.

    Winter in the countryside was challenging, especially as we were of limited financial means. The heating would only go on when it was really cold, but most mornings would see ice on the inside of the windows as I clambered out of bed, pretty much fully clothed. The short walk from the house to the bus stop on a school morning was spent watching the thin trails of my breath snaking away from me on an outward breath as I hurried along in shoes that were too small and trousers that I was told I would have to grow into. In the summer, however, it was glorious. I’m sure by now you’ll understand that it probably wasn’t, but those sunny days hold some of my warmest memories. I was quite insular as a child, so I didn’t really feel that I was missing out in the absence of any ‘friends’ and I’ve always been comfortable in my own company. During the school holidays, my sisters would sometimes come and stay and we’d go for long, family walks, more to have something to do than for any other reason, unless we were picking blackberries or rummaging in the scrubland by the golf course for any errant balls that dad could sell on in the pub that evening. There was a run-down, shabby building near the golf course that often held my attention, prompting spooky stories that would get written down in my schoolbooks when I’d tired of football and cricket.

    My other love at the time was reading. I’d regularly check out books from the school library on a Friday and spend the weekend devouring stories. Admittedly, the theme was often restricted to science fiction and the Target series of Doctor Who books were read over and over again, to the point where I could probably have recited chapter after chapter if I’d ever needed to. There were one or two books that broke that pattern. I loved ‘Gobbolino, the Witch’s Cat’ along with the Narnia books and in particular, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I’m sure that there were many others but none that I can recall with absolute certainty.

    For some reason, Dad objected to my interest in sci-fi and he would regularly berate me for my choice in books or television programmes (Doctor Who, Blakes 7, The Adventure Game), telling me that I needed to grow up and that science-fiction was just nonsense. Having said that, he twice made an effort to reach me in the wobbly corridors and imagined alien vistas that enabled me to mentally escape from the trauma of my childhood. The first time, he’d been out for the day and he came home with a copy of the latest Doctor Who magazine. I didn’t ever get to buy it as we couldn’t afford it, but when he handed me the issue with Peter Davison and Janet Fielding (Issue 85, complete with a pull-out poster of the Master that I wasn’t allowed to put on my wall) on the cover, my poor, malnourished heart very nearly burst with joy. Of course, I wanted to share every detail with him, which didn’t happen, but it was one of the best moments of my life to that point, which on reflection, makes me feel a little sad. Still, it was recognition of something important to me and even if only in my own head, it was affirmation that I was allowed to like the things that I did. It proved to me that occasionally, my father was capable of…I don’t want to say kindness but I’m struggling to find an appropriate alternative. Compassion, perhaps? Or just capable of hinting that he could be so much more than he was. And suddenly, I feel sad again.

    The other occasion was when I asked if I could read to him, being a couple of chapters into my brand-new copy of ‘Warriors of the Deep’ (which would place this memory in the autumn of 1984, my autism reliably informs me). He agreed, albeit reluctantly, so we settled on his bed to continue one of my favourite adventures. Sadly, within three minutes, he was asleep and I can still remember my disappointment to this day. I’m sure that he had the best of intentions and was quite prepared to listen to me go through my full range of both human and reptilian voices along with my very best Peter Davison impression, but alas, the best laid plans and all that. So, I slunk off to my room with a tear in my eye and a lump in my throat and continued to read alone. In my head, I was travelling the Universe, watching suns rise and fall on distant worlds, righting wrongs, battling evil and saving the day. The reality was so very different.

    Copyright Alec Hepburn, 2025.

  • Living a Boy’s Adventure Tale

     We left Teignmouth after Mum and Dad separated, although I’m not too sure of the hows and the whys involved in moving out of the town. In fact, thinking about it, it must have been a little while after the split that we moved because more stuff happened before we made our way out to Ideford, but there is time enough for those stories in other parts of this blog.

