Shortly after Tony moved in we were threatened with eviction from the police house. From the moment Dad left us we were not really entitled to go on living there, but we had nowhere else to go, and it took quite a while for the police force to catch up with the fact that Dad had gone. Mum tried to get the council to re-house us, but they had a very long waiting list, so she and Tony scraped together a deposit, arranged a mortgage and bought a small end-of-terrace modern house on an estate in Cheshunt, Hertfordshire. They married a year after we had first met Tony.
We transferred to another school, St Clement’s, in Cheshunt, and while living there we joined swimming and karate clubs. We settled down quite well, singing in the school choir and playing football for the school. I was the more active of the two of us: Mum says I have always been hyperactive. Even when I’m supposed to be sitting still I tend to fidget and from a very early age I was forever drumming with my fingers on the arm of a chair or a table. It drove the grown-ups wild at times.
It was at Cheshunt that I had my first taste of rejection in love, when I was ten years old. The object of my affections was a girl called Tina, who was two years older than me and not remotely interested. I used to race out of school so that I could be sitting on the wall when she walked past. Up to that point, you could guarantee that Matt and I would be the last out of school, always larking about in the cloakrooms, but Tina changed all that for me. It must have been infectious, because Matt then decided he was in love with her, too, and we had our first rivalry over a woman. It didn’t really matter, because to Tina we were both too young to even be considered as boyfriends.
While we were living at Mitcham, my parents had a very angry showdown. Dad wrote to say that he had now decided not to see us any more: he said he had been advised by our teachers and a doctor and social worker who he had consulted that it would be better for us to have a clean break from him, at least until we were older. When Mum told us, we were desperately upset: I can remember crying my eyes out. We never got used to the idea of not seeing Dad and eventually Tony got very angry, the angriest I have ever seen him. He picked up the phone and rang Dad, and held the receiver out so that Dad could hear us crying. ‘That’s your sons,’ he said. Tony handed the phone to me and Dad just said, ‘Hello, son.’ The word ‘son’ was enough to choke me with tears, I couldn’t talk to him for crying.
Dad accepted that we needed him and started to come and see us again. But it was a very bad time for our relationship with him and both Matt and I got through by camouflaging our feelings, putting him out of our minds as much as we could. That year he actually left our Christmas presents on the doorstep on Christmas Day. I could not believe it: I thought it was a joke, and that he was hiding round the corner and would jump out to wish us a Merry Christmas. It was devastating to think that he had been so near to us and had not seen us. On another occasion, when I was about nine or ten, I called him ‘Daddy’ and he told me I was a bit old for that, and should call him ‘Dad’ in the future. Perhaps if I’d been seeing him frequently the change to ‘Dad’ would have occurred naturally by then, but I still clung to the name I had called him by when we were little and he lived with us. I was hurt that he had to say that to me.
Our new life in Cheshunt did not just entail a new house, a new school and a new stepfather. We also acquired a new stepsister and stepbrother, Tony’s children Carolyn and Adam. Carolyn was a year younger than us, Adam three years younger. They lived with Tony’s ex-wife, but visited us at weekends. We were determined to hate them from the word go, but the first time we actually saw them they were in the bath – how can you be standoffish with two kids who are in the bath?
Every weekend when they came to our house we would start out dreading it, not wanting them to come. And every weekend when it was time for them to go home all four of us would be pleading to stay together. Matt and I enjoyed horse riding, and they would come with us to the stables. Sometimes we would all pile into the car – Mum and Tony had an E-type Jag, a leftover from his prosperous days – and drive out to Billing Aquadrome with the caravan in tow. We’d spend the whole weekend fooling around in inflatable dinghies, fishing, making dens in the woods. There was a permanent fairground nearby and we spent all our pocket money there.
I can see now how hard it was for everyone. Broken families are an equation and different people solve it differently: Tony and his ex-wife Pauline got on better than Mum and Dad, for instance; Mum had plenty of troublesome times with Carolyn and Adam; we were not exactly pleasant to Dad’s wife Margaret and we gave Tony a few problems. On the other hand, the adults were not always as sensitive as they might have been in handling us, and at times their behaviour was downright unforgivable.
All in all, we had far more problems with the adults than we ever did with Carolyn and Adam, although we were envious of the way Tony could show affection for them more easily than he could for us. There were jealousies and suspicions all around, but children always find their own level and come to terms with each other better than they do with grown-ups. Tony himself says he measured the success of our relationship with Adam and Carolyn by the fact that before too long we had all dropped the word ‘step’ and referred to each other simply as brothers and sisters.
I always feel weird when I see other identical twins. If they are very alike, they look to me like something from the twilight zone. Freaks. Clones. Then I wonder if people feel that about Matt and me. I hope they don’t, because I don’t think we go out of our way, like some twins do, to look and be spookily alike.
There was no single moment when I realized that I was different from other kids because I was a twin – I always knew it. There are pluses and minuses in being a twin, but on balance I think the minuses outweigh the pluses. It’s not that I don’t love having Matt as a brother: I wouldn’t have missed that for anything. There’s an indestructible bond between us. But we have both had to fight all our lives to be treated as individuals, and I expect all other identical twins will understand and recognize that problem.
As a twin and a young child, individuality is virtually impossible. You are regarded as being half of a whole: anyone who knows your brother assumes that you have an identical personality, simply because you look the same. At school you are both tarred with the same brush: if I was bad, Matt was assumed to be bad also, and vice versa. Children, in particular, ask you stupid questions – but you also get a fair amount from adults. When Matt broke his arm, all the other kids wanted to know why I didn’t have a plaster cast on mine, too. When he wore a brace on his teeth I was asked – even by adults – why I didn’t have one. And I got heartily fed up with well-meaning shop assistants and old ladies in the street asking us if our mother could tell us apart.
Mum did not deliberately dress us alike, but it is difficult to be creative with shopping when you are struggling around with two lively little boys in tow: it was easier to buy two of everything. When we got dressed in the mornings the clothes were all kept together, there was no clear sense of his and mine. When Tony moved in with us, he admits it took him a while to recognize us as individuals, and he asked Mum to make sure we were dressed differently.
Later on, when we were buying our own clothes, we guarded them jealously. When they were no longer new we would lend them to each other, but we both had certain things which were out of bounds to the other one. We respected the unwritten rules because the battle for even that much individuality had been hard won.
When we started at school we had to wear badges with our names on. Later on, at secondary school, when all the other kids were being called by their first names, we had to put up with being addressed as ‘Goss’ because teachers did not know who was who. I was constantly in trouble for saying ‘I have a name, sir’ to teachers. Like most twins, we hated being referred to as ‘the twins’ or ‘the Goss twins’, we were desperate from an early age to be treated as individuals.
The confusion between us probably