by Nick Frost
One weekend I managed to persuade my London mates to drive down to Haverfordwest to stay with my gran for the night, then go clubbing. I wouldn’t say it was a disaster but it was a long way to go for a night out. We smoked joints on the way down and when we got nearer I told a story about an evil dwarf that lived with my grandmother. I managed to lay it on pretty thick and put the willies up them.
We were silent while we drove through the pitch-black lane, and a sigh of relief washed over them as we saw the welcoming lights of my gran’s house. Now, the story I told them was not actually completely untrue: my Uncle Emmy had suffered from a terrible bout of scarlet fever as a child. It stunted him mentally and physically. He never really grew up. Emmy was amazing. Me and all my cousins loved him so much. He was small and wrinkled like a prune with the spirit and heart of a child. I knew the weed had bent their minds and I wanted to use this.
My lovely gran welcomed us into the kitchen. The guys, stoned off their minds, huddled around her big Aga cooker in silence; it was the same Aga that years before I’d seen her use to hatch half a dozen hens’ eggs.
Uncle Emmy was a creature of habit. I knew exactly where he’d be, sitting in his chair, the one behind the door, watching the big old TV Gran owned. Knowing this, I sent the boys into the front room to sit down. They opened the door and essentially hid Emmy from their view. Once settled, Emmy kicked the door closed so he could see the TV. He omitted one of his funny trademark noises, a kind of long, loud hum.
From inside the kitchen I heard the boys shriek. Poor things. That night didn’t go so well. The club was cool although at some point we thought someone had spiked our drinks. I have a vague memory of one of us getting punched too, or threatened with a punching at the very least. At one point walking down the lane deep in the forest on the way home I decide I need to shit more than anyone in the world. So I do, by the light of someone’s Zippo. Bleak.
In the morning the terrible truth is revealed to me. While crouching to plop I had not cleared my own jeans. I had shit into my jeans and all down my white AS Roma away shirt. Oh dear.
I always had a vague notion I’d end up living in Wales. It was a dream, that’s all. For all the issues and faults I had with and in London with Mum and Dad, it was still my home. But it was difficult. Things were difficult. Mum continued drinking, Dad’s business was failing, leaving school with and for nothing, no job, a sadness descends. Looking back now at the age of forty something, I’d pinpoint this time as the beginning of a lifelong battle with depression. A battle I didn’t understand was being waged in me until years after.
***
Although no longer at school, the boys and me were still mates at this point. It was just before Mum and Dad lost everything, before I was cut loose by my friends and forgotten, ignored. I spent a lot of time with the fellas in a shit car driving around smoking hash. We did that a lot. Our range was fairly big, from Gants Hill and Barkingside all the way to Romford and Southend. We’d just drive around listening to pirate radio or Public Enemy, Shut Up and Dance, Jungle Brothers, Doug Lazy, Twin Hype, getting off our heads.
There was a place up in Epping Forest near High Beach where we’d go and park and smoke joints. It was a tiny lane deep in the forest in the middle of nowhere. Early one evening the four of us were sat in a mate’s shit beige Escort estate. I was in the passenger seat. So and So always drove, bullied and guilted into driving, poor fella. We’d smoked so much shit that I couldn’t see the driver, we’d created what the Dutch call a Grade 5 ‘hot box’. Down the lane we saw two headlights slowly bumping down the track. ‘Old Bill!’ I joke. We all panic and then laugh like drains. Some paranoia flashes over us.
‘Don’t fuck about.’ Another peel of laughter that’s immediately cut short when we realise a police car has pulled up beside us and the coppers are silently peering into the smoked-filled car full of red-eyed lemurs looking back at them.
I whisper loudly, ‘Don’t open the windows.’ They mishear me and the windows are opened immediately. Forty cubic metres of bright blue smoke are emitted into the low atmosphere around the vehicle and for a moment it looks like the car has a foggy afro. The police move off slowly, eye-fucking us. A terrible panic breaks out among the lemurs. Everyone fires off an opinion at once, and eventually in about one millionth of a second a conclusion is unanimously reached . . . DRIVE!!!