    In my head, I’ve settled more or less for the summer of 1982 being the time that we arrived in the little village that holds a very special place in my heart. The Falklands War was drawing to a close as Captain Sensible was about to top the charts with Happy Talk, although I don’t believe that the two events are related. It would be quite the claim for Raymond Burns, the punk founder of The Damned, if that were the case, although his foray into British politics with the creation of the Blah Party in September 2006 would at the very least suggest that he had more than just a passing interest in the affairs of state.

    Elsewhere, ABC’s The Lexicon of Love, the fourth best-selling album of the year, reached number one in the UK charts. The hugely enjoyable televisual extravaganza, ‘It’s a Knockout’, aired its final episode, as did the mysteriously terrifying Sapphire and Steel. Gandhi won eight Academy awards including Best Picture and in the World Cup, England were eliminated at the second group stage following a goalless draw with a Spain side who had earlier lost in the group stages to Northern Ireland, courtesy of a late Gerry Armstrong goal. The Mary Rose, flagship of Henry VIII was raised from the Solent while Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾ was published, a book that I would eventually read and enjoy immensely.

    I hope that the residents of Ideford will forgive me if I describe the village as unremarkable. It’s about four miles out of Teignmouth, up over the golf course and beyond, down narrow, twisting roads that are hellish to drive along and pretty much in the middle of nowhere. In the early to mid-eighties, during our time there, Ideford contained a pub (The Royal Oak, which is still there), a post office that looked suspiciously like somebody’s house that now looks exactly like somebody’s house and is no longer a post office and a garage that fixed cars but didn’t sell anything (to the best of my knowledge). There were a couple of phone boxes and the remaining one was doubling up as a marvellous book exchange on my last trip back. And a church. As in there was also a church, the phone box wasn’t purporting to be a place of worship, I suspect it’s a tad trickier to contact a higher power than hoping they’ll accept a reverse charge call.

    We lived at number one, Church Road. The first of a row of eight houses (two blocks of four) on a hill that, surprisingly enough, overlooked the church. Being in the end house had its advantages; we had an enormous garden that surrounded the three unattached sides of the house. At the front, there was a small-ish lawn with a beautiful Chinese Lantern tree in the corner. Looking outward from the house to the left of the lawn was a vast expanse of about 25-30 metres where we built a couple of fishponds, the largest of which would leak during the summer, so we would regularly have to refill it by carrying a huge stew pan full of water from the kitchen and emptying it carefully into the pond so as not to create any more damage to the fragile lining. That stew pan was heavy and transporting it from the kitchen was no mean feat when one had biceps like gnat bites. The other pond, further away from the house, was essentially a large, plastic tub sunk into the ground and filled with water and plants. The area in which it was located was quite overgrown and we would regularly see frogs and toads in the water. During the winter, it would freeze over with ice so thick that we were unable to break it, but somehow whatever was living in it managed to survive.

    Alongside the house ran a sloping lawn, although I use the term lawn loosely. It was long enough to be able to set up a full-length cricket wicket, although the covering of grass was sparse to say the least – I suspect that batting on that deck prepared me for playing at the likes of Storrington, St Peters and those other dodgy wickets that I encountered in my adulthood. At the back of the house, a long garden stretched off into the distance. This was where we grew our vegetables during the summer (whether we had a love of gardening or not, we were all expected to take part) and I have vague memories of a rabbit hutch, home to the white furred and red-eyed ‘Fluffy’, in front of a D.I.Y. corrugated iron fence on the right of the garden, opposite the shed. I don’t remember what happened to Fluffy, but I think perhaps I shouldn’t ponder on it for too long given the paucity of food offerings that we often had to contend with. Behind that corrugated iron fence, we would regularly build dens that doubled up as spaceships or gangsters hideouts, furnished with bits of old carpet and whatever else we could find, oblivious to any bugs that might be living in the trees or bushes.

