Thursdays meant a trip to the newsagent to purchase that week’s ‘New Musical Express’ and a dash back to my college room to read the issue cover-to-cover and then tackle the latest ‘NME crossword’. It was a weekly head-to-head contest between me and fellow Collingwood first-year student Keith Miller to prove our superior knowledge of popular music. I was no crossword fanatic. I had no competitive streak. However, I was sufficiently motivated to demonstrate there was one subject in which I had expertise, my university academic course and student life having quickly proven a major personal disappointment.
Both my friend Keith and I were fish out of water. We had both arrived at Durham University from state schools, me from Surrey and Keith from Essex. 95% of our fellow students had arrived from private schools and looked down their posh noses at us, just as they probably did their nannies, servants and chauffeurs [see blog]. We were invisible to them. We were not worth the time of day. They were loud, arrogant and domineering. We were the little people that they had been put on earth to lord it over. It must have proven a worse experience for Keith than for me. He appeared to be the only visible minority in our college of three hundred students. He was regularly ribbed by colleagues for having achieved a GCE certificate in ‘African Drumming’ at school.
Aside from my NME crossword years (1976-1978), I have never been a competitive person. In secondary school classes, I never shot my hand up in the air in order to prove to teachers or my mates how superior I must be. Graham Taylor, our Physical Education teacher, resented me because I had no interest in ‘winning’ at the ‘Games’ he forced upon us every Wednesday afternoon for seven years [see blog]. I tried to avoid his team sports. He once sent me to race in a Surrey County athletics championship where I demonstrated no interest in winning against other schools. My termly school reports criticised me for not participating more in class and not speaking up at the slightest opportunity. Was ‘taciturn’ an appropriate adjective for our headmaster to write about a boy whose results in many subjects were amongst the top five of his year of sixty students? Feeling under attack from such judgemental adults, I responded by engaging even less.
At the time, I failed to comprehend that my secondary school’s objective was not to turn its boy students into well rounded individuals, as experienced previously at my wonderful primary school on a Camberley council estate [see blog]. Although this grammar school operated within the state education sector, it emulated the British private school system, aiming to produce self-important ‘leaders’ who could confidently dominate any room they entered and shout loudly amongst their peers about their breeding and supposed superiority. In that endeavour, I was already a lost cause. It was not that I lacked self-confidence. One school report had even labelled me “a tower of strength”. It was just that I felt no need to wear my abilities loudly on my sleeve. Perhaps that was because my parents showed no interest in whether I performed well or badly at school. I was never called upon to show off at home that I was ‘clever’. Besides, I thought actions were supposed to speak louder than words. On that score, my term and exam results spoke for themselves. My motivation to do well came purely from inside me, not from my parents, family or peers.
At the end of my first year at Strode’s School, I was somewhat surprised to be awarded three School Prizes. As if to prove that British society was not founded on meritocracy, these book token prizes [see blog] were rarely given to students who had scored the highest examination or classwork results. Rather, they seemed to be determined by the whim of each subject teacher. This was proven by me being awarded the first-year ‘Religious Knowledge’ prize, despite having never read the Bible, having no belief in God and having attended church only once in my life [see blog]. During the first term of my second year, an event was held in the school hall to formally award boys the prizes they had won, dragging them onto the stage to receive a book token. It was called ‘Speech Day’ even though it was only the staff who made speeches. Parents were invited to watch their bright young things be acclaimed as ‘special’. That year, neither I nor my disinterested parents chose to attend.
One year later, things turned out different. I had been awarded no second-year School Prize. This outcome did not bother me. It merely confirmed my suspicion that the prize criteria were wholly subjective since my exam and classwork rankings in some subjects had improved over the previous year. Exactly how could I have achieved first place in Mathematics during the academic year but fail to be awarded that subject prize? Maybe the school was displeased with my demonstrated deficit of competitive spirit. Maybe me and my parents’ absence from last year’s ceremony had been grudgefully noted. Maybe the school had merely concluded that I was an ‘unworthy’ student as, during my remaining five years, I was awarded no prize.
