The first real thing I clearly remember was watching Mum being hit by her boyfriend. I don’t remember the details of us living with him, or anything else about him, I just remember lying on my mattress in the corner and seeing her flying across the room. There was a lot of blood on her face.
She didn’t hang around with that bloke long after that – Mum wasn’t one to be a victim like the sort of battered women she sometimes met around the flats. I remember being upset by the incident, but not really frightened. I don’t think I felt in any danger myself and I think I trusted Mum to be able to sort it out. I just watched it happen, like I might watch a cartoon on the telly. People are always being hit in cartoons and they just get up and keep going, which was pretty much what Mum did. I was drawing pictures of her, all covered in blood, for months afterwards.
After that Mum said that was it for her with men. ‘Sod the lot of them.’ From then on it was just her and me and she didn’t have another boyfriend for nearly ten years. Dad got back in touch when I was six. I don’t know what made him suddenly think of us, but he said he wanted to see me again, which was cool. Mum wasn’t best pleased with him because she only ever got one tenner out of him for maintenance all through my childhood, even though she was having to work so hard to make ends meet, but she wanted me to be in contact with my dad if possible, so they made an arrangement for him to pick me up from the flat.
I had no memory of him but when he turned up I thought he looked really cool, with a really good image, very trendy. He didn’t look like most other people’s dads, which I liked. Mum was still a pretty wild punk then, still wearing the leather jackets, still changing her hair colour all the time, still looking like some Billy Idolette, but Dad had mellowed his image down a bit from the glamorous punk that Mum had first met.
Neither of us was quite sure how to handle our first father–son day out, so we went for a walk. It felt great to have a dad with me, even though he didn’t feel particularly like a dad, just a big man who had turned up from nowhere.
‘Let’s go in there,’ he suggested as we passed the gates of a graveyard.
‘OK,’ I agreed cheerfully. Why not? It looked like an interesting place and I didn’t remember ever having been in there before, although I must have been to the graveyard with Mum when I was tiny, to return her unwanted gravestone present from Johny. We spent a wicked hour or two looking at inscriptions and reading poems about missing loved ones, about walking with the angels and all the rest. I’d learnt to read by then from studying Garfield cartoon books, so I could make out most of the words on my own. Mum wasn’t much impressed when we got back and told her where we’d been.
‘Why can’t you take him bowling or to the park like a normal dad?’ she wanted to know. She can’t have been that surprised though, having spent so much of her own youth in punk pubs, or with goths in the Batcave. Had she forgotten that she and I had gone to the torture museum as a Christmas outing when I was really tiny? I have a feeling pretty much anything Dad could have done that day would have pissed her off.
We had to face it; none of us was that good at being normal, but I wasn’t bothered. I thought it was all cool. Even then I loved people who were a bit nuts. Dad made another date to come the following week and I got myself all ready and waiting by the door in my duffel coat, wondering what we would do this time. The appointed time ticked past, the tense silence eventually shattered by the phone. It was Dad calling to tell Mum he couldn’t get there because he was in bed with some other woman. I guess he was trying to punish Mum or something; there must have been a grown-up agenda going on that I knew nothing about. Not surprisingly this news really, really pissed Mum off. She said she didn’t care who he was in bed with, but he shouldn’t be letting me down. I cried a lot for a while, but got over it pretty quickly. There was too much interesting stuff going on in the world to worry about the bad for too long. I never liked stress, always preferring to move on and find something more cheerful to do or think about. Dad and I didn’t see each other again for another ten years after that.
I loved going to stay with Nan and Grandad in the West Country. They had a garden and a paddling pool and all the things that children think are so magical, all the stuff that we couldn’t have on a council estate in Peckham.
When I was about three we all went to the beach at Weymouth, with Mum’s friend Virginia Astley. Virginia was a very successful singer, who Mum had met at the Guildhall at the same time as Anna Steiger. She played the flute and they sometimes used to busk together outside Kensington tube station. Her dad had been the composer of theme tunes for Sixties television series like The Saint and Danger Man. Her elder sister had married Pete Townshend of The Who and he made a video of us at a party once, with Mum dressed as a bumblebee. Anyway, Mum and Virginia had gone off to the shops to buy something, leaving Grandad in charge of me. Seeing he was distracted rolling himself a fag, I wandered down towards the jetty, which I thought looked interesting, jutting out into the water. It was much too high for me to be able to climb up there myself, so I just held up my arms and looked pleadingly at a passing woman. She took pity and lifted me up. By the time Mum and Virginia got back I’d disappeared from sight and Grandad was a nervous wreck, certain that his negligent child-minding skills had caused the death of his grandson. They were all certain I had been abducted or drowned or something – instant paedo-alert as usual. Virginia was a bit psychic and suddenly shouted, ‘I know where he is.’
She leapt up on to the jetty and ran out to the end where a group of bigger boys were jumping down twenty feet or so into the water. I was just about to take my turn, poised to launch myself off into the unknown when she got there, barged through the crowd of boys and grabbed me as I teetered on the edge. I suspect I owe her my life for that little mercy dash. Cheers, Virginia!
On a much later visit to Nan and Grandad we all went to a Sunday market in the local town. It was really interesting for me, not like anything I’d seen in South London, lots of country crafts and homemade produce. There was a stall selling live rabbits for pets. I’d had a white rabbit before, but it had escaped and disappeared and I really wanted another one to replace it.
I convinced Mum that it would be OK to keep it on the balcony of the flat and, against her better judgement, she gave in – it was hard for her to resist such a cute fluffy little thing when it was actually sitting in her hand. We bought him, christened him Buck, and took him home to London at the end of our stay. Within a couple of weeks he had doubled his size and he just kept on growing. It was like some sort of alien life form, threatening to take over the world. The balcony became a sea of poo and pee. Our family pet was a giant, furry, crapping machine. Even though Mum did everything for this ever-expanding fur-ball, cleaning up after him, shovelling food into him, he seemed to hate her with a terrible vindictiveness. She became terrified to go near him. He would stare at her malevolently and then pick up his plate in his mouth and smash it down on the floor in front of her, as if determined to show her who was boss.
When he stood on his hind legs Buck was about three feet tall and he would attack anyone who dared to come near to him apart from me, so I would hear nothing said against him. I loved him with a passion. I was sitting on the balcony cuddling him one day when something happened to make my elbow suddenly jerk and smash the patio window. It could have been an early spasm, or it could have been Buck making a sudden movement, but either way there was now a hole in the glass. Once she’d stopped tearing her hair out, Mum made a good job of patching the hole up with cardboard, but the next day, while I was at school and she was at work, Buck forced his way through the flimsy defences and into the house.
That evening when we got home the fluffy invader had made the final move in his takeover plan and we spent hours chasing him round the flat as he dived under the bed and armchairs, snarling at Mum as she struggled to flush him out. In the end she forced him out into the open, threw a sheet over him and fell on top of him, wrestling him into submission. Over the following hours we discovered that he had chewed through virtually every wire in the flat; the stereo, the iron, everything was fusing and blowing and giving off sparks as we tried to plug things in and switch