I am so conscious of talking about these events, but I must preface it by pointing out it’s just one of those situations that happens in life; it’s nobody’s fault. Separation is not easy on anyone. Dads go through loss, mums go through loss, and husbands and wives go through loss. But purely on the level of being a child, the starkest realization was that we were not going to go back to Majorca next year after all. It’s also strange how after Mum and Dad separated, I became so much more aware of certain elements that I’d previously been blissfully ignorant of. Suddenly, school was full of other kids from broken homes, little people with secret histories.
By the time my parents separated, my father had been a policeman in the City of London force for over two years. He’d trained when Luke and I were two and a half, and even back then there were tensions between him and Mum. When we went to Majorca, we were living in a police house at 17 Priestley Road, Mitcham; that provided our family with a level of security that was very welcome. Unfortunately, the crumbling edifice of my parents’ marriage never matched the solidity of a safe, secure police house.
Separation and divorce were not looked upon in a very good light within the force, so it was an especially difficult time for both Mum and Dad. One unsettling memory I do have of the police house in Mitcham is that for a couple of weeks, a man stood outside our home. We were never sure of what was going on but it might possibly have been someone watching to see if Mum was living with anyone, because there are obviously rules about who lives in a police house. We reported this to the police, as did several neighbours. Sometimes this man would be sitting in a car and other times he would stand by our hedge reading a newspaper. We were only kids and it scared the hell out of us but it was especially disturbing for Mum.
My early childhood was painful, constantly seeing my mother in tears, genuinely aching. Every night she would come in to our bedroom and give us a kiss, then sing us to sleep, songs like ‘American Pie’ and ‘Fly, Fly Superbird’ – I can hear her singing them now. But then she would leave the room and we would wait for her to start crying. Many years later, I wrote a song which my mum doesn’t know about called ‘Ms Read’, her maiden name; ‘I can hear you crying Ms Read’. It was very sad to see her like that.
Mum always did her crying in private, and tried to shield us from as much as she could. We knew she was upset but we were only little and we didn’t always know how to approach her; all we really wanted to do was give her a cuddle and make her feel better.
The break-up of my parents’ marriage hit us very hard. Its effects manifested themselves in many ways. One night my mum went out of the front door to go to the phone box. It was dark, being around nine o’clock, and Luke and I flew into a blind panic. We screamed and screamed, tears pouring down our cheeks, and ran out of the house. Mum was really startled and said, ‘What’s wrong? What on earth is wrong?’ We’d thought she was going to leave us.
I can still feel the chill of the fear that I had, thinking she was not going to come back. It’s an awful memory. ‘Of course I was coming back, my loves. I’m just popping to the phone box.’ Mum was brilliant, she went back inside and zipped us up in our parka coats over our pyjamas and held our hands down to the phone box. She was smiling and being so lovely with us to cheer us up, but inside that must have been a terrible thing for her to see.
I don’t know how we got by. One afternoon, Luke and I wanted to do something but we had no money. We asked Mum but she said, ‘Look, I’ve got nothing,’ and she opened her purse to show us a single twopence coin. Then she went to the phone box and, as we followed her, it started raining heavily. We stood outside and watched Mum put the coin in to phone her dad – that was what calls cost in those days. We had to wait outside and watch Mum hunched over the phone, absolutely sobbing to her father. It was pouring down with rain by now and it was an awful moment. I just felt so useless.
But then, we looked down at the ground and there was a one-pound note, just lying there in front of us. That was a lot of money, a week’s food at least. A crumpled, green, old one-pound note. I picked it up and started banging on the phone box window. No answer from Mum. Again, Bang! Bang! Bang! Mum was still crying and shouted, ‘Hold on!’
So I did it again.
Bang! Bang! Bang! Finally, she looked round and there we were, standing in the teeming rain, proudly holding up this note. We didn’t say anything, just held it up. Mum looked at the money and then at our beaming faces and said, ‘I’ve gotta go, Dad!’
We ran home holding her hands, sprinted upstairs and put the note on the boiler, then just sat there, the three of us, waiting for it to dry. And as the dampness evaporated, the edges of the note started to curl up and there was another one stuck to it. It was one of the most insanely amazing moments ever. I just kept thinking, ‘You could buy two hundred Black Jacks with that,’ but in my heart of hearts, I knew that putting food on the table was more important.
Another time, my mum slipped a disc and my brother and I kept her alive on jam sandwiches for a week. She could not move out of bed, so we made her cups of tea and jam sandwiches. We were really proud of ourselves, looking after her when she was always so doting on us. Luke and I are her life, always have been, sometimes to the point where I feel guilty, she has put so much into us. She is my angel.
One time when I was eight, I really needed my angel. For some reason, my knee had swollen up to quite a size, it looked very odd. They took me in for a check-up and said they would have to investigate further as it wasn’t clear what the problem was. I was taken to the local hospital and all sorts of doctors and people in white coats busied themselves around me. Eventually, they inserted a huge needle into my leg to scrape cultures off the kneecap. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to anaesthetize the kneecap because of the lack of muscle and the proximity of the bone to the skin, so I had no painkillers. I was in agony. To this day I have a very strong phobia about needles and I don’t think you have to be a psychologist to work out why.
Tests were done and I was told I’d have to stay in for ten days. One day, Mum came to visit and was talking to a doctor by my bedside when he asked her to go outside. Once they were out of the room, he talked to her in somewhat hushed tones. Mum came back in all teary, although desperately trying to look cheerful. I later found out that they suspected I had septic arthritis and among all the sheaves of paperwork Mum had had to sign and agree to, one had asked for her consent to amputate my leg. That’s a dreadful position for any parent to be placed in.
Fortunately, the swelling began to subside and it turned out that there was no lasting damage. Nonetheless, I had to sit there for ten days which, to an eight-year-old boy, seemed like for ever. My dad bought me a little wooden box that had a maze and some ball-bearings in it. It was like some Stone Age Gameboy, it predated hand-held computer games, but I bloody loved it, it was such a good present. I spent hours every day trying to get the little silver balls to tumble their way through the maze to the finish. That simple little toy got me through those ten endless days. I wish it had been as easy for Mum and Dad. Eventually I was sent home with a clean bill of health (a bout of measles had also sent me to hospital so I should have been used to it!).
There was still the fear within me though, a constant sleeping partner. One result of this was that I wet the bed up until I was in my early teens. I used to put three felt-tip pens vertically under my wet sheet to lift it off the mattress so it could dry, then I would try to sleep on the floor. When I heard Mum coming to my room in the morning, I would knock the pens away quickly so that when Mum felt the sheet it would be dry. There was so much fear. As trivial as it sounds, I truly believe in talking about this unwelcome habit – kids go through hell, the fear of not wanting to wet the bed so badly it makes them do it anyway.
Eventually, my dad took all the pressure off me and his intervention really helped. He told me to hit the pillow with my fist the number of times that coincided with what time I wanted to wake up and go to the toilet. I did exactly that, I woke up and went to the toilet when I wanted to and the next morning I hadn’t wet the bed. It took me a further two years to believe I had finally stopped.
When