A Young Man's Passage Read online

  MY MOTHER HAD met my father six years earlier when they both worked for the Met Office in Dunstable, near Luton. (Fifty years later they’re both still prone to glancing up at the sky and announcing to bemused visitors: ‘Cumulonimbus coming in from the west, I see.’) They were both 18 and away from home for the first time. My father had a motorbike. One thing led to another. You can quite understand it. ‘Shotgun Boogie’ and Frank Sinatra were all the rage. They didn’t mean any harm, your honour.

  Office life was some kind of big open-plan arrangement full of lots of young people who were good at geography. My mother made a name for herself by refusing to sit on a seat if it was still warm from the previous occupant. Apparently she would stand over the offending chair and fan it with a cotton handkerchief to encourage the cooling process. My father, with his film-star looks and easy-going manner, was quite a catch. No doubt they were all sniffing around each other like dogs on a council estate. Soon Peter and Brenda were an item.

  During their engagement my father had joined the Metropolitan Police and was, it has to be said, a bobby on the beat. At the coronation of Queen Elizabeth the Second he was on duty, standing in the middle of Cambridge Circus directing traffic. My mother was with some friends who, along with thousands of others, were sleeping on the pavement in order to secure their spot to watch the great spectacle. Rumour has it she legged it over the barrier, ran to the roundabout where my father was doing his police constable duties, and kissed him to the applause of the assembled throng.

  As you drive over the M4 flyover in Brentford, it curves disdainfully round the unpretentious spire of St John’s Catholic Church. It was here in 1953 that Peter Clary married Brenda McDonald. They look remarkably happy together in photographs taken then. My mother seems positively coquettish and my father looks full of laughter. Clearly enthralled with each other, it is alleged they managed to keep themselves nice till their wedding night, which is something I suppose. Their sense of decorum had obviously evaporated by the time I was conceived. One might have hoped for a romantic weekend in Paris or even the grounds of a minor stately home, but it wasn’t to be. I’m not bitter.

  My father sold his motorbike to pay for their honeymoon in Guernsey. The entire hotel was full of honeymoon couples and there was a lot of giggling over breakfast.

  Then they lived in Acton for a while, in a small flat on the top floor of a relative’s converted house. Proper teas served on a proper table, napkins, fruit bowl on the sideboard, feeling very grown-up I dare say . . . By the time I was born they had moved into police flats: 1 Meadow Bank, Surbiton, Surrey. Brand new as well. Low rise, red brick, substantial lawns. Proper brick sheds for the rubbish bins and no smell of wee on the stairs.

  The day before each of us was born, a nesting instinct possessed my mother and she went into spring-cleaning mode, emptying cupboards, cleaning windows and polishing floors. I was born at home. Brown paper under the sheets to save the mattress and brown paper up the walls, too, apparently, in case of who knows what. An enema had been performed to prevent Baby being born covered in unsightly faecal matter, and for that, at least, I’m grateful. Gas and air were administered to ease the pain of each contraction, so intoxicating my mother that she made unflattering remarks about Dr Pretzel. Given that he was delivering her baby there and then, the midwife thought it best to silence her. This she did by more or less sitting on my mother’s face. A tough woman, the midwife, by all accounts. ‘Very good, but didn’t like children,’ my mother recalled. ‘Referring to your sisters, she said, “When are the two brats coming back, then?”’

  Twenty-five years later, I went on a rebirthing course in Hampstead. A particular type of breathing is taught to you and a misty-eyed woman of a certain age gazes down at you. Soon an altered state was upon me. I struggled down the birth canal. I felt the warmth of an open fire, saw the tiles that surrounded it, stared up at the white knobbly ceiling, and heard my mother groaning as she expelled the afterbirth. I wanted attention. I cried.

  I think it cost about £20.

  I WAS NAMED Julian after a Benedictine monk.

