Semi-Detached

Griff Rhys Jones was born in 1953. He was educated at Brentwood School and Cambridge University. He has worked as a security guard, a petrol-pump attendant and a television star and has written for hundreds of radio and television programmes, and in the press. His To the Baltic with Bob was published by Penguin in 2003.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank everybody who helped me try and remember some of this stuff, especially Graham, Charlotte and Geoff, also Louise, for being so patient, Cat for being so good, David for being so attentive and Jo, without whom nothing at all would be possible, ever.

So you think you will be happy, taking doggie for a walk
With your semi-detached suburban Mr…
Semi-detached suburban Mr…
Semi-detached suburban Mr Jones

1. Into the Woods

The first thing I can properly remember is having breathing competitions with my father. I can recreate the sensation of lying up close to him, in my parents’ bed, waiting for him to come to properly. We would have been under that pink eiderdown – the shiny satin thing, with the arabesques. It ended up in the spare room, the stitches going, fading in sunlight, but at that time, slippery and cool to the touch. It was thrown over the lot of us, crammed into the one bed on a Sunday morning. My older brother and little sister, across the landscape of imaginary hillocks, beyond the Kilimanjaro of my father’s stomach, were there too, huddled up against the cold. It was cold in houses in 1960s mornings. That’s why we were all in their bed. I must have been about four.

There had been previous lives in Cardiff and in Banchory in Scotland, where my sister was born. I had had a bobble hat with flaps and a pretty impressive sledge, because I have seen the photographs, but a starting point which is mine and not part of a diary or hypnotic recall is that Sunday imprisonment in my father’s hum. I can feel the walrus enormity of his presence, instantly reimagine the sure, steady rhythm of his inhalations, as he dozed on, drifting in and out of sleep while I waited for him to get up.

My father never slept like a baby. He slept like a piece of agricultural pumping machinery. It was quite impossible to out-breathe him. I got dizzy trying to fill my lungs in his ponderous way, particularly when the slight fizzing whistle started up and the honking suck of a snore began somewhere in the back of his throat. I remember worrying too, because listening to him used to make me acutely conscious of something that otherwise I did all the time without ever thinking about it.

To get back to my beginning, one weekday in March I returned to West Sussex. It was an unfamiliar route, which was good. There was a sense of exploration, which is what I wanted. At Hindhead the traffic lights in the middle of the A3 had a pre-war craziness, which was apposite. Turning left towards Haslemere, I began to pass the estate cottages, with their doors and windows in the jaundiced yellow of the Cowdrey Estate, turned off at the top of the downs on to the mile-long drive towards ‘the Sanny’ and plunged into a thick, wet mist. What could be more appropriate? I was visiting this place through a Powell and Pressburger special effect. My dad worked at this sanatorium as a junior doctor. We lived in ‘the Lodge’, sometimes known as ‘the Engineer’s Lodge’, just before you got to the hospital itself. I went to a kindergarten school called Conifers down the hill in Midhurst. When I was seven he got another job, and we moved away. But the truth is I always remember Midhurst as a paradisical half-dream. And now that world of woods and paths and the little house amongst the Douglas firs was coming at me through a watery vapour condensed about dust particles, a fog of associations and half-glimpsed realities.

To the south of our house, through the trees, lay the mansion of the eminent Australian chest doctor who ran the place, Sir Geoffrey Todd (‘the Old Man’). So if it had been a Sunday, after my father had dragged himself out of bed and complained loudly about how he hated socializing, we would have gone down there for pre-lunch drinks.

Our hair would have been plastered down to our scalps with water. (Run the comb forward with a harsh, agonizing scrape and then flick to one side.) Our grey socks would have been pulled up tight to the bottom of the knees, anchored there with tiny elastic garters, so that no more than an inch or two of white-scarred and sometimes black-pitted leg showed below our long, pleated shorts. The shorts were held in place with a snake-belt, again striped and elasticated, the ingenious ‘s’ buckle slipping through a twisted metal hole. On top of this we would have worn a tight, woolly v-neck jumper, grey flannel shirt and, in all probability, a tie. And this was our day off.

All the grown-up males dressed in an adult version of the same get-up. Not shorts, but long grey slacks (gathered high, in pap-scratching mode), tweed jackets and tiny striped or tartan ties. Somewhere between schoolteachers and scientists, the doctors were the post-war Punch middle classes. They talked lawnmowers and smoked pipes: sometimes bold modernistic ones, with a corner-angled bowl. The memsahibs wore hooped, fullish skirts in bold patterns. And everybody drank gin and tonics, probably in special gin and tonic glasses. It wasn’t an affluent time, but it was an aspirational time. They dressed like the Royal Family – like Prince Charles still dresses.

