1961. Christopher is left-handed. Neither Dudley nor the school approves. Both try to train it out of him. It is suspect in some way, ‘other’, an unnatural, un-Christian thing. The teacher hits his left hand with a wooden pencil case. He walks up behind him. Sometimes nothing is said. It is as though left is a link to the wild, to be suppressed. With Dudley, it is just ‘different’. Fitting in is a thing with him, no standing out. We are learning to be invisible, at the expense of Chris’s hand. It doesn’t work, of course. Christopher is good at being hit.
1962. I like to scare myself as a child. There is a tree in the darkest part of the lane behind the house where I like to linger. It is tall, maybe malevolent, its branches and bark twisted like something from Tolkien. Christopher always hurries past (though he is braver than me with bullies). I stop and wait, savouring the moment of fear as scary branches wave in the wind. By about 10 or 11 years old, I have graduated to an abandoned badger sett I find on one of my long walks along the river. It is buried into the bank. I crawl deep inside, under the exposed roots, the heavy Devon clay. Burrow in as far as I can. I lie there daring the roof to fall, to bury me in red soil. The appeal is enhanced by the feeling I might never be found, the thought I can just disappear. After maybe half an hour of lying there I go home for lunch. By age 12, I get kicks from a piece of shaley cliff where the path had been eroded. I look down at the white water and rocks, and slide. You can’t walk it, do it carefully. The only route is surrender, to guide the drop to a piece of broken path with your feet. I love to let go, see if I can cross to the other side, stand where no one else would dare. I never do it with anyone else. Secrecy is the thing. I grow out of it when I become interested in girls.
1963. Lilian’s mother has come to live (or more accurately, die) with us. Christopher has to give up his bedroom and move back in with me. It’s not going well. He is not happy and when he is not happy we fight and I lose. At least he is outdoors all day, while I am obliged to stay in and read to her. She sends me to the village to buy her bottled stout. Mum and Dad are teetotal, the only booze the Christmas cherry liqueur and Harvey’s Bristol Cream on the sideboard for guests who never come.
Mum and Dad don’t read, except Dudley’s local Western Morning News. There is only a scant handful of ancient books in the house. The old grandma is a bit bad-tempered and I don’t like the smell of her or her beer, but I am fascinated by her age, her drab clothes, her thin, lined mouth and the thought that she is near to death. So we sit in the curtain-drawn gloom in the summer afternoon and I read her Heidi. She is 84, from deep in the nineteenth century, like my Victorian stamps and coins, too far away for a small boy to comprehend. She dies one night while we are asleep. We don’t get to see her or go to her funeral, though we are allowed to join the tea with Lilian’s good tableware. Christopher is soon moved back to his room.
1964. Mum cuts our hair with clippers: old school, hand action, blunt. She is always snagging our necks. She is worse at cutting a fringe. I think she is nervous. So are we. Christopher screams like he is being butchered. He checks for blood. He hates sitting still. I think we are all relieved when crew cuts come in and we can go to the barber in Kingsbridge. They let me take a sneak through Parade and pore over its pictures of topless girls. They also have Health and Efficiency – smaller, less sexy pages of naked ping pong in a naturist magazine. I leave feeling almost a teenager, splashed with spritz.
JULY 23. Of course I am now concerned about the baby squash and courgettes in the heatwave. The weather has been baking for days, so I am back on the first bus with today’s bleary-eyed postal workers. It’s bright, the start of a maybe 30-degree day, but there’s cool in the early-morning air, the first spectral tendril of autumn. The plot will need water and I can be back home before breakfast. Bill is there when I arrive, communing with his allotment, waiting for the day. We talk a little about the benefits of growing seed at home. It gives them a head start, he says. A heavy wave of sweet pea hits me as I pass the corner by the plot. A pigeon is feasting on the elder at the end of the plot, flapping its wings anxiously to maintain its greedy balance. The berries are turning now. Autumn won’t be long. Mary’s runner bean wigwam is flecked with flower and the bush beans are breaking through. I am more worried about the borders. Bindweed is creeping its way into the strawberry bed and the lovage is being tethered to the ground like Gulliver, sporting parasitic blooms. I grab a handful of beans. I have been bitten again and am starting to scratch. I soak the pumpkin bed, grinning at the new growth. Watering may be the best feeling in gardening. By 7am I am back on the bus, refreshed. I need breakfast and a bath.
