Most of the photos in this book are from my grandmother’s and my mother’s photograph albums. It says a lot about my family’s self-importance that the ONLY photos with my Uncle Ted in are four pictures from their wedding in 1944. There are dozens and dozens of photos from many years of my Aunt Bill’s husband Guy – the one who use to take his belt to my cousin Jenny if she wet the bed, but then my Aunt Bill must have told him otherwise he wouldn’t have known. But then, Uncle Guy came from our side of the tracks. So that was OK.
STYLE – I HAS IT
I was at the cutting edge of fashion right from the very start, as you can see.
The photo says it all: ‘Colin in first long trousers.’ I was almost thirteen and the last one in my class to stop going to school in shorts. Most of the other boys had got into long trousers by the time they were ten. I imagine the reason was because shorts were probably two shillings cheaper.
Photographs were a sort of grey-brown colour when I was a little boy. So I’ve added the yellow to my Mac and Souwester to show you just how fashionable I was and highlighted my wonderful Red Leather Gaiters, which had the girls in Savernake Kindergarten falling at my feet.Is it any wonder I grew up colour blind?
Looks can be deceiving. I promise you I was NEVER a hippy. I’m far too cynical. I was simply scruffy.
OH GOD
It’s not the photo of me saying my prayers that is so terrible, it’s the fact that my mother actually wanted to record it.
There were parts of growing up when it wasn’t just the photographs that were out of focus.
I actually had a soprano voice like an angel and passed the audition to go to Westminster Choir School – but my voice and faith broke at about the same time.
1948, 1949, 1950, 1951, 1952, 1953 – HOW TO COMPLETELY FUCK UP YOUR ONLY CHILD FOREVER WITH ONE SIMPLE SENTENCE
‘Where’s my daddy?’
‘He was a horrid fat man who didn’t like children so I sent him away.’
This fiction was repeated every time I asked the question and I was sixteen before I discovered the truth.
He fucked someone else.
No, he was a horrid fat man who didn’t like children so he got sent away, which, of course, meant it was all my fault.
My mother then married God, but there was no Baby Jesus to be my brother.
1950 – MY BEST FRIEND
This is a photo of me and my best friend Tigger. I had a black cat before this, but I can’t remember his name. I do remember that he gave me ringworm, which I was never told was not actually a worm, so was quite frightening. I had to go to hospital and have an ultraviolet light shone on my hair and then I think they put ointment on me and pulled some hairs out. I don’t know how often this happened, but it was more than once.
As for the cat, they killed him.
Then Tigger arrived and was my best friend until I was sent to boarding school.
While I was away at school, they killed him too, but told me he pined away because I wasn’t there, which meant it was my fault.* He was three years old. It was many years before I realised that cats are far too selfish to pine away.
When I was fourteen I built a big cage in my parent’s flat and got eight budgies and each one was a different colour.
While I was on holiday in Cornwall at Aunt Pam’s, my stepfather gave them and their cage away to an old people’s home.
*I think a pattern of guilt was emerging here.
1949 – MUMMIES AND DADDIES
‘Why do I always have to be the mummy?’ Anna, the girl next door, asked.
‘Because you’re the girl,’ I told her.
‘I want to be the daddy,’ she said.
‘Well, I’m the daddy. You have to be the mummy and stay at home with the baby and cook the dinner.’
We were both seven years old. Her mummy and daddy came from Greece and we were standing in the gloom of the abandoned air-raid shelter in their back garden.
Every house down Audley Road built a shelter during the war. Some were no more than corrugated tin covered with earth. They had been taken down years ago. Others, built of concrete, had been harder to demolish and a lot of people had just covered them with climbing roses and kept the lawnmower in there.
My grandparents had built their shelter underground in the front garden. As a baby, I slept through long nights in it, safe in the comforting smells of damp earth and condensed milk. A few miles away London had burned, but out in the suburbs the nights were generally calm and uneventful. Only one house in our street had been hit by a bomb. Our shelter had been sealed up and hidden under crazy paving and a bed of rose bushes, a tomb of ghosts and darkness. I imagine it’s still down there and whoever owns the house now won’t have the faintest idea it’s there.
I was born during the war, but I was only three when it ended and I have no memories of it, but its remnants and aftermath were still around. As my grandfather drove me through London in our big blue Wolseley, I peered over the edge of the window at a different world, a post-war gloom where grey kids with dirty faces and toy swords played on exciting-looking bomb sites in streets where the houses had no gardens or bathrooms. There was nothing like that in Ealing, W5. You could hear a pin drop three streets away. Our world was laid out in tidy squares, clean suburbs, nice gardens. I had an electric train set Uncle Ken brought me from Germany and a big wooden fort my grandfather got made by a German prisoner of war, with a place in the bottom where I could keep all my soldiers and tanks.
We didn’t just live on the right side of the tracks, we owned the factories that made the tracks and the trains that ran on them. Except we didn’t personally. My family actually owned the factories that had made
the surgical instruments to mend our wounded soldiers. The war, that killed so many, made my family rich.
‘Well, I want to be the daddy,’ Anna said. ‘It’s my house so I can say.’
‘Oh, all right then.’
‘Well, I’m off to work now,’ Anna said, ‘and when I come home you can have a baby.’
‘All right.’
I poured some water out of a jam jar into tin of earth and stirred it round and round with an old spoon.
‘I’ll get the dinner ready,’ I said.
‘OK,’ Anna said and walked off down the garden towards the blackcurrant bushes. I sat in the darkness of the air-raid shelter, stirring the mud. I stood up and rocked Anna’s doll’s pram backwards and forwards like I’d seen her do. The doll looked up at me with one eye shut and the other stuck wide open.
I could see cobwebs