    Korky, our cantankerous, black cat named after the cover star of the comic, The Dandy, came with us to our new home from Teignmouth. I would hazard a guess to suggest that she was loved by few in the family and had probably learned the hard way to make herself scarce when voices were raised and tempers flared. I’ve always loved animals and have been fortunate enough to have always been in a position to have pets. Korky, however, challenged that love of animals after an incident that took place shortly after we had moved into our new home. It was a grey day, deep in the middle of winter and it was cold enough for us to have lit the fire in the lounge. I heard Korky at the back door, miaowing to come in, so at my father’s request, I went to ‘do the honours’. With the door open and the heat rapidly escaping, Korky then decided to just sit on the back doorstep and miaow some more. Hastened by my father’s demand to ‘shut that bloody door’, I bent down and scooped Korky up in my arms, smiling as she nestled into my woolly jumper that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a lighthouse keeper.

    Closing the back door, we crept back into the kitchen at the precise moment that my Dad chose to clear his throat with a ‘harrumph’ that closely resembled the sound of a foghorn. Korky panicked, twisting in my arms in a bid to escape the frightful racket. However, in her agitated state, one of her claws became caught on the fabric of my jumper. As I tried to calm her enough so that I could free her, she wriggled and writhed like some sort of evil dervish, swiping at my face with her other front paw and scratching just below my right eye and catching the bridge of my nose. As I screamed in surprise and my father charged into the kitchen, Korky became more traumatized and decided that the best thing to do would be to bite my right ear lobe before finally freeing herself from her temporary incarceration and fleeing through the lounge and up the stairs, swiftly tailed by my cricket-bat wielding father. With blood running down my face and dripping from my ear, I chased after them, insisting that the cat wasn’t at fault but that she had simply been scared. Fortunately, for Korky at least, she found a hiding place out of reach of the said piece of willow and stayed there until the wee small hours, only emerging once a more serene air had settled upon our home.

    It might seem strange, but looking back at the time in Ideford, I’m convinced that this was as good as it got during my childhood. It wasn’t great and I still went through things that I shouldn’t have had to go through, but there were also times when I think I was genuinely as happy as I could be. For obvious reasons, it’s not an emotion that comes naturally to me and it’s only been the last few years that I have felt worthy of admitting feeling it to myself, let alone anyone else. For a long time, if I said that I was ‘ok’ that was ‘my happy’ and I believed that life would never be any better than that. Of course, I still live in fear of everything falling apart, but I’ve got better at recognising happiness and enjoying it for what it is at the time. Happiness often strikes me as the most temporary of emotions, harder to cling on to than anything else. I’ve always preferred to feel content rather than happy. It’s less far to fall when the next thing goes wrong.

    It’s perhaps no surprise that the village of Ideford would go on to feature in the books that I would write, renamed as Ivyford. I had to add a couple of things to the village, such as a cricket pitch and a water mill, but most of the village described on the page is accurate. I’m pretty sure that events of Stand Against the Dark were first dreamed up among the leafy lanes of the village, perhaps even the first plot ideas were born there and then pushed to the back of my head to bake for a few years. Whenever I write about the village though, it always feels to me like I’m going home and that’s the biggest compliment that I can give it. I regularly pop back to soak up the atmosphere if I’m ever running dry on inspiration and it’s one of my very favourite places in the whole Universe. It’s probably just as well that there has never been a cricket pitch in the village, I may never have left.

    I’d changed schools when we moved to the Ideford, although the nearest school was in Bishopsteignton, a couple of miles in the opposite direction to Teignmouth. It took a while to settle in and the early morning bus trips were a time for my mind to wander. At Bishopsteignton, it became obvious to me that the teachers I got on well with would get the best out of me. Living a life at home where the next wallop or bollocking could come out of nowhere meant that I was never going to respond well to discipline or threats. My first teacher was Mr Dunn, who was also in charge of the football team, as was Mr Glenny after Mr Dunn left. Whether or not word got around about my situation at home, I don’t know, but I was happy under these teachers and would do my best on and off the football pitch. It was here that I discovered my love of reading and writing, for once excelling at something all of my own – I’d regularly receive fulsome praise for my spelling and creative writing, completely new territory for me to be in receipt of positive feedback! I was genuinely sad to leave Bishopsteignton when we moved away from Ideford. I was given a football that was signed by all of the team, which meant an awful lot to someone who found friendships and home life difficult. Again, there were moments of contentment there and I’ll be sharing some of my memories of my school days in this blog.

