Although he never physically harmed me, my dad’s brooding rages were terrifying and have probably left me with my own legacy of neurosis. He could be very controlling – always demanding to know where you were going if you left the room. To this day it’s impossible for me to even go for a piss without telling my wife. It’s like that scene in The Shawshank Redemption when Morgan Freeman’s character gets the job as a bag-packer in the supermarket. At other times he could be hugely confrontational and would make outrageous or quixotic statements about politics and music. When I eventually drifted towards adolescence and began to challenge him, we would continually clash in increasingly bitter, cyclical debates over the relative merits of pop and classical. Christmas after Christmas would end in fraught, charged arguments as we sat glumly at the table in paper hats while he passionately but pointlessly tried to prove to me that the Pathétique was ‘better’ than ‘Satisfaction’. The experience made me highly opinionated about music and probably prepared me wonderfully for a lifetime of over-explaining my own.
There were lighter moments, of course, too. He could be gentle and kind, and sweet and funny and wonderfully anti-materialistic, completely unaffected by the eighties climate of crushing ambition, content within his tiny kingdom of chip-board and paint. He was surprisingly practical, and was always sawing and drilling and gluing and hammering and fixing things with his perfectly maintained collection of tools. He made furniture and shelves and picture frames for my mother’s paintings, and even his own speaker cabinets. One Easter holiday he was working away on what he told Blandine and me was a cabinet for his tools. We were puzzled by its need for chicken wire until on Easter day we were ushered out to the garden to be presented with a beautiful white rabbit each. He’d been building a hutch for them.
The rabbits became a looming presence in our little world. Every morning we would traipse over to the wasteland behind the dump by our house, and pick them dandelions and choice greenery, and our mum would make them a delicious-smelling, warm, mashed-up mealy thing in the winter made of oats and potato skins. Blandine even started what she called The Rabbit Club, the point of which was vague. The only rules of membership seemed to be that as a form of recognition between the members (just two – her and me) we would twitch our noses at each other. Anyone who knows me well will know that it’s a habit I’ve found hard to shake.
If my father’s obsession was Lizst, my sister’s was Watership Down. She read her paperback version so often that the cover disintegrated, and she made her own replacement one with a lace and denim trim, and her own watercoloured interpretations of Hazel and Fiver et al. She was so keen for me to know the story that she actually paid me 2p an hour to listen to her read it aloud – a practice that later fed into other authors like Tolkien and Rosemary Sutcliffe. I don’t ever remember being read cutesy young kids’ books, though, and one of my earliest memories is of my mother reading me Beowulf. Blandine’s influence on me was huge: she introduced me to literature, inspired me to want to be educated, and later played me the pop music of the sixties and seventies, which would grow and evolve within me and form the second strand of my musical self.
When I was about six or seven, Blandine and I started going to Sunday School. It was a white-brick, single-storey building on the edge of our estate run by a frail elderly couple called Mr and Mrs Marsh (my sister always joked that they should have lived somewhere called Bog Cottage). Anyway, I was far too young to understand any of the real spiritual dimensions of what I was signing up for, and looking back I’d have to interpret the whole experience as a process of indoctrination to which my atheist parents seemed blithely passive. I suppose what attracted me was the end-of-year ‘prize-giving’ ceremony where the children were rewarded for the number of days they had attended over the year. Depending on how many weekly stamps you had accrued, you would be presented with some childish bauble or book. Of course, the more ruthless local kids would exploit this and turn up just for that day, marching home triumphantly brandishing dot-to-dot books or bits of similarly worthless religious tat.
Our house was at the end of a terrace next door to a kindly, toothless old milkman called Bing and his family. Even from a young age, though, I sensed a real friction between us and the other families on the estate, most of whom I think perceived us as distant and aloof. The unruly boys next door would thump and cackle and play heavy metal until late into the evening, and there was a coterie of little thugs who would shout abuse at my dad and spend all day kicking footballs at the corrugated iron fence right outside our house, trampling on my mum’s flowers and cruelly shattering her brittle, fictional Edwardian idyll. Indeed, our homemade Arts and Crafts-inspired world must have sat uncomfortably with the popular Zeitgeist of Status Quo T-shirts and plastic furniture. Our mother made most of our clothes so we must have looked very different from the corduroyed hordes, and would often be mocked and provoked. I don’t think our dad’s growing reputation as Haywards Heath’s answer to Edith Sitwell or my mother’s habit of sunbathing nude in the garden really helped, but slowly we were accepted and absorbed within the community, although we were always seen as outsiders – ‘that lot with the piano in their kitchen’.
