Truths, Half Truths and Little White Lies Read online

  The house in the forest and its small stream running through the garden meant this place was a haven for dens and general pre-teen hijinks. We were master denmakers. We’d leave the house early in the morning, Star Wars figures in tow, and spend the whole day out walking through the forests and splashing in the rivers. At some point we colonise a small island we name Rickmelbon and the Nettle Cutters Club is born.

  At one point we decide to build a long, high zip line from a tree up on a ridge down into the raspberry patch. It takes us ages securing the rope and pulling it tight. Eventually we’re ready to go. We draw straws – no we don’t, we bully Simeon into doing it. He’s pretty high. Twenty or so feet. He’s nervous. We’re nervous. The wind drops and he’s off. And down. The rope untethers and he drops like a sack of shit into the soft earth below. He survives.

  I think being at my gran’s house as a young boy surrounded by my extended family, having my foul-tempered grandfather swiping at me with his stick for being half English, was the happiest time for me. I’ve been happy since then obviously but when I think about that place and the long endless summers it’s only ever good. It’s innocent, and it’s fun, baking gets done, baby chickens hatch, berries are eaten off bushes, fish get caught and dogs get patted. The older I get the more things change, things always change, but back then it was perfect.

  By the time my grandad came swinging into my memory he was already pretty old. I always remember he looked how men looked in pictures from the forties. Baggy trousers, white shirt, sleeves rolled up, braces. This was his uniform. His hair was wartime too. Classic short back and sides, maybe even a little Brylcreem. Grampie walked with a cane and would use it to attack us grandchildren at any moment. We’d play a game of roulette where we’d creep towards him as he slept – our aim was to twang his braces. He was never really asleep. As soon as we got within range he’d explode awake and scythe us down with his stick. It was all bluster. Sometimes we’d bundle him en masse and shower his scratchy unshaven chops with kisses. We’d laugh as he feigned disgust. He smelt like whisky but nice whisky.

  My gran was a white-haired joy straight out of central casting. She was compact and sturdy, a no-nonsense lady who loved to laugh. She smelt amazing and I loved running in from the car on those days I got to spend with her and burying myself into her smell. She mostly wore a kind of cleaning dress with deep, apron-like pockets in the front, the pouch always full of treats and tasty tidbits. To finish off her ensemble she wore wellies with the tops turned down. The only exception to this look was when Gran either went into Haverfordwest to shop or when she went up to Tre-wyn to play bingo – then she’d get dolled up. I loved staying at her house with my cousins, being looked after by Uncle Emmy while Gran and Mum and the rest of the sisters went out for the night. He’d tell us ghost stories and frighten the hell out of us. I’d lie in that massive soft, hot bed, in that creaky, windy house, breathing hard until fear eventually led to sleep.

  Gran was quick to use her big rough hands to mete out country justice. In a good way of course. Those hands were so strong, she loved laughing and giving you a pinch or a little dig. Mum and Gran’s hands looked exactly the same. I loved holding those hardworking, hard-slapping meat gloves.

  Mum and the other Hobbit women of Dyfed had a weird connection with the occult, the supernatural if you will. This shit’s hard for a kid to be around. One night back in Dagenham my mum is woken by a tremendously bright light; she tries to wake up my dad and failing to do so she sits up in bed only to come face to face with Jesus Christ himself. Not a spirit or a malevolent poltergeist but Jesus. She said he was talking to her but she couldn’t hear what he was saying, he was just moving his lips. She turns to try and wake Dad who’s lifeless, but when she turns back the baby Jesus is gone.

  Looking back now as an atheist it’s clearly an alcohol-induced hallucination or an ultra-lucid dream. She wasn’t a massive drinker back then, that came later, but as her seven-year-old son and raised a Catholic I had to believe what she said. Why would I disbelieve it? My mum was completely convinced. She fled the house that night and sought sanctuary with our family priest Father Dodd. She stayed there for almost a week, drinking whisky, smoking cigarettes and trying to get to grips with what she had seen.

