Naver Call me Mummy again

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The Brook

I come from haunts of coot and hern,

I make a sudden sally

And sparkle out among the fern,

To bicker down a valley.

By thirty hills I hurry down,

Or slip between the ridges,

By twenty thorpes, a little town,

And half a hundred bridges.

Till last by Philip’s farm I flow

To join the brimming river,

For men may come and men may go,

But I go on for ever.

I chatter over stony ways,

In little sharps and trebles,

I bubble into eddying bays,

I babble on the pebbles.

With many a curve my banks I fret

By many a field and fallow,

And many a fairy foreland set

With willow-weed and mallow.

I chatter, chatter, as I flow

To join the brimming river,

For men may come and men may go,

But I go on for ever.

I wind about, and in and out,

With here a blossom sailing,

And here and there a lusty trout,

And here and there a grayling,

And here and there a foamy flake

Upon me, as I travel

With many a silvery waterbreak

Above the golden gravel,

And draw them all along, and flow

To join the brimming river,

For men may come and men may go,

But I go on for ever.

I steal by lawns and grassy plots,

I slide by hazel covers;

I move the sweet forget-me-nots

That grow for happy lovers.

I slip, I slide, I gloom, I glance,

Among my skimming swallows;

I make the netted sunbeam dance

Against my sandy shallows.

I murmur under moon and stars

In brambly wildernesses;

I linger by my shingly bars;

I loiter round my cresses;

And out again I curve and flow

To join the brimming river,

For men may come and men may go,

But I go on for ever.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

CHAPTER 1

The flowers that seemed to be hanging in a vertical bunch from an invisible vase on the small, polished-wood table were almost luminescent in the dimly lit room. My brother stopped a few feet away from where I was standing, hesitated for a moment and then closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he took a deep breath and stepped forward until his shoulder was almost touching mine. I turned my head to look directly at him and, as I did so, I realized my hands were sweating.

We looked down almost simultaneously into the open coffin and I could sense the same stiffening of my brother’s muscles that I could feel in mine. At first, I didn’t recognize the pale face that lay below us. It was the face of an old man whose pallid skin had an unnatural, almost waxen, texture. What struck me more than anything else, however, was how small he looked. I had always thought of him as big and very strong, but death had stripped him of the aura of powerful aggression he’d had in life, and by doing so it allowed me to see him for what he had really always been – nothing more than a belligerent bully.

I could feel an emotion rising up inside me. It seemed to be coming from the very centre of my being, from the place where, as a child, I’d imagined my soul might be. At first I couldn’t identify the feeling that was spreading like liquid through every vein in my body. It certainly wasn’t sadness: whatever else I might feel about the passing of the man who lay in the silk-lined wooden casket, I had no sense of loss or mourning.

When an involuntary sound like a suppressed cough escaped from my partially open lips, my brother looked quickly towards me and I immediately covered my mouth with my hand, like a guilty child. But it was too late to stop the roar of laughter from exploding out of me into the respectfully silent room. I’d had no warning that it was coming and once it started it wasn’t something I could control.

I let my hand drop on to my brother’s shoulder in a gesture of apology – or maybe because I felt an instinctive need to touch and align myself with another living being. And, as I did so, he began to laugh too.

‘He looks so … insignificant, almost pathetic,’ my brother said at last, the words fragmenting as he tried to catch his breath. ‘Why, in God’s name, were we so afraid of him?’

We were still laughing when we turned our backs on our father and walked, side by side, out of the room.

Although it would be understandable if you thought otherwise after reading the last few paragraphs, I’m not a callous person. In fact I tend to be oversensitive to other people’s misfortunes, and I’d gladly move heaven and earth to prevent the people I love from feeling pain or distress. If there’s one thing that makes me believe there must be good in me, it’s the knowledge that my wife, Anne, still loves me.

Anne is a gentle, kind woman and I know she couldn’t love a man who hadn’t earned her respect. For all these years I’ve held her love – and the love of my daughter – inside me like a precious talisman. Even when dark, unhappy thoughts of my childhood crowd in on me and threaten to swamp me, if I try hard enough, I can see the light that shines from their love and I can use it to guide myself back up to the surface again.

Every significant or momentous event in one’s life is bound to elicit some sort of emotional response, and on that day when my brother and I stood looking at the mortal remains of our father in his coffin, laughter – born, I suppose, of relief – was the one emotion that came naturally to us. I had other complicated, confused feelings too, but my overwhelming sense was that some burden I’d been carrying since my childhood had been lifted off my shoulders as a result of my father’s death.

