The Wayfarer Chronicles - Book

There's a saying that goes something along the lines of having children doesn't come with a rule book. Come to think of it, why would it need to? With every parent having begun life as children themselves, they've had first hand experience of what it feels like to be one. Yet, in reality this experience may count for little and be quickly forgotten by parents forging a child-rearing path which may well be influenced by how they themselves were parented.

So, if there is such a thing as an ideal childhood, I wonder what would it look like. Would it be a wholesome experience free from strife and hardship or perhaps one consisting of elements of both grief and harmony? Regardless of which is better, perfection in parenting seems to me to be an altogether unrealistic expectation. As for the child, the likelihood of enjoying a happy childhood depends upon many things, central to which is the character and past experiences of their parents.

Many people may pay the ultimate compliment to their own parents by emulating the way in which they were raised. Meanwhile, others may vow never to raise their children the way their parents raised them. Either way, at the heart of good parenting lies an understanding of the basic needs of children and a commitment from the parents to put such needs before their own.

Among the most fundamental needs of any child, or any person for that matter, is the need to know they're loved and know where they belong. Indeed, the lack of a sense of either in childhood can have dire consequences in later life and lead many an unfulfilled person to look for love and acceptance in the most undesirable places with similarly undesirable results. There are those who are fortunate enough to find family among their relatives while others are forced to look elsewhere. Furthermore, some will continue to look for love from those whose need to be loved is greater than any capacity to give love.

It is not my intention in the retelling of this story to paint a biased picture by emphasising the bad over the good. Indeed, in the interests of fairness to all concerned, I intend to present as best I can a balanced version of events in order for the reader to judge the character of those featured herein. Suffice to say this is not a hard luck story, but a success story. A story told from the perspective of a boy who struggled, fought and survived the very people who should have loved him and ensured he knew where he belonged. Instead, he ventured through life as if he were alone, a wayfarer, a joker, a protector, a truth seeker and a problem solver.

What I know of my parents' lives is based largely on what they and their respective family members chose to reveal. Born in London in 1934 to Jack and May Hills, my dad, John Robin, was thirty-eight years old by the time of my birth. The British Hospital for Mothers and Babies in Woolwich, South-East London, was the place where I entered the world as the third of John Robin's four children. His first child, a daughter named Leigh, was born in April, 1960, to him and his first wife, Jackie. John Robin and Jackie were married no more than seven years before she left him following an affair with his brother-in-law, Jim, who'd married John Robin's younger sister, also named Jackie.

Following the breakdown of his first marriage, John Robin left the family home in Lewisham and apparently went to sea intent on discovering the manhood his first wife had mocked him for lacking. Upon his return to London in 1968, he rented a flat in Bennett Park, Blackheath, and rejoined the Prudential Insurance Company with whom he'd been an insurance agent since leaving the RAF in 1956. Tragically, in 1936, Jack Hills died of tuberculosis when John Robin was but two years old. Exposed to the deadly infection through his profession as a glass-blower, Jack's son would have no memory of his father.

Considering Jack's kind and gentle nature, it's little wonder that May was said to have been inconsolable when he died. With no other means by which to raise their son, May's older sister Liz and younger sister Grace looked after John Robin while May went out to work. Come the late 1930s, May married a man named Harry. May and Harry eventually settled in a large semi-detached council house in Campshill Road in Lewisham along with John Robin and his half-sisters, Val and Jackie, born of Harry and May. Feared by his wife and children as a mercurial man with a cruel temper, Harry never warmed to Dad and bullied him in a way he would spare both his daughters. While the reason for the bullying remained unknown, there's also no way of knowing whether Harry's cruelty actually created or merely reinforced his stepson's altogether meek and unassuming character.

Compounding his misery, May's apparent lack of affection towards her children did little to mitigate the effects on John Robin of Harry's bullying. Being six years older than his sister Val and almost eight years older than Jackie, John Robin often spent rueful time having to babysit his younger siblings. He would lament as much on numerous occasions in the future to his offspring how he felt he'd done his time looking after children. Following his perceived penance, in the early 1950s, John Robin joined the RAF as the force typist. With his travels taking him to Egypt and Cyprus, he tasted freedom for the first time until his discharge in 1956.

Following his failed marriage to Jackie and subsequent trip to sea, while living in Bennett Park in 1968, John Robin met the girl who would become his second wife and my mother. At the time of their meeting, at age seventeen, Mum was roughly half Dad's age. Dad never spoke of where they met or what initially attracted him to Mum. Nonetheless, if a mature relationship was what he wanted, it's doubtful he would have found it in the arms of a seventeen-year-old girl. Furthermore, Dad was a man of simple needs who, like many men of his generation, were accustomed to having a woman do everything for him. Therefore, as long as his dinner was on the table when he came home from work and he could get his leg over whenever the opportunity arose, he'd be a happy man.

As aware of Dad's fundamental needs as I eventually became, I found myself in later life questioning why he thought a seventeen-year-old girl would be a good choice for meeting them. While she would meet his needs in the early days of their relationship, by the mid 1970s a sudden and inexplicably dramatic change occurred in her behaviour. For a man apparently lacking in emotional intelligence concerned primarily with the fulfilment of his needs, Dad would soon find himself as powerless as his young children to cope with the sudden and tempestuous change in his young wife, Pamela.

Born in Camberwell, south-east London in 1951 to Ron and Lucy Edmonds, Pamela would be the first of their six children together. However, Pamela was not the eldest sibling, as both Ron and Lucy both had a child each from a previous relationship. Ron enjoyed a career in banking while Lucy kept house for Ron and their burgeoning family. The Edmonds clan lived a comfortable existence in houses in the Lewisham, Lee and Catford areas of south-east London. Home life consisted of an inter-generational household of parents, maternal grandparents and an aunt named Joyce, with the seven Edmonds children all sharing beds.

A strict disciplinarian, if Ron hit one child he would hit them all. However, not without kindness or favour it could be said that Ron was a fool for his wife. The standing family joke within the family went that Ron would give Lucy the top brick off the chimney if she asked for it. According to Lucy, Ron had an obvious favourite among their children who she considered to be Pamela. Her belief in her daughter's special status rankled Lucy and roused within her a deep feeling of jealousy and spite. However, it was not the perceived favouritism of Pamela that persistently pitted her against her mother, as much as Pamela's contention that she was being sexually abused by her maternal grandfather.

My mother spoke very little about the alleged abuse perpetrated against her, regarding it as too horrific to relive. However, she alluded to having been paid by her grandfather to keep schtum and hid the money in a crack in the stairs of the family home. When confronted one day by her mother, who had observed her concealing money and demanded to know from where it came, Pamela's admission of the abuse she had suffered was roundly rejected by Lucy, who then proceeded to accuse her of stealing from her purse.

The final nail in Pamela's coffin came following her rejection of her parents' attempts to plan her future. By 1968, now aged seventeen and long possessed of an unapologetically wilful character, Pamela resisted her parents' wishes for her to marry a member of their extended family. Her rejection of Ron and Lucy's proposal occurred around the time that Pamela met John Robin. Crucially, after a series of assignations, one night, Pamela committed the unforgivable transgression of staying overnight at John Robin's flat in Bennett Park.

While the exact details of the doorstep showdown differed depending on who was telling the story. Lucy contended that Pamela left the house of her own free will while Pamela maintained that her belongings were waiting for her on the doorstep when she arrived home. Pamela's grandmother weighed in, along with her other daughter, Pamela's auntie Joyce, by slapping Pamela around the face. Regardless of whose version of events bore greater resemblance to the truth, nonetheless, Pamela's subsequent departure from the family home threw together two hapless individuals burdened by the wretchedness of their respective pasts. Time would reveal just how mismatched John Robin and Pamela were and how their peculiar coupling perhaps owed more to convenience than chemistry or common interests.

Although the present harmoniousness between John Robin and Pamela wouldn't last, by mid 1969, she had fallen pregnant. Suffering low birth weight and breathing difficulties upon his birth on 27th January, 1970, her first born child, named Matthew, died after only 12 hours of life. Following their move to a two-bedroom house in Southbourne Gardens in Lee, south-east London, Pamela learned she was pregnant again. In December of the same year, Pamela gave birth to a second child, a daughter, who I shall refer to by her nickname, Dee. Almost two years almost to the day following Dee's birth, in December 1972, I came along followed just under five years later by my younger sister, Saskia.

With Dad working as an insurance agent for The Prudential while Mum remained at home to take care of her children, their respective roles were typical of the time. While Dad, with his strong work ethic, was well suited to hard work, Mum was his polar opposite. Indeed, they were polar opposites in most respects and had little in common except the need for fulfilment of their respective emotional needs yet with virtually no capacity to meet the emotional needs of the other. In addition, they shared a joint propensity to place the fulfilment of their own emotional needs before those of their children.

So, with a hard working and productive father and a stay at home mother, my family ticked all the boxes of what was considered the nuclear family. However, this did not make the home environment a wholesome one because in many respects my family was far from normal. How could it be when at the centre of it all was a woman who, with her casual lies and cruelties, her deceit, her dark moods and her erratic behaviours, struggled to slay the demons of her past.

Drawn into the storm that had been building within her was a man hopelessly dependent on her yet powerless to resist her and equally powerless to control the most destructive elements of her character. Between the two ill-fated individuals lay three innocent children struggling to make sense of their world and find refuge amid the storm soon to rage around them which threatened to engulf them all.

This is the story told from the perspective of one of their children; a story of a boy's fight for survival, a fight to escape his parents, a fight for life and the right to just be a boy, a boy called Johnno.

My earliest memories I can date from around the age of two. Among them are of my elder sister Dee and I being strapped into the back seat of my dad's car and listening cheerfully to the music playing on the radio. The theme continued at home where Mum played the songs of her favourite artists of the day, such as John Denver, Abba, The Carpenters and The Bee Gees. On the radio, Jimmy Saville's Old Record Club of a Sunday lunchtime she'd particularly loath to miss. While in those days Mum tended to listen to her music aloud, there'd come a time when, lost to those around her, she'd don a pair of oversized headphones and retreat into her own far-away world.

Situated on a quiet suburban street in Lee, south-east London, our house at thirty-one Westdean Avenue was the first one which I firmly recall. The V-shaped avenue consisted of two rows of 1930s terraced houses on either side each with their mock Tudor style apexes. Neatly trimmed privet hedges defined the borders of many front gardens, including ours. Our neighbour at number thirty-three was a grumpy middle-aged man by the name of Mr. Richmond. His large, dark rimmed glasses, similar to those worn by my dad, suited his altogether unfriendly manner. I rarely saw Mr. Richmond speak to my parents. He didn't seem a particularly happy man and struck fear into me and every other child on Westdean Avenue.

In contrast, Mrs. Bird, our neighbour at number twenty-nine, was a gentle and kind elderly lady. Next to her lived Auntie Mari. While not our actual aunt, all the children of the avenue referred to Auntie Mari by that name. A petite Asian lady, Auntie Mari would often come outside during warmer weather and doll out ice-pops of many different colours from a brown paper bag. Needless to say, Auntie Mari enjoyed considerable popularity among the children of Westdean Avenue.

Our home would've appeared to be nothing out of the ordinary to anybody who passed by. My bedroom window looked out onto the avenue alongside Mum and Dad's while Dee's overlooked our back garden. My earliest memories of Dee are of a rather shy and introverted girl. Her chestnut brown hair cut in a basin style so typical among seventies children framed a small oval-shaped face dotted with freckles. Her skinny frame lent itself perfectly to the kind of athleticism which enabled Dee to outrun most other five-year-olds and out-perform the boys in her favourite sport of football. Consequently, with her characteristic tom-boyishness and athletic prowess Dee was often asked if she was, in fact, a boy. As for me, with a carbon copy pudding bowl haircut I resembled Dee yet without the freckles and dark brown hair. With my light-brown bowl cut resembling that of actor and comedian Tim Brooke-Taylor, my Auntie Grace would often remark each time she opened her front door whenever we visited that I reminded her of the famed 'Goodies' star.

At little more than five feet tall, my mother's lack of height rather accentuated her stoutness. Despite being overweight, her round and protruding stretch-mark ravaged belly and similarly large breasts were to me both comforting and reassuring. In addition, Mum sported a peculiarity in the form of a chipped front tooth which she said occurred following a fall while climbing out of a swimming pool as a child. With chestnut brown hair framing a pretty face, comparisons could be drawn between my mother and another well-known and overweight celebrity at the time in the form of international singing star, Cass Elliot.

As for Dad, he seemed like a giant to me, although most adults appear tall to small children. His dark, salt and pepper coloured hair brushed backwards exposed his receding hairline while his ever present dark-rimmed glasses created that same forbidding look of our neighbour, Mr. Richmond. Yet, Dad's most prominent feature sported by many men at the time was his bushy, jawbone length sideburns. Being below average height at five foot six inches tall and plagued by bowel problems which would bedevil him throughout his life, Dad cut a rather unhealthy and fragile figure, both physically and emotionally.

A fundamentally unaffectionate man, I witnessed Dad belly-laugh and cry no more than once. On account of their mutual love of football, Dad had an easier time forming a bond with Dee than he did with me. With my enjoyment of the music that Mum played, I developed a stronger attachment to her than to Dad. However, that did not prevent me for now from gravitating towards Dad until such time in the not too distant future when the nature of our relationship would dramatically and permanently change.

Approaching his mid forties by 1976, Dad had worked as an insurance agent for the best past of twenty years. Being a productive man, he appreciated routine and was one of life's grafters. His morning routine began by rising around seven o'clock and making a cup of tea before having a strip wash at the bathroom sink, with the door always remaining open. Consequently, I grew accustomed to the sight of Dad's naked, hairless buttocks and pendulous scrotum dangling free as he bent over the sink. Both Mum and Dad thought nothing of wandering about the house at times wearing very little clothing, therefore, the sight of their near naked bodies soon became a very familiar sight.

A further mark of his eccentricity was how Dad shaved with an old fashioned soap stick and brush. Signalling the completion of his ablutions, Dad would always conclude with a splash of Old Spice patted on each cheek followed by a little square of toilet paper covering the part on his face or neck where he'd nicked himself shaving. Always smartly turned out, Dad donned one of his many boxy suits before heading out to work.

On account of his rather reserved nature, Dad never enjoyed a particularly large circle of friends. However, one exception was a work colleague, a fellow Prudential insurance agent by the name of Bill Stone. Apart from my uncles, Bill is the first man I recall outside my immediate family. Peculiarly, although I knew Bill to be associated with Dad, I don't recall ever seeing them together. Indeed, Bill would only ever come to our house on those weekday evenings when Dad would be out collecting insurance premiums from his customers.

Possessing a charismatic personality with a frivolous streak, Bill appeared to be everything that my dad was not. With his warmth and friendliness and inclination to act the giddy-goat, Bill embodied the figure of fun character to whom children would naturally gravitate. Indeed, he would leave Dee and me in fits of laughter each time he'd tell us to “park our bums.” Although of a similarly slender build, Bill was slightly taller than Dad and had rather greasy looking greying hair and a pointed nose. Also unlike Dad, Bill was a heavy smoker and not as smarty turned out. However, his charm lay in his exuberance rather than his appearance and Dee and I were very much taken with him. We were not the only ones, as Mum seemed quite taken by Bill, too. Unbeknown to me, I was about to learn how my mother truly felt about this marvellously captivating man.

Just a few months shy of her fifth birthday, by late 1975, Dee had begun school at nearby Horn Park Infants'. A year later marked the first time I'd be able to recall Mum and I walking her the short distance to the school. When I say walked, I meant that Mum and Dee did all the walking while I remained firmly ensconced in my buggy. At the age of three, my legs were far too small to be able to climb the steep hill leading to the forbidding looking school building situated at the top.

Having left Dee in the charge of the staff of Horn Park on this one particular day, Mum turned my buggy around before heading back the way we came. Even more terrifying than going up the hill was going down it. My fear of descending such a steep hill and the sight of the busy road at the bottom was such that the experience would give me nightmares for years after. Yet, these particular dreams were characterised by my mother letting go of my buggy, which hurtled down the hill before careening into traffic. At this point I'd suddenly awaken. To what extent these dreams led to my persistent bed-wetting, I cannot say, however, more often than not during the early part of my life I'd wake up with my pyjamas, sheets and mattress soaked through.

As we neared the bottom of the hill, rather than turn right and head for home, instead Mum crossed the road and pushed my buggy through a gate and along a garden path. Looking up, I saw a yellow door with the number 249 above it. No sooner had Mum rung the doorbell than the door opened and there stood Bill. Following his greeting, Mum unfastened the safety straps on my buggy before lifting me up and taking me inside. Leading me into Bill's living room, Mum suddenly disappeared following which in came Bill. As I looked up, the towering man before me suddenly produced a brown paper bag and handed it to me then left the room, closing the door behind him. Opening the bag, I reached inside and pulled out a game containing a blue coloured plastic toy handgun and two table tennis balls.

With the apprehension of finding myself all alone in a strange place, I didn't bother to break open the plastic and cardboard packaging of the toy before I opened the door in search of my mum. With neither Mum nor Bill anywhere in sight, I made towards the stairs and began to climb them. Just then, I heard the sound of muffled voices. As I reached the top of the stairs, the voices grew more distinct. I followed the sound to a door at the end of the landing and, reaching up, I pulled on the handle. There before me removing what remained of their clothing were Mum and Bill, who then climbed into bed. Thinking they were playing some sort of game, I immediately took off all my clothes and climbed into the bottom of the bed where, fortunately, I must have fallen asleep, as I do not recall any more after that.

While as a three year old I couldn't have understood then that my mother and Bill were having sex, those images would endure and be revisited at a time when I was old enough to understand what they were really doing. Unbeknown to my mother, she had given birth to a child who could recall memories in vivid detail from the age of two onwards. Unbeknown to me, this particular memory was just the beginning and served as a taste of the kind of selfish hedonism to which my mother would subject my sisters and me over the years to come.

Indeed, Babylon was merely the first stop on a roller-coaster ride I had no business being on. I wouldn't know it then but by that time I was already trapped; trapped on a ride driven by my mother, a ride that hurtled from place to place, from one upheaval to the next, and with no idea where we were headed or how to get off.

So, back to the power of music to stir memories. I'd also come to learn in time how for each chaotic episode there would be a song, or songs. In the case of Bill, there were three such tunes my mother associated with him which would form parts of the soundtrack to her dissolute life. As for me, whenever I hear 'If You Leave Me Now' by Chicago, 'My Girl, Bill' by Jim Stafford, and 'Don't Give Up On Us' by David Soul, I'm three-years-old once again, back on that roller-coaster ride yelling at the top of my lungs to be let off, a cry to which no-one ever responded.

Not long after mum's secret rendezvous with Bill, Dad found out they'd been having an affair. To this day I don't know how he learned of mum's infidelity. However, Dad left Dee and me in no doubt that Mum had done something wrong when he lashed out at her in front of us. Despite the fact that his children were in the room, Dad rained blows on Mum while Dee and I stood by, terrified, helpless and sobbing. I wish I could say this was the only time as a child that I'd witness Dad beating Mum up, alas, I cannot. While he may have relieved his frustration towards her, time would reveal how thrashing my mother did nothing to deter her future behaviour. Furthermore, by lashing out at her in the way he did, Dad had begun to sow future seeds of resentment within me; seeds which, once germinated, would pit us against each other and foment the kind of mutual animosity from which our relationship would never recover.

On her part, Mum had embarked on a course of conduct which would alienate her not only from Dad's extended family but, eventually, her own. Dad's younger sister, Jackie, whose husband had left her following an affair with Dad's first wife, had never taken to Mum, regarding her as devious and incapable of telling the truth. Mum cooked her own goose the day she telephoned Auntie Jackie to ask if she'd be Bill's escort to the annual Prudential staff party. Smelling a rat straight away, Auntie Jackie flatly refused and told Mum in no uncertain terms that she knew what her game was. One more incident would seal Mum's fate with her sister-in-law and soon enough that moment came.

For someone who thought nothing of having sex with another man in the presence of her child, anything is within their capabilities. Therefore, when Auntie Jackie revealed to me years later the events that unfolded one afternoon around the time of Bill, I wasn't at all surprised. At that time, Auntie Jackie shared the family home at Campshill Road with her mother and father and her two teenage sons, Adam and Nicky, providing care for them all. Relying heavily on the financial support of her estranged husband, Jim, Auntie Jackie received six pounds per week towards the upkeep of both boys.

Following Jim's weekly visit to drop off the six pounds, Dad, Mum, Dee and I came to visit. Within minutes of us leaving, Auntie Jackie went to check her purse and found the six pounds missing and broke down in tears. When her father, Harry, heard her crying he asked her what was wrong. Furious to learn of the betrayal, no sooner had Auntie Jackie revealed the theft to her dad than Harry rang our home and demanded to know who had taken it. Dad in turn confronted mum who revealed three-year-old me to be the culprit.

Fortuitously, my cousin Nicky had witnessed the theft with his own eyes, revealing that he'd seen my mum take it. Humiliated and suitably embarrassed, Dad drove straight back round to Campshill Road to return the pilfered money to its rightful owner. Consequently, to the accusations against mum in Auntie Jackie's eyes of being devious and incapable of telling the truth, the charge of thief could be added.

Despite what time would reveal to be an almost relentless succession of irresponsible and erratic behaviour, following the Bill Stone saga, Mum and Dad would enjoy something of a reconciliation. Following their reunion, in an act which was dubbed 'the baby to save the marriage', Mum fell pregnant again. In September, 1977, my younger sister, Saskia, or Sas as she came to be called, was born.

Prior to Sas' birth, during the summer of that year, we moved the short distance of less than a mile from Westdean Avenue to a new home on Guibal Road in Lee. Situated at number 32, our house was actually located in a cul-de-sac off Guibal Road. With its kitchen on the ground floor, living room and Mum and Dad's bedroom on the first floor and our bedrooms at the top, our house at Guibal Road had a very topsy-turvy feel. Like our previous house, this too was three-bedroomed, however, all the rooms in our new home were noticeably bigger.

So, for now, by late 1977, the Hills family had moved home and gained another member in the form of little Sas. In addition, I'd joined Dee at Horn Park, starting in the infants for half-days for the first term, while Dee began her first year at Horn Park primary. Signalling the calm before the oncoming storm, the mood at home at that time felt particularly joyful. Central to the jubilation was of course our younger sibling. For one of the few times that I can recall, my parents appeared happy and united. There would be no better example of their joy than when they'd stand approximately ten feet apart from each other and throw Sas to and fro between them. While the little girl giggled with delight, I held my breath, afraid they might drop her. Alas, the joy of Sas' birth would be short lived as the period following her arrival would see a sudden escalation in my mother's behaviour, which took on a darker and more unwholesome dimension.

Ordinarily a source of great fun for children, bath times for Dee and me of a Sunday night were no different. Following the hilarity of pulling our shampoo thickened hair into bunny ears and sliding around a drained bath, we laid across Mum's lap so she could rub talcum powder into our skin. However, it was following bath time that my mother began to both cup our genitals in addition to which she'd pull our buttocks wide apart before sinking her teeth into one of our cheeks. While this particular habit of grabbing our genitals originated following bath times, the biting was not a new occurrence and had in fact begun while we lived at Westdean Avenue.

While I'm well aware of how playfulness between parents and their children can take many different forms, any kind of activity which causes a child harm cannot be considered playful. Even if my mother's original intent in what followed was playful, it did not end that way. Continuing an act which I later learned she inflicted on her own much younger siblings, Mum took to biting Dee and me on our arms.

With me being the smaller child, I bore the brunt of the assaults each time my mother scooped me up from the lounge floor where I'd be playing, hold me to her chest and begin biting my arms. However, this was not playful biting, as Mum would sink her teeth deep into my skin. The depth of her bite was such that when she finally let me go, a wailing and quivering mess, through my tears I'd look down at my arms and see teeth marks embedded in my skin. Adding insult to injury, with my pleas to stop whenever she bit me going ignored, I'd began hitting Mum in the face. As if to punish me for defending myself, in response she hit me back many times harder.

Alas, I wish I could say that my father was on hand to protect us but I cannot, even though he knew what had been going on. On a number of occasions during this time I'd arrive along with Dad and Dee at the home of Auntie Grace with bite marks on my arm. With no confirmation needed on my part as to who was responsible, Auntie Grace told me to tell my mum that if she bites me again, she would come round and bite her. My teenage cousin, Adam, would find me in similar circumstances with bite marks up my arm. Offering me his comfort after having found me sobbing on my bed on one particular occasion, Adam reported back to his mum how she must've really hurt me.

However, gratuitous biting would pale in comparison with what came next which constituted the single most terrifying moment of my young life. Few who recall the most severe punishment they ever endured would forget what prompted it. While I had it in myself to be a naughty child, still to this day I cannot account for my mother's actions on the day in question. Yet, the shock of being grabbed by her so suddenly and so forcefully was such that before I knew what had happened, I was supine on her bedroom floor with a pillow hurtling towards my face. The next thing I knew everything went black and immediately I began to kick and scream. While Mum pressed down on the pillow I continued to struggle in absolute terror. In what must've been no more than a minute yet felt like an eternity, Mum suddenly let go of the pillow before running out of the room in tears. Feeling dazed and confused, I sat up and my tears began flowing with abandon. After having calmed down, I brushed sweaty hair from my face and made for the lounge, tears still rolling down my cheeks.

What happened next goes against the human instinct for self preservation, yet, in the context of a child's bond with a parent makes perfect sense. At that very moment, the only thing I wanted to do was be comforted, by my mother, the very person who had hurt me so brutally. Curiously, I'd witness the same inclination in other children many years later as part of my work in residential children's homes. Placed many miles away for their own protection from parents who only meant them harm, there were those among our young charges who'd abscond back to the very people who posed the greatest risk to their well-being. I wouldn't know it then but in a little over ten years time I'd find myself in similar circumstances to those children. For now, in need of her consolation, I went into the lounge and approached my mum who was slumped in a chair, crawled under her arm and curled up beside her.

