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Nature
or nuture – which has the decisive influence on
a child’s upbringing?
Young David finds his 1960s
upbringing on the Reso, a notorious council
estate in the north Wales resort town of Rhyl
brings what he learns at home and what he
encounters on the “mean streets” of the estate
into sharp contrast.
The Reso was the name given by
all those who were not inmates of the council
estate in question to its inhabitants. It stood
for the Reservation and reflected the general
view that the estate residents were savages,
unfit for the civilisation beyond its confines.
The action is seen through the
eyes of young David as he comes to terms with
life on the estate and glimpses other worlds in
such unlikely places as next door’s biscuit
barrel and the parade of the consumptives.
David grows up in what he
believes to be a normal world. He treads a
delicate path between the unwritten harsh rules
of the estate and the increasingly insistent
voice of his conscience – which sounds
unerringly like the disembodied voice of his
mum.
In David’s house they don’t have
chocolate biscuits because his mum says they
will only eat them. David knows the answer to
the question posed by the bully “Are you staring
at me?”.
If there is a God, and David
believes there must be, he would consider David
to be a bloody nuisance. In search of help and
salvation from his self-inflicted scrapes, David
delivers more final demands to God than the
electricity board does on the Reso.
Despite his Christian upbringing,
David is an adherent of the firework god
Kalamakulia and takes part in the autumnal
rituals of the cult, funding the special
sacrifices of Little Demon bangers which echo so
effectively in the entries between the houses.
Both God and Kalamakulia seem to
desert him when he finds himself swathed in the
winter-greened bandages of Veronica’s
grandfather, incarcerated in her shed. An
operation has gone horribly wrong and now Nurse
Veronica is closing the distance between his
face and hers, playing with his fate as she
munches a family pack of Salt and Vinegar
crisps….could this be love?
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