Where Did It All Go Right? (4 page)

I still developed asthma. Since the age of 31 I’ve been a two-doses-of-Beclomethasone-a-day man, with the option of a quick pull on the Salbutamol inhaler if the wheezing starts. So much for those white-coated timewasters at Bristol University.

* * *

Though they tucked me up, my mum and dad, I was never cosseted, never wrapped in cotton wool or kept in a glass case, even though urban paranoia was really beginning to catch on in the Seventies. All those terrifying public information films warning you not to take sweets from strangers or play near electricity pylons, and never to cross the road without Joe Brown or Alvin Stardust (
’E don’t need any ’elp, does ’e
?). If my mum and dad lived in constant fear of our abduction or accidental death they didn’t show it.

Twice I remember them losing their cool.

One evening, after
The Magic Roundabout
or
Noah and Nelly
or whatever five-minute buffer signalled the end of children’s television, Simon and I had been allowed ‘down the field’, and at that time fishing was the big thing. Armed with empty jam jars and ‘bandy nets’ we intrepid hunter-gatherers would trawl the stream for even the tiniest finned entities, take them home as trophies and subsequently leave them in the garage to die. (A ‘bandy net’ was a cheap, coloured plastic net mounted on a wire hoop stuck into the end of a bamboo pole, the sort of rig often purchased at the seaside. I’ve never seen the name listed in any slang dictionary, although ‘bandy’ is an old nineteenth-century colloquialism for a
silver
sixpence, so perhaps that’s how much they used to cost in the time of Oliver Twist.)

This particular fishing expedition fell on one of those September evenings when the night rolls in without warning, and in all the excitement of midget freshwater angling neither Simon and I nor any of our mates had registered that it was pitch black. Suddenly, from out of the darkness Dad appeared to drag us angrily back home, unimpressed by the fact that we’d just caught a ‘jopper’ (i.e. a big fish, name derivative no doubt of ‘giant’ and ‘whopper’ but again not legitimised by any dictionary). I don’t suppose it was
that
late, but you don’t want your boys out after dark, do you? We were sent to bed with our tails between our legs (and the jopper’s tail in its killing jar out in the garage). Why? Because Mum had been ‘worried about us’.

The other vivid instance of Mum being worried about us in our absence occurred in broad daylight. Simon and I had arranged to go and meet Pap Collins at his allotment on Billing Road,
³
easy cycling distance from our house, just the other side of the field. We used to love it when Pap appeared on his little moped
⁴
in that trademark piss-pot helmet – not that we called it that then – and we relished helping him dig up carrots in return for a piece of chocolate in his tiny, smaller-than-a-man shed. However, on this occasion, Pap never appeared.

We waited and waited at the entrance to the allotments, but no Pap. Not that we were worried about
him
– our young imaginations extended as far as blowing up the guns of Navarone, but not to an elderly man having a moped accident. In the event, Pap had simply changed his mind about going down the allotment, and had phoned Mum to let us know. But we’d already left the house.

Oh well, we thought, let’s call on Johnny Green – his house is right next door to the allotments and he’s got Mouse Trap and a pond and everything. Ace! (To use the vernacular of the time.) Johnny was home, and the three of us wiled away most of the afternoon there, playing hide and seek in his oversized, tree-filled back garden – quite a luxury, as our little back garden offered the choice of precisely two hiding places: behind the coal bunker and inside the coal bunker. Meanwhile, back at home, ever since Pap’s phone call Mum had been beside herself: why hadn’t we come straight back? Where were we? Had a stranger offered us sweets? Had we flown a kite too near an electricity pylon?

When we gaily strolled back up Winsford Way (it wasn’t late or anything), Dad was out looking for us while Mum sat at home fretting and waiting for a call from Mountain Rescue. Dad shouted at us, Mum cried, we cried, and it was a right old scene. We’d only been in Johnny’s back garden!

We learned something that day, as Kyle says on
South Park
: you can go anywhere and do anything as long as Mum doesn’t know where you are or what you’re doing.

It’s funny how insightful I must have been at that young age, because deep down I knew Dad wasn’t as worried as Mum (she was always the worrier), and I knew they only shouted at us out of relief at our well-being.