SUMMER 1964. I have an appointment to be beaten. It is my choice. Dudley had been renting the field to the farmer for his cows to pasture but some escaped. It is our fault. Christopher and I have made a den in the hedge, a hideout for outlaw brothers after robbing a stagecoach or train. But the cows broke through and one became trapped in the river mud. I remember it lowing down the valley as the tractor tries to pull it out. It is freed eventually, it doesn’t drown, but the farmer’s nearly lost a beast and Dad is incandescent. He decides we can choose our punishment: to be caned or to miss TV for a week. No great loss, I think. We have BBC until 7pm, Dixon of Dock Green on Saturdays, maybe Doctor Who. The only person who can pick up ITV is the local coroner, who is given dispensation for a giant mast in the garden for his aerial, maybe because he spends his days with the dead.
Christopher goes for the TV option. I choose the beating. Just before bed I head downstairs in my dressing gown. I am scared but I want the anger over. Christopher waits, the thought of (another) beating unbearable. Mum and Dad are sitting in the living room by the anthracite fire. He has a garden cane beside him, a few cream crackers and cheese, a blue mug of Ovaltine. It is almost as though he is worried he will need a snack to replenish his strength. I am bent over his knee, my dressing gown has been removed. I think I am crying. I am hit once, maybe twice, but he doesn’t have the heart. After half an hour of Z-Cars, I return upstairs, triumphant but tear-stained. Christopher is angry I’ve almost escaped. I am furious the next day when his sentence is rescinded. There is no justice.
JULY 27. I had to leave the allotment yesterday; it was too hot to garden. I had contented myself with moving a few sunflowers and courgettes. I haven’t grown sunflowers for a while; the last were self-seeded. They grew like Jack and the Beanstalk, creating a shadowy canopy three metres tall. But I discovered seed in the bottom of my bag and I couldn’t control myself. I pick through radishes. They are big, round and red like kids’ lollipops but eat like crisp, mustardy apples. I cut lettuce for lunch and chard for weekday dinners, and gather a few multi-coloured handfuls of beans. It is too hot to work: days of mad dogs and Englishmen.
First thing Sunday morning, I am back. It’s cooler now so I lift the last of the calendula, tying a favoured yellow flower to the wigwam to save for seed. I weed through vegetable beds and train sweet peas. Mostly, though, this morning is about watering. I might not get back now for a couple of days so I soak everything in. The allotment site feels a bit abandoned. I miss seeing Mary.
1964. Being in the church choir is unavoidable for a village boy in Aveton Gifford. Only posh and ‘problem families’ are exempt. It is an infallible way to tell. Every week we pull cassock and surplice over our Sunday best and add our unbroken voices to the service. I faint once in the summer when the air is heavy, and come around to the sound of my feet drumming on the raised wooden floor. Wednesday evening is choir practice. There is sometimes a wedding on Saturday. Dudley never goes to church. Lilian goes twice a year: Easter and Mothering Sunday, when the church distributes the bunches of primroses we have gathered in the week. My favourite service is harvest festival. Hymns about ploughing fields, altar bread shaped like a sheath of corn, a table of fruit, vegetables, flowers and a few random tins of soup.
I don’t much like the vicar and he doesn’t like me. I don’t do sports, play cricket or football in the vicarage grounds lik
e other boys, although Christopher excels at both. I prefer my own company, which the vicar doesn’t trust. One Wednesday evening, waiting for choir practice to start, I decide to stay outside in the sun. Christopher’s plan to blackmail me is undone a couple of days later by a knock on the door. The vicar and the village policeman (it seems bunking off village choir is close to a crime in the Sixties) stand there. Dad doesn’t invite them in. They think he should know, the vicar says. Perhaps bad blood will out. A priest and cop have come to our house. I have brought disgrace. I return to church and the choir, lesson learned. Back to singing solo, back to Advent weekend afternoons touring old people’s homes in brown-face and a beard and crown, a king in a Christmas carol. The vicar is probably right, I think. A rebellion has begun.