We children had to stand properly in a little row until Lady Todd had paid us due attention. Like all the grown-up ladies she was rustly and powdered, but slim and angular in her Australian way, and with Antipodean shorter hair, bolder earrings and the twinkle of sophisticated, amused condescension in her eyes. And then we got a Coca-Cola. It was a measure of how far into the stratosphere these people were that they dispensed real Coca-Cola from a deep fridge somewhere in ‘the servants’ quarters’. These were bare and functional, compared with the glittery, shiny Todd front room with its French windows opening on to an achingly bright lawn. Real Coca-Cola was something we never saw anywhere else. Not simply because it was an expensive luxury, but because, like American comic books and ITV, it was something inherently corrupting, although not apparently to Australians. At Sir Geoffrey Todd’s house it was served in little metallic cocktail beakers in a translucent blue, or a glittering pink, which went cold with their contents. Oh! The icy perfection of it.

Once, the Old Man himself took my father and me up to his attic. We had to mount a ladder which he pulled down from the ceiling and crawled through a hatch under some dark planking to emerge in the middle of a model railway system of stupefying complexity. Hundreds of feet of rail snaked past gasometers, stations and signal boxes, not just in single measures, but sometimes laid six in flank. And then he flicked a switch and plunged us into darkness, and his entire marshalling yard landscape lit up. Each train was illuminated, obviously, but so were hundreds of free-standing lights on tiny gantries. The Pullman carriage windows revealed little lampshades inside. Sir Geoffrey sat in the middle of his network, rattling his personal fairy-lit trains hither and thither though the gloom, and puffed on his pipe.

What was it about doctors and do-it-yourself enterprise? In Blake Morrison’s book When Did You Last See Your Father? he writes about his GP dad and his ever-handy tool kit. My friend Rebecca Hossack’s doctor father built his own house in the Australian desert, decorated throughout with homemade murals. Perhaps the other doctors and their families, a little squiffy from their G and Ts, spent the rest of the afternoon playing tennis together on the sanatorium’s private courts, but not my daddy. He would have got bored, falling asleep in the middle of tea and snoring embarrassingly. He preferred to sequester himself in the middle of his own territory, using his family as a sort of human shield, and then make things.

Elwyn, my father, was the youngest of four siblings after a five-year gap. ‘Some sort of mistake, it seems.’ He had been brought up by his older sisters, Megan and Gwyneth, his mother, ‘Nain’, being rather too grand in a Welsh, pompous way to bother with him. ‘Spoilt,’ was one verdict. He was certainly indulged, nannied and babied in a manner that the matriarchal Welsh enjoy. He seemed to me to spend an inordinate amount of time in the bath. He loved sweeties, and sought out ice creams with which to treat himself. He looked like a baby, too, soft, pink skin, a large, growing belly, pale, scrupulously scrubbed, chipolata hands, with the doctor’s fingernails always trimmed to nothing. (There were nail scissors everywhere in our house.)

He would sit at Sunday lunch with a napkin tucked up into his shirt front, knowing that he would splatter it with my mother’s nursery cooking. Casseroles and chops and frozen peas were favourites. Rissoles, shepherd’s pies, big cream puddings or trifles followed. He was happiest at his own table, in his own house, where his indulgent habits and self-centred shyness could be annexed from the demands of any normal social order. He never went to any party without grumbling. In later life, despite working at three different hospitals, he came home every day for lunch. Other people and their English social rituals frightened him. Once at a wedding, a dreaded occasion, he advanced towards the greeting party and kissed the bride’s father by mistake. With strangers he could be curt and offhand, wanting, I think, to escape human confrontation and its attendant boredom.

He drank little, gave up smoking when it was discovered that it caused cancer, never played golf or joined any clubs, and had few close male friends, particularly in later life. He never seemed to have an affair. (It would have been unthinkable, actually, impossible to imagine.) He never seemed to join any committees, or even the adult world. He supported himself on a trolley of his own dignity. He was like Arthur Lowe. I can never catch a glimpse of prickly, slightly fat, shy, silvery-haired men, men like Edward Heath, without being reminded of him. They are a type: sexless, defensive, often intelligent in a boffinish manner, self-important, and I always rather love them.

We can’t really get to know our fathers as other people until we are almost grown up ourselves, and by then they have become that immutable bundle of fixed opinions and uncurious appetites – the middle-aged man. But in Midhurst, Elwyn would have been in his mid-thirties: young, ambitious, a bit of a comer in his own way, I suppose. He would have been part of a close-knit hospital fraternity, modelled much on the army – quite a difficult man for me to get at through the fog.

I parked my car in 2005 opposite where we had lived. Even though the mist still hung around I could see that a lot had altered. For a start the woods were a car park. I had arranged to meet the communications and PR manager of the hospital. She showed me into her office. I trailed mud over her white carpet. I apologized. She passed me a history of the sanatorium as I sat down. ‘Your father was the engineer here?’ she began briskly.

‘No, no. He was a doctor.’ I was disconcerted by this. I nearly said consultant, but that was still some years ahead.

