Meanwhile, Mum was still getting knocked about. She was working in my Uncle Ronnie’s shop in Port Glasgow – he was a Newsagent – and she’d come in early in the morning, sometimes not having been to bed at all, with bruised lips and black eyes, and my uncle would say: ‘Oh, Helen, you can’t serve the customers looking like that,’ and she’d say: ‘Well, it was your brother that did this to me.’ But, of course, no one intervened. It was a different time then. Domestic violence was still considered a private matter, something for couples to sort out between themselves.
‘That’s bloody terrible,’ he’d say. ‘You should hit him back.’
Fat lot of good that advice was. Things got so bad that Mum finally worked up the courage to leave him, and the council gave her, Ronnie and Yvonne a flat. But Dad was soon back, pleading forgiveness, promising that everything would be different. And so it would be, for a few weeks. Then he’d start sliding again, back to his old ways, all this anger always pouring out of him. Oh, he was good at crying crocodile tears, but his heart was an empty space where all the normal feelings a man has for his family should have been.
Next, they embarked on some kind of house swap, and the four of them ended up in Bridgwater in Somerset. Same old story…No sooner had they settled in than Dad was off again – this time on a cruise ship. He took Diane with him, to sing, which put Mum’s mind at rest a little because even after everything he’d done to her, she was still worrying that he would run off with someone else, and she had this idea that a cruise would be full of beautiful women. Diane was engaged by this time, and her fiance and Mum saved up to go out and meet the ship in Venice. Mum worked so hard – she had three part-time jobs on the go all at the same time. But when they got there, no sooner had they boarded the ship than Dad had some big, drunken argument with the man who was in charge of the entertainment. This ended with Dad, in a fit of pique, sabotaging all the ship’s musical equipment, at which the captain told him he had to leave. They all came back to London by bus – a fine end to Mum’s dream trip. Did he feel bad about this? Did he feel guilty? Not at all. He had got his revenge, and that was all that mattered.
It was in Bridgwater that he committed the final transgression, and departed our lives – almost for good, if not quite. It’s a time I cannot think about without feeling the blood pulsing in my temples, though I was not even there when it happened. I’m not sure what I’d have done if I had been.
Dad had had a couple of drinks, but he certainly knew what he was doing; this attack was calculated, clever even, not some dumb, drunken rage. He came home from work one night, and he just started. There was no ‘trigger’. Mum was in bed, with a mug of hot milk. He poured it all over her, even as she lay there, leaving bad scalding to her chest. Then he dragged her downstairs, and the beating started. By the time the ambulance arrived, she looked like she’d done five rounds with a heavyweight boxer. Her eyes were completely closed, her face swollen and pulped. First, she was taken to a hospital, then to a refuge. Dad, of course, didn’t stay to face the music. He disappeared at the first sound of a police siren.
A few days later, I finally tracked him down. He was with a woman called Anne, whom he would later marry.
‘Mum’s been in hospital for three days,’ I said. ‘And she’s still wearing sunglasses.’
‘Well, she asked for it,’ he said.
That was when the social services and all the other authorities got fully involved, and a restraining order was taken out on him. He wasn’t allowed anywhere near the house.
But when Mum went home, she found everything that she had built up and saved for smashed to smithereens. He hadn’t left as much as a light bulb intact.
Worst of all, Dad had left a note on the mantelpiece. It said: ‘One night, when you are least expecting it, I’ll come back and finish you off’. Even after the restraining order came into effect, there were some evenings when Mum would be sitting in alone and the phone would ring and she’d hear his voice telling her that he was on his way. Many nights, you would have seen a patrol car parked outside the house, just in case. How she slept, I’ll never know.
Journalists have often asked me whether I loved Dad, whether I had any love at all in my heart for him. The truth is that any time I tried to get close, I’d just come up against this competitive streak in him. Later, my feelings for him hardened into hatred. Everything he did, I was determined to do the opposite. I never wanted to follow in his footsteps, and that’s why I never picked up a fucking guitar, and that’s why I never sat at the fucking piano. Were there any good times? Not really. I suppose the only thing that I really admired about him was the fact that he was a fisherman. He was a great fisherman, there’s no two ways about it. But even that got tainted by all the other stuff.
Ronnie was good at keeping Dad’s secrets, but I made the mistake of telling Mum exactly what he used to get up to. After that, I was never taken fishing again. We used to go to this campsite on the River Tay in Perth – salmon fishing. Ronnie and I would be sitting on the riverbank at nine o’clock at night on our own, fishing, while Dad and his mate Thomas would be out drinking. He’d give us a fiver between us, and tell us to keep ourselves amused. I remember one time when the weather was bad, it was raining heavily, and we’d booked into this little bed-and-breakfast. That night, Ronnie and I ended up sleeping in the bathroom because Dad had brought some woman back. I can’t have been older than twelve at the time.
After a while, Dad went off to Spain, and I didn’t see him for many years. I was too busy trying to make a success of my life, but even if I hadn’t been working every hour God sent, I had no real wish to see him. Dad, though, had a way of turning up when you least expected him, like a bad penny. It was towards the end of 1997. I was busy trying to win my second Michelin star by this point – which should give you some idea of how much time had passed – when I got a call from Ronnie telling me that Dad was in Margate. He’d had an argument with Anne, and Anne’s sons, and he’d upped and left.
I called him on the number Ronnie had given me – I don’t know why. He sounded very low.
‘I’m here to see my doctor,’ he said.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Why are you really here?’
‘No, I’m back just to have a check-up.’ There was a pause. Then he said: ‘Can I see you?’
‘Yeah, yeah, I’ll come down.’
It had been a difficult year. My wife, Tana, and I were expecting our first baby. And I was involved in all sorts of legal wrangles over my restaurant, Aubergine. Still, I drove down there. There was something in me that couldn’t refuse his request. We were to meet on the pier where we used to go fishing back when we had lived in the town ourselves, so I knew exactly where he’d be. I got out of my car and I saw this old, frail, white-haired man with bruises on his face, and marks on his knuckles. I felt stunned. This was the man I’d been scared of for so long, brought so low, so pathetic and feeble.
We went and had breakfast in a little cafe. The waiter came over and asked us what we would like and, straight away, Dad started into me, telling me that when I was at home I always used to steal his bread. The words came out of nowhere. Another unwarranted attack.
‘What’s happened to you?’ I said.
‘Oh, Anne and I separated, and I had an argument with one of her sons and he tried to have a go at me.’
‘Look at the state of you. Where are you living?’
He pointed at the car park, and there, as ever, was his Ford Transit van. We went out and I opened it up and inside there were all his possessions: his music equipment, his clothes, and these silly lamps – paraffin lamps – and an inflatable camp bed in the back with these awful net curtains in the windows.
We finished our breakfast, and we went for a walk on the pier, and it was so sad. So I went to the bank, and I got out £1,000 and I gave it to him for the deposit on a flat. I thought that at least I could do the right thing by him. And that’s what he did, he got a little one-bedroomed basement flat. A week later,