Essex Boy: My Story (3 page)

We didn’t get told it all at the time, but over the years I have pieced together the fact that Dad had met Stacie, who was about eight years younger than him, at the club, Hollywood, where
he worked on the door.
She worked behind the bar, and at some point their relationship had moved from being co-workers and friends to having an affair, and he must have fallen in love with her.

Of course, from day one I had a real issue with Stacie.
In my mind she was the woman who had destroyed my family and hurt my mum, so I was never going to click with her.
And I don’t think
she took to me either.
Perhaps she knew I was such a mummy’s boy that she would never win me over, so she didn’t bother trying.
In the beginning we would have conversations, but they
were always short and awkward.
I wasn’t comfortable around her.

Not that we didn’t have good times when we went to visit Dad – of course we did.
After that first visit we would often stay for the whole weekend, so there was time to do loads
more.

I will never forget these mini motorbikes Dad bought for us.
We used to ride them around the back yard of the warehouse where he worked down at the docks.
There would always be plenty of other
workers around – mostly men – but they didn’t mind us.
They would just say a few nice words and stand and watch us if they were on a break.
We were tiny at the time, but I guess
it was Dad’s way of introducing us to motorbikes, as he loved them so much.
Whenever he was driving us there and back through the docks in his van, there was one bit where it looked like the
road had dropped away next to us, and he would go really close to it, and pretend he was going to drive us off into the water.
We’d be screaming our heads off in the back, genuinely convinced
we might fall off.
But then as soon as he veered away, we’d be bravely shouting for him to do it again!
Other times he took us to a nearby hill and we would go down it on the bikes.
I was in
the Beavers and so he would also take me to the little hut in Tilbury where we had the weekly meetings, and played games, and whatever else it is you do at Beavers!

Like I said, Dad was always keen for us to go to church, and he kept that up any Sunday we were with him, taking us to St Thomas of Canterbury.
And we would also go and visit
our grandparents, who lived nearby.

Dad’s parents were always very presentable.
His dad, Bernard, was always in a shirt and tie, even indoors – I still have a pair of his cufflinks today that he used to wear all the
time.
He would never talk rude, or think it was OK to fart or burp in front of a lady.
He would hold himself well, and always shake my hand.
I don’t ever remember getting a cuddle off him
– it was always a firm handshake, which made me feel very grown-up.
He was a real gentleman.

Dad’s mum was called Margaret, but I always called her Nanny Pernod, as in the alcohol.
Apparently she once bought a dog for one of my uncles – Dad was one of five kids – and
he called it Pernod as he liked the smell, and somehow that became my name for her too!

My favourite memory of Nanny Pernod is from when I was very small.
Someone in the family had died, but I was too young to go to the funeral, so she was looking after me while everyone else was
away.
She took me out for the afternoon and bought me a little green stuffed dog that I called Oscar, after the lurcher we had at home.
I loved Oscar and took him everywhere, although he was
forever falling apart and having to be sewn up, as he got dragged into just about every scrape and adventure with me.
He joined my other favourite toy, a car that could play the
Batman
theme tune.
That car was great – until I dropped it in a glass of milk and broke it.

When I was about six, Nanny Pernod got cancer of the oesophagus, and had to have her voice box removed and a stoma put in her throat – where they make a hole for you to breathe through
instead.
It meant she had to have one of those little microphones that you put up to your throat to speak – the ones that make your voice sound robotic.
I didn’t really understand why
she was speaking like that at the time and found it scary at first, and then funny.
It was quirky and she used to joke around with it to make us laugh, pretending to be a robot.
Ironically, she was
cured of the cancer, then a year or two later she was killed by a haemorrhage in her stomach, caused by all the medication she was on.
It was my first experience with death and I don’t think
anyone really told me what had happened, or said, ‘She has gone for ever.’
I watched her deteriorate, and then she was no longer there.
There was a general feeling of sadness, but I
only realized she was really gone when I asked, ‘Can we go and see Nanny Pernod?’
And they said, ‘No, we can’t.’

Like in my memories of Dad, I associate a smell with Nanny Pernod: the scent of lime, similar to one of those shower gels that smell like real fruit.
Sometimes when I’m shopping,
I’ll go down the health and beauty aisle in the supermarket just for a quick smell of the gel, to remind me of her.

My mum’s side of the family were very different.
Her parents were called Jean and Fred, although to me they were Nan and Granddad.
They were both quite slim and small, and Nan really
looked like my mum, just a few years older!
While Granddad never went bald, but had this big mass of white hair that everyone always commented on.
They lived a couple of miles from us in Tilbury,
and because Mum couldn’t drive, whenever we went over we had to walk.
It was a horrible route along a busy road with no pavement but we had no other choice if we wanted to see them.

Then once we got there, all the men would be telling rude jokes, getting drunk, doing crazy things, even smoking joints on special occasions!
Granddad would get someone to roll him a spliff and
hide it in with his other rollies, then when he got to smoking that one he’d say, ‘Oh, this one tastes a bit different, I wonder why?!’

Nan would shout, ‘Fred!
What are you doing?!’
and he would go off and hide in the shed to finish it without getting in more trouble from his wife.
He was brilliant!