‘He was the only one with membership in the place,’ my mother had explained only a week before. She meant membership of the Royal College of Physicians, an extra qualification he had worked hard to get. ‘If they had any problems they would all come running to him.’ He had asked her to show the head chef how to feed diabetics. She had invented a lot of recipes to his instruction.

I came upon a photograph of the ‘World Conference on Tuberculosis’ in the history book the PR manager had handed me. ‘That’s him!’ I nearly shouted. But I was relieved to find him there, looking perhaps a little tense in the back row compared with the exaggerated bonhomie of the senior consultants who were slouching at the front, but he had been young then, a junior medical assistant.

Now a general hospital, with a cardiac unit which treats morbid obesity amongst other things, the sanatorium where my father worked was built at the turn of the twentieth century to house TB patients. They had no idea then how to cure the ‘Bluidy Jack’, but they sought means of mitigating its effects. There were expensive clinics in the Alps, like Davos (the inspiration for Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain) and whole townships in the balmy air of the South of France. While the Kaiser ordered up dreadnoughts to compete with what he had seen in Britain, Edward VII struck back with a consumption hospital. The Germans had hundreds of showpiece treatment centres. Britain was falling behind in the medical race. With money made available by Casells, his financial advisors, the King personally supervised the project and stayed in the grounds, in ‘our’ house, which had been painted red and gold to make him feel at home.

Apparently he entertained his mistresses there. If he did it would have been in unaccustomed pokiness. The place was a miniature Arts and Crafts cottage with tall chimneys, high gables and tiny rooms. Not much room for King Edward’s renowned copulation harness in the Lodge. Nonetheless, if you drove a pedal cart at speed into a skirting board, the white paint would flake off and reveal red and gilt trimmings underneath.

My mother explained across the kitchen table how we got there: things I had never known, never really sought to find out. After the war there had been too many doctors leaving the army. Originally my father had done extensive research in diabetes and its effect on eyesight for his PhD. But his consultant had asked to borrow his results to use in a lecture and then published them in the British Medical Journal as his own. He thanked my father in his acknowledgements, ‘for his help’, but the research programme had become useless. ‘He was very upset,’ my mother told me. The simplicity of the words and her direct look showed me how she must have helped him through it. I knew his capacity for worrying. ‘We carried his notes around for years. They filled a tea chest and in the end I made him burn them.’ After that he was advised by another senior doctor, angry on his behalf, to specialize in chest medicine. He had gone to Banchory, a hospital near Aberdeen, which coincidentally featured on a television programme I presented in 2003.

The sanatorium had recently gone into liquidation. ‘The best thing for it’, because it had enabled a rescue package to be put together. The rescue was of the building itself. All the space and light that the architect Percy Adams had deliberately designed into the wide corridors, the Arts and Crafts staircases and the shuttered balconies (recently declared unsafe for patients) would soon go into up-market apartments. They would certainly take me to the Lodge, but would I like to see the San first?

It is difficult to walk down the corridors of your past in the company of a tour guide. I had to apologize and leave them waiting as I stopped and stared into the hospital stores. The hospital stores! We used to be taken there for sweets, but I tried to remember. There was always something strangely forbidden about it, wasn’t there? Was it some memory of the anxiety? We had to be extra good because it was inside the hospital.

We walked out. There was the cricket pitch. My father hated having to play cricket. But that would have been the only time we were ever allowed in these Gertrude Jekyll gardens. I could remember him in the whites and being given his gloves to hold. I could remember playing on the dry-stone walls with those purple flowers which hung out of them in great swags. ‘And over there,’ I said, pointing across to the trees. ‘Isn’t that where Sir Geoffrey Todd would have lived?’

I hoped our house would provide clues or starting points. But I toured behind Tricia, and David Hayward, in a semi-anaesthetized trance. If I pushed, just a little, I could remember the texture and colour of two grey blankets, with a red check in them, and the glow of the tiny Christmas tree in a wooden tub, and even the holly-berry-red curtains, but only in my mind. Nothing in the shape of the place started anything. I stood there hopelessly. I couldn’t even say which bedroom had been which. The shape of the fire-surround was familiar, but it had been painted over. The place had anyway been used as an office. ‘It can be very cold in here,’ said David. ‘There are three outside walls with the windows facing north.’ At the base of the staircase the gloss white had been knocked away to reveal red paint underneath; the only evidence that this was in fact the same house.

In due course we had to have our own train set. My brother and I slept in a tiny room with a sloping roof, though I could not identify which one in 2005. Our beds were shoved up against the wall, because one corner gradually became occupied by my father’s version of Sir Geoffrey Todd’s railway empire.

