London, England—East End, not in Cheapside, nor within earshot of the bells of St. Mary-le-Bow church, but close enough. The midwife trainee arrives on a bike. The kitchen is infested with rats and cockroaches. Your mother lies back on a drainage pad over a mattress, each foot up on a different chair.

Boil more water, the midwife tells your father, while she snaps on her gloves and sterilizes the equipment. I'll need some towels, whatever you have.

In late January, 1969, you are born. Mother's pale skin, father's blue eyes. His nose. The dark blond of her hair.

Lee.

Your name is Lee.

Lee is a good name. Bit of Irish back in the line, your father says, need to pay homage. Your mother agrees as she always has; she's found plenty of his faults, but she likes his direction more, loves him, in fact.

Your mother is a waitress. You'll take after her: the steadfast way she loves, the devotion, the way she sees hope and the way she tells about it. She dreamed of a whole lot of things before she was pregnant with you, but you coming along didn't change a thing. You just made it necessary to adapt a bit. It's the way it always is, for working women with children, but she'll never blame you for it.

Your father, on the other hand, is a coal miner. There's a hiring boom in the 1970s that makes the job ideal from his former job as a busboy. It pays enough to put food on the table especially now that there's family, and the country relies so heavily on coal that the Three-Day Week puts almost every business to a standstill.

What you get from him is something more than your name.

You get his power. His instincts. You get something from him that years down the road, will put you in a very coveted spot in the military, will have you react with every moral sinew about wrongs, will draw Harry Hart's eye to you as you sit in that pub long enough for him to offer you a chance to turn your life around, will have you instinctively dive to throw yourself over a suicide bomber. You get a danger from him, because he grew up on the streets and he passed it onto you, and that you'll pass onto your son.

(One day, Eggsy will use that to kill a man in cold blood, and he will lose no sleep in doing so.)

But that isn't important when you're young.

When you're young, what's important is this: David Unwin had a temper. When talks about global warming come around, the government isn't putting as much pound into the coal mining industry. It suffers for it. And you suffer, and your mum suffers.

Scars and bruises rough up the skin that you haven't already covered. Walk the streets with a black eye. It's nothing new; you're not in a place where something like that is uncommon, and it's not like children younger than you haven't started early too.

What's important is this: you grow up, better for worse, in a single-parent home. David is never round if he can help it; the older you get, the less he's over, which means he's gone eventually, him and his new love of drink. But your mum manages, knows her lot like she knows the life that will be for the both of you for the next few decades. You learn sleights of hand from the other boys in the neighbourhood while she makes ends meet, roughs and rabbles just as good as the rest of 'em.

You live, Lee, which is the point. Walk the walk, and talk the talk. There's no room for kindness here, though your mother makes sure that it's there, and you do your best to defend your own bleeding heart under the swaggers and attitude because there's nothing else for it.

1980—you and your mum into a shared house in the primarily white Pembury Estate of southern Hackney. You keep attending school because it's mandatory up until you're sixteen, and you're eleven right now. Falling in line with other people's rules has become second nature to you, even if you don't understand the use of education for you, even if all that nonsense won't do anything for you in the long run. The 1970s and 1980s are a period in which tradition apprenticeships don't work out anymore. More and more qualifications required per industry. Vocational education will hold no appeal.

You grow to develop a flinch of the stick. The bruises and welts create solidarity with the other boys who sport their stories on their bodies just like you hide on yours, and deeper under your skin.

In 1980-1983, there isn't much. All you remember of that period is the new school, the new home, and the fact you meet the girl of your dreams. She's beautiful, wears a dress of pastel blue that brings out the brown of her eyes, the ribbon in her hair. The hem swishes around her knees.

(When you're older, you'll think back to your first love with nothing but fondness, and you'll wonder where she ended up.)

The first time you see her, you blurt out, "What's your name?"

Her eyes snap in your direction. This isn't the first time you see someone's eyes shifty, but they're clear.

You step closer. She clutches her books closer to her, lips drawn in a thin line. "Who wants to know?"

"Lee."

You get her name, eventually, because you're young, Lee. Young and there's something in you that people find that's not in everyone everyday: You're Earnest. (You'll never read Oscar Wilde to understand the joke, but Harry will one day tell it to you fondly when the two of you are at a pub drinking pints of Guinness.)

"Danielle," she says.

"You live here?" You ask. You've never seen her around, but then again, you don't tend to come home on time. You linger with the other boys, trying to find a space for yourself because that's how you adapt. That's how you live.

Danielle hesitates, and glances up. Her home is on the third floor of the block, you figure. You follow her gaze—

Dog crap is spread over the steps. Racial slurs are scratched on the stairwells.

"I'll see you at school, Lee," she tells you.

You watch as the door scrawled crudely with a smudged gger closes behind her and feel helpless when you realize there is more here than just a divide of poverty. Of course, you've always known it, but it spells itself deeper somehow.

Danielle, as you begin to know, as you learn the more you know about her through the years, the more time the two of you spend together, isn't interested in love. Education is her name. She prefers the books, her letters, the lessons at school. She was thirteen like you when the two of you met, and she already had a dream that she still keeps now: she wants to learn.

You want to learn too, so you ask Danielle if she's ever seen the sights. You want to learn what makes Danielle Danielle. What makes her happy. You want her happiness beyond all else. None of this crap that makes you furious.

"Lee," Danielle says, "if you're going to be my friend, you're going to have to get used to the policemen." To the racial hatred, she doesn't say.

