Pete: My Story. Pete Bennett

      Nan and Grandad had to leave half way through the afternoon because Grandad had to get back to his local pub before opening time. He was always a stickler for his routines. Maybe he was a bit obsessional too! Wow! So many possibilities for weird behaviour in my gene pool, so much rogue DNA swirling around, looking for a place to settle.

      At the reception after the ceremony Dave took care of all the music and he and I planned a surprise number for me to perform as a wedding present to Mum. I slipped away to another room, my heart thumping with excitement, and changed out of my wedding suit and into a pair of Mum’s multicoloured skin-tight leggings and a psychedelic top. I then greased back my hair and stuck on a moustache. Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, I was going to be Freddy Mercury, miming to ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. I loved Freddy and I loved getting up and giving a performance in front of an audience. I’d done a Freddy impression once in a school concert and knew it went down well with people. The moment I walked out into the spotlight I felt instantly comfortable on the stage in front of everyone, feeling their eyes on me, seeing their smiles as I started my act, and afterwards hearing them clap and tell me how brilliant I’d been. Some people would rather die than be the centre of attention, standing in the spotlight, other people just know it’s the right place for them. To me, it felt completely right.

      Soon after they got married, Dave bought us an old Victorian family house just round the corner from where we had been living in Plumstead. It had been owned by an old lady who hadn’t done anything to it for years. There was one room that was particularly gloomy and depressing, and that was designated to be my bedroom. I kept telling Mum the room was evil, that there was something awful in the vibes, but I could tell she wasn’t taking me seriously. I felt that things moved around it in the dead of night and shapes would appear in front of me, which I was sure were ghosts or demons or poltergeists.

      ‘Don’t be so silly,’ Mum would say, assuming I was just making up excuses not to go to bed. ‘You’ve got to go to sleep now.’

      In the end she agreed to come and sleep in there with me, just to prove there was nothing to be scared of. That night she climbed into bed and turned the light out. I waited quietly to see what would happen next. I could tell she was nervous despite her protestations, and wasn’t dropping off to sleep. There was a lot of sighing and thumping about in the bed as she tried to get comfortable. Then she turned the light back on again. She’d left a glass of water on the dressing table a little way across the room and it suddenly shattered, spraying shards of glass and water everywhere. Mum let out a blood-curdling scream, grabbed me and we ran back to bed with Dave. None of us went back in that room for as long as we lived in that house.

      * * *

      Having a baby brother was great because it gave me a permanent audience and Alex was always very appreciative of any show I liked to put on for him. I made a set of finger puppets out of felt and then wrote full-scale musicals for them to perform. I could operate all ten of my fingers simultaneously as different characters. There was a crocodile, a policeman, a dog, a robot and banana-man. It was like a mini finger Muppet Show. Mum had bought us an old piano and I would use that to build the musicals, taping the songs to intersperse with the dialogue. I don’t know how much of it Alex took in; he probably just liked having his big brother’s attention and watching the bright colours of the felt, but it seemed like he was enthusiastic as he gurgled and clapped, laughed and drooled his appreciation. One day, once he was moving about more, he shut his finger in the piano by accident and it all went horribly septic, so I invented a character called ‘Big Green Scary Finger’.