The railway was constructed on a made-to-measure platform, which lifted on one side so that you could clamber in and sit in the middle. It was much less detailed than Sir Geoffrey’s. It ran on grey rails instead of individually sleepered tracks, but there were Airfix stations and a brown WH Smith newspaper stand with the books and newspapers on sale in incredibly tiny writing on the side, which added a splash of authenticity to the grey plastic platform.

But wait, wait, wait! Here we go. This is doing it. This is opening the file in my memory. The speciality act was the mail coach. Some sort of hook arrangement hung by the side of the track. There were several tiny red plastic lozenges with a loop at one end, supposed to represent mail-bags. You hung one on the hook, set the train in motion and it would pick it up, carry it on to the body of the red mail coach with a satisfying click and, because it was so small and the terrain proportionately was travelling past so quickly, it all happened at super speed; a quick whizz-click and it was in. No matter how hard you concentrated it was almost impossible to spot the mechanism in action. It just happened. Whizz-click. And better than that, it disgorged the same mailbag lozenge into a special black plastic collector chute further down the track, as the train rattled on, around my father’s frankly rather lurid landscape.

His hills and tunnels were rudimentary affairs, but my father liked to paint them in blazing oils. It was the same ‘pointilliste’ manner he had once used to do the view from his house in Cardiff. Perhaps he was going through a Churchillian phase at the time. There were splodgy impastos of trees and walls, as if the major inspiration of Monet had been ‘Yes, I could probably manage something like that, too.’

But Elwyn was mainly transfixed by woodwork; sawing and glueing at the kitchen table, to the despair of my mother, never changing out of his ‘good’ clothes and carrying sawdust through the house. The boys got the railway platform. My sister got the doll’s house (not quite as good as the one he made earlier for my cousins in Gloucester, which had an opening front, stair rods on the stairs and an array of clunking great electric switches hidden in the lean-to round the back); Helen’s was a flat-fronted, four-storey cupboard with a dormer roof, but it was painted a sticky white with a poisonous green creeper up the front, spotted with cabbage roses; a Kees Van Dongen, Post-Impressionist influence for a change.

Later came a full-sized puppet theatre and puppets, animal hutches, shelves, cupboards, record boxes, garden fittings, walls, garages and an entire boat. Meanwhile in Midhurst he moved on to a tree-house in an oak tree up at the back of the clearing. It had Tyrolean peep-holes, and a real pitched roof. Having got that far, he set to work on a section of the woods themselves. He got into brick-laying (more Churchill?) and built himself a giant barbecue which could have doubled as a field kitchen for a battalion (mind you, I suppose there were an awful lot of Australians around the sanatorium). Others might have settled for an old oil-drum, but we got a pit. He laid foundations and constructed a sort of Vulcan furnace. An old wash-pot was inserted into a brick surround which climbed up to a towering, oblong chimney. It vied with the kitchens of Hampton Court.

In 1988 the hurricane had come at the south-facing slopes of Easebourne Hill like Thor with a strimmer. The entire pine forest behind the house was mown flat. It had quickly been replanted, but nearer to the Lodge than before. The new wood had grown up in thick, serried lines. It was already about twenty feet high when I plunged into it in 2005. I was back in a metaphor. My widely spaced, wooded, open playground had been smothered with an overplanting of reality. I stepped over a chicken-wire fence and found myself in a beige, dead world. There was no path at all. It had been obliterated. Within minutes I lost every sense of direction. Instead of finding the things I wanted in memory-bank wood – the pet cemetery, the tree-house, the barbecue – all I got was a thick, claustrophobic maze. I quickly got lost. I began absurdly to panic. I literally couldn’t see the wood for the trees.

When I suddenly burst through back to the edge of the garden right in front of the house, almost by accident, I kicked into a brick. It might have been a brick from the barbecue, covered in a thick green moss. I noticed there were others around. I felt like a detective in a Polish film, searching for evidence of some past atrocity. It was damp and cold. What did it signify anyway? What had I expected to find? Bones?

Did we ever use the barbecue much anyway? Elwyn certainly built himself a picnic area to surround it, using massive half logs, dipped in a preservative that never quite dried. The accompanying benches were anchored to the ground, just a stretch too far away from the splintery tables. He was very proud of it. We were too. He must have ordered a patent glass cutter from a magazine, because I remember the trees were hung with half-bottles in wire cradles, holding candles. Everybody was called around to drink gin and tonics, eat the burned sausages (how could they be anything but incinerated in the improvised blast furnace) and swat the midges, until my father announced, as he habitually did, ‘Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m off to bed now.’

What a dad! Except of course he was always a little remote, busy at something, perpetually screwing or sanding, glueing or painting, and when he wasn’t, he was down the hill at the hospital, where we seldom went.

We went everywhere else. Perhaps because my father was so diligently occupied, and my mother so understanding, we were released into the wild as no parent would dare do today. There were strict times we had to be back: for lunch, supper and bed. We must have gone to school, but I only remember my time in Midhurst as a pre-lapsarian paradise of feral gangs.