What measure of idyllic childhood was this? I was essentially free to do whatever I wanted, providing I returned before sundown and didn’t do one thing when I was supposed to be doing another. I got told off all the time, and had the backs of my legs slapped on more than one occasion, but Mum and Dad managed to care about our welfare without keeping us on a string. Perhaps that’s why we didn’t rebel – at least not to the point of having to be picked up from the police station or scraped up off the road.

I smoked my first cigarette down the field with a ruddy-faced boy called Pete Thompson in the last year at middle school, when I was 13. When I say
smoked
, I wet the end of it and made the other end glow. It was a vague thrill, but did nothing for me, and I’m grateful for that now.

As a kid you tend to do exactly what you’re told not to, and maybe if my parents had constantly warned me not to smoke and threatened me with cancer and damnation I would have tried a bit harder with Pete’s Embassy Number Ones. As it is, I know that Mum – an ex-smoker – would have disapproved loudly if I’d taken smoking up as a covert habit, but it was never cast as the original sin.

Getting water inside our wellies carried a sterner punishment. And we risked that all the time.

Let’s get this clear: Mum and Dad weren’t hippies. They were very much the rock’n’roll generation; married before peace and love, Mum was pregnant with me when President Johnson launched Operation Rolling Thunder in Vietnam. In fact the
laissez-faire
attitude they maintained while Simon and I grew up was quite an achievement for two straights. (Hippies make terrible parents anyway: liberals are just as oppressive as fascists. Mum and Dad were just grateful the world hadn’t ended during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.)

My dad’s a laid-back sort of bloke. So am I. It must be in the genes then, because Pap Collins was not the worrying kind either. In fact, Pap took it to the extreme, and allowed old-fashioned stoicism to prevent him from ever seeing a doctor until it was too late.
⁵
He managed to turn ‘not worrying’ into a self-destructive act. At least my dad speaks up if he has an ache or pain. Whenever I talk myself out of visiting my doctor, I can hear the stubborn, scared voice of my Pap, who claimed he took his own teeth out by tying a piece of string to a doorknob and ended his days in hospital with one leg less than he’d started out with.

My dad worries only out of loyalty to my mum, who worries as a form of catharsis. It’s a way of life for her. I think she enjoys a little fret. Yet she managed to hold back throughout my formative years, an act of long-sighted reason for which I am eternally indebted. She lost it completely when I was 17 and she decided I was gay, but then maybe the Cuban Missile Crisis consumed so much of her worry, it
took
her 20 years to get back into her stride. It’s a thought. Even my laid-back dad was a bit anxious when those Soviet merchant vessels approached the US blockade on 27 October 1962.

* * *

Were it not for Khrushchev, I could have been born in the London Borough of Sutton (which would have been poetic because that’s close to where Julie’s mum lives now). Rather adventurously, Dad had lived in a rented flat in London for almost a year when he married Mum. He shared with his best mate and later best man, Jim
⁶
and I’ll bet they had a swinging time. I know they sometimes drank in the same pub as the great British screen actor Jack Hawkins. They never spoke to him, but perhaps they should have. A couple of years after they’d quit London, he lost his voice following a throat cancer operation.
⁷

He carried on making films, usually dubbed, until his death in 1973. Jack Hawkins meant something to me only in retrospect – it’s likely I never even saw
The Bridge on the River Kwai
or
Zulu
until after he’d departed – but my dad had gone to the pictures to see him in Charles Frend’s
The Cruel Sea
back in the Fifties and he’d left an indelible mark on the boy; just as Brigitte Bardot would later do for entirely different reasons. Legend has it that Dad and Jim went to see one Bardot film three times, because you glimpsed her bare back in it. A swinging time.

By the time my mum decided that I was gay in the early Eighties, homosexuality was out in the open and on
Top of the Pops
. But in the early Sixties, when Dad’s landlords decided that he and Jim were gay, it was a truly underground lifestyle choice, the stuff of codes and slang and nods and winks. But Dad and Jim, innocent
provincial
boys who’d barely unpacked their suitcases, read nothing into the fact that their landlords were
two men
who
lived together
downstairs. Furthermore, he and Jim fancied Brigitte Bardot, which allowed them to share a tiny flat – and a double bed – with impunity. So when London’s gayest landlords invited them downstairs for ‘a drink’ one night, a thick fug of Northampton naiveté prevented them from reading the runes. Dad and Jim swung, but not in that direction. When the penny dropped it must have sounded like a cathedral bell falling to the ground. It was high time they got married to two nice girls from back home.

