Chris, the son of the boss, was one of those people born with a silver spoon in his mouth. The kind of jumped-up, power crazy dweeb that would have made a good captain in the Hitler Youth. He loved to humiliate people. One chap was sacked for dropping a palette of bottles from a fork-lift. I saw another guy being made to clean his shoes. Two weeks after leaving college, it was my job to be at the end of a production line packing bleach bottles sixteen to a box. I clocked in at the factory at 8am and out at 5pm. Half an hour for lunch. A morning break of fifteen minutes. I tried hard to implement what I had learnt in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I failed.

I had got the job because my mother worked for the local Jobcentre and was determined that I wasn’t going to spend my days in bed, particularly after bringing further disgrace upon the family by becoming a ‘drop-out’. This was the only job going she said, but it always felt like it was a punishment – chastisement for my failure to be who I was expected to be. It really couldn’t have been much worse.

Fortunately, a good friend of mine from the village, Grant, was working at the same place. Grant had played drums with Ipso Facto, my first band, and was the only one of us with any real musical talent. Unfortunately, he didn’t share the same taste in music and was now playing for an awful shlock-metal band called Hell Bat. Grant was such a mild-mannered, easy-going chap, that he didn’t seem to notice the gruesome working conditions. He had already been there for six months and was well on his way to seniority. He was allowed to be in charge of a couple of the machines – making sure they didn’t overheat or run out of dye or whatnot. He was still on the minimum wage, however. I used to catch a lift in to work with him and his brother in the morning. His brother worked at the army camp just a mile away from the factory; taken on as an apprentice at sixteen.

There was also a young girl there called Steph who we were friendly with. Steph’s boyfriend was a traveller and, being an inclusive-minded kind of person, I invited them to come to the party I had organised in honour of the fact that my parents were taking their annual two week holiday in Greece. To my horror, they took the presumptive step of inviting half the Tewkesbury underworld, too. It turned out that while my sister and all her sixteen year old friends were dancing to Chesney Hawkes, a circle of at least twenty assorted travellers, tattooed, bearded, dreaded, skin-headed, sat rolling joints on what appeared to be straw beach-mats in the middle of our lawn. By the end of the night they were actually giving lessons to my sister’s mates:

“No, never use the skins packet for a roach. Always keep a bit of card handy in your pocket, see.”

“Okay,” said my sister’s friend, Daisy. “What do you do for a living, then?”

“This and that. Just been inside, actually.”

“Oh right. Prison. What was that for?”

“Nothing much, GBH.”

My mother is really going to kill me if she finds out, I thought. Not only am I corrupting all the kids in the neighbourhood, but also I’ve brought all the people who sign on back to the house of the person who sometimes refuses their giros! I tried to hide everything that was valuable in one room downstairs and spent the rest of the night loitering by the door in order to guard my parents’ antiques. The next day everything was accounted for except for an Asian pewter smoking pipe, which had obviously caught one of the hippies’ eyes. I immediately raced to Cheltenham and scoured the antique shops until I had found a similar replacement.

Later that evening, while vacuuming and dusting the lounge, to my shock I noticed that some knob had actually engraved his or her initials into one of my parents’ most beloved antique mahogany tables. There was no time to call out a French polisher as they were due back the next day. The only thing I could do was put a picture frame over the spot and hope they wouldn’t notice until I had time to get it fixed.

The next morning, about 11am, they came back. I had tidied everything I could think of. The place was immaculate.

“Who’s been smoking in the house, Danny?”

“What?”

“Have you had some friends round while we were away?”

“Yes, but not many, we had a small party.”

“I’ve told you before about people smoking in my house. I won’t have it!”

“Sorry, Mum. Did you have a nice time?”

At this point, she was circling the room like a bird of prey. She knew something was wrong, God knows how. Within two minutes she had spotted it.

“Look, what that boy has done, Henry! Just look! You’re for the high jump and I kid you not! I don’t want you as my son anymore! You can’t be trusted! You’re a disgrace!!”

Well, it could have been worse. In fact, this was nothing compared to the time two years ago when she had actually physically thrown my entire drum kit out of my bedroom window. And I didn’t have one of those downstairs bedrooms, either! Actually, she couldn’t get the bass drum through the gap, but the rest of it went: cymbals, snare drum, stands, sticks, the lot.

“You can’t do this, Mum!” I protested.

“I can, Danny”, she replied, “and, so help me, I will!”

This time I counted myself lucky.