Rod Liddle recalls his own childhood fumblings and says that the case of Alfie Patten proves nothing much has changed. If Britain is ‘broken’, it always was
I still sometimes wonder what would have happened if Julie’s parents had somehow stumbled in. Or mine, for that matter. They would have had to peer pretty hard, the lights being so low. Probably their annoyance would have focused first, as so often, on the music: ‘Turn that bloody row off!’ A confected teen-pap trio called the Arrows, if I remember rightly, emanating from a Dansette, grinding out their only real hit: ‘I wanna touch too much of your sweet sweet loving…’ Well, yes indeed, precisely. Then, with growing alarm, the parents would have noticed the empty cider bottles, the heaps of discarded clothing and finally maybe the intertwined bodies; four of them — two on the bed, two on the floor. Total cumulative age of intertwined bodies: 50 years.
‘Do you know what this is?’ her dad, a strict blue-collar Roman Catholic, would have said, shaking his head, to my dad, a devout blue-collar Methodist. ‘It’s Broken Britain. That’s what it is. Broken Britain.’ And then we’d all have received a bloody good ‘twatting’ — more for the drink in my case, more for the sex in hers. This is a guess, of course. They might have sent us to counselling, I suppose, but, you know, I doubt that.
The parents didn’t stumble in, of course, luckily. They absented themselves for the evening so that the party — one of four or five in that bright early spring of 1973 — could go ahead unhindered. So I blame the parents. What did they think we were going to do all evening? Play Scrabble? Nah; this new game of ours was far more exciting than a double word score.
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