While the extent of my mother's violence would never again reach such an extreme as this, as long as we were small enough to be treated in such a way, she would continue to do as her mood dictated. Although not as harrowing, my mother would show a similar level of aggression the day I came home as a six-year-old smelling of smoke after having had a cigarette shoved in my mouth by a group of older boys who collared me while out riding my bike. Grabbing me with one hand and a piece of off-cut wood in the other, my mother made me hold my arm out and thrashed me across the wrist with it. While doing a kind of war dance and watching through tears as my wrist turned purple, I managed to tell Mum that the older boys shoved the cigarette in my mouth and told me to suck on it. Despite my confession, Mum continued thrashing me for not knocking on someone's door to tell them what the boys were trying to make me do. Needless to say that such a suggestion did not occur to me while surrounded by a group of menacing boys twice my height.

Although like mine, her perspective and experiences are uniquely hers, both Dee and I endured similar assaults against us at that time and also subsequently. Even the most minor of provocations were met with a totally disproportionate level of force. Indeed, my mother would think nothing of picking up a pair of scissors and throwing them at us. A similarly favoured projectile took the form of her wooden sole Dr. Scholl sandals while on other occasions she would take to us with the kind of black flex cord which powered a portable cassette player before proceeding to whip us, prompting another war type dance. Coupled with the ongoing biting of our bottoms and arms and the groping, Dee and I found ourselves on our guard very early on, having also learned quickly how to duck when some projectile came flying our way.

Although it's true to say that abuse takes many forms, the neglect that Dee and I would experience in later years also had its roots during this time. My mother, while wanting a comfortable home in which to live, took no pride in maintaining it and did the minimum she could get away with to fulfil our basic needs. With Dad being the kind of man who expected his dinner on the table when he came home from work, Mum ensured that she at least fulfilled that obligation. Any others, such as tending house, were done sporadically and reluctantly. Indeed, two such glaring examples at that time were the condition of our toilets and my bed sheets. In the case of the former, our toilets became so thick with wee and poo stained limescale that on the rare occasion any extended family members came to visit, they refused to use the toilet. As for my bed sheets, which I'd soil nightly, instead of replacing them with fresh ones, my mother took to placing my bedside lamp underneath the sheet and opening my bedroom window. Consequently, I went to sleep each night to the acidic odour of a urine stinking sheet only to wake up in the morning and find I'd soiled it anew.

Furthermore, a similar odour would have hit anyone in the face who dared to open the laundry cupboard on the ground floor, as urine soaked sheets were left to rot for months on end. However, my mother was not without a capacity to show care and attention. Indeed, she was never more attentive towards us than at Christmas, when she'd pull out all the stops to buy us the Christmas presents we wanted, and when we were poorly and off sick from school. Yet, that is where the extent of my mother's care ended and in the not too distant future, Dee and I would find ourselves alone, far away in another country where we had to fend for our own selves.

Despite the trials and tribulations of home life, nothing made me happier at that time than riding off for hours on my Raleigh Budgie bicycle. Such was the way of parenting back in the 1970s that children would play out for hours on end without their parents knowing where they were or what they were up to. Therefore, I could ride far away on my bike for as long as I wanted and so I freely indulged my singular and independent streak. However, being a fast runner like Dee, we also enjoyed the opportunity of playing out with the other kids of Guibal Road, indulging in such street games as British bulldog, hide and seek, knockdown ginger and three bad eggs.

Interestingly, it was about this time in the late 1970s when the most unexpected and thrilling moment of my life thus far occurred. Out on my bike one sunny day, I came to the end of Guibal Road as usual, poised to turn left before coasting down the hilly Winn Road. For some unknown reason, I suddenly turned right. Just then, as I headed past a small green I caught sight of a boy roughly my age playing alone on the grass. Drawn to him by the fact that I hadn't seen him before, and wouldn't thereafter, I stopped and said hello. Having exchanged pleasantries and a mutual desire to want play, my new friend invited me to his house to see his newborn brother. Being well in practice at cooing to newborn babies, I cheerfully accepted. To my surprise, my friend's house, which could be seen from the green, was situated directly across the busy main road of Burnt Ash Hill. Within minutes we were peering into the cot of his baby brother, who stared contentedly back at us as we shook the mobiles suspended above his cot.

Just then, the sound of heavy footsteps distracted me and as I turned towards the bedroom door, in bounded an enormous man, naked except for a towel in his hand which he used to dry the back of his head. Clearly fresh from bathing, my friend's dad stopping briefly to see what we were doing before continuing to dry his mop of curly red hair. With the exception of my Dad I hadn't seen another man naked. Yet, this man looked decidedly different to my dad and I couldn't take my eyes off him as he continued to dry his hair. Each backwards and forwards motion caused the large muscles on his raised arms to jiggle. His hairy chest had a broadness to it quite unlike my father's while his large penis dangled proudly between muscular thighs and I found myself completely transfixed.

For the rest of that day and on many occasions since, I've revisited that moment which has remained so vivid in my mind. Although at the age of six I couldn't possibly have understood why it had excited me in the way it did, there would come a time in the future where I could relate an awareness of my orientation back to this one event. Furthermore, I'd become aware in time of the absence of similar feelings of intrigue and excitement about the naked female form. For now, however, I just wanted to be a happy boy, ride my bike and be free. Alas, until such time as my mother was no longer a part of my life, that would not be possible. You'd think I'd have learnt that by now, wouldn't you?

Standing behind me in the bathroom as he fastened the blue and gold striped tie around my neck, Dad prepared me for my first day at Horn Park Infants School. Until such time as I learned to tie my own tie, I relied on Dad to do it for me. To the feeling of the breath from his nose on the back of my neck and the scent of Old Spice, I stood as still as I could until he'd finished. As smart as I must've looked in my new grey shorts and blue v-neck sweater, I dreaded the prospect of my first day at school.

With my brown and orange faux-leather satchel flapping at my side, Dad led me by the hand up a set of steps and into the main building. The contrast in the light was such that it took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dingy concourse before us. A peculiar musty smell in the air I would later learn originated from the books on the bookcases bordering a carpeted area to one side. Standing tall in the corner among the bookcases was the object so commonplace in schools in the '70s and '80s. Concealed behind a cabinet atop four chrome legs and wheeled feet was the school television.

Having slowed us down with my gawping, Dad pulled me to him and led me in the same direction he must've led Dee two years earlier. Stopping outside a closed door, Dad knocked and waited. Just then, out strode the terrifying figure of Miss Norton, the school headmistress. Austere in both her dress and manner, Miss Norton cut an altogether severe, no nonsense character. It was while looking up at this fearsome looking lady before me that I eyed Miss Norton's most peculiar characteristic. Sitting just below her hairline on one side of her forehead was a purple birth mark. Resembling a smaller version of that belonging to future leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, Miss Norton's birth mark immediately captivated me. However, I'd soon become distracted from it the moment Dad let go of my hand and left me in the charge of Miss Norton. While tears streamed down my face, Miss Norton lead me down a long corridor to the classroom of my new teacher, an equally stern and forbidding looking woman by the name of Miss Taylor.

Despite being the youngest child in my class, before long I had settled in fairly easily among my new classmates. All the teachers, with Miss Norton at the helm, ran a consistently tight ship. Their no nonsense approach to thwarting misbehaviour while offering little in the way of soothing words to a distressed child would characterise my school experience both then and in the years that followed.

The sternness of the teachers aside, school would become a perpetual struggle for me on account of what I came to recognise as an inability to concentrate for too long. Despite moments of almost zen like focus and fixation on a particular task, from which I could not break until I'd finished it, on the whole my focus in class remained poor. In later years this would manifest itself in my disrupting lessons by seizing the opportunity to play the clown and the class comedian. Little did I realise then that I'd be merely emulating at school the role I'd end up falling into at home.

The difficulties of the classroom notwithstanding, like most children, the place where I felt happiest was in the playground. Remaining one of the smallest children in my class throughout school, I found myself blessed with winged feet. My ability to be able to outrun children much older than me stood me in good stead. In addition to being swift of foot, I had a tendency to be equally swift of mouth, taking great delight in taunting my elders, whom I'd invariably outrun whenever they tried to catch me and duff me up.

In a similar manner to the classroom, the place where I felt most ill at ease was in morning assembly. As was the case in most schools around the country, assembly took place in the school hall. There, children sat cross-legged in rows on hard, varnished parquet floors. However, the discomfort of the floor paled in comparison to what happened each time assembly got under way. No sooner had Miss Norton begun to address the hall than I'd experience a sudden swelling sensation in my shorts. In a state of confusion, I immediately pressed down on the lump with both thumbs in an attempt to make it go away. For fear of revealing my embarrassment to those around me, I kept my head bowed until such time as the lump began to subside. Suffice to say that until those unfortunate episodes subsided, I found myself dreading morning assembly.

Nonetheless, with my first year at Horn Park coming to a close in the summer of 1978, I looked forward to showing Mum and Dad my work during parents' evening. However, it was not my parents' reaction to my sloping handwriting on the unlined page of my exercise book that I'd remember about my first parents' evening. No. This particular evening was more memorable for the first of many audacious acts on my mother's part of petty larceny.

With parents' evening having concluded, we made our way down the corridor leading to the dingy concourse and the way out. Before reaching the end of the corridor, in the last classroom, we passed a pretty array of whicker baskets. Just then, my mother darted into the classroom and seized a basket before rejoining us in the corridor. Despite my sense that she'd done something she probably shouldn't have, the effortlessness with which she acted made her behaviour seem strangely acceptable. Yet, I wouldn't realise until later on just how conditioned I was fast becoming by Mum's behaviour.

When my mother took a dislike to someone there'd be very little they could do to redeem themselves. From certain individuals to specific groups and from the old to the young, my mother could dislike someone at will. However, this often worked both ways each time someone learned that despite being charming to their face, she'd been talking about them behind their back. They in turn would end up distancing themselves from her. Indeed, there would come a time in the not too distant future where, on account of her behaviour, my mother would alienate herself not only from Dad's side of the family but her own as well. Unsurprisingly, there would never be a time in her life when she'd have any real friends.

During this period in the late 1970s, events transpired to set the family tone in a way which would endure throughout the 1980s. Aside from these, three specific events occurring around this time I recall with nothing else except shame and regret. Taken together, they provide a stark illustration of how my mother's behaviour had begun to influence my own. The first involved my discovering the whereabouts of the keys to my father's cash box from which I subsequently stole a small sum of money. What I'd fail to realise as a foolish six-year-old boy was that I had taken money paid to him by his customers for their monthly insurance premiums; money he would have to repay from his own pocket.

While stealing from my own father remained an isolated occurrence, so to was an incident which followed, although that in no way absolves me of any wrongdoing. Whether influenced by the so-called Battle of Lewisham, which saw five-hundred members of the National Front attempt to march from New Cross to nearby Lewisham in August 1977, my mother began to openly express a revulsion of black people, referring to them pejoratively as coons. To my shame I found myself one particular day facing the wall outside headmaster Mr. Thomas's office for having used an even more revolting slur against a mixed-race girl in my class. Again, thankfully, this too remained an isolated occurrence. As previously mentioned, even when my mother took a dislike to someone, being averse to confrontation as she was, she'd be nothing but charming to their face. Two examples from this time were our next door neighbour, a rather haughty Margot Leadbetter type called Muriel and my form teacher at the time, a lady by the name of Miss Costaras. In Muriel's case, I suspect that her crime was her snooty upper-class manner, something to which my mother aspired and of which, it is more likely than not, she harboured feelings of jealousy. Further damning Muriel in Mum's eyes was how she referred to her baby daughter. Rather than calling her Caroline, Muriel referred to her daughter by the nickname “Corky” for which Mum mocked her behind closed doors. As for Miss Costaras, this surly and unfortunate woman would get the treatment each time Mum referred to her as “horse-face” courtesy of her equine features.

While my mother remained charming in the presence of those she privately disliked, my half-sister, Leigh, remained the one person outside our immediate family to whom Mum would be openly spiteful. Unbeknown to me at the time, I myself would unwittingly become party to my mother's spite towards her step-daughter. Not until the early to mid 1980s would I learn of the existence of Leigh's, my father's daughter from his first marriage. This would only come about one July day when he received a birthday card saying 'to dear dad' and signed from Leigh. Dad never spoke of Leigh and it wasn't until March, 1989, that I'd meet Leigh properly, albeit under unfortunate circumstances. It would be another twenty years hence that I'd sit down with her as an adult and discover the full extent of my mother's wickedness towards her.

As Dee and I would have daily proof, my mother had very little patience and care for children. Therefore, it came as no real surprise years later when she admitted to her dislike of them. As mentioned previously, this is not to say that Mum was immune to random acts of kindness. Indeed, she was never more attentive than when we were off sick from school, or more generous than at Christmas. She would even go so far on one occasion to surprise Dee, who'd gone into hospital to have her tonsils removed. With Dee's hospital admission coinciding with the popularity of Saturday Night Fever and Grease, Mum hurriedly cobbled together a scrap book of newspaper cuttings featuring John Travolta, a favourite of Dee's at the time. Furthermore, Mum would go on to exhibit similar generosity towards her children at certain moments in the future. However, given the context, her generosity perhaps owed more to a need to atone for her behaviour than a desire to do selfless good.

Despite having experienced first-hand how spiteful my mother could be towards children, the disclosures made during my meeting with Leigh left me shocked. Without a hint of malice in her voice as she spoke, Leigh explained how, as an eight-year-old girl, she would take two buses from her home in Kidbrooke to visit her father at his flat in Bennett Park, Blackheath. Following her knock at his door, my mother answered and informed Leigh that her father wasn't home. This turned out to be untrue, with the lie being confirmed to Leigh by Dad in a subsequent telephone call that he had in fact been at the flat when she called.

As if this first revelation were not appalling enough, what followed would be even more reprehensible. Indeed, Leigh went on to explain that on those occasions when she was able to see her father, they'd often walk along the street holding hands with my mother following behind. In an act of particular cruelty, Mum would take to slapping their hands in an attempt to break the bond between father and daughter. It wouldn't be too long before Mum would actually succeed in permanently severing the already fragile bond between them. This came on the day when Leigh, as a ten-year-old girl, received a phone call from her father to say that in order to keep the peace at home, he could no longer see her. Despite the devastating news, Leigh made consistent attempts at regular intervals throughout the seventies to contact her father by phone. These were similarly unsuccessful each time my mother answered and told Leigh that Dad was out and to stop calling. This is where I came in the day I sat with my colouring book on the bottom step of the stairs next to the telephone table at our home in Guibal Road.

The phone call which came this particular day would otherwise have been unremarkable had my mother not berated the caller by name before telling them not to call again. Being unaware of the existence of my half-sister at that time, I believed the caller to have been a male by the name of Lee. When the phone rang again, my mother told me to fetch my descant recorder and remove the mouthpiece. Following this, she said that if the phone rang again I must blow on the mouthpiece as hard as I could down the phone. Then, if that didn't work, she told me to lower my voice and announce that 'Lee' had come through to switchboard of the local police station. It was not until Leigh mentioned her attempts to phone her father that I realised I'd been used as my mother's stooge. Although I could not have been held responsible for my part in such a deplorable episode, this did not prevent me from feeling obliged to apologise to Leigh subsequently for any hurt that I'd caused.

While there'd be many times in the no too distant future when I'd find myself once again a stooge for my mother, the stooge in what can only be described as an utterly repulsive act of depravity this time involved my baby sister, Sas. With Dee and I already on our guard against various airborne objects hurtling towards us in addition to the threat of being mercilessly bitten, came perhaps the most disturbing act of all. Beginning during her nappy change, Sas often ran naked around the lounge until she had a clean nappy put on. However, before then my mother would scoop her baby daughter up and, with Sas's back against Mum's chest, she'd pull her legs back, thereby fully exposing Sas's vulva and anus. Thinking it was all some sort of game, the giggling baby then found herself thrust genitals first into the face of whoever, between Dee or me, happened to be close by. With our faces covered in the revolting smell of our sister's unwashed genitals we'd rush in tears to the bathroom and frantically scrub our face clean. Such humiliation would continue until such time as our reflexes improved and Sas became too heavy for Mum to lift.

As for Dad, it would be his and Dee's mutual love of football which formed the basis of their bond as the 1970s drew to a close. Despite my disinterest in football, I'd often feel left out every Saturday afternoon that Dad and Dee went to see Charlton Athletic play at home. On the one occasion when Dad did take me, I misbehaved to such an extent that he vowed never to take me again. However, when he took us with him to see the greyhound racing at Catford dogs, that was a different matter. Indeed, the deafening roar of the spectators each time the dogs were released from their traps thrilled us immensely. Likewise, the discarded programs lying around on the ground like snow, which Dee and I would kick up and then watch as they fluttered back down to the ground as we left the stadium.

Nonetheless, by taking Dee to the football, Mum convinced herself that Dad meant to deliberately exclude me. For me, consolation lay in the records Mum would play as we sat together and listened. While football provided the bonding element for Dad and Dee, music provided the same for Mum and me. To my delight, Mum went out and bought me a radiogram, which quickly became my most treasured possession. To the song 'The Wonderful Thing About Tiggers' I'd bounce up and down on my bed and sing along, pretending to be Tigger. Peculiarly, having experienced more alone time with Mum than did Dee, and by now aged seven, I found myself becoming more attuned to her moods and emotions.

For the first time during the summer of 1980, I sensed in my mother the kind of discontent and restlessness which would cause so much disruption to our family throughout the 1980s. Not only would the new decade see us make a number of regular house moves, it would also see us move abroad in pursuit of the kind of happiness which always seemed to elude my mother. With her perception that there were too many black people in suburbia, she began to openly protest at having to stay in London and suddenly proposed that we move to the country. The hand of fate would play a part around this time one Saturday in Lewisham. There, an event took place which my mother would leverage and bring about our move out of London at the end of 1980 for good.

With my first year at Horn Park Primary School fast approaching, Mum, Dee and I headed one Saturday to Lewisham precinct to buy our new school uniforms. As we walked, Mum suddenly stopped to retrieve her purse from her bag. No sooner had she reached in than three black youths ripped her bag from her hand and ran out of the main entrance. The next time we saw Mum's bag it had been handed in to her local bank, minus the contents. While being the victim of a snatch theft must have been unpleasant enough, Mum wasted no time in leveraging the youths' race in order to support her case for moving away. In addition to this, she would also invoke the name of her good friend, Pauline.

As stated previously, my mother would navigate life making very few friends along the way. Therefore, it came as something of a surprise when she began to speak of moving down to Maidstone in Kent to be nearer this never before heard of lady by the name of Pauline. It would transpire that Pauline and Mum had attended school together. However, we had never met Pauline and, unsurprisingly, following our move to Maidstone we would meet Pauline only once. Nevertheless, in November, 1980, we moved the forty-six mile distance from south-east London to West Kent to a village to the south of Maidstone named Coxheath.

Sparing a thought for Dad, while he managed to gain a transfer with the Prudential with relative ease, London had always been his home and that of his ageing relatives. Indeed, despite our move to Kent, we would make regular return trips with him to see our aunties, Liz, Grace and Jackie. What these forays made clear was that Dad never wanted to leave London and only agreed to do so to appease my mother. Unfortunately for him, he would find himself in a similar dilemma less than six years later while torn between staying in or leaving the UK. Alas, he had begun to make a rod for his own back and it appeared there was little he wouldn't do to please my mother, regardless of the cost to his health and his wallet.

For now, having settled into our new home in Coxheath, Dee and I were enrolled in the nearby Junior School while Sas followed into the infants two years later. As for Mum, she was finally away from London and also the proud owner of a brand-new split level cooker she insisted be installed in our new home. Knowing that he'd be the main beneficiary of her demand, Dad was only too happy to oblige her. Yet, it remained to be seen for how long following this current move my mother would remain happy. Alas, we hadn't been in Maidstone for long before she and my father continued in earnest something which had begun in London. Between them they were about to embark on the kind of corrosive favouritism which would pit me against my father and create a mutual hostility from which our relationship would never recover.

Within weeks of our move to Georgian Drive, an event occurred which would shock the world. During the seventies, there were two particular images I'd consistently see in newspapers and on television. The first featured a thin man with round wire-rimmed glasses while the other featured an altogether captivating blonde-haired lady. While too young at first to know who they were, their images impressed upon me a sense of how very important they must've been to a lot of people. Tragically, I'd see the man again on the front page of Dad's copy of The Daily Mirror when it landed on our doormat on 10th December, 1980. As for the lady, I'd find myself similarly saddened three and a half years later to learn of her death from cancer, such was the enduring popularity of British legends Diana Dors and John Lennon.

It seemed rather ironic considering the difference in purity between the London and Kentish air that within weeks of our move to Maidstone I'd be diagnosed with asthma. Almost overnight, I began having regular attacks which left me severely short of breath. Furthermore, the greater the attack, the more hysterical I became which in turn worsened the attack. My request to Mum to call a doctor would almost always be met with the response that a doctor wouldn't make a home visit for a simple asthma attack. Instead, Mum would resort to sitting me on the floor following which we'd link hands and after placing her feet on my chest she'd begin vigorously rubbing up and down. Alas, Mum's home remedy was no match for a steroid inhaler upon which I'd remain dependent until well into my twenties.

Although my difficulties with concentration and focus in class persisted, I wasted no time in making friends. Chief among them was a similarly short-legged fellow with boyish good-looks by the name of Dale. With our class and every other throughout the school separated into designated houses for sports and competitions, being in the same house as Dale, I naturally gravitated towards him.

In addition, I found myself before long drawn to an otherwise nondescript blonde-haired blue-eyed girl by the name of Elizabeth. As well as being a fellow recorder player, Elizabeth had her own horse. Peculiarly, I have no idea why Elizabeth in particular became the focus of my attention among all the girls in my class. With me being completely uninterested in football, the girls were the only ones at playtime with whom I could play. Yet, Elizabeth's tendency to wet herself in PE then put her hand up to be excused before rushing off in a humiliated state and leaving a pool of urine behind further endeared her to me. Why she didn't put her hand up before she wet herself, I'll never know. However, when Elizabeth started going out with Dale, I began to feel proper pangs of jealousy.

Our house at Georgian Drive was the first of two houses in which my mother insisted on having a split-level cooker installed. Ironically, the kitchen would be the room in which she'd spend the least amount of time. While she knew she could not avoid having to cook my father's dinner each lunchtime, my mother would not prepare anything for Dee, Sas and me for tea beyond a sandwich, a packet of crisps and a Cadbury's mini-roll. However, come the weekend, we'd sit together as a family for lunch. On these days we ate solely the kind of meals that Dad would eat, such as liver and bacon, beef stew and dumplings or sausage casserole. Never one to rush his food, and inclined to read his newspaper while he ate, Dad would always be the last one to leave the table.

Christmas 1980 marked the only time Mum's parents, whom we referred to as Nanny and Grandad, came to us for Christmas dinner. Although we'd visit Nanny and Granddad a number of times throughout the year, it was rare for them to visit us. Whichever way around it was, Nanny always greeted her daughter by remarking on her weight. Moreover, whether it was her intention to antagonise my mother further, Nanny would spend an inordinate amount of time praising Mum's younger sister, Kathleen, stating repeatedly how she had a heart of gold. Despite the festivities, Nanny then made a point of cleaning the kitchen from top to bottom, implying that if she didn't do it then it wouldn't get done.

Bearing in mind her daughter's lack of house pride, of course, Nanny was right. However, when considered in the context of her comments about Mum's weight and the high praise reserved for Kathleen, Mum saw Nanny's comments, perhaps justifiably, as thinly-veiled put downs. The lack of genuine affection for my mother by her own appeared obvious, despite Mum's attempts to try to please her. Dad, on his part, would always refer to Nanny as Mum, despite being only ten years her junior.

Unlike his wife, Granddad appeared gentle and kind and not at all the strict disciplinarian that my mother described. Regarding Granddad, Mum described a man who would take his belt to his children without a moment's hesitation. Furthermore, she recalled how her father would hit her in the face and make her mouth bleed while her mother stood by and laughed. By now, this man cut a much softened figure and seemed to enjoy nothing more than cooking, maintaining a comfortable home and keeping his wife happy.

On the other hand, with Aunty Joyce, Nanny's sister, living upstairs in their shared house, it's true to say that a browbeaten Granddad often found himself ganged up on. In less than four years I myself would witness the fury of both women when they'd reveal their true feelings about my mother. Yet, Granddad's warmth endeared me to him, despite the awkwardness of our goodbyes. To Mum, Dee and Sas he'd invite them with outstretched arms to give him a banger (a kiss). To me, he'd merely pat me on the head and declare that boys don't kiss.

If it's generally true that families share a similar sense of humour, it's fair to say that ours was straight out of the bawdy Carry On mould. Music and comedy appeared to have the effect on my mother of lightening her mood and lifting her spirits. In addition, by this time I'd begun to develop the kind of quick-witted repartee she found appealing and which made her laugh. Consequently, our shared sense of humour and similar taste in music and film brought me firmly into her favour. The favouritism, such as it was, that my mother began to show me at this time she justified on the basis that she was merely compensating for what she felt I wasn't getting from my father. Even at age seven, I possessed the kind of characteristics which appealed to my mother and which she had not found in her husband, specifically the capacity to make her laugh.

Predictably, with my mother's focus firmly on me instead of my father, I began to find myself the target of his ire. This usually manifested itself by him hitting me around the head repeatedly for often trivial reasons. Indeed, the cat and dog quarrelling which took place between Dee and I provided him with the perfect excuse to intervene at the earliest opportunity and begin belting me repeatedly around the head.

As if the blows themselves were not enough, the signet ring Dad wore on his little finger would often catch me, resulting in a cut to my head. Tellingly, my father only hit me around the head and never Dee or Sas. Somewhat hypocritically, my mother, who was still very much in the habit of launching scissors and similar projectiles at us, warned my father against consistently hitting me around the head. However, it's entirely plausible that he continued to do so in order to get back at her for making me the focus of her attention rather than him. Upping the ante, my mother would begin to belittle him openly by called him a “weed” and remarked on how he wasn't happy unless he was “mithering about something”. To his complaints about his sleepless nights or upset stomachs she'd dismiss them as being all in the mind and express thinly-veiled regret that he'd likely outlive us all.

