“At the age of thirteen I thought I was carrying the weight of the whole world on my shoulders …”
‘Patches’ had become a surprise number two UK hit single for blind southern soul singer Clarence Carter at the end of 1970 (written by General Johnson whose group ‘Chairmen Of The Board’ had just had a number three UK hit single with their wonderful debut ‘Give Me Just A Little More Time’). In the lyrics, ‘Patches’ is the thirteen-year-old son of a poor American farmer who, on his deathbed, pleaded:
To pull the family through
My son, it's all left up to you”
‘Patches’ was one of my mother’s favourite records of that period. At the time, I could never understand why because, to my young ears, it was an over-sentimental, over-American rural fantasy and not a patch on Bobbie Gentry’s enthralling and mysterious ‘Ode To Billie Joe’ family tragedy from 1967. Whenever ‘Patches’ was heard on ‘BBC Radio 1’, my mother would stop whatever she was doing and listen intently to the lyrics. Why did this song mean so much to her?
A little over a year after ‘Patches’, unexpectedly I was to become that thirteen-year-old carrying the weight of the whole world on his shoulders. However, rather than my father dying surrounded by his loving family, mine had sordidly run off with a girl only a few years older than me, scarcely to be seen again. From that day, though neither parent instructed me as such, it seemed to be left to me “to pull the family through”. My father’s new mission was to wreak vengeance on our family in every which way, disowning us whilst stealing possessions we valued [see blog]. My mother fell into a resigned malaise that lasted the remainder of her life [see blog]. I felt only relief my father had left, a better outcome than observing my mother cower from his violence. Fortunately, he had never touched me, my knowledge having proven too valuable to his businesses [see blog].
Hearing the lyrics of ‘Patches’, had my mother anticipated the inevitable dissolution of her marriage and the consequential demands on me, her eldest son? Her husband had been cheating on her since the 1950’s and, now that his business ventures were finally generating significant ‘cash’ profits, he felt justified in unilaterally indulging juvenile desires unaffordable until now. In 1970, he had proudly shown me his impulse purchase of one of the first handheld electronic calculators, whose £100 price tag infuriated my pregnant mother. In 1971, he had changed his recent American Motors ‘Javelin’ sports car unnecessarily for a newer, more powerful ‘AMX’ model [see blog], a totally impractical upgrade for a three-child family. He had been behaving like a kid in a sweetshop as he approached forty. And then he was gone.
During the preceding years, I had already taken on a role as our family’s administrator, typing correspondence, posting letters, opening and filing incoming mail. Our financial management – paying the bills, writing cheques – had rested with my father. In retrospect, I am never sure if it was coincidence that my parents had trained me in administrative skills from an early age, or whether my mother had foreseen that I would have to become the family’s ‘Patches’, required to steer our family away from administrative and financial oblivion. Although it was she who had taught me financial skills, her husband’s departure paralysed her into inaction, clinging to a hope that he would someday return and restore our family’s equilibrium, or at least take care of family finances once again.
We should all have been living in Canada by now. For more than a decade, my parents had planned to emigrate there. In 1962, they had visited Canada House in Trafalgar Square and come away with a huge, colour fold-out wall map of the country (that I still have). In those days, neither visa nor migration papers were necessary. You could simply book seats on a plane or boat and be welcomed as a newcomer to the Dominions. Unexpectedly, during the two years following my brother’s birth in late 1963, my parents abandoned this long-held plan. No explanation was offered me. All their preparations for a North American lifestyle – me and my brother’s names [see blog], our succession of American cars, my father’s ice skating, our weekly ten-pin bowling [see blog], our American music, our American kitchen appliances [see blog] – came to nothing, never to be mentioned again. I was disappointed.
In 1965, my father discovered for sale an empty plot of land on the other side of Camberley that might be purchased at a discount. The owner of one of Camberley’s huge Edwardian mansions, ‘Old Knowles’ on Upper Chobham Road, had divided the far reaches of their estate into small plots, each sufficient for one family house to be built. However, ‘Plot 7’ remained unsold due to its odd shape and access problems. A new ‘Calvin Close’ cul-de-sac had been constructed to reach these new properties and building work had already progressed on some sold plots. Plot 7 comprised a long narrow upward-sloping driveway, barely wide enough for a car, that ended in a flat square-ish plateau. However, for some crazy reason, the new electricity sub-station serving the street’s houses had been built at road level slap bang on the driveway, preventing any vehicle access.