I was a man when my father died. I was just two years old when I saw my mother for the last time. I remember very little about the day she was taken from the house on a stretcher, lifted carefully into the back of an ambulance and driven away. My only complete memory of that day – which is one of the most vivid memories of my early childhood – is of watching the ambulance as it backed up towards the front door. When it hit one of the wooden pillars that supported the porch, there was a thud and the whole structure began to sway precariously. I can remember seeing my father running to put a hand on the pillar, as if to hold the whole thing up. Then he shouted and banged on the side of the ambulance with his fist. If it hadn’t been for all the panic about my mother, I don’t know whether the ambulance driver would have escaped, as he did, without a bloody nose.

Of course, at the age of two, I didn’t really understand what was happening – either when the porch swayed or when my mother was carried out of the house. The thought certainly didn’t enter my head that she wouldn’t ever be coming home again. I’ve always wished I had known what was going to happen that day, so I could have put my arms around my mother’s neck and begged her not to go, although in reality I know she didn’t have any choice and she didn’t leave me because she wanted to, or because of anything I’d done.

My mother was twenty-eight when she died. The few memories I have of her and of the first two years of my life are vague, like faded, out-of-focus, sepia photographs. But I think she was good to me, and to my siblings too, from the little they told me about her over the years.

I don’t think my father treated my mother very well, so perhaps dying was a sort of release for her – an escape from a life that may not have been a happy one. And maybe she’d have been glad to know that the child she tried to abort with a knitting needle – which was the act that led to her death – didn’t survive either.

People say that children need their mothers. I certainly needed mine. I know there are many fathers raising children on their own and doing as good a job of it as any mother would do. But at the other end of the spectrum there are fathers like Harold E. Kilby.

I was born on 10 February 1942 – more or less slap bang in the middle of the Second World War. The venue of my first smacked bottom and affronted cry was a nursing home in a Cotswold market town. By the time I was born, my parents already had four children between the ages of three and eight; I was their second son. When I was a few days old, my mother took me home to a small, red-brick, three-bedroom bungalow in a village that was little more than a mile away.

The bungalow was next to an estate owned by a man called Colonel Howard and his wife, who everyone knew as Dr Margaret. For as long as I can remember, I’ve drawn comfort from the belief that my mother and Dr Margaret had a warm, friendly relationship: why else would someone who was a GP and local magistrate become godmother to the son of someone like my father?

If it was my mother who was responsible for creating the connection that existed between me and such a remarkable woman, I’m grateful to her, not least because it was Dr Margaret, with the help of my grandmother, who gave me my first insight into the way other people live their lives. It was a re-education that was to prove as enlightening as it was enduring, and I believe it played a significant part in opening my eyes to possibilities and options that changed and probably saved my life.

Most of what I now know about the time when I was looked after by my mother before she died, I learned many years later from my siblings. However, there are two things I’ve always known, instinctively and with certainty: that my mother loved me and that, whatever happened during those first two years, they were the best years of my entire childhood.

The fact that my mother died before I had a chance to be aware of and remember her, remains one of my greatest regrets. Although my father lived until I was an adult with a family of my own, it seems I didn’t really know him either.

I never had any reason to like my father and there’s nothing I could learn about him now that would change the way I’ve always felt about him. It wasn’t until I was in my forties that I even considered the possibility that his character was anything but one dimensional, and I was very surprised to discover that he was quite a clever man. Before then, I don’t think I’d given much thought to what he did to earn a living.

The experiences of my childhood had crushed any chance there might otherwise have been of having a relationship with my father; it certainly wasn’t something he’d ever wanted to have with me. I’d never been interested in what he thought or what he did, because I already knew everything I needed to know about all the aspects of his character that impacted on my own life: he was nasty, brutal and self-serving and whether he was capable of caring about anyone – which I very much doubt – he’d never held any love in his hard heart for me.

In the 1980s, my eldest sister told me things about him that made me wonder for the first time what sort of man he really was – or had been when he was young. When my sister was dying, I went to visit her several times in hospital and when I arrived to see her one day she handed me a pink business card and said, ‘It was Dad’s. I want you to keep it.’

She was sitting up in the bed supported by pillows and I knew she was nearing the end of her life. If she hadn’t been so ill, I might have refused to take the card and told her I didn’t want anything that was associated with or had belonged to my father. In the circumstances, however, that would have seemed cruel, particularly as it was obviously important to her. So I took the card and put it in my pocket, assuring my sister that I’d do as she wanted me to and hold on to it.

I’d forgotten all about it when I reached into the pocket of my jacket later that day for my car keys and felt the edge of it with my fingers. Pulling it out, I read the words that were printed on it:

Sets supplied, two shillings a week

Lissen Radio battery charging

H. E. KILBY

Radio Contractor

Established 18 years

My father wasn’t much older than twenty when he married my mother, so I assume the business of hiring out radio sets and selling and repairing batteries had been started by my grandfather. According to my sister, our father – the H. E. Kilby whose name was engraved on the card – also added a new section to the shop where he sold what were called at the time gramophone records.