Moreover, there were consequences for poor Dee, who would also be brought into the fray. It's fair to say that Dee regarded me as every inch the annoying little brother. It's also true to say that I sensed an indifference from Dee towards me and my merciless teasing of her was often a childish attempt on my part to gain her attention. However, Mum began to act towards Dee in the same way that Dad had towards me each time that with little provocation she'd hit Dee. Adding insult to injury, Mum would often criticise Dee for what remained of her south London accent, cruelly mocking her for sounding like a “fish-wife”, and a “coal-man's daughter”. These divisions would only deepen on all sides with each passing year until they'd reach the seemingly inevitable breaking point towards the end of the decade. In the meantime, Mum doubled down and ensured each Christmas that my presents were laid out on the lounge settee while Dee's and Sas's were crammed into the two matching armchairs.

On his part, Dad also doubled down in his behaviour towards me. In an attempt to belittle and intimidate me, Dad would often come into the bathroom after I'd gone to the toilet or blown my nose to check how much toilet paper I'd used. On those occasions where he considered the amount I'd used gratuitous, he'd resort to calling me a “waster”. Next, if I ate more than one sandwich biscuit and one plain one he'd brand me a “gannet”. Moreover, on the odd occasion where I accidentally broke something he'd yell and call me a “clown” or a “toe-rag”.

However, I was not then and nor since, someone who would allow myself to be easily intimidated. Consequently, Dad and I would enter into running battles as to who'd have the last word, which invariably ended in him losing his patience and hitting me around the head once again. Yet, I would not roll over and his hostility towards me not only strengthened my resolve but served to deepen my resentment towards him. This resentment would become fixed eighteen months later following an event which threatened to tear already fragile bonds to pieces. Indeed, rather than address the favouritism problem, my father's hostility towards me merely intensified it and had the predictable consequence of bringing my mother and I closer together.

Keeping pace with one another, the emerging conflicts and the restlessness stirring once more within my mother set the tone for what lay ahead during the next few years. After only eighteen months at Georgian Drive my parents suddenly sold up. At my mother's insistence were about to move for the third time in five years although this time into rented accommodation on the other side of Coxheath. Yet, the move alone would not satisfy my mother. Maybe satisfaction would come courtesy of the only proper family holiday we'd have the month following our move in April, 1982.

However, my mother was beginning to display a tendency when the going was good to sabotage things for herself and those around her. So, in May of that year we jetted off for two weeks to the west coast of Cyprus to the ancient city of Paphos. How fitting then that the island considered the birthplace of the Greek goddess of love, lust, and passion would provide the setting for my mother's most audacious act to date; an act which would see her permanently outcast from both sides of our family and brought her own to the very brink of destruction.

Following on from her grammar school days, my mother maintained a sense of self-education. During this period of the early 1980s, she'd develop keen interests in subjects such as heraldry, ancient Greek mythology and cosmology. The latter likely came about courtesy of the screening on BBC1 during the summer of 1981 of Carl Sagan's thirteen part documentary series, entitled “Cosmos”. Unlike Dad, a creature of habit who remained steadfast with what he knew, Mum had a sense of adventure and a willingness to try new things. Both traits would be on full display during our upcoming holiday in Cyprus. Despite only having read about the eastern Mediterranean island, my mother decided she'd fallen in love before we'd even set foot there.

Whether kismet or mere coincidence, our holiday apartment in the west coast town of Paphos came about following an advertisement in my Dad's company's monthly newsletter. The owners of the apartment, a Greek Cypriot man and his British wife, ran their own holiday company in North London. By chance, our holiday coincided with the owner's trip to Cyprus to visit his extended family who were also based in Paphos. Introducing himself to my mother by his Greek name of Stelios when he telephoned the apartment one particular day, we'd subsequently refer to him by the anglicised version of Steve.

While it's fair to say that we were doing just fine before Steve made contact with us, things became much more eventful afterwards than they were before. Despite his intense dislike of driving, in order for us to see the sights, Dad had to bite the bullet and hire a car. Top of Mum's list was the town of Kouklia, home of the remains of a sanctuary dedicated to Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love. The second on her list, 'Aphrodite's Rock', marked the birthplace of the legendary goddess born of the sea foam on the coast between Paphos and Limassol. Although we'd have no difficulty locating Aphrodite's Rock, owing to Dad's lack of confidence as a driver and unclear road signs, we'd never actually manage to find Kouklia, despite it being located no more than ten minutes from the rock itself.

Nevertheless, it's similarly fair to say that our holiday could be divided into two parts, the part before and the part involving Steve, who arrived at the apartment as arranged with my mother the day after his phone call. What transpired as he walked through the door I can only describe as the kind of combustible moment I'd witness between my mother and another man for the first and only time. Yet, the nature of Steve's appeal was certainly not in his appearance. At almost a year younger than my Dad at the age of forty-six, a little overweight and with a large, curved nose, Steve cut a rather ordinary figure. However, his appeal lay in the kind of charm, warmth, wit and sense of fun which, like a magnetic tractor beam, pulled us all in almost immediately.

On a separate yet related note, during our monthly visits to Auntie Jackie and the rest of Dad's family in London, I'd often hear her ask Dad what he saw in Mum. As if grappling for an answer, he'd always respond how she could be very charming. The part of her response I wouldn't hear as a child, although would learn as an adult, was how in addition to her charm she must be possessed of a 24-carat gold pussy. Indeed, her charms, which started from the moment she met Steve, would remain on full display for the duration of our holiday.

Starting as he meant to go on, the fun with Steve commenced the very first day of our meeting. In matching hire cars we began our tour of Paphos by following our host down to the harbour, home to a rather lonely looking castle and some enormous pelicans. From there we headed north for a swim in the sea at the renowned Coral Bay. Yet, perhaps the most memorable moment occurred as we entered a taverna on the hill above the beach following our swim. While we made our way through the entrance, an elderly lady reached out to my mother and handed her a small pastry parcel filled with cheese. Right there and then, in that simple gesture of hospitality, was the very moment my mother truly fell head over heels in love with Cyprus. Furthermore, in the days that followed she'd leave us all in absolutely no doubt whatsoever how she genuinely felt about one of its sons.

Continuing where we left off the following day, we headed over to the house of Steve's sister, Aristi. Sporting a similar shaped nose as her brother, we met Aristi and her four daughters, with the youngest two, named Christina and Stavroula, close in age to Dee and me. While sat on a bench under a large tree outside their rather dilapidated little home, with its wonky corrugated iron roof, Christina, Stavroula and I were tasked with making the tea.

On a battered old dual burner camping stove, the girls boiled some water while I gathered some cups. In what would provide a moment of comedy gold, a solitary piece of crooked wallpaper stuck to the painted wall behind the burner suddenly caught fire. Following their initial screams, both girls quickly set about putting the fire out. That done, Christina then dove into a cupboard a produced a roll of wallpaper from which she cut a similar sized square and placed it in the same spot on the wall in the same crooked fashion. Continuing on as if nothing had happened, both girls busied themselves once more with the tea.

As the days unfolded, the more time we spent with Steve the more captivated we became with him. Being exotic, cultured and fun, he embodied everything my father did not and the differences between both men could not have been starker. While eating out he'd teach me Greek phrases to say to the waiters. Furthermore, he'd do the same the evening Aristi and her daughters joined us all for dinner at the renowned Demokritos restaurant in Paphos old town. Yet, Steve truly secured his place in our affections the day he took us to an obscure beach located further up the western coast from Coral Bay. Upon the sands of Corallia Beach, he delighted us all by walking along a fair stretch of the beach on his hands. Such a feat my father would never have considered, let alone attempted.

In addition, the extent of Steve's thrill seeking sense of adventure would be on full display during a subsequent trip into the mountains of Troodos. Following a visit to the famed Kykkos Monastery, Steve decided to take us back to Paphos the longer route via the mountains rather than go back the way we came. With the light eventually turning to dark and the mountain roads growing ever narrower, it became clear that Steve may have lost his way.

Being more like a footpath than a road, by now the ground beneath us was barely wider than the width of the car. Furthermore, the lack of any protective barriers against a sheer drop and the speed with which Steve drove left us all biting our knuckles to the bone. Adding insult to injury, Steve resorted to speeding up each time a mountain rabbit ran out in front of the car. Suddenly, with a loud bang followed by a bumping sensation, it became clear as we came to a halt that we had a flat tyre. With Steve and Dad working in tandem to change it, we were soon on our way and arrived back in Paphos late in the evening exhausted by our little detour.

Whether as a consequence of the recent activity, during the middle weekend of our holiday, I'd spend part of the day in the local hospital following an asthma attack. Contrary to her usual indifference to them, this particular attack was sufficiently prolonged and intense for Mum and Dad to take me to Paphos hospital. After a few hours on oxygen, the medic packed me off, much to the amusement of all whom my father regaled subsequently, with two suppositories. How a suppository could prevent an asthma attack was anybody's guess. Indeed, had I rocked up with a broken leg, or worse, I suspect they would've handed me a suppository or two and sent me on my way!

Nothing which occurred at the beginning of our second week could've predicted how it would end. While the sudden change of pace was a welcome one and with Mum making no secret of the fact that she wanted to move to Cyprus, we'd spend the next few days viewing apartments. Yet, what started off as different and exciting soon became monotonous with each apartment we viewed. Consequently, when Mum announced one afternoon towards the end of the week that she and Steve were going to view another apartment, we were all content to stay home. Despite looking somewhat overdressed in a light cotton number she'd bought from a local gift shop, and with no objections, my mother left the apartment.

Considering how captivated Mum had been with Steve, and, seemingly, him with her, it should have come as no surprise to any of us when she didn't return to the apartment that night. Indeed, no-one who'd observed how engrossed in conversation with each other they were at any opportunity could deny the connection between them. Undoubtedly, he'd lit a fire under my mother and brought her fully to life in a way I'd seen neither before nor since. As unsettled as I was at the prospect of going to bed that night with her gone, in addition to being left alone with my father, I found myself invested in her happiness and went to sleep that night feeling strangely pleased for her.

Conversely, for my father I had little sympathy whatsoever. Although the sight of him sitting bolt upright on a sofa bed in the dark as I crept to the toilet in the middle of the night was a pitiable one, I naively considered him the source of my mother's unhappiness in addition to my own. The following day, my mother telephoned the apartment to say that she'd spent the night in the capital city, Nicosia. To the news that she didn't know exactly when she'd be back, Dad took us all to the beach opposite the apartment, which involved beating a mile long path through plantations and marshland.

With the two nights she'd been away having felt like an eternity, Mum returned the day before we were due to leave. Armed with boxes of Turkish delight for Dee, Sas and me, my mother wandered in without a care in the world. Considering how perfectly at ease she and Dad were with arguing in front of us children, the fallout I had expected didn't come, save a few cross words exchanged after we'd gone to bed on our last night.

The following day, the driver who'd fetched us in his Mercedes from Larnaca Airport met us outside the apartment for our return journey. Just then, at that very moment, Steve pulled up and came over to say goodbye. During the one and only time I'd see my father cross with another man, he proceeded to tick Steve off by telling him that he'd ruined his marriage. As our car pulled away, and with Mum sitting in the back with us, she pulled me to her and began crying, to which I found myself suddenly doing the same.

It took no time at all following our return home for us all to continue where we left off. Furthermore, Mum's dalliance with Steve compounded the ongoing tension between her and Dad. In addition, Dee and I continued to fight like cat and dog, as did Dad and me. As for Mum, she became increasingly withdrawn and began putting her headphones on and retreating into her own world. Indeed, her lot would become a more onerous one following Dad's announcement that our rented accommodation placed an untenable burden on the family finances and that Mum must now find work.

Predictably, Dad's disclosure would not be music to the ears of someone who'd got away with doing as little around the home as possible and whose greatest pleasure at the time was sitting and listening to her music. Yet, the secretarial role Mum would shortly fulfil became the first in a slew of roles she'd gain and then quickly lose. Unfortunately for her, she possessed the kind of character inclined to talk about people behind their back while remaining charming to their face. Furthermore, until her colleagues knew better, they would unwisely take my mother into their confidence only for her to subsequently betray them to the rest of the staff.

Moreover, my mother engaged in the kind of shameless flirting with male colleagues which pitted her against the females in her office. Additionally, the prospect of an incident of petty theft remained a perpetual risk. All of these rather problematic tendencies meant my mother would be out of employment more often than in it. Indeed, jobs were easy enough for her to come by although much more difficult to sustain. Against a backdrop of failed appointments, in the years that followed, County Court judgements began to appear intermittently on our doormat.

By now the pattern was well established in that my mother's moods tended to affect that of those close to her. Yet, rescuing her from her current misery, a padded envelope which landed on our doormat one day ensured her immediate relief. Upon opening it, a cassette tape fell out which she placed in the tape deck of her hi-fi before pressing play. Suddenly, the sound of a Greek bouzouki emerged followed by the familiar voice of Steve. As if transported immediately back to Cyprus, my mother came fully to life once again. With Dad being out at work, Mum played the tape right through and would do so over and over. To the sound of Steve's musings interspersed between jokes recorded from the radio, even from afar, Steve had a power my father didn't have, a power I also possessed, to make my mother laugh.

Her contact with Steve suddenly re-established, my mother became completely preoccupied with the charismatic Greek-Cypriot once more. Engrossed by her tape, she'd take to playing it whenever she could, even listening to it with her headphones on while my father sat directly opposite. What with more tapes arriving on our doormat on a regular basis, it wasn't long before, with Dad at work, Mum and Steve began talking on the phone.

Between their lengthy conversations and her listening to his tapes, my mother was now completely engrossed with all things Steve. By now hopelessly smitten with him, she took to inserting his name into song lyrics she'd sing aloud while wearing her headphones. In a similar manner to Bill Stone, the soundtrack to her affair with Steve came courtesy of Abba tracks “Under Attack” and “Angeleyes” in addition to Barbra Streisand's “Woman in Love” and John Denver's “Shanghai Breezes”. Needing to maintain some semblance of a connection with my mother, I'd often sit at her feet while she listened and sang.

Moreover, in moments of unguarded candour, my mother would listen to unlucky in love type songs before revealing how they reflected her own sense of desire and longing. As if further proof were needed, I opened a book on Greek mythology one particular day to find the words “...I miss him only on the days ending in y…” inscribed on the inside cover. Predictably, it would only be a matter of time before my mother and Steve conspired to meet again. I wouldn't know before then the part I'd play in their rendezvous or the ramping up it would signal in their relations. Nor did I know what would transpire the day my father's restraint and patience with my mother finally ran out.

Despite the eventual rupture, the summer of 1982 would be memorable for two particular reasons. Firstly, on the initial Saturday in June the whole of Coxheath village turned out for a fete on the green behind the village hall. Stalls, music and entertainment provided the build-up to the much anticipated World Custard Pie Championship held annually at the event. Taking my place alongside the other kids in the village brave enough, I stood behind either of the two opposing teams launching flour and water based pies at each other. When a team member ducked, the pie tended to end up in the faces of the kids standing nearby.

Then, during the six-week school holiday, Dee, Sas and I attended the summer playscheme which took place in the village hall itself. Once again, the children of the village converged from Monday to Friday to enjoy arts and crafts and such sporting activities as badminton, rounders and table-tennis. During a few games of the latter I met a rather bolshie young blonde-haired girl by the name of Michelle whom I recognised as one of Dee's classmates. Before long, she and I learned that aside from table-tennis, we shared a mutual love of actual lawn tennis. Seven years on from our initial meeting, Michelle and I would meet again and begin in earnest a friendship which continues to this day.

Electing to meet on a Saturday afternoon while Dad was out, Mum began dressing in preparation for Steve's arrival. Having finished curling her hair and applying make-up, Mum added the finishing touches with a dab from her L'aimant perfume compact to each wrist. Despite my mother being overweight since her mid teens, even her own mother conceded that she had a pretty face. Yet, expectation soon turn to frustration and then panic when Steve hadn't arrived by the arranged time. Dutiful to my mother and with a desire to see her happy again with Steve, I quickly donned my sneakers before running up to the main road to find him.

Having perched myself high up on a fence, I sat and watched as car after car passed by. In my rush to leave, it hadn't occurred to me to ask what make and colour car Steve drove. My head moving this way and that as a stream of cars flowed by, after a while I still could not see him. Suddenly, a red Ford Granada Estate car came into view being driven by a smart looking man in a dark blue jacket. Recognising the driver to be Steve, I waved my arms frantically and jumped down from the fence. Slamming on his brakes, he opened the passenger door and beckoned me in before he drove us the short distance to the house.

With Mum now happily aboard, she and Steve headed off. Only once his car had disappeared from view did I wonder where they were headed and, most importantly, when she'd be back. Nonetheless, my mother's absence on this particular weekend set the tone for what was to come over the next few months. Whereas on that first weekend my mother left on the Saturday and returned late the following day, during subsequent weekends, she'd disappear of a Friday and not return until late on the Sunday evening. Indeed, it became a regular occurrence for Dee and I to arrive home from school on a Friday afternoon to find cooking instructions sitting next to a casserole dish on the kitchen counter. Instead of him cooking food for us, my forty-eight year-old father ended up having his dinner prepared for him by his eleven year-old daughter.

Whereas on their first weekend my mother and Steve stayed overnight in a local hotel, on subsequent weekends she began travelling to London. Following her return of a Sunday evening, I'd take at times to sitting on the stairs in the dark and listen to them argue. To Mum's suggestion that they find a way to compromise, Dad retorted that he'd compromised as much as he were willing to. As a nine-year-old, I didn't know the meaning of the word 'compromise' although knew I'd have to look it up at the earliest opportunity. I'd later learn that compromise meant something along the lines of having to live on certain terms.

Likewise, it wouldn't be merely my father having to compromise. With each absence I found feelings of resentment for my mother beginning to stir. It'd be another four years before I'd unleash the kind of anger and frustration on her that had been gradually building following the events of the previous ten years. In the meantime, what began as joy for her that she'd finally found happiness eventually turned to resentment; resentment that she'd gone in the first place and that, having done so, she'd left me in the company of someone for whom I shared a mutual resentment. Nonetheless, following her absence, my mother would always return of a Sunday evening without a care in the world bearing gifts from Hamley's and copious amounts of sweets. As would so often be the case, her motivation for giving owed more to atonement and buying affection than a genuine desire to do selfless good.

As for Dad, until such time as his patience with mum and capacity to compromise finally ran out, he'd seek relief in both the likeliest and the unlikeliest of places. Regarding the former, he'd have a captive audience in Auntie Jackie, who'd long since considered my mother bad news. Done without any consideration for the effect on his children, Dad would recount to his sister every last detail of Mum's antics both during and since our holiday in Cyprus. Yet, Auntie Jackie's response would be muted in comparison to that of Mum's own mother, from whom Dad also sought sympathy.

In a similar manner to our visit to Auntie Jackie, with Mum currently away in London, Dad took the opportunity with us present to bring Nanny and Granddad up to speed. Sitting in her armchair, Nanny knitted frenetically while Dad spoke, pausing only briefly to take intermittent drags on her John Player Carlton cigarette. As Dad continued to relay the lurid details of Mum's shenanigans, the pace of Nanny's knitting quickened while the drags on her cigarette grew longer and harder.

Suddenly and without warning, Nanny slammed her knitting down before launching into a ferocious attack against her eldest daughter. Having never witnessed Nanny angry the hairs immediately went up on the back of my neck as the true extent of her resentment became apparent. From past to present, Nanny hurled every accusation possible at my mother, branding her a great actress who could turn on the water works at will, a thief who stole money from her purse, a snob who wouldn't deign to live in a council house and someone who, with these latest antics, had broken her father's heart.

It's worth noting that with the last accusation, Nanny took it upon herself to speak for Granddad, who sat opposite her in silence throughout the entire tirade. Declaring her daughter no longer welcome in their home, Mum suddenly found herself persona non-grata on both sides of the family. As for Steve, Nanny henceforth referred to him as 'the greasy Greek' whenever he came up in conversation. As a consequence of her vitriolic display, my view of Nanny changed that day and I'd remain forever wary of her. Little did I know then that less than seven years hence I too would become the target of her casual cruelty.

As for the unlikeliest of places for Dad to find sympathy, while he may not have exactly found that, he certainly discovered a kind of solace. Whereas in the future when my father found himself similarly besieged he'd seek sanctuary in his local Baptist church, during Mum's affair with Steve he sought distraction at a nearby nudist camp. A dyed-in-the-wool naturist, Dad would often walk around at home wearing noting except a pair of flip-flops.

Indeed, there'd come a time in the future when, with Dee and I both at secondary school, Dad would wake us both at 7am each morning with a cup of tea. To the sound of his flip-flops I'd awaken all bleary eyed. Mercilessly, my first sight of the day would be my father's hairless buttocks bobbling up and down as he walked away after setting my tea down on my bedside table. Adding insult to injury, he'd often turn the corner to leave my room and fart on his way out. Nonetheless, providing some consolation to him what with Mum in London, Dad headed to a nudist camp nestled in the Kent countryside with Dee, Sas and me in tow. While we played in the club pool with the other children, Dad could often be found enjoying easy conversation with the other patrons.

On the Sunday that we'd been to visit Nanny and Granddad, we came home to the unexpected sight of Mum in the kitchen peeling potatoes. In a rush to denounce what I naively regarded as his treachery, I wasted no time in informing her that Dad had told Nanny and Granddad about her affair with Steve. To this, Mum branded him a big mouth just looking for sympathy and any excuse to stir things up with her parents.

Furthermore, I relayed to Mum how Nanny said she was no longer welcome in the family home. Facing potentially devastating rejection, Mum responded nonchalantly that as there were only so many times she were willing to be kicked in the teeth, she didn't care if she never saw her mother again. Indeed, the ease with which both women let each other go suggested there was no love lost between them whatsoever. While Dad would continue to take us kids from time to time to see Nanny and Granddad, our visits with them had become tainted and I'd never feel comfortable in her presence again.

With Mum's primary focus being her relationship with Steve, she began to harbour doubts as to the direction in which their relationship was headed. Their lengthy phone calls appeared to provide her with little reassurance and when not on the phone, Mum sought ever more solace in her music. One evening while occupying my usual position at her feet, Mum pulled her headphones away from one ear before revealing how she'd asked Steve on a number of occasions for clarification on the future of their relationship. Following this she explained how his response was always the same and mimicked his voice before saying “baby, don't worry”. Yet, worry she did, so much so that she soon forgot discretion and began engaging in conversations with Steve with Dad in the house. Indeed, Mum's lack of tact would prove to be a bridge too far for him and, one Saturday afternoon, events were brought to a head in a sudden and altogether shocking manner.

On those occasions during their affair when Mum didn't go to London, it wouldn't have been down to her. Indeed, my mother wouldn't have given us a second thought if the opportunity arose to spend time with Steve. Therefore, the reason for Mum remaining at home this particular weekend is most likely to have been down to him. While unable to meet, this did not prevent them both on this particular day from engaging each other in yet another lengthy phone conversation. However, this call was different in that it took place while the rest of us, including Dad, were in the lounge watching the football on television.

With the phone perched on the windowsill at the bottom of the stairs opposite the open lounge door, Mum's conversation could be easily overheard. With her child-like giggles and lovey-dovey chat beginning to rankle him and in an attempt to drown Mum out, Dad turned up the volume on the television. Likely unable to hear for the noise, Mum came to the lounge door and slammed it shut. In response, Dad promptly sat down on the floor with his back against the door. After a time and with her conversation with Steve having concluded, Mum attempted to open the door. Just then, upon finding the door wedged shut, Mum began to kick it. Despite each mighty kick, Dad remained firmly against the door. Suddenly, following one almighty kick, Dad flung the door open and ran out into the hallway. No sooner had Dee and I ran out after him than we were met with the sight of Dad smashing the telephone receiver repeatedly into Mum's face. While Dee and I looked on in horror, Dad gave vent to all his pent up anger as he continued to rain blows with the receiver. Unable to witness the assault upon my mother any longer and realising my powerlessness to protect her, I ran out of the front door in tears and headed straight for the phone box in the village.

After running half a mile without stopping, I reached the phone box still in tears having cried all the way there. Wheezing like a set of bagpipes someone had just sat on, I picked up the phone and, without thinking, immediately made a reverse charge call to Steve's home. After accepting the charges, a lady on the other end of the line asked who I was. No sooner had I attempted to speak than I began sobbing once more. In my distress I hadn't even considered what I might say if anyone other than Steve had answered the phone.

Nonetheless, speaking to me in a gentle tone, the nice lady on the end of the line calmed me down long enough for me to explain to her the horrible scene I'd just witnessed before I dissolved into tears anew. Attempting to soothe me once more, the lady told me to return home as my mother would no doubt be worried about me. Eventually I calmed down sufficiently to promise the nice lady that I'd go straight home. With this, she told me she had to go herself and promptly hung up. Although unaware at the time, I'd learn subsequently that the kindly lady who'd answered the phone was in fact Steve's wife!

Moments later I found myself back home again having run all the way back from the village without stopping. Upon entering the living room I saw my father sitting in his chair calmly reading the newspaper. Opposite him at the dining table sat my mother with a cold compress against a lump above one eye which had swollen to the size of a golf ball. With the sight of my mother injured in this way coupled with the realisation of my powerlessness to protect her, at once I felt the kind of fiery resentment for him that would burn within me for what remained of my childhood. While relieving his frustrations in the way he did, in one fell swoop, he had shattered the little that remained of my sense of home as a place of safety.

Nevertheless, if my father reasoned that violence alone would be enough to control my mother's behaviour, time would prove him sorely wrong. However, the trips did indeed begin to occur less frequently as did the phone calls. Before long and without any explanation as to why, my mother stopped going to London altogether. In addition, she stopped playing the songs she associated with Steve and spoke less of him as time went on. Yet, on those odd occasions when my mother did mention Steve, her recollections were tinged with a noticeable sense of fondness, longing and regret.

Considering how much of her feelings towards Steve my mother had expressed so openly, conjecture leads me to believe that plain embarrassment prevented her from revealing how their affair ended. Furthermore, I suspect that my mother gambled by giving Steve an ultimatum, either his wife, their family and their business, or her. Indeed, Steve had far too much to lose to choose my mother over his wife. Indeed, my mother would not have thought twice about leaving her family in search of her own happiness and in her naivety I've no doubt she expected that Steve would do likewise.

