Chapter 2: Middle school years

1990 - 1994

Thinking back to my school years in the 90s, I attended a total of four different schools - finishing up at college in 1997. We moved house four times as well before I started college: Horsham > Emsworth > New Jersey, USA > Emsworth. So as you can imagine there was a lot of stopping & re-starting and friend-making that had to be done.

In 1990-1991, I would visit my friend Justin, he had an 8-bit Nintendo NES system - that was my first introduction to Duck Hunt & Mario - after that I was hooked and wanted one! Even though the next generation 16-bit SNES had just landed, I was adamant that I have the same NES as my pal!

We also spent a lot of time creating stories - I remember he had a series of Disney books, and we’d make copies of these. The book construction had got more elaborate, as we used thick card for the cover - joining the two pieces with sticky fabric, and it had stapled paper pages inside glued inside.

Our Mickey Mouse hand-made book and Super Mario Bros (NES game)

Justin really liked sports trainers, so then I did too. We were obsessed with Reebok Pumps too - at one point, all the kids wanted them. As part of our drawing sessions we created a trainer brand, and as I can remember the brand name was Pro-nix. We drew it everywhere - inside board game boxes, on our school notebooks - and as you might guess, the branding was basically similar graphic shapes & elements merged together into something not dissimilar to other well-known brands. I’d say this was my first dabblings with graphic design I suppose.

I must have become more aware of football, maybe the 1990 world cup helped that year, as I can remember watching the games on TV. Justin also supported Liverpool FC, he was always talking about Barnes & Rush. I remember playing football outdoors for hours, I went through a goalkeeper phase for a little while, I was pretending to be Peter Shilton of England 1990 fame. Always trying to avoid any dog poo in the longer grass, but not always succeeding.

Fast Forward magazine, Michael Jackson - Dangerous, Peter Shilton and Reebok Pumps

Music and pop culture was becoming more of a personal influence in the 90s. I ended up with my own spin-off magazine that was called ‘NewsMag’ - again creating and editing the whole thing. I’d moved on from the storytelling phase for now, so again I can see now this was more graphic design territory.

In November 1991,  I can remember buying Michael Jackson - Dangerous on cassette, probably in MVC. But apart from that, I think most of my music was home-made cassettes which I’d started making around 9-10yrs old. My walkman must have been in use since the late 80s, as I can remember long car journeys churning through all my cassettes. Kylie was also big on my radar at this point, I’d collected a few more 7” vinyls, but also had her album on cassette. I was also getting heavily into techno and disposable pop, always listening to chart shows and watching Top of the Pops.

Age 12ish - I was at a new middle school getting familiar with new surroundings. One kid in particular seemed to go feral in the playgrounds - kicking and scaring everyone, and was picking on my younger brother. So one day I grabbed his leg when he kicked out and pushed him over - it seemed to do the trick. However I was then getting picked on by other kids from my own class, probably for being the new kid or something, but eventually worked my way out of trouble - I had to learn to stick up for myself & think my sense of humour and friend-making skills must have paid off eventually.

What came of a London school trip to The Natural History Museum? I remember buying two crystals in the gift shop at the end, and hence my crystal-collecting phase was born! This grew into quite a serious hobby, I can remember regularly visiting craft shops, hunting new types out, and even walking along the coastal pathways around Emsworth, finding stones there that vaguely had a bit of crystal sheen in them, but never quite as nice as the fancy colourful stuff. I plan to pass this collection onto my nephews at some point, once they’re ready!

A sample from my crystal collection

Outside my role play activities were evolving, we’d moved house again to a town near Portsmouth, and I was making new friendships in the neighbourhood. For some strange reason I loved being a car park attendant - so our driveway was blocked off, but I manned a barrier, and let the kids on bikes in and out, then charged them parking fees. It was a great job, until my brother Al came charging through one day on his new roller boots, and tripped on some gravel… he had a fractured arm, but wore his arm plaster with pride!

In December 1992 - Josh was born, my youngest brother. It was a home-birth, and I can still remember sitting in the kitchen patiently with Al, waiting to meet him. We didn’t have to wait too long. I used to help get him to sleep sometimes, Lionel Richie greatest hits seemed to work a treat.

'“Clever Girl…” Jurassic Park in July 1993 - what a film! I went to see it at the cinema maybe 3 or 4 times! Still have a t-shirt even today I wear. There were a lot of memorable films of 90s, Home Alone being another of those classics - again we’re still watching it most christmas holidays even now.

Home Alone (1990) and Jurassic Park (1993)

Our first major long distance holiday abroad was to Florida, USA in 1993. I’ve still have good memories of seeing a rocket launch on Cocoa Beach, exploring Ron Jon’s surf shop, it had a frickin’ waterfall inside the store! The sheer scale of USA was mind-blowing, like it makes you feel so tiny when you come back to UK, everything is micro-size in comparison. It’s not just the physical environment scale, their food portions are also crazy.