The Lodge sat on a little promontory above a drive that led a few hundred yards down the hill to the main hospital, hidden from view by the woods. The trees crept up on the other side of the white road too, fronted by a few mountain ashes and the occasional giant chestnut.

Behind the house was a little fenced garden; beyond that a stretch of grass, traversed by a path; and beyond that more of the enclosing trees. They were tall Douglas pines with red, scaly trunks. We thought they were useless, because, although they had branches, the branches started twelve feet above our heads and they were impossible to climb. Miles up there somewhere, they formed a canopy of dark green fir, which groaned in high winds.

The floor of the wood was thick with pine needles, soft underfoot, even and clean and slightly bouncy. ‘The buxom, rosy-faced and high spirited patients’ were discouraged from drinking and given the gardens to till. They also went for walks, which were ‘measured’ so that just the right amount of exertion could be prescribed. The walk past the back of the house was one of these. This was where we buried the family pets: in the middle of it. The hamster went into a shoe-box coffin with a wooden cross made of twigs. There was Winston, an angora rabbit. (My father claimed my mother shaved it for its fur and it died of the cold.) We liked our graveyard so much that we took to searching for other corpses and carried dead birds and squirrels to be buried in state, and once, triumphantly, an adder squashed down the road next to the fuchsia bushes. Thus the passing-away of a loved one became bearable to the infant psyche. Or rather we became all too keen for our pets to hurry up and die, and took to examining the tortoise with the blue cross on its back, the guinea pigs and Bella the dog for signs of imminent mortality. (Wasn’t there a donkey too? Now that would have been a funeral.) We liked our ceremonies and the jewels and cotton wool in the caskets, but best of all we liked revisiting the plots for a touch of disinterment. We dug up a woodpecker over and over again to scare ourselves with the shiny white maggots, until my mother caught us at it and chased us off.

We’d have run on down the path, now eradicated. One second and you were in the woods, thirty seconds and you were gone. The undergrowth was surprisingly dense, good for camps and ambushes, but scratchy to push through in shorts.

Just along the way, heading west, the path crossed a ride cut through from the back of the main hospital building, lined with massive rhododendrons. There was some unwritten rule that we were never to be seen by the hospital staff, and most particularly the patients. It would give them some sort of fit, apparently. So when we decided to climb the giant larches, we had to scoot across to get to them.

A family gang, as opposed to a school gang, involves a variety of ages, including an unwanted baby figure, who has to be held by the hand, one of the boys from the Benicky family, several girls and an older brother who goads the younger brother (me) into life-threatening situations.

The lower branches were prone to snap off, but they were frequent, rather too frequent, in fact, because we had to take risks to wiggle between them. Nobody had ever climbed this tree before. That was obvious. We kicked off clouds of green dust from the tops of the branches. It was so thick we were not really able to see anything, except if we looked down, the upturned faces of the girls, now too small to register as anything but a smudge of concern. But I distinctly recall, when we finally got right to the top, that this was the highest tree we had ever climbed, high enough to see right over the top of the hospital, beyond the cricket field on the other side, down to the valley of the Rother. In truth, it was rather higher than we wanted to be. It began swaying. And after the moment of triumph, a wash of panic came sluicing up. The whole superstructure suddenly seemed fragile. So I gripped tighter to the only bit that really seemed substantial, the trunk itself.

Then everybody started panicking. The branches seemed an enormous distance apart. It was impossible to stretch down to the next foothold without releasing the iron hug on the trunk. And that was the only thing that stopped me falling.

Not that he knew. He started crying before I did. He was the one who was going to start shouting at me, because he was the one who would have to tell my father that he left me at the top of a hundred-foot larch tree.

‘Let me put it down. You’ll be all right if you can get your foot on to this branch.’

After about five minutes, I was. But the way down was horrific. The scratches from the twigs began to really hurt. There was inevitably a horrible slip on a green-covered branch, which wrenched an arm socket and crashed me on to my crotch, so it brought tears stinging.

‘He made me do it,’ was a useless excuse. ‘If he told you to put your hand in the fire would you do it?’ This didn’t require an answer except to shake the head and stare resolutely at the ground, but the honest answer was probably ‘yes’, especially if he had got away with it without hurting himself.

We once went to some house further up the hill, and I was sent off with the son, a brand new acquaintance (while the adults drank gin and tonics). He took me through the farmyard and stood me in front of a long barn with a row of upper windows, yards long. It was a dappled-sunshine day. He leaned down, picked up a stone, said, ‘This is fun,’ and threw it straight through a pane of glass. It was fun actually. They were big panes and collapsed with an exemplary destructive implosion, so we worked our way along the building, taking it in turns to demolish the lot. As we reached the end I glanced up to see my pal’s father stomping round the corner of the barn. There is a sort of level at which you can understand, even excuse, the fury of your own parents (blood counts for a lot) but there is an unspoken rule amongst the badly behaved that dads don’t bawl out other people’s children. Your own parents, hot with embarrassment and shame, can usually be counted upon to redouble any hand-me-down annoyance. But here was my friend’s father in the throes of a full screaming fit at me. Me! It must have been bad. I was left quaking for the rest of the afternoon, though I noted that the scion of the house got over it fairly briskly.