  My mother had grown up in the village of Stoke Ferry, Norfolk. The McDonalds occupied the Manor House, and although they weren’t lord and lady, the prestige that came with their residence didn’t escape them. They had moved to the countryside when my grandfather took a job as accountant in a local sugar beet factory. During the war their substantial dining room was turned into a place of worship, and Father Julian Stoner gave mass there each Sunday. Local prisoners of war would come and fulfil their obligations alongside the villagers. I imagine swarthy Italians winking at veiled shop girls, sideways glances and shy blushes, but then I am a homosexual.

  Father Julian was six foot six and the son of Lord and Lady Fermoy of Stoner Castle in Oxfordshire. He gave my mother her first holy communion and obviously made an impression. ‘I decided to name you after him because he was the kindest man I knew,’ my mother recalled.

  When I was a few months old, my mother wheeled me to the shops. Prams in those days were big, metal affairs with massive spoked wheels, the size of a street cleaner’s trolley. To transport her children about my mother wanted the top of the range. ‘We saved up for ages when I was expecting Frances. We had no stair carpet but the pram was a priority. It cost £28 and your father got £6 a week. It was a London Baby Coach, the same as the Queen had. The most expensive. Grey colour. All coach-built. Too big, really.’

  She parked me outside the butcher’s, went in to buy some chops and went home. For several hours she quite forgot she’d even given birth to me. It was only the sight of the nappies fluttering on the line that reminded her. She raced back to the butcher’s and I was still there, asleep in my pram. I could have been wheeled off by any old Loopy Lou, sold abroad into a life of slavery, made into sausages.

  I’ve told my mother not to feel bad about it, though. I did the same thing with Fanny the Wonder Dog: tied her up outside the newsagent’s and quite forgot she existed until lunchtime when I wondered why I had a cupboard full of Pedigree Chum. She was still there, looking bored and bewildered, three hours later.

  MARRIED IN THE 1950s, when the 1960s arrived my parents had to get with it.

  The ration books and valued chastity that were the reality of their youth were replaced with feminism, free love and the Beatles. My mother changed her hairstyle, a highlighted, tufted crop instead of the dark, trained top curl. My father grew side-burns. Money was tight on a police constable’s wages so they earned extra cash in the evenings after we three were in bed by making lampshades and folding Christmas cards at five shillings per thousand. So she was understandably tired out one afternoon when she mistakenly made our Sunday tea chocolate cake with Bisto instead of cocoa.

  My great auntie Wyn – who was a regular Sunday visitor – was there and was given the first slice. My mother’s chocolate cake was always cause for excitement. It was two chocolate sponges with delicious, sugary chocolate cream both in between and on top, decorated with swirls done with a fork, as creatively as my mother’s limited time would allow. Auntie Wyn took a bite, paused, took a sip of tea and swallowed. She replaced the remainder of her cake on the plate and said nothing. The plate was part of a delicate, green and white bone-china tea service that was originally owned by my grandmother, and it was only used for Sunday tea. My sisters and I were served next and we all took big greedy bites. As one, Frances, Beverley and I spat our mouthfuls of cake out, Beverley missing her plate and indeed the table altogether. My mother was horrified by her children’s vulgar display. ‘Eat it!’ We pulled faces and looked down at our plates with fear. ‘I said eat it!’ my mother insisted.

  Luckily Auntie Wyn came to our rescue. ‘Actually, Brenda, it does taste rather different . . .’

  ‘Does it?’ My mother indignantly took a bite. She spat hers out too. ‘Bisto!’ she said, identifying the culprit.

  My father did shift work as a policeman and there were ‘late turns’, ‘early turns’ and ‘night
turns’, when we had to creep around during the day and make no noise because ‘Your father’s asleep!’ His job carried an element of danger, and when he got home my mother always asked if everything had been all right. She asked the obligatory question one night without turning to look at him. When he only mumbled in response she looked up and saw his face was bruised, battered and bleeding. In those days, banks had night safes where money or cheques could be deposited. Driving home after his late shift my father had seen someone being robbed of his cash as he tried to post it through the slot of the night safe. My father jumped out of his car and wrestled with the robber, who fought back violently. The robber got away but left his jacket behind. With that and my father’s description, the man was soon apprehended and jailed. An article in the local paper praised my father’s bravery. A few years later at school I exaggerated the story, telling my classmates that my father had been shot and wounded while single-handedly foiling an armed bank robbery. I obviously felt the need to be this dramatic quite regularly, because I remember other untruths I told quite clearly. When, as a nine-year-old, I was told by mocking classmates that I sounded like a girl, I solemnly informed them that, if they must know, I’d had a lung transplant a few years ago and had been the recipient of a girl’s lungs. My feminine voice was the result of this life-saving medical procedure, and I’d rather they didn’t make fun of me because I couldn’t help it.

