After that, he sold our home, a sprawling country pile outside Kinross known as ‘Warwick House’ (over 30 years later I’m still confused – how could he have afforded it in the first place?), before leaving The Edinburgh String Quartet and disappearing to the west coast of Scotland to dive for scallops and build himself a yacht. Two years on, Monkey Hanger set sail for the Caribbean and he’s been there ever since.
On the surface, Austin Patterson had a stable family background, and yet he was never satisfied with his lot – if you’ve ever been to Hartlepool in the north-east of England, you’ll probably have a good idea why. Mollycoddled by a gentle mother and demonised by a tyrannical father, he was in many ways the classic war baby, torn between a sense of duty and a sense of disgust at said duty – a rebel in a straitjacket. The unhappy soul became a driven individual, determined to: a) prove a point to the bullying patriarch, and b) get the hell out of there.
He duly won a scholarship to the Guildhall School of Music in London and pretty soon he was fiddling his way through the Swinging Sixties – albeit decked out like a penguin in dinner suit and dickie bow for the BBC Concert Orchestra. ‘Fiddling’, in fact, became the recurring motif of his life. More of which later.
Contentment never led to any revolution, it’s true. And restlessness leads to change, which can be better or worse than the original state of affairs. Perhaps restless people shouldn’t live on an isolated farm. Then they wouldn’t wallop their five-year-old son over the head for singing ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ while feeding the geese (blasphemy, apparently, though he wasn’t religious himself) or throw their wife’s homemade pizza against the wall because it wasn’t hot enough.
Some people are bad but their bad intentions result in something good. Take Guy Fawkes, for example – he tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament and now we get bonfire parties every year. But I’m not going to burn my ‘Guy’, despite the shadow he’s cast over our life. Instead, what I’d like to try to do now is forgive him. And the best way of doing that is to celebrate his mistakes. Because, without his mistakes, I wouldn’t have got to where I am now: a retired rocker spouting a lot of psycho-babble.
How To Disrespect A Good Mother
We used our dad’s name, Patterson, for quite a while, even after he deserted us, until our Mum, Catherine (pronounced ‘C-A-T-E-R-E-E-N’), opted for her own distinctive surname – ‘Poullain’* – to signal a single-handed devotion and sole authority over us. Being French, and the most hyper woman on the planet, she couldn’t help but stand out among the dowdy Scottish mothers who tended to shy away from denim hot-pants and a Kevin Keegan bubble perm. It wasn’t unusual for an 11-year-old budding Romeo in my primary school to rhapsodise about her charms – ‘Franny’s ma’s a pure “ride”, by the way!’ – while his pal would nod along sagely, just to make sure I got the point: ‘Ah’d gie her one, right enough.’
I was touched by the sentiment, but wasn’t quite sure how to respond.
She brought me up to believe that ‘Humans are worse than pigs because at least pigs push their rubbish into a corner.’ Looking back she was right, but that’s probably what triggered off my misanthropy, and it also meant my mum was accidentally responsible for me becoming a vegetarian: after all, how could I be expected to breakfast on a superior life form?
Instead, she broke raw eggs into our porridge (oats, water and salt) on school days, insisting that the heat of the oats would ‘cook’ the eggs and that this slimy ritual was the most nutritious breakfast anyone could wish for. I could gag all I like – when it came to the benefits of a healthy morning meal, my mum’s mind was made up. And there was a wooden spoon at hand to make sure we got the message.
One day back in the mid-eighties, we were cruising along the Promenade des Anglais in Nice on the Côte D’Azur, on the way to see our French grandparents, when a couple of friendly hitching backpackers noticed the UK number plate on our Mini hatchback and shouted, ‘WE’RE BRITISH TOO!’ just as we were approaching them. It was a lovely day, but overheated car journeys can get to anyone – even mothers. She shot her head out the window and howled like a banshee: ‘F-O-C-K O-F-F!’The Promenade des Anglais froze in shocked silence. I looked back and saw these bewildered hippies with their mouths hanging open, wondering exactly what it was they’d done to provoke such fury.
With her French accent, and the sheer randomness of said outburst, the incident was doubly entertaining for my brothers and me. After that, whenever we saw hippies thumbing a lift we’d shout, ‘FUCK OFF!’ at them – in a French accent, of course – just to see their reaction. If there’s one thing worse than a hippy, it’s a hitchhiking one who’s British and proud of it.
Recently, she got back from a Kenyan safari holiday and made a point of telling me a story about the male bull elephant reaching adolescence. Apparently, with the first sexual stirrings he tries instinctively to ‘mount’ the mother, who then pushes him away, banishing him into adulthood and the outside world. Then, if she sees him again, she’ll raise her trunk in a greeting of recognition and he’ll silently march past in a kind of stoic shame.
It seems that even baby elephants are embarrassed about maternal relations. But you don’t learn anything if you only stay in one place, so you could say that being embarrassed is a blessing in disguise – sometimes it takes travelling the world to realise that your mum is the most entertaining one.
* ‘Poulain’ is French for ‘foal’ or ‘baby horse’, but bullies chose to mishear it as ‘poulet’ (‘chicken’). I can’t blame them, really. There’s much less mileage in: ‘You’re nothing but a baby horse.’
I was the middle child. On the surface, to be in the middle is bad – a balance, a compromise, a nothing. That’s the way of life. But eager people travel from the middle to extreme directions. This can end up well or badly. They say some of them don’t even go to confession.
The three of us were born in successive years; in fact, my older brother Tim and I are ‘Irish twins’. That means there’s less than a year between us. Eight days less, to be precise – Mum and Dad were fast movers, pioneering the ‘Coitus “Non”- Interruptus’ approach years before it became fashionable among the Vikki Pollards of today. In many ways my brother’s a classic ‘Timothy’. He has what I would call ‘Posh Tourette’s’, a politer version of the usual affliction: at least half of his vocabulary consists of the words ‘thank you’, ‘please’ and ‘sorry’, spat out like friendly fire from his ‘Timmy’ gun. Sometimes you’ll walk past him and he’ll mutter, ‘Sorry’, for merely encroaching into your vicinity. And when you ask him to ‘Please stop saying sorry’ (I can be quite polite sometimes too), he’ll reply (you guessed it): ‘Sorry!’ An apology fetishist.
Tim loves to show people a good time. Apparently, cheering people up is now recognised as a form of intelligence, because, in his own words, ‘If you’re surrounded by happy people it’s bound to rub off eventually, and surely the whole point of being intelligent is to be happy?’At least, that’s how he tried to explain it to me – and he’s always had straight ‘A’s, so he should know. Like all brothers, we’re different and we’re the same. When I’m in the company of happy people, I can’t help monitoring them – just to check if they’re doing it properly.
My younger brother, Chris,