A Young Man's Passage (3 page)

I’ve told my mother not to feel bad about it, though. I did the same thing with Fanny the Wonder Dog: tied her up outside the newsagent’s and quite forgot she existed until lunchtime when I wondered why I had a cupboard full of Pedigree Chum. She was still there, looking bored and bewildered, three hours later.

MARRIED IN THE
1950s, when the 1960s arrived my parents had to get with it.

The ration books and valued chastity that were the reality of their youth were replaced with feminism, free love and the Beatles. My mother changed her hairstyle, a highlighted, tufted crop instead of the dark, trained top curl. My father grew side-burns. Money was tight on a police constable’s wages so they earned extra cash in the evenings after we three were in bed by making lampshades and folding Christmas cards at five shillings per thousand. So she was understandably tired out one afternoon when she mistakenly made our Sunday tea chocolate cake with Bisto instead of cocoa.

My great auntie Wyn – who was a regular Sunday visitor – was there and was given the first slice. My mother’s chocolate cake was always cause for excitement. It was two chocolate sponges with delicious, sugary chocolate cream both in between and on top, decorated with swirls done with a fork, as creatively as my mother’s limited time would allow. Auntie Wyn took a bite, paused, took a sip of tea and swallowed. She replaced the remainder of her cake on the plate and said nothing. The plate was part of a delicate, green and white bone-china tea service that was originally owned by my grandmother, and it was only used for Sunday tea. My sisters and I were served next and we all took big greedy bites. As one, Frances, Beverley and I spat our mouthfuls of cake out, Beverley missing her plate and indeed the table altogether. My mother was horrified by her children’s vulgar display. ‘Eat it!’ We pulled faces and looked down at our plates with fear. ‘I said eat it!’ my mother insisted.

Luckily Auntie Wyn came to our rescue. ‘Actually, Brenda, it does taste rather different . . .’

‘Does it?’ My mother indignantly took a bite. She spat hers out too. ‘Bisto!’ she said, identifying the culprit.

My father did shift work as a policeman and there were ‘late turns’, ‘early turns’ and ‘night turns’, when we had to creep around during the day and make no noise because ‘Your father’s asleep!’ His job carried an element of danger, and when he got home my mother always asked if everything had been all right. She asked the obligatory question one night without turning to look at him. When he only mumbled in response she looked up and saw his face was bruised, battered and bleeding. In those days, banks had night safes where money or cheques could be deposited. Driving home after his late shift my father had seen someone being robbed of his cash as he tried to post it through the slot of the night safe. My father jumped out of his car and wrestled with the robber, who fought back violently. The robber got away but left his jacket behind. With that and my father’s description, the man was soon apprehended and jailed. An article in the local paper praised my father’s bravery. A few years later at school I exaggerated the story, telling my classmates that my father had been shot and wounded while single-handedly foiling an armed bank robbery. I obviously felt the need to be this dramatic quite regularly, because I remember other untruths I told quite clearly. When, as a nine-year-old, I was told by mocking classmates that I sounded like a girl, I solemnly informed them that, if they must know, I’d had a lung transplant a few years ago and had been the recipient of a girl’s lungs. My feminine voice was the result of this life-saving medical procedure, and I’d rather they didn’t make fun of me because I couldn’t help it.

I was a happy, healthy child, but from the age of about six months I had a problem with my eyes. It was a form of eczema that made them red and itchy, and it came and went for years. As I slept, a yellow goo would be produced and I’d wake up in the morning with lids glued together by Nature’s gunk. My mother had to bathe my eyes each morning to dissolve the gunk before I could open them and see. She used to take me to the skin hospital in Leicester Square for treatment. One day while we were there she was struck by one of her infrequent but incapacitating migraines. When these happened she had to lie down in a darkened room immediately. She phoned my father, who was on duty in Soho at the time.

My father worked in the traffic division for many years, driving around looking for violations, responding to calls and patrolling the motorways. He was first on the scene at many horrific car crashes, and was on duty when a British Airways 111 crashed in Staines, Middlesex. Once when I was late leaving for school and he was on early turn, he got me there in double-quick time, sirens blazing. On this occasion, his response to my mother was unsympathetic.

‘You can’t get home? Get the tube to Waterloo and the train to Surbiton.’

Once he understood the true urgency of her words he collected her in a police car and drove her to the nearest police station. There was no suitably dark room available, so she lay down in a roomy broom cupboard and told my father to shut the door and come back in two hours. As my mother told me this story recently I couldn’t help but notice that my role, as a principal player in this anecdote, had been faded out entirely.

‘What happened to me?’ I asked, concerned.

‘Well, the migraine was so bad I couldn’t care less about you. I think you were left in the station canteen being looked after by whoever was about at the time.’

I remember waking up once in the middle of the night when a cat fight was going on outside my bedroom window, unable to open my eyes. The wailing falsetto sounded like the devil’s death throes to me. I got blindly out of bed and crept as far as my parents’ bedroom door before I started screaming. Within seconds my mother was there, clutching my head and saying everything was fine: it was only cats having an argument.

This mother/son scenario repeated itself when I was 34. In the midst of a black hole of depression and Valiumed to the eyeballs, I arrived at Swindon similarly traumatised by my drive down the M4. I stood on the doorstep and rang the bell, tears streaming down my face. ‘All the cars were going backwards,’ I said. ‘I thought I was going to die.’ My mother clutched my head and said everything would be fine.

It is incidents such as these, variations on themes subtly repeated like a quiet refrain in a piano concerto, that seem to imply there is, after all, some order to our lives, some recurring scheme or rhythm we may not even notice. We can’t quite join the dots but we see them, like signposts along the way.

