Anyway, I’m getting distracted. Let’s get back to the story.
From what I remember my parents’ divorce was really quite amicable. Amelia and I were kept out of all of the proceedings, and not once did we see any kind of arguments between them. I don’t think there was any big drama when it came to their break-up: they had simply fallen out of love with each other.
The only thing that did upset me was the idea of my dad cross-dressing. As a child, Mrs Doubtfire was one of my favourite films. It must have made quite an impression on me, as I once got very upset believing that the only way Dad would be able to see Amelia and I was if he dressed up as an elderly woman like Robin Williams did in the film. I think a whole generation of divorcee Doubtfire kids genuinely believed our fathers now had to become transvestites.
As I started to get older, I refused to let my parents’ divorce give me a skewed attitude to relationships. I have friends from broken families and as a result they’ve become really cynical about love, but I believe that just because one relationship doesn’t work out it doesn’t mean that they’re all doomed to fail. Anyway, there was no way I was going to let my parents’ divorce put me off my quest for the perfect partner.
As part of the divorce negotiations my sister and I were given the choice of who we wanted to live with. It was a hard decision to have to make but I was a massive mummy’s boy so Amelia and I lived with Mum, moving to a housing estate called Highwood Park in Hedge End, near Southampton.
Initially Dad stayed in our family home before buying a new-build in Southampton, so he wasn’t far away. We saw him at least every other weekend, and continued to do so when he later bought a new house on Hayling Island. I was excited about this new beginning, but it turned out to be a horrible time. It was around 1997 and my sister had just turned 12 when she decided that she wanted to go to boarding school. I think she wanted a bit more independence and it was also her way of trying to put our parents’ divorce behind her.
When Amelia left I was alone living with Mum, and it soon became clear that she wasn’t coping with the divorce as well as we’d all thought she was.
Mum seemingly became terribly thin and weighed six and a half stone, and being the only person around, it fell to me to comfort her. I hated seeing her so lonely and at the time she felt like she didn’t really have any sort of social life, which must have been terribly difficult for her.
As soon as I went to bed at night she would open a bottle of Martini – which would be empty by the time I came down the next morning. She would sit in the kitchen smoking hundreds of cigarettes, and playing the same two songs over and over again. The songs were Scarlet’s ‘Independent Love Song’ and ‘Don’t Cry For Me Argentina’ from the Evita soundtrack, and even now when I hear them I am instantly transported back to those Martini days.
Even though she was obviously very low, I never regarded Mum’s drinking phase as her being an alcoholic. It was more of a, ‘I’m going to get drunk and forget all my troubles because that’s what I need to do right now’ kind of thing. Ab Fab, if you will. In years to come I was to know exactly how she felt. To this day Mum is my absolute rock, and we get drunk and talk about life and love and dance to ‘New York, New York’. She is my favourite person on this earth.
Mum was paying for half of our school fees so she had no money at all. Any spare cash she had after she had bought the household essentials went on Martini and presents for us. She bought me a gecko called Spike from a car boot sale for being good at school, and he soon became my confidant. I felt so terrible for her, but as a 10-year-old I couldn’t do an awful lot to help, except cuddle her whenever she needed me to.
I have no idea what happened money-wise when my parents went their separate ways, but I do know we were really struggling.
Dad is a wealthy man these days, but I don’t know if he had money back then. He’s not someone who flaunts it – he lives in a normal house and drives a normal car. Amelia and I always went to private schools, but I had no idea at the time that that was anything to do with wealth. To be honest, I just assumed everyone paid for education. A private education is all I’ve ever known and when I was that age I assumed everyone attended a school that resembled Hogwarts.
All of her life Mum had dreamed of becoming a radio presenter. She’s blonde and glamorous and always looks immaculate so she would be amazing on TV, but radio has always been her passion and she would do anything she could to be involved in that world. Some of my most vivid memories of childhood involve me spending hours on end in radio studios in my pyjamas because Mum was working at Max FM most evenings.
The work was all voluntary and the radio station probably reached about 50 people in the Southampton area. It was the most unglamorous place you could imagine. We’d have to stay there until 11pm and I’d often fall asleep on the sofa of the studio. I remember getting very excited when Mum used to give me 20p to go and get a hot chocolate. It was the highlight of those long nights.
It got to a point when in order to earn a bit of spare cash Mum took a job delivering videos to the local video rental shop. She was paid £80 a week, but £70 of it went on babysitters for me when she was out delivering.
I remember my best friend Rupert’s mum sneaking kitchen rolls and cigarettes into our house and hiding them so Mum didn’t realise. She’d stumble across them and assume she’d bought them and forgotten about them. How she never caught onto it I’ll never know!
Also, most of my clothes were handed down to me from Rupert, but back then he was a lot fatter than me so I spent most of the 90s in clothes that were ‘you’ll grow into them’ huge, and often had a massive ‘Gap’ logo on the front. Not very chic, I’m sure you’ll agree.
Rupert’s parents, Joanna and Charles, later discovered that he was hiding boxes of cereal in his bedroom to eat throughout the night, which sparked the weight issue. Rupert hit puberty alarmingly early, and had he not been caught with cereal and shed the pounds he would have resembled a young, bum-fluffed version of George Michael, which is never a good look. His mum made sure he got his upper lip sugared regularly for the next two years until he learned to shave. Sugaring is basically waxing, but camper – especially when you’re meant to be shaving.
There are 12 days between Rupert and I and we’ve been best friends ever since we were born. If it’s at all possible, his love life has been more disastrous than mine. We’ve basically grown up bonding over masturbation stories, and a series of crap relationships. He now works as a very serious doctor and is still useless in love.
I used to spend half my life at Rupert’s house when I was growing up and I always felt slightly inferior because his parents were still together and very much in love. They lived in a gorgeous house, had horses and money was never a problem. Rupert would always have the latest PlayStation games, whereas I would be a year or so behind because they always went down in price when their popularity waned. I would virtually live on his bedroom floor for weeks after the latest release. The day he was given a DVD player was momentous because they were so rare, and we were glued to his sofa for an entire summer as we made our way through a series of Jilly Cooper-esque, soft-porn, 80s rom-coms that his mother favoured.
Rupert’s house was stylish, always immaculate and smelt like you were walking into The White Company. It was a heady mix of fresh laundry and beautifully scented diffusers, candles and room sprays, whereas my house was more Martini and Air Wick plug-in. Mum went through a stage of putting vinegar everywhere because apparently it gets rid of the smell of smoke, but it just made everything smell very acidic and the saucers of light brown liquid looked terribly unsightly.
Joanna