Outside each block of houses there were little grassy spaces where all the kids would compete in endless games of football. The estate would be ringing with the sounds of play, and tribes of little ruffians would bustle around on their Chopper bikes with their threats and their air pistols. Years later, whenever I returned, I was always struck by the absence of this; the grassy areas mute and childless now the generations had grown, the estate left to the greying parents – unwell, divorced and abandoned, like a line from ‘North Country Blues’.
2
Everything we owned was either homemade or second-hand. My mother, my sister and I would be jumble sale regulars; battling the elbowing pensioners every Saturday afternoon at the local village hall. Ornaments, books, even underwear were snapped up for a few coppers and ferried home. Somehow I can still feel the second-hand purple nylon pants my mum used to make me wear. My mother ran our household on the proverbial shoe-string. She had been a child during post-war rationing so absolutely nothing was wasted or thrown away. She would pick wild nettles and mushrooms to make salad and soup, and pluck dead birds and skin rabbits to eat in stews. She would always be sewing; an arsenal of pins in her mouth, Cleopatra make-up and her hair done up like Elizabeth Taylor. Countless winter evenings while my dad was at work were spent sitting crouched around the fireplace listening to the quiet, gentle sound of needle on cloth as the firewood spat and crackled awaiting the dreaded scrape of my father’s key twisting in the lock heralding the lottery of his mood. His meagre wage didn’t allow much extravagance and my mother was always forced to buy cheap meat – chewy, fatty cuts and offal and veiny liver. Waste was forbidden, however, and we were not allowed to leave the table until we had finished every morsel on our plates. On those dreaded evenings when steak and kidney pudding was plonked in front of us, I was simply unable to comply, and would regularly sit alone for hours at the round, white, Formica kitchen table gagging and sobbing into my food until late in the evening when my furious mother eventually gave in and angrily threw my scraps away. The experience has left me with a lifelong hatred of meat, and must have left me hungry too, because Blandine and I began to hide and hoard food in our bedrooms. Whenever there were snacks or spare scraps of things we actually liked, we would pocket them and ferry them secretly up to our bedrooms to be squirrelled away for times of hunger. I remember my mum used to make these savoury, twisty Marmite tarts, which I loved and would smuggle into my room to store under my bed in an old cardboard box that had once contained a pair of my dad’s headphones. I became so obsessive about this little hoard that I started to forget the original point and ended up keeping it far too long. One day my mother confronted me angrily with my box full of mouldy, mildewy, rotting pastry after discovering it while cleaning, and I spent the rest of the day in a state of exposed, gloomy shame, nev
er daring to repeat the cardinal sin of wasting food again. But looking back, she was a remarkable woman: incredibly creative and practical and stoical, and in her own way as hard as flint. Apart from a cheap electric oven we had no mod cons so she washed and dried all of our clothes by hand, something that seems unbelievable to my pampered twenty-first-century self. In her crusade to economise during the winter she would use the lukewarm contents of our hot water bottles to do the washing. There was no central heating in the house, just a small fireplace in the lounge and a little paraffin heater in the kitchen. The coal black mornings were brutal, and the ritual of lighting and maintaining the fire assumed a religious status. My mother was the high priestess, and we were her acolytes; fetching and carrying kindling and bits of old newspaper to hold over the flue to make the fire draw. On damp afternoons she would be crouched on the floor blowing at the smouldering embers, her hands smelling of woodsmoke and a line of worry etched across her forehead.
