Читать книгу I Owe You Nothing - Luke Goss - Страница 9
ОглавлениеIt was the most violent thunderstorm I have ever seen. I was four years old, and terrified. I huddled on my bed with my brother Matt, both of us crying. Suddenly a flash of lightning crackled across the window, lighting up the room. In the brightness I saw my mum and dad, standing by the French windows, side by side. Just the sight of them made me feel warm and safe and secure. It was one of those lovely childhood feelings when you know, deep down know, that because they are there, everything will be all right. You cannot be harmed while your mum and dad stand guard, and they were standing by the window guarding Matt and me from the storm. I stopped crying and snuggled down to sleep, a happy little boy.
Three weeks later my childhood happiness would be shattered: my dad left us, for good.
The storm broke in Majorca, on the only foreign holiday we ever went on. It was the summer before my fifth birthday, so I was old enough to have clear memories of it. It was a week of perfect fun: swimming, playing, Mum rubbing suntan oil on our backs. It felt like a family should feel.
Unknown to me at the time, the holiday was a farewell gesture from my father. When my parents had booked it, they did not know they were going to split up; but by the time we all went away, Mum already knew that when we got back Dad would be leaving. I think going on the holiday was probably a mistake. On the one hand, it gave us some happy memories to treasure of our parents together, but on the other hand it lulled us into a false sense of security. However young we were, my brother and I had some inkling that things were not quite right, we were aware of the friction: but seeing them playing happy families on holiday in Majorca soothed any doubts we had, and left us unprepared for the shattering blow of Dad leaving. Looking back on the memory of them both standing at the French window while the storm raged is particularly poignant because to me it summed up all the happiness and security that a child has the right to be given, and it left an indelible image of their togetherness, which made my sense of loss so much more acute.
Things had not been going well for Mum and Dad from the time that Dad joined the police, more than two years earlier. He was sent away to Oxford for three months training, and that was a lonely time for Mum, as Dad only got home at weekends. But when the course finished, she was determined to see his passing out parade: she was very proud of him. She had saved some money for the train fare, she borrowed her sister Ann’s boots so that she looked her smartest despite the tight budget we lived on, she dressed my brother and me in our best clothes and set off for Oxford. We were nearly three years old, so we were a handful to control during the journey and the ceremony, but Mum was determined that we should see Dad’s big moment.
She arrived to an uncomfortable reception. Dad asked her if she had received his letter: apparently he had sent her a six-page letter telling her that he thought their marriage was over and that he would not be returning to live with us after the course. Mum had not received it before setting out. Not surprisingly, there was a huge row and a terrible journey home for us all. Mum at least had the satisfaction of forcing Dad to tell her to her face, but none the less she was devastated. She had honestly not realized that there was anything seriously wrong with the marriage, and she loved Dad very deeply.
‘I had a boyfriend before Alan, but Alan was the first real love of my life,’ she says. ‘I was young and inexperienced, but I believed that marriage was for ever and that children need a father. I wanted him back and I was so miserably unhappy.’
We went back without Dad to the maisonette in Hither Green, and he was still away at the start of 1972, the year of the miners’ strike when the whole country went on to a three-day working week, and when electricity supplies were cut off for long periods each day. The flat at Hither Green was all-electric, and it was cold and damp at the best of times, so my great grandmother said we could go and stay at her flat. She moved in with her daughter, my gran, and we took over her home at Nunhead, which is between Lewisham and Brixton. Mum walked there with the two of us, a suitcase full of clothes, and our cat in a bag. We must have looked a sorry sight.
Our new home was in a big old block of flats in a tough area, a place where kids put lighted matches through the letter box for sport. Mum was ill while we were there, and she remembers it as the worst period of her whole life. I don’t remember it at all, although I have clear memories of my great grandmother, who died when I was seven.
After we’d been there a few weeks my dad decided to come back home again. He and Mum talked, and in the end determined to give their marriage another go.
‘I hated being away from my kids, I really missed them very badly, missed knowing what they were up to every day,’ he says.
