Dad received a bad school report about us and was very angry. He assumed that we weren’t trying: we were, but we had moved about so much that our schooling had been disrupted. He wrote to us: it was a typed letter and it was a ‘harsh, dogmatic attack’; those are his own words to describe it and he accepts that he should never have sent it.
We each received identical letters and we were desperately upset. It was as formal as a letter to a bank manager, but much nastier. He even signed it ‘Alan Goss’. To me, it seemed like yet more proof that my father did not love me. A child does not understand about marriage breakdown: when one parent leaves, the child always imagines that in some way they are at fault, that the parent does not love them. Not enough was done to compensate for that; Dad never went out of his way to explain it to us, nor did he demonstrate his affection physically. So when we read the letter we were convinced that he did not love us. We were so upset that we did not go to school that day.
Mum went berserk and there was a loud slanging match down the phone. She said that she would not let us go to stay with Dad: he and his wife Margaret had recently moved to a house that was big enough for us to visit, and he wanted us to spend a week with him for the first time since he had left home. Dad retaliated by taking Mum to court, claiming that she was refusing him access to see us: this after he had been dissuaded from dropping out of our lives altogether a couple of years earlier. Mum explained to the court that she was not denying him the right to have his children stay with him, she simply wanted him and Margaret to build a closer relationship with us before we were taken off to stay with a woman we did not know in an unfamiliar house. The court agreed, and ordered Dad and Margaret to travel to Cheddar and see us at least three times before we could stay with them. They did it within ten days, and we went to stay with them for a week.
Margaret made a great effort to welcome us. She cooked our favourite foods, made me my favourite tuna and mayonnaise sandwiches, and we in turn behaved ourselves and the week passed very well. I remember being so nervous before we went there that I felt sick, but at the end of the week I had developed an affection for her. It was the only time that things worked out between her and us though, and I cannot really explain why. I suspect we were all trying too hard that week and in real life nobody can keep up that level of effort. Dad says we were cold, sullen and withdrawn on our next visit: we probably were. We were eleven years old and wracked with guilt about enjoying being with Dad; we felt it was a betrayal of Mum, even though she did not consciously impose that view on us, and I think we just put the shutters up on our relationship with Margaret.
Mum says, ‘Watching them going off to stay with another woman tore me apart. I tried hard not to let them know how I felt. I genuinely wanted them to get on well with their Dad because blood is thicker than water. But I’m sure they sensed how unhappy I was seeing them go.’
When we moved back to London, just before we went to the caravan, we stayed with my granddad; I have some lovely memories of that time. Granddad has been the most constant father figure in my life, always there for me whenever I needed him. While we were there, Dad did not know where we were living: he found out that we had left Cheddar by contacting the school, because in all the rush to get back to London nobody had given him our new address. He was livid, and applied to the court for care and control of us (he and Mum had been awarded joint custody at the time of the divorce).
He wanted us to go and live with him and Margaret, and he was claiming that Mum was an unfit mother. Mum received the letter from the court making these allegations when we were living in the caravan at Henley. That morning, driving us to school in Camberley, she hit a bus and wrecked the Jag. It was an old car by then, but she really loved it. The accident was totally her fault; she couldn’t concentrate on the driving because the words ‘unfit mother’ were pounding through her brain.
I detested my father at this point. It was bad enough as a family having to live in a caravan, but to have the added grief and pain of his court action was dreadful, and there were times when Mum and Matt and I all clung together, crying.
The court arranged for a welfare worker to visit us and assess whether or not we were being properly cared for. By the time she came, we had moved into the house in Camberley. Matt and I had chosen the colours for our bedrooms: his was red and white stripes and mine was green and white. The day the social worker came we dashed in from school as usual, and Mum didn’t tell us who the lady there was, although we soon guessed when we were asked to show her round the house. We were so obviously well-cared for, the social worker decided very quickly that the whole thing was a waste of court time.
My father’s point of view was that we were leading very unsettled lives and that our schooling was suffering. He thought the caravan was an unsuitable place for us to live and did not realize that it was only a temporary home. There were some very angry scenes between him and Mum at this time, and we were not sheltered from them. Our loyalty was with Mum, who had been there for us all our lives, and that partly accounts for why we became as difficult as we did with Margaret.
Living in the kind of jigsaw puzzle family in which we grew up is now very common: almost half of all school children in Britain today come from a broken family, and there are literally millions of kids struggling to come to terms with step-parents, half-brothers and -sisters, stepbrothers and stepsisters, several sets of grandparents and all the other baggage of multi marriages. Our situation was probably no better and no worse than the average, and I know that the other people involved – Mum, Tony, Dad, Margaret – were also in a lot of pain, but that didn’t make things any easier.
Looking back now, Dad accepts that he handled this stage of our lives badly.
‘My marriage to Margaret was good for me in many ways, so I shut my eyes to the fact that she had problems with my kids. She did talk to me about it once, and I understood it wasn’t easy for her to have a sort of part-time relationship with two boys who clearly resented her existence.
‘When Carol and I were together, we never argued about the way the children were being brought up: even now, after many years of being divorced from her, I think Carol did a remarkable job with them, and must take credit for the fact that they have turned into two caring, decent, honest young men. There were problems between Carol and me over the years, as is inevitable perhaps when there has been a rather bitter divorce, and there was a time when I was very worried about the conditions they were living in. But looking back, I think she did the best possible job in view of all the upheaval and moving.’
It was soon after we left Cheddar that Matt achieved a milestone in his life: he stopped wetting the bed. I wet the bed until I was about five and a half, then I stopped until I was seven when I became disturbed at Tony’s arrival in our lives, and I wet every night for another year. By the time I was eight I was dry at night, but it took Matt longer. The problem could be equated with the traumas in our lives: I expect that’s what the amateur psychologists would say. But I’m not so sure. I was old enough to be aware of it, and so was Matt. I came to the conclusion that Matt simply went into a very deep sleep every night, much deeper than most people. He is a very dreamy person even during the day: if you want to attract his attention you often have to say his name four or five times. I think he stopped wetting the bed when he reached an age where he may have started sleeping less deeply, because we were at secondary school by then, and had busy lives and more pressures than a small child has.
I’m not claiming to have any solution to the problem but I believe it should be talked about, because I’m sure there are lots of kids who are deeply embarrassed by it. It’s treated like a taboo although in reality it is probably very common. There are lots of parents, too, going through hell because of it, blaming themselves and getting angry with their children. I’d like to tell everyone to relax about it. It will eventually go away, and the