The thing I learned in school was that there are some people with a hell of a lot more advantage than others. For example, there are people my age now who talk about how much they loved their Crombie coat, their Harrington jacket, their Adidas or Dunlop Green flash Trainers, but I didn’t have any of those things because we couldn’t afford them. I used to pray in church every week for God to bring me a red Chopper bike, but the bugger didn’t. Martin Johnson got one though, and a new skateboard but God had ‘nowt to do with it.

My Mam did give me a new bike once; it was a proper racing bike, blue frame with white handlebars, I was about fifteen and I was over the moon. But I was only allowed to ride it on a few local streets and even then only after dark because my Dad had got it as a stolen job lot from a bloke in the pub. The Police were on the look out for them and I used to crap myself and dive into a hedge if I ever saw a copper.

We couldn’t afford fancy bikes so we’d make our own from spare parts we’d find on rubbish dumps. We would tie roller skates on to our feet with our Mams old tights and make ‘bogey’ carts from old pram wheels. It was brilliant. I look back and I love all of that poverty, now that I’m not living in it and I’ve dressed the memories up with frills and lace. But back then it was hard.

The kids from the Middle Class areas didn’t have to worry that their Mam couldn’t afford the school trip, or that the chances of them being able to go on the school skiing holiday were about as high as Boro winning the First Division title. Maybe I’ve got it all wrong of course, but it felt like they had parents who comforted them when they fell over, who told them they loved them, who were interested in their education and who drove them to extra-curricular clubs, and who talked to them like their opinion mattered. Our Mam just told me to shut up whining, she never told me she loved me in her entire life, she never came to a parents evening, I rarely went on school trips, and I was always told to be seen and not heard.

This was just some of the obvious differences between how we were brought up. We were different to the other kids, we talked different, we had different perspectives and different outlooks. It felt like they were a pedigree, pampered pooch and I was the scruffy mongrel.

Footnote: many people of my age say being poor never did them any harm, but I disagree. What I endured as a kid has got a different name now, it’s called socio-economic advantage and it is still very much part of life in 21st century Britain. The UK is one of the most socially and economically disadvantaged countries in the developed world. Want to succeed and make something of yourself? Well, your chances of doing that if you’re poor drop significantly. Add being black, or South Asian into the mix and it’s even worse still. Most of the wealth, and the top jobs remain firmly in the hands of the privileged few that were born into it. So much talent is wasted, so much potential lost, and so many incompetent leaders rose to powerful positions simply because they had the good fortune to be born into the right family.

When I hear people saying: “you can be anything you want to be,” I get annoyed, because it simply isn’t true.

Excerpt taken from Classroom Catastrophes, my autobiographical memoirs available from Amazon