1965. Dudley is prone to strange schemes and fancies. The Christmas trees, the poor chinchillas he keeps caged in a shed. The barn is converted for battery chickens, stacked high like Tesco. There are two sets of lights, one white, one red. The sight of blood from a crushed or cut bird sends the house into a frenzy but switching the light turns the red blood brown and the birds soon settle. I am never quite happy in the barn, picking eggs, spotting corpses. The mis-sexed young cockerels are the first to go. Don’t call so loud and proud, I want to warn when they show off their crow. My dad will hunt you down.
One day, two white goats appear. Dad’s been reading Farmers Weekly. We drive them miles to be mated, the first step to producing milk. I have never come across anything that stinks like a stud billy goat and wonder why Lilian and I are watching while they have sex. Must be a farmer thing, I think. I became fond, though, of the nannies in the field behind the house, fascinated as their bellies balloon. I think their babies will be like having lambs (Christopher is forever coming home with stories of rejected young sheep being kept in an Aga drawer). The big day comes. I rush home from school. There are no cute baby kids gambolling in the paddock or nuzzling their mother’s milk. I am confused. They were male so I clubbed them, Dudley tells me matter of fact. When I ask where their graves are, he points to the cesspit. I think I hate him a little that day.
The main trouble with the goats is no one likes their milk. We are having it in tea, on cereal, on our porridge. We are spared from drinking it straight. Dad is the first to switch. I am soon back to picking up his milk from the farm. We kids have to stick with goat for a while: it is good for growing boys, he’s read. But one day they have disappeared, as though they never happened. I wonder why we don’t get to say goodbye. I don’t go near goat’s cheese for 20 years.
There is a photograph of me in my final year of primary school. I am sitting up straight, blond hair neatly combed, looking into the camera, superior smile on my face. Pure Midwich Cuckoo, pure Peter Drabble. The rescue operation appears complete. Like our river cottage, I have been rebuilt into something smarter. Gone for now the questioning eyes, to be replaced with overweening confidence. I am head boy at my small Church of England school, garlanded in gushing valentines and the 11-plus. Grammar school is next. There is also, though, an uneasiness about my last year there. A girl from the estate is humiliated in class. She renders the summer sky yellow, the wheat field blue. I like the painting’s boldness, its originality, but the teacher humiliates her, toys with her like a cat showing kittens how to torture mice. We are being taught about more than English and maths. This is a lesson in class, about who her parents are.
Christopher is becoming crueller. The hunted grows to be the hunter; the abuser rather than the abused. It is simple, the psychology. The Drabbles have withdrawn their favour. His hurt has to be displaced. He turns to shooting random birds and rabbits; breaking wings, breaking legs. He sends in dogs. He turns on Mum and Dad, snarls his anger. He turns on me. I am blinded by other loyalties, too young and stupid to see. He grows to like a fight, my brother; is more of a force at school (I have sometimes cause to be grateful). Ironically, by the time he is a boxer in the army, Dudley brings him back into the family fold. It is my turn to be exiled.
Christopher is already at secondary school in Kingsbridge, the local market town, learning to curse, spray power words around like cunt and fuck and twat. He is a Jenkins, running with a tougher town crowd, I am a Drabble, still tied to my village primary. By the time I get to Kingsbridge, the grammar and secondary schools have merged, the new comprehensive classes streamed. I am in 1.1, year one, top tier, Christopher in 2.5. Our drift apart is official, as if we are not brothers any more. What we had is almost invisible.
It isn’t until secondary school that I realise how old my mum and dad are. It is a year of Bob Dylan, The Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Sandie Shaw. BBC newsreaders sport longer hair, longer collars, wider and brighter ties. Dad watches The Supremes on TV and says unfortunate things. Other kids have posters in their bedroom, their fathers will grow their hair. Lilian and Dudley are 20 to 30 years older than the parents of other kids in my class, their lives forever defined by the war. Even their names speak of another century.
Each year of the mid Sixties adds a half-decade to the differences between us. The questions they have raised me to ask become more difficult. What about apartheid and Vietnam, I demand, though their politics never waver. Clothing becomes an issue. We aren’t allowed jeans. I pine for a pair of Levi’s. I take a paper round and start buying records, though we only have a radio for Dudley’s classical concerts. The person I want to be is being redefined, away from Mum and Dad’s plan. I must be a source of worry to them.
From five to 13, I have loved my village life, our dog, our donkey, but now I long for a life less defined by who my mother and father are. Lilian despairs, the threats to ‘send us back’ increase, her love less unconditional by the day. Dudley becomes more angry while I become more defiant. Christopher sulks and stays away ever longer.
It isn’t yet hopeless. I am doing well at school, and Christopher is promoted a class each year: 2.5 became 3.4, 4.3: an A-level stream, but we don’t know our childhood is over, a chill teenage winter is coming. A care crisis plan is about to be put into action. We will never be the same. I have stupidly forgotten the lesson about always earning conditional love.
AUGUST 3. Plot 29. Two days of hoeing, digging, raking – clearing weeds from Mary’s beds. Her broad beans have gone over, pods fat and ripe, hanging heavy, waiting for her. The onion bed is also overgrown. Greedy calendula has taken over, with sycamore seedlings in support. Bindweed by the wheelbarrow-load has been creeping in, smothering other plants. Mary’s cold frame is nurturing weed. Attack is the best defence.
Bindweed to the waste bin, calendula to the compost, seedy perpetual spinach too. I clear the frame and lay out a sack for onions and shallots. It is sweaty work in sultry weather but we need clean beds to sow. September is only four weeks away, the sun is starting to dip, sap is beginning to slow.
By teatime Sunday, I am sitting, hands a bit torn, shirt a bit sticky, when I hear my name behind me. Mary’s standing there, a little tired. I show off the beds like a proud schoolboy handing in his homework. She smiles. We talk about her crop rotation. She has a plan at home she says she will send me. We admire the runner beans and the sweet peas I have just finished tying (the sweetest-smelling job). The pumpkin bed is thriving. Her courgettes are flowering and the rest not far behind. She gathers herbs and rocket and beans. I press her to take some of our chard and red-hearted lettuce. Howard and his family are on holiday and I am daunted by how lush everything is. Mary hands me seed to sow. I’ll be back in a couple of days.
1968. It is decided I should go to boarding school. Plymouth children’s department will pay and there will be a scholarship. I am mostly messing about at Kingsbridge but coming top or near it in exams. My French master hates me for it. My writing is sloppy, a source of shame to Dad, whose copperplate is immaculate. The teacher makes me rewrite my French exercise book overnight. It starts neatly until I see it is too slow. He slippers me the next day. Punishment is measured in strikes of three or six, with the teacher’s choice of weapon (he favours a gym shoe) on your non-writing hand. The notebook is worth six, the small man almost jumping as he hits. After he’s finished, I smirk my contempt. He has me hold out my right hand for another six. I walk back to my seat in angry tears, girls are looking up at me, sad.
It isn’t just schooling. Mum and Dad are worried about sex, about me spending time with girls in their bedrooms listening to Jimi Hendrix. Dad loathes Hendrix, his black sexuality. The girls’ allure is almost as much in the soft colours and fabrics of their pop-postered rooms (mine is austere, almost military) as the thought I can slip a hand in underwear. Mum particularly seems obsessed by the idea of sex. Maybe it is the fear of