‘Alan and I were probably both too young when we married, but he was able to pick himself up and walk away from it, doing his growing up somewhere else in a way that suited him. I was forced to grow up and get on with life because of the children. But I would never, ever change places with him: he missed out on so much joy by not being with Luke and Matthew.
‘If we had stayed together, the boys would have had a tougher upbringing and may not have turned out the way they did. I don’t regret my marriage to Alan: I loved him, my children were conceived in love and born in love – how can anyone regret that?’
We had started school by the time they split up, at first going to St Mark’s Junior School in Mitcham, but transferring after a while to Beechholme, also in Mitcham. One of my happiest memories is of being met by Mum at the gate and going home to sit on her lap with tea and biccies. It was a ritual that I loved. It sounds like something out of Little House on the Prairie, but it’s true. I fell in love with my first teacher, who had glasses and long hair, and I sobbed when I had to leave her class.
We were typically naughty little boys in those days. I can remember dunking my head in a puddle to try to catch a cold, so that I could stay home from school. Unfortunately a woman saw me and followed me home to tell my mum, and I was in trouble. Another time Mum nearly caught me and a girl called Jenny showing each other our naughty bits in the garage – we hid in a wardrobe that was stored in there, terrified of being caught with our pants down. The garage, which was at the back of the house, was a favourite place. We spent all our pocket money on bubble gum and practised for hours trying to blow bigger and bigger bubbles.
Money was very tight. We were offered free school dinners, but Mum was too proud to accept them. She put cardboard in her shoes and borrowed a friend’s sewing machine to make our clothes, to save money. One day, in desperation, we went in the pouring rain with Mum to the phone box so that she could ring granddad and ask him for some money. She called me into the phone box because I was getting wet outside, and as I went in I noticed something that looked like a pound note on the floor. When I picked it up I saw that it had the Queen’s head on both sides – I was very disappointed, because I thought it must be toy money. But when I gave it to Mum she realized that it was two pound notes stuck together, probably worth about ten pounds today, and enough to buy us all some food for the rest of the week. We all hugged each other in delight.
Mum got a part-time job working in an employment agency in Streatham. Her boss would not let her leave the office five minutes early to catch the bus back to Mitcham, so when she finished work she literally had to run all the way to be sure of being at the school gates when we came out: we were so insecure we would be distraught if we could not see her face among those of the other mums.
When Dad first moved out he went into rented accommodation in Finchley, sharing a house with some people much younger than him, but he was already seeing Margaret, the woman who was to become his second wife and our stepmother. They met on the train when he was travelling to work from Mitcham. She was also married, but was separated from her husband, and before too long she had bought a flat in Sutton where they lived together. It was a while before we met her, and it was never really an easy relationship.
‘Both the women in my life were unhelpful with my relationship with my sons,’ says Dad. ‘It was understandable from Carol, she felt a great deal of animosity towards me and she made it hard work for me to visit them. I could see how they were affected by the bad feeling. I was also given a hard time at home afterwards from Margaret, who I felt resented the time I spent with them. In the end it was too taxing, too sad, too hard to go back each week, and I cut my visits down to once a month, and then every six weeks, even every eight weeks. I can see now that Luke is right, I should have worked harder at being with them more. But I never actually stopped seeing them, even at the risk of my relationship with Margaret, and even after being told by their teachers and doctor that my visits were too upsetting for them. It was not a good situation, but it was probably typical of many, many broken marriages where children are involved.’
Dad married Margaret in 1976, and we weren’t told about it or invited to the wedding. Luckily for us, Margaret did not have any children from her first marriage, and she and Dad did not give us any little half-brothers or sisters: I don’t know how I would have coped with sharing him with other children, especially knowing that he was living with them and therefore much closer to them than he was to us. I know lots of kids have to live with that situation, but I’m just grateful it didn’t happen to us.
Mum had also met a man six months previously who was to become our new stepfather, and play a very large role in our lives: Tony Phillips. She went out one evening with a crowd of her girlfriends and found herself chatting to a man with ‘twinkling eyes’, as she describes it.
‘I didn’t fall in love instantly, but I thought he was very cute and I was attracted to him straightaway,’ she says. ‘I’d tried going out with one or two other fellas after Alan left, but I’d never met anyone that I wanted to see again, until Tony came along. For a few weeks he came round to see me every Tuesday, but I wouldn’t let him over the threshold until the children were asleep. He was the only man I allowed into the house: I’d no intention of the boys having to cope with a succession of strange men.
‘Then one Tuesday Tony came round and Luke and Matthew were still awake, in bed. He asked if he could go up and see them. I was very possessive about them, and very reluctant, but eventually I agreed.’
I can remember clearly the night Tony first walked into our bedroom. He’s not very tall and he has a very slight limp caused by the arthritis he has suffered with all his life. He didn’t talk down to us or try to buy our affection. He simply said ‘hello’, and then told us a story about a little bird, which he made up as he went along. The bird lost all its feathers, but found some new ones to stick on. Unfortunately, it was only a little bird and the new feathers were from an eagle. Tony said that if we ever saw a bird flying around faster than Concorde we’d know it was our bird from the story. We took to him straight away.
But we were only seven years old at the time and very used to being on our own with our mother: I don’t think we made life easy for Tony when he moved in, despite such a good start.
Looking back, I can see that Mum didn’t help the situation either. She didn’t give him enough authority over us, she never allowed him to make decisions about us or to exercise discipline. Tony can be philosophical about it now, but I think he’s looking back through rose-tinted spectacles: at the time I’m sure he thought we were a couple of spoiled little brats, and I don’t think he liked us at all.
Tony now says: ‘I learned quickly that Carol’s relationship with the boys was the number one relationship, I couldn’t compete. They had created a very close bond, which overruled everything else, an even closer mother-son bond than normal. So I learned to keep quiet and just get on with things. After all, I was courting their mother, so I didn’t want to fall out with them. There was certainly friction and I know Luke took it personally. But I only got involved in confrontation with them when I felt they needed it, in the same way that all children do from time to time: it wasn’t personal for me at all.’
Tony, who is a year older than Mum, has led an interesting life. He was involved in the 1970s’ property boom, but the boom collapsed into a slump and cost him a lot of money. At the time Mum met him he had a garage in Holborn, but when the council put double yellow lines in front of it business was wiped out. Since then, he’s done a great variety of different jobs, almost always being self-employed. He’s not a nine-to-five person, and he’s not a person who ever lets life get on top of him for long: he always finds another scheme to keep himself going.
He is very different from Dad. At times I have felt Tony to be very cold, because he is not a demonstrative person who shows his feelings. Mum says this does not mean that he does not feel anything: he is just more restrained than the rest of the family – we are all the sort of people who hug and kiss and say ‘I love you’ all the time. Tony knows that our nickname for him in the family is ‘the robot’.
We’ve