‘Your father’s always been the same, I was even warned about him, dancing off with other girls at parties.’
She’d tell me of the time she caught him ‘smooching with some silly girl’, and how she put on a Highland fling, grabbed a man at random and reeled past, bumping into him as hard as she could. She laughed at the memory and I guessed he’d seen the funny side too.
‘Always the same type. He won’t change. Once a womaniser …’
A word that acquired heroic status in my mind. Other boys could be engine-drivers or firemen, I wanted to be a womaniser.
I worshipped Dad. He was always around, as he worked at home. Page upon page emerged like the product of a twenty-six legged centipede dipped in ink. So long as I was quiet he’d allow me to sit with him, overlooked by a John Bratby painting in chunky, thumb-nail deep oil that years of indoor football eventually chipped away. Around the time I was able to translate its abstract shapes into men playing billiards, there’s enough primary evidence and eyewitness testimony for my history proper to begin.
Now that I’m six I’m as clever as clever And I wish I could be six now for ever and ever
sang Christopher Robin, and I believed him. All year I’d been reciting those lines as a mantra that promised to see off the ills of infancy. I’d crossed the first threshold and I could see rewards beyond it. Good things happened in autumn. Boots and hats and coats and gloves and scarves smothered me against the foggy foggy dew Dad often sang of. The trees painted their multi-coloured pictures and every footstep was an adventure in which you might crackle, crunch or slide. Each week Mum and I walked to the Kensington children’s library. Our jaunts recalled the golden days when I had no sisters, no brother Toby, a time before I was wrenched from Mum’s lap and hurled into the world of the nanny beyond. Our twenty-minute walk was the magic of the annual journey to Santa’s grotto repeated every week, and the books Mum and I chose, tales of witches, ghosts and other creatures living in fantastic realms, comforted me until the next visit. At night I kept my world alive even when the lights went out, continuing my reading with a torch under the sheets.
Dad started taking me to football matches. I’d sit with him in the press-box, for the first time allowed into a world that had been exclusively his. Not that I was entirely ignorant of it. I could name every team in the country, plus dinosaurs like Wanderers, Blackburn Olympic, and The Royal Engineers. I knew all the F.A. Cup winners, year-by-year, League champions, Charity Shield opponents, but my one love was Manchester United. I don’t know why. It never occurred to me that they played a very long way from west London as I assumed that the entire universe bordered Holland Park Avenue and that if you went past North Kensington you’d fall off the edge. It didn’t matter that my first game was Chelsea v Nottingham Forest. Even now I can visualise an all-blue Osgood streaking through helpless red shirts to score the only goal of the game. A comforting, enveloping mist came off the damp wooden seats, the playing turf, from the mouths of ranked journalists, and the mugs of tea served at half-time. In those days, the players were as magical as the immortals I read about by torchlight. In my second game I saw Rodney Marsh score a hat-trick in a 4–0 QPR victory over Watford. His name echoed round Loftus Road to the accompaniment of a massive bass drum. I then started watching Dad’s own team, Chelsea Casuals, on the pitches in front of Wren’s Royal Hospital alongside the Chelsea pensioners in their magnificent red and navy uniforms and wondered how long it would be before I’d be able to play for them myself.
Sport was always the bond between me, Dad, and eventually Toby. It was one that divided the family on gender lines. One day Dad appeared in the nursery with a long, green box.
‘Okay, kid. Let’s see what you’re made of!’
His grin revealed a wolf’s crowded jaw in all its splendour.
The pine table in the nursery where we normally ate our cornflakes was about to be transformed into a ping-pong table. Dad ripped apart the cardboard and hurriedly assembled the net with the eagerness of a lynch mob erecting a gallows. I juggled the ball on my bat. Having seen off all comers at a party recently, I was feeling pretty confident.
‘Ready, kid?’
He served the ball gently and it bounced across the net, high enough for me to be able to smash it down on his side.
‘Pretty good, kid!’
It was all going as I’d expected until I began to serve. The ball flew off the end of the table and under the battered red couch by the wall.
‘The table’s not long enough.’
‘Excuses, kid.’
My game worsened with my growing frustration until, gradually, I mastered the short length of the breakfast table and Dad’s gentle returns left plenty of room for winning shots.
‘Okay, kid. How about a game? Play for service?’
Dad bounced the ball across the net and I returned it with ease, but my next shot spun off against the window.
‘My serve.’
Dad chopped at the ball and it came across the net gently enough, but, as I attempted to return it, the ball spun off viciously and hit the window.
‘1–0,’ beamed Dad.
For some reason his serves were now impossible to return. o–5 down, it was my turn to serve. I bounced the ball swiftly across the table where it clipped the end, veering beyond his reach.
‘Blast!’ cried Dad, his smile metamorphosing into a grimace. When my second serve achieved the same result, he flung the new bat down on the ground. I was concerned he’d break it. The next three serves were as fast and efficient as I could manage, but on each occasion my attempt to return resulted in the ball flying off in the opposite direction from the one I’d intended. As the score piled up against me, I simply couldn’t understand why my shots were all miscuing. The tears welled behind my eyes as Dad’s expression grew more and more triumphant.
I couldn’t be six for ever and ever, so I was sent to The Hall, a pressure-cooker preparatory school in Hampstead where pink blazers emblazoned with black iron crosses made us targets for the kids from the local secondary modern.
… he is on the whole placatory and nervous at school and not very popular. My parents attacked this dilemma with a fork – psychotherapy on one prong, martial arts on the other. At the judo club in Vauxhall I came across kids like the ones from the secondary modern and got on fine. When they discovered I could stand on my head for five minutes at a time, everyone was summoned to watch my feat. Although they may have been smiling at a freak show, from my upside down vantage point even the glum faces were smiling. I could have stayed there for hours. I also learned Tai o Toshi, which I used to defeat the school bully. Heavy wooden desks and chairs flew in the hurricane of our combat.
There’s a motto shall ring in the ears of all Who e’er have spent their youth at The Hall. It’s a call to the sluggard, the dull and the wise, A call we cannot and daren’t despise. So now and for ever raise the call Hinc in altiora, up The Hall! There are overs and unders in life all through, In after life you’ll get your due. If you keep up the struggle and never stop At the last Reading Over you’ll come out top
I found this ancient piece of bombast beneath a pile of neglected sheet music. ‘Overs’ and ‘unders’ and ‘Reading Overs’ were still the yardstick by which academic success was judged forty years later. Everything we did was measured so we need be left in no doubt as to our level of achievement at any given time. Everything I enjoyed was tarnished by the incessant competition. In a school of three hundred there were 120 prizes and cups to be won. (I once sat down and counted them all just to make myself more miserable.) With such a ratio I should surely have won something. It was hard to believe Mum, Dad or any of my supporters and backers when all my best efforts failed to convince successive Hall judges and juries. Praise was mere flattery until quantified