As well as holding the household together she used to make most of our clothes, and when she wasn’t reading or painting or tending to the fire you could often find her kneeling on the mustard-coloured carpet with a pair of dress-maker’s scissors in her hands, hunched over a sewing pattern – a sort of tailor’s blueprint made out of gossamer thin paper that you would use to cut around fabric to assemble and stitch together parts of dresses and trousers and shirts. When my sister reached those self-conscious teenage years, she insisted that my mother sew in her own fake ‘brand’ label into one pair of cords so that she didn’t feel too different to the other girls in their Levi’s and Lee Coopers. The only time I remember being bought any clothes was when my mother forked out for a new winter coat for me when I was about eight. I wore it for the first time at a kid’s party that was at a little boy’s house out in the countryside on a small ramshackle farm. I got involved in a mud fight with all the other boys and turned up back home caked and splattered. My mother greeted me with an anger more wild than I ever remember, flying into a screaming, terrifying rage and setting about viciously slapping my bare legs. This was something that she would normally reserve for especially grave transgressions and was usually administered with a stern control, but this one time it assumed a sort of demented fury. I suppose the unforgiving, thankless, exhausting task of trying to keep a grip on the family’s meagre purse strings had brought her to a kind of snapping point, and she simply couldn’t contain herself as the frustrations finally spilled over.
Whereas my father’s family was originally from Kentish Town, my mother was from Sussex country stock. Her own mother had died of breast cancer before I was born, and her father had moved and remarried, his loyalty so reapportioned to his new family that my sister and I only ever met him once; a prickly, uncomfortable afternoon hunched over tea-cups in a small house in Lewes when I was about eight. Mum used to trundle around the village on a sturdy, blue tricycle to the back of which my father had fixed a large wooden box. When it wasn’t carrying groceries it would house her beloved Welsh springer spaniel, Misty, who would loll and pant and slobber as my mother pumped away at the pedals and the world looked on arch-eyebrowed and quizzical. In her more relaxed moments my mother was delicate and romantic, and would sit painting and listening to Joni Mitchell or The Stones on her little plastic portable cassette deck. As her single, solitary indulgence she would very occasionally allow herself the luxury of a can of Carnation condensed milk. It must have been some rare treat that she had been allowed during her bleak, austere childhood as it was the one thing that somehow seemed to make her vulnerable again; the frosty robes of control that she normally wore discarded as she sat there at the kitchen table smiling and purring like a little girl, spooning the white goo into her mouth. She was warm and loving and kind too, and I was obsessed with the possibility of her death. Occasionally she would wear a wig, which she kept on a surreal-looking polystyrene head on her dressing table, and in a kind of sixties hangover she would back-comb and lacquer her hair, and would always be spraying herself with hairspray. I was convinced that inhaling too much of it would give her cancer, and like all sons was terrified of being denied her warmth and love. The twin fears which loomed on the landscape of my psyche like Isengard and Mordor around this time were this obsession about the malign effects of hairspray and the ever-present threat of nuclear attack which during the early eighties, when the world was still locked in the paranoid grip of the Cold War, seemed like a genuine possibility, and was regularly exacerbated and worried by the ever-irresponsible, ever-self-serving popular press. People were forever lugubriously poring over projected blast-damage maps or speculating gloomily about whether surviving or being immediately vaporised would be preferable in the gruesome event, and these kind of glum discussions meandered their way to our kitchen table where my mother would pontificate grimly about the agony of being burnt by melting nylon clothes, or about whether we would have time to save the rabbits. She was a voracious reader, and when she wasn’t painting or sewing she would sit, stockinged feet up on the settee, lost in her novel while I clung to her, burying my head against her arm and plaguing her with interruptions about the plot and asking her if there were any pictures I could look at. Her love of literature must have bled through as even though it lay fairly dormant in me as a young man my appetite for books now borders on the rapacious.
Apart from the standard C. S. Lewis/Tolkien fantasy stuff the only serious novel that really dug into my consciousness as a boy was Orwell’s 1984. It’s a book I regularly return to, enjoying how the intriguing process of re-reading it within a different period of my life can tease out new nuances of meaning. The well-documented presciences are, of course, fascinating but for me the real essence of the novel is its core love story. Quite early on I became aware that essentially the vast majority, if not all, art is in some way about love. Years later I began to apply this to my own writing, always framing songs within a human, emotional context, and allowing the dramas and frictions between people to be the vehicle that reveals further, wider truths. Any later interpretation of our music as being ‘apolitical’ has always struck me as over-literal; social comment surely not being just something that’s limited to the primary colours of party politics.