Is it only because these traumas are lodged like burrs in my hairy subconscious that it felt like our lives were one scurrilous outrage after another? We ate all the peas in the vegetable garden at Jimmy Summers’ house. When I was three, I chopped the heads off every tulip in our front garden. I went on the run in Chichester. I broke my arm attacking a swan. When I was six I reached up and pulled down a poster stuck on a tree in Bosham, just for the thrill of it. I had seen it done in a film. It was what cowboys did to ‘wanted’ posters. Nobody ever found out.

We must have been good sometimes. After all, the fury of all adults, and my father in particular, was something to be avoided if possible. A good spanking was hardly as common as in the Dandy, but I remember once being offered the choice between missing television and having a smack. My father laughed when I chose the beating.

Forty years later, in the end, I found the path again. I walked up the road, skirting round the new plantation, and turned south. A few yards through some overgrown rhododendrons and there was the unmistakable view of the back of the hospital. So the little track leading west must be the path, the path where I learned to whistle. It was nothing. The larches had gone. Twenty yards through what was now overgrown scrub and I was standing on ‘the cliff’.

The hospital was built to be a sustainable community, which in the 1960s meant a self-contained community. There was an incinerator block with a tall chimney and a hooter that sounded at twelve for lunch. Round the back and down a set of steps were the kitchens. My father used to take me there to meet ‘chef’, who liked to escort me into his cold room and feed me scraps of over-cooked pork or cold chipolata sausages. I have grown up with a dread of hospitals and especially the greasily polished kitchen departments. This was the real morgue: the heavy door that threatened to seal you in the gloomy, yellowy-grey room with its metallic shelves and hanging carcasses. I didn’t like the noisy clatter of battered baking trays, the pale, fleshy hands of the largely Italian staff who grabbed my hamster cheeks and pinched them hard – to get a reaction presumably – out of a sudden welling of affection probably – but all alien and noisy and utterly unappetizing.

There had been fields of Brussels sprouts and pig sties too, which must have been part of the total operation, I suppose. My brother William was old enough to be taken down to see a litter of piglets born. I only remember the morning after and being led down to where they lay, like us with our father in bed, in the smelly straw under a hot lamp. The pig shit and dirty, low-ceilinged hovels were more appealing than the hospital.

And there was a hay barn. This was on ‘the cliff’ which overlooked the offices of the sanatorium. The cliff was ours.

It was here we discovered something smelly in a milk bottle and took it in turns to go and look at it. I think it was probably a premature pig, at least I hope it was. But up there in the undergrowth, where we were in charge, we could keep an eye on the comings and goings and take our own time over exploring things, including boys and girls things.

Though I left this place before I was seven, I had already taken part in some complex games of Doctors and Nurses in the elder bushes behind the hay barn – unusual scenarios of a melodramatic nature that needed one of the little girls to injure herself, requiring ‘doctors’ to examine her bare areas beneath her dark-blue knickers, sometimes using a twig or leaves. I forget the names of the girls, or who initiated the games, but they fired up the pangs of curiosity and added significantly to the layer-cake of guilt. And the girls were much keener on the play-acting than we were. It was almost as if the chance to satisfy curiosity was the price we exacted for taking part in the silly play-acting games in the first place.

We much preferred to be inside the barn. It was totally forbidden, but never seemed to be visited by anyone. It was piled full of straw-bales. At the risk of white ridges in the fleshy parts of the fingers, these could be lugged around in the half-light by the two strands of thin baling twine to make first a tunnel and then, after hours of work, secret inner caves. We had hardly settled triumphantly in one room of bristly benches before somebody would start yanking at another bale.

Later, when the recriminations came, it was pointed out that the entire heap could have collapsed at any moment, smothering us, in a tragic disaster from which our mothers in particular would never have recovered. We had not, apparently, been thinking about them at all. That was true. We had worked our way through the straw building blocks until we came up against the planked wall of the barn. The sunlight struck through the slats and a knot gave us a spy hole through which we could see the woods, and the path snaking away through the pines. For once, there was actually someone coming along it.

We spied on an old man (probably in his forties) pushing a bicycle. It was laden with panniers. There was a large basket filled with parcels at the front and a wooden box fixed to the rear. He propped his bike up against a tree and walked off down the hill towards the sanatorium offices. He had sideburns. Like a cowboy.

