A Life More Ordinary

 I was born on October 29^th, 1973, in the city of Exeter. Wait, that’s weird, writing in the first person. Still, I digress. You may need to get used to that.

Where was I? Ah, 1973. David Bowie was tearing up the charts, while the unremarkable ‘Daydreamer’ by David Cassidy occupied the top spot during the week of my arrival (David Cassidy fans need not get in touch to disagree).  Sunderland had shocked Leeds United in the FA Cup Final in May, much to my father’s delight, Roger Moore’s first Bond film was released (Live and Let Die) and Pizza Hut opened its first restaurant in the UK in Islington. Two IRA bombs went off in London in March, killing one person and injuring 250. Women were admitted to the London Stock Exchange for the first time and JRR Tolkien passed away.

Three minutes to one in the morning was my official time of birth (as pictured below), narrowly missing October 28^th, an occurrence which would have impacted nobody at all in any meaningful way. Born to parents (yes, I know it’s supposed to say ‘loving’, but more on that later), Rosemary Letitia and Thomas Southern Hepburn into a family of three sisters (Carole, Alison and Rachael). My parents had previously lost a son, Andrew, so I suppose in some ways my arrival was a blessing. However, theirs was a tumultuous relationship. I have no idea when the cracks started to appear, but I suspect that by the time my younger sister Ellie burst onto the scene almost two years later, there was definitely more than a hint of all not being well with the Hepburns of 178 Kingsway, Teignmouth.

Wikipedia, that occasionally reliable repository of fact and fiction, tells me that Teignmouth is a seaside town, fishing port and civil parish in the English county of Devon on the north bank of the estuary mouth of the River Teign. From the 1800s onwards, the town grew rapidly in size from a fishing port associated with the Newfoundland cod industry to a fashionable resort of some note in Georgian times. The port still operates and the town remains a popular seaside holiday location. To me, it’s always felt like a town that can’t quite make its mind up as to what it wants to be. I have no quarrel with that, indeed I find it quite endearing. While my earliest experiences of the town were traumatic, I have since returned to establish a new narrative and it’s one of my favourite places to spend time these days. In 1818, Keats completed his epic poem, Endymion, in the town, which begins with the line; ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever’. Triple jump world record holder, Jonathan Edwards, also lived in Teignmouth in his early years and attended Inverteign Juniors school.

For obvious developmental reasons, memories of my early days are sparse to say the least. Dad was working as a nurse; I have a vague recollection of Starcross, a small village between Teignmouth and Exeter, being mentioned as a place of work. I would imagine that Mum was very much a full-time mother with five of us to parent and with no in-laws to help, it must have been hard work. Our house, to partially quote the Madness song, was part of a row of terraced houses opposite flats that to a young and imaginative mind were accessed by a glorious and slightly precarious-looking bridge at the far side of the narrow road. The reality, when I returned several years later, was very different!

Of course, during those early years, I had no idea about social status and council estates, but we certainly weren’t in the most affluent area of the town. We lived a very short walk from the nearest school, the aforementioned Inverteign Junior School, where the fearsome Mr Last ruled with an iron grip, a man whom I had the misfortune of crossing on just the one occasion. The ‘once’ was more than enough and the resultant lecture and subsequent threat of the cane, only deferred because my reputation (or at least that of my familial circumstances) preceded me, had me managing my own behaviour ultra-cautiously from that point on.

My parents argued and as I grew older, I discovered that those arguments were often punctuated by acts of physical violence. At some point, before, during or after, perhaps all three, this spilled over into the family. Dad was very much the disciplinarian and coupled with a short temper, a lot of time was spent treading on eggshells. Despite this spectre looming over the family, there were brief moments of…I hesitate to call them happiness, but perhaps calm would be more apposite. Relative calm at least.

My earliest memory takes me back to a Christmas Eve, perhaps 1978, in the kitchen with mince pies and sausage rolls under preparation and the air filled with magic and the hope of better days. There was I, in my pyjamas, rocking merrily back and forward on a long, wooden bench adjacent to the kitchen table, upon which my elbows were comfortably resting as I continued to enthusiastically enjoy the sound that the bench was making on the cold, kitchen floor. Having already been warned that what I was doing had more than an element of danger to it, it will of course be of no surprise to anyone that the bench tipped over, managing to land on all of my toes, breaking them in the process and necessitating a trip to the local A&E department. By all accounts, this wasn’t my first emergency visit to the hospital either, as I had previously had my hands run over by a go-kart, which had broken my knuckles as it sped off over the aforementioned bridge to the flats, leaving me wailing in its wake, the kart’s dastardly driver remaining unknown to all and sundry. Rumours of a sniggering dog in the kart have never been verified (I’m afraid you’ll have to be of a certain age to understand that cultural reference!).

 Living in an environment where we were regularly exposed to violence was bound to have an effect. I will say here that there were reasons behind my father’s behaviour and I will discuss these in detail later. I won’t excuse what went on and neither will I make light of it, but what I will say is that all behaviour is communication and I believe that later in his life, he found another way to express himself and went some way towards achieving the healing that he so desperately needed. For me, the effect of living in that environment reached crisis point quickly. I don’t know how old I was, five maybe, but to the best of my knowledge, there had been a falling out between one or more of my sisters and a girl from the flats. It would seem that I was a protective younger brother as I acted impulsively at the sight of my upset siblings and to my shame, I picked up a rock and threw it at the girl in question. Possessing a decent throw for someone of such tender years, my aim was unfortunately far better than I had intended, the missile hitting my target in the head and precipitating a scene resembling Carrie at the Prom. I can speak with reasonable certainty when I say that I suspect my actions that day earned me a hiding and it’s not something that I look back on with anything other than disappointment and ignominy.

Time moved inexorably on, the house itself took on a starring role in our lives (to be discussed in future posts) and the situation deteriorated with alarming rapidity. Whether or not my memory of the timeline is correct remains to be seen, but I am reasonably confident in stating that Mum left at one point and moved, at the very least, me with her to Sussex, leading to a brief spell at the unimaginatively named Colgate Primary School before returning to Teignmouth. I guess that a reconciliation with my father was attempted before she left again, a much more vivid memory for me that I will come to shortly, simply because it led to one of the most painful days of my life that is forever etched in my mind. Essentially, however, this was my beginning. I’m not going to lie; I think it could have gone better.

Copyright Alec Hepburn, 2025.