Therefore, with the one who got away now gone, it begged the question of how my mother could expect to find contentment as a wife and mother ever again. The simple answer was she wouldn't, as she'd prove in the not too distant future. In the meantime she'd continue to do the minimum she could get away with in her dual role while withdrawing consistently into the escapist sanctuary of her music and losing jobs as quickly as she'd found them.

With my tenth birthday approaching at the end of the year, while by this time I'd stopped wetting the bed, one unpleasant aspect of this past summer's events would linger. Following Dad's assault on my mother, I began to experience particularly disturbing dreams. Confusingly, these dreams would feature my mother and an exact double of her. Both naked, the double would begin attacking my mother before pinning her down on the floor and biting her ferociously. Upon hearing my mother's screams, I'd attempt to enter the room where the attack was be taking place to find that the door would only open wide enough for me to witness the attack but nothing more. At this point I'd invariably wake up. While these dreams would not continue indefinitely, I became reluctant for a while to go out and play lest I'd return home to find my mother dead on the floor having been bitten to death.

Nonetheless, while we didn't manage to find Kouklia in the literal sense, albeit briefly, my mother found a Kouklia of her own with Steve. However, time would prove over and over how those whom she wanted ultimately didn't want her and those who wanted her she didn't care about losing. Unsurprisingly, following the events of summer, 1982, I found myself harbouring a visceral resentment for my father while the seeds of the same for my mother had by now been sown. Somewhat of a mouthy kid by nature, I had also begun to develop something of a chip on my shoulder.

Yet, the greatest sympathy during this time I reserved for my sister, Dee. Despite our mother's casual cruelties towards her, Dee too felt the disruption of Mum's repeated absences. Inevitably, this led a girl otherwise reserved in her emotions to seek ways of releasing her anger. Curiously, as if one kitchen fire wasn't enough for one holiday, the morning following the night I'd seen Dad bolt upright in the dark, I went into the apartment kitchen. On the wall where before hung a set of instructions on how to use the various appliances was now an empty space while the instructions themselves had been reduced to a pile of ash. With me being by far the naughtier child and Dad willing to believe in my eternal guilt, despite my protests that it wasn't me, I still got the blame. Why Dee waited until we were both in our forties to “fess up” is beyond me. Better late than never, as they say!

Approaching my junior school gates on Friday 11th March, 1983, I had no reason to suspect this day would be different to any other. Yet, for the most unexpected of reasons, this particular day would turn out to be one I'd never forget. Having taken the register, my teacher, a tall and handsome man by the name of Mr. Harrington, closed it and stood up. Usually at this point, Mr. Harrington would walk over to the blackboard then sit down in front of it and proceed to pick his nose. Unconcerned by the grimacing faces of his class, he'd select a plum bogey and, after examining it for a few moments, proceed to pop it in his mouth. However, on this day he began by drawing our attention to the absence of Elizabeth, the horse loving recorder playing object of my affection still going out with my best friend, Dale.

Appearing solemn in his manner and tone of voice, Mr. Harrington announced that the previous evening Elizabeth had been knocked down by a car while crossing the road opposite her home. Upon hearing these words, suddenly my heart leapt into my mouth while others around the class gasped. Mr. Harrington went on to explain that while Elizabeth's injuries were not life threatening, she'd be spending the next few days in Maidstone's West Kent Hospital. Following the dreadful news, our third year class spent the rest of the day in a state of shock and disbelief. Upon arriving home the tears I'd suppressed all day overwhelmed me and no sooner had I put my bag down on floor than I began sobbing uncontrollably.

While not completely lacking in a capacity to console, I'd find my mother in this instance gentle and kind in a way I'd never known her before, or since. Having cuddled me until my sobs had subsided, she suggested I go into the garden and pick a large handful of the daffodils among those which had recently sprung up. Following my return to the kitchen, my mother explained that she'd phoned the hospital and was advised that I could stay with Elizabeth until visiting hours were over at 8pm. With this, she put the money for the return bus fare in my hand and packed me off to the hospital.

Soaked to the skin having been caught in a downpour, and with a bunch of wilted daffodils in hand, I presented myself at the foot of Elizabeth's bed. Sporting a doozy of a black eye, she remained in good enough humour to remark on how funny I looked as I came through the ward door all wet and carrying a handful of soggy daffodils. That night, Elizabeth's father dropped me home and it came as a great relief to overhear him explaining to my mother that once his daughter's fractured pelvis had knitted back together, she'd be as right as rain.

Eighteen months had passed since we'd moved into our current home, a rented semi-detached house in a quiet cul-de-sac named South Crescent. Our move to South Crescent came about, as did most things, at the insistence of my mother. Preceding this was the disclosure from a wealthy insurance client of my father's, a man by the name of Mr. Judge, that a tenant in one of his properties had recently been diagnosed with a terminal illness and a short prognosis. In his desire for a quick turnaround, Mr. Judge proceeded to ask my father if he would like first refusal. After viewing the house in question, a mock Tudor cottage nestled in a valley in the nearby village of Boughton Monchelsea during a brief drive-by, my mother decided we'd all be much happier living there.

Consequently, for the purposes of a speedy move once Mr. Judge's ailing tenant had died, and on my mother's whim, my parents sold our house at Georgian Drive following which we moved to South Crescent. Yet, eighteen months later, Mr. Judge's stricken tenant remained alive. Therefore, my father thought it wise to put himself and my mother on the property ladder once again. Remaining in the village of Coxheath, their purchase of a three bedroom terraced house represented my fifth move in eight years. Characterised by one considerable disadvantage and one consolatory advantage, in late 1983, we moved into yet another new home.

Similar to our home in Georgian Drive, for our move to the new home in Chestnut Drive, my mother once again insisted on the installation of a split-level cooker. As to the obvious disadvantage, this came in the form of my bedroom, which would be in a rather dilapidated looking wooden conservatory attached to the rear of the house. Worse still, while I'd be at one end of the conservatory, at the other was situated my father's office. With Dee having shared a room with Sas for the previous six years and approaching thirteen herself, she had more than paid her dues and needed her own space. Yet, while the prospect of being separated from everyone else at night didn't exactly fill me with glee, I soon overcame my disappointment when I realised that in the next street to us lived my good friend, Dale.

Following this latest move, the spring term of 1984 would see my class bid farewell to the nose-picker Mr. Harrington and welcome a new teacher into our fourth year class. Prior to the arrival of our new teacher, our headmistress, the formidable Mrs. Levick, paid our class an unexpected visit. Departing from her characteristically formal manner, Mrs. Levick explained to the class that in addition to being a good friend of hers, our new teacher, a lady by the name of Mrs. Stapleton, was very overweight and cautioned us to remain respectful. Suffice to say that her caveat was unnecessary as Mrs. Stapleton, with the kind of warmth and care so sorely lacking in teachers of the time, charmed her way into the hearts of her young charges with considerable ease.

Indeed, so assured did I feel of Mrs. Stapleton's care and compassion that I found myself sitting before her one morning break time. While the rest of the class ran around the playground with abandon, I shared with Mrs. Stapleton the intimate details of the previous eight years of my life. From Bill Stone to Steve and from my mother's violence to my turbulent relationship with my father, she listened sympathetically as I spoke. Much like a similarly gentle teacher I'd encounter a few months later during my first term at secondary school, Mrs. Stapleton stood apart from the surly and slap happy teachers which were so commonplace at that time.

Regrettably, said surly and slap happy teachers were two-a-penny come September when I finally joined Dee at Cornwallis Secondary School. Situated in the adjoining village of Linton, reaching Cornwallis involved a daily three mile walk. On the first day, the first year pupils gathered in the lower school assembly hall where we were divided into our respective classes. With each class sat in rows one behind the other, I sat in silence and stared at the back of an unknown classmate's head until such time as our form teacher came to collect us.

During the two years I'd spend at Cornwallis, a French teacher by the name of Miss Baker would be my form teacher. Besides being petite in stature, Miss Baker's two most prominent characters were her heavy lisp and thick blue eye shadow which appeared to have been applied using a trowel. Each class year from the first through to the fifth year were divided into one of four houses. Expecting to be placed in the same house as Dee, named Monchelsea, instead I found myself in another house named Wayfarers, or “gay fairies” as we were otherwise known. Yet, it wouldn't be too long before I realised that despite some menacing looking characters among the upper school kids, the biggest bullies at Cornwallis were in fact the teachers.

Undoubtedly, it felt rather odd at first to refer to the teachers as “sir” and “ma'am”. Much like Coxheath Junior, kind and compassionate teachers were in very short supply, with ill-tempered characters very much in the majority. Two of the most fearsome teachers among the staff I'd encounter in successive years. The first, an overweight and perpetually bad-tempered woman by the name of Miss Burkett, or “bird shit” as she was otherwise known, I'd encounter as my first year music teacher.

Similarly, an equally bad-tempered man by the name of Mr. Greenslade I'd encounter as my science teacher in my second year. Sporting scruffy hair and a goatee beard, Mr. Greenslade resembled the television character “Catweazle”. Possessed of a wicked aim to rival that of my mother, Mr. Greenslade needed no excuse to throw the blackboard rubber across the room, or cane someone's buttocks with a metre ruler, or thrash them with the rubber hose connected to a Bunsen burner or simply slap them around the face. Despite the overall strictness, I'd readily indulge my own attention-seeking urge to make others laugh by seizing the opportunity to be the class comedian where I though I could get away with it.

Nonetheless, there was one man whom I wouldn't have even dared to think of crossing in the form of the forbidding Mr. Andrews, head of the lower school. Following the first registration with Miss Baker, the boys were sent back to the lower school hall for a talk from Mr. Andrews. Like a drill sergeant barking at a group of young cadets, Mr. Andrews addressed the first year boys from the hall stage. While standing beneath him, we listened as he proceeded to remind us of the school's strict uniform policy and how we were not to remove our ties in the summer until he'd done so first. Consequently, during those odd occasions when Mr. Andrews actually removed his tie, news of the rare event spread through the lower school corridors like wildfire.

In addition to the overabundance of strict and ill tempered teachers, arguably the most hardening experience at Cornwallis was school showers. With the boys in winter playing football and rugby on the field in the pouring rain, our reward for doing so would be communal showering in the freezing sports hall changing rooms. While our male PE teachers looked on, approximately fifty mostly pre pubescent boys caked in mud collectively froze to death under tepid water before rushing to dress amid the chill of the changing room. Perhaps more devastating to most than the bitter temperatures was the curious sight of the odd boy who'd already begun puberty while the rest of us had to wait a few more months in anguished expectation for hair to appear on our genitals and our balls to drop.

Menacing teachers and Baltic showers aside, like Mrs. Stapleton at my junior school, I'd find one teacher with whom I'd instantly connect in the form of my English teacher, Mrs. Firth. Having joined the staff during the year prior to my arrival, Mrs. Firth had already earned a reputation among pupils of being a soft touch. While I'd seize the opportunity in her class to indulge in my usual smutty banter, I found myself experiencing a sense of empathy for Mrs. Firth on account of one unfortunate physical characteristic.

Around this time, Mrs. Firth had endured a particularly stressful divorce which had left her with a noticeable bald patch on the crown of her head. While it was certainly within my capabilities to mock teachers for their appearance, I could not collude with those who, within her earshot, would so cruelly refer to Mrs. Firth by the nickname “baldy”. While meeting Mrs. Firth again many years later, she revealed how she was fully aware of the unfortunate tag and disclosed the circumstances surrounding her sudden hair loss. With Mrs. Firth's love of the printed word remaining undiminished, I admitted my regret at not having paid more attention in her class and how I too had come to share in her perpetual love of words.

Although I'd clocked him for the first time while we were all sat on the lower school hall floor waiting for Miss Baker, it was during our first English lesson that I'd become properly aware of a classmate by the name of Stuart. What made Stuart stand out was that he and I were the only ones in our class who showed up on our first day wearing a blazer. Consequently, having realised we were in a minority, we soon put our blazers to the back of our respective wardrobes. Yet, when Stuart arrived late to our first English class with a tear-stained face at having lost his way, I knew instantly that I wanted to be his friend. An academically bright boy, Stuart would leave Cornwallis for grammar school two years later.

However, in the meantime, Stuart and I would become good mates while forming part of a slightly larger group of friends. Made up of fellow classmates, our group consisted of Justin, a boy whose lankiness made him appear older and, therefore, ideal for buying cigarettes, along with Penny, whose parents ran a village pub, and Simone, an overweight yet pleasant girl whose father was a police officer. Despite our occasional ribbing of Simone, she'd show her mettle as a friend and come to my rescue four years later in perhaps the most desperate moment of my entire childhood.

As for Dee, she too had made conscious choices when it came to her friends, albeit with one peculiarity. Being somewhat of an anomaly was the pairing of Dee and another girl in her class by the name of Angela. A precocious girl with large breasts and an attitude to match, Angela's reputation preceded her. With a penchant for fighting and readily back-chatting teachers, Angela was the polar opposite of the shy and retiring Dee. Despite their opposing characters, Dee and Angela would become the best of friends. Remaining curious as to their coupling, I'd ask Dee many years later what drew her to Angela. To this she replied that on account of the shit going on at home, she didn't want any trouble at school. Consequently, with Angela by her side, Dee ensured she'd be as safe as houses during her time at Cornwallis.

On the other hand, the house in which we were both less safe remained our own. While a relative tranquillity belied the next chaotic episode to come, the abnormalities of my mother's behaviour continued unabated. Indeed, my father was not the only one who'd walk around at times with next to nothing on. Giving him a run for his money, my mother would make a similarly immodest attempt to cover up courtesy of the single petticoat she'd so often wear while sitting around the house. Leaving little to the imagination, whenever her petticoat rode down her nipples were exposed although when worn too high up would leave her vulva fully displayed. One advantage of the petticoat was the ease with which my mother could pull it down and scoop up her ample breasts before shoving them in my father's face. Grateful for her attention by whichever means possible, my father would respond in kind and plant appreciative kisses on each of my mother's boobs.

Similarly audacious at this time was my mother's antics with a fellow work colleague of my father. Like Mum, my father had no real friends except a fellow insurance agent by the name of Clive. With Dad being much more organised in his accounts than his friend, Clive would visit each time he needed Dad's help to balance his books. A taller and stockier man than my dad and with an unabashedly juvenile sense of humour, Clive revelled in winding my father up. Enlisting my mother in the kind of shenanigans in which she'd be only too happy to oblige, the playful pair engaged in long and lingering kisses full on the lips. Realising he was being made the butt of their joke, my father would end up ignoring them both and continue in his attempt to make sense of the mess Clive had made of his paperwork.

Perhaps the most peculiar occurrence which to this day remains unexplained took place after my bedtime. With my twelfth birthday approaching in December of that year, like every other pubescent boy at that time, I began to produce semen. While I had not disclosed this fact to my mother, its occurrence coincided with her coming into my room late at night and then waking me up to change my bedsheets. In addition to being in a state of groggy confusion at having just been roused from my slumber, I also found myself in a state of embarrassed arousal. While attempting to mask my erection with cupped hands, my humiliation would have been complete had my mother discovered the masturbation hole I'd fashioned in my mattress. Indeed, if what was to occur in the coming weeks had not taken place, I wonder on how many more occasions my mother would have woken me up in such invasive and humiliating circumstances.

Nonetheless, with Dee and I both settled in secondary school and Sas by now in the infants, 1984 was gradually drawing to a close. While a famine had begun to develop in Ethiopia, the striking miners battled the police on our television screens and the IRA attempted to assassination Margaret Thatcher by placing a bomb in her hotel, our family was about to experience a bombshell of our own. Fresh off the school bus, Dee and I arrived home one Friday afternoon to find the house empty and our mother unexpectedly gone. As we walked into the kitchen our eyes were immediately drawn to the casserole dish sitting on the counter top and the set of cooking instructions lying beside. While we knew this could only mean one thing, what we didn't know then was where our mother had gone, with whom, and, most importantly, when we'd see her again.

In a similar way to how my mother’s affair with Steve ended, how this latest one began was also something of a mystery. All she’d reveal was that she’d fallen in love with a man by the name of Richard who lived in Harrow, Middlesex. While occupying my usual spot on the floor by her feet as she listened to her music, Mum produced a photograph of her new love interest. A slightly overweight man with straight brown hair, full red lips and a moustache, Richard bore a striking resemblance to the ‘Shoestring’ actor, Trevor Eve. In view of the fact that my mother had recently lost her third job in two years and with no other occasion when they might’ve met, I could only conclude that she’d met Richard while at work.

Indeed, my mother’s latest dalliance represented the third time in the last eight years that she’d seek satisfaction outside of her marriage. While this latest affair came about without any warning whatsoever, it would prove equally as disruptive as those with Bill and Steve. In keeping with the latter, Mum began disappearing of a Friday and would not return until the Sunday evening. With his fear of losing his wife dictating his initially tame response, my father once again let my mother go and offered little more than a feeble admonishment upon her return. While still invested in my mother’s happiness, by this point I’d begun to feel conflicted by the realisation that, yet again, she’d placed her own needs above everyone else’s. Consequently, I found myself spending as much time as I could with my friends and thereby reducing the amount of time I’d have to spend in the company of my father.

Despite my best efforts to stay out of the house as much as possible, spending some time in the company of my father would prove unavoidable. While he’d continue to hit me around the head at any opportunity and hurl his time-tested “clown”, “waster” and “toerag” barbs at me, his doing so would only deepen my resentment of him. Yet, this new mire in which he suddenly found himself had begun to detrimentally affect his already compromised health. With the anguish of his wife’s latest infidelity becoming too difficult to bear, Dad began to experience sleepless nights and an explosion, literally, in the severity of his diarrhoea.

While the sound of Dad in the toilet would provide an endless source of amusement to the childish ears of Dee and me, his disrupted sleep would have consequences for me particularly. Unable to remain in bed, Dad began venturing downstairs in the middle of the night. Once down, Dad would come into the kitchen and turn the light then boil a saucepan of milk to make a hot drink. With my bedroom located next to the kitchen, whether by the light shining through my window or the sound of boiling milk, I found myself waking up at the same time. After making his drink, Dad then sat in the lounge and read his paper, with the light from the lounge also shining through my bedroom window. Regardless of his disrupted sleep, Dad would still bring Dee and me a cup of tea at 7 o’clock each morning before school. Of a weekend, we were expected to return the favour, which we duly did.

Whether made worse by my own disrupted sleep, I found my asthma symptoms worsening and began using my inhaler more frequently. Having run out of my rescue inhaler a couple of days before, I awoke one Sunday morning in November wheezing profusely. Unlike Dee, I never succeeded in making Dad’s tea exactly the way he liked it. Yet, with it being my turn, I made his tea before setting the cup down on his bedside table. Breathless and wheezy as I spoke, I explained that I’d run out of my inhaler and asked Dad if he’d call the doctor. To this, Dad replied that as soon as he’d finished his tea he was off to church and that if I needed to see a doctor, I should phone one myself.

Having by now become used to booking and attending my doctor’s appointments alone, I rang the on-call doctor who came out and, after listening to my chest, provided me with a new inhaler. Interestingly, many years later, I’d have access to my medical records. While thumbing through them, I discovered an entry dated Sunday 18th November, 1984. In addition to documenting the circumstances of their visit, the doctor wrote “...Mum’s in London, Dad’s in church...what’s happening in this family...”?

What was happening was that my parents’ marriage was failing, my mother was in London with her lover, my father was in the local Baptist church and my sisters and I were left to fend for ourselves. With my mother’s affair continuing come December, she would not allow the prospect of Christmas to spoil her fun and left for London as usual on Friday 21st. Furthermore, with our sleep by now so seriously disrupted, and with my twelfth birthday approaching on Sunday 23rd, in a rare display of generosity, Dad allowed me to top and tail with my seven-year-old sister upstairs in her bed.

Making my way to Sas’ room that Saturday night, I’d convinced myself that not only was my mother unlikely to make it home for my birthday but for Christmas as well. In a sudden burst of frustration, I entered my parents’ room where I removed from a drawer under their bed the Sony Walkman Mum had bought me for Christmas. To the sound of the tunes which made up the previous week’s Top 40, I eventually fell asleep.

Stirring briefly from my slumber, I turned over and began to fall back to sleep. Just then, I felt something soft pressing against my cheek. To the scent of Pagan, my mother’s favourite perfume, hanging in the air, I opened my eyes to the sight of my mother leaning over me. As I pulled the headphones off my ears she kissed me again before wishing me a happy birthday. However, the warmth of her greeting gave way to a slightly sterner tone as she asked me why I’d taken my Walkman. In as contrite a manner as I could muster, I replied that I didn’t think she’d be back in time for my birthday to which she called me a silly billy and pointed out that she always returned home of a Sunday.

Two days later and with the smell of the sherry and satsumas that we’d left out for Father Christmas still on her breath, my mother roused Dee, Sas and me early on Christmas morning. Predictably, we awoke to more expensive presents this Christmas than before, which I suspect had more to do with making up for her absence than a desire to do selfless good. As for Dad, he’d do what he always did on Christmas morning and arose later and joined us once we’d opened our presents. Surveying our gifts as he sat and drank his tea, Dad’s composure belied the angst he must’ve felt as to how much all this had actually cost him.

With the Christmas festivities now over, 1985 began as the previous year had ended with my mother resuming her weekend trips to Harrow. Yet, trouble lay dead ahead and one Saturday night in January brought an interesting development. Having gone to sleep in Sas’s bed that night, I awoke to the sound of the phone ringing downstairs. As the phone never rang that late, I became instantly concerned that something might have happened to my mother. Climbing out of bed, I crept to the top of the stairs where I crouched down and listened while Dad spoke to the caller.

Peering around the bannisters, I spied my father sitting at the telephone table at the foot of the stairs. With the caller speaking for what seemed like an eternity, Dad sat and listened, interjecting only briefly now and then. As I began to lose interest, my father suddenly asking the caller what he should do and whether he should just beat my mother up immediately refocussed my attention. As the conversation unfolded, Dad revealed to the caller how his wife had been making regular trips to Harrow over the past few months and how he suspected her of having an affair. After a few more minutes of listening and briefly interjecting, Dad requested the contact details of the caller before ending the call. With this, I crept back to bed, intrigued as to the identity of the mystery caller. Feeling ever more resentful of my father for disclosing my mother’s business, I went to sleep determined to tell her all about it when she came home.

We wouldn’t have to wait too long to learn something of the unknown caller. Indeed, the following day, Dad revealed to Dee and me some of what he’d learned during the previous night’s call. Sparing us none of the details, Dad confirmed that Richard, the man with whom Mum had been having an affair, had also been having affairs simultaneously with two other women After having learned of each other’s existence, the three women united to confront him at his Harrow address. Alarmingly, the confrontation had resulted in fisticuffs with my mother’ whereabouts currently unknown.

As if this were not enough, my father went on to reveal that although he could not confirm at that time from where the funds came, my mother had spent £2,000 on a Jaguar car which she had subsequently gifted to Richard. While resentment towards my mother had begun to build, it hadn’t yet reached the same level as that for my father and my lack of sympathy for him remained undiminished. Indeed, following his disclosure, I offered one of my own by revealing to my father that I’d overheard him on the phone the previous night and witnessed how he’ betrayed my mother. My resentment for him getting the better of me, I called him an “upstart”, a term he would often use against me, before attempting to walk away.

However, I wouldn’t get very far. With the shock of discovering that his wife having another affair coupled with the devastating news that she had potentially landed them both in £2,000 worth of debt, Dad suddenly snapped. As he lunged towards me I turned around and ran up the stairs and only made it halfway up before Dad pinned me down and began belting me around the head.

As the blows rained down, I could do little beyond raise my arms to cushion myself from them. Unleashing a torrent of frustration all his own, with each lashing, Dad merely strengthened my already seething resentment for him. After what seemed like an eternity, Dad stopped, at which point I fled upstairs to Sas’s room and slammed the door. With my knees up against my chest and arms wrapped around my ankles, I buried my head between my legs and, with my upper body throbbing, began to sob. Right there, in that very moment, I hated him, I’d begun to hate her and, not only that, I’d begun to hate just about everybody.

Despite the negative thoughts stirring within me towards my mother, when she arrived home later that day I could not have been more relieved to see her. With her back to me as I entered the kitchen, I found my mother standing at the sink. Next to her was a plastic bag from which she pulled a blood-stained blouse. As she began soaking the blouse in the washing up bowl, my mother looked at me and saw that I’d been crying. No sooner had she asked what had been going on than Dad chimed in that I had the hump after he’d thrashed me on the stairs. Following my confirmation that Dad had hit me around the head once again, Mum began to berate him.

With the presence of blood on Mum’s blouse unexplained, once she’d finished tearing into Dad, I asked her if she’d been hurt in a fight. To her admission that the blood on her blouse belonged to someone else, Dad revealed to Mum that he’d been made aware of the events occurring in Harrow the previous day. To the sound of raised voices, I awoke later that evening. Climbing out of bed I ventured down the stairs. Stopping halfway down and close enough to hear Mum and Dad through the closed living room door, I sat and listened. Expecting to hear them arguing about Mum’s affair in addition to the revelations made by the mystery caller and from where the money came to purchase a £2,000 car, I was dismayed to discover that instead they were arguing about me. Growing frustrated that each attack on me would be met with a defensive reply from Mum, my father suddenly declared that he loathed me. Much like the moment during one of their previous arguments when I first heard the word ‘compromise’, I’d subsequently look up the word loathe in the dictionary and wasn’t at all surprised when I discovered what it meant.

Suffice to say the feeling was mutual and with the rapid succession of events in the weeks that followed, my resentment towards my father would descend into unmitigated hate. The series of events began with my mother returning to Harrow in an unsuccessful attempt to retrieve the car she’d bought for Richard. The following Monday, I returned to school. With Dee off sick that particular day I’d make my way home on the bus alone. Upon arriving home, I found my mother sitting in the armchair next to her hi-fi unit with her headphones on. Crouching down by her feet, I could sense that something was wrong and asked her what had happened. With this, my mother turned up her top lip to reveal a large purple bruise on the inside of her mouth. Immediately I knew Dad had hit her again.