Muhammad Ali is our first hero, still called Cassius Clay when we listen to his fights on the radio (the wireless, as Dad always calls it). Christopher at first prefers Sonny Liston, impressed by his brutal efficiency. Dudley disapproves of them both but despises Clay’s cockiness. I love his swagger. Christopher and I don’t share other heroes, except Eusébio in the football World Cup in 1966. Christopher is for mop-top Paul and Ringo, I am for George and John. We don’t often like the same music or people but Ali is a unifying force. Christopher admires him for his boxing; I love him outside the ring.
1965. Dudley is prone to strange schemes and fancies. The Christmas trees, the poor chinchillas he keeps caged in a shed. The barn is converted for battery chickens, stacked high like Tesco. There are two sets of lights, one white, one red. The sight of blood from a crushed or cut bird sends the house into a frenzy but switching the light turns the red blood brown and the birds soon settle. I am never quite happy in the barn, picking eggs, spotting corpses. The mis-sexed young cockerels are the first to go. Don’t call so loud and proud, I want to warn when they show off their crow. My dad will hunt you down.
One day, two white goats appear. Dad’s been reading Farmers Weekly. We drive them miles to be mated, the first step to producing milk. I have never come across anything that stinks like a stud billy goat and wonder why Lilian and I are watching while they have sex. Must be a farmer thing, I think. I became fond, though, of the nannies in the field behind the house, fascinated as their bellies balloon. I think their babies will be like having lambs (Christopher is forever coming home with stories of rejected young sheep being kept in an Aga drawer). The big day comes. I rush home from school. There are no cute baby kids gambolling in the paddock or nuzzling their mother’s milk. I am confused. They were male so I clubbed them, Dudley tells me matter of fact. When I ask where their graves are, he points to the cesspit. I think I hate him a little that day.
The main trouble with the goats is no one likes their milk. We are having it in tea, on cereal, on our porridge. We are spared from drinking it straight. Dad is the first to switch. I am soon back to picking up his milk from the farm. We kids have to stick with goat for a while: it is good for growing boys, he’s read. But one day they have disappeared, as though they never happened. I wonder why we don’t get to say goodbye. I don’t go near goat’s cheese for 20 years.
There is a photograph of me in my final year of primary school. I am sitting up straight, blond hair neatly combed, looking into the camera, superior smile on my face. Pure Midwich Cuckoo, pure Peter Drabble. The rescue operation appears complete. Like our river cottage, I have been rebuilt into something smarter. Gone for now the questioning eyes, to be replaced with overweening confidence. I am head boy at my small Church of England school, garlanded in gushing valentines and the 11-plus. Grammar school is next. There is also, though, an uneasiness about my last year there. A girl from the estate is humiliated in class. She renders the summer sky yellow, the wheat field blue. I like the painting’s boldness, its originality, but the teacher humiliates her, toys with her like a cat showing kittens how to torture mice. We are being taught about more than English and maths. This is a lesson in class, about who her parents are.
Christopher is becoming crueller. The hunted grows to be the hunter; the abuser rather than the abused. It is simple, the psychology. The Drabbles have withdrawn their favour. His hurt has to be displaced. He turns to shooting random birds and rabbits; breaking wings, breaking legs. He sends in dogs. He turns on Mum and Dad, snarls his anger. He turns on me. I am blinded by other loyalties, too young and stupid to see. He grows to like a fight, my brother; is more of a force at school (I have sometimes cause to be grateful). Ironically, by the time he is a boxer in the army, Dudley brings him back into the family fold. It is my turn to be exiled.
Christopher is already at secondary school in Kingsbridge, the local market town, learning to curse, spray power words around like cunt and fuck and twat. He is a Jenkins, running with a tougher town crowd, I am a Drabble, still tied to my village primary. By the time I get to Kingsbridge, the grammar and secondary schools have merged, the new comprehensive classes streamed. I am in 1.1, year one, top tier, Christopher in 2.5. Our drift apart is official, as if we are not brothers any more. What we had is almost invisible.