Dad by this time qualified for a police house, so we moved to a three-bedroom 1930s mid-terrace house in Lee, south-east London. It was the best home we had ever had, with hot and cold running water and an upstairs bathroom, and they both thought this would give them the break they needed to get their marriage together again. The clearest memory I have of this house is of the ‘ghost’ who shared a bedroom with Matt and me. Both of us saw the figure of an old man in our room. We weren’t terribly frightened; he seemed to be a kindly presence who stood between our beds, looking at us. When we called for Mum he would disappear.
Mum also thought the house was haunted. She always went upstairs with her back against the wall because she was sure there was ‘something’ on the stairs, where it was always very cold, no matter how hard she tried to heat it. On one occasion, after a row with Dad, Mum went to sleep in the small back bedroom. She heard footsteps on the landing that couldn’t possibly be Dad’s, and she felt the bedroom turn icy cold. When her sister Ann came round she, too, sensed some presence. Our granddad Harry was also aware of it; he says he never liked that house. Granddad has discovered since then that he is psychic, and I believe that Matt and I have inherited some of his abilities. We certainly have a very highly developed ability to communicate with each other without talking, something many twins have.
At this stage of our lives we even had our own language, which Mum says started when we lay side by side in our shared cot. We would babble away together, understanding each other but excluding everyone else. Gradually it lapsed, as we became able to speak properly, but the bond between us did not lessen; to this day we have a sixth sense which tells us if the other is in pain or is upset.
‘They were so close that I could not come between them even when they were fighting,’ says Mum. ‘If I told one of them off the other would turn to me with big round eyes and defend his brother – even though that brother had been thumping him only a moment before. They made me feel wicked for even suggesting one of them was in the wrong! It was always the two of them against everyone else. I sometimes felt excluded, even as their mother.’
It was at this house, though, that I thought I had eliminated Matt from my life for ever: I really did think I had killed him. He was perched on a kitchen stool which had wheels, and I gave it a hard push. He careered down the kitchen and hit his head on the corner of a cupboard. There was so much blood I was sure he was dead, and he’s still got the scar to prove it. I think I cried more than he did, I was so worried.
While we were living at Lee my grandmother, Win, died of cancer. I wish she had lived longer as I would have loved to have got to know her better, although I even now sometimes have a very strong feeling that she is close to me. From everything I have heard about her from my mum and granddad, I know she was a terrific person, and I have a dim memory of her crawling around on the floor on her hands and knees, with me on her back. Mum was devastated when she died and still misses her after all these years.
We got a transfer to another police house, in Mitcham. It was more modern, but still not modern enough to have central heating, and Mum seemed to spend a lot of her time carrying in coal for the fire and cleaning out grates. She was also very busy trying to earn some extra money for the family: she did typing at home, made jewellery, addressed envelopes. At one stage she got a job as a secretary, which earned enough money for her to pay for our extras. We were looked after at a nursery in Blackheath. I can remember that we had to go to bed for a sleep every afternoon on little camp beds, with itchy blankets over us, and Matt and I never wanted to sleep. I can also remember having jam sandwiches for lunch.
But that arrangement did not last long because we both caught measles, and Matt had complications that meant that he had to be kept in the dark for several days, to protect his eyes. Mum had only had the job for three weeks, and had to give it up to look after us. Dad was away on a four-week course.
Things were breaking down again between my parents, but I do have some very happy memories of my early childhood: of them singing together, Dad playing the harmonica and trying to teach Mum the guitar; of Mum sitting on the floor between our two beds, holding hands with each of us and singing us to sleep, songs like ‘Toora Loora Loora’ and ‘Fly, Fly Superbird’; of her putting on funny little shows for us on the landing while we were in bed, singing ‘Hey, Big Spender’ with all the actions. I remember going to a music shop on Lewisham High Street with Dad, and staring at a drum kit in the window. I was so small that only half of my face came above the windowsill, but I could see these huge, gleaming drums and I knew then that I wanted them. The kit might as well have been made from solid gold, it was so far out of my reach, but I dreamed about it for the rest of my childhood, and even now when I think about it I can feel again that same mixture of excitement and longing.
It was while we were living at Mitcham that we went on the holiday to Majorca. The only holiday I have a memory of before that was camping in the New Forest in a tent. Just Dad and Matt and me, which was fun. Strangely enough, for several years after the holiday in Majorca I pretended I could not remember it. It was as though I were blocking it out. Dad would ask about holidays we remembered, and I would always talk about the New Forest, and when he asked me about Majorca I’d say I couldn’t remember. But in fact it is the holiday of which I have the clearest memories: I think, in my very young way, I felt that I was somehow betraying my own unhappiness by talking about it. To me, my father leaving home for good was always linked with that holiday.