Wasting no time at all, I ran straight upstairs to find my father in his room getting ready for work and Dee alone in hers. Heading straight to Dee’s room, I found her still clearly in a state of shock. When I asked her what had happened, Dee explained that our father had beaten Mum up because she’d refused to do his dinner. Furthermore, and in a rare departure from her kinship with him, Dee proceeded to describe Dad as ‘a psycho’. Crouching down, Dee then knelt on the floor beside her bed and reaching underneath. To my surprise, Dee pulled out a broken metal chair leg which she said she intended to use in the event that Dad started again. It being likely that Dad had overheard our conversation, he found the chair leg before leaving for work. Eyeing my father as he walked to the garage at the end of our back garden, I witnessed him throwing the chair leg over a fence. No sooner had he gone than I ran out and climbed the fence before retrieving the chair leg, which I then concealed under my bed.

As if hearing Dee’s account of what had happened wasn’t bad enough, my father would subsequently relate the entire series events to the very person with whom he’d always have a captive audience. While I’d anticipated some trouble, had I known what would actually transpire during our visit to my maternal grandparents, I would’ve tried my best to avoid going. However, in a scene reminiscent of two years ago, Dee and I sat together in the kind of dutiful silence that we always did when visiting relatives while Dad, with Sas under his arm, had command of the floor.

Although the name of the man involved may have changed, the sordid details had not and nor, predictably, would Nanny’s reaction. Yet, during their conversation, Dad would reveal a few details hitherto unknown to us children. Firstly, my father chose this moment to disclose that the mystery caller that Saturday night happened to be one of the spurned females involved in three simultaneous affairs with the caddish Richard. Secondly, he revealed that the money used to purchase the Jaguar had come courtesy of a loan for which he and my mother were both liable.

Right on cue, and continuing where she left off following Mum’s affair with Steve, Nanny launched into another bitter tirade against her daughter. However, this time she’d have an ally equally opposed to my mother about to join us to put in her two pennies worth. Before then, Nanny declared once again how Mum had broken her father’s heart, without explaining precisely how, followed by the suggestion that Dad ought to sell our house in Chestnut Drive and move us all into a council house. On the basis that my mother wouldn’t deign to live in a council house, Dad dismissed Nanny’s suggestion out of hand. By now clearly irritated by Dad’s inability to take control of the situation, Nanny suggested that Dad beat Mum up to which he replied that he’d already done that a few weeks ago, bragging that at one point he really started ‘whipping her’.

Having witnessed Dad’s assault on Mum and understandably distraught at having to relive it, Dee suddenly burst into tears. As she did so, Nanny’s sister, the fearsome Auntie Joyce, came into the room. Sobbing uncontrollably, Dee got up to leave the room but was stopped in her tracks by Auntie Joyce. Despite being by now fourteen years old and slightly taller than her great-aunt, the merciless Auntie Joyce grabbed Dee by the arm and, while pulling her back into the room, yelled at her that if she left the room now she’d end up a whore like her mother. With this, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up and the adrenaline began coursing through my body.

Forced back into her seat, Dee continued to cry. Tellingly, not once did Dad make a move to console his daughter or criticise Auntie Joyce for her man-handling of Dee or adding to her distress. Instead, Dad turned his attention back to Nanny, who pointed at me and asked him who’s side I was on. With Dad’s confirmation that my loyalties lie with my mother, I waited for a reproof from Nanny that, surprisingly, didn’t come. Next, she glanced over at seven year-old Sas and asked which side she was on, following which Dad pulled her close before declaring that she was with him. Nodding her approval, Nanny appeared gratified to learn that all but one person in the room was against her much detested daughter.

With Nanny and Auntie Joyce suitably wound up, Dad unburdened and Dee and I emotionally wrecked, we headed home to Maidstone. Despite my innate boldness, I hadn’t lost sight of the fact that children at that time were indoctrinated to respect their elders. Yet, the elders in my life were not respectable people nor did they behave in a way worthy of respect. Indeed, my relatives allowed their resentment of my mother to prevail over any concern they felt for my sisters and me.Furthermore, at no time did any of them, my father included, talk to us with any tenderness about our feelings and how all this had impacted us. In time I’d come to know myself as someone perfectly capable of respecting others, especially when given something to respect, while withholding respect for those not worthy of it. Indeed, it would not be unfair to contend that my mother gave me precious little to respect. Moreover, following a devastating act of betrayal against me later on that year, 1985 would signal a dramatic change in my relationship with my mother against whom I’d begin to rebel in earnest.

As was the case on two previous occasions, my parents were once again tenuously reconciled. Unlike before, my mother would have only one song, a reflective, wistful ballad by John Denver and Placido Domingo, entitled ‘Perhaps Love’, to encapsulate her emotions. With her character firmly fixed, it would only be a matter of time before she’d revert to type and the inevitable chaos ensue. In a little over a year’s time, my mother would succeed beyond her wildest dreams in finally tearing her family apart. With her own character also firmly fixed, while Nanny would provide us with a much needed lifeline, she’d soon withdraw it when it no longer suited her. In the meantime, with my thirteenth birthday fast approaching, I’d meet a girl who, along with her mother, would subsequently come to my rescue at a time when my so called family seemed all too content to let me drown.

To my surprise during the spring of 1985, I found myself the object of someone’s affection. What made it noteworthy was the fact that my love interest was a girl. While it wasn’t love in the truest sense of the word, the expression would be appropriate to describe the affinity I’d feel for a truly sweet girl by the name of Nicola. Being much taller than most of the other kids in our year, Nicola was easily spotted in the lower school corridors. With me being a veritable ‘short-arse’, it came as a surprise to learn from a mutual friend that Nicola liked me. Indeed, this all seemed a bit odd to me considering that up until now, I’d only really appealed to girls as someone who made them laugh.

Nonetheless, with her long dark-brown hair, low-hanging fringe and gentle nature, before long, Nicola and I started going out together. The eldest of three children, Nicola lived in a detached property nestled in a valley in the nearby village of Loose. Her home appropriately named ‘Valley House’, Nicola and her siblings lived with their parents, David and Janet. A former Miss Maidstone consistently dressed in pleated skirts and pearls, Janet cut an altogether genteel figure. Yet, the elegance of her appearance belied a deliciously saucy sense of humour and upon meeting her she and I connected instantly. Alas, the same could not be said for her husband, David, a rather reserved man always ensconced behind his living room desk with headphones on whenever my friends Justin, Stuart and I dropped by.

Despite her kind and gentle character, I knew full well that something in my relationship with Nicola didn’t feel quite right. Indeed, it was no great shock to me to discover I had a physical attraction to my own sex. Considering my brain’s response to the sight of my friend’s naked father six years earlier, I had no difficulty accepting the fact. For me, the difficulty came in ensuring my true nature remained undetectable by others until such time as I no longer felt the need to conceal it.

Being as much the case back in the 1980s as I suspect it still is now, the ultimate high school put down was to be labelled ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’. Indeed, the mere perception of ‘gayness’ would be enough to trigger all manner of cruel slurs and threats of violence. While possessed of the kind of confident character which made me stand out, I also wanted to belong. Furthermore, while my tendency to be the class comedian and make others laugh deflected that kind of negative attention, so did my relationship with Nicola. Nonetheless, even before she and I began going out with each other, I’d harboured a long-standing crush on a boy in our year by the name of Matthew.

While my class belonged to the school house of Wayfarers, Matthew and his class were in the same house as both Nicola and Dee, named Monchelsea. A sporty kid with strawberry blonde hair and freckles, I first clocked Matthew in the summer of 1984 when, as fourth year pupils, my school played his at rounders. With the look of Huckleberry Finn about him, I focussed completely on Matthew and wondered if or when our paths might cross again.

Indeed, I wouldn’t have to wait too long come September when we both started at Cornwallis as first year pupils. Not being in the same class or house meant my contact with Matthew was limited to passing him in the corridors or while going up and down the boys stairs. However, in August of 1985, I’d attend a party thrown by a fellow pupil from Coxheath Junior who was now in Matthew’s class. While nothing could have possibly happened, at least I got to hang with Matthew that night and found him to be a really cool kid.

With my thirteenth birthday approaching at the end of ‘85, come September, I’d begin what would turn out to be my second and final full year at Cornwallis. Indeed, a year from now I’d find myself physically, emotionally and geographically in completely different circumstances altogether. Yet, for now, I took my place among my fellow pupils who’d spend their break time discussing both the eccentricities and the sex appeal, or otherwise, of our teachers. A favourite among the boys was the maths teacher, the appropriately named Miss Ovary, whose low-cut knickers were clearly visible through her pencil skirt. As for the girls, they made a beeline for the well-built and moustachioed PE teacher, Mr. West.

Regarding the eccentricities, plenty of gossip and rumours had filtered down to the lower school ears from upper school mouths. For instance, in an attempt to recreate the effect of a female teacher’s protruding nipples, some girls resorted to sticking pencils up their jumpers. In addition, girls were warned to be on their guard from those among the male teachers who’d deliberately drop their pens in front of the desks of female pupils as a ruse by which to peer up their skirts. Moreover, other teachers were singled out and mocked for their sweat patches, body odour and bad breath.

Furthermore, even the most innocent of remarks from teachers, such as “...let’s get down to it…”, or, “...right, let’s get them out…” prompted sniggers and cheers from around the class for their supposed sexual connotations. For instance, when during recorder lessons our music teacher, the ill-tempered Miss Burkett, told everyone to “...finger and sing it…” the class went into near meltdown. However, the lesson of the year award for 1985 belonged to my science teacher, the fearsome Mr. Greenslade. In an attempt in our class on reproduction to teach us about the birds and the bees, the hapless Mr. Greenslade instead spent most of the lesson teaching us the correct pronunciation of the male organ, stating repeatedly that it wasn’t “penus” but “penis”.

While the remainder of the year would turn out to be otherwise uneventful, it would mark a dramatic change in my relationship with my mother. For now, Mum and Dad had settled back into their usual malaise, with Dad remaining grateful of any attention and affection from Mum that he could get. Perhaps the best example of his need for Mum’s care came of a night once a week when, bent over the bathroom sink, Dad washed his hair. Wearing only trousers and a towel draped over his back, Dad would lather his hair with shampoo. Signalling his readiness, Dad then whistled following which Mum trudged upstairs to rinse his hair. Being fifty-one at the time, it’s inconceivable that Dad couldn’t rinse his own hair, yet, by enlisting Mum’s help in this way he received the kind of care and attention he craved from her.

As for me, I’d take the opportunity during this time of using my pocket money to pay for tennis lessons at the new tennis centre which had opened in Maidstone the year before. With Dee and I both sporty and possessing good hand-eye co-ordination, while she excelled at football, I’d find my niche in tennis. Yet, as well as I could play, on those rare occasions when Mum and Dad came to watch me, it would always end in strife.

Regrettably, conflict occurred between my mother and I in this instance as a consequence of her poor capacity for effective motivation and positive reinforcement. In an attempt to motivate me, she would often state that I’d always be a good “blah blah blah” but never a great “blah blah blah”. Perhaps her intent was to inspire me to prove her wrong. Nonetheless, whenever I hit a poor shot in tennis she’d sit court side and tut loudly her disapproval in full view of the other kids and parents, leaving me suitably humiliated. Upon arriving home, she and I began to argue following which my father would weigh in and chastise me for speaking to my mother so disrespectfully. Indeed, that would not be the last time my father, with his own interests to protect, would conveniently disregard the hurt my mother had caused and seize the opportunity to cast me as the villain of the piece instead of her.

Nevertheless, with my own wilfulness, bolshie attitude and teenage hormones coming to the fore and my mother’s hypocrisy and “do as I say, not as I do” mantra finally losing its power, she and I were set to truly clash. While what happened next would be nothing compared to the dramatic and very public confrontation which occurred in the summer of 1986, it would very much set the tone for what was to come.

Having prepared dinners, made tea and washed dishes, Dee and I were accustomed to doing chores around the home. Furthermore, when seeking affection from our mother, we became used to her turning around instead and asking us to tickle her back or her leg. Once again overlooking our needs in favour of our mother’s, we duly complied. Moreover, being someone who felt the cold and had the heating on even in the summer, my mother would think nothing of sending Dee or me upstairs several times in one night to turn the heating from timed to constant and back again.

Unemployed once more and spending most of the day ensconced in the chair next to her hi-fi, my mother began firing off commands left, right and centre. When around 9pm my father returned from work, upon hearing his key in the back door and with the lounge in a mess, my mother would yell “quick, quick”. Following her call to alms, Dee and I scurried about like lunatics tidying up and turning the fire down, which up until my father’s arrival had been on full blast.

Furthermore, while we by no means starved, so as to avoid having to cook again of an evening, my mother insisted we have our main meal at school. Consequently, of an evening we made do with a sandwich, a packet of crisps and a Cadbury’s Mini Roll. While I fully understand the merits of developing a child’s sense of independence, the penny had finally begun to drop that my relationship with my mother was orientated more towards me meeting her needs than the other way around.

Therefore, while Dee remained dutiful and even began tackling the ironing, I objected to my mother sitting on her backside all day then using us as her lackeys. Consequently, while Dee continued to do as our mother told her, I began to say no. Unsurprisingly, my treachery did not go down well with my mother, who would take her revenge at the first available opportunity.

That opportunity came one evening after Justin, Stuart and I went to a friend’s house where, in a joint venture, we stole a bottle of cherry brandy. Alas, our plan to drink the spoils was scuppered when we walked slap bang into a police officer on foot patrol minutes from my home. After I declared to the savvy officer that the alcohol belonged to my mother, he shrewdly insisted on escorting us home in order to confirm my story with her.

Having lied so effortlessly to the police officer by stating the alcohol was hers, my mother then asked to speak to him in private while I waited in the lounge. Considering myself in the clear, I was surprised when the officer came and sat down opposite me while my mother remained in the kitchen. Much to my astonishment, the officer began giving me a dressing down for my attitude towards my mother. While seething inside at her disloyalty, I couldn’t bring myself to reveal to him my mother’s behaviour over the past nine years and accepted a ticking off for whatever it was the officer had been led to believe that I’d done.

Nonetheless, rather than break my resolve, her hypocrisy served to strengthen it. Even with Dee and I both teenagers, there remained occasions when we’d have to duck to avoid scissors and other projectiles or jump up from the floor when my mother looked set to pounce and bite us. Yet, it was around this time that my mother carelessly forgot herself and cupped my genitals in front of Stuart. No sooner had she left my room than Stuart turned to me and asked how long my mother had been doing that. Intrigued by his question, I casually responded that she’d always done that. To my assertion that surely every mum must behave in such a way, Stuart glared at me while shaking his head repeatedly. From that very moment, I finally began to realise that what went on in my family wasn’t necessarily what went on in those of other people.

Nevertheless, with my mother, at under five feet tall, no longer able to control her five feet three inch thirteen year-old son by force, she took to using a far more powerful weapon in the form of words. Having branded me ungrateful and a thug for standing up to her and refusing to be her lackey, my mother still continued to possess, for now, the power to make me doubt and feel bad about myself. Seizing the opportunity whenever it presented itself, she’d use our latest move in mid 1986, to the nearby village of Loose, to put the boot in.

To my enquiry as to why we were moving yet again, my mother claimed that the reason we moved so often was because everywhere we went, I upset the neighbours. While I put my hands up to having knocked the odd tennis ball over a neighbour’s garden, I failed to see what else I could’ve done to cause such upset that we had to move so often. Although in time I’d begin to see through my mother’s spite, for now, I found myself giving more credence to her lies than they truly deserved.

So, in May, 1986, and for the fifth time in nine years, we moved home. Leaving Coxheath, we move to a rented property located down the road from my friend, Stuart, in the nearby village of Loose. Coinciding with our move, after thirty years with The Prudential, Dad left his job as an insurance agent on health grounds. With precious little sympathy for him from Mum, she’d mockingly dismiss his health issues as being all in the mind and lament the possibility that he’d likely outlive us all.

With Mum remaining unemployed, Dad had to continue working to bring the money in. In complete contrast to my mother, my father possessed a strong work ethic and would not have considered it beneath him to take a cleaning job if necessary. Yet, his next move would be into something far better suited to him. Indulging his love of walking, during which he could walk for many miles, my father took a job as a postman. At the same time, my mother began scanning the situations-vacant column of our local newspaper and one June day a curious advertisement appeared which suddenly caught her eye.

With our new home situated no more than a quarter of a mile from Cornwallis, I applied for a pass which would enable me to leave the school grounds at lunch. With Stuart and Justin having done the same, we converged at lunchtime in a nearby cornfield where we stood around smoking. On the odd occasion, I’d sneakily keep my dinner money then pop home for lunch and raid the biscuit tin. Having arrived home at lunchtime one day, I found Mum in the living room reading our local newspaper. Just then, she brought my attention to an advertisement in the jobs column. Upon my sitting down next to her on the armrest of her chair, Mum pointed towards an article which began with the words “Work in the Sun”. Below the heading was a list of European countries and, with Cyprus listed among them, I immediately understood why the advertisement had piqued my mother’s interest.

While it had been easy enough for my mother to pressure my father into moving from London to Kent, it would be a real coup indeed if she were able to convince him to move to Cyprus. Yet, such was her hold over him that once she got an idea in her head, he’d be powerless to stop her. Consequently, it wasn’t long before they were both on a train to London for interviews and not much longer after that when a letter arrived one day confirming the outcome. What began for my mother as excitement soon turned to disappointment. Unexpectedly, the letter explained that while the company were not due to set up operations in Cyprus until the end of the year, they hoped my parents would consider spending the summer in Malta. There, they could expect to gain valuable work experience before moving on to Cyprus at a later date.

While not exactly the news my mother had hoped for, she saw Malta as a stepping stone to where she truly wanted to be. Likewise, the news of a move abroad would not be to Dee’s satisfaction, either. Unsurprisingly, with Dee about to begin her fifth year at Cornwallis in September and in the O-level group for all subjects, she had a lot to lose by leaving. Yet, my mother had made up our minds and with her at the helm, what could possibly go wrong???

As for me, although the prospect of heading to sunnier climes suited my sense of adventure, like Dee, I was reluctant to leave my friends. However, with my ongoing inability to be able to pay attention in class, I found school a perpetual struggle and felt glad to be leaving. In response to our enquiry as to what would happen with school come September, Mum made what would turn out to be a piecrust promise to find us a suitable school in Malta.

Therefore, with our flights booked for the evening of Thursday 17th July, we set about getting rid of as much of our unwanted belongings as possible while the rest of our possessions, including Dad’s car, went into storage. While Dee and I had finished Cornwallis the previous Friday, the following Monday was our school sports day, with me due to run the second year boys 400m race. Much to my dismay, having expressed a desire to return to school to participate in the race, my mother said no. With my wilfulness by now more than a match for hers, I maintained I was going and went to leave the house. Alas, I wouldn’t be able to do so without her aim finding its mark one final time. As I went to leave, my mother launched a pair of scissors which became embedded in the right side of my hip. Despite the intense stinging sensation, I yanked the scissors out following which blood began to trickle down my leg. With this, I ran out of the door and up to Stuart’s house, where his mother patched me up. Following this, he and I joined the rest of our class for sports day, during which I won my race.

This last incident signalled the final time my mother would physically injure me, while psychologically she’d continue to do so in various ways for some time to come. Predictably, with all the anger of the past finally surfacing two months later, she and I were set for an explosive and highly public confrontation. Little did Dee and I know that in a place where the adults behaved like children and the children like adults, Malta sounded the death knell for whatever remained of our childhood. While she and I would have to keep our wits about us if we were going to survive, for our mother it was playtime, with Malta providing the best example yet that when she came out to play, her children would inevitably pay.

Despite our late night arrival in Malta and the difficulty of sleeping in the oppressive July heat, I awoke the next morning with a sense of excitement. Impatient to see the resort by day, I left our hotel room alone and headed out in search of the seafront. Upon reaching the end of the road, I looked back to see the name ‘Bugibba Holiday Complex’ in large brown letters on the side of the enormous sandstone building from where I’d just come. Making my way towards the sea, I passed a succession of low-rise sandstone apartment blocks with balconies upon which hung lines of drying laundry. My attention returned to the road just in time to avoid a pothole right in front of me. While I’d soon become familiar with the location of the numerous potholes, the endless succession of holidaymakers who stumbled into the hotel reception with bloody knees weren’t so lucky.

Having made my way the short distance through some back streets, before long I found myself on the seafront. Situated in the St. Paul’s Bay area of Malta’s north-east coast, the town of Bugibba had become a hive of tourist activity characterised by numerous hotels, a lido and rocky coastline. Located in the centre was Bugibba Square, a large roundabout bordered by a British style pub, a jewellery shop and fruit stalls. Making my way along the promenade, known locally as the ‘Strand’, I passed a shop with a sign which read ‘Dolceria’. From behind the counter stood a man serving pies and pastries. The flour on his face and in his hair gave him an aged and somewhat ghoulish appearance.

Continuing along the Strand, on a ledge above the beach I spotted what looked like an ice-cream van and made my way towards it. While dodging the steady stream of holidaymakers coming towards me, on the road alongside me passed a steady stream of cars that would not have looked out of place on UK streets in the late 1960s. Interspersed with the cars were equally vintage looking green buses which sounded like tractors as they chugged the length and breadth of the Strand en route to the capital city of Valletta. Busying herself behind the counter of the ice-cream van, or ‘gelateria’ as its sign read, was a plump girl with dark curly hair and exceedingly hairy arms. On the counter, a sign which read ‘Catania Special’, created a sense of intrigue in me as to exactly what one was. Alas, with no money on me, I decided to head back to ‘the complex’, as it came to be known, to tell the others what I’d discovered.

Exactly what my parents knew of the details of their new roles I cannot truly say. Furthermore, I suspect that considering her eagerness for a life free from the drudgery of being a wife and a parent, my mother would’ve jumped at the chance no matter how risky or unappealing the offer. Ostensibly, they had come to Malta as sales representatives working on a commission only basis to sell timeshare to British tourists.

Put simply, timeshare ownership involves buying time in a holiday home, with additional fees to be paid for property maintenance and when holidaying in a different location. Although timeshare is considered a cheaper alternative to holiday home ownership, it is perhaps not as cheap as an annual package holiday. With the top floor of Bugibba Holiday Complex dedicated to timeshare, my parents’ role would involve the selling of plush apartments to British tourists brought to the hotel by street canvassers. Predictably, timeshare came to be regarded as a con and its street canvassers a thorn in the side of unsuspecting holidaymakers.

By 1986, there were at least six hotels across the island with a section of apartments dedicated to timeshare, with half of them located in the St. Paul’s Bay area. Needless to say, the competition on the streets was fierce to be the first to “pitch” those unknowing lily-white British tourists and spirit them to the hotel represented by the canvasser. There, they’d experience all manner of sales tactics designed to persuade them to buy timeshare. After little more than two weeks by the hotel pool while my parents spent their day upstairs in the sales lounge, I became restless and asked for a job. Following my request, I attended my first ever interview with Minnie, the manageress of the street canvassers. With high hopes of joining their ranks, and having been successful at interview, I soon found myself pitching down on the Strand for Bugibba Holiday Complex.

Being a precocious child and someone who, like my mother, conversed easily with strangers, I took to the canvassing role like a duck to water. Each morning I attended the daily canvassers meeting before heading down to the Strand. Setting up shop on a street corner opposite the ice-cream van, the gelateria would be my first stop of the day. There, I’d enjoy my ‘Catania Special’, a cup filled with chocolate ice-cream and topped with a thick dark chocolate and hazelnut sauce. Wearing a green striped tabard and a white granddad style cap to keep the sun off my head, I’d get right to work. While like me, some canvassers occupied a particular patch, others went around in cars to bedevil the newly arrived holidaymakers. Although perfectly content to remain on the Strand, it would be a real treat for me on those occasions when Minnie picked me up to ‘go riding’ during which we’d travel farther afield to find fresh meat among the newly arrived Brits.

Despite my age and cocksure attitude, I settled in well among the other canvassers and the hotel’s timeshare staff. Having turned fourteen three months earlier, the canvasser nearest me in age was a boy called Trevor. The youngest son of the timeshare manager, a man by the name of Mr. Zahra, Trevor was both handsome and well built for his age. While Trevor replaced Matthew as the object of my affection, my attraction to him took a dousing a few weeks later when he began dating my sister, Dee. However, their liaison would be over before it had even started when Trevor began canoodling with other girls in front of Dee at his parents’ summer pool party. Incidentally, this whole unfortunate business represented the one and only time Dee and I would have our hearts broken by the same man!

Among the timeshare staff with whom I’d become good friends were two teenage sisters named Claire and Louise. Aged seventeen and fifteen at the time, both girls lived in an apartment around the corner from the complex. Tragically, they’d lose their mother to cancer while still young girls. Sometime after her death, their father married a real-life wicked stepmother. At their father’s plan to move them all in together, Claire and Louise both refused. Proceeding with his plan, their father moved in with his new wife and left his teenage daughters to fend for themselves. Sympathising with our struggle, it would be kind-hearted Claire who’d come to the aid of Dee and me a little over a year later when in our hour of need.

The centre of activity for the timeshare sales reps and family members was, by day, the pool bar, or pizzeria as it was otherwise known, and by night, the hotel cocktail bar. While for the first few weeks we lived in a room in the hotel itself, eventually we moved to a ground floor apartment on the opposite side of the hotel pool. Having been at work all day and with the pizzeria on our doorstep, my mother was not inclined to cook of an evening. Therefore, we ate most of our meals in the pool bar except on the odd occasion when we’d traipse around Bugibba studying one menu after another for something that Dad could eat. Being a meat and two veg man with an extremely sensitive stomach, he had to choose his meals carefully.

Suffice to say that the cost of feeding five people three meals a day in addition to drinks became expensive. Compounding the problem was my mother’s tendency in the evening to curry favour in the cocktail bar where she’d regularly buy her colleagues drinks and run up a sizeable bar bill. To make matters even worse, the exchange rate at that time was fifty-four Maltese cents to one English pound. Despite Malta being a considerably cheaper country in which to live at that time, our accommodation and food bills soon began to mount up.