It was great fun, and very easy to relax around them, but they were the complete opposite to my dad’s parents.
We always had to remember whose family we were visiting, so we knew how smart
or otherwise we had to be dressed, and how politely we must behave!

Nan and Granddad’s house wasn’t the only place we had to walk to.
It was a pain not having a car where we lived.
Because it was a new estate, not many shops had been built nearby
yet, so Mum had to walk everywhere – and I mean everywhere.
In my memories of her around that time she is always walking, walking, walking .
.
.
She had never taken her driving test for the
same reason she hadn’t developed a career – she married young and thought Dad would always be around, and as he could drive, that seemed like enough.
She would head out to do the weekly
shop at Asda while we stayed at home, as it was a hard enough job for her without having to drag us along too.
It was quite a mission to get there, but she would head off and reappear a couple of
hours later, with dozens of Asda bags all up her arms – she must have had the strongest arms in the world by the time we left Borley Court!

There weren’t even any decent bus routes around ours yet that she could use – although that was good for us in one way.
Because it was impossible for us to get to school, the council
provided a free taxi to and from school for us each day.
So actually, we travelled to school in luxury!

But no matter how hard things got on her own, Mum kept on trying.
At night she would make a real point of the three of us curling up on the sofa together after dinner, watching TV and cuddling.
We always felt really loved by her.
And she would do little things to encourage us.
She knew I hated school, so she would have some sweets for Daniel and me laid out on the sideboard waiting for us
when we got in every day.
She always made sure that we got exactly the same amount each.
Some days there weren’t many, maybe just a couple of sweets, but they were always there as a little
reminder she had thought about us during the day.
It was one of those things I always looked forward to as a kid.

Mum made sure that we grew up polite, knowing good manners, and to say please and thank you to people.
That was her real obsession: ‘No matter what, say please when you ask for something,
and thank you when you get it!’

And she would teach us good morals as well: to be kind, to share and to help other people.
They’re basic things, but it can take time to teach them to kids.

Like many single parents, one of Mum’s big worries was money.
She went back to work after she split up with Dad, which was something she had never expected to do, and
brought in money that way.
But she wasn’t very qualified or experienced, so there was a limit to what she could do.
While we were at school she worked in a warehouse, putting leaflets and
free gifts inside magazines, and then on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights she worked in a restaurant, while our grandparents or one of our older cousins babysat.
But it wasn’t always
enough to get us by, and sometimes we would have to turn to Dad.
He and Mum didn’t have an official agreement about money after he left.
Instead he carried on paying the mortgage, and Mum was
to deal with the rest of the bills.
He would also give her extra money from time to time when she needed help, but he soon stopped that, claiming she was spending it on herself.

There was a lot going on between my parents that we didn’t know about, so I can’t make too much of a judgement about the way things were.
Mum and Dad were protecting us by not
telling us everything, and anyway we were too young to understand.
But there was one time that sticks in my mind when it was hard not to feel that we could really have used some help from Dad.

The first Christmas after he left, the electricity and gas in our house ran out as there was no money left on the meter.
We couldn’t believe that they were both gone – and at that
time of the year.
So Mum called Dad.
I don’t know what his response was, but for whatever reason we didn’t get the money to put in the meter over Christmas.
Mum wouldn’t have gone
to her family about it as she’d have been too proud and didn’t want to be seen to be failing.
So there we were, the three of us, sitting there on Christmas Day and then Boxing Day, no
lights, no heating, no electricity.
We couldn’t make our Christmas dinner as there was no way to cook, and there was no television or anything like that.
We literally just sat there.
As the
only cash Mum had saved had been spent on food, we hadn’t been bought presents, so it wasn’t like we had new toys or whatever to play with.
I remember my mum crying, I guess because she
felt responsible, and it’s not what anyone wants for their kids.
She must have felt embarrassed, sad and ashamed, but I was just angry for her.
She was doing what she could, and then that
went and happened.
And it was like that for four days.
Even having a bath we could only sit in cold water.
It was hell, to put it bluntly.

Not that we didn’t have happy times in Borley Court.
In fact, in a way, that was the happiest time of my childhood after Dad had gone.
Daniel and I were closest around this time, mainly
because there weren’t many other kids our age living on the estate yet.
A lot of the houses were still empty so we made do with each other as playmates, and actually, we got on pretty well,
despite the three-and-a-half-year age gap.

Like our first house, this one had empty fields nearby, and by now I was old enough to go and roam around them.
Daniel and I felt totally free to run wild and created a whole other world for
ourselves out there!
I swear it was summer most of the time we were living in that house.
In nearly every memory I have from Borley Court, the sun is shining and we are outdoors.
I am sure we had
proper summers when I was a kid, not the ‘sun one day, rainy crap the next’ that we seem to get these days.
And as for the six-week school holiday .
.
.
that went on for ever!

Our favourite place to go was a big field about a minute from the house, which was used as a dumping ground.
We would find all sorts in there.
Other people’s rubbish could be an amazing
find for us.
Our best discovery was some old office wheelie chairs – we spent hours pushing them to the top of the hill above our house and then racing down.
It was great fun – until
the day I split my thumb open and Daniel broke his arm.
Then we had to stop that one .
.
.