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