I visited the plot with my parents, us having to squeeze past the sub-station’s wooden fence and clamber up to the plot. It was clear that, though Old Knowles had retained a huge perfectly manicured rear garden, the plots up for sale beyond had been left as wilderness for years. It was a jungle. My parents were unaware that this land had once held an industrial gravel pit. Each plot had apparently been drawn on a map without consideration about what might be on the ground. In Plot 7, we found the end of an old concrete ornamental pond, though its substantive part stretched onto an adjacent plot. There was no back fence to the big house (the right-hand edge of Plot 7), just a line of thick high rhododendrons that you could push through, tempting you to march across their perfect garden.
The rear of the plot was marked by an ancient sunken alleyway wide enough for a horse and cart, the dug-out soil having been piled up on either side and planted with thick bushes that grew into a canopy of foliage, making the path invisible from beyond. It stretched in a perfect straight line southeast from Upper Chobham Road 600 yards to a neighbouring estate, ‘Toad Hall’ (formerly ‘Edgemoor’), and then diverted with a 90-degree turn southwest to ‘Eastlea Court’ estate (formerly ‘The Firs’) on Chobham Road. Perhaps this overlarge ditch had marked the western limit of the 300 acres of heathland purchased in 1860 by Swiss botanist Augustus Mongredien to build a silk farm named ‘Heatherside’ that soon failed, the land defaulting to mortgage lender Sir Gabriel Goldney of Chippenham. A century later, ‘Goldney Road’ was the unmade, potholed rough access road necessary to enter our cul-de-sec and the new Heatherside housing development beyond, then under construction by housebuilder Bovis that had acquired most of Goldney’s land.
I failed to understand how the wilderness of Plot 7 could be transformed into a home for our family. It was full of insects, spiders and creepy-crawlies that terrified me. For the next two years, I elected to spend weekends at home alone [see blog] whilst my parents spent every daylight hour at Plot 7 to clear the site and house build. My father petitioned the Electricity Board to relocate its problematic sub-station to adjacent land not yet built upon and, following a long wait, his request was approved and executed, allowing vehicles to reach the site for the first time. My father made a sign on a sample floor tile saying ‘Plot 7’ in white Letraset and nailed it to the fir tree on the left of the driveway at street level. To save money, my parents did as much of the building work as they could, employing specialists only for tasks that needed heavy equipment or trade skills.
My father was an admirer of American architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s modernist buildings and seized the opportunity to build a similarly novel property in Camberley. Having executed so many renovations and extensions for clients, this would be his first opportunity to design an entire house to his own specifications. Perhaps he was inspired by a photo-feature in his beloved ‘Architects Journal’ of the 1959 ‘Rossdale House’ on Hendon Road in London, since many of its features were replicated in our home – a carport instead of a garage, exposed dark purple brickwork inside and out, floor-to-ceiling glass sliding doors, an adjoining pond/pool and a white oval dining table and chairs (as seen in ‘2001’). Though the London house comprised two storeys built on stilts, ours was limited to one floor by the land deeds, the owners of stately Old Knowles not wishing to look out their back windows and sight the top of our modest home beyond their perfectly kept garden.
My father designed his house in the shape of the letter ‘H’, the right sidebar comprising three bedrooms, the left a long, open living/dining room and, within the crossbar, the kitchen, bathroom, WC, coat cupboard and heating/hot water system. The majority of the ‘walls’ were floor-to-ceiling glass, enabling sightlines from outside straight through both wings of the house. The roof was flat concrete, supported by the bare brickwork between the glass windows. The bathroom included a separate bath and enclosed shower cubical, unusual in that era. The bathroom mirror was a huge sheet of thin aluminium foil stretched over a frame ordered from the US. Instead of a letterbox in the front door, there was an American-style upright post-box on the wall alongside the two-vehicle carport, much to the confusion of postmen/women who had walked up our long driveway. Instead of a front door key, embedded in the wood was a press-button combination lock ordered from the US. Opening the front door from outside, you were confronted with a huge floor-to-ceiling clear Perspex window that overlooked an exterior pond at the rear. The heating system was underfloor gas air, also ordered from the US. The living room thermostat was manufactured by Honeywell, ordered from the US. The kitchen sink included a waste disposal unit, ordered from the US. In the garden was constructed a greenhouse that resembled the top half of a clear glass sphere.
