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THREE

Some Roses In My Cheeks

We’d sold Jasmine Cottage when we left Cheddar, but hadn’t yet bought a house back in London, so for about two months we lived in a caravan. I was just about to start secondary school, which is such a formative period of childhood, and here we were living in a caravan. I hated living on that site with its cold, concrete communal shower stalls and cramped spaces. Yet, even though I wasn’t a fan, I knew that we were only there because of circumstances, a moment in time, and my mum’s continued dedication to Lukie and me far outweighed any dislike I had of my temporary home. I could have lived anywhere as long as I was with Mum and Luke.

Looking back, knowing how hard life was for her at times, my mum was just a tower of strength. She would drive us ninety minutes to school in Camberley every day then just after lunch get back in the car to pick us up again. It was such an effort for her but she never batted an eyelid.

Unfortunately, my dad’s perception of the situation was different. He decided then that these were not the ideal circumstances for two children to be in and announced that he wanted custody of us. It was a heavy moment for my mum.

Dad was elusive at times when I was younger, or that’s what some of my memories tell me. I didn’t quite understand him then. It is hard for me to talk about these things because I love him so much and as adults we are great friends. He is sensitive to those difficult times, understandably, but I am often put in a position when I am asked questions about such things, so I will try to be as respectful as I can whilst still recounting the history.

As an adult, I can probably understand Dad’s perception of our temporary caravan lifestyle, his feelings came from the right place. But life’s not always about perception, it’s about finding out the facts, and certain situations are not always exactly how they appear. Despite how it might have looked, I loved my mum desperately, so I was essentially happy at the site and, although I didn’t like it on the surface, I didn’t feel any less safe because I was in a caravan. When the custody issue was raised, it was an intensely fearful moment for my mum, I know that now, but I don’t have explicit memories because I was only a kid. All I knew was that I was very happy as long as my mum was with me. So, when I heard I had to go to court, it was no problem. I just thought to myself, I will go and tell the judge how I feel, which is that I am not going anywhere. I love Dad but I do not want to leave Mum.

So that was what I did. Luke was exactly the same and there didn’t seem anything else to discuss. That’s as simple as it felt to me at the time. We were old enough at that point to say to the judge, ‘No, I want to live with my mum,’ and as I recall it, our frankness resolved the issue.

What I will say from that experience and having seen the effects of such predicaments on children and parents, is that if it is at all possible for couples who have separated to keep a line of communication open, even if it is formal rather than friendly, then please try to do so. After that issue was settled and we stayed with Mum, communications between her and Dad opened up a little bit – prior to that they had sometimes been quite constricted (it is strange as an adult to think they were once so deeply in love). Better communications in these circumstances will eventually benefit the children, no question.

As I’ve mentioned, while we were living in all these different places, the one constant that never wavered was my grandparents’ flat in Crawford Road, Camberwell, the one place that felt like ‘home’ to me as a kid. When I remember Crawford Road I think of white pepper. My grandad used to put stacks of white pepper on his roast dinner.

In that flat I saw my mum happy, her mood would change when she got there and so that was uplifting for us too. I would love going round to find my Aunt Sally at home. Even though Sally was a gardener at Buckingham Palace, she used to dress a bit like a hippy and always had an afro comb which she would be pulling through her hair. She would buy a new pair of gleaming white plimsolls, come straight home and bury them in the garden for an hour. As a little kid, I was absolutely bemused, but now I understand that she wanted them to look worn-in.

Grandad’s neighbour Rita had a daughter, Dawn, whom I fancied. I have to admit, though, I had an even bigger crush on her mum! I really used to fantasize about her – all I wanted to do was have my wicked way, even though at that age I am not sure I knew what that was! Dawn had been the first girl to let me put my hand down her knickers but Tony caught me doing it on the steps and made me come in and tell the whole family.

It was in Camberwell that a man tried to snatch me into a car. I can still see his face vividly, dark-haired and with a moustache. I often used to sit on a wall by the old people’s home at the top of Crawford Road. One day I was on there, just hanging out and being a seven-year-old kid really, when I heard a noise behind me. I looked round and saw this man reaching for me. Over his shoulder I could see his car parked by the grass verge with the back door open. I jumped off the wall – which was about ten feet above the pavement on that side – and ran all the way home. I won’t say it haunts me to this day, because it doesn’t, but at the time it scared the hell out of me.

I bought my first record at Crawford Road in 1978. It was Ian Dury and the Blockheads’ ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’. I listened to it over and over and over again, until my brother started pleading with me not to play it any more. I loved that single. I was really intrigued by Ian Dury too, this man on the telly who, to a young boy with no knowledge of such things, looked like a cripple. I was fascinated by him, he just looked as if he was in pain. I heard people saying he had polio, which sounded like the bubonic plague or something to me – guaranteeing that I was always first in the queue to take the little cube of sugar dipped in polio vaccine. It sounds simplistic I know, but I was only a child. I didn’t stay a fan of the Blockheads for long, it was just that one moment, but your very first record is an important snapshot in your life.