I blame television. He was inadvertently acting out the scene of the man who thinks he’s on his own in a clearing in The Last of the Mohicans. Virtually every day we sat in front of the black-and-white television in the brown, shiny bakelite box with an armoury of ‘Lone-Star’ cap-revolvers and Winchester repeater rifles close by on the sofa, in order to shoot down the ‘baddies’. On long journeys, we would attempt to drive our young and exasperated mothers out of their minds by humming the six notes from the theme from The Alamo under our breath, until the mummies suddenly boiled over, brought the car to a halt and turned on us with undisguised fury.

The man was a bicycling grocer. We were Apache. So we raided his pack. We sneaked out of the barn and were probably just going to have a quick look, but the basket was packed with sausages. This was too much. They were beautifully pink and squishy. We had to hang them in strings like Christmas decorations all over the nearby trees. What else could we do? Well, we had to stick pine needles in them first, obviously, to make them prickly. I know this because, as I write this, I can suddenly recall sticking the thin, bifurcated spikes of pine needles into pink, yielding sausage meat somewhere, and when else would I have done that? I can still remember the pungent whiff from the packets of tea in the panniers, oblong boxes with pale blue markings. Inside there were grease-proof paper bags. We tore them open. It was ordained. We had to scatter the useless stuff all over the pine needles then and trample them about a bit. We stuck all the cigarettes in the trees. We didn’t steal anything. We simply vandalized the lot. Then we went back in the barn and waited. The excitement of the exercise was the opportunity to appear from nowhere, wreak havoc and then slip away to watch the result. It was a real adventure raid, not a pretend. That’s what made it good.

I don’t even remember whether he railed, jumped up and down or looked mystified; probably the lot. But it was easily worked out, by a process of elimination, who did it. Apart from the kids who once set a dog on me, there was no one else it could have been.

Weeks later, we overheard a scrap of comment (while they were drinking gin and tonics and giggling about it). When my mother offered to buy the stuff, the man pretended that we had destroyed far more than we actually had. Not only that, but after she paid for it, he wanted to keep it. ‘Probably going to sell it,’ my mother said, and the other mothers snorted. So, he was untrustworthy, and we were on the right side, and that was all right. But we still knew it was better to say nothing.

The naughty child knew that if he could just endure the lecture, stand still, wipe the smirk off his face, look abashed, even squeeze out a tear, then the raging parent would fall prey to exasperation soon enough. A mournful walk across the garden, head down, and then as soon as you were safely round the bamboos, run! As long as my brother didn’t seek retribution, the matter was forgotten, the woods closed around again, and it was straight back to the camp for a few moments kicking dirt while the shame evaporated and someone suggested something else, like ‘an explore’.

The barn has gone. The piggeries have gone. There is a new housing estate where ‘the staff’ lived. Sheltered by the nursing home, some of the huge firs have survived, but the whole place looks suburban and containable now. What had seemed a continent was little more than an extended back garden, even then, though we still managed to get lost easily enough.

Once, somebody had been given a tent for her birthday, and this warranted a proper trip. We took sandwiches. My mother probably helped make them: Marmite, that black line of salt on the smear of butter, or sandwich spread, a vinegary dice of vegetables in mayonnaise, or Shipham’s fish paste – in several different colours but one basic fishy flavour, out of unscrapable jars (you couldn’t get the bit out from under the shoulder) with the green screw tops and the pink plastic sealing ring that needed plunking open. When we were all packed up and laden with bags for our ‘expedition’, she probably waved us goodbye, imagining, as any mother might, that we would come back in a few minutes to borrow the kitchen table and turn it into a boat. But we trudged off, dragging some really tiny ones along with us, out beyond the barn in the woods, beyond the piggery, up the hill on the other side where the sprouts grew, past ‘Aunty Edith’s’ house, with the goldfish in the front garden and the budgie in the kitchen, and off through the fields, out on to the heath that crowned the downland area. Here we pitched camp for the night.

The weather changed. The sky grew cloudy. There was a considerable argument in favour of going back, but, logically, that was quite impossible. First, the youngest children wouldn’t walk and seemed to have given themselves over to lying on their backs and crying. Secondly, my sister had put on her Wellingtons and disturbed a bumble bee, which had stung her. And thirdly, it was now quite dark and we had no idea where ‘home’ was. The solution, forcefully outlined by my brother, was to sit in the tent, shut up crying all the time and wait until morning, morning being but a few moments away, since it was already night. In the meantime a delegation was sent across to knock on the door of a nearby farm cottage and beg, as travellers did, for bread and water. The owner of the cottage was naturally startled to open his door to two eight-year-old children ‘just staying the night’ across the field.

We were equally surprised about half an hour later to see a phalanx of parents pounding up the hill, waving sticks like a village mob in a vampire film. It is an image as vivid in my memory as the opening credits of Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men. The dark shapes of the adults and the flashes of their torches, bobbing towards us, against the clouds of a late-summer night. As they approached, the entire tent burst into tears. And then, instead of the expected wrath, they scooped us up and hugged us. How can that image sit so fixed in my consciousness? It is utterly fuzzy at the edges – no real ‘before’ or ‘afterwards’, but like a Mivvi bar, ever more concentrated at the centre, frozen into a gooey sweet jam of pure recollected emotion.