  It changed Mum, she became slightly more devout after this (when it suited her of course). It was weird going into her bedroom while she was away and looking at the chair Jesus had sat on. It was a white high-backed thing with a purple cushion, very uncomfortable, classic Jesus. I stood and looked at that chair, touched it. I remember sniffing the seat cushion a bit, hoping that he’d left the scent of flowers behind. It didn’t smell like flowers, it’d been too near Dad’s arse and his dirty socks for too long for even Christ’s sweet bum scent to permeate. Still, it felt creepy. I’m not sure why it would be creepy. Surely Jesus is anti-creepy?

  My Auntie Linda, a small fiery woman with a jet-black bob, tells a story that used to chill me when I was younger. She went to work as a chambermaid in a big hotel in London and stayed with an old friend of hers who had a two-year-old son. Upon arriving she found all the rooms of the house empty, all the furniture from the flat crammed into one room.

  The baby had his cot in the empty room next door. The mum, Linda’s friend, hardly went into that room after the baby was put down for the night. At one point during their conversation that evening my aunt’s friend described to her a thing that had been rampaging in their house at night. As Linda told it to me it always sounded like a classic poltergeist.

  Linda told me that just then they heard a noise, a rhythmic thumping. They edged into the baby’s room and saw the child standing in the cot watching a rubber ball bounce from wall to ceiling back to wall and so on. Like Paul Newman with the baseball in The Great Escape. When the baby saw them he laughed and the ball stopped. Telekinesis. It went on for a few years. The older the baby got the less it happened.

  Then there’s Auntie Melanie (Melons). All the cousins are sure she’s either (a) a witch, (b) some kind of night dweller, or (c) has a Dorian Gray thing going on, because she’s fifty something and is still pretty fit in a kind of Kate Bush way. She always has been, and she doesn’t seem to age as she gets older. Maybe it has something to do with never being awake during the hours of daylight.

  She lives in a house on an estate on the outskirts of Haverfordwest and she too has always been surrounded by supernatural happenings. When I was seventeen/eighteen I spent a lot of time in that house and it was there where I’ve been nearest to things unmentionable.

  I’d lie on the couch at night trying to sleep, my ears thumping, hair on the back of my neck standing to attention. There were things in that room with me. I’d hear the noise of our empty coffee mugs being gently pulled across the table. Porcelain sliding on glass. Stopping. Then sliding back. I’d bury myself under the blanket, I was so afraid.

  What didn’t help was that Melons’s daughter, my beautiful cousin Siobhan, was a keen sleepwalker. Sometimes if I crept up the stairs to wee between phantasms I’d be met by a small girl with long blonde hair, wearing a Victorian-style nightie pointing at me. Terrifying.

  ***

  When I was about ten my half-brother Marc came from Wales to live with us in Dagenham for a while. He was eight years older than me. I loved it having my big brother there. Debbie (my half-sister) would also come and stay for extended periods back then. Never Ian though; Ian was/is my other half-brother who died while I was writing this book. I’m so gutted. It was a phone call I knew would always come but it still punched me in the balls when it finally arrived. He was a man who struggled with grief and anger and alcohol and depression for most of his adult life. Taken away by a booze-related illness, exactly the same as my mum. I miss you, mate. I’m sorry I couldn’t make it better.

  I think Ian was too cross with Mum, believing, quite wrongly, that she’d abandoned him/them, Marc, Debbie and him. She’d really had no choice if she wanted to live. I wasn’t sure at the time what the ‘half�
�� bit meant. As far as I was concerned these people came out of my mum. They were my blood.

  My dad tried to be a father to my half-siblings. As much as he could anyway. I always felt he was very sensitive to his place in the food chain of their family. He was good like that. I think Marc and Debs quickly warmed to Dad. It took Ian longer to come round; that said, it was never tense or moody. There were never furious rows, just the odd stand-off from time to time.

  When Debbie lived with us in Redbridge there definitely was the odd argument. She was moody and Dad wanted to stick up for Mum and let Debs know that she couldn’t just do what she liked in his house etc. I guess similar conversations go on with step-kids every day. She was difficult though – boys, drinking, weed, boys, boys with motorbikes, thrush. Teen girl shit.

