‘Do you think,’ Tony had mused idly, ‘our boys will bring their own kids here one day?’ I lay back on the sand, his hand in mine, and smiled up at the sky. ‘I’ve never thought of that, Tone. But now you say it, yeah. I hope they do. What an amazing idea.’
The truth was, I had never imagined we would bring our own kids to Treasure Beach. I hadn’t seriously expected us to make it as a couple, or have children of our own to take anywhere. If someone had told me ten years earlier that one day we would lie on Calabash beach and watch our sons build sandcastles while we speculated about grandchildren, I would have told them they were out of their mind.
When Tony and I first met, I was married to a man I loved very much. Everyone loved Paul. Everyone loved our marriage. We were one of those couples who make people sentimental; the sort that serves as a repository for their faith in the dreamy ideal of happily ever after. I loved being that couple.
Before then the only kind of couple I had ever been involved with was of the strictly comedy variety. Most of my friends had been falling madly in and out of love for years, and appeared to have no difficulty finding partners with whom they could contemplate a future, but the boyfriends I chose would have been impossible to mistake for credible candidates. There was the flatteringly pretty drummer who lived with his parents and wrote terrible poetry, and a morose Irish chef from Derry, whose appeal would have been indiscernible had I not been immature enough to find any whiff of the IRA romantic. He taught me how to say Tiocfaidh ár lá – our day will come – and I was thrilled. There was a postman, a DJ, a sales rep, a bouncer – and I was fond of them all. Falling in love with any of these men, however, would have been demonstrably absurd.
I was reasonably content with the comedy boyfriends, because it felt unrealistic to expect to meet a serious one. I don’t think this assumption was subjected to close analysis at the time, but the problem would have been easy enough to identify. Losing one’s heart to someone requires a degree of recognition – a shared sensibility – and this was hard to find in anyone else when my childhood had left me marooned between all recognisable categories of social class. In the dating game I was a stateless refugee.
My parents had met at Dartington Hall in the 1950s, when it was still a progressive boarding school favoured by middle-class radicals. Black and white photographs show them as teenagers marching to Aldermaston, wearing CND badges, smoking roll-ups. My father’s father had been a conscientious objector; my mother’s father was an Oxford don. They married before she turned twenty-one, and moved to Bristol; he became a teacher, and at twenty-three she gave birth to her first son. After their second arrived they moved to rural Wiltshire, to a broken-down cottage in a tiny hamlet of woodland and old watermills. A third son was born in their bedroom, and my father gave up teaching to become a carpenter. They were still in their twenties when I arrived in 1971.
Because I am reasonably well-spoken, these days people often assume I come from money. When I was a child, however, we would get mistaken for hippies. To Tory Wiltshire in the Seventies, CND car stickers and a subscription to the Guardian were enough to consign a family’s reputation to the outlandish extremes of bohemia, but this was no more accurate than the false impression of wealth. My parents had little patience with the lazy hypocrisies of hippies – nor did they have any money.
We didn’t have a television, either, but this was unrelated to having no money. It was a signifier of the particular social category to which my parents belonged – one that was very much of its time, relying as it did on the possibility of living in a big house in the country without earning very much. In essence, it meant being highly educated, intellectually radical but indifferent to materialism. My father used to half-joke that we were the ‘genteel poor’, meaning we didn’t care about money. We didn’t care about fashion, or cars, or appearances. What we cared about were words. Conversation wasn’t just a worthy substitute for material possessions, such as a television, but a superior currency of limitless value – the supreme, unrivalled expression of love.
As a consequence, we were an extremely noisy family. When I think about family mealtimes now, in my head I hear something like a cross between The Moral Maze and Question Time. Even The Moral Maze’s smug undertones are faintly audible, for while we were all shouting away about God or Denis Healey, I think we shared an unspoken understanding that this was a dialogue from which other children expected to be excluded. Other children didn’t know about the Labour party, had no idea religion was man-made, and were not typically solicited for their opinions on the monarchy. How we knew this I could not say, but I am sure we did.
We called our parents by their names instead of Mum and Dad. Prefixes for relatives – uncle this or aunt that – were considered infra dig, as were the euphemisms conventionally deployed for bodily parts and functions. ‘Waterworks’ or ‘down below’ made us squirm with laughter. Swear words, on the other hand, were entirely acceptable; we swore like troopers as soon as we could talk, and had to be coached in the delicate diplomacy of who would and would not find this offensive. The distinction was surprisingly easy to grasp, though occasionally its subtleties would fox us. ‘It’s alright!’ we would bellow across a crowded room at our mother. ‘I was going to say fuck – but I didn’t.’
This hybrid identity our parents fashioned for us was probably recognisable to their Sixties generation. By the Eighties, however, its combination of entitlement, coarseness, penury and privilege made no sense at all to the other kids at our local comprehensive. When I Tippexed my Remembrance Sunday poppy white, the pacifist protest was widely interpreted to signify lesbianism. My refusal to accept the school maths cup was intended as a winning egalitarian gesture, but received as further evidence that I was ‘up ’erself’ and weird. Our father’s Scottishness only made matters worse. Although born and bred in England, we were indoctrinated to regard England – and worst of all, London – with deep suspicion, and our contempt for every national occasion of patriotic unity – a royal wedding, the world cup, Tim Henman doing quite well at Wimbledon – only exiled us further. The only other people I knew who occupied our peculiarly niche substratum of the British class system were members of my extended family.
My teenage self was pragmatic enough to take pride in our failure to fit in. When I left home, the wilful isolation still did not present an immediate problem. Or rather, a solution presented itself before it had begun to dawn on me that I might need one. Very early on as an undergraduate in Manchester, I stumbled upon the city’s gay village, and spent the entirety of my student years blissfully within its confines. Given that I am straight, I did sometimes wonder why. Looking back, it is obvious. Gay culture represented a social universe in which class had been trumped by sexuality, and everyone shared my own sense of being an outsider.
But when I graduated and moved to London to begin a career in journalism, class identity became an unavoidable issue. I thought it highly unlikely that I would fall in love with a man who did not read books or watch Newsnight, but could not see myself getting into bed with anyone called Hugo – and was seldom invited to anyway. The Hugos found me puzzling, and were understandably put off by my unaccountable prejudice against perfectly nice things like rugby and good wine. Sometimes I would find myself at a Notting Hill house party full of privately educated young professionals, and wonder how they could tell each other apart. As far as I could see, at the end of the night they could couple up and go home with anyone, and it would probably work out fine. Part of me pitied their interchangeability. Another part coveted the clarity of identity, because it seemed to make falling in love so enviably straightforward.
Paul was photographing Tony Blair at the 1997 Labour party conference when a mutual friend introduced us. A few hours later we met up in a bar to watch Celtic play football, and by the time I went to bed that night I was in love. It was as easy as that.
A working-class Glaswegian, Paul had joined the Labour party at fifteen, and credited politics with firing up an ambition to escape his Glasgow tenement and defy his alcoholic father’s order to quit education and train as a glazier. He went to college, became a photographer, moved south, joined Reuters, won awards, and by the time we met was an established member of the London media scene.
He