A dislike of suburban living was only sown as a seed at that time. As I came to experience other societies and social arrangements, it became clear that there were not only far better alternatives but also far worse.

If we had been moralists, we would have understood that, compared with many war-torn and conflict-driven parts of the world, our suburbia was a benign heaven, despite being primordially dull and antiseptic. If we had been schooled in ethics, we may have appreciated the protections afforded by the rule of law, which allowed us to wander freely and enjoy the security of our cardboard boxes. If we had been economists, we would have definitely appreciated the candy store on the corner of Station Road, from which we purchased small bags of candy on the way to school, which made a mockery of any standards of English oral hygiene. If we had been religious, we would have definitely lamented the shortage of communal spaces to deepen our faith through hymns, prayer, and eulogies. If we had been savvy anthropologists, we might have thought that man was better left alone in his primitive existence. If we had been genuine humanitarians, we must have known that there were more important things to fight than boredom. If we had been absolute idealists, we might have thought any damn thing, and if we had been passionate, gifted, and excessively arrogant, might we not have considered any cause worth fighting rather than surrendering to the mediocrity of middle-class aspirations?

Above all, we may say that suburban living must have been tolerable, as residents were not throwing themselves in front of commuter trains or filling the wards of psychiatric hospitals, at least not to any degree we were aware of.

It would have been a vain boast for us to think we were philosophers of anything. We had no personal interests to speak of and therefore nothing to share as we went about together, filling our free time with the frivolities of adolescence. Notoriously unworldly, we knew and cared nothing about what was going on in the world.

Radio Luxembourg was the exception. Most Friday nights with my parents out of the house visiting friends for a card session, I would sneak into the dark of the living room and listen to the top twenty on the old gramophone that stood in the bay window there, watching intently through a crack in the curtains for the vehicle lights that would signal the return of parental authority and my dash for the covers. Number three was really a source of dread. Still, the popular records of the fifties were compelling enough to risk her wrath.

Who could have imagined that soon would come, after the Beatles and another decade or so of popular music, the death of melody and the end of songs and instrumentals so catchy that you got up in the night to hear them and then hopefully over and over again? Who could have guessed, given a decade or two more, that the radio waves would be jampacked with music generally so irksome and painful to hear that to escape altogether from it might become a priority of life?

Our rooms were not filled with technological gadgetry. My room in the box was bare, except for the bed. It lacked a carpet, a chest of drawers, a mirror, a bookshelf, a desk, a chair, wall hangings, fancy curtains, or a closet to make it a comfortable retreat and refuge. Just the bare walls and the bed and the tiled bare floor upon which dust bunnies magically appeared and scampered before finding their final resting places in the corners of the room and under the bed.

Suburban life could be described, in its most rudimentary form, as organic rather than anything else, with each modest faction and part finding its place naturally among the labyrinthine complexities of its creeping existence. Of course, there were exceptions to the general benign atmosphere that prevailed, and there were pockets of irascibility serving as cankers, as in any purely organic arrangement. The towns along the Cray River, for instance, we did not visit, knowing well from only one experience the humiliation of having to run the gauntlet of angry young men eager to return with a bunch of fives, any inadvertent glance in their direction. Even aliens dropped in from Mars would have sensed the truculence in the air and directly aborted their mission to avert any confrontation with the vindictive, surly victims of early industrialization, public housing schemes, and, above all, overspill and council developments.

If we had recognized the common enemy, we might have realized that we were on the same side and that we both had an attitude problem, the only difference being between a demonstrative attitude and an acquiescent attitude. If we had been better informed, we might have been able to identify the paragons of mediocrity who were facilitating social decline and fragmentation—the well-intentioned, yet mindless, bureaucrats who comprised the elected officials of local government.

I have never personally met a councilman, known anyone who knew or voted for a councilman, or seen a councilman in person. Still, they exist, of that we are sure. We are sure, for instance, that when we see the shockingly soulless results of suburban development, they did not happen by chance. And when we see that the places of our fondest memories are no longer recognizable, it takes more than just the natural effect of time to make them so. Councils may now be planting a tree or two and a few bushes to soften and obscure the results of their brutality, but the damage has been done. Only a bulldozer and a considerable amount of prayer and inspiration can rectify the situation.

My imagined stereotype of a councilman was someone somberly dressed in a three-piece dogtooth suit, dour, paunchy, balding, and bespectacled, getting hurriedly into a vehicle to quickly escape responsibility and outrun the damage to his conscience caused by his latest compromise and demonstration of gross incompetence. If I had ever met one, I might have thought differently. Since someone was to blame, I chose them and their clandestine and secretive ways, which were unknown to the average law-abiding citizen.

Councilmen existed like the pervasive hint of a foul smell that could not be ignored, due to the deleterious effects of their obnoxious influence, which could be seen and felt everywhere, just as sunlight or the air we breathe. Look no further than the public trash cans on High Street to assess, by their ugliness and swift corruption, the state of local government. In my opinion, if saints exist, they should be found where they are most needed, in the town hall and municipal offices, and in education, welfare, and housing, the three primary responsibilities of local government that require most the influence of their beatific mandate. In other words, the smell is so ingrained that it would take a miracle to eliminate it. Elected by whom exactly, one was forced to conjecture, and qualified to decide what? Compared to the multifaceted covert armies of local authorities, the central government was a troop of Boy Scouts, a party of philanthropists, or simply a gang of thugs. Just a thought.

In one sense, we were justified in thinking ourselves free and the embodiment of cool, but only by default. The most extraordinary detail of that suburban existence was the astounding fact that the middle-class citizenry was invisible, never to be seen in the streets, standing at the doors of their houses, in their gardens, shuffling behind their curtains, or, least of all, getting in and out of their cars, which most did not possess. I passed houses over a period of five years without ever once getting a glimpse of their occupants.  

My mother did not have a vehicle, which meant that when my father was not at home, which was the majority of the time, she was confined to the house. I could not have imagined her venturing even into the unmade road that fronted the box except to get into the car, what to speak of walking the mile or so to Orpington railway station or the High Street. It seems she may have had good reasons to be angry with my father and enjoyed less overall freedom than her involuntarily enlisted serf, chained as she was to the box and her Siamese cats.

The result of bourgeois anonymity was that, going about, we were the de facto Lords of all we surveyed, and we generally wandered around at will, remarkably unrestrained by the public, landowners, or the police. What need of a police force in a dormitory town where the residents, after their daily commute, have neither the inclination nor energy to do anything but slump in a chair or lie down, and least of all to develop a criminal mentality? Voila. Therein lies the explanation of Orpington’s particular type of suburban malaise and the withdrawn, invisible, and innocuous nature of its residents, only to be seen more than fleetingly in the High Street on Saturday mornings, buying their weekly provisions.