  They loved my dad though. He was kind and funny and fair and adored their mum. What’s not to like. When Dad died Ian made the journey from Haverfordwest with my cousins up to east London to attend his funeral and cried like a baby. He loved my old man.

  ***

  It was 1980 when we started our fractious relationship with Barking rugby club. I say our, I mean Mum and Dad’s. I think it was because of Marc staying with us and wanting to play for a local team while he was living in London that Barking RUFC became a big feature in my life. The coach journeys to away matches, the old clubhouse full of stolen trophies pinned, nailed, screwed on the wall, proud relics of battle.

  Playing for Barking Youth was a treat, it was the camaraderie and physical contact young me needed. I don’t mind saying I was pretty good. My brother Marc loved it there too, and because he was much older than me he seemed exciting and dangerous. Sometimes the door knocked at three or four o’clock on a Sunday morning and Mum would get her dressing gown on, cursing as she descended the stairs.

  Opening the front door she’d be picked up by fifteen drunken rugby boys and bundled inside. It was Marc and his hammered teammates. My mum loved boys and men, she was a real man’s woman. She’d never be cross but that wouldn’t stop her from at least feigning anger. Slaps were dealt out but the charm and enthusiasm of the drunken lads meant she was easily swayed.

  Mum, without fail, would always cook. She was like Martin Scorsese’s mother in Goodfellas but Welsh. A 4 a.m. feast of sausage, egg and chips or bacon sandwiches was not unusual. She loved the fact that they all called her Mum. I’d stand in the corner and watch these boys. Once we woke up to find a bus stop in our front garden they’d cemented in overnight as a prank. Stuff like this happened all the time. I loved my big brother. He was courageous, generous and honourable.

  In the mid eighties there was a new style of crime on the tubes and trains called ‘Steaming’. Gangs of youths, ten or so strong, would get on a train at one stop, steam through the carriage taking everything they could, before getting off at the next stop and legging it or getting on another train to do it all over again. Devilishly simple, impossible to predict and difficult to combat.

  Marc was sitting on the train eyeing up a woman when a gang of steamers boarded the carriage ransacking the place. When a youth grabbed this chick’s bag and headed off, apparently Marc uttered the words ‘This one’s mine’ to the woman and set off after them. He managed to get hold of her bag and began rampaging into the shocked gang like a drunken man-rilla. Sadly he ran out of steam pretty quickly and they fucked him up. Using his skills as a prop forward he lay in a ball clinging onto that bag until the attack was over. Bleeding and bruised, he gave the girl her bag back. I suspect, knowing Marc, he may have even given the lady a wink as well. He got hurt, not too badly, something broken, some stitches, but that was Marc all over. Gosh I miss him.

  When Marc left us he spent a few years travelling the world on the lucrative sheep shearing circuit. If I remember rightly the ‘circuit’ was Australia, New Zealand, the States and somewhere in Scandinavia. Marc told me a story once. In the off-season from shearing, by all accounts a thing he was brilliant at, he took a job working in an abattoir, something he was really cheery about. The picture he paints of the place was horrendous, but he didn’t seem to mind. I think the après-murder more than made up for the killings.

  Lots of like-minded lunatics holed up at night in some dark, alcohol-fuelled Scandinavian abattoir bar. It sounded like one of the circles of hell, but with music. One day an old bull was brought in to be euthanased. After the grizzly act Marc thought it would be hilarious to de-cock the retired stud. Later that night after work when the lunatics were smashing it up in the bar, Marc waited until a number of people had gone off to the toilet. He hid the bull dick down his trousers and went to the loo. His friends made room as he edged into the trough. I imagine there was some casual chatting before Marc reached into his pants and unravelled a giant twenty-pound beef stick. It crashed into the steel trough splashing piss everywhere. People gasp, momentarily believing this titanic wang might just be his. There is screaming which ebbs into howls of laughter, which become tears. The way he told it, that beef willy was paraded around the place like a returning war hero. They propped it up at the bar and all night bought it drinks. I imagine it sitting there, fat and slumped over slightly, tired and triumphant like Hemingway himself.

