I’m always fascinated, when out after dark, by lights on in flats above retail premises, but that’s because I grew up above the shop myself. My dad’s optician’s shop was on Jesmond Road, Newcastle. It was a busy main road in the 1960s, and our black front door was forever splashed with dirt from passing traffic. Decades later, when I found a similar door near the Barbican in London, I stole it for a book.
I shared a bedroom with two of my brothers, and a bunk bed with one of them. My eldest siblings had rooms of their own, my brother’s with black and white polystyrene tiles on the ceiling – local colours.
The door to dad’s shop opened on to a waiting room with long mirrors built into opposite walls, so you could see yourself bending slowly into infinity. The landlord, my mother later told me, forced my parents to pay an additional £1,000 for these mirrored walls after the lease was agreed.
There was a garage to the rear of the shop, but we didn’t have a car, so this was sublet to Mr Bortoloni, an inventor. I don’t know what he invented, but it involved machinery: there were oily screws and bolts everywhere. I once found something – a metal valve, it must have been – which was the exact shape a spaceship would be. Maybe he was inventing tiny spaceships.
A passage with wooden doors at both ends ran alongside the garage to the back lane. Its walls were brick, and ripe with moss, and I’ve rebuilt them round the back of Jackson Lamb’s Slough House.
The back lanes were where we played. Once, standing near there, I saw a huge aeroplane pass over the houses, very low. It triggered a dream, one of the earliest I can recall, in which I stood on that spot and watched a wave cresting the rooftops, crashing towards me.
Dad was a fine optician, and tended not to charge people who were unable to afford it. I once delivered a pair of glasses to Sid Chaplin, the author, who’d be happy – he later told dad – to talk to me about a writer’s life. Stupidly, inevitably, I didn’t take up this kind offer. So the nearest I came to a north-east writer was leafing through my mum’s Catherine Cookson novels, discovering in them a Newcastle that seemed long gone to me, though my parents recognised it.
We moved when I was about eight, though it remained Dad’s shop for years. I’d spend Saturday mornings there sometimes, “helping” – sitting at his desk, answering the phone. And then I’d go upstairs, and notice how the rooms got dustier and emptier as time passed. Those black and white tiles fell from the ceiling.
Seeing my childhood home fall into disrepair seems the most blatantly novelistic scenario I might contrive. But it was just what happened.
• Joe Country by Mick Herron is published by John Murray (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