He left soon after we got back from Majorca. Apparently, when he told Mum he was leaving us as soon as he found somewhere to stay, he offered to let the three of us go on holiday without him. But she insisted that he came, hoping it would be a last chance to get everything right. She remembers ‘that awful, pathetic feeling of just hoping that someone will love you again, when their love for you has died’. But when we returned she knew it was finally over.
I’ve never believed in using the breakdown of my parents’ marriage as an excuse for anything I’ve done in my own life. Lots of kids play on it, and make out it causes them all sorts of problems. I cannot pretend it made us happy, but I don’t believe it lets me off the hook for my own actions, and in some ways it may even have helped me. It made me more independent and stronger than I perhaps otherwise would have been. We weren’t shielded from it: Mum levelled with us that Dad wasn’t coming back, and I can remember sobbing my heart out.
The worst thing was the unnaturalness of our relationship with Dad when he came to see us at weekends. Every time we saw him felt something like the first day at a new school – that strange feeling of having to get to know your way round, having to re-establish yourself, even the way we had to put on our best clothes and have our hair neatly brushed to go out with him. We had to build some sort of relationship afresh every time we saw him, and I always had huge butterflies in my stomach when I knew he was coming.
I developed a sort of tunnel vision, shutting out a great deal of the thoughts and memories around me and concentrating on getting on with life from one day to the next; I’m sure that’s how lots of kids cope with it. It’s such a common experience, but I do think you have to live through it to fully understand what it’s like. You feel as excited at seeing your missing parent each time as you do, much later in life, when you are meeting a lover. It’s a different emotion, but just as strong, and you are just as desperate to make a good impression, be the person they want you to be. Somehow, in a childish way, you think that if you can be perfect maybe your dad will come back home.
We went from seeing our dad every day of our lives to seeing him every couple of weeks – and that feels like a lifetime to a child. He became almost a stranger to us; we had things in common to talk about, but the closeness was gone, the comfortableness of a well-worn and familiar relationship where you don’t even need to talk. He would take us for a meal, and that was always a nightmare because I don’t think Dad was really cut out to sit in a restaurant with two small boys whose table manners weren’t always immaculate. He was probably not ready for young kids, he didn’t want to be embarrassed or shown up. Then we’d go to the pictures or the zoo or something. The worst bit was the gap between the meal and the start of the film, because he would sit with us in his car or on a park bench and lecture us on how we ought to be getting on at school, how we ought to behave, all sorts of things. He was trying to make judgements about us based on one-day visits; we were rapidly becoming strangers to each other.
He says now that he didn’t see us more often because he encountered a lot of hostility from Mum. I’m sure that’s true: her life had been devastated by him walking out, and she wasn’t about to put down a welcome mat for him. But I believe he should have persevered for at least the first two or three years, seeing us more regularly, for our sakes. As it was, he copped out and let his visits slide, so that when we did see each other it was such hard work for all of us. At the end of the day we used to say goodbye with a little peck on the cheek, when all along I was desperate for him to fling his arms round me and hug me. I used to walk into our house with tears in my eyes, trying hard not to let him see them.
I don’t believe that the break-up of any marriage or long-term relationship is entirely black and white: there are faults on both parts and I have tried not to take sides between Mum and Dad. But I do know that in terms of bringing us up on her own my mum was brilliant, and my dad was just not there, however much we wanted and needed him.
When you have a child you immediately become a fully-fledged parent. You don’t have any training courses, you don’t have to produce a CV or any other certificates, you are what that child has got. You are taken for granted by that small person you have created; that’s part of the deal of being a parent. It’s a responsibility you have to take very seriously, no matter how difficult it is at times. You can’t cop out, like my dad did. Even though I now understand everything better, I know what he was going through and I get on with him brilliantly today, in spite of this there are still huge, unresolved miseries inside me when I think back to those years.