During those last days of her life when she was in hospital, my sister told me a lot of things I hadn’t previously known. There were also some things she wouldn’t talk about, including, for some reason, why our father either lost or had to give up the radio and battery business.

Three of the stories she told me gave me a particularly puzzling insight into a man I didn’t recognize, a man who didn’t sound anything like the father who’d plagued my miserable childhood and caused part of my soul to shrivel up and die before I was old enough to know that the way I was being treated wasn’t normal. I sometimes wondered if he would have behaved differently if his mind hadn’t been poisoned against me, although nothing could really have excused his cruelty and total lack of any paternal sense of being responsible for me and needing to protect me.

One of the incidents my sister told me about took place in 1937, the year that a silent film called The Sheik was re-released worldwide. Even today, excitement is generated by all the trumpet blowing and media hype that accompany the release of blockbuster films. So it isn’t difficult to imagine that at a time when very few people had televisions and when even radio sets weren’t found in every household, a film starring the handsome Italian actor and 1920’s heart throb Rudolph Valentino was a very big deal indeed.

My parents were living in a small town at the time of the film’s re-release, and when the date was set for it to be shown at the local picture house, my father got permission to set up a stall in the foyer, bought as many records of the film’s music as he could afford, dressed himself up in full Arab costume and sold his entire stock to eager filmgoers after each show. It was an astute and imaginative idea, thought up and put into action by a man who, certainly throughout my lifetime, never showed any sign of having either characteristic.

As well as being a good salesman, it seems that my father was also a clever engineer, as illustrated by another of the stories my sister told me. Apparently, when he was a young man he had a motorcycle with quite a large sidecar. One day, he fixed a control panel into the sidecar, lay down so that he could see out through a small Perspex window, covered himself with a blanket and drove the seemingly rider-less motorcycle around the town where he was living at the time. He was stopped eventually by the local policeman, who can’t have been completely unsympathetic to my father’s attempt to liven up the sleepy market town because he let him off with just a warning.

It’s a story that paints a picture of a young man with a sense of humour and fun – as I say, a man I wouldn’t ever have recognized as my father.

I’ve never wanted to feel connected in any way to the man I knew him to be, so it doesn’t make me happy to think that I probably inherited my own practical abilities and interest in engineering from him. What makes me really sad, though, is the thought of how different everything might have been if he’d been influenced by a good woman rather than by the evil witch who became my stepmother.

The third of the most surprising stories was more in keeping with the man I knew.

When my mother was alive and we were living in the bungalow that was my first home, we had some chickens, a tortoise – which miraculously survived being run over by a lorry – and a red setter called David. I remember the chickens and the tortoise, but I don’t remember the dog at all. It was really my mother’s dog, but apparently my brother, sisters and I loved it passionately too.

‘Within a week of Mum dying,’ my sister told me just a few days before she died herself, ‘Dad poisoned that dog with cyanide. I won’t ever forget the sound of its screams.’

‘That’s terrible,’ I said. I could feel tears welling up in my eyes. ‘Why would anyone do something like that? Why was he such a cruel man?’

My sister just shrugged her shoulders and refused to talk any more about our father, and after she died, there weren’t many other people who were able – or willing – to fill in any of the many gaps in my memory of my childhood. In fact, it was only relatively recently that someone filled in a gap I almost wish had been left unfilled and told me what my mother had been attempting to do when she inflicted on herself the injury that resulted in her death: it seems that it wasn’t the first time she’d tried to give herself an abortion with a knitting needle.

Surprisingly perhaps, in view of the second horrible turn of events that occurred within weeks of the ambulance coming for my mother on that spring morning in March 1944 – less than a month after my second birthday – I consider myself lucky to have been born. I don’t feel angry with her for leaving us unprotected and defenceless against the evil that came to reside in our house when she was gone. She must have been at the end of her tether to do what she did; I can’t bear to think about how miserable and lonely she must have felt.

I have just one clear, precious memory of my mother: I was sitting on her lap while she fed me what I think was bacon fat. (It was a different era, before people were burdened by knowledge about the potential health hazards of the things they ate – and smoked.) As well as that one memory, I have one photograph of her, which shows a slim, pretty, dark-haired young woman with kind eyes and a shy, tentative smile.

It’s funny how things that are locked away in your mind sometimes find a means of expressing themselves without your understanding what’s happening. That photograph is a case in point: I didn’t realize for many years that it was the reason why I collected, almost compulsively, porcelain figurines of slim young women with dark hair. I think I’ve been searching for my mother since I was two years old.

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE BEGINNING

Peter Kilby with Jane Smith

NEVER CALL ME MUMMY AGAIN

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

A Good Boy

The Brook

CHAPTER 1