Tom - 1983 (2024)

   

The tale of an imaginative childhood set in 1980s Nottinghamshire, from Sunday Times bestselling author Tom Cox.

Benji is an imaginative eight-year-old boy, living with his parents in a mining village in Nottinghamshire amidst the spoil heaps and chip shops that characterise the last industrially bruised outposts of the Midlands, just before Northern England begins. His family are the eccentric neighbours on a street where all the houses are set on a tilt, slowly subsiding into the excavated space below. Told through Benji’s voice and a colourful variety of others over a deeply joyful and strange twelve-month period, it’s a story about growing up, the oddness beneath the everyday, what we once believed the future would be, and those times in life when anything seems possible.

1983 is steeped in the distinctive character of a setting far weirder than it might at first appear: from robots living next door, and a school caretaker who is not all he seems, to missing memories and the aliens Benji is certain are trying to abduct him.

Why have I yearned, even ached, so much to write about 1983 lately? On a purely nostalgia-based level, I find myself wanting to swim around in a time from my life when there was a bit more idle space in the world: a time when I went to a lovely school, had a fertile imagination, a great social life and spent a lot of time outdoors. But there’s much more to it than that. I turned eight midway through 1983, and in a way it seems like the first year of my life for which my memories are solid and fully coloured in, an energetic midpoint of childhood when, fully recovered from the illness that had almost killed me a couple of years earlier, I started to properly become the me I am now. 1983 — a general election year, and the eve of the Miners’ Strike — also seems, in retrospect, to be when the big lights of the 1980s, Thatcher’s 1980s, fully came on, when things started to get a little glossier and, in many ways, more problematic. Nottinghamshire — a very unglossy place, halfway up the country, with its strong reliance on the coal industry — seems to me an interesting prism to examine this through. A pit village in north Nottinghamshire, quite a lot like the one I grew up in, especially.

You can’t avoid politics when you write about a place like this at a time like that, but I also would not describe 1983 as a political novel. It is also definitely not a ‘Hey, remember ZX81s and C5s — what was all that about?’ pop-cultural cheeseboard. It’s a story about an ordinary family, in an ordinary village sandwiched between two ordinary collieries, an ordinary childhood, an ordinary (yet unusual and magical) inner-city primary school, an ordinary(-ish) robot maker, and some extraordinary goings-on. It’s very autobiographical and very unautobiographical, mundane and sci-fi, silly and serious. But it is also marinated, unavoidably, in the cultural atmosphere of the time. If you want a flavour of what D. H. Lawrence country had become by the time ‘Blue Monday’ was first on the playlist at the local leisure centre roller disco, you’ll inevitably find out here.