I always used to like lying under things, tables, chairs, hiding. Always hiding. There was one particular table made out of a solid piece of wood and that was my favourite hiding-place, my sanctuary.
One Saturday, my mum’s sister got married and Lukie and me were asked to be pageboys. We were both so excited; we were given tuxedos and were even bought new shoes from Clark’s – they were expensive and it felt like we’d won the football pools because we were shopping there. It was a great day but when we came back to the police house, the back window was smashed and there was blood smeared on the remaining shards. Bloody fingerprints were on the window and the door handle. It was very frightening. We didn’t know if an intruder was still in the house and Mum was on her own with six-year-old twins. We anxiously walked in through the damaged door to find that every stick of furniture had gone. Everything – even my little table.
Luke and I were eight years old when my mum met her future husband, Tony Phillips. Prior to that, she had been very considerate to us, she hadn’t really had any boyfriends, even though times had been very difficult for her and she must have craved adult company and support.
We were still living at the police house in Mitcham when we first started noticing the man who was making our mum smile again. For the initial few times, we only saw Tony briefly to say ‘Hello’. Over a few weeks, he started seeing Mum more often, and then one night we heard our dog Tiny barking frantically and realized that Tony was coming up the stairs. He calmly walked into our bedroom, introduced himself to us and – rather brilliantly – told us a story. Looking back, it must have taken some courage for him to do that and likewise for Mum to let him, but it was a lovely gesture and I can remember the tale as if he had only told it yesterday.
It was about a magnificent bird in a forest, the fastest and most beautiful bird of all, which for some reason had lost its feathers. The bird was very sad but all the other animals in the forest saw this and decided to collect together bits of their own feathers and fur for him. Tony told the story so well; I remember lying there entranced, desperately wanting to know the ending. Then, Tony explained, using honey from the bees the animals stuck this collection of feathers and fur on to the bird, which once more became the fastest and most beautiful creature living in the forest. It was a happy ending for the bird and I remember that moment, it was very peaceful.
It was such a simple and lovely story. It was a long time since we’d had a man come in and say goodnight to us. Tony is a peaceful and calm person, he doesn’t get fazed easily and it was the first moment for as long as I could remember where there was an element of order and peace in our life.
There was one aspect of Tony that was out of order, however, and that was the dodgy tartan trousers he used to wear (he knows I have to reveal that). At first he also drove a rather nice 7 Series BMW and then an E-Type (he owned a garage at the time), both of which were dream cars to us two boys, given how little money we had at home. One day Tony explained that regretfully he was short of money as well and would be swapping the BMW for a Morris Minor. That’s quite some leap backwards. So, after a brief flirtation with leather seats and sports trims, it was back to Skintsville in the Goss household.
Although Tony brought a sense of peace and calm to our house, I didn’t really feel any more secure. Unfortunately, he was going through a divorce, like Mum, so he had no money either. However, what he also brought into the house was Carolyn and Adam, his two children and, with their entry into my life, I have at times felt like the richest boy in the world.
When I first met Adam, he looked like a gargoyle: he had the biggest mouth. I used to think that he could swallow an apple whole. Over the years, his mouth has stayed pretty much the same size, but the rest of his body has caught up.
He was really only a baby when we first met, six years old. I don’t know how I can accurately explain my initial feelings towards them but he and Carolyn just fitted. We seemed tailor-made for each other. We never ever had any problems connecting. Two families colliding like that can produce a source of great tension, but with Adam and Carolyn there was only ever a tangible sense of gain when they came into my life. I thought ‘Wow! We have a bigger family now!’ It felt like we were a little bit less destructible.
With Adam, we felt very connected. He would always be pulling funny faces, keeping us laughing. Actually, back then he was very frail, he had really severe asthma, wheezing all the time and his health suffered terribly. However, this didn’t stop him playing around and being a lot of fun to be with.
There was also a swift emotional connection with Adam’s sister Carolyn. I’m quite a tactile person, Carolyn was too and she was very kind with it. She was such a beautiful person, even at the tender age of seven she wanted to do more for the world. She was very clever too – she went on to pass ten ‘O’ levels and three ‘A’ levels before lining up a university degree. They both reminded me of Tony. It might sound an obvious statement to make, but Carolyn was like a girl-version of Tony and Adam was simply a boy-version of Tony.
Previously, I’d felt quite vulnerable. We all did at times, me and Mum and Dukus, as I often called my twin brother (he would call me Maffy). When I say I felt vulnerable, that is not because of my dad not being there, it is just the way I felt. Then Adam and Carolyn arrived and I suddenly felt that there were a few more people in the gang, a bigger team, we were a little bit less vulnerable. I also sensed that Adam and Carolyn were, like me and Luke, rather weary. They had gone with their mother when she and Tony had split up and there had been much pain on both sides. Of course we were only young so we would still lark about, but there was definitely an unspoken acknowledgement of being a little bit bruised from the break-ups.
Divorce is just something that happens in life, you can’t say who’s right and who’s wrong. What you can say is it’s a fact that when parents split up, emotional upheaval is the inevitable result. Whether parents like it or not, such events do affect kids. It hurts them. They are not stupid, they want to do the right thing for their parents, be there for them and not whinge, but this also means that they have quite evolved feelings of pain and confusion.
When you put a couple of new kids into the mix, it can often polarize emotions and cause even more friction. However, for me at least, it created this strange reassurance that I wasn’t the only one feeling a little battered. Within a matter of a few weeks, whenever I knew Tony’s two kids were visiting I would be shouting, ‘Oh wow! Adam and Carolyn are coming round!’
And yet, for all the pain that Adam and Carolyn had obviously gone through, part of me was oddly glad that their parents had split, at least in the sense that it brought Tony to my mum. I couldn’t love Tony more. As a boy Tony was in a cast for two years from the waist down – the doctors didn’t know if he was even going to be able to walk again. He’s since had two hip replacements but has never moaned about his pain; that’s not his style. Tony is not the tallest man in the world but he has not a shred of a Napoleon complex about him. Although he is quite a small guy, mentally he is a rock. I am so lucky, he’s a great step-dad.
When my dad came to see us, I do remember some good times. We went down to the local swamp one afternoon and caught a load of frogs. We triumphantly took them back to the house and made a rock pool for them out of a plastic container, some stones and tap water. It was the summer of 1976, which was the hottest English summer for over two hundred years. There was something about that summer that seems to have stuck in the minds of many, many people. It wasn’t a good summer for my frogs, though. I went out to play one day and innocently forgot to top up their water. When I came back there were just these raisins with legs stuck to the rocks! There wasn’t a drop of water left, it had all evaporated, leaving behind this sorry collection of green Californian raisins