If we were suffering, so was Mum. ‘I don’t fall in love easily and I don’t fall out of love easily,’ she says. ‘It takes me a long time to turn. But part of me wanted the marriage to end because at least I would know where I stood, we had been messing around for so long trying to keep the thing going. I was terrified of being on my own with just the boys, petrified. It sounds cowardly, but it’s the truth. I didn’t want the loneliness, the poverty. I didn’t even feel secure in our home, which was a police house.
‘But it was a question of dusting myself down, and doing my crying when the boys were in bed. But they did know how upset I was, and they did their share of crying, too. I didn’t hide from them the fact that their dad wasn’t coming back: I thought that if I lied to them they would have nobody left in the world they could trust.
‘They became very insular, very dependent on me. I once went down the road to the phone box, which you could see from our house, to ring my father. I’d only been gone a couple of minutes and I could hear them crying. They were at the end of our path looking for me, clinging together with tears pouring down their faces. “You won’t leave us, Mummy, will you?” they kept asking. It was heart-breaking. It cracks me up even now to think about it. I just had to give them hugs and hugs to reassure them.
‘Alan and I were probably both too young when we married, but he was able to pick himself up and walk away from it, doing his growing up somewhere else in a way that suited him. I was forced to grow up and get on with life because of the children. But I would never, ever change places with him: he missed out on so much joy by not being with Luke and Matthew.
‘If we had stayed together, the boys would have had a tougher upbringing and may not have turned out the way they did. I don’t regret my marriage to Alan: I loved him, my children were conceived in love and born in love – how can anyone regret that?’
We had started school by the time they split up, at first going to St Mark’s Junior School in Mitcham, but transferring after a while to Beechholme, also in Mitcham. One of my happiest memories is of being met by Mum at the gate and going home to sit on her lap with tea and biccies. It was a ritual that I loved. It sounds like something out of Little House on the Prairie, but it’s true. I fell in love with my first teacher, who had glasses and long hair, and I sobbed when I had to leave her class.
We were typically naughty little boys in those days. I can remember dunking my head in a puddle to try to catch a cold, so that I could stay home from school. Unfortunately a woman saw me and followed me home to tell my mum, and I was in trouble. Another time Mum nearly caught me and a girl called Jenny showing each other our naughty bits in the garage – we hid in a wardrobe that was stored in there, terrified of being caught with our pants down. The garage, which was at the back of the house, was a favourite place. We spent all our pocket money on bubble gum and practised for hours trying to blow bigger and bigger bubbles.
Money was very tight. We were offered free school dinners, but Mum was too proud to accept them. She put cardboard in her shoes and borrowed a friend’s sewing machine to make our clothes, to save money. One day, in desperation, we went in the pouring rain with Mum to the phone box so that she could ring granddad and ask him for some money. She called me into the phone box because I was getting wet outside, and as I went in I noticed something that looked like a pound note on the floor. When I picked it up I saw that it had the Queen’s head on both sides – I was very disappointed, because I thought it must be toy money. But when I gave it to Mum she realized that it was two pound notes stuck together, probably worth about ten pounds today, and enough to buy us all some food for the rest of the week. We all hugged each other in delight.
Mum got a part-time job working in an employment agency in Streatham. Her boss would not let her leave the office five minutes early to catch the bus back to Mitcham, so when she finished work she literally had to run all the way to be sure of being at the school gates when we came out: we were so insecure we would be distraught if we could not see her face among those of the other mums.
When Dad first moved out he went into rented accommodation in Finchley, sharing a house with some people much younger than him, but he was already seeing Margaret, the woman who was to become his second wife and our stepmother. They met on the train when he was travelling to work from Mitcham. She was also married, but was separated from her husband, and before too long she had bought a flat in Sutton where they lived together. It was a while before we met her, and it was never really an easy relationship.
‘Both the women in my life were unhelpful with my relationship with my sons,’ says Dad. ‘It was understandable from Carol, she felt a great deal of animosity towards me and she made it hard work for me to visit them. I could see how they were affected by the bad feeling. I was also given a hard time at home afterwards from Margaret, who I felt resented the time I spent with them. In the end it was too taxing, too sad, too hard to go back each week, and I cut my visits down to once a month, and then every six weeks, even every eight weeks. I can see now that Luke is right, I should have worked harder at being with them more. But I never actually stopped seeing them, even at the risk of my relationship with Margaret, and even after being told by their teachers and doctor that my visits were too upsetting for them. It was not a good situation, but it was probably typical of many, many broken marriages where children are involved.’
