When I was growing up, Wilmslow was a pink jumper, white stilettos kind of a town. Flash. Flashy. It was where Mancunians moved to once they’d made a bit of money: it had plenty of large, squat, thirties-era houses, with garages, gardens, gables, porches. Pretty fields clustered round its southern perimeter. More importantly, to its residents, Wilmslow had a Porsche garage, and a Benetton, and its very own department store, Finnigan’s. Finnigan’s had a china department described by every local grandmother as ‘lovely’, and an exclusive hair salon called Steiners that would do you a feather cut and highlights for a price that would straighten Granny’s shampoo and set. Wilmslow had pubs where work boots were not allowed, and expensive shoe shops that stocked every kind of court shoe available. As long as Madam wanted them in white.

And Madam always did. Wilmslow girls lived in white stilettos. They wore them everywhere: at school, at party, at pub, at it on the bench outside Barclays Bank. In fact, aside from the pink jumper (slung and knotted around the shoulders), Wilmslow girls wore white everything. White shoes, white mini-skirt, white plastic earrings, white streaks in mousy hair, white Consulate cigarettes, white convertible Golf GTI with matching white spoilers. You could spot the odd tinge of colour ~ turquoise mascara, luminous nail varnish, Marbella-orange legs topped up with brick-red fake tan ~ but the overall effect was of a poodle that had been put in the washer with Tipp-Ex as well as Persil. And then subjected to an eye-wateringly vigorous fur-tonging afterwards. Wilmslow girls could tong for Britain. They wielded their hair tongs like light sabres. You know that coffee advert where the attractive young thing tearfully plugs her portable heating element into the car cigarette-lighter to heat up her lonely Nescafé? That was the kind of thing that Wilmslow girls could never understand. Why didn’t she just plug in her hairtongs? Sort out some of life’s real problems, the silly ninny? Well, honestly. Coffee before curling? Sustenance before a scrunch-dry? No wonder the girl was crying. She’d be weeping in shame. In Wilmslow, a half-hour’s hard tonging, plus full slap and appropriately co-ordinated jumpsuit were required just to put out the bins. On Saturday afternoons, when Wilmslow girls tripped gigglingly along Grove Street, tinkling their car-keys, tossing their root-perms, swinging their Ravel bags, it was as if an army of Barbies had come to life, eaten cream buns for a week, and then decided to invade Cheshire. Armed only with hair tongs and bright white stilettos.

White was the preferred colour for a Wilmslow girl’s wardrobe because ~ despite her seeming independence: her flighty car, her fluffy chatter, her feather earrings ~ every Wilmslow girl was practising for her wedding day. The Wilmslow World was stuffed with pictures of unblushing brides in swathes of satin-feel polyester. Each looked like a living marquee. And judging by the fierce smile, each was proud to do so. The groom’s mood was more difficult to read. Still, if you searched a photo carefully you could usually just spot the lucky man, a tiny speck in the background suffocating under several miles of snowy petticoat. Of course, the joke was that white wouldn’t be right once you’d got to your wedding day, ha ha. At least not if those wild Wilmslow boys had anything to do with it. And as I got older and could read those one-thought expressions beneath those fearsome flicker fringes, the intention in the Action Man grip of those soap-smooth hands, I understood that the wild Wilmslow boys were not the marrying kind. Well, not until they were in their twenties, anyway.

Wild Wilmslow boys had wild jobs, in ‘business’, which usually meant they spent their days photocopying or doing deliveries for their dad’s firm. They had wild names: John, Mike, Darren. And they had a wild song which they sang on wild occasions, like on the way to The Swan or The King’s Arms every single Friday night. It went: Dr Martens, yellow laces/Levi jeans with clip-on braces/We’re the ones who’ll smash your faces/We’re the Wilmslow boot boys. Which was strange because every Wilmslow boy I knew wore a pink jumper. And pulled that chase-me pink jumper over the tidgiest hint of a Boddingtons’ belly to tuck smoothly into the waistband of pale blue stonewash jeans. And probably straight into the waistband of his pale blue stonewash Y-fronts too. True, a Wilmslow boy strutted with the dick-first swagger of a man from the north-west ~ what is it about that walk? Is every male born within twenty miles of Manchester taught to toddle like that by law or something? ~ but he never strutted in braces. Also, if a Wilmslow boy was going to smash your face in, no way would he do it in Doctor Martens. No work boots allowed: he’d never get into the pub for a pint afterwards.


For a time, I forgot about suburbia. Then one day, in the late 1990s, when I was over thirty and over caring what other people thought of me, I woke up in a mucky London flat and got up and walked to the mirror and this is what I saw. A woman whose hair was dyed a little too blonde; whose dress-sense was a little too young; who was wearing blue nail varnish and a good slather of self-tanning lotion; who drove a turquoise soft-top car; who had given up on black clothes years before in favour of pastel-hued sportswear; who wore pink pearly lipstick and read celebrity biographies and loved ickle puppies and thought it would be brilliant to have a smart kitchen. And I thought: look at you, woman, your roots are showing. You better go and reclaim your past.