The house was initially designed to be completely open-plan, with internal doors only for the bedrooms, bathroom and WC. However, British building regulations necessitated the addition of fire doors to separate the kitchen from the bedrooms, as well as from the living/dining room. Frustrated by these rules, my father installed a ridiculously expensive kitchen door constructed entirely of thick, frosted glass, an unnecessary appendage that we never closed in all the time we lived there. Essentially, my father had built a ‘showhouse’, permitting his potential architectural clients to view a real-world example of futuristic living that might have been commonplace in California but was rarely seen in suburban Surrey. I loved living in the house, though its purpose echoed the earlier building of the Rossdale House as a marketing exercise for architect Geoffry Powell’s practice ‘Chamberlain, Powell & Bon’.
Our new futuristic home was not without its problems. The mostly glass exterior made birds believe they could fly at speed straight through the house during daylight, only to ‘thud’ against the glass window and be found dead, requiring regular burials in our garden. Leaving a glass sliding door open meant the occasional squirrel would enter, then panic and race around the floor inside the house, banging against the glass windows until we could usher it back outside. The deafening roar of low-flying test flights by Concorde from nearby Farnborough Royal Aircraft Establishment would rattle the huge glass windows, worrying us they might shatter. At night, our house lights would attract foxes, whose two red eyes would appear out of the darkness at a living room window, staring at us sat within like a horror movie. My mother purchased yards of thick, olive-green patterned material from Liberty that I helped her measure, cut, line, pleat, add curtain heading tape and hang in front of the eight expanses of glass window. The house being located some distance from the road, it felt as if we were living in countryside since neighbouring properties were not visible from our windows, a major change from our previous home fronting a bus route near Camberley town centre.
The red standalone enamel hooded fireplace mounted on a large inch-thick black slate square in the living room looked impressive but, when there was the slightest wind outside, smoke from a lit fire would blow back down the iron chimney and fill the living room. In summer, sunlight on the glass windows heated up the rooms terribly, particularly when the house was closed up. Conversely, in winter, the absence of insulation and the bare brickwork made the house cold, particularly the bedrooms that all faced northwards, while the open-plan design made it impossible to retain heat in one part of the house. Only a few years later (after my father had left), the heating system failed completely and, despite my repair efforts [see blog], we lived in an unheated house for years thereafter. The house’s legacy was that much of its equipment purchased from the United States could not be serviced or repaired in Britain, rendering those amenities defunct.
When I bought the Simon & Garfunkel album 'Bridge Over Troubled Water' in 1970 from 'Dykes' record shop in Camberley, I was surprised to hear the Paul Simon composition 'So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright' dedicated to this American architect who had died in 1959. My childhood had passed with my father regularly showing me articles about Wright in architectural magazines and glossy coffee-table books bought on trips to London, filled with his modernist building designs. The song's lyrics included:
And never change your point of view.
When I run dry
I stop awhile and think of you."
During the first years in our new home, I was given new responsibilities. My father insisted I regularly clean his preposterous American sports car in and out, afterwards spending hours polishing its bodywork inch by inch, a task I really hated. I was charged with mowing the grass lawns on three flanks of the house with a newfangled 'Flymo' lawnmower (‘It’s a lot less bovver with a hover’), after my mother’s attempt nearly electrocuted her when she rolled over and sliced its electric cable. For some reason, I was also the one who had to light the living room fireplace in winter, struggling with matches, firelighters and bits of damp wood. After initially continuing to share a bedroom with my younger brother, one year later my parents moved me into the house’s third bedroom, the first time I had occupied a room of my own. Despite the unwelcomed isolation from friends and my much-loved maternal grandparents, life proved enjoyable.
