SEX EDUCATION – PART 0
Here, in the most minute detail, is all the sex education I had.
HEROES
I imagine that every child has a hero in their family. One person who seems larger than life compared to everyone else. One person who doesn’t have the remoteness that most adults have.
I was lucky because I had two. One used to turn up with no announcement, be around for a few days and just as suddenly go off again – Uncle Ken, except he was my mother’s cousin, so not my uncle, but my second-cousin.
‘Uncle’ Ken was my hero, not just because he brought me a wonderful train set from Germany or his enormous moustache, but because his whole life seemed like one huge adventure and so much more exciting than ours.
Ken was something to do with the British Forces Radio Network in Germany. I’m not sure exactly what and later he ended up travelling England as a locum, not for doctors or dentists but for pub landlords, who he then attempted to drink into bankruptcy while they were away on holiday. I’m not sure who won because in the end, he drank himself to death.
My mother always claimed Ken wanted to marry her, which I do hope wasn’t true. He would have been a great dad, but I would never have wished my uptight joyless mother on him.
My other hero was my Uncle Ted. He was my real uncle, not a cousin, and married to my mother’s younger sister Auntie Pamela. The rest of my family thought that Pamela had married beneath her, more than anything because Uncle Ted came from ‘Up North’.
We all knew that once you travelled further than about thirty miles away from London everyone wore sacks and shoes made out of wood, especially if you went north where it was even worse. Up North, shoes were just a rumour that many people refused to believe in. It was all right to go on holiday there if you didn’t stay too long and only in nice hotels, and it was even all right to buy their vegetables or bunches of violets or even possibly employ them, but one did not marry them.
Except Auntie Pamela did.
Every summer holidays Aunt Pam and Uncle Ted rescued me from my tidy quiet sterile box into a home of topsy-turvy excitement with my four cousins and an uncle who told me to pull his little finger and then farted.
A larger-than-life Uncle Ted, who rowed my cousin Stephen and me down a wide green Shropshire river and told us that if we touched any of the brass screws in the bottom of the boat it would fall apart and sink.
So we sat clutching our knees trying to hold our feet in the air because the water looked so cold and neither of us could swim.
Giant Uncle Ted, who at weekends took us into the empty laundry where he was the manager and let us ride the conveyor belts up into the roof, high over the silent machines, and fall off the end onto mountains of dirty clothes.
Mad Uncle Ted, who one afternoon played William Tell with the dartboard on the back of the kitchen door and missed and threw a dart into the top of my cousin Stephen’s head as he stood stock-still beneath it.
Spellbinding Uncle Ted, who drove down Scottish country lanes in his laundry van with Stephen on his lap holding the steering wheel and me sitting high up behind them on brown paper parcels of washing, and when Stephen crashed the van into a narrow stone bridge, just burst out laughing and didn’t stop laughing until we got back to the house in Dumfries, where one night the kitchen ceiling fell down and rats ran across the beds in the darkness, even though there were nine cats in the house, including one which Stephen’s little sister Christine dressed up in her doll’s clothes and put to bed in her doll’s pram, and another cat, a genuine Scottish Wildcat – or so Uncle Ted said when it sank its teeth into his thumb.
My wonderful uncle, who made the empty space in my heart where my father should have been feel emptier than ever and yet filled it up with light and laughter.
My wonderful, wonderful uncle, so different from my remote grandfather and the rest of my family, who I wished so much was my father, an uncle that I loved like no one else, an uncle that everyone should have one like.
Life with Pam and Ted was one long adventure and I never wanted to go home. It was like being deliriously happy drunk and the sombre silence of my own home was the hangover, stone cold sober and full of sadness.
Life with Auntie Pam and Uncle Ted was how life should be and I lived from one school holiday to the next holding on to tiny details that other people with normal lives forgot because they could take them for granted.
When I was with them, it felt as if my eyes were wide open all the time, and that back at home I was half-asleep, part of me switched off.
Stephen and I would lie in bed at night and talk until we fell asleep. Sometimes we didn’t clean our teeth. Sometimes we didn’t wash our faces and we never knelt by our beds with our hands clasped to say our prayers.
If Auntie Pam had had her way, I would never have gone home, just moved in and lived with them as their fifth child. My loving mother even agreed at one point to Pam and Ted adopting me, but my grandmother put a stop to that because of what the neighbours might think.
Every year they seemed to live somewhere different, places that were far away and exotic – Shropshire, Dumfries, Cornwall. I think Uncle Ted got restless, maybe they all did, because they never seemed to stay in one place for long.
Not like us. We had our feet nailed to the ground. Everyone in Audley Road, Ealing, London, W5 did. I was born in the Old Court Nursing Home round the corner, baptised and went to Sunday School in the church round another corner, and went to school down the road.
We were all like that round there, because we knew our place and we knew it didn’t get any better than that.
But Uncle Ted had a head full of dreams – nothing dramatic like moving to Australia, but where his dreams flew his body and his family followed. Their homes were always full of half-unpacked cardboard boxes as if they never knew when the wanderlust might take them again, so there was no point in unwrapping everything, just what they needed there and then.
The boxes with their newspaper nests were always home to a troupe of cats that travelled the country with them, stragglers left behind here, new kittens adopted there.
Every summer I spent the holidays somewhere new, in places that were full of excitement, places that to most people were probably quite ordinary, but places where life might suddenly break out of its rigid repetition and burst into song.
Cornwall was the best. I was fifteen by then, but life with Pam and Ted was still a wonderful adventure of illicit happiness. And when I look back, I realised they just lived a normal life that thousands of families everywhere did and none of it was illicit at all.
Normal people often left the washing-up until the next morning and didn’t get into trouble or feel guilty about it. Normal people told dirty jokes and laughed unashamedly at them and sometimes went to bed in their vests. They didn’t kneel on the floor every night, hands clasped, eyes uplifted to some invisible fiction, asking for blessings and forgiveness from some demanding spirit that lived above the ceiling and could never be satisfied.