"I could take you," you say. "Where do you want to go? Anywhere you want. Once I'm rich, you can go anywhere. Live in one of those fancy houses, maybe." The two of you are fifteen. You're sure you could make it somewhere, as long as she said yes.

"Don't be stupid, Lee," Danielle tells you, not unkindly, blinking past past the black eye, tight-lipped about the absence of her older brother who used to be a part of her world, whose things you spot in telling hands. "I'm staying here. I'm getting an education. I want to be somewhere and I'll work my way up." Danielle hesitates, and then she stares at you.

The thing is, her parents aren't rich, and they haven't gotten good enough education themselves. There'll be a struggle for her to get there, but she's stubborn. She's smart.

She'll do well, you think. She'll get there, but that's no place for someone like you.

(You'll learn from a passing acquaintance years down the road that she did it all: education, a job, a reputation, a family consisting of a husband and two daughters. You'll be with Michelle then, but the desire for what could have been will strike you hard and fast like a slap, but you'll feel no regret. You'll have a beautiful wife and a beautiful baby son that you love, and they'll be your entire world.)

"It doesn't have to be your story either, Lee," she says, looking away. "This cycle."

You reach out and hold her hands. "Not as smart as you," you remind her, squeezing. She smiles at you, watery, and for a moment it's just the two of you. You squeeze her hands again because they're soft hands, because you'll afraid you'll never see her again. (Too right.)

"You're plenty smart," she tells you, but she doesn't say you could apply yourself or study harder. It's not much of a second shot for you. "So that's it then? Throwing your lot in with the military? The Royal Marines, even? Will they let you in?"

"I'm good on the fitness and eyesight. Got a bank account recently too." You nod, more for her than for yourself. "Small job. Been paying off me mum's loans but she says I should just go."

"I wish you could've stayed on longer," Danielle says. "In school."

"I'm dropping out, you know that. But you tell me how it goes, the whole educated toff life."

Her room isn't too big. A plant sits on the windowsill ledge, and a desk soaks in the Sunday afternoon sunlight. Books and small baubles she's collected her whole life sit on the small shelf on the wall. Danielle is sweet, her name rolls off your tongue, and when she hugs you, she smells like everything you'll miss, everything you love.

On a bright day in December 1984, less than a month from your sixteenth birthday, you say goodbye to your best friend and apply for the Royal Marines. They accept you, and you make it through the training, through the courses, you make it out of that neighbourhood.

In 1949, Orwell published a dystopian world painting a never ending war between three countries with neither true importance nor consequence. Danielle will read it and send you letters that you will fold up and put in your uniform pocket, and those letters will continue for a few months until they stop.

The last you hear from her, Danielle's mother doesn't want her to talk to you ever again, they're moving, everything and everything in between.

(You disagreed then, but by the time the letter got to you, Danielle's family had moved out, and your unopened letter never saw the light of day again.)

Danielle's loss is raw on your heart, but for some reason, there's nothing like bitterness associated with her memory.

You love her, plain and simple, and even as the years pass, you don't stop thinking about the years you knew her and how they shaped you. About what you learned from her-perseverance, justice, equality-everything good that your mum once taught you, that you never really understood until then.

1988-You'll meet Michelle on leave, though, when you're nineteen. What grabs you her is her smile, her charm. She's a pretty girl, just like Danielle is in your memories, but the moment you spot her just walking by, just about the entire world changes the same way that Danielle changed it for you seven years ago. At the same time, it's different. Maybe it's because your bleeding heart loves Danielle with every part and resists the change. Maybe it's because your love for Danielle was puppy love the same way this is-but this.

This strikes like a bullet straight through your lungs. The world feels like spinning.

Is it because you're older? Is it because you suddenly lose out on the confidence of your youth? Your mouth runs dry. Your feet stop working with your brain.

(Your mum used to tell you stories of how it was when she met your father. Everything suddenly just doesn't matter anymore, everything suddenly makes sense. She was a romantic; and for some reason, you never doubted that you'd be one too.)

Bill nudges you. "Doing all right there, Lee?"

"Right," you gasp, dazed, and you can't tear your eyes away. The blond of her hair is dazzling; the mischievous expressions she shoots between her friends and the laughter from their group, even as Bill ushers you to a booth where the rest of the boys are waiting. You stumble, when her eyes meet yours and widen slightly, and you know.

You keep watching her table, because she's watching you back, and so are her friends, before all of them whisper furiously with each other, giggling.

"See someone you like, Lee?" Tom elbows you, and you scowl. "Go on."

"Bugger off," you hiss, red-faced from being caught in the act.

"Never thought you'd be showing some interest in somebody," Bill retorts, glancing over his shoulder.

"Yeah, but our Lee is a good lad. Doesn't chat up." Tom tries to mess your hair, and you elbow him off. "Temperamental, aren't you?"

"Reckon it's that bird in the blue," Bill says. "Pretty one. If I didn't have Anne, I'd be asking her out myself. Go on, Lee." He shoves you roughly, and if he didn't pull rank, you wouldn't have, but someway or another, you find yourself getting up from the booth and self-conscious.

Palms sweating.

The girl of your dreams saves you from embarrassment when she meets you half-way. "Susan says you boys are military," she says casually. Your eyes follow as she tucks a stray strand of blond behind her ear. Up close she's even more stunning.

"Lee," you blurt out. "My name's Lee."

"Michelle," she says, charmingly, and oh, how you fall.