Of course as a 12yr old, with a 10yr old brother, Disney World was mandatory - we did 2 out of 3 of the parks: Magic Kingdom & Epcot, but we missed out the studio park. The excitement of running around the park, and hoping to see one of the guys dressed up as a character. We eventually tracked down Mickey Mouse, Goofy and one of the Chip ’n Dales. The excitement of the whole holiday made us want to document & save everything, hence I found this paper bag with our original park tickets in! After Disney, we also did a day-trip to Universal Studios - notable rides I can remember were Jaws, King Kong, Earthquake, as well as seeing the Jurassic Park jeep and sick triceratops model outside one studio entrance!

Memorabilia from Disney World and Ron Jon Surf Shop

Dennys was the first place we ever ate a meal in America - I can still remember getting chicken & fries in a plastic basket and a milkshake. I don’t think we’d really experienced food like that much before, and other sugary food venues like Dunkin’ Donuts and the fact that they all had a drive-thru… it just all seemed a bit strange as the UK had none of this up to that point.

Kennedy Space Centre, Cape Canaveral was a real highlight - sitting close to equator, it’s America’s main working spacecraft launch site, and it also has a museum of historic spacecrafts, photos and paraphernalia. We went on a coach out to the launch pad, it takes ages to get there, I guess it has to be far away from everything else for safety, but along the sides of the long straight roads were swamps full of alligators, and eagles regularly flew by too. One other random memory about that trip - huge Mr Whippy XL ice cream cones!

1993 was the year of the Sega Megadrive, as the first FIFA game arrived, and it stood out in my memory, as all the football games used to be flat 2D birds-eye view before that, but this one was a little bit more 3D. It also had real crowd-cheering sounds. Street Fighter II was another top game, after seeing it on the arcade machine at the swimming pool when we went for lessons, I was super hyped when they finally brought it out on the Megadrive.

The Gameboy was also highly sought after in the 90s, I remember kids at school bringing in these chunky plastic bricks on the dress-down days, with a green tinted screen, and those tiny little grey cartridges. We ended up with one in our house, and Tetris remained a family toilet favourite. 122 lines was my world record for a while.

I had some good art teachers during the early 90s. I can remember a particular teacher at middle school - clearly art was her favourite subject, as it felt like we did a lot more art than anything else. Either that or I was just drawing pictures in almost every subject, this was actually the only way I would pass some subjects - history & geography I can remember being so terrible at, but my visual skills helped scrape me through.

I did a pen & ink drawing of a castle whilst out on a field trip one day in July 1993, and it ended up being featured in the school newsletter. 

Pen & ink drawing of Porchester Castle and a school project book example

We made a lot of large school project books, and I remember doing a lot of drawing and experimenting to make interesting cover background patterns - including marble ink patterns and potato printing to name a couple. We mounted all our writing and pictures onto coloured paper & neatly cropped them all. I remember my teacher telling us about colouring-in, especially letters and to always have a darker heavier edge, to make them stand out more.

A pop-up book design project came up at school - I was in heaven! The book we made was all about documenting a school trip that we went on, it was some kind of outdoor activity centre we’d stayed over at - I can vaguely remember abseiling, rowing a boat, obstacle-courses and a first aid beginner’s lesson. There was another girl who was really good at art & crafts, I got super competitive with her on the pop-up book-making, but she ended up getting top marks - with double gold stars. I think I only managed 1 silver & 1 gold maybe, still haven’t let go…

I was always at public schools until 1993, then I did one year at a private school which was further away from my house and I had to catch a coach to get there. I remember it passing through many villages to get to the outskirts of Petersfield, and the final stretches were narrow country farm roads that often got flooded, so we did get stuck a few times.

Again art was still my favourite subject, and I got to try out some new mediums - we had pottery classes, and I was using oil pastels too. It’s the first time I can remember it feeling like a more serious art class, as we did some still life drawing, and self-portraits. I can remember always covering all my school notebooks in scribbles and doodles too.

A friend at school one day showed me Fighting Fantasy stories - I loved the fact that you could decide the direction of a story through your own choices - it seemed such a great way to empower the reader. I built up a small collection of these books. You see this technique in video games now.

Top Trumps were popular in the playground too, I had a few different sets going, fantasy monsters was one of them…

Super Top Trumps: Fantasy edition

In 1994, at age 13, we left England to go back to the USA, this time to live there for almost 3 years. I remembered screaming ‘I don’t want to go!’ I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to move that far away! I’d already decided it would be terrible, and ‘I’ll have no friends there!’ We had to pack everything up and it got shipped out ahead of us, we left our house in Emsworth, which was then rented out to another family whilst we were gone. Let’s see how much I can remember in the next chapter - all about living in America.