Why the fuck did we do that? That was one of several ropy decisions we made that night. The car, now clear of smoke, moves off at pace (7 miles an hour). I look back, praying I don’t see lights, praying they don’t turn around, the 1.2-litre engine screams under the bonnet. I see lights. On our left we see a parking spot full of early-shift doggers. In front of us a small hill, beyond that, the safety of Epping Forest.
We are all shouting our opinions, I catch flashes of sentences, ‘pull in’, ‘let’s run’, ‘the woods are our new home now’ and ‘they’ll never catch us’ among other things. What the fuck were we thinking as we come hammering into the car park, skid to a halt, exit the vehicle and make off across the field and up towards the safety of the trees?
Realising we’d forgotten our carrier bag full of snacks we turn back. We grab our Frazzles and the giant Fruit and Nuts we’d need to survive and shunt it up the hill. No one ever stopped and thought for a second what we’d do once we got there. I actually remember hollering out, ‘If we get to the safety of the forest they’ll never find us!’
The whelp of the siren throws my life into slow motion, the trees in front of me bathed in the flashing of a shade of blue light that can only mean one thing. You’re fucking nicked, my son! I look across at H, we both have the same weird, almost peaceful look which is somewhere between ‘having witnessed a rapture’ and a ‘dynamic young veal in an abattoir’. I recall us both laughing, although neither of us seemed at all happy.
The police shout something, I know not what although if I had to hazard a guess I’d say it was probably something like: ‘Stop, you little fuckheads!’ I do the only thing available to me at that point and I open my Frazzles. After the twenty-metre shuffle up the hill I’m absolutely knackered and happy to stop. I hate running and eating crisps at the same time, it’s pointless, like a pub-crawl. Just stay in one pub and drink a lot. Why combine drinking with cardio? We turn and slowly trudge down the hill. People who’d been fucking in their cars quickly speed away. We are restrained but it’s fine as I’ve finished my crisps.
Lots of things, confusing things, happen in the next twenty minutes or so. We’re searched, the car is searched, souls are searched and discussions are had. The word ‘arrest’ is bandied around, some wee plops up, but oddly it’s all pretty jovial, the atmosphere, not the wee. I wish this story had a better ending but we are let go! We were all completely amazed. They took our big lump of hashish and our Liquid Gold and threw it into a patch of long grass. To stop us spending three hours looking for it they made us drive off first. The deafening silence was broken by an eruption of wheezy laughter. What a fucking lucky escape. Thank you, lenient policemuns.
I have hash at my house so I suggest we spin round and grab it. This is exactly what we do. We pull up. ‘I’ll be five minutes.’
I let myself in and immediately notice that the TV is off. This is a terrible sign. Something’s happened, someone has died. This first time I feel the dread of a silent room is when I’m 10 and we’re staying in my Auntie Marion’s house, in Broadhaven. I used to be able to do a weird thing where I’d lie in bed at night and make the light switch move around the wall just by looking at it. I’d stare and it would tremble and then move. Sometimes I could get it up on the ceiling. I’d seen Carrie so I thought it was a form of telekinesis. I wasn’t telekinetic in the slightest and, I won’t lie, was partly disappointed by the fact.
In the early morning I could hear a commotion coming from Auntie Marion’s kitchen. I inch down the stairs peering through the banisters and notice the telly is off. Deborah had died. She was my dad’s oldest child and my half-sister from h
is first pop at marriage. She was a beautiful eighteen-year-old, a talented up and coming actress and singer who lived so far away I’d only ever met her twice. One night after a show she came home, lay on the couch and had a massive asthma attack. She never recovered. No matter, my dad’s anguish was now mine. To this day I can’t bear to be in a silent room. Something always needs to be on.