  At Barking RUFC one of the highlights for me was the food we got in the clubhouse after a game. Pie and mash with beans, or sausages, shepherd’s pie, hearty grub suitable for the returning warriors all served through a mysteriously low serving hatch. Sometimes I’d sneak into the kitchen, the sweaty, steamy room on the other side of that low hatch, and watch the big-armed kitchen dollies sling out post-game delights. If I was lucky they’d wrap up a fantastically hot sausage in a napkin and give it to me to eat, and I’d rush outside and eat it under the bridge round the back of the club.

  I was too young to fully understand what was happening in that clubhouse but I remember witnessing a fair amount of lunacy. It was always good natured and I enjoyed watching adults get silly. My dad loved it; he never really had many male friends that I can remember so I think he enjoyed the bullshit and camaraderie with the other blokes. I think that was part of my mum’s problem: she lost control of him when he hung out there, he became one of the boys. Dad wasn’t like that generally – he was a homebody; they enjoyed each other’s company. They were together most of the time. But Mum was high maintenance. Dad was Mum’s. That sounds mean but this isn’t my intention.

  On Saturday nights the clubhouse would be rammed and raucous. I don’t think it really mattered whether we won or lost. If the first and third teams played at home the second and fourth teams would play away. At some point in the evening the battle coaches would return and the club heaved. Most of the time people would end up naked, steaming, frequently spraying Ralgex or some other heat-based embrocation on each other’s balls and anuses. (That was just the women.) I’ve been fortunate enough to spend some time in the Sergeants Mess in the military hospital at Headley Court, Surrey over the years and it reminded me of the clubhouse at Barking.

  Even during the chaos and the mayhem there were still rules and regulations to be adhered to. Failure to do so resulted in more and more drinking. A lot of this revolved around toasting and the wearing of correct clothing at all times, asking to go to the toilet. Not picking up on minuscule signs the others were secretly showing you resulted in drinking and balls being plucked or shaved or sprayed with a napalm-like substance intended to be used only in the event of a human being’s spinal muscles going on strike.

  Pints of beer would be flung everywhere, on the floor and all over each other. People would then fling themselves down the length of the clubroom, often leaving giant torso- or head-shaped holes in the plasterboard at the other end of the room. As a child this was amazing. I could do literally anything I wanted and a drunk man with no trousers on, balls the colour of a baboon’s summer-rectum, would throw a pint on me, ruffle my hair, and tell me I was a good boy. Amazing. Maybe it was here that the seed of my love and terrible fear of mass lunacy was planted.

  Round about t
his time, due to Dad and the office furniture company he worked for doing well, he got a new car. It was a really big deal – we’d never had a new car before. I seem to remember some of our neighbours coming out and cooing while the kids sat in the driver’s seat making high-pitched engine noises. It was a brand-new Jaguar XJS V12, metallic mint green with a plush cream leather interior that smelled like wealth. He was a man going places.

  He once drove that car on the motorway with me in it at 142 miles per hour. I whooped and egged him on. (I loved and still love the speed and roar of a very fast car, something my son has picked up, enjoying it when I stick my M5 into second gear and rev hard.) Dad had been cut up by an urchin. He looked at me, eyebrows waggling.

  ‘Shall we take him?’ I nodded excitedly. There’s only one way to deal with an urchin on the burn-up. We hammered past him doing close to one hundred and fifty. I was later to beat his speed record by 13 miles an hour – on a closed circuit I might add! Eat that, dead Dad’s speed record!

  ***

  After an afternoon, an evening and a night at the rugby club, Mum and Dad had the first massive fight I can remember. It started simmering and boiling in the car and exploded when we got home. I could not escape it, I couldn’t go around it and I couldn’t go over or under it. I stood there in the corner eating a banana while a foulness in a black cloak, an ebony-wrapped tornado, raged all around me.

  At its height, Dad, so frustrated by my mum’s drunken belligerence, punched his fist through a door, breaking it badly (both fist and door). This is where I must have picked up my annoying and very painful habit of breaking my own hands. I’ve broken three or four hands stupidly over the years. That sounds weird – I only have two hands but I’ve broken them both several times. It’s a way to unload a terrible need to hurt someone other than yourself while only hurting yourself. The last time I did it – and hopefully the last time I ever do it – was during the shoot for Paul in New Mexico.