One of my earliest childhood memories is of walking through Lower Gornal, then a white working-class village in the Black Country, counting the “pretty” front gardens in between the “yucky” ones on the way to my grandparents’ house. This was back in the 1990s – long after the nearby steelworks had closed – and the defiant immaculacy of such neighbourhoods was starting to fray.
There were still enough homes with hanging baskets of shocking pink pansies, theatrical stagings of garden gnomes and hopefully high hedges to make the counting game worthwhile – though the number of houses with closed curtains, cordoned off with chicken wire, was considerable. At one point, I passed a teenage girl rocking the pram of a baby I assumed was her younger brother or sister. I nodded and was delighted when I got a half-smile back. My grandma – of poor but proud background – called them “wrong-uns”.