***
Back home, high and cocky from my brush with the law, I poke my head around the door to the lounge and Mum and Dad are sat in silence, telly off. How long had they been there? How long were they planning on being there? In the middle of the room, in the middle of our mint-green carpet, was a giant lump, my giant lump of hash. It looks exactly like a brown Rubik’s cube but obviously a lot easier to solve. Trouble now breaks out. Not a row, just a kind of Category C rumble with a drug pro and con to-and-fro-type parent deal. To be fair they make a compelling argument but I’m high, the guys are waiting, and I’d like to be higher. My counter comes in the shape of a rat out.
I decide to point out to Dad that me and Mum have indeed smoked hash together. This should relieve some of the pressure. It does and they turn on one another, it enables me to brazenly grab my gear and fuck off. I jump back into the car, I’ve been six minutes thirty-five seconds: ‘Sorry I was so long.’ We drive off.
What an absolute little prick I was. Writing this makes me feel bad. Yes I was young and naughty but this feels like something and someone else. Makes me feel like a schemer. I think it was the beginning of a turn in me and drugs seemed to be the catalyst and the accelerant. Of course my life at home and the things going on were the driving force of this escape but still . . .
I go through a heavy drugs phase round about now, lots of hash, poppers and tons of LSD. These were the times when I started going to my first, and indeed the first, raves. Raindance at Jenkins Lane was my first. I was terrified and I loved it. Others followed, unused farm buildings, weird old dilapidated manor houses near Basildon, industrial units near Tilbury, sometimes wine bars in Loughton. It was exciting. I was a little Essex druggy tearaway, an urchin, a scoundrel if you will but a scoundrel with a good heart.
For me it was all about the music and getting high. Getting to a place where the sun would collapse into itself, there’d be a tremendous flash, and I’d wake up in a white room surrounded by all the other most fucked-up people in the world. An orbital way station for people on a chemical vacation. Psychonauts fleeing their earth land.
This time coincides of course with bad shit personally. It was my escape from my mum’s alcoholism which was a huge problem for me. I hated it and I hated her and I hated myself for feeling that way. Around then Mum and Dad decided to separate. A lot of my friends’ parents were splitting up so for once I didn’t feel behind the curve on a current social trend. This is a perfect example of why I wish I’d asked more questions even though it would’ve made for a difficult conversation. I can’t remember why they separated. My overwhelming hunch was drinking. It had to be, right? What else could it have been? I’ve thought maybe one of them strayed but it just doesn’t feel right. Dad was deep into his workaholic phase. I wonder now if this was to get away from Mum and her drinking.
Don’t get me wrong – it wasn’t like she was arseholed from morning till night at this point, god no. That was unacceptable to Mum. She was a woman who believed it was unseemly for a ‘lady’ to smoke a cigarette walking down the street. Oh no, with her it was all about public perception and image. Me and Dad would often crack up listening to Mum answer the phone using her posh voice. This feels dangerous to me now, caring what the neighbours thought. This is why things became hidden. No, Mum was a fully functioning drunk then. A mother and a home maker. Still I wonder if Dad coming home late every night to a G-’n’-T-soaked, angry, emotional firebomb was the thing that made them split. It feels right but I’ll never know.
This was a time of weekend visits from Dad while he lived in Uncle Brian’s spare room. I didn’t feel like I was being denied a father, in fact I probably saw him just as much to be fair. We went on what felt like functional trips to places like the newly opened Thames barrier and the Cutty Sark. We both hated it really. He wanted to be home and I didn’t really want to be forced to lose a weekend on my hot BMX.
We had a big fight one Saturday when me and Dad went to buy rugby boots. He tried to fob me off with bad boots with moulded rubber studs. Oh no. All the forwards from my team that season were wearing Adidas Flanker and that’s what I wanted. He was so cross. He slammed the cheap boots down and walked out of the shop without me. I was in trouble. He really screamed at me in the car.
After almost a year Mum and Dad had worked things out and Dad moved back home. What a strange episode. I guess their years and years of relationship groundwork and the fact they had me meant eventually they couldn’t be apart. They were in love, right up to the end. I think you have to be to go through what they went through. Sometimes it’s just easier to keep going forward together than to leave.