I was, for example, a sturdy baby. I enjoyed being sung to and I slept a lot. Today I listen to yodelling music and sleep a lot . . . As soon as I could walk I used to drape towels and scarves round my shoulders and attempt a toddler’s version of swanning about . . . As I write I’m wearing a soft pink silk kimono that Jasper Conran made for me. I was once asleep in my pram outside the French windows when some rough girls came and threw dirt over me . . . I was recently trashed in an interview by Lucy Cavendish from the
Evening Standard
. . .

All similar experiences, don’t you see?

WHEN I TRY
to remember my early childhood, it comes back to me in short, atmospheric film clips: a flowerbed full of marigolds with a path made from fire cinders, my father in his police uniform saying goodbye when he left for night duty, a green coat behind a frosted-glass front door, a high-ceilinged hall with a stained-glass window, the sound of stiletto heels on pavements and tiled floors, a kind, smiling, glamorous woman called Sylvia, my father in the kitchen, opening a container then saying, crossly, ‘There’s no ruddy coffee again!’ I remember Norfolk fields covered in snow, and sitting on my grandfather’s lap – he had a small lozenge-like growth on his jaw and when I or my sisters pressed it he made a funny prolonged quacking noise, as if we were pressing a front-door buzzer. I remember my grandmother’s smiling, excited face when she greeted us at the front door of the Manor House, her placemats featuring scenes from classical ballets, the dark, shiny sideboard with two cupboards you opened by sliding a short wooden arrangement left or right, to the right if you wanted to get into the left side, and vice versa. I remember a television on tall, spindly, 1950s legs, built into a wooden case with ‘doors’ made of thin vertical slats of wood. When ‘open’ they disappeared into the sides of the box. You ‘closed’ the television by sliding them out with two thin gold-coloured metal finger-grips, designed to match the petite round ‘feet’ on each leg.

I remember lying in my bedroom studying the wallpaper at about the age of five. For some reason a design of climbing pink roses had been deemed suitable. Delicate buds sprouted from a thin green stem that twisted from left to right. Every foot or so the pattern repeated itself but the join was hard to discern and it was only a slightly quirky slip of a bud barely out of its green casing that gave the game away. The overall effect was of a wildly glamorous sequence of rose stems bursting forth on every available inch of wall space. In the small boxroom of the flat that was quite overpowering.

I had an Action Man (the first of many), while my sisters had Sindy dolls. They had boxes full of outfits with matching shoes and accessories, and my Action Man had a choice between camouflage all-in-ones or black slacks with matching polo neck. It was a ridiculous situation and I did the only thing I could. Very soon my Action Man was Surbiton’s first cross-dressing experiment. (I blame the wallpaper.) Stretch fabrics looked particularly fetching on his well-toned torso and rippling limbs.

There was a girl who lived at the flats who wasn’t quite right. She’d fallen out of the window as an infant and couldn’t speak properly. Chains were put on all the windows. Judith’s parents weren’t going to let such a terrible accident happen again. But she had a fantastic dressing-up box, and whenever I went up to play we draped ourselves in oversized ballgowns and eased our feet into diamante slip-ons.

At the flats there was also a boy about twice my age I shall call Glen. I used to follow him round. He had a sweaty smell about him that excited me in a way I didn’t understand. I spontaneously asked him for a fight once, not because we had fallen out but because I wanted him to touch me. He said no and then he stabbed a stag beetle with a stick and spread its creamy white innards across the pavement. I liked him even more after that. Years later, as I performed a sex act on a glass collector in the toilet cubicle of a Sheffield nightclub and experienced once again the life-affirming wonder of the male ejaculation, I thought spontaneously of Glen and the stag beetle’s innards.

The local sweet shop was called Frank’s. It was run by three brothers who happened to be midgets and stood on boxes to reach the till. If you wanted something from a jar on the top shelf you had to wait until someone tall enough to reach it came in. Frank and his brothers later appeared in the film
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
. Obviously the confectionery business was just a stop-gap for them.

Three young children is quite a handful for any mother, so washing, dressing, breakfast and bedtimes were all achieved on a rota system. I’m not sure where I came in the feeding and dressing stakes but I was always last in the scummy lukewarm bath and first to bed.

I ATTENDED SEVERAL
primary schools, starting aged four at Arundel House in a smart red-and-yellow striped uniform. When I was three my mother had sent a photograph of my sisters and me to Father Julian, along with a letter in which she asked what school he thought she should try for. How expensive was Downside, for example? She still has his reply.

Talacre Abbey,

Prestatyn 2.2.63

Dear Brenda,

Thank you so much for the lovely photograph of the children. Julian certainly does look brim full of character and intelligence and I can understand you wanting to give him every chance. But Downside really is fantastically expensive. I believe it costs £1,000 to keep a boy there for four years, and this would be on top of about six years at preparatory school.

There are two daughter schools of Downside which might be worth your visiting, as they would both be relatively easy to get to from Surbiton. One is Worth, which used to be a preparatory school for Downside when I taught there, but which is now building up its own public school – it is in the most lovely setting and Downside sent the cream of its community to form the staff there. Three Bridges on the London–Brighton line is the nearest station, about four miles away. The other is Ealing Abbey, which was also founded and staffed by Downside and is, of course,
very much
cheaper, as it is a day school.

I do hope you are all managing to keep warm in this fantastic winter—

Bless you all always—

Yours affectionately

Fr Julian Stoner

Whatever the letter from my mother to Father Julian had said about my potential, I wasn’t very bright. In fact, there was some suspicion that I was backward. (I gather ‘backward’ is a bit like being ‘slow’, as if we are all clocks on the wall.) Reading and writing were difficult for me: for several years I could only manage mirror-writing.