    Life in Ideford wasn’t terrible, perhaps aside from all the walking we would do (including the regular eight mile round trips to Teignmouth and back). Summers always seemed sunny, perhaps now viewed through rose-tinted glasses, and we’d often go walking during the holidays to pick blackberries along the narrow lanes. One time, a particularly juicy-looking harvest caught my eye from across the knee-deep stream that ran through the fields and despite my fear of water, I was tempted enough to brave the foot and a half deep flow, tiptoeing carefully to avoid the small, brown fish that darted around my wellies that were probably a little too big for me. Two or three minutes into my picking stint, I attempted to shuffle back along the stream with my half-full bowl of fruit nestled in the crook of my arm, eyeing up another batch of berries destined for a crumble or pie. However, my welly got stuck in the mud at the bottom of the stream and as I moved back, my foot slid outwards and upwards and I toppled back into the water, earning myself a soaking and a rebuke for losing the aforementioned blackberries from my bowl. I also had to spend the remainder of the afternoon’s expedition in soaking wet clothes – going home to dry out wasn’t an option. After that, country walks were never really high on my list of enjoyable activities.

    Copyright Alec Hepburn, 2025.

  • This Must be the Place I Waited Years to Leave

    We stayed in Teignmouth for a while, in the Devon-based equivalent of the house from the Amityville Horror movie, after my parents had separated. I remember my Dad being involved in a relationship with a woman named Sharon. I think she was a bit younger than him and if I’d been in a different headspace as a young child from a broken home, I might have been able to appreciate what I’m sure were the many positive facets of her personality. However, I was hurting and I felt that she was trying to replace my mum. Older and wiser now, I’m sure that she wasn’t but through childish eyes that was what I saw and felt. And I behaved accordingly.

    In fact, thinking about it, I’m not even sure that I thought she was trying to replace my mother. I was probably more worried about her taking my Dad away from me. Essentially losing one parent and only seeing them for a handful of days every year was tough enough, I felt abandoned and unbelievably lonely. I think that I must have clung to my Dad after their separation, despite his parenting ‘style’. Even a dysfunctional family set up can be comforting in its own way and the constant comings and goings were unsettling to say the least.

    So, Sharon arrived on the scene and I was suddenly having to compete with someone else for my Dad’s attention. It wasn’t pretty. I was a little shit, rude and thoroughly unpleasant. I would interrupt every opportunity they tried to create to share any intimacy. At Kingsway, the kitchen was at the back of the house and accessed through the hallway. There was a window above the kitchen door and next to the door we had a tall fridge and various piles of domestic detritus. On one occasion, Dad and Sharon escaped to the kitchen, either in search of shenanigans or serenity. Perhaps both. Neither were attainable, thanks to the furious, small child scaling the Hotpoint equivalent of Mount Everest and pressing his tear-stained face up against the dusty windowpane. They did their best to ignore me, but I’m nothing if not persistent when the mood takes me and I earned myself an absolute shoeing that day. Maybe it was justified.

    Shortly afterwards, Sharon broke things off with my Dad and he was only too happy to make sure that I knew it was entirely my fault. It was only when I got older that I understood more about what had happened and I still feel appropriately guilty about how that particular situation unfolded. Maybe that’s why I try to understand why my Dad did the things that he did, he was far from perfect and there was an inordinate amount of trauma behind his actions as there was behind my behaviour back then and the person I am today. Of course, there is no way of knowing how that relationship would have panned out, what it would or wouldn’t have led to. But was I ultimately responsible for the fact that it didn’t work out? Yes, I was. It must have been an awful situation. Yes, I was hurting and I was only a child…perhaps that’s why I try to take responsibility for my own actions as much as possible. It’s all about choices…and sometimes there are only bad choices but we still have to choose.

