Where were you when Maggie died? I’d be surprised if you can find a single person this week who can’t answer that question. (I was in a hotel in Seoul, in case you’re interested, about to go to bed.) Because, unpalatable as this may be I, and everyone else born between the mid-sixties and late-seventies, are Thatcher’s Children; the generation Thatcher privatised.
Maggie. It’s such a
seemingly inoffensive diminutive, for one who could most definitely not be
described as inoffensive by even her most ardent admirers. She was our Iron
Mother, and we were a constant source of disappointment to her. Like the
teacher’s voice in Charlie Brown she was always there, in the background,
admonishing, punishing, finger-wagging. If you were lucky. If you weren’t, she
was in the foreground, closing the steelworks where your dad worked, waging a
war you didn’t really understand over an island you’d never heard of and
couldn’t find on a map, stealing your school milk.
(At this point, I have a
confession to make: I hated that milk. Warm and claggy, and on the days when
the milkman left it outside the school long before the teachers arrived, rank
and sour, too lumpy to make its way up the skinny pink straw. The day I went to
school and the milk was no more was one of the happiest of my short life, and I
wasn’t alone. A generation of junior school pupils rejoiced. Little did we know
what else the milk snatcher had in that big square handbag she always carried.)
Which is where Damian
Barr’s brutally honest (and often just brutal) memoir, Maggie & Me comes
in. Barr was three in 1979, the year Thatcher came to power, born in the shadow
of the Ravenscraig steelworks to a Catholic mother and Protestant father. Then
his parents split up. His new stepfather, Logan, was terrifying and abusive;
his father took up with Motherwell’s answer to Dolly Parton, Mary the Canary.
And life for the small boy who already knew he didn’t quite fit got a whole lot
worse.
If that was all there was
to Maggie & Me, it would be more than enough. For this story of growing up
in small town Scotland in the shadow of AIDS as Barr tries to neither die of
ignorance (“I catch AIDS in 1987. I’m not sure exactly how but I’ve definitely
caught it so I’m definitely going to die: horribly and soon. I’m eleven.”) nor
difference, will make mincemeat of your heart.
But this is no ordinary
memoir, it is also an anatomy of an age. An age in which the UK was
transformed. The eighties.
Starting in Brighton with
the bombing of the Grand Hotel (“Shit disnae burn, Maggie won’t,” says Barr’s
mum), it ends back there in a different world entirely, one irrevocably changed
by Thatcher’s policies.
Barr begins each chapter
with a quote from Thatcher. But two struck me as particularly pertinent: “I
would say, let our children grow tall and some taller than others if they have
the ability in them to do so. Because we must build a society in which each citizen
can develop his full potential…” and “Children who need to be taught to respect
traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right
to be gay.”
Barr is the living proof of
the contradiction that lies at the heart of the children Thatcher made. He
believed in his right to grow taller, to develop his own potential, in his
inalienable right to be gay. He is, by his own admission, Thatcher’s child.
Like it or not, we all are.
I can’t say enough about
this book. It’s Shameless meets Starter for Ten, without the cheating. And not
everyone gets a happy ending. Maggie didn’t. But Barr does, and he deserves it.
Maggie & Me is
published by Bloomsbury, 25th April.
(This piece was
first published on Bazaar on Books blog, www.harpersbazaar.co.uk/blogs, 11th
April 2013.)
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