Tracy Stopford-Baines had an identity crisis. Everyone at school thought, having heard the name, they knew all about Tracy Stopford-Baines. Upper class twit was one of the milder labels used.
Why’ve you got a girl’s name, he was asked. And, why’ve you got two second names, doesn’t your mum know who your dad was?
The answers, though
nobody cared, were: (a) his grandfather was Irish, hence Tracy. No E he always
had to say; and (b) his mother’s family, the Baines, were full of their own
importance and long heritage. Long but long fallen on harder times, such that
Emily Baines had ended up marrying (in haste to preserve legitimacy) Johnny
Stopford, ace winger of the Salford rugby league team. Of course, if he’d been
ace winger of a football team, say Everton or Liverpool, it would all have been
different. Then Tracy Stopford-Baines would have been accepted without question
by his peers at some fee-paying private school in leafy Cheshire.
But not at Ellesmere
Comprehensive in Eccles.
[Flash fiction - 3 September 2026]
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