‘I don’t really think I did have a premonition about twins, but I can remember waiting inside the hospital once while Carol was attending an antenatal class and fantasizing about the possibility. For some reason I thought if one was a boy and one a girl I would phone Carol’s parents and tell her mum that she had a grandson and her dad that he had a granddaughter, and leave them to work it out for themselves. I never thought about two boys.’
If they had thought about two boys, they might have had another name ready. They had chosen my name before the birth: Luke Damon. If I’d been a girl I would have been Rebecca! They weren’t ready with another boy’s name, and it was Mum who chose Matthew Weston when the registrar called at the hospital to register the new babies.
Dad remembers her telling him about it when he visited her in hospital. ‘Carol told me she had named the second baby after her father, who everyone called Harry. I said, “Harry? You called him Harry?” She shook her head and I remembered that her father was also known as Sam. Harry and Sam are fashionable names now, but they weren’t then and I wasn’t keen on either of them. But she shook her head again – her father’s name is actually Samuel Matthew, and it was Matthew she had chosen, to my relief.
‘Then she said she’d given him a second name after my father. “Denis?” I asked, because that’s my stepfather’s name, and I didn’t like that much. No, Weston, she said – that’s his surname. I liked that, and unbeknown to us both at the time my real father also has Weston as his second Christian name, so it worked out fine.
‘It was only afterwards that I realized Luke and Matthew together made us sound a very Biblical family, which we weren’t. But I liked both the names very much.’
So that’s how my brother and I were launched on the world.
It was the week that Mary Hopkin hit the top of the charts with ‘Those Were the Days’ – and they certainly were for my parents. Coping with one baby is difficult, but twins are a nightmare.
But to understand anything about anybody, you have to go back a long way before their birth. How any of us ends up is influenced by a great many factors, but our parents have the most crucial role to play …
My mother, Carol, was born in Peckham, south-east London, in 1946. Her father Harry, my granddad, was in the building trade: the war had interfered with his studies to become a surveyor, but he ended up as a building-site foreman. My grandmother, Win, worked in a variety of different jobs, usually as a shop assistant.
Harry and Win’s home had been blown up during the war, and afterwards Harry made such a stink that the housing department of the local council found them a prefab – he threatened to pitch a tent for his family outside the council offices if they didn’t get a home.
‘Prefabs’ were prefabricated buildings that were put up hastily all over the country after the war, to help with the massive housing problem caused by the population bulge. Lots of men, like my granddad, came back from fighting and didn’t waste any time before having families. They’d given seven years of their lives to their country, and they weren’t prepared to wait any longer, certainly not until the government got around to building enough houses for them all.
Prefabs were far from being shanty-style houses, even though they were put up very quickly and didn’t have traditional brick walls. They were warm – they had central heating before it became standard in British houses – and they came fully equipped with fridges and cookers, back in the days when fridges were luxury items. So my nan and granddad were very happy there with their two daughters – my auntie Ann was born within a couple of years of my mum.
When my nan was thirty-nine she had another baby, as much to her astonishment as everyone else’s. My aunt Sally was born on my mother’s twelfth birthday, and because of that my mum has always regarded her as a bit special.
‘I thought she was my own personal present, an extra-special birthday gift,’ says Mum.
About the same time Sally was born, the family were moved by the council to a maisonette in Camberwell Green, because the prefabs were being pulled down. Tower blocks were put up in their place – soulless, miserable places compared to the prefab community, where everyone had taken a pride in their home and where there were annual competitions for the best gardens.
Because my grandmother worked, my mum and her sisters were largely brought up by their grandmother – my great grandmother – a smashing old lady I remember from my own childhood.
Mum stayed at school until she was fifteen and a half, when she left to take up an apprenticeship at a hairdresser’s. She had learned shorthand and typing at school, and her teachers had wanted her to stay on and take exams, but she was set on leaving and starting work.
My dad, Alan Goss, was born in a stately home. But there was no silver spoon in his mouth – his mother had been evacuated there for the birth to get away from the bombing raids on London. Dad is two years older than my mum, and he, too, comes from south-east London. His mother was sent to Luton Hoo, a stately home belonging to the Wernher family (relatives of the Royal family) in the Bedfordshire countryside near to Luton, a week or so before he was born. It was used as a maternity home for mothers from areas where there was a high risk of bombing. The London hospitals were overstretched dealing with casualties from the raids, and, besides, it was safer for the mothers and newborn babies to be out in the country.
After he was born, my dad and his mother went to live in Norfolk, where his father was stationed with the RAF. My grandfather was a technician who became an expert in the development and use of X-rays (after the war he stayed on in the RAF, and many years later worked for British Aerospace until his retirement). My grandparents and my dad lived in the village of Horsford for the last year of the war. Dad was a sickly baby and everyone was very worried about him for a few months because he did not feed well. But he survived, which is more than his parents’ marriage did: after the war his mother brought him back to Walworth and he never saw his real father until many years later, not until after his mother had died.
Life in a single-parent family was not easy, even though my grandmother received a maintenance payment from my grandfather every week. It was twelve shillings (6op), which was not a bad amount immediately after the war but one which never increased, despite inflation. So my grandmother worked as a typist to support herself and my dad. They lived in a one-bedroom flat in a house without electricity, only gas lights. There was no bath, so my father was taken to Manor Street baths for a weekly wallow, and the rest of the week his mother stood him on the kitchen table and scrubbed him down.
He was introduced to music at an early age. His mother took him with her to her favourite ballets and to a concert by Edmundo Ross at the Albert Hall. She didn’t trust babysitters, so she always took him along. He remembers buying his first pop record – a Little Richard EP, when he was twelve – and having to go round to his cousin’s house to play it, because without electricity he couldn’t plug in a record player. He had a good singing voice, singing in the South London Schools Choir, until his voice broke.
When Dad was thirteen his mother remarried. His new stepfather was Denis Weston, who worked with his mother at the local electricity board. They all moved into a council flat in East Dulwich, where my father could play his records! Dad left school at sixteen with only one O level, GCE Art: he admits that, like his sons, he wasted his time at school and didn’t enjoy studying. He was good at art, but nobody encouraged him to take that any further. His only other interest was cars, so he became a trainee motor mechanic at a local garage. After a year he was transferred to the reception desk because he was good at handling customers. Three years later, dissatisfied because he wasn’t progressing fast enough, he left and joined the London Electricity Board for a short spell. Ten years after leaving school he had been through ten different jobs, including two jobs as a sales rep, one selling tyres and the other selling hosiery.
‘I wanted to go into car sales but there were no openings. I was young and naïve – I expected