Dad married Margaret in 1976, and we weren’t told about it or invited to the wedding. Luckily for us, Margaret did not have any children from her first marriage, and she and Dad did not give us any little half-brothers or sisters: I don’t know how I would have coped with sharing him with other children, especially knowing that he was living with them and therefore much closer to them than he was to us. I know lots of kids have to live with that situation, but I’m just grateful it didn’t happen to us.
Mum had also met a man six months previously who was to become our new stepfather, and play a very large role in our lives: Tony Phillips. She went out one evening with a crowd of her girlfriends and found herself chatting to a man with ‘twinkling eyes’, as she describes it.
‘I didn’t fall in love instantly, but I thought he was very cute and I was attracted to him straightaway,’ she says. ‘I’d tried going out with one or two other fellas after Alan left, but I’d never met anyone that I wanted to see again, until Tony came along. For a few weeks he came round to see me every Tuesday, but I wouldn’t let him over the threshold until the children were asleep. He was the only man I allowed into the house: I’d no intention of the boys having to cope with a succession of strange men.
‘Then one Tuesday Tony came round and Luke and Matthew were still awake, in bed. He asked if he could go up and see them. I was very possessive about them, and very reluctant, but eventually I agreed.’
I can remember clearly the night Tony first walked into our bedroom. He’s not very tall and he has a very slight limp caused by the arthritis he has suffered with all his life. He didn’t talk down to us or try to buy our affection. He simply said ‘hello’, and then told us a story about a little bird, which he made up as he went along. The bird lost all its feathers, but found some new ones to stick on. Unfortunately, it was only a little bird and the new feathers were from an eagle. Tony said that if we ever saw a bird flying around faster than Concorde we’d know it was our bird from the story. We took to him straight away.
But we were only seven years old at the time and very used to being on our own with our mother: I don’t think we made life easy for Tony when he moved in, despite such a good start.
Looking back, I can see that Mum didn’t help the situation either. She didn’t give him enough authority over us, she never allowed him to make decisions about us or to exercise discipline. Tony can be philosophical about it now, but I think he’s looking back through rose-tinted spectacles: at the time I’m sure he thought we were a couple of spoiled little brats, and I don’t think he liked us at all.
Tony now says: ‘I learned quickly that Carol’s relationship with the boys was the number one relationship, I couldn’t compete. They had created a very close bond, which overruled everything else, an even closer mother-son bond than normal. So I learned to keep quiet and just get on with things. After all, I was courting their mother, so I didn’t want to fall out with them. There was certainly friction and I know Luke took it personally. But I only got involved in confrontation with them when I felt they needed it, in the same way that all children do from time to time: it wasn’t personal for me at all.’
Tony, who is a year older than Mum, has led an interesting life. He was involved in the 1970s’ property boom, but the boom collapsed into a slump and cost him a lot of money. At the time Mum met him he had a garage in Holborn, but when the council put double yellow lines in front of it business was wiped out. Since then, he’s done a great variety of different jobs, almost always being self-employed. He’s not a nine-to-five person, and he’s not a person who ever lets life get on top of him for long: he always finds another scheme to keep himself going.
He is very different from Dad. At times I have felt Tony to be very cold, because he is not a demonstrative person who shows his feelings. Mum says this does not mean that he does not feel anything: he is just more restrained than the rest of the family – we are all the sort of people who hug and kiss and say ‘I love you’ all the time. Tony knows that our nickname for him in the family is ‘the robot’.
We’ve had our problems, but I have a lot of love and respect for him. I’ve seen him go through tremendous business problems, and I’ve seen him cope bravely with the pain from his arthritis. I’ve learned a lot from Tony, and I like him as well as love him.
Shortly after Tony moved in we were threatened with eviction from the police house. From the moment Dad left us we were not really entitled to go on living there, but we had nowhere else to go, and it took quite a while for the police force to catch up with the fact that Dad had gone. Mum tried to get the council to re-house us, but they had a very long waiting list, so she and Tony scraped together a deposit, arranged a mortgage and bought a small end-of-terrace modern house on an estate in Cheshunt, Hertfordshire. They married a year after we had first met Tony.