Two nice girls both called Christine, coincidentally. Dad and Jim married their respective Christines in 1962 and dragged them both down to London where all the swinging was. They stuck it out for less than a year.

Suburban Sutton, let me tell you, is a long way from Carnaby Street, and I don’t just meant culturally. Considering it’s south of London, Sutton’s not even that handy for South London. It’s more like Northampton than London in fact (especially today, now that everywhere looks like everywhere else). My future parents had jobs that were situated as far apart from each other as, say, Harpole and Ecton in Northampton.
⁸
He worked in Kingston, she in Croydon, which meant that every morning the radiant young newly-weds would stand at bus stops on opposite sides of the same road in Sutton and head off in opposite directions. To compound the situation, Jim and Christine – their only real London friends – fell for a baby early and decided to bail out.

So, at the end of that nail-biting year of 1962, with a cosy Christmas spent back in Northampton to remind them of home, the bushy-tailed young couple swallowed their pride and, like the Russian ships, turned back. Back to the bosom of the family.

Even when I’d successfully relocated to the capital in my twenties, I never judged Mum and Dad harshly for not being up to London life. I had three years of college to lower me gently into the moronic inferno; they spent most of their days on opposing poles of public transport, looking forward to a supper of ‘batter bits’
from
the chip shop and for all they knew the end of the world. In their shoes, I think I might have gone back to Northampton to die.

* * *

How can I ever know what it must have been like? I can’t. All this – Guantanamo, Sutton – happened before I was born. Here’s what I know for a fact about the world into which I was painfully and noisily delivered around 9 p.m. on 4 March 1965: it was snowing. Sir Winston Churchill had not long been buried in a churchyard near Blenheim Palace after lying in state at Westminster for three days. T.S. Eliot had died that January, and Stan Laurel in February.
⁹
A statesman, a poet and a comedian died in the first months of 1965 so that, karmically, I might live. I almost wish I believed in reincarnation.

In those first two pre-Andrew months of 1965 the war in Vietnam escalated and Sir Stanley Matthews retired. I arrived in a world where LBJ ran America and Harold Wilson ran Britain. ‘I’ll Never Find Another You’ by The Seekers was at Number One in what was still called the hit parade (monumentally insignificant to me, that one). Laws in this country were emerging from the Dark Ages: the death penalty was abolished in the year of my birth, and within three years it would be okay to get a divorce, be homosexual (a red letter day for Dad and Jim’s feather-boa-wearing landlords), take the pill and, if you forgot, have an abortion.

I wish I could tell you that I remember Neil Armstrong walking on the moon in 1969 but I don’t. I sort of recall Concorde’s maiden flight the same year but only because Nan and Pap bought me a cool little commemorative model with a movable nose. Kent State and Watergate, naturally enough, passed me by. What little I knew of British politics was taught me by Professor Yarwood.

As an insulated modern child in the East Midlands of England,
the
events of the world had to work pretty hard to impact upon my life. Power cuts were an invasion by greater forces into domestic sanctity but I accepted them, as we all did – Fetch the candles, Dad! – they had no wider implications than not being able to watch
Love Thy Neighbour
on telly. There was oil out there and power, and these things could run short or run out, causing minor inconvenience. What else was there to know? I knew there were ‘starving children in Africa’, because Mum would threaten to send them my dinner if I didn’t eat it. (Not much of a threat when you think about it.) I knew there was an oil shortage in 1973, when I was eight, because the school closed for two days. You note things like that in your diary.

Ah, diaries. I started keeping one in 1972, aged six going on seven. It was a habit – encouraged, to begin with, by my posterity-minded parents – that stayed with me right through my childhood, past the college years into my early twenties. I kept my last diary in 1993, a secret journal – this time tapped into my Mac Classic – which petered out when the relationship that turned into my marriage became more important than writing about it, and there were no more secrets.