The other difference that second year was that, despite my lack of prize, I attended Speech Day with my father. There was no compulsion for us to be present. I was confused that a father who took zero interest in his son’s education had unilaterally decided we both attend. I had explained to him that I was not receiving a prize that year but he remained firm. It felt very strange. This was the only occasion on which my father visited my school during my entire seven years there. He parked his ridiculously ostentatious American sports car [see blog] on the playground outside the main hall in which we sat together during a ceremony lasting several hours, me completely befuddled about why we were both there.
I had absolutely no inkling then that this one day would change the rest of my life. Not because of Speech Day. Not because of my school. Not because of me. Not even because of my father. Or even the silly car he had driven frighteningly fast and dangerously to and from the event. So what happened? The clue was in the absence of my mother that day at that event. Where was she and what was she doing?
To understand her absence, it proves necessary to go back in time thirteen years and 173 days to the occasion my mother gave birth to her first child in a semi-detached council house on the Old Dean Estate. I have no knowledge about the circumstances of that arrival because my mother refused to elucidate, except to accuse her husband of absenteeism because he was visiting a mistress due to give birth imminently to his child. Within months, my parents and their new baby were evicted for non-payment of rent, due to my father having unilaterally purchased an unaffordable car to impress his mistress. If my mother’s father had not bailed them out with accommodation, they would have become homeless.
Five years and 217 days later, my mother gave birth to her second child in Farnham Hospital, a facility Camberley (population 33,770) still lacked. During her absence, she entrusted childcare of her firstborn to her husband, despite him having never shown any paternal feelings for his offspring. Luckily, my mother’s parents now lived next door and ended up feeding and entertaining their grandson during his mother’s absence. Did her husband drive his son daily to the state infant school on Old Dean Estate he had started four months earlier, as asked? No, but he did warn his son not to admit this absenteeism to his mother when she returned a week later. Did he visit his wife in hospital? Not once. Was he busy with yet another mistress? Who knows.
Take a further leap forward in time to where my story started - Speech Day at my school in 1971 and the absence of my mother. Where was she? She was in hospital giving birth to her third child that day. My father would have done anything to avoid being alongside her in hospital, even if it meant him attending a function at my school for the first and last time. It proved convenient for him to be 21 miles and a 53-minute drive away from his wife on that day, armed with a suitably fatherly excuse, having demonstrated a sudden interest in my schooling. In retrospect, my two parents were already moving along divergent paths, that day merely widening the gulf between them and soon leading to the breakup of our now three-child family.
My mother had grown up during the War in a two-up, two-down suburban semi-detached house, sharing a bedroom with two older sisters in a loving working-class family. Together, the three children had shared homemade girly pastimes in an era before they had radio or television. They lived on a quiet residential street in a house with a large back garden, surviving the War with produce grown in their father’s well-maintained allotment at the top end of Barossa Road where he raised chickens. It had been an idyllic childhood, despite having to occasionally hide under the wooden dining table when the German bombers arrived to attack adjacent Sandhurst Royal Military Academy [see blog].
My father was raised in a household filled with anger and violence. His brutal father beat his wife and his two sons, for none of whom he ever demonstrated love or affection. He knocked his wife down the stairs and killed her. A significant part of my father’s attraction to my mother and her family was that they were everything that he was not. She had loving parents, she had attended grammar school, she was beautiful and radiated a youthful, confident optimism. He had left school at age fourteen with few prospects and was desperate to escape the hell of his parents’ home. When the couple eventually married, once my father returned from Army conscription to the Suez Canal, my mother’s father refused to attend their ceremony, believing that his much-loved youngest daughter deserved a partner with better prospects from a less abusive family.