Moreover, with my parents not receiving a salary and being paid commission on the sale of any timeshare, it would be many months before they could expect to receive any earnings. Therefore, with the cost of our outgoings having to be met and my parents’ savings rapidly dwindling, my mother turned to me for support. With me being the only one earning any money, she stated how it was incumbent upon me to support my family. While my mother received no opposition from me on this matter, I asked that whatever money I gave her she repay me once we reached Cyprus in the form of tennis lessons, to which she agreed. Consequently, I began handing over to her most of my weekly pay packet except for a few Maltese pounds, which I kept back for the odd piece of clothing, my morning Catania Special and drinks while out working on the Strand.

While Dee and I began joining Mum of an evening in the cocktail bar, Dad tended to spend the evenings in our apartment looking after Sas. Needless to say, when the cat was away the mouse would play, with Mum beginning to flirt outrageously with her male colleagues. Notwithstanding the drinks they’d happily accept from my mother, her largesse wouldn’t prevent them from making fun of her behind her back for being overweight. Furthermore, her generosity would not provide currency sufficient to see her fully admitted to a peer group characterised by one-upmanship, back-stabbing and adultery.

In an attempt to keep herself in the mix, my mother referred to type and began talking about other reps behind their backs, telling lies about them and betraying confidences. To my shame, and in a similarly misguided attempt to be included and liked, I began mimicking my mother’s behaviour and did the same. Considering the altogether unwholesome environment, my mother and I were merely playing the same game as everyone else. However, I’d soon come to understand there was a double-standard at play whereby my faults as a child were criticised while adults got away with the same behaviour judgement free.

The difficulty as a bigmouth kid of gaining acceptance among an older age group aside, courtesy of Claire and Louise, I met a mutual friend of theirs by the name of Connie. Aged eighteen at the time, Connie and her family were well known in Bugibba. With business interests all over town including a hotel, a jewellery shop and a clothing boutique, the jewel in the family crown was their bar and restaurant, called ‘Swiss Chalet’. Being another girl who had her own horse, Connie and I became firm friends.

Before long, I found myself on occasions joining her behind the bar at Swiss Chalet on a busy Saturday night to wash glasses on a fancy spinning bristle cleaning machine. Like our mutual friend, Connie would also be there for Dee and me in our hour of need. Yet, the new friends I’d made and my success as a canvasser notwithstanding, I found myself starting to miss my friends in the UK and began making regular calls back home.

Unsurprisingly, the beginning of September came and went with no mention from my parents of enrolling us in school. What with me being the only one bringing any money in and my mother the main beneficiary, she did not appear in any great rush to alter the arrangement. Nevertheless, as September progressed, pangs of homesickness grew within me by the day. Exacerbating my feelings was a chance meeting by the hotel pool one day between my father and an elderly couple from Loose village.

In their mid to late seventies at the time, Joan and Charlie lived no more than two hundred yards from Valley House, home of Nicola and Janet. While my father did not go into detail regarding his conversation with Joan and Charlie, the part which did interest me was their offer to accommodate Dee if she wanted to return to the UK to finish her last year at school. Had their offer been made in early August, Dee may well have jumped at the chance. Indeed, in the first few weeks following our arrival, and still unhappy with our move, she’d remain in bed and not surface until lunchtime before joining us in the pool bar. However, come the end of September, my sister and I experienced something of a volte-face, with Dee now inclined to stay while I wanted to go home. Yet, in light of what happened next, Dad began to realise that he and my mother had been seriously misled.

Fundamentally, what should have given my parents cause for concern was the fact that as none of the foreign sales reps or canvassers had employment permits, we were all working illegally. Nonetheless, it would take two bombshells occurring in quick succession for my father to decided that he’d seen enough. First, he found himself presented with a bill for £350 for our flights, an expense which the company advised they would meet. Then, my parents received word that operations in Cyprus were no longer going ahead and that they could choose to remain in Malta or return to the UK.

Galvanised by the news from the timeshare management team, I began looking into the cost of flights home, without a thought for where I might stay following my arrival. With the only seat available within the next week costing more money than I’d saved up, I approached my mother one lunchtime while on our way to the pool bar. As she and I descended in the lift to the ground floor, I revealed to her my intention to go home and asked her to return all the money I’d given her. In response, my mother flatly refused to repay me and said I wasn’t going home before turning and walking away. Suddenly, an intense wave of anger came over me, not just born of her current refusal but of all the times over the past ten years when my mother had abused me, lied to me, deceived me and neglected me.

Joining the rest of my family, I sat and ate my lunch in brooding silence. Yet, having gone beyond the point of no return and ready to erupt, I resumed my argument with my mother. Relying on a lie, I told her that as I’d already booked my flight home I’d be leaving whether she liked it or not. Her response coming through gritted teeth, my mother growled that I was not going home. These last words tipping me over the edge, I grabbed our apartment door keys which were sitting on the table and threw them with all my might at my mother, hitting her directly in the face. As she cried out in pain, the other guests at the bar, including my parents’ line manager, turned around just in time to witness my father, for the last time, landing a violent blow to my head.

With this, I fled to the public toilets and ran into a cubicle before bolting the door. Born of the last ten years of my parents’ abuse, I perched on top of the toilet seat and allowed repressed tears to finally flow free. Yet, although I hated myself for what I’d just done, I hated them both even more and continued sobbing until my tears ran dry. For his misguided loyalty towards my mother, Dad would not be rewarded by her and when he announced that he’d had enough and intended to return to the UK, my mother and Dee expressed their desire to stay.

Despite my animosity towards my father, I knew deep down that I could not return home alone and so on Sunday 5th October, 1986, he and I flew back to the UK while Mum, Dee and Sas remained in Malta. Thinking that by returning home my problems would be over, I’d soon realise that they’d only just begun with the most disrupted period of my life about to follow. In the meantime, Dad and I landed at Heathrow and made our way to Auntie Jackie’s flat in Kidbrooke, South-East London Having been brought up to speed by Dad as to events over the summer, Auntie Jackie then asked Dad where he intended for us to stay. Alas, the way in which Auntie Jackie framed her question left us in no doubt that staying with her would not be an option.

Consequently, in the hope of us being able to stay with them, Dad then phoned Nanny and Granddad at their home on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent. After a few minutes, my father came off the phone and explained that he’d just spoken to Auntie Joyce. As luck would have it, Nanny and Granddad were no more than three miles from us in Grove Park visiting their daughter, my Auntie Jenny. With no time to waste, we sped by car to Grove Park to discover Nanny and Granddad’s Austin Allegro parked outside Auntie Jenny’s house. Finding themselves put on the spot at our unexpected arrival, Nanny and Granddad could do little else but take us back to the Isle of Sheppey with them, where we remained for the next two weeks.

While my grandparents were pleasant enough to our faces, with Granddad remaining as dutiful as ever, our ongoing presence in their home appeared to unsettle Nanny. Proof of this came via Granddad the day he took us to collect Dad’s car from the storage facility. After collecting Dad’s car, Granddad escorted us to a nearby petrol station. Following my goodbye to him, I returned to the car and closed the front passenger door but not before overhearing him apologise to my father for us having to leave so soon and the fact that he had to live with Nanny. With the implication that Nanny had pressured Granddad into asking us to leave, Dad and I headed towards Maidstone. After dropping me off at Joan and Charlie’s house, my father then set off in search of lodgings of his own.

Although their offer of accommodation had originally been extended to Dee, Joan and Charlie seemed perfectly willing to take me in on a short-term basis. Both creatures of strict routine, Joan and Charlie would not tolerate any disruption to their well established way of living. Consequently, following my return home fifteen minutes after my 9pm curfew one night, Joan was understandably miffed and complained to my father. Following discussions with Nicola’s mum, Janet, with whom I’d got along well, I found myself moving down the road to Nicola’s home at Valley House. Making her feelings known, Joan telephoned Janet during which she slammed my mother for neglecting her maternal duties in favour of “whoring around in Malta”!

Notwithstanding Janet’s kindness and affection for me, my stay at Valley House would be of a similarly short duration and end in tears, literally. Coinciding with my move there, Dad returned to Malta in early November in an attempt to bring his wife and daughters home. For the first time in my life I found myself parted from my family and despite Janet and Nicola’s care, I struggled to deal with the separation.

Regrettably, things came to a head one night when, having received no contact from Malta in a few days, I took my host family’s cordless phone to my room without permission and made a call to Malta. Unbeknown to me, Janet’s husband, David, had picked up his desk phone to make a call and overheard me on the phone to my father. No sooner had he realised that I’d made an overseas phone call than he burst into my room and yanked the phone from me before storming back out. Both hurt and humiliated, I curled up under the duvet and began to cry. Reaching in through my anger, confusion and frustration, just then, I felt the gentle touch of Nicola, who’d snuck into the bed beside me and began tenderly stroking my head.

Equally disastrous was my return to secondary school as a third year pupil. With half my second year class going off to grammar school, I returned to discover those who remained had merged with another class. Having had very little previously to do with the kids in the other class, I immediately felt, and was treated, as an outsider. Indeed, a hierarchy had been established and the kids were not about to allow anyone to upset the newly established order. Furthermore, having enjoyed a taste of freedom, earned my own money and have more control over my own life, I realised how much I’d moved on and felt I could no longer relate to my friends. Consequently, along with the struggle of a disrupted family life, I found the school environment confining and a place where I felt I no longer belonged. Yet, I lacked the emotional maturity at the time to figure out what that meant and where I felt I truly fitted in.

As for Dad’s plan to bring everyone home from Malta, while Mum and Dee decided to remain abroad, Dad would accompany his youngest daughter back to the UK. Despite his earlier assertion that he’d done his time bringing up children, Dad appeared overwhelmed at having to parent nine-year-old Sas alone. Compounding matters was the difficulty he faced in securing more suitable longer-term accommodation. Until such time as he did, both he and Sas moved all over Maidstone to short-term placements which saw Sas changing primary schools every few months. Consequently, in need of support to meet his own needs as well as his daughter’s, my father joined a single parent support group run by the Gingerbread charity. Needless to say that being preoccupied with Sas, he had no objection whatsoever when I said I wanted to return to Malta.

At this point, I must take the opportunity to clarify that in the mid ‘80s, non-Maltese nationals were granted permission to remain in the country for no longer than three months. In addition, the foreign national had to leave Malta for a period of twenty-four hours following which they could legally return for another three month period and so on. Therefore, my journey back to Malta on 2nd December, 1986, marked the beginning of the rootless comings and goings between there and the UK which would characterise my life for the next eighteen months.

Approximately two months had passed since I was last in Malta. Streets which before were teeming with tourists in shorts and t-shirts were replaced by elderly couples in trousers and cardigans enjoying a three-month winter break. Even the hotel pool was concealed under a tarpaulin for much of the day. What should’ve been similarly concealed although on full display were the excesses of my mother’s behaviour. To his horror, during Dad’s brief return to Malta, he discovered that my mother had spent £1,500 of their money on a timeshare. Overlooking his past rejection of her, my father, when faced with his own, began writing to his eldest daughter, Leigh. In letters which I’d read as an adult, my father decried how my mother would refuse to leave the bar with him of an evening, electing instead to remain there and flirt outrageously with the male staff.

Indeed, I had not been back in Malta for more than a few days before my mother would outdo herself. Having moved from my old room at the front of our apartment, I began sleeping in Dee’s twin room at the rear while my mother remained in the main bedroom. On one particular evening, having witnessed as much as we could bear of my mother’s unbridled behaviour, Dee and I returned to the apartment and went to sleep. The next thing I knew, I found myself awakened by a noise resembling a barrel rolling alone the stone floor of our apartment. Upon sitting up, I found my mother perched at the foot of my bed. Surprised to discover her sitting there in the dark, I asked her what the noise was. Following her response that it was snoring, I asked by whom, to which she replied that it was one of her fellow colleagues, whom she’d brought back with her from the bar.

With winter bringing in fewer tourists, those who did come stayed for longer. Therefore, getting couples into the hotel in order to sell them timeshare became a challenge, as did making actual sales. Furthermore, my mother had yet to receive the commission from any of the sales she’d made over the summer. Consequently, with little money and the bills mounting up, my mother decided to return briefly to the UK. While there, she planned to arrange the surrendering of an insurance policy so she could settle her hotel bill and continue living in Malta.

However, there was one major sticking point. With the bills mounting and her being considered a flight risk, my mother had been made to surrender her passport to the hotel manager. Unable to leave without it, my mother asked me to remain in Malta while she returned to the UK. With the experience of being left alone still fresh in my mind I flatly refused. Using her charm, at the eleventh hour, my mother managed to talk the hotel manager into returning her passport to her. Following this, we made a mad dash to the airport just in time to make our flight back to the UK. Yet, the hotel manager needn’t have fretted, as my mother had absolutely no intention of remaining in England. Indeed, she and Dee would be back in Malta in time for Christmas while Dad, Sas and I headed to Bournemouth to spend the festive season with his younger sister, Val, and her family.

Come January, 1987, South-East England would experience the kind of winter storm which saw twenty inches of snow dumped on the county and brought it to a standstill. The delay in my trip back to Malta allowed Dad enough time, following a plea from my mother, to surrender another of their remaining insurance policies. To do this would require her signature and after placing in front of me a copy of her signature and a policy document, he asked me one afternoon if I could copy it. Despite what I considered to be a rather pathetic attempt I obliged my father before handing the form back to him. Looking perfectly satisfied as he surveyed the form, my father took it to a wardrobe where pulled out another bundle of paperwork before merging the two. As he did so, I caught a glimpse of a letter written in my mother’s handwriting.

My interest in the letter sufficiently piqued, I asked my father what it was about. Making no further attempt to conceal its existence, he handed me the letter which I began to read. While I did so, my father explained that it had been written by my mother two months ago to the new Front of House Manager, a man by the name of Manuel. Owing to its highly flirtatious and suggestive tone, it was handed to the hotel manager who then felt it best to deliver it to my father. Reading as if written by a lovesick teenager, throughout the letter my mother made reference to the sight of Manuel’s bum in the tight cream trousers of his front of house uniform. The letter aside, while I had no sympathy for father, I couldn’t bring myself to add further insult to injury by disclosing how the previous month she’d brought a timeshare colleague back to our apartment for sex.

Nonetheless, armed with the last financial bailout that my father could provide, on Saturday 24 January, 1987, I took a late night flight back to Malta. Arriving at the hotel in the early hours, I found my mother waiting in the lobby. Expecting to return to our apartment, I was somewhat surprised to learn that we were moving back into the hotel. Having been given a key by David, one of two night receptionists, my mother led me upstairs to room 407. As she opened the door I followed her inside and found myself in a tiny studio room containing two single beds along with a kitchenette and a small bathroom. With there being only two beds, it was just as well that Dee was conspicuous by her absence.

That night, I went to sleep in a bed opposite my mother, too weary from my travels to contemplate what had become of our family. Indeed, in less than a year, my parents had gone from owning their own home to living in cramped conditions in separate countries with money running out and bills continually mounting. Yet, inexplicably, the last thought on my mind before I nodded off belonged to the mysterious man in the cream trousers. Suitably intrigued, I resolved to find out more about the latest object of my mother’s affection as soon as I possibly could. Alas, despite him being the object of her affection, she would not be his. Indeed, time would reveal that he was, in fact, very much attracted to someone else.

With Dee having stayed out all night, I awoke the next morning to find that Mum had gone to work and taken my new cardigan with her. I’d later learn that Dee had stayed out the previous night with a new friend she’d made by the name of Hilary. However, this Hilary was not a female, but a nineteen-year-old Maltese lad from a town approximately ten miles to the south of St. Paul’s Bay. While both Dee and I became good friends with Hilary, it was his infatuation with her that motivated him to venture north to Bugibba on a nightly basis.

On many an evening, either one or both of us would jump in Hilary’s immaculate white Volkswagen Beetle and go joyriding around the island. Yet, this was no ordinary joyride as Hilary had installed the kind of sound system that would shake the car, and the occupants within, to the core. With my ears ringing, I’d bounce out of the car and into whichever bar we stopped at for a drink. Fancying ourselves so cool, we rode around the island with the windows down, music blaring and posing with a freshly lit fag. After dropping us off, Hilary would often call into the complex to catch up with long-time friend David, the night receptionist, before heading home. While Dee’s lack of reciprocation would lead to and eventual souring in relations with Hilary, for now, she and I enjoyed the time we spent in his company.

As to Manuel, the man whose tight cream trousers had so titillated my mother, he had a type he went for and it was certainly not her. Indeed, he’d leave me in no doubt as to which the day he and I found ourselves alone together in the hotel lift. His swiftness of movement matching his audacity, the bigger and stronger man suddenly grabbed me and pulled me towards him. Locked in his arms, Manuel slid his tongue in my mouth and began kissing me. Upon reaching the ground floor and with the intention of prolonging the moment, he sent the lift up to the top floor and back down again. Like a child feasting on their favourite lolly, Manuel circled around my lips with his tongue. Only the intermittent tickling sensation of his moustache on my mouth would interrupt the feeling of intense ecstasy I’d experienced in that moment.

Yet, the intensity of our initial encounter represented the high point of our brief interaction. What began with kissing soon progressed to me pleasuring Manuel orally. Having naturally developed into a horny teenager, I wanted to experience being pleasured in my turn. However, my pleasuring of him in that way would not be reciprocated. Nevertheless, as a naive and inexperienced fourteen year-old boy, I hadn’t realised I was being exploited by a man almost three times my age and mistook his lust as love. Predictably, my mother would provide no such guidance on the matter when I revealed all to her a few weeks later and, in fact, would attempt to leverage my disclosure to her advantage.

Although I hadn’t intended to reveal the details of my relationship with Manuel to my mother, she rather forced my hand. Having returned to room 407 from work earlier than expected, she announced that as a result of a conspiracy against her by work colleagues, she had been sacked. Knowing my mother to be incapable of telling the truth about anything, particularly when it involved any wrongdoing on her part, I knew I couldn’t rely on her to be honest. Yet, following her announcement that with money all but run out we could no longer remain in Malta and would have to return home, I broke down. In desperation, I revealed the details of my relationship with Manuel to my mother along with my belief in my love for him. Sensing an opportunity, rather than caution me as to the dangers of exploitation, my mother suggested that if Manuel felt the same way about me, I should ask him for money so we could stay in Malta.

Needless to say, as much as I didn’t want to leave, I had no intention of asking Manuel for money. Despite having returned to canvassing, with very few short-stay tourists coming to Malta during the winter months, I was not making the kind of money that I had during the summer. Furthermore, although I’d subsequently take a second job pot washing in the hotel kitchen of an evening while Dee canvassed with me on the streets, it would not be enough to cover food and rent. Consequently, one evening in late February, Dee, Mum and I checked out of room 407 with nowhere to go. With our worldly possessions in a few bags around our feet, we sat in the hotel lobby and exchanged forlorn glances while privately hoping for an angel of mercy. Just then, Hilary walked in.

As was so typical of her, having spotted Hilary, my mother turned to Dee and asked her to approach him for help. While Dee refused, I had no such reservations and so I accosted Hilary before explaining our predicament to him. Following my plea for help, Hilary conceded that he could not provide us with accommodation. With my hopes dashed, I rejoined Mum and Dee to break the news to them. Having taken a moment to speak to his friend David, the night receptionist, Hilary then came over to where we sat. In a somewhat hushed tone, he explained that David had given him a key to a room behind the pool bar where we could sleep for a few hours.

After midnight, once the coast was clear, Hilary led us to the room behind the pool bar and ushered us inside. To the sight of bed frames stacked several high, it became immediately apparent that the room was being used for storage. On the two beds containing mattresses, Dee, Mum and I bedded down. In an attempt to keep the chill of the cold February night at bay, we remained in our clothes and huddled together. Before departing, Hilary explained that if we were discovered, David would lose his job. Stating his intention to return at 5am, he then left so we could go to sleep. As we lay together in the dark, my mind wandered back to the moment a few weeks before when Dee approached me with a scrunched up five pound note in her hand. With there being only two single beds in room 407, Mum had spent each night alternating between my bed and Dee’s. As that night was Dee’s turn to have Mum, she attempted to bribe me with the fiver into having Mum with me in my bed for an additional night.

As arranged, Hilary returned at 5am and, with his Beetle parked outside, spirited us out of the hotel via the rear entrance. In order to kill some time, Hilary drove us around the far north of the island. While slumped against each other on the back seat, Dee and Mum slept while Hilary and I talked and smoked. Shortly after, Hilary took us to his family home where Dee and Mum continued to sleep while he and I went to a bar where we played pool and drank coffee.

Later that day, my mother made an interesting discovery which would provide us with a temporary reprieve. This chance occurrence came about courtesy of the timeshare she’d bought a few months before. Crucially, her purchase of one week in the low season covering February and March enabled us to spend one week in a timeshare suite on the hotel’s sixth floor. Consequently, in the space of twenty-four hours, we went from bedding down in secrecy in a cold storeroom to a plush two bedroom apartment with panoramic views over Bugibba. Our reprieve allowed us vital breathing space to decide where to go next. While time was running out for my mother, she showed she wasn’t ready to throw in the towel and return to the UK just yet.

In contrast to our plush surroundings, we had very little money for food and even less for new items of clothing. While my mother began borrowing skirts with elasticated waistbands from Louise that she’d eventually return all stretched out, Dee inherited my cast-offs. Among them was a pair of jeans that, owing to a broken zip, were not longer wearable. Although I couldn’t risk wearing jeans with the zip broken, Dee didn’t seem to mind, despite the fact that through the gap it created you could clearly see her knickers. As for our food, with regular meals in the pool bar a distant memory, we hit the local mini-market where we stocked up on pasta, instant coffee and tins of evaporated milk, which left very little money for other essentials, such as soap and shampoo.

Delaying the inevitable for a little longer yet, after leaving the timeshare apartment, we found ourselves completely reliant on the good graces of others. For the two weeks that followed, we stayed in a poorly heated apartment belonging to the parents of a friend of Claire and Louise. With no other offers of help forthcoming, my mother had to resort to drastic measures. Two mysteries arose from these measures. The first was how she acquired the rental on a small flat opposite the rear entrance to the hotel. The second related to where she met the man she subsequently moved in to share it with us. With Dee and I still canvassing for the hotel timeshare during the day and me pot-washing in the hotel kitchen at night, the location was convenient. Yet, far less convenient was the presence of the latest man in my mother’s life.

In order to avoid confusion, I shall refer to the man as Rudi. While not his real name, Rudi shares the same name of an individual in this story with whom Dee and I would cross paths towards the end of 1987. As previously noted, where my mother met Rudi, I really could not say. With his tanned and leathery skin, curly grey hair pulled tightly to the back of his head and shirt open to the navel, he had the dishevelled appearance of a street drinker. A far cry from the sophistication of my mother’s previous lover, Steve, this man did not possess the look of someone with whom my mother would typically associate. However, when I came home from work every afternoon to find him cooking for Mum and Dee, I realised the nature of his appeal. While my mother got what she wanted, she ensured Rudi did too when he began staying over on a nightly basis.

Although I had nothing against Rudi as a person, his continued presence and the nature of my mother’s relationship with him bothered me and so we began to quarrel. Our arguments becoming more and more heated, things came to a head one evening when my mother came at me with a steak knife she had stolen from the pool bar restaurant. Brandishing the knife in my face, I took hold on the serrated edge and snapped it off at the base. With my mother by now more furious than before, she lunged at me with the knife handle to which I pushed her away. At this, my mother spun round and fell backwards although not before hitting her head against a concrete pillar.

To the sound of my mother crying out and the sight of blood coming from a cut above her eyebrow, Dee suddenly appeared. For what must have looked to her like a deliberate attack on my mother, and not an act of self-defence, Dee began to berate me before running off to fetch our friend, Claire, who lived across the street. Little did I know then that my mother would use this bruising encounter to her advantage in a letter which I took back to the UK at the end of April. Throwing herself on my father’s mercy, she told him how she wanted to come home and how in my company she feared for her safety as well as her sanity. Conveniently, she neglected to mention her relationship with Rudi and the other men she’d entertained in various beds over the past six months.

Crucially, after having received letters from my mother during this time, in particular the one I gave him following my April visit, my father then wrote to his daughter, Leigh. In letters shown to me by Leigh many years later, my father expressed considerable doubt to his daughter about having my mother back after all the trouble she’d caused him. In addition and unbeknown to me at the time, my mother had disclosed to my father my relationship with Manuel. In turn, while expressing to Leigh his amazement that I’d found love with another man, he asked himself whether he should be so surprised after all.

Nonetheless, with my latest three month stay now at an end, I left Malta in the last week of April for a short stay with my father and Sas. When my father met me at Gatwick Airport, two things struck me. The first was how much weight he had lost as an already slender man, while the other was his uncharacteristic warmth towards me. However, I wouldn’t have to wait too long to discover his motivation when, on the way home, he asked if I had any money. When I replied that I had a little to spare, he asked if I could lend it to him until he could draw the family allowance and pay me back. While I had no regard for my father, it brought me no gratification to see him so broken. As to his malnourished appearance, he disclosed having recently had a dodgy meat pie from a street van following which he suffered food poisoning.

Having arrived in Maidstone, I found my father and sister sharing a Victorian terraced house on a main road just outside the town. While Dad and Sas had a room on the first floor, the ground floor was occupied by a couple in their late twenties and their two young girls. Although I wouldn’t go so far as to say my father and I got on like a house on fire, it seemed strange to enjoy uncharacteristically cordial relations with him. Yet, our bonhomie would not last once word had reached us from Malta that my mother had decided to come home. Following her request of him to purchase her a one-way ticket, my father and I went into Maidstone and got a good deal on a flight. Predictably, betraying none of the doubt that he’d expressed in his letters to Leigh, my father welcomed my mother back with open arms.

Days before my own return to Malta, my father and I were back at Gatwick airport to fetch my mother. Despite her pleas to him and the current wretched state of her life, she appeared in no way gratified to be back in the UK. Her displeasure would be on full display upon discovering she’d be sharing accommodation with another family. That night, with Sas and me on bunk beds and my father on a divan, my mother sat on the edge of the bed and refused to get undressed. Having fallen asleep to her protestations, I awoke a few hours later to observe my mother still sitting bolt upright and fully clothed in the dark. Come the morning, I awoke to the sight of her dress on the floor and the owner fast asleep on the edge of the bed.

