The Invisible Boy Chronicles

Back in the 70’s horror films were a great late-night pastime for kids like me . Not officially, but nobody gave a shit what I was doing most of the time.

Everyone was getting involved. Or at least, that’s how it looked. There was a Cub Scout parade as part of it. Proper little march, uniforms, scarves, the lot. I wanted to be in it. Course I did. Every kid did. Only problem was, I wasn’t a Cub Scout.

I was nine. He was eighteen. We didn’t know each other… and my mum sent me to the fair with him anyway. The summer of ’76. Heatwave. Finsbury Park. And a ride where the floor disappears and you get stuck to the wall. Then a bloke walks in, tells everyone not to do something… and does it anyway. I’d never seen anything like it.

So we know the story by now. I won’t labour the hard-luck details, but in the late 70s and early 80s I was a hungry little kid. One thing I’d always look forward to was a trip to mothers boyfriend's gaff in West Croydon . Not for the house itself, oh no . That was just another filthy dimly lit shithole and held no interest for me at all. I was interested only in the outside, the main road near Graham's house, London Road. A great long sprawling high road that basically ran fr

I believed the little boy in me was dead. I was wrong. This is the true story of the day I found him again, and everything that changed after.

The year was 1986. I took my lovely new girlfriend Alison to meet my dad, not to his house, he didn't have one. I took her to a park in Thornhill Square where we walked straight up to a bunch of tramps sitting on the benches. She shied away and said maybe we should go the long way around and avoid that nasty bunch of tramps. I said don't worry, that's my family, that's my dad, and I could often be found sitting with these people and people like them for the last 10 years, d