It isn’t until secondary school that I realise how old my mum and dad are. It is a year of Bob Dylan, The Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Sandie Shaw. BBC newsreaders sport longer hair, longer collars, wider and brighter ties. Dad watches The Supremes on TV and says unfortunate things. Other kids have posters in their bedroom, their fathers will grow their hair. Lilian and Dudley are 20 to 30 years older than the parents of other kids in my class, their lives forever defined by the war. Even their names speak of another century.
Each year of the mid Sixties adds a half-decade to the differences between us. The questions they have raised me to ask become more difficult. What about apartheid and Vietnam, I demand, though their politics never waver. Clothing becomes an issue. We aren’t allowed jeans. I pine for a pair of Levi’s. I take a paper round and start buying records, though we only have a radio for Dudley’s classical concerts. The person I want to be is being redefined, away from Mum and Dad’s plan. I must be a source of worry to them.
From five to 13, I have loved my village life, our dog, our donkey, but now I long for a life less defined by who my mother and father are. Lilian despairs, the threats to ‘send us back’ increase, her love less unconditional by the day. Dudley becomes more angry while I become more defiant. Christopher sulks and stays away ever longer.
It isn’t yet hopeless. I am doing well at school, and Christopher is promoted a class each year: 2.5 became 3.4, 4.3: an A-level stream, but we don’t know our childhood is over, a chill teenage winter is coming. A care crisis plan is about to be put into action. We will never be the same. I have stupidly forgotten the lesson about always earning conditional love.
August
AUGUST 3. Plot 29. Two days of hoeing, digging, raking – clearing weeds from Mary’s beds. Her broad beans have gone over, pods fat and ripe, hanging heavy, waiting for her. The onion bed is also overgrown. Greedy calendula has taken over, with sycamore seedlings in support. Bindweed by the wheelbarrow-load has been creeping in, smothering other plants. Mary’s cold frame is nurturing weed. Attack is the best defence.
Bindweed to the waste bin, calendula to the compost, seedy perpetual spinach too. I clear the frame and lay out a sack for onions and shallots. It is sweaty work in sultry weather but we need clean beds to sow. September is only four weeks away, the sun is starting to dip, sap is beginning to slow.
By teatime Sunday, I am sitting, hands a bit torn, shirt a bit sticky, when I hear my name behind me. Mary’s standing there, a little tired. I show off the beds like a proud schoolboy handing in his homework. She smiles. We talk about her crop rotation. She has a plan at home she says she will send me. We admire the runner beans and the sweet peas I have just finished tying (the sweetest-smelling job). The pumpkin bed is thriving. Her courgettes are flowering and the rest not far behind. She gathers herbs and rocket and beans. I press her to take some of our chard and red-hearted lettuce. Howard and his family are on holiday and I am d
aunted by how lush everything is. Mary hands me seed to sow. I’ll be back in a couple of days.
1968. It is decided I should go to boarding school. Plymouth children’s department will pay and there will be a scholarship. I am mostly messing about at Kingsbridge but coming top or near it in exams. My French master hates me for it. My writing is sloppy, a source of shame to Dad, whose copperplate is immaculate. The teacher makes me rewrite my French exercise book overnight. It starts neatly until I see it is too slow. He slippers me the next day. Punishment is measured in strikes of three or six, with the teacher’s choice of weapon (he favours a gym shoe) on your non-writing hand. The notebook is worth six, the small man almost jumping as he hits. After he’s finished, I smirk my contempt. He has me hold out my right hand for another six. I walk back to my seat in angry tears, girls are looking up at me, sad.
It isn’t just schooling. Mum and Dad are worried about sex, about me spending time with girls in their bedrooms listening to Jimi Hendrix. Dad loathes Hendrix, his black sexuality. The girls’ allure is almost as much in the soft colours and fabrics of their pop-postered rooms (mine is austere, almost military) as the thought I can slip a hand in underwear. Mum particularly seems obsessed by the idea of sex. Maybe it is the fear of my feral other mother. Christopher, meanwhile, contents himself with football and fighting, hanging out at the village pub.
Plot 29 Page 4