The diversity of my mum’s and Aunt Sally’s taste in music rubbed off on me. There was a lot of rock in there, Cream, Free, AC/DC and so on, but Mum also loved artists like Roberta Flack. When The Fugees later covered ‘Killing Me Softly’, a definitive cover version if there could be such a thing, the memories came flooding back for me when I first heard it on radio. It was like a time warp. Sally would always be singing, as would my mum. Sally used to tell us all about the concerts she went to see. She had a lovely voice and it was great to hear Stones and Beatles songs when she belted them out. Whenever we’d visit Sally at her flat on the Peabody Estate on the Old Kent Road, I used to love singing with her. After a while, I began to try to out-sing her, that’s when I started to get that sensation that I could do anything with my voice.

I was heavily into Stevie Wonder, and Michael Jackson was a big favourite too. Like forty million other album-buyers, I was into Thriller, how could you not be? But for me Off The Wall was something special too. The songs were just monumental, and knowing that Rod Temperton, an Englishman from Cleethorpes, could write tracks like ‘Rock With You’ and ‘Off The Wall’ makes it even more incredible to me.

By the end of the Seventies, like so many other British kids, I was massively into ska. I was never really into punk, not least because I was just too young, but Two Tone fascinated me. In the space of two years it seemed bands like The Specials, The Selecter, Madness and The Beat dominated the school playgrounds of Britain. I was in one of those playgrounds and couldn’t help but be infected. It’s funny how adults theorize about genres of music – in the case of Two Tone they talk about how it perfectly captured the social tensions of Thatcher’s Britain, how it fused Jamaican ska with inner-city desolation and so on. I am aware of that now. Back then, it was so much more personal. It was a style of music and a sartorial choice that, for this eleven-year-old at least, was far more pragmatic than the pages of a broadsheet feature.

I had the full ska uniform: the pork-pie hat, Fred Perrys, Doc Martens, Sta-Prest shirts. We all did. Then there was the music. I adored The Specials, it was obvious Jerry Dammers was a genius. I had every Madness album. The Specials’ ‘Ghost Town’ is still one of my favourite songs ever. That song is always feted by critics for soundtracking the whole social polarization of Thatcher’s Britain, but for me and my mates, it was more about the death of ska – ironic since it was their most successful song and a Number 1 hit. We simply felt like saying, ‘No! Don’t say the clubs are closing down, because we are still dancing . . .’

The music was so deft too, so clever and that has stayed with me. It can be quite hard to splice elements of ska into my albums themselves, but if you go to one of my shows, you will find parts of the gig are drenched in ska and the crowd will be skanking away! Playing live allows you to do that, to break out of any pigeonholes that your records might be placed in. I think it surprises many people that my live set can include ska and Stevie Wonder but to me that is as natural as putting on ‘Superstition’ straight after ‘Ghost Town’. They are both phenomenal songs, that’s all there is to it.

While life in Crawford Road was heavenly to me, the time I spent with my dad was a little less straightforward. Not because of Dad, as we were always so excited to be going to see him, even though it wasn’t as often as we all would perhaps have liked. It was because he had remarried back in 1976, to a woman called Margaret and, inevitably, that complicated matters for everybody.

I wasn’t particularly fond of Margaret, to say the least. She never made me or Luke feel welcome, never made me feel at ease around my own dad. It was often the smallest things, like rationing how much ketchup we could have on our food, or how many biscuits we were allowed to eat. It was weird because Dad was always the one who would dunk two biscuits in his tea at the same time. We would look forward to having a cup of tea and biccies with Dad so this was all very suffocating. Margaret was really formal. She wasn’t off with us in front of Dad, but the most credit I would give her is to say she was polite. I always used to look forward to seeing Dad, of course, but I genuinely did not look forward to seeing Margaret.

Luke and I were never rude to her. In fact, we tried hard with her but Margaret never made us feel loved or wanted. Nonetheless, I promise you, we were very well-behaved children. Dad insisted on that and Mum had raised us that way as well. Speak when you are spoken to or, if you have something you feel really strongly about, then you can speak up. Adults had the right of way in our house, and rightly so. I believe that is the best method with kids. So we were never rude to Margaret, but that didn’t change the chilly atmosphere.

One time, my dad pulled up at a petrol station to fill up the car and while he was paying at the counter, Margaret leant over the seat and said to us, ‘I’ll give you a pound if you tell me whether your mum is with anyone.’ We basically told her to stuff her pound, as politely as we could. When my dad got back in the car we said nothing. Neither did Margaret.