2. Weston-super-Mare

My mother was eighty on a Sunday in 2004. It was a convenient day. We could organize a celebration at my house in Suffolk. About forty people had been invited. They were mainly old and respectable and many seemed peculiarly anxious to remind me that they had seen me last at my mother’s seventieth birthday. My sister’s children were all, I noticed, suddenly quite large. My son was nineteen. Was he? I had renovated these barns. I had moved into them. There had been television programmes. We had taken holidays. But the headlong rush must have stopped somewhere. ‘Ten years ago’.

If we noticed we were getting older on a daily basis we would do nothing but squat in the dust and fret.

‘It’s mainly a state of mind,’ a girl once told me. ‘You know, there are some societies where people don’t age at all, because they eat the right things.’

‘Yes, their hair doesn’t go grey either. They just stay with black hair, because they are in tune with their environment and they all live to the age of over a hundred.’

And this was a nurse talking. She seemed happily entranced by what was, by anybody’s experience, preposterous twaddle.

‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘But that’s because you have actually allowed yourself to age.’

I nodded. I was only talking to her in the first place because she was a sexy, smiley nursey. And she must have been in her early twenties. Was she? I couldn’t really tell any more. The nineteen-year-old peering out of my flaccid fifty-year-old body didn’t want to.

I got no reassurance from all the game old biddies at all. Most of them had lost their husbands, or the ones still trailing along dropped hints about how happy they were to have survived their scare, or took me aside, like the old GP and family friend, who wanted to seriously tell me how he had only just survived the same thing that carried my father off – prostate cancer. He wanted me to make sure that I was ready for it, to ensure that I got all the tests, because the cancer was genetic and I should be taking the greatest care now.

Now what? Now I was getting old, he meant. Which test did he mean? Would my doctor do this thing? Could I ask? But I was whisked away to serve up some meringue.

How could all these old men face their passage from the world with such equanimity! ‘Gosh! That’s great, I’ve got another five years at least.’ Five years! My God, didn’t they understand, the last ten years had passed in an out-of-focus whiz? My mother was eighty.

It is quite difficult to write about your mum. I can’t be judgemental. I was, still am, a Mummy’s boy. If I look at the few photographs that seem to survive from my early childhood then there she is – young, beautiful, with handsome Welsh features and long black hair, usually tied in a bun. (A catch for my dad, I should think.) But I also see what she is now: trusting, enthusiastic, loving, laughing, simple – good.

There is one Madonna-like, black-and-white snap of her, cradling my sister, where she gazes at her baby with such intensity. It can be no surprise that she submerged herself and her life in her family. My feelings for her now are some sort of refined version of the great blob of emotion that I felt for her then: a blob because it has no definition. I only know that at a young age I hated to be separated from her. To pick out moments from that blob is impossible. There are only memory snapshots, like the horror when she cut off her long hair. (My father was mortified, and we children were no help. Like all under-tens we were as conservative as the Pope.) Her girlish enthusiasm, driving up the hill to Singleton one summer day, with the car full of all of us, and suddenly skittish, squealing at the little Morris as it laboured up the last of the steep bit through the beeches, banging the wheel, ‘Come on, come on, you can do it, you can do it!’ Or the silliness of her yodelling ‘coooee!’ when she walked into somebody’s unlocked house, a tone which even we knew she had picked up from her new posh friends. But how can I forget my mother coming in to say goodnight on a summer night? Perhaps it was one of those annoying evenings when we had to go to bed ages before it got dark and they were ‘going out’. The rustle of her silky dress and the waft of scent when she leaned down to kiss me, and later waking in the black, as the headlights flashed across the ceiling and I knew they were home, and making some noise so that maybe she would come in and whisper about going to sleep now.

My mother became severely ill when I was six. This was a rarity. You weren’t allowed to properly become ill in our family. ‘Disturbing the doctor’ was a sin. Any attempted days off school resulted in a thermometer bunged in your mouth and an expert finger probing underneath the chin for swollen glands. The only suffering ever experienced was apparently by the hard-working medical staff. (Ever since I have apologetically claimed to be ‘perfectly all right, Doctor’, while exaggeratedly feigning fatal symptoms.) This applied to everybody except my father. Ill, he staged a performance worthy of a seamstress in an Italian opera, with a strictly enforced silence and tinkling upstairs bells.

But if the doctor did come out, then we were suddenly encompassed by the fraternity. We got a glimpse of my father’s real world. The doctors openly banded together to discuss our symptoms and their diagnoses.

Contents

Acknowledgements

1. Into the Woods

2. Weston-super-Mare