When my mother became pregnant the first time in 1957, she hoped to have a girl with whom she could relive all the girly activities she had enjoyed with her sisters. She was disappointed to give birth to a boy. She persevered anyway, teaching me to knit, to sew, to bake cakes in the kitchen with her and to cut out clothes patterns with pinking shears. She passed down to me her and her sisters’ 1930’s childhood books such as ‘Heidi’, ‘Black Beauty’ and ‘Anne of Green Gables’. But I showed no interest in dressing up, sculpting elaborate hair-do’s or playing with makeup. I was a disappointment. As the youngest of three sisters, she had never experienced a baby in her household. She had no idea how to raise a boy, so she left me to my own devices most of the time, failing to instruct me in personal hygiene [see blog] or the three R’s. Our home possessed few books, but I consumed cover-to-cover the huge piles of 1960’s women’s magazine titles my mother bought, teaching myself to read and write. Once old enough to walk out by myself, the nearby local municipal library in Knoll Road became my saviour [see blog].
Five years later, after my mother gave birth to another boy, her sense of disappointment was even more self-evident. She committed even less effort to raising him than she had her firstborn, allowing him to grow up barely literate or numerate. He ran away regularly from primary school, showed destructive/self-destructive, violent tendencies and barely spoke to his older brother, despite them sharing a bedroom for six years. Much later in life, he was treated for addiction and was divorced by his wife. In the words of the song [Epic EPC7632]:
“One child grows up to be somebody who just loves to learn.
Another child grows up to be somebody who just loves to burn.”
Eight years later, my mother unexpectedly became pregnant for a third time. I learned this from hearing my parents’ arguing at night in their bedroom adjacent to mine. My mother wanted to keep the baby, hoping finally to have the girl she had always desired (there now being an 87% chance). My father was telling her to have an abortion. The arguments became more heated. My mother refused to leave the house for a week due to a huge bruise across the right side of her face. On one occasion, she locked herself in the toilet, only for her husband to kick a hole in the wooden toilet door. The door remained that way for the next decade as a visual reminder of his violent behaviour.
My mother won the argument and her third child, a girl, was born whilst I was sat with my father in the school hall, enduring Speech Day presentations. He took no interest in his newly arrived daughter nor, by extension, in her mother. Approaching the age of forty, he was riding a middle-aged wave of selfish indulgence, fuelled by cash profits from dodgy property deals he was making with his new business partner, a local second-hand car dealer not afraid to employ mafia-style pressure tactics [see blog]. Flush with money for the first time since leaving school, he could at last satisfy his craving for fast sports cars, dinner parties, restaurant meals and foreign holidays. He took me with him on a flimsy pretext to Florida for a week, only to abandon me alone in a motel whilst he practiced a playboy lifestyle [see blog].
Within months, after increasingly unexplained and lengthening absences, my father walked away from his family altogether to pursue the hedonistic lifestyle he had evidently desired all along [see blog]. I did not miss him because he had played almost no role in my upbringing. He no longer had to pretend publicly that he loved his family. Instead, he decided to do everything possible to cause us pain and suffering, just as his parents had done to each other, to him and his brother. He now took zero responsibility for his former family, fighting in the courts not to provide financial support. He broke into our house and stole everything of value, including the car he had given my mother and most of her jewellery [see blog]. Our lives would never be the same.
During the months leading up to his departure, my father had been regularly playing on the living room stereo a vinyl single he had bought by The Fifth Dimension called ‘One Less Bell to Answer’ [Bell BLL1137] whose lyrics included:
“I only know that since he left
My life's so empty
Though I try to forget
It just can't be done
Each time the doorbell rings
I still run
I don't know how in the world
To stop thinking of him
'Coz I still love him so
I end each day the way I start out
Crying my heart out”
Only in retrospect did I realise these words represented the pain my father had been planning for some time to inflict upon his wife. During the previous two decades, she had ignored his regular philandering. Now, having finally gained the daughter she had long desired, he was determined to make her pay. He secretly visited each of her relatives and friends to convince them that his wife had done something heinous that had forced him to leave her and their three children. Most ignored his pleas but some, notably my mother’s older sister Sheila, bought his lies and refused contact with my mother for decades [see blog]. The outcome was that my mother became isolated, lacking moral support she should have received from the people in Camberley she had known her entire life. Meanwhile, my father had set up home with a teenage bride who had lived only a few doors away from us [see blog].
