Introduction: Moving Histories

Abstract

In her recollection of childhood in 1960s’ and 1970s’ England, Lorna spoke of the shame she had felt because of where she came from. The Larkman social housing estate in Norwich, where she grew up, and the adjacent estates of Marlpit and North Earlham, which were often associated with it, had a reputation in the rest of the city. Here is Lorna again:

if someone says the Larkman, ‘Oh, she lives over the Larkman, she comes from the Larkman’, that engenders a very particular response from people in Norwich… even people who come from what I would consider other big council estates.

I’m sorry in a way because I know that you’re quite keen to break down the stereotypes… but I do feel, and again this is perhaps another source of my shame, that our family fulfilled absolutely every stereotype you can think of. So… my Mum had a drunken Irish Catholic father who everyone called Paddy… [her] mother died so the children were taken. My youngest aunt who was only a couple of years older than me was literally handed over the fence at the age of three to a neighbour who then brought her [up]… It was a mess… but I was obviously reasonably oblivious, or it was just ordinary to me then. All the family shipped around, stayed with various people on the estates… my granddad [sighs] went from… strength to strength in his drunkenness… living with various members of the family including us for a lot of years… I just remember his sitting on the corner of the bed with his false teeth out and nothing on his top half and he had this kind of breasts and chickeny skin, hacking his guts up and dipping his toast in his whisky…

(Lorna Haley¹)