It wasn’t just us that were affected, my dad’s time with his boys was affected too. I remember being made to sit in the dining-room one night when all I really wanted to do was sit on the couch with my dad, my dinner on a tray, and watch TV with him. We weren’t allowed to, but you know what? I think Dad wanted to do that too.

I feel for my dad in a way on that level because if Margaret had made him happy then that would have been cool with us, but I never really had the feeling that she did. There was always an underlying atmosphere, it was really tiring. Then, one day when we were all on a day-trip to Blackpool, while visiting family in Preston, Dad suddenly stopped the car by the sea and said to Margaret, ‘You know what, Margaret? If you don’t want to spend time with my kids, if you don’t want to see the boys, then you’re not welcome when I bring my kids out. When are they ever rude to you?’

At that exact moment, I felt incredibly awkward because I feared Margaret would become even worse and really hate us in the future. But then – and I’m not going to lie – once I was over that initial spasm of fear, I was so happy inside that Dad had stuck up for us, his boys. I think that was pretty much one of the last times we hung out with Margaret.

A line of sorts had been drawn, but Margaret was obviously still there whenever we visited Dad. Every visit was tiring, we were drained by it all. We just wanted to see our dad and have a nice time. Even to the day that my dad and Margaret split up (they eventually divorced), we never had the feeling that she really liked us.

When they did separate, my dad was obviously feeling a lot of pain which wasn’t nice to see for two young boys. I’d seen Mum so desperately troubled by her marriage break-up but I’d never seen Dad upset like that and I really felt for him. Yet, to be brutally honest, part of me was quite relieved. We had, at best, a tense relationship with Margaret, and at such a young age there isn’t yet room for being gracious or magnanimous. You just want your dad.

My father leaving the family home paralleled what had happened to him when he was a boy. His own dad had left but, unlike my father, had not kept in touch with his growing son at all. Before he had split up with Margaret, my father’s mother died and Dad started to look into where his own dad lived, to try to reconnect with him and that estranged side of the family. In my book, that was a very brave thing to do. I admire him very much for making such an effort in very difficult circumstances. He managed to re-establish contact and for a few short years we were graced with a whole new strand to the family. Suddenly we had a new grandad, a new grandma, new cousins and aunties, we’d gained a whole new family seemingly overnight, it was just the most exciting thing. And this wasn’t like a fifth cousin four-times-removed – this was a legitimate, direct bloodline through my father.

However, so much of my life has pivoted around gain and loss, gain and loss, and this was to prove no different. When Dad and Margaret broke up – Margaret was having an affair – my father’s own dad, my newly discovered grandfather, took Margaret’s side. Yes, he sided with a woman he wasn’t related to and hadn’t known for very long against his own son. To me that was absolutely disgusting. Even if Dad had been mainly in the wrong (which as I understand it he wasn’t), you can’t take sides against your own. That’s his own son. I was incensed.

I don’t see that side of the family any more, their own actions have wrenched them back out of my life. I do see Dad’s sister and her family at gigs and on other occasions and they are all absolutely lovely, Janet, Sara and Mark. They supported my dad during that time. Janet sided with him, her brother – I have a lot of time for Janet. I have no negative feelings for my dad’s family. I would have loved nothing more than to have had a healthy, loving relationship with my new-found family but, as I am sure anyone would agree, my loyalty lies with my father. As for my dad’s dad? He can kiss my arse, I have no time or respect for him after what he did.

I know that episode broke my dad’s heart. To realize that he had grown so far apart from his dad that they could no longer even reach each other must have really hurt. What’s more, I know that it hurt my dad’s step-father, who in my mind and as my dad also realizes, is his real father. My dad now regrets searching for his biological father, but even more regrets the hurt it caused his step-father. I know my dad only considers himself to have one father and that’s Grandad Weston.

I have no time for what happened and probably remain more angry about it even than my dad does. He is quite philosophical when he thinks about it and seems to have been able to move on. It remains incomprehensible to me. You lose your son for many, many years, somehow that son plucks up the courage to come and find you and kick-start a relationship that time and circumstances threatened to have destroyed for ever, then you take the side of someone who is not even part of your direct family! The way that families behave sometimes is unbelievable to me.

Fortunately for Dad, there was a fantastic new wife around the corner. Her name is Helen and Dad married her in 1996. I honestly think that at that time in my dad’s life, she was the best thing that could have happened to him. She is the same age as me (so well done Dad!) but she has an old soul, and I mean that as a great compliment. She has not only made my dad younger, but conversely she has made him older as well, made him more peaceful. She is a very gentle person and that has definitely rubbed off on my father. Helen is very considerate, very loving, she makes my dad happy. She is a tiny, petite woman who looks even younger than she is and, being the same age as Luke and I, we have great fun calling her step-mum! She cringes but it is hilarious. She’ll return the fun by putting her arm around me and saying, ‘You’re my step-son!’ I am really glad that Helen is in my dad’s life, she is a lovely lady.