Growing Up In Coventry

Growing Up In Coventry

When people ask me what Coventry is like two things pop into my head. The first is that Coventry is a very different city now than when I lived there over 20 years ago. Coventry in the 80s and early 90s was a ghost town. The Specials wrote an entire song about Coventry back then. And you could feel it in the air back then. It was a dive. Every pub was a dodgy pub, they had paved over the green in the city centre, the public toilets were underground.

white and blue graffiti on wall
Photo by Dan Edge on Unsplash

Now it’s a different place. A lot of money went into the city centre, and while the green will never return, it was cleaned up a lot. The dodgy pubs in the centre are gone, replaced by, well different dodgy pubs, but a lot of it has been taken over by the university. The university bought or built a lot of property in the city centre and the only thing that really hadn’t changed much in the twenty years was the bus station.

Semi-Professional Queer is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribed

The other thing that pops into my head, is the time my cousin came to stay and brought a friend with him. I was about 14, and staying with my nan, dad and gramps for the Christmas holiday. My cousin Dave was also living there, as his mum has moved to a town near Norwich and he didn’t want to go. So he moved into my nan’s house. My other cousin Rich – his older brother – did move. He’d come home to visit his brother (not his dad, but, different story) and brought a friend with him.

His friend had never been to Coventry before.

In fact, I don’t think he’d even been out of East Anglia before.

So, in typical family fashion (for our family anyway) we took him to the pub.

I have stories about this pub, it’s a dive. Was then and still is now. My dad has been barred from it a few times over the years, most of the regulars have. Kids under 14 weren’t allowed in the bar back then, but we went anyway. all our dads drank there. That’s just what we did.

So we went to the pub.

a brick building with a green sign in front of it
Photo by Shubham Vispute on Unsplash

It was January, and bloody cold and for some reason my friend Sam was in a T-shirt and a skirt; a mix of parental neglect and the fact that nine year olds don’t really feel the cold. We had barely left the cup-de-sac where my nan’s house was when a car came rushing down the road.

It was a red ford of some kind, that wasn’t in the best shape to begin with and certainly wasn’t after the two lads who had stolen it crashed it into a house. Number 16. It hit the wall under their bay window after they lost control on the icy road.

The lads got out and legged it back the way they had come (from the direction of the pub) and my cousin turned to his mate and said:

“Welcome to Coventry.”

Then we carried on up the road towards the pub and didn’t even think about it again. It wasn’t even in the local paper.

I think about that story every time someone asks me what it was like growing in Coventry. And it’s not so much the part where a newcomer to the city saw two lads crash a car they had nicked for a joyride, but the way we went to the pub without even waiting for the police or calling them ourselves. That’s what has stuck with me, but I know everyone focuses on the stolen car part.

But we were so used it that it didn’t even occur to us to do anything about it except laugh before we carried on.

Cause that was Coventry To me, that was what it was like. It was sitting in the pub, ignoring the chaos around us, until we got out.