My dad had gone through a big change. He’d left the company that he’d helped to build from the ground up when he realised he was not getting everything he should’ve been. Yes we had a nice house, and a nice car and blahblahblah but it wasn’t what the others had and in terms of a work – life balance there was none as he was always working.
Dad decided to start his own company. Clover! It was the happiest I remembered him. (Not completely true but you know what I mean.) He was moving on and forward, he was doing something that would make sure we had the big house in Essex and the horses and the tennis court and the Ferrari and endless summer barbecues where we laughed and stuffed ourselves with meats prepared over open flames. What a life. If anyone deserved that life he did. Dad had worked from the ground up and had taught himself everything there was to know about the design, manufacture, sale and distribution of high-end office furniture. He was a good man who had made a lot of friends in the business and people wanted him to succeed.
Being a sixteen-year-old boy-man I was shielded from certain aspects of our family life. Things that might worry a young brain. Things kids don’t need to know about, don’t really care about until Christmas gets cancelled and you end up all alone in a shit council estate . . . Oh.
The things I was shrouded from was how Dad got the money to start the company. Essentially everything was up for grabs. The house was remortgaged up to its balls to pay for this venture. In hindsight it’s a massive risk and it’s easy for me to sit here at the free laptop Apple gave me because I’m a ‘celeb’ and criticise a man, a good man, trying to do the best for his family. Could I do what he did? I doubt I’d have the bollocks to be honest.
My mum and dad turned our shed at the bottom of our garden in Redbridge into a workshop to make high-end office furniture. They worked so hard. Dad spent the first few weeks out on the road selling Clover. He spent so long drawing little designs for logos and beautiful sketches for amazing chairs. He was so talented, such an amazing draughtsman. Dad was also a fantastic watercolourist. So technical, creating perfect buildings and landscapes. I have all those paintings. People went crazy for his designs but that’s all they were at that point, just designs, pictures on a pad.
Once they had enough orders in, Mum and Dad set to work making the chairs themselves. Let me just write that again . . . They made the chairs themselves! All the individual pieces were manufactured off site then delivered and put together by Mum and Dad in the garage. Some nights they’d be down there until two or three in the morning putting together handmade chairs. After a couple of hours’ sleep Dad would load up the van he rented and deliver the things himself.
I think a business of this kind needs to expand quickly and take people on, otherwise you get swamped and can’t actually fulfil your orders. This was exactly the case with Clover. They got a big order from a major company to make chairs for a new HQ. This was it. Fulfil this order and we were fucking laughing. We didn’t and we weren’t laughing.
As I said, I d
idn’t know and still don’t know all the whys and wherefores, but we failed. The order was just too big. The bank sent notices, the creditors circled and we were finished. When the end comes it’s horrible. Everything my dad had worked his balls off for was taken. Assets and dignity stripped away. In the garage the frames of chairs, the skeletal remains of a dream wrapped in sheets of soft Italian leather, lay waiting to be reclaimed by creditors. Behind closed doors voices are raised. Tears. Fists are pounded into tables. In public there is silence. Dad gazes into the garden. Deep sighs. Thousand-yard stares. Mum busies herself around Dad, cajoling, geeing him up, trying to ignite something in him. Everything is gone, and with it my beautiful father’s dignity. He never recovers.
We were out on the street. The bank takes our home away. How can a bank be allowed to turn a family out onto the street? It’s criminal. The council refuse to rehouse us at first, so we live next door with Chris and Mandy and Ian and Martin. They do what real friends do and they step up.
From our lovely double-fronted house in Redbridge where so much had happened to us, we now lived next door in one tiny room that used to be Mandy’s bedroom. Three of us lived there with our massive Alsatian Sheba. It was weird to think that only eighteen months before I’d been sat in that room on Mandy’s bed sniffing her novelty rubbers trying to think of new inventive ways to kiss her. Apart from death, I can’t think of many things worse than losing everything.
We were all so stressed and sad and angry. I spent a lot of time suffering at the end of a Rizla or hiding under the saggy tumtum of a laughing Buddha.