A tiny literary seed must have been planted in me because in the late seventies I started to keep diaries. Completely forgotten about until now, they lived in a cardboard box for decades, following me mutely from house to house quietly waiting for their moment. Unfortunately, their moment is still to come as they failed to turn out to be the illuminating, revealing exposé of my early life that I’d hoped for when I came to write this. Sadly, they’re just a dull litany of weather reports and trips to the shops, a drab timetable of school lessons and exam results lacking in any sort of insight or description, or anything interesting really. Even when events that now seem seismic happened, I seem to have blithely glossed over them, preferring to enthuse about what we had for dinner or the score of a football game. What a ‘deeply boring young man’ I must have been. Maybe Morrissey was right after all. I suppose I had yet to acquire any sort of emotional depth or any sense of perspective. Subjects like the complex landscape of my parents’ marriage are represented by the odd sentence like Mum and Dad had a row, revealing myself to be an unusually myopic and self-centred child. I think my mother especially kept me safely wrapped up in a warm, cosy blanket of delusion, never daring to betray her fears about the shifting, shaking fault-lines upon which our brittle world rested. It wasn’t until I was well into adolescence that I remember having any sort of meaningful, honest conversation with her. She preferred to communicate through chats about books or TV programmes, or more often just through those tender, primal channels that mothers and sons often use.
Blandine, however, was much more perceptive. During the seventies and the early eighties my parents were still young, and as a concession to youth would throw parties at our house. It was always a magical and fascinating experience for Blandine and me who, exiled to upstairs, would hover by t
he banister listening to the bustle and chatter, the shrieks and the chink of glasses and breathe in the illicit, wafting fumes of alcohol and cigarette smoke as we perched high on the fringe of the adults’ mysterious, exotic world. The next morning we would wake up early while my parents were still sleeping it off, tip-toe downstairs and step gingerly amongst the debris, making sense of the clues like detectives piecing together a mystery. I’ll always remember finding a pair of discarded tights behind a curtain and wondering why Blandine found it so intriguing. Of course, my naive child’s mind didn’t understand the implications. Once the detective work was over, we would hurry about drinking the dregs that were sitting in the tumblers and glasses that still littered the tiny lounge and kitchen; downing the stale fingers of alcohol and thrilling to the intoxicating, sticky mixtures and the heady sense of transgression. I’m not sure how many would have belonged to my father, however, as he was almost a complete teetotaller. I think his childhood dealing with the sharp end of my grandfather’s alcoholism had coloured him hugely, and apart from the odd small glass of sherry at Christmas I don’t think I ever saw him drink. Tea was his obsession, and it’s one that I have inherited from him. He would forever be hovering by the steaming kettle, spooning loose leaves into the pot with a little, squat, tarnished silver spoon. After long nights at work he would lie in bed until late in the morning, and when he eventually woke up would bang savagely on the bedroom floor with a stick as a signal for my mum to bring him his tea, something that she would unhesitatingly do. Nowadays, rituals like that sound horribly misogynistic and primitive, but my parents had one of those old-fashioned, unwritten and probably unspoken agreements where the division of labour within the marriage was very clearly defined; my father earned the money and expected my mother to do pretty much everything else. I never once remember him cleaning or washing up, or, despite the fact that he had trained as a chef, ever helping with the cooking. Instead, he would sit at the table and brood, and insult my mother’s food if the menu strayed in any way from the unadventurous ‘meat and two veg’. Hilariously, he would even refer to spaghetti Bolognese as ‘foreign muck’, and when he’d finished pushing the food around his plate would slide it towards the centre of the table and make a sort of theatrical moue and a dismissive, fey, flapping gesture with his hands as a sign for my mother to take it away. The hierarchy of his household was for him very strictly defined; he was an Englishman and this was his castle, and as his marriage wore on he increasingly began to regard even his wife as chattel. This whole archaic equilibrium seemed to function for a while but, as my sister and then later I myself emerged from the numbing cocoon of childhood, we began to question his authority and clash with him in inevitable, endless, adolescent skirmishes.
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