    The saving grace was that he did find happiness further down the line and that happiness led to him becoming a different person. A better person, I think. A better parent in some ways, because the violent outbursts diminished and eventually stopped completely but there were still areas of our relationship that were fragmented and in many ways beyond repair. The damage, as they say, had already been done.

    Things became even more difficult after the failure of that relationship. I suspect that I was subconsciously aware that through my actions I was at fault and was ultra-keen to make amends. I have no idea why or how my sisters and I ended up at the local tip, but we snuck in and began to poke around, completely oblivious to any potential dangers. This was the late seventies/early eighties after all…

    After a few minutes, we hit the jackpot. Or at least we thought we had. Carrier bags full of discarded beer mats. I imagine the thought processes went something like this:

    Beer mats…Dad likes beer…so he must like beer mats. That’s about it. Nothing more complicated than that. So, we set off for home, weighed down by our haul yet joyous with our potential peace offering. That joy lasted mere seconds upon our arrival, mud-caked shoes and grime-streaked clothes being greeted with an unexpected fury.

    My world turned upside-down. Quite literally as I was grabbed by my right welly, flipped the wrong way up and dragged upstairs towards the bathroom. I was about to suggest that I was quite unaware as to why I had been the one to cop my father’s anger, but in hindsight and considering the previous paragraphs above, it’s probably quite obvious. Upwards I floated, my head banging on each stair until we reached the summit, his rage peaking in time with our movements, his voice rising all the time while he violently shook me by the leg on the landing. In one movement, my foot slipped out of my boot and my back hit the top step. Time stood still as I teetered on the brink, small fingers clutching at the threadbare carpet for what felt like an eternity before I began to slide backwards, tumbling towards the front door in a whirl of terror, oddly aware of the sound of myself screaming as if I was watching on from outside of my body.

    I hit the floor at the bottom of the stairs with a thud, the world spinning, my heart pounding and hot tears running down my face. I could feel the carpet burns on my back and arms, my neck hurt and I felt sick. A sharp pain in my left ankle suggested that I had hit my leg against the banister on the way down. And then, a welcoming blackness swept in.

    I have no recollection of what happened after the incident. I’m guessing that there wasn’t much left to discuss. I’ll make an assumption that my father felt a mixture of regret and relief, although I’m not convinced that either emotion would have been voiced. I would probably have received a drunken apology at some point along with a poorly reasoned attempt at justification. Love most definitely did not live at 178 Kingsway.

    It wasn’t all doom and gloom in Teignmouth but incidents such as the one above were commonplace. It’s fair to say that light-hearted moments were certainly few and far between. There was one mealtime, however, that went down as legendary in our family history. There was a disagreement between myself and at least one of my sisters and for once, it was allowed to play out without physical intervention in the form of a fist or the flat of a hand. I think my Dad may also have encouraged the dispute along its path. Suffice to say that it reached a certain point and I reacted in a particularly irritated and vociferous manner, launching into a verbal tirade as I bravely decided that I would leave the table before everyone had finished (which absolutely was not allowed and will bring me to another, small tale shortly) and storm off in the general direction of the rest of the house.

    After exiting swiftly, with no plan other than to put as much distance between myself and the rest of the family, I thought of one other thing to say, so pushed open the kitchen door. At this point, my Dad picked up one of the used tea bags from the table, whirled around and threw it in my direction just as I opened my mouth to speak. I kid you not, the teabag flew straight into my open mouth, splitting instantly and spilling tea leaves all over my tongue and lips, only serving to enrage me further but causing everyone else to dissolve into one huge, hysterical mess. Eventually, and by that I mean some days later, I managed to see the funny side of it.