With my mother now back in the fold and me about to return to Malta, my father was only too happy to schlep out to Gatwick Airport once again. Heading back to Malta as a fourteen year-old, for the first time I faced the prospect of life without my parents. Yet, with my mother now back in England, I hadn’t given any thought to where Dee and I would stay. At Malta airport, I’d be met by Hilary, who revealed that Dee was now sharing a room in a flat alongside a new cohort of timeshare canvassers. With the implication being that there was no room for me, Hilary offered me the single bed next to him in his parents’ house until I could make other arrangements.

Unexpectedly, the intervention of fate would give me no such opportunity to make other arrangements and instead within two weeks of my return to Malta I’d find myself back in the UK once more. The incident which brought events to a head occurred one afternoon in the second week of June. While out canvassing on the Strand in Bugibba, I wandered into a gift shop to buy a cold drink. Behind the counter sat the shopkeeper, a bespectacled lady I’d never seen before.

As I approached the counter to pay for my drink, the lady enquired as to the whereabouts of my mother. Somewhat taken aback by the question, I responded that she was no longer in Malta. With no idea how this woman knew my mother, or me, I asked why she wanted to know. In reply, the woman revealed herself to be the landlady of the apartment we’d stayed in along with Rudi. To my surprise, the woman went on to explain that my mother had never paid the rent. Furthermore, she alleged my mother told her that owing to a bereavement she had to go back to the UK and would reimburse her as soon as possible. In the absence of my mother, she demanded payment from either me or my sister. In no position to repay the debt, suddenly I felt the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. Demanding to know where Dee was living now, under pressure and in a moment of panic, I informed the woman of Dee’s whereabouts.

With the landlady having subsequently tracked her down, understandably, Dee was furious with me. Later on that day, she and I entered into a blazing row in the hotel kitchen. While in the throes of confrontation, Hilary entered the room. Upon seeing Dee and I begin squaring up to each other, in a pre-emptive strike, Hilary intervened and proceeded to punch me in the face. No sooner had he done so than I fled in tears to Claire’s flat around the corner from the hotel. Although unable to see things more rationally at the time, I’d found myself in a situation I was far too immature to manage appropriately. Furthermore, I’d make matters worse by leaving Malta without considering the longer term consequences of having to live once more with my parents. Nonetheless, I couldn’t see beyond my momentary anger and left Malta the next day vowing I never wanted to see my sister again.

Following my return to the UK, the summer of 1987 represented the first time I’d fall into what I’d later recognise as a bout of depression. Coupled with life under my parents’ roof, contributing to my low mood was another failed attempt to return to school. Having witnessed me withdrawing ever further into myself, my father, in a rare display of concern for me, took me to the local courts for a game of tennis. With Dad at the net, I fired ground strokes at him which he blocked back with crisp volleys. When one forehand I hit went whistling past him, for the only time in my life, he complimented me for having hit a good shot. However, tennis alone would not be enough to lift me out of the funk. What made matters worse was that, with my anger having abated, I began to miss Dee and realised the mistake I’d made in leaving Malta so abruptly.

Realising the depth of my misery and the fact that as long as I was around, he wouldn’t be the sole focus of my mother’s attention, Dad phoned Dee and told her of his intention to send me back to her. Following Dee’s acceptance, on 31st August, I returned to Malta. Our falling out swiftly forgotten, the sight of Hilary waiting for me in the airport arrivals lounge could not have been more pleasing. Likewise with Dee who, sporting a deep tan and yellow espadrilles, met me outside the hotel kitchen during her break. With minimal effort, I soon settled back into my canvassing role while Dee and I worked alternate nights in the kitchen.

Although Dee explained that I’d be staying with her, as all the beds were taken up I’d have to sleep on the lounge settee. Located in a coastal town next to Bugibba, our second floor apartment overlooked the sea and some salt pans. Despite the stench of sulphur, the discomfort of the settee’s wooden frame digging into my ribs and the sound of mosquitoes buzzing overhead, I slept contentedly each night. Following the move six weeks later of Dee’s room mate, I began sleeping in the single bed in Dee’s room while she slept in a double.

While throughout September I’d earn a reasonable amount of money from canvassing, come the end of the month the tourist trade began to die off. Had I learned the lessons from our struggle earlier on in the year, I would’ve been more conservative with my spending in preparation for the winter. Yet, Dee and I were living among a group of twenty-something Brits content to spend their evenings in the bar across the street from our apartment. Consequently, from time to time we found ourselves smoking and drinking alongside them. Unable to build up much of a tolerance to alcohol, I’d often end up being sick before reaching our apartment. On another occasion in the not too distant future, I’d overdo it once again although this time with disastrous consequences.

Before then, on Wednesday 14th October, I telephoned my parents to let them know I’d be coming home on the Saturday of that week. During our conversation my mother expressed her surprise that my voice had broken. Without much thought up until that point for the lot of my parents, on Saturday 17th October, I flew back to the UK for an eight day trip.

While glancing out of the window as my plane approached Gatwick, the sight of flattened trees and power lines met my eyes. Not until we were heading home did I learn of the full extent of the hurricane which occurred two days earlier. With the exception of a few roof tiles landing around the back of his car, Dad explained that the house had escaped undamaged. However, upon arriving home I looked across the street and witnessed the sight of an enormous tree which had fallen into the block of flats opposite. An additional surprise came with the news that, following the departure of the couple living downstairs, Mum and Dad had moved to the lower floor to make way for a lodger. Furthermore, this lodger was none other than Angela, Dee’s fearsome friend from Cornwallis. While appearing more cheerful than usual, my father did most of the talking while my mother sat in silence. This was not the usual way of things and led me to wonder what on earth was going on.

Having not seen Angela since our last day at school the year before, I found myself excited to see her again. With her flame red hair as big and vampish as ever, I couldn’t wait to sit down and bring her up to speed with events abroad. As it happened, neither could she and before long she asked me to intervene in a situation involving my parents. My curiosity sufficiently roused, I listened intently as Angela explained that my father had been having an affair. Dismissing the notion out of hand, I revealed the full extent of my mother’s infidelity towards my father and declared him incapable of doing the same. To this, Angela responded that during the past few weeks, he’d been going to the house next door but one and spending a few hours of an evening with the lady living there. In reply I stated this was not proof of his infidelity.

While Angela conceded my point, she revealed having been woken up at night to the sound of my mother pleading with my father to confirm whether he was having an affair. Sensitive to my mother’s anguish, Angela asked me to speak to him. Considering her behaviour over the years, I had no sympathy for my mother whatsoever and, on that basis, declined to intervene. Nonetheless, what this occurrence did go to show was that while my mother didn’t want my father, she didn’t want anyone else to have him.

Following her disclosure about my father’s supposed infidelity, Angela proceeded to lament the lack of fulfilment in her life. Citing a succession of unsatisfying sexual encounters and her dead end job as a sales assistant in a wicker-ware shop, she rued her current prospects and wanted more. Whether Angela had been sending out subliminal messages that my mother had somehow picked up on, I had no idea. However, I’m at a loss to account for her proposal on the day prior to us going to London to purchase my return ticket to Malta, that I take Angela with me. Suggesting that Angela could keep Dee company, when my mother offered to pay for her ticket, of course seventeen year-old Angela jumped at the chance. Therefore, with Dee unaware that I would not be travelling alone, on Sunday 25th October, Angela and I headed to Malta where Dee and Hilary awaited my arrival.

Having arrived late in the evening, Angela and I made our way through the airport to the arrivals lounge. Maximising the element of surprise, while I headed towards Dee and Hilary, Angela crouched behind me. Upon reaching them, Angela popped up and gave Dee a huge hug. Catching a glimpse of Dee’s face, I perceived a mix of shock and surprise in her expression. Sometime later, Dee would confide in me that while she had been pleased to see her friend, she knew Angela to be a force of nature and someone whom trouble seemed to follow around. Indeed, time would prove Dee’s fears to be founded and no more than a month had passed before an incident occurred following which we’d find ourselves homeless once again.

Wasting little time in creating an impression, the shenanigans of our new flat mate began on her very first day. Actually, they began before that as became evident when Dee, Angela and I sat together in the lounge the morning following our arrival. While we were sat talking, Angela suddenly got up and went to the bedroom. Returning momentarily, Angela laid out on the lounge coffee table some cigarette papers, some rolling tobacco and a small ball wrapped in cellophane. Having laid out the papers upon which she sprinkled some tobacco, Angela then unwrapped the ball to reveal some dark brown matter resembling chocolate. After taking her lighter to it, she began crumbling the substance over the tobacco as if it were an Oxo cube. While Dee and I looked on in astonishment, it became clear that Angela had put us both at risk by smuggling what I later learned to be hashish into Malta.

With it being essential that Angela attempt to earn her own money, the next day she accompanied Dee and me to the complex. There, we talked the canvassing manager, Minnie, into giving Angela a job as a canvasser. In addition, on account of her bubbly personality and sex appeal, the catering manager snapped Angela up immediately and gave her a job behind the bar. Yet, the force of nature Dee had spoken of would soon emerge and before long Angela began hanging out with some wayward boy-racer types and turning up for work whenever she felt like it. Things came to a head one Saturday night when she and I planned to have dinner in the hotel pool bar.

Having sat down at the very table where my mother and I had had our humiliating confrontation just over a year before, Angela and I began swilling pints of dry cider. Although she and I had gone out with the intention of having dinner, on account of the amount of cider I had drunk, I no longer felt hungry. When Angela’s spaghetti bolognese arrived, the two small forkfuls I ate confirmed that I’d definitely lost my appetite. No sooner had she finished her meal than she and I headed upstairs with the intention of dropping into the kitchen to say hello to Dee before going on to a club.

Alas, we wouldn’t even make it as far as the kitchen before Angela stopped to talk to a young guy. Possessing an innate ability to attract bad boys, before I knew what was happening, the three of us were holed up in a cubicle in the men’s toilets where Angela produced a joint. While she and the guy passed it backwards and forwards, between them, at regular intervals, one of them would place it between my lips before telling me to breathe in. Taking small drags, before long I began to feel dizzy and lost some of the feeling in my feet. In need of fresh air, I stumbled through the hotel reception and made it outside where I sat on a wall for a few minutes. Just then, a peculiar sensation came over me following which I immediately burst out laughing.

Having remained in this state for what seemed like an age, I struggled to my feet before tottering off towards the outside entrance to the hotel kitchen in search of Dee. Considering the prospect of surprising her absolutely hilarious, I grabbed a window shutter and thrust it open. To the sight of a startled Dee turning around from the kitchen sink to see what the noise was, I burst into laughter once again before slamming the shutter closed. From there, I made my way back up to the hotel’s front entrance. Suddenly, I found myself joined by the guy from the toilets, minus Angela. Too disorientated to bother looking for her, I asked him if he wanted to go to a club. Thinking we’d need more money, we both stumbled back to my apartment. There, in a moment of disorientation and utter thoughtlessness, I took my pay packet from a drawer and gave him the entire contents. Promising to meet him in a club later on, I told the guy I just needed to have a little sleep beforehand.

To the sound of distant banging I gradually awoke in the dark. Stumbling over to turn on the light, I felt something warm and sticky on my cheek. After turning on the light, I looked over towards my bed and saw what looked like an entire bowl of spaghetti bolognese all over my bed and up the curtains. With the sound of further banging, I realised there was someone at the door and went to open it. There, looking exhausted and suitably pissed off was Dee. Leading her down the corridor to our bedroom and apologising profusely along the way, the last thing my sister wanted to have to deal with was a pile of vomit. Indeed, I’d leave it until the next day to explain to her that I’d given all my money away to a complete stranger, to which she deservedly gave it to me both barrels for my stupidity.

Hot on the heels of the cannabis incident, from which we’d both barely recovered, came the straw that broke the camel’s back. Taking advantage of a warm November day, Dee, Angela and I decided to sit out on the apartment balcony. Just then, Angela got up and went over to the railings. No sooner had she done so than a car roared past to which she whooped and waved. To the sound of the car coming to a screeching halt, Dee and I immediately got up and went over to the railings. Down on the street below us in a flashy convertible were two boy-racer types. With this, Dee and I returned to our chairs just in time to witness Angela pull up her t-shirt and expose her bare breasts. Curious to see their reaction, Dee and I went back to the railings to observe both men standing on their seats. With their pants pulled down to their knees, both men jiggled their penises before roaring off into the distance.

Alas, what we considered to be nothing more than high jinks would turn out to have dire consequences. Unbeknown to us, on the day this incident occurred, our elderly landlords were sitting out on the balcony in the apartment directly below. Having become alerted by Angela whooping and the screeching tyres, they too looked over their railings to observe the young men exposing themselves. Suitably outraged, we, along with the other tenants, were given immediate notice to quit. While Angela threw her lot in with one of the boy-racers she’d been hanging out with, Dee and I were left once again having to rely on the good graces of others.

The first person to come to our rescue would be our friend, Claire. Despite strict instructions from her father that no males were allowed in their apartment, following my explanation of our predicament, Claire allowed us to stay with her for the next two weeks. With Dee and I still quite small for our age, were able to sleep comfortably in a single bed beside Claire. Following this, we found ourselves once again sharing a single bed although this time on the upstairs landing of a converted garage. Similarly temporary, our accommodation belonged to a short and overweight man by the name of Reno, a van driver for one of the other timeshare resorts in St. Paul’s Bay.

Despite his kindness towards us, Reno seemed a rather mysterious figure about whom something just didn’t feel quite right. Yet, with the odd hours he kept and the fact that he’d often stay out all night, there were periods when we saw very little of him. Consequently, with Dee having just turned seventeen and me two days before Christmas turning fifteen, she and I enjoyed our first Christmas without either of our parents. Providing a real feast, she and I munched on steak burgers and chips while playing our favourite cassette tapes.

When it came to having a bath, Dee and I resorted to boiling pots of water on the stove top. Owing to the number of pots required to fill the bath, we took to sharing each other’s water. Furthermore, with there being no central heating in the garage, Dee and I kept warm courtesy of an old floor heater and the electric blanket on our bed. However, having shifted around in the bed one night, Dee had dislodged the sheet on her side and had been sleeping directly on the electric blanket. Being old and worn out, the copper wires had become exposed as a result of which Dee awoke the following morning to discover superficial burns down one side of her body.

While Christmas of 1987 may have passed unremarkably, New Year’s Eve would provide the highlight of the festive season. With the hotel restaurant fully booked, both Dee and I were tasked to work. Having washed enough pots, pans and dishes to sink a battleship, we joined the chefs sat on one side of the kitchen for a beer and a well earned smoke. Next to them on the counter top sat trays of leftover cake. In a moment of playfulness, one of the young chefs scooped up a handful of cake and threw it in the face of the eldest chef who was too slow to move out of the way. Just then, all hell broke loose and with us all joining in, the air quickly became thick with cake flying in all directions across the kitchen. Not even a bollocking from the catering manager would blunt our spirits, as Dee and I ushered in 1988 on our hands and knees scraping cake up off the kitchen floor.

Alas, the new year would not signal a positive change in our fortunes and the beginning of January would see Dee and I leave Reno’s garage suddenly. Our departure came courtesy of a comment made to me on the Strand by a canvasser working for the hotel for which Reno drove a van. During our conversation, the canvasser asked me if I was aware of where Reno spent his nights. When I responded that I had no idea, they revealed that Reno acted as a pimp for the working girls of ‘Strait Street’, the centre of Valletta’s notorious red light district. Whether or not a preposterous slander, Dee and I felt sufficiently unsettled by the prospect following which I resolved to find us somewhere else to live.

As luck would have it, an opportunity arose for us to share with two British men, also from Kent, who’d recently arrived from the UK to canvass for our hotel. Both in their mid twenties by that time, Marcus and Eddie had secured a short-term rental on a third floor apartment along the street from my friend Connie’s family restaurant of Swiss Chalet. Initially, Marcus and Eddie shared with an older female canvasser. However, when it came to light that she had pilfered an alarm clock from Marcus and Eddie’s room then concealed it in her bed, Eddie gave the woman her marching orders. With Eddie having invited us to move in, I arrived the following evening with our possessions.

Following Marcus’s move into the main bedroom, Eddie explained that Dee and I would have to share a bed, or beds, with him. In fact, his bed consisted of two single beds pushed together. Therefore, we agreed that he and I would sleep on the outside while Dee would take the middle. On to the matter of rent, my body temperature began to rise and my heart rate quicken. With Dee and I making barely enough money for food, I knew that rent on top of having to save for our next trip home would prove to be a struggle. When Eddie explained that we’d need to contribute to the deposit which meant he’d need forty Maltese pounds up front, I began to panic. Making the excuse that I had to leave to go and fetch the money, I left our possessions on the floor of Eddie’s room and fled. Having reached the bottom of the stairs, I stood outside on the street not knowing what the hell to do. Just then, I turned and saw the lights of Swiss Chalet glinting like a beacon of hope in the distance so I headed towards the restaurant in search of Connie.

To my eternal relief, I found Connie where she spent most of her time as a teenager, working behind the bar. Adding to my relief, when I revealed our plight, Connie was only too happy to lend me the money we needed. Indeed, this would not be the only time Connie came to our aid. In order to afford the rent, we had very little money left over for food. Consequently, we found ourselves some nights going to bed early to sleep through our hunger while on other occasions I approached Connie once more. Ever kind and generous, she’d load me up with pizza and bottles of beer to take back to the apartment to share with Dee, Eddie and Marcus. Furthermore, the nights when Dee or I worked in the kitchen provided us with an additional opportunity to scrounge some food.

Our stay with Eddie and Marcus would not be complete without some bedroom mishap for my unfortunate sibling. This time, it wasn’t another encounter with a worn out electric blanket which would be the cause of Dee’s latest strife, No. Going to bed each night, Dee would assume her designated place in the middle. However, on account of all the tossing and turning, the two single beds would separate during the night. Consequently, I’d wake up on many a morning to the sight of my sister with her bum on the floor and her feet inches away from her face in a perfect ‘V’ shape. While Eddie and I saw the funny side of it, Dee didn’t so much.

Come March, 1988, my sister and I had remained in Malta without our parents for almost seven months and had no contact with them since the previous December. With my latest three month stay about to expire, I ventured home unaware that within a month I’d be back in the UK permanently. The circumstances which brought about my departure occurred during my latest trip back home. While in a shopping centre in Maidstone two days before my return flight, Mum and I bumped into the estranged wife of one of the hotel’s timeshare managers. Upon learning that I still lived in Malta, the woman asked after her estranged husband. When I explained that he and his new girlfriend appeared to be getting on very well, the woman made her excuses and hurried off. Not until I returned to Malta two days later would I find out that with this throwaway comment, my fate had been sealed.

With Dee unaware of my return date, upon answering the door of the apartment she scolded me for not letting her know I was coming back. Furthermore, she explained that had I done so she would’ve told me not to bother. When I asked why, Dee explained that following my conversation in Maidstone with the estranged wife of the timeshare manager, she had phoned him to let him know she knew of the existence of a new girlfriend. Upon learning it was me who told her, the manager summoned Dee and advised her to tell me I was sacked and no longer welcome in the hotel. Furthermore, should I cross his path, the manager advised Dee that he’d probably punch me.

At a loss to understand exactly what I’d done and despite the warning, I went to the hotel later that day to speak to the manager. During a rather heated conversation he stated that with my comment I had made things difficult for him when the time came to divorce his wife. Still none the wiser for his anger towards me, what I did know deep down was that without my job maybe the time had finally come for me to leave Malta and return to the UK. Unlike my mother, I accepted my fate and saw no reason to delay the inevitable. To some over the past two years I’d been a good friend and someone who made them laugh while to others I was cocky, immature and a pain in the arse.

Nonetheless, I left Malta at the end of April, 1988 and returned briefly for a week at the end of June. With Claire eighteen years-old by this time and allowed to entertain males in her apartment, I stayed with her and Louise. With the help of Connie, I enjoyed our time together to do all the touristy things that being a resident I never found time to do. Yet, one unfortunate incident which occurred during my stay I prayed would be forgotten the next time I visited in June, 1991.

Having completely abandoned my sense of self-restraint, one afternoon while sunbathing on the roof of Claire’s apartment, I forgot myself and indulged an urge to masturbate. Concealing myself behind a wall, I sat down and began doing the deed. However, just as I was about to climax, Louise appeared. Realising she’d discovered me in an act of self-pleasure, she immediately turned around and walked away before calling my name. Suitably humiliated, I stood up from behind the wall and returned to the apartment, praying that Louise wouldn’t mention the unfortunate incident to Claire. To my relief, no mention of it has been made, until now, of course.

Suffice to say that despite the trials and tribulations of the past year, the eight months Dee and I remained in Malta without our parents constituted the quietest period of my life thus far. Yet, one event which occurred following my fallout with Dee and return to the UK stands out from all the others that year. While driving towards Maidstone with my father, with never much to say to each other, we headed into town in silence. All of a sudden, my father turned to me before blurting out how glad he was that I didn’t turn out to be gay. Despite the frankness of his comment, I didn’t care enough for my father to tell him the truth. Furthermore, I found myself more than a little surprised that he gave a damn whether I was or not.

Nevertheless, while I settled back into life in the UK, Dee too would return home for good three months later. However, Dee would not be alone for long. Indeed, within a few weeks of her arrival, her boyfriend, a Maltese man by the name of Joe, came to live with us. Our current home far too small to house six people, shortly before Dee and Joe’s nuptials in September, we moved into a three-bedroomed house in the south Maidstone village of Boughton Monchelsea. With patterns of behaviour so well established, hot on the heels of the quietest period of my life came the next chaotic instalment. Indeed, this latest episode would culminate in my removal from the family home followed by a sudden and shocking event that nobody appeared to see coming.

The transition back to life in the UK would be made easier by the fact that my parents were in no rush to put me back in school. In fact, my mother had a much more important use for me. This use involved my labour, or specifically, the money this would generate. Having been the beneficiary of my labour previously, and with money still so tight, my mother saw an opportunity and began scouring the jobs column of our local newspaper. When at last she spotted an advertisement for casual staff for a new employment agency in the town, she encouraged me to give them a call. As we didn’t have a phone, I ran to the telephone box down the road and gave them a call. Following the news from the agency that in order to register with them I had to show proof of age, I returned home somewhat crestfallen. Considering this no obstacle whatsoever, my mother hatched a plan.

Rummaging through a carrier bag full of odds and sods, my mother produced a piece of paper folded into a perfect square and handed it to me. Upon opening the paper, I discovered it was the birth certificate of my deceased older brother, Matthew. Having died twelve hours following his birth in January, 1970, Matthew would have been eighteen by the summer of 1988 had he lived. So, armed with my brother’s birth certificate, I secured a job at the employment agency which specialised in supplying casual staff to hospitals and factories all over Kent. Purporting to be three years older than my actual age, on my first day I rocked up as Matthew Hills, aged eighteen. While my work with the agency continued throughout the summer, it would come to an abrupt end following our move to Boughton Monchelsea, when we finally came to the attention of the authorities.

Much like our move to Chestnut Drive five years before, following our latest move I found myself once again drawing the short straw in terms of my bedroom. Indeed, the conservatory at Chestnut Drive was absolute luxury compared to the windowless store cupboard barely wide enough to accommodate the sun lounger on which I now slept. Unsurprisingly, despite the limited dimensions of my room, the amount I was expected to pay to my mother in rent remained the same. Meanwhile, for the first time in her life, at the age of eleven, my younger sister would have her own room.

For similar reasons to me, my parents would never completely take to Dee’s new husband, Joe. At the risk of alienating his daughter, my father concealed his dislike from Dee. Furthermore, when she sought his consent as a seventeen-year-old to marry, he gave it unquestioningly. As for my mother, while initially she’d be charming and friendly to Joe’s face, in the not too distant future during an all-family showdown she’d make her true feelings known. Before then, much to everybody’s surprise, Dee learned she was pregnant.

While Dee’s response to learning of her condition could not have been more muted, I found myself tickled pink at the news. However, my delight would be short lived when a couple of weeks later Dee suffered a miscarriage. Similarly restrained in her response, Dee did not shed a tear whereas I found myself inconsolable for her loss. As newlyweds who had just recently endured the pain of a failed pregnancy, their need for privacy was understandable. Yet, the effect of the miscarriage was such that it further entrenched a tendency which began as soon as we moved. Following the event, Dee barely ventured out of her room except with Joe, who himself would only appear downstairs to cook their meals before returning to their room. While time would prove my mother’s suspicion that her daughter may be being controlled to be true, I became resentful of the possibility and began to be openly antagonistic towards my new brother-in-law.

With my resentment no doubt rooted in my own jealousy, I found my attitude towards Joe reinforced by my mother’s assertions. Chief among them was her contention that the overuse of oil in the food Joe cooked Dee likely contributed to her miscarriage. Too naive to know otherwise and only too willing to believe in his guilt, my snubbing and open criticism of Joe began to bring me into conflict with the other members of my family. Providing only temporary relief from the tempers which had begun to flare on all sides was an unexpected visit one morning from Maidstone Police.

To the sound of my mother sliding back the door to my cupboard, daylight flooded in as I attempted to open my eyes. With great unease in her voice, she revealed that the police were downstairs and wanted to see me. Wondering what I’d done, apart from being a long-term truant from school, I got dressed and headed downstairs. Upon entering the living room, I found a detective opening a briefcase he’d set down on our coffee table. As I took a seat, I caught a glimpse of the registration card that I’d filled out for the employment agency among the contents of his briefcase. With my mother and I conveyed to Maidstone police station, Dad joined us not long after having been summoned from work. For the rest of the morning, the three of us were detained in separate cells and each interviewed in turn.

Perhaps on account of my sixteenth birthday being just over two months away, the police decided not to prosecute my parents. Instead, they turned the whole matter over to social services. On a rainy October night, our social worker, Carol, arrived on our doorstep. Appearing to be in her mid to late forties at the time, Carol’s straight talking approach appealed to me. Before I knew it she had me sat down on my own in Sas’s room where she asked me to tell her about my life. Fearful of being taken away, I decided against retelling the whole sordid history in favour of more trifling matters, such as my father bursting into my room during petty arguments or telling me to turn my music down. However, had I known what was about to transpire, I might’ve thought more carefully before deciding against disclosing the truth.