This stasis did not last long. My parents had spent two years building their ‘dream home’ and then four years living in it when my father deserted his wife and children [see blog]. My mother was left with a millstone property, raising alone three children in a now unheated home that she could ill afford to maintain or repair. Her dream had become a nightmare. Each of the house’s five sets of glass sliding doors were locked with a key, one each of which my father kept. The front door could only be opened with a number combination which my father knew. Securing the house from my newly vengeful father proved impossible. When we were all out, he would walk in and steal whatever he wanted, including parts of my precious vinyl record collection for which I would never forgive him [see blog]. Every summer, my mother’s sister Pam would generously pay for our one-parent family to stay somewhere in Britain, but I would never again accompany my mother and two siblings on holiday as I had to stay home alone to guard it from my father [see blog].
The most immediate impact of my father’s departure was my education. Three years earlier, when my parents decided to send me to a secondary school the other end of the county [see blog], they had promised to give me a lift every school day to Camberley railway station to catch the 8.10 train. Arriving back at Camberley station at 5pm, I would walk to my father’s town centre office and cadge a lift home. That was then. Now that my parents’ promise was in tatters, I had to be the first to rise at 6.30, make breakfast, then walk out to the Prior Road bus stop just after 7 to catch the irregular bus to the town centre and await the 8.10 train. Now, arriving back in Camberley at 5pm meant a wait until 5.40 for the next 39B bus that would deliver me home after 6. Outside of winter, if the weather was fine and I was not carrying too many books, I would choose to walk the two miles home, though it meant a trudge to the top of Church Hill, down Crawley Hill, across the M3 interchange, a walk up Prior Road, then finally down Goldney Road. I could arrive home shortly before 6, but often exhausted.
To avoid such long days, I asked my mother to sign a letter I had typed to my school, asking if I could be let out ten minutes early at the end of the day, as I could arrive home a full hour earlier by catching the 4pm train from Egham. The school reluctantly agreed though, in practice, it proved impossible to enact because teachers of the final afternoon lesson set the day’s homework during their final minutes, to be handed in the following day. It was Hobson’s Choice: get home early or fail my homework. The school office had already become suspicious of my home circumstances. At the end of one term, my regular school report booklet failed to arrive home by post. On enquiring, I was informed that my father had phoned, asking for it to be sent to his new address. I had to explain repeatedly that I did not live with my father and that he took no interest in my life, before I could persuade staff reluctantly to change back the address. How could I admit that most of my father’s stories were lies?
There were reasons for needing to reach home from school at a sensible hour, none of which I wanted to explain to my school. Every weekday, teachers set two subjects of homework that had to be submitted the next school day. They seemed to imagine students reached home within minutes after the school bell, joined their family for formal dinner, then one or other of their parents helped them complete their schoolwork. In my case, nothing could be further from the reality. Neither of my parents ever assisted with my homework because they lacked the knowledge or skills. Instead, once I reached home, my most urgent ‘home work’ now was to administer my mother’s perilous circumstances.
I had multiple uncharted waters to navigate. Our mortgage lender. The municipality’s property ‘rates’. Southern Water. Southern Gas. Southern Electricity. The Post Office telephone service. Buildings insurance. Contents insurance. Car insurance. Service contracts. Inland Revenue. Midland Bank. Until then, all household bills had been paid by my father. I had to contact these agencies by typing letters in my mother’s name and setting up new payment plans, urgently where outstanding balances had accrued due to my father’s abrupt cancellations. I had to field regular ‘red reminders’ and threatening court summonses. Once my mother had signed this correspondence, I would carry it to school and post it in my lunch hour at Egham Post Office. I created a set of labelled folders at home to track all the documents, filing carbon copies of letters I had typed (rediscovered intact four decades later during house clearance following my mother’s death).
At the same time, I had to respond to my father’s resort to the legal system to harass us. He filed a case for regular access to his one-year-old daughter, despite having tried to prevent her birth and never having shown an interest in the upbringing of his children. Farnham Court ordered my mother to permit him to take my sister one weekend a month, seemingly oblivious that neither he nor his teenage mistress knew the slightest about baby care. Those weekends were particularly fraught in our home when my mother would fret terribly that her husband might disappear with her daughter merely to spite her. Eventually, my father bored of this antagonistic routine, spurning further contact with his daughter for the remainder of his life.