    My father was a stickler for rules, especially around the dinner table. Correct use of cutlery was one, noisy eating was not allowed either. The main one, however, was nobody was allowed to leave the table until everyone had finished, which was a constant source of frustration for us all. The flip side, however, was that it offered us siblings the chance to irritate each other, which I think made it all the more entertaining for my father. There was one occasion when some of us were desperate to leave the table to watch something on tv, I can’t recall what exactly. Rachael had different ideas and decided to cut every baked bean on her plate in half and eat those halves one at a time, very slowly. My Dad found it ‘hilarious’ and played along, telling her to take her time, which she did, of course. These were the days before video recording or DVDs, so you generally had one chance to watch something and that was it. We missed whatever televisual extravaganza we’d been pining for and Rachael made whatever point it was that she wanted to make.

    Behaviour like that was fine all the time that Dad thought it was funny, but more often than not dinner would be a stressful affair. There were times when he would throw plates full of food at the wall and we’d be made to clean up the mess and if he was in a particularly bad mood, we’d have to eat the food even if it was covered in hair or dirt or bits of porcelain. We’d often be sat in silence trying not to make even the slightest sound, even to the point of trying to make sure that our knives and forks made no noise when cutting food on the plate. The rules were inconsistent as were his reactions and it made navigating home life unpredictable and at times, terrifying.

    The fluctuating moods of my father and the instability at home were nigh on impossible to understand as children and I’ve no doubt that the destabilisation of the family unit and the lack of parental guidance have a lot to answer for when it comes to the trials and tribulations that we have been through over the years. When Dad was at home we were constantly walking on eggshells and we never received any positive recognition. When he wasn’t there, we felt very much as though we had been left to fend for ourselves. Carole, as the oldest sibling, took much of this on herself but at the age of 12, maybe 13, had little experience in dealing with suddenly being thrust into the role of matriarch while also attempting to make sense of puberty. The result was not good.

    I look back on my days at Kingsway with such sadness. Those formative years of ours are so important when we move from our first stumbling, tentative steps to learn all about the world and the people around us, those people that we hope will be the touchstone for our developing personalities to lean on and learn from and then stand shoulder to shoulder with us to face whatever difficulties the Universe has in store for us until such a time comes that fate intervenes. The love of your parents should be the first thing you experience, the first certainty that you can call on when you are afraid. Unconditional love. That’s not to say that our actions and our choices don’t impact that love or challenge it, in the worst cases even slowly eroding it to a greater or lesser extent. But you can love somebody without necessarily liking the person they are at certain times. It was expected of us, the children. We were expected to love our parents regardless of their actions. So why was it not reciprocated? Why did their love come with unspoken caveats that we were supposed to be aware of in not-so-blissful ignorance?

    I have moments where I want to believe that it was perhaps because they never experienced unconditional love either. I’m pretty damn sure that my father didn’t. When I’m feeling…calm and reasonable, I can make myself ok with that as an explanation. But…I didn’t experience unconditional love as a child, yet I can clearly remember having been on the receiving end of parental frustration and punishment and understanding completely that this was not how things should be. I didn’t parent the way that either of my parents did, which in many ways blows that initial reasoning out of the water.

    I’m not saying that there should be an absence of consequences for our actions, we all have to learn how to get along in the world and even as adults we can struggle with this at times. But consequences within a family environment should be administered with love, surely? Teach with kindness, learn to understand together the rights and wrongs of social interactions. Love completely. Parental love isn’t something to be earned. If you make the decision to bring life into this world, you have a responsibility for that life from day one. You don’t stop being a parent when your child reaches the age of eighteen because to be perfectly frank, your child doesn’t stop needing you then. They don’t stop looking at you for guidance, for understanding, for kindness. For love.

    And that’s a big part of what I think my parents never understood. I may have moved out of Kingsway a long time ago, but for years there was a ghost of my own trapped in that house. Sometimes a ghost isn’t a spirit but a memory and those tortured reminisces of my childhood were just as much a prisoner in that house as the actual ghost was who haunted it. It took an awfully long time to set it free.

    Copyright Alec Hepburn, 2025.