We transferred to another school, St Clement’s, in Cheshunt, and while living there we joined swimming and karate clubs. We settled down quite well, singing in the school choir and playing football for the school. I was the more active of the two of us: Mum says I have always been hyperactive. Even when I’m supposed to be sitting still I tend to fidget and from a very early age I was forever drumming with my fingers on the arm of a chair or a table. It drove the grown-ups wild at times.
It was at Cheshunt that I had my first taste of rejection in love, when I was ten years old. The object of my affections was a girl called Tina, who was two years older than me and not remotely interested. I used to race out of school so that I could be sitting on the wall when she walked past. Up to that point, you could guarantee that Matt and I would be the last out of school, always larking about in the cloakrooms, but Tina changed all that for me. It must have been infectious, because Matt then decided he was in love with her, too, and we had our first rivalry over a woman. It didn’t really matter, because to Tina we were both too young to even be considered as boyfriends.
While we were living at Mitcham, my parents had a very angry showdown. Dad wrote to say that he had now decided not to see us any more: he said he had been advised by our teachers and a doctor and social worker who he had consulted that it would be better for us to have a clean break from him, at least until we were older. When Mum told us, we were desperately upset: I can remember crying my eyes out. We never got used to the idea of not seeing Dad and eventually Tony got very angry, the angriest I have ever seen him. He picked up the phone and rang Dad, and held the receiver out so that Dad could hear us crying. ‘That’s your sons,’ he said. Tony handed the phone to me and Dad just said, ‘Hello, son.’ The word ‘son’ was enough to choke me with tears, I couldn’t talk to him for crying.
Dad accepted that we needed him and started to come and see us again. But it was a very bad time for our relationship with him and both Matt and I got through by camouflaging our feelings, putting him out of our minds as much as we could. That year he actually left our Christmas presents on the doorstep on Christmas Day. I could not believe it: I thought it was a joke, and that he was hiding round the corner and would jump out to wish us a Merry Christmas. It was devastating to think that he had been so near to us and had not seen us. On another occasion, when I was about nine or ten, I called him ‘Daddy’ and he told me I was a bit old for that, and should call him ‘Dad’ in the future. Perhaps if I’d been seeing him frequently the change to ‘Dad’ would have occurred naturally by then, but I still clung to the name I had called him by when we were little and he lived with us. I was hurt that he had to say that to me.
Our new life in Cheshunt did not just entail a new house, a new school and a new stepfather. We also acquired a new stepsister and stepbrother, Tony’s children Carolyn and Adam. Carolyn was a year younger than us, Adam three years younger. They lived with Tony’s ex-wife, but visited us at weekends. We were determined to hate them from the word go, but the first time we actually saw them they were in the bath – how can you be standoffish with two kids who are in the bath?
Every weekend when they came to our house we would start out dreading it, not wanting them to come. And every weekend when it was time for them to go home all four of us would be pleading to stay together. Matt and I enjoyed horse riding, and they would come with us to the stables. Sometimes we would all pile into the car – Mum and Tony had an E-type Jag, a leftover from his prosperous days – and drive out to Billing Aquadrome with the caravan in tow. We’d spend the whole weekend fooling around in inflatable dinghies, fishing, making dens in the woods. There was a permanent fairground nearby and we spent all our pocket money there.
I can see now how hard it was for everyone. Broken families are an equation and different people solve it differently: Tony and his ex-wife Pauline got on better than Mum and Dad, for instance; Mum had plenty of troublesome times with Carolyn and Adam; we were not exactly pleasant to Dad’s wife Margaret and we gave Tony a few problems. On the other hand, the adults were not always as sensitive as they might have been in handling us, and at times their behaviour was downright unforgivable.
All in all, we had far more problems with the adults than we ever did with Carolyn and Adam, although we were envious of the way Tony could show affection for them more easily than he could for us. There were jealousies and suspicions all around, but children always find their own level and come to terms with each other better than they do with grown-ups. Tony himself says he measured the success of our relationship with Adam and Carolyn by the fact that before too long we had all dropped the word ‘step’ and referred to each other simply as brothers and sisters.