My mother could not adjust to our changed circumstances. Until the day she died half a century later (or, more accurately, until the day my father died), she continued to believe that her husband would one day knock on her front door and come back to her. He never did. Her father having disapproved so publicly of her marriage choice, she had tried to do everything to prove him wrong, even ignoring the mistresses my father had accumulated over many years and the unknown children he had sired. The remainder of my mother’s life was lived in a sad, darkened interregnum in which she awaited a resumption of her pre-1971 ‘happy family’ lifestyle. It never happened.
Although her daughter was not yet one year old, my mother was forced to take two jobs to generate cash to feed her family because her spiteful husband was paying nothing. Her full-time day job was as bookkeeper for British Car Auctions in Frimley. Her evening job was cleaning offices in Yorktown. Her retired parents, who stuck by her, looked after my baby sister during weekday daytimes. Year after year from that moment, all my mother seemed to do was work to try and make ends meet. Having lost her own car to her husband’s new mistress, she had to borrow her father’s 1963 Austin Cambridge car just to get to work. Fortunately, my eight-year-old brother’s school was within walking distance of our home.
Although she possessed the skills to administer her new single-parent life, the result of having previously been employed in a bank and accounts offices, my mother now abdicated all responsibility for her affairs. Almost all of the mail she now received were bills, red reminders and threats of court action. Not only did she refuse to open them, she would stuff them all into a drawer in the living room, never to be retrieved. Out of sight, out of mind. Neither was this a temporary reaction to her struggling situation. Until the day she died half a century later, she refused to deal with any paperwork she received or was required to action. It was a blatant refusal to adapt to a life in which her household budgets and accounts needed to be balanced, paradoxically the very work she performed for her employer five days a week.
Not once did my mother ever ask me to take on the responsibility of managing her affairs. She could not have cared less. I realised that her strategy was irresponsible and would doubtless drive our family into disaster. Unopened letters stuffed into a drawer would inevitably lead to court actions, debt collectors and bailiffs. My mother would lose her jobs. We would lose our home. Me and my siblings would be placed into care. We would all have to change schools. Perhaps that was the exact outcome that my cruel father wanted. I was the oldest child of our family. I was clever. I had already received more formal education than any of our relatives. I was barely fourteen. By default, I had become the ‘head’ of the family, a role I had never wanted but which was now thrust upon me.
Within months of my attendance at my school’s Speech Day alongside my father, my whole world was turned upside down. My supposedly carefree teenage years and adolescence were taken away from me. I was suddenly a young adult. Never again would I observe my life as similar to that of my peers. I had responsibilities. Huge responsibilities. My own personal ambitions had to be subsumed to the struggle for mere survival of our family unit. There was nobody with whom I could share this responsibility or even explain the tasks I now had to do. My schoolfriends would never have understood. School staff were already unsympathetic towards me, having sent me home occasionally for wearing the wrong colour socks, the wrong colour shoes, slip-on’s instead of lace-ups and having hair touching my collar [see blog].
Events that took place on that one day, 7 October 1971, events over which I had no control would impact the entirety of my life. I did not realise it then. At the time, I thought I was simply doing ‘the right thing’ whilst those around me seemed hellbent on doing ‘the wrong thing’. I had no idea that a life of making small personal sacrifices as a teenager would lead to making bigger and bigger sacrifices as the years passed and end up stealing away so many opportunities to satisfy my own life.
After my father walked out and disowned his family, I could have just ignored the consequences and retreated into my own world, as my younger brother chose to do. But I was old enough and wise enough to understand the outcome of that route. Our circumstances would fall into irreparable disaster and we might all be split up and sent to children’s homes. Our mother might be imprisoned for unpaid debts. I decided to do my best to stop those disasters happening. Nobody else was there to help. It was me alone who had to try and keep us all together. So I tried.
[to be continued...]