  • Bridge Over Troubled Water

     It had been a busy day in the seaside town of Teignmouth, the sort of day that publicans loved as it precipitated heaving gardens and thirsty punters. The sun had shone and the beaches had been busy, ‘early busy’ too, as families had fought for space to lay down their towels before the sea had barely begun to recede from the shore. Local businesses had enjoyed a profitable summer so far and the weekly influx of ‘grockles’, as the residents named the ‘not-we’, looked set to increase as July gave way to August and sales of buckets, spades and meaningless plastic tat went through the roof.

    The London Inn, a good stone’s skim away from the Back Beach and arguably the busiest pub in Shaldon, was enjoying a livelier than usual Tuesday evening as children played on the green at the front of the pub, parents closely watching over the tops of pint glasses from packed benches that sat beneath slightly discoloured walls and a string of opaque, coloured light bulbs that struggled to throw muted reds, greens and blues further than three feet from the open, wooden door above which they were hung.

    Inside the pub, it was busier still, where men elbowed their way throught the crowd to the bar, their bell-bottoms sweeping the floor as they tried to make themselves heard over both the natural din of the congregated drinkers and the hideously oversized collars of their tight-fitting shirts. Behind the bar, through a thick fog of cigarette smoke, the landlady grinned a toothy grin amid idle chatter, her long, brown hair just beginning to show the first signs of being within noticeable range of middle-aged. Meanwhile her husband, puffing on a Rothmans and dropping ash as grey as the colour of his hair onto his impeccably pressed white shirt, stuffed another handful of pound notes into the till, mentally planning the holiday they would take when the holiday season had finished and autumn arrived in the town to whisper its chilly reminisces through the narrow, litter-strewn streets.

    Beyond the heaving masses, out past the toilets and the corridor that was lined with empty silver barrels, was a small, concrete garden that housed yet more drinkers and a hydrangea bush that was bursting with life, the odd lazy bee circling the flowers despite the late hour and the drop in temperature. Sat alone at one of the tables, a small boy with an unfortunate haircut that only served to draw attention to his white-blonde hair, stared solemnly into his glass that had been empty for about two hours, the Muppets on his t-shirt clearly having a far better time than he was. He looked over towards his father, deep in conversation with a woman some seven or eight years his junior, her shoulder-length, dark hair falling over a brown roll-neck jumper (or roller-neck as the boy would have called it, his fashion sense strictly limited to t-shirts displaying the creations of Jim Henson and blue-checked shorts that really were quite short).

    The boy’s father shuffled off towards the bar in search of another drink and the woman gave the boy a look that he didn’t understand. Had he been older, he might have recognised the pity in her eyes. He might even have picked up on the slight irritation at his existence, but he knew little of such things, so he simply said nothing, focusing on hiding his disappointment when his father returned with two drinks, neither of which was for him. His stomach rumbled as an empty crisp packet, long since devoid of said crisps, rustled beneath the dirty ashtray beside him as it was caught by an errant breeze.

    The evening seemed to drag on and on, with little else for the boy to do but shiver and look up at the stars. He was tired and seemed to be the only person in the pub who wasn’t having a good time. He wondered if the children that he’d seen out the front earlier were still playing and pondered why he hadn’t been allowed to join them, before his solitude and thought processes became too painful so he brought that particular train of thought to a shuddering halt.

    The conversation between his father and the woman petered out amid frustrated glances in his direction as other drinkers went on their way, unsteady on their feet, some positively glowing as their day in the sun without any form of skin protection caught up with them. The boy reached down towards his battered, school plimsolls and pulled his grey socks as far up his legs as they would go in a bid to retain the last of the warmth that he was feeling from the cooling patio and stone walls. Finally, when everyone else had gone and even the streetlights appeared to be thinking of calling it a night, the boy and his father left via the side gate, the silence only broken by the gentle lapping of the nearby waves and the sound of their footsteps. They reached Shaldon Bridge in just a couple of minutes and began their walk back towards Teignmouth, the dark water below visible through the railings at the side of the pavement.