Having convened in the living room for a meeting with Carol, minus Sas and Joe, my father immediately took to the stage. When asked by Carol for a frank appraisal of the problem, all my father could offer in response was how I teased Dee mercilessly when we were younger and my current attitude towards Joe, followed by other petty examples of misbehaviour. Quite how my father thought these examples explained my ongoing absence from school was anybody’s guess. Yet, to hear him reel off a catalogue of misdeeds on my part and cite these as the root of our family’s ills while ignoring both his and my mother’s behaviour over the years left me seething. As for Mum, as she had the most to lose should the truth come out, her silence was to be expected. Similarly, Dee remained conspicuously silent.

Next, we went on to discuss the issues that I’d raised with Carol, earlier. Addressing the matter of my father bursting into my room, Carol declared my bedroom to be my personal space and admonished him not to enter without knocking. His facial expression resembling that of a man who’d lost a pound and found a penny, this did not go down well with my father at all. Nevertheless, he opted to just sit there and take a ticking off. Moreover, sensing a complete lack of respect from any quarter in terms of our methods of communication, Carol cautioned us on the benefits of using more positive language as an alternative to swearing at each other.

Lastly, having asked me to play some music on the living room hi-fi, Carol jumped up and went outside. While I turned the music up and down, Carol attempted to establish a volume upon which we could all agree and a level which could not be heard from outside. Having listed all the points to be adhered to, Carol advised she would draw up a family behaviour contract. Furthermore, sensing our collective need for relief, Carol offered me a weekend placement with a foster family in their home north of Maidstone. Alas, it would all prove to be a case of too little too late. In the weeks that followed, it would become all to clear that no family behaviour contract or offer of weekend respite could halt the direction in which we were headed, which was towards total family breakdown.

Before then, and serving to compound matters, for the third time since leaving school two years before, I found myself back there once again. Despite my having completed no more than three months of schooling in that time, the decision was taken to return me to my former year. The fact that in six months time my class would be sitting their GCSEs suggested that very little thought had been given to the matter. Undoubtedly, there was no way I could make up for the loss of two years worth of education in just six months. Unsurprisingly, I began to struggle in every respect and only the opportunity to rekindle my friendships with former classmates Justin and Simone kept me going. Indeed, it would be to the latter that I’d flee when the moment came one evening following the inevitable family showdown that I finally reached breaking point.

As is so often the case, years of unresolved conflict is less likely to light the touch paper of confrontation as much something trivial. Well, that is how this particular evening at home began. What started with mother and I falling out after she had accused me of making an international call on the family phone progressed to her making dinner for herself, Dad and Sas while excluding me. In the throes of me remonstrating with her, my father then threatened to ‘stick one’ on me. As if this were not enough, when Dee and Joe appeared my mother began tearing into her son-in-law for keeping Dee away from her family. Jumping to her husband’s defence, Dee and Mum began physically fighting following which I’d finally reached breaking point. Just then, in a moment of utter despair, I grabbed a sharp knife from the kitchen drawer and ran out of the house into the night.

With no thought for where to go, I sobbed and stumbled my way through the dark for what seemed like an age. At that moment, I found myself on a footpath leading from Boughton Monchelsea to Loose, the home village of my friends Nicola and Simone. With this particular path leading more or less to Simone’s house, I headed there. Reluctant for my friend to see me in such an emotional state, upon reaching my destination, I chickened out and headed for the woods opposite her home. Having found a comfortable spot, I sat cross-legged on the ground and removed the knife from my coat pocket.

While focusing on the blade, I reflected on the desperation that led to me grabbing the knife in the first place. But what now? Would I really be better off dead? If so, did I have the courage to go through with it? And what if I turned out to be wrong? Having rested my upturned left wrist on my leg, I contemplated all these questions. Despite my hopelessness, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Was there a way to achieve the same end without causing myself any physical pain? Having resolved upon absolutely nothing, I returned to my former state of despair. Just then, out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of Simone closing her bedroom curtains. Until I could devise a more pain free alternative, I abandoned my plan and returned the knife to my pocket. Desperately in need of the comfort of my friend, I got up and ventured towards Simone’s front door.

Considering the lateness of the hour, it came as no surprise upon my knocking on Simone’s door to see her father standing before me. Despite his somewhat forbidding air which befitted his role as a police inspector, upon witnessing the state I was in, Simone’s father spirited me up to his daughter’s room with haste. No sooner had I sat next to Simone on her bed than the tears began to flow. Eventually, I stopped crying for long enough to tell her of the night’s events before producing the knife from my pocket. After I handed the knife to Simone, she left the room momentarily, no doubt to update her father on what had happened. Considering my home that night to be far from a place of safety, Simone’s father contacted social services. Before I knew it, I found myself in the back of his car en route to my respite placement on the other side of town.

With it being after 11pm by the time of our arrival at my foster placement, we were not surprised to find the house in total darkness. Deterred by the late hour from knocking on the door, Simone’s father explained that he’d be taking me instead to a children’s home on the outskirts of Maidstone. Upon our arrival at the children’s home, with the exception of a single light shining from a downstairs window, we found the home similarly in darkness. With the home resembling a medical facility rather than a place where children lived, we ventured inside. In search of a member of the night staff, we passed an older teenage boy sitting in a TV lounge watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Having safely delivered me into the care of the night staff, Simone and her father left and returned home.

Having become a notoriously poor sleeper, and despite the faint whiff of stale urine in the air of my room, I fell into a deep sleep that night. When I awoke the next morning, I would not do so alone. With news having got around overnight of a new arrival, the other residents decided to gather in my room. Upon opening my eyes, I was rather unpleasantly surprised to find a group of fearsome looking boys standing around my bed. While some were dressed in full pyjamas, others wore just the bottoms and were bare chested. Yet, there appeared to be not one friendly looking face among them and when the most muscular suddenly asked me if I was hard, I found myself lost for an answer. Unsure as to whether my response might give rise to the offer of a fight, I began to stutter. At that moment, one of the day staff, a lady by the name of Barbara, entered the room and told the boys to go and get washed and then come downstairs.

Following breakfast, I met with Barbara in her office where she announced that Carol would be coming over shortly to pick me up. From here, Carol intended to take me to my foster placement where I’d remain on a longer term basis. While my foster family were wholesome, sweet and kind, in fact everything my parents were not, the prospect of remaining with them indefinitely filled me with dread. Despite knowing full well that my parents were the worst thing for me, I struggled with being forced to stay away from them against my will. While I’d been able to maintain a safe distance from them for most of the previous year in Malta, that had been my decision. Indeed, tough decisions are easier to live with where there is a choice involved. Incidentally, I’d remember well my own conflicted feelings during this time in my future employment as a residential social worker in a Children’s home. Like so many of the children for whom I’d provide care, I too began to abscond from my foster placement and head towards home.

Before then, following my move into the foster placement, the decision was taken that I wouldn’t have to return to school. Instead, social services consented to me finding a part-time job. Having been given the go ahead, before long I found myself a seasonal post as a cashier in a popular newsagents in the town’s main shopping centre. Furthermore, with my mother having recently started working in a nearby employment agency, we began meeting up during our lunch hour. Voicing my struggles to her at having to live away from home, my mother echoed similar sentiments at the prospect of another woman parenting her son. Consequently, I began drifting back to Boughton Monchelsea, where not everyone, specifically my father and Joe, would be pleased to see me.

Predictably, with an interest to protect in keeping me away, my father made it known I wasn’t welcome in the house. Being someone who always hated driving, in order to ensure my guaranteed departure, he’d cheerfully break his own convention by escorting me back to my foster placement personally, despite my protestations and tears. Events came to a head when, desperate to be in the last place I should be, I absconded back home one day. With the news that my foster family were on their way over to collect me, I absconded from my own home until they’d come and gone. That night, having been reported as a missing person, I squeezed under my younger sister’s bed. Emerging the next morning in urine soaked clothes, my mother decided enough was enough and after contacting Carol, she confirmed to our social worker that she wanted me back in Boughton Monchelsea.

Following my return to the family home I’d turn sixteen. With my presence casting a pall over Christmas, 1988, come the New Year, Dee and Joe moved out. As expected, my father blamed me. Desperate not to be outcast again, I knew the key to remaining at home lay in ensuring continued good relations with my mother.

Therefore, it came as something of a surprise to find myself of a Sunday morning escorting my mother to the last place I’d expect to find anyone with such anti-religious views - the parish church. However, no sooner had I clapped eyes on the dashingly handsome vicar than I immediately understood the draw. With old habits dying hard, and despite the lack of reciprocation, my mother flirted shamelessly with the alluring man of the cloth. With his warmth and charisma, the vicar enjoyed great popularity among his parishioners, particularly my mother. Alas, with him being happily married, all her efforts were in vain, not that she’d allow such a trifling detail to prevent her from trying.

Prior to Dee and Joe’s departure, with the threat of school no longer hanging over my head, I secured my first legitimate full-time job as a cashier in the town centre branch of Safeway. Following receipt of my acceptance letter, which included the amount I would be paid, my mother demanded half my wages. Having resumed my place in my original digs, I felt aggrieved at having to part with half my wages on a room that was, in reality, a store cupboard. With neither of us capable of resolving disagreement with each other without descending into an argument, the inevitable fallout occurred one evening. While I stood in the dining room playing darts, my mother delivered the news of how much she expected me to pay.

Considering her demand excessive, it didn’t take much before she and I descended into a blazing row. Following this, in yet another display of misguided loyalty towards someone who had shown him absolutely none, my father weighed in and berated me for speaking to my mother in such a disgraceful manner. Having finally had a gutful of his pathetic devotion to her, and as resentful of the man who now stood before me as ever, for the first time I told my father to “fuck off”. No sooner had I done so than he made a move towards me as if to lash out. With this, I grabbed the handful of darts I had set down beside me on the breakfast bar and aimed them at him. Cautioning him to “back the fuck off”, with these words I glared at my father, whose eyes displayed the kind of fear he’d likely seen in mine each time he’d lashed out at both me and my mother. Just for once I wanted him to feel the kind of fear from me that on countless occasions I’d felt from him. Realising I’d finally lost my fear of him while he’d discovered his of me, my father retreated and went upstairs.

After this latest incident, Dee and Joe moved out following which I moved into their old room. Except to criticise me for the speed with which I’d taken Dee’s place, to which I responded that with her room empty he could hardly expect me to remain in the store cupboard, my father and I wouldn’t speak to each other again for another month. Monday 20th February, 1989, to be precise. Before then, in what would turn out to be a fateful night, I’d enjoy a few weeks of relative peace in my new job. Yet, with the pattern of my life appearing to be set, a period of calm would often be followed by inevitable chaos. When the disruption came, a life would hang in the balance. As if fate were intervening to prove her wrong, a phrase used by my mother so often to belittle my father would finally come back to haunt her one night in an altogether unexpected and dramatic fashion.

For as far back as I can remember Dad had agonised over the state of his health. With his perpetually slender physique, indifference towards alcohol and inclination for regular physical exercise, he possessed few bad habits. Indeed, his lifelong love of walking would often be the bane of our existence. Indulging a dual intention to avoid traffic and satisfy his desire to walk, many a Saturday trip into the town centre involved Dad parking at least half a mile away. Whereas Mum, Dee, Sas and I arrived weary and fretful without so much as a bead of sweat on his brow Dad always appeared as fresh as a daisy. Only his consistently high regard for gravy rich dinners and steamed puddings betrayed an otherwise active and healthy lifestyle. Owing to his altogether lively appearance Dad enjoyed little sympathy among the rest of our family for the multitude of ailments he claimed to have suffered. Assuredly each time he complained of a restless night or an upset stomach Mum ridiculed him for what she regarded as his self-indulgent hypochondria. As if lamenting the prospect of being stuck with Dad for the rest of her life Mum scoffed and responded that he’d likely outlive us all. Indoctrinated by her prophecy, to me its probability never appeared in doubt. Unfortunately for Dad he cried wolf too many times for his complaints to ever be taken seriously and eventually I joined Mum in mocking him.

After returning from church one Sunday at the end of January Mum and I found Dad in the lounge cradling a bandaged finger. Barely allowing Mum the opportunity to remove her coat Dad quickly revealed a broken cup while washing the dishes as the cause of his misfortune. Sensible to Mum’s characteristic indifference Dad continued that suspecting the need for stitches he’d attended casualty that morning. Whilst being tended to Dad explained having disclosed to the nurse an uncomfortable sensation along his left arm akin to pins and needles. Appearing somewhat alarmed by his revelation the nurse advised Dad to visit his own GP. After doing so the following week Dad confirmed to Mum the doctor’s suspicions of suspected angina. Seizing the opportunity to make light of his indisposition I asserted that I knew of a woman by the same name. Unimpressed by my poor attempt at humour Dad glared at me and announced that his friend Clive had offered the same predictable response when he’d informed him of the doctor’s suspicions. Suffering a double dismissal, when Dad revealed having been woken the previous night bathed in sweat and suffering palpitations Mum disregarded the suggestion as being all in the mind. Wounded by her lack of sympathy Dad retorted that far from being in the mind his condition was very much in the body. While events transpired to prove Dad right, another three weeks would pass before he’d call out and this time for the only person likely to take him seriously.

Apart from my rather unsophisticated attempt to be witty, not since the day I moved into Dee’s room had I exchanged more than a few words with Dad. Ever since then I’d decided to spend my time either outside the house completely or ensconced in my room listening to music. With my actions successfully preserving the silence between us it came as something of a surprise to find Dad standing at my door one bitterly cold February evening. In as few words as he could possibly utter Dad asked for my help in unloading the bags of logs he’d bought for our lounge fire on his way home from work. Seeing no occasion for rudeness I made my way downstairs and unloaded the logs from the car in silence. After dumping the last of the sacks in the lounge I darted back upstairs to the comfort of my room and settled down for the night.

To the sound of a female’s voice sometime later I found myself drifting in and out of sleep. In a state of semi-slumber I laid and listened in the hope of quickly returning to my former state of unconsciousness. Just then a strained voice cried out my name. With the desperation in its tone alerting me to some particular distress I lifted my head from the pillow and listened. Before long the voice cried out again with even greater desperation than the first time. At this I leapt out of bed and opened my door. No sooner had I done so than another weakened cry called out my name but this time from Mum and Dad’s room. Seeing the bedroom light on and the door open I ventured hastily across the landing and entered the room. Lying in bed in a foetal position I found Dad bathed in sweat and barely able to speak. A clenched fist against his forehead drew my attention to his ashen features. Before I had the chance to fully assess his pitiable state Dad uttered to me in a low and rasping voice to call him an ambulance. With his extreme distress no longer in doubt I flew downstairs to the kitchen to find Mum already on the phone to the doctor. Sensing not even the slightest hint of urgency in her voice, to my surprise Mum began to play down Dad’s conspicuously weakened state. Appalled by her casual lack of concern I motioned behind me with my thumb and growled at her to get off the phone. As she lowered the receiver onto its cradle Mum eyed me warily and then scuttled back upstairs. While my heart pounded rhythmically I grabbed the phone and made a hurried call to the emergency services. After racing back upstairs to inform Dad that help was on its way I fled once more downstairs and waited anxiously in the dark in front of the lounge window. Illuminated by a band of light from the streetlamp opposite, the clock on the wall above the fireplace revealed the time to be shortly after two o’clock in the morning.

No more than twenty minutes had passed before the ambulance arrived and two paramedics were stood at the foot of Mum and Dad’s bed. While one crew member unpacked a heart monitor the other pulled the quilt away from Dad who lay naked and fixed in a foetal position. Sensing the need to preserve his dignity I went and stood on the landing outside his room closely followed by Mum. As I turned to face her, in hushed tones Mum began to make light of the paramedic throwing back the quilt which had caused the piece of tissue Dad habitually applied to the tip of his penis after sex to be made visible. Before I could berate Mum for her insensitivity, with his pitiful enquiry as to whether or not he would live my attention became immediately drawn back to Dad. Upon his pathetic assertion that he didn’t want to die the paramedics assured Dad that he had in fact registered a normal heartbeat. Having overheard their earnest assurances I watched in surprise moments later to see them suddenly strap Dad into a portable chair and carry him off down the stairs.

In expectation of his being given a humiliating all clear from the hospital Mum rushed to dress herself before accompanying Dad into the ambulance. Standing shoeless in the cold night air I looked on in silence as the paramedics hoisted him inside. While they jostled Dad into position I took account of the horribly confused look on his face and realised that he hadn’t once opened his eyes. As the doors were about to close Dad offered his thanks to me for calling the ambulance. Believing him to be unaware of my presence Dad’s words left me in astonishment as I watched the ambulance disappear into the night. Despite his evidently sickly pallor I felt it better to believe in Mum’s prediction that Dad’s illness was all in the mind and he would indeed outlive us all. No sooner had the ambulance turned the corner than I darted back inside and checked on Sas who had slept soundly throughout the night’s events. With Mum’s promise in mind to phone as soon as she had some news I returned to the kitchen and sat patiently next to the telephone.

More than two hours had passed without word from Mum after which I found myself becoming angry. Buoyed by the injustice of yet another broken promise I grabbed the receiver from its cradle and telephoned the local hospital. After explaining the nature of my enquiry to the receptionist I waited agitatedly while staff fetched Mum to the phone. Without a hint of care or concern in her voice Mum greeted me after which I began to berate her for not making contact as she had promised. In an attempt to mitigate her behaviour she explained that with Dad sitting up in bed talking to the nurses there appeared to be no real cause for alarm. Sensing that she’d begun to succeed in alleviating my fury Mum advised me to go to bed in readiness for work later that morning.

Having believed once more in the truthfulness of Mum’s appraisal, a few hours later on a quiet Tuesday morning I presented myself at work. While sitting at my checkout waiting for the throng of customers, between bouts of intermittent fatigue I became preoccupied by thoughts of Dad. No sooner had I dared to fantasise about his possible death than Mum’s prophetic assertions brought me swiftly back to reality. Despite his cruel disregard for me I couldn’t allow myself to seriously consider such a prospect no matter how sorely I felt tempted. In a desire to correct my earlier transgression and clarify Dad’s condition I telephoned the hospital during my lunch hour. Putting to rest any suggestion of his death the duty nurse informed me that despite being moved into Intensive Care Dad’s condition remained stable. Sufficiently placated by the nurse’s assurances I resolved to see out the rest of the day at work before making my way up to the hospital.

As is so often the way when attempting to travel anywhere in a hurry I encountered one obstacle after another. Having walked out of the supermarket I took my place at the end of a queue a mile long for a bus to the hospital. After two buses stuffed to the gills with standing passengers had whizzed past without stopping, the sight of a third virtually empty bus filled me with relief as it came into view. Predictably, the bus ground to a halt at practically every red light thereby doubling the journey time to the hospital. Having eventually reached my destination at approximately half past five I walked briskly across the sodden grass towards the main entrance. Once inside I found myself standing in confusion before a multitude of signs not one of which gave directions to the Intensive Care Unit.

Gripped by a sudden impatience I ran to the reception desk and barked an abrupt request for directions to my intended destination. No sooner had the receptionist pointed to a set of stairs leading to the first floor than I found myself atop them and standing at the end of a long corridor. After being presented with another set of signs I searched in desperation for the one locating the Intensive Care Unit before continuing my brisk walk down the corridor. At the entrance to each passing ward I glanced anxiously down for fear of missing the unit completely. Jutting out from the wall in the distance I spotted a sign indicating the entrance to the Intensive Care Unit and suddenly I quickened my pace. Just then as I was about to turn the corner Dee and Joe came out into the corridor clutching each others hand. Her cheeks made wet by newly shed tears, upon meeting my gaze Dee declared that Dad had died.

At that very moment the world and everything in it stopped and nothing mattered other than seeing Dad. Despite Dee’s obvious distress at the appalling truth I needed to look upon him with my own eyes before giving way to my emotions. Turning back in the direction they came I followed utterly stupefied behind Dee and Joe as they led me down a seemingly endless corridor. Upon reaching a floor length curtain at the end Dee pulled it to one side revealing the foot of a hospital bed. At the sight of what I assumed were Dad’s feet under a blanket a sense of apprehension suddenly stirred within me. After making my way through I stood in silence at the foot of Dad’s bed while Mum sat impassively alongside him. While struggling to absorb the spectacle of his pale and lifeless body my eyes became fixed on Dad’s rigid mouth and parted lips which had drawn their last exhausted breath. Suddenly the corners of my mouth curled and my chest began to heave before the tears eventually came. No sooner had I started to sob than Mum stood up. Placing herself over Dad she began to repeat how he wouldn’t wake up before dissolving into tears the timing of which I didn’t initially question.

Just then a member of the nursing staff entered the cubicle. Upon seeing my distress she placed her hand on my shoulder before I fell into her arms and continued to sob. An hour or so later, having left the hospital to fetch Sas, we returned to Dad’s bedside in order to say our goodbyes. My face still wet with tears, I ventured towards him knowing what I must do to make good our parting. At that moment the last sixteen years of my life with him were at once inconsequential. The only thing that mattered was this moment, the here and now, a moment which I would remember for the rest of my life. Placing my hand gently on his hair I leant over Dad and felt the warm skin of his forehead on my lips. Whether out of fear, obligation or as a token gesture I had parted from Dad in the only way I knew how and the only way that seemed proper.

As Joe’s car pulled onto the driveway I became aware of a different reality beginning with entering a house of which Dad was now no longer a part. With one less person to fill it our house seemed suddenly much emptier and far less safe than before. After meeting with the vicar who’d called to offer his condolences I settled down by the phone and began notifying relatives of Dad’s death. Despite her disbelief upon hearing the news Aunty Grace put aside her own anguish to offer me comfort. As I began to sob my diminutive yet formidable Aunt, who’d threatened to avenge me by biting Mum if she bit me again, treated me with kindness and compassion. Calling me boy and urging me not to cry I soon found myself consoled by her soothing words. With the only people left to inform being Nanny and Granddad I dialled their number and waited, expecting to find them equally as sympathetic as Aunty Grace.

While Nanny’s resentment for Mum had endured for the last seven years, Dee, Sas and I had hitherto managed to avoid becoming a similar object of contempt, until now. With Dad now dead nothing prevented Nanny from finally severing connections with her wayward daughter and her associatively guilty offspring. In tearful despair as I delivered the news of Dad’s death, Nanny remained unexpectedly cold and curt. Even with my disclosure that I’d arrived at Dad’s bedside too late to say goodbye Nanny proved her heart would not so easily be touched. Dismayed and somewhat exasperated as to what I could say to elicit a sympathetic and caring response I made a humble request to come and visit her. Gracious enough not to prolong my hurt Nanny offered a cruel and callous response that she had all the grandchildren she needed. With these few words she had created a wound far greater and less easily healed than that caused by Dad’s death. Without any desire to avenge her hardhearted cruelty I uttered a tearful goodbye and put down the phone. From this moment I finally realised that I had never been loved or held in any real regard by Nanny with whom I remained estranged until her death eighteen years later.

Despite the unorthodox nature of my past I had never experienced death in any respect. With the advent of Dad’s untimely passing causing me to recognise my own mortality I felt reluctant to fall asleep for fear that I wouldn’t wake up. Being unaccustomed to either the emotional or practical considerations associated with death the ten days between Dad’s death and his funeral were surreal indeed. Chief among such unfamiliar practices was that of visiting Dad in the funeral home. In the company of Dad’s friend Clive, with whom Mum had enjoyed her playful clinches, we were led into a cold and dimly lit backroom in a newly opened establishment in Maidstone. Wholly ignorant of the natural deterioration of the human body the condition of Dad’s corpse filled me with horror. While Clive began to weep I looked inside Dad’s open coffin in shock at the sight of his sunken eyes and blackened fingernails. Accentuating Dad’s disturbing appearance was the powder blue satin shroud with lace trim in which the funeral directors had dressed him. With the shroud also forming the lining of the coffin, for a man who spent most of his life in a suit Dad never looked so inappropriately dressed. The haunting image of his sunken features I’d never forget and would resonate anew the moment the pallbearers pulled Dad’s coffin from a hearse the following week.

On a mild winter’s day bedevilled by rain those who knew and cared for Dad assembled in the local church to pay their last respects in a service presided over by the vicar so favoured by Mum. As he stood before us the vicar lamented the date during the previous week which, had Dad lived, would have been his and Mum’s seventeenth wedding anniversary. Speaking of the sanctity of their marriage precious few among the congregation who knew of Mum and Dad’s turbulent history would not have recognised the irony. For the duration of the church proceedings the rain continued to fall heavily. However, as if by celestial inspiration, as the congregation began to emerge from the church the sun shone brilliantly through the blackened clouds. Providing a glorious backdrop to Dad’s burial, above the deer park behind the grave yard as if bound for the Heavens a magnificent rainbow soared across the sky. While the pallbearers lowered Dad’s coffin into the ground the vicar clutched little Sas as he spoke. Realising my Dad’s journey through life and mine with him was finally at an end I began to sob once more. Into the arms of Janet from Valley House, the one person who I believed had truly cared for me, I sought and found comfort.

She was a storm in human form -- my mother, her venom etched into my bones from day one. Adulthood slammed the door shut: I fled, scorched but alive. Her greatest sin as a parent? Sparking an inferno in my soul to claw through her venomous whispers: You're worthless. Broken. Doomed.

That blaze hurled me across oceans -- to London's fog-shrouded secrets, America's neon chaos, Spain's sun-bleached scars. I collided with her ghosts: silver-tongued predators who twisted knives just like hers. And saviours, too -- beacons who cracked my armour, whispering, Fight back. Mirrors weren't enough. I hungered for the machine behind the madness: how empires rise on lies, hearts shatter on truths untold. Forget the cheap seats -- I'd slip backstage, fingers trembling on the velvet, then yank it down in a roar. Illusions? Smashed to dust.

"PULLING BACK THE CURTAIN" rips open my wild adult odyssey: a savage tapestry of triumphs, betrayals, and gut-punches that forge a soul. Hollywood ghosts with hollow grins. Soul-crushed wrecks clawing for air. Power-hungry snakes in suits. And one oracle -- eyes like ancient fire -- who changed everything. Buckle up. This ride? It devours illusions. Yours included.