I now diverted my school lunchtimes to the upstairs reference section of Egham public library, reading dusty law books to understand our family’s rights in the face of my father’s legal onslaught. He was well aware that he had left my mother without sufficient funds to fight his actions, requiring me to fill out forms for ‘Legal Aid’ and attach the requisite proof of our dire financial situation. I had to apply to Surrey County Council to support my education, most urgently for the expensive termly railway season ticket necessary for travel to school, as well as subsidies to buy my school uniform and entitlement to free school meals [see blog]. Until my mother could find employment, having not worked since my sister’s birth the previous year, I had to apply for social security benefits from the government DHSS agency. My mother’s change of status proved difficult to document when we were unaware of my father’s new address as he had ended direct communication with us.
To represent her in court, my mother hired local solicitor Neale Turk whose office on Kings Ride had recently opened. I accompanied her to their initial meeting and explained our family’s situation with reference to the legal statutes I had read and photocopied at Egham library. While my mother would attend follow-up meetings, she said Turk instructed her not to invite me again. Unfortunately, my mother’s outcomes from a succession of Farnham court appearances, none of which I was permitted to attend, proved not particularly positive. Only later did we discover that my father had at some time been a client of Turk. Mmmmm.
Court orders requiring my father to make maintenance payments to my mother for her and his children were ignored. It was left to me to phone the Clerk to Farnham court from home once a fortnight to ask why we had still not received his overdue funds, me having to fib to the school that I had some medical or dental appointment. I heard every excuse under the sun relayed by the Clerk. Eventually, once my father’s arrears had accumulated to astronomical amounts, he disappeared. He never did pay what he owed us. Only later did we discover he was an illegal immigrant in the United States, the place he had sought to emulate so much in his architectural work [see blog].
Before he fled, his design legacy was left for all to see on Calvin Close, not only in our house but also at the far end of the cul-de-sac. His ‘showhouse’ had brought him a commission to design a group of identical houses around the bottom of our road. Quite how the municipal planning committee approved his plans I never fathomed, as they were designed in the style of Swiss chalets with steep pitched roofs, completely out of character with surrounding homes. Whenever I happened to pass them, I felt ashamed of my association. Decades later, most of those monstrosities were demolished and replaced with orthodox houses.
In 2004, visiting my mother in the tiny house she now occupied in a town near Camberley, she showed me estate agent sale particulars for a property about which she had enquired, having seen it advertised in the local paper. It was our former home in Calvin Close. She told me she was thinking of arranging a viewing. I was horrified. No no no! Even after all the terrible things that had happened in her life, she still imagined she could resume her ‘happy family’ years between 1968 and 1972 by living in that house. Mercifully, the £340,000 price tag was way beyond her means. I never did find out if she ignored my pleas to stay well away.
My parents’ now rather post-modern home was demolished after planning permission was approved for a conventional, two-storey house in 2011. Their decision not to emigrate to Canada had had disastrous consequences. Their dream of a ‘new start’ there had turned to dust: my father an illegal immigrant on the run and my mother impoverished for the remainder of her life.
[to be continued…]
POSTSCRIPT:
Nearly two decades after our Calvin Close house was built, another Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired house was constructed in Camberley at 11 Crawley Hill, an address I had walked past hundreds of times on my way home from school via the railway station. Built between 1981 and 1984, initially named ‘Rhododendron’ but later renamed ‘Betterwords’, it was designed by architect David Elgin Dodge (of the American ‘Dodge’ car dynasty) for owner Firoz Mehta, an “industrial consultant” who had lived in Camberley since 1972 and “had always wanted to be an architect”. By remarkable coincidence, in 1985 I happened to work briefly in this house and experienced an eerie familiarity with my childhood home that, by then, had been consigned to memory. This later property attracted considerable press coverage for its retro-1960’s stylings (“It is the only house of its kind in Europe”, Mehta proudly told ‘The Camberley News’), including in the national 'Daily Telegraph'. It now apparently fulfils three Surrey Heath Borough Council criteria that make it a “significance of heritage asset”, whereas my father’s genuine contemporary 1960’s modernist design, built one mile away, had attracted zero public attention … perhaps because he had not been a 'real' architect [see blog].
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