    About halfway across, maybe three minutes into their crossing, the boy’s father stumbled drunkenly, reaching out to steady himself against the metal supports. They had stopped beside one of the few lamp posts that lit the bridge, the two of them facing each other in the feeble glare of their very own spotlight. Instinct told the boy that something was wrong as his father looked down at the water below and his fears were confirmed as he watched a solitary tear run down his father’s cheek before launching itself from his bristly chin, swirling in the breeze as it plummeted towards the inky depths below. He gently reached out to take his father’s hand in his and frowned when his father pulled away.

    It’s entirely possible that when you are small even the shortest of distances can seem far greater than they actually are and this was very much the case where the boy and the bridge were concerned. He imagined that the void beyond the side of the bridge was at least a hundred feet below them and that the waves beneath the concrete on which they stood must have hidden depths of fifty or sixty metres. Not only that, but he had very clear memories of a film that he had recently seen on television, the imaginatively titled ‘The Night the Bridge Fell Down’, a bridge that in his memory looked exactly like the one on which they now stood.

    His father slowly reached up to the lamp post and used it to lever himself up so that he was standing on the railings.

    ‘Daddy? Daddy, what are you doing?’ asked the boy.

    He was suddenly more afraid than he had ever been, which was quite an achievement given some of the things that he had already experienced in his short life. Whatever his father’s failings, and he suspected that there were many, he had never once indicated that something like this was on his mind. The boy was instantly taken back to the fateful day in the kitchen, when his mother and sisters left and he had made the choice to stay with his father, despite his fears and uncertainty.

    ‘I can’t…’ sobbed his father, his long hair ruffled by the wind, which to the boy at least was masquerading as an incoming storm, threatening to dislodge the person that he loved the most in the whole world from their precarious perch and even more precarious grip on life.

    ‘Daddy, don’t do it. I love you,’ the boy pleaded, his voice sounding fragile and insignificant, his words inadequate next to the struggle taking place before him.

    ‘You’ll be better off without me,’ cried his father. ‘All I do is mess things up. You don’t need me.’

    With hot tears swimming in his eyes and panic rising from the pit of his stomach, the boy wanted to grab hold of his father’s legs and hug him so tightly that he wouldn’t be able to jump. He wanted to hold on to him forever and show him how much he loved him because he didn’t think that all of the words in the world would be enough right now. But he also knew that one false move could send his father toppling over the edge of the bridge and into the water below and while realistically the fall would have done him little harm, the amount of alcohol that he had consumed would certainly have impacted his ability to survive.

    They stood there together for what felt like an eternity, the stars gazing down impassively in the night sky, the clouds intermittently scudding across their jet-black canvas. The boy was silently pleading for a miracle as his father remained tentatively perched on the precipice of indecision, moments away from stepping into the void and numbing the pain forever. A pain as old as the man himself, who had once been like the boy, full of naivety and ignorant to the suffering that life could cause. He was tired of that pain, the one that inhabited his every waking moment and beyond, the pain that he had brought to others, an echo of every injury and every failure that he had ever known. It went round and round, again and again. He couldn’t see a way to break the cycle. Unless he…

    He took one step towards the blackness and the boy closed his eyes, screwing them shut tightly and wishing the most powerful wish that he could think of.

    The boy never knew who or what intervened and occasionally, when he was brave enough to remember that night, he suspected that his father never knew either. But when he opened his eyes again that night on the bridge, to see the crumpled and broken man slowly and carefully clambering down from the railings before sinking to his knees beside him, he thought that miracles must exist, however rare they may seem and however difficult they may be to find. The boy launched himself at his father, raining kisses down upon him and sobbing as he wrapped his arms, his legs, his everything around his Daddy. Together, they wept. Cars drove past, a late-night train rattled along the rails at the near end of the bridge and the world continued to turn.

    At some point before the sun rose, while the town slept on and the dreamers dreamed their dreams, they both got to their feet and walked home in silence, hand in hand. And that night was never mentioned again.

    Copyright Alec Hepburn, 2025.

Learn more