  I was a happy, healthy child, but from the age of about six months I had a problem with my eyes. It was a form of eczema that made them red and itchy, and it came and went for years. As I slept, a yellow goo would be produced and I’d wake up in the morning with lids glued together by Nature’s gunk. My mother had to bathe my eyes each morning to dissolve the gunk before I could open them and see. She used to take me to the skin hospital in Leicester Square for treatment. One day while we were there she was struck by one of her infrequent but incapacitating migraines. When these happened she had to lie down in a darkened room immediately. She phoned my father, who was on duty in Soho at the time.

  My father worked in the traffic division for many years, driving around looking for violations, responding to calls and patrolling the motorways. He was first on the scene at many horrific car crashes, and was on duty when a British Airways 111 crashed in Staines, Middlesex. Once when I was late leaving for school and he was on early turn, he got me there in double-quick time, sirens blazing. On this occasion, his response to my mother was unsympathetic.

  ‘You can’t get home? Get the tube to Waterloo and the train to Surbiton.’

  Once he understood the true urgency of her words he collected her in a police car and drove her to the nearest police station. There was no suitably dark room available, so she lay down in a roomy broom cupboard and told my father to shut the door and come back in two hours. As my mother told me this story recently I couldn’t help but notice that my role, as a principal player in this anecdote, had been faded out entirely.

  ‘What happened to me?’ I asked, concerned.

  ‘Well, the migraine was so bad I couldn’t care less about you. I think you were left in the station canteen being looked after by whoever was about at the time.’

  I remember waking up once in the middle of the night when a cat fight was going on outside my bedroom window, unable to open my eyes. The wailing falsetto sounded like the devil’s death throes to me. I got blindly out of bed and crept as far as my parents’ bedroom door before I started screaming. Within seconds my mother was there, clutching my head and saying everything was fine: it was only cats having an argument.

  This mother/son scenario repeated itself when I was 34. In the midst of a black hole of depression and Valiumed to the eyeballs, I arrived at Swindon similarly traumatised by my drive down the M4. I stood on the doorstep and rang the bell, tears streaming down my face. ‘All the cars were going backwards,’ I said. ‘I thought I was going to die.’ My mother clutched my head and said everything would be fine.

  It is incidents such as these, variations on themes subtly repeated like a quiet refrain in a piano concerto, that seem to imply there is, after all, some order to our lives, some recurring scheme or rhythm we may not even notice. We can’t quite join the dots but we see them, like signposts along the way.

  I was, for example, a sturdy baby. I enjoyed being sung to and I slept a lot. Today I listen to yodelling music and sleep a lot . . . As soon as I could walk I used to drape towels and scarves round my shoulders and attempt a toddler’s version of swanning about . . . As I write I’m wearing a soft pink silk kimono that Jasper Conran made for me. I was once asleep in my pram outside the French windows when some rough girls came and threw dirt over me . . . I was recently trashed in an interview by Lucy Cavendish from the Evening Standard. . .

  All similar experiences, don’t you see?

  WHEN I TRY to remember my early childhood, it comes back to me in short, atmospheric film clips: a flowerbed full of marigolds with a path made from fire cinders, my father in his police uniform saying goodbye when he left for night duty, a green coat behind a frosted-glass front door, a high-ceilinged hall with a stained-glass window, the sound of stiletto heels on pavements and tiled floors, a kind, smiling, glamorous woman called Sylvia, my father in the kitchen, opening a container then saying, crossly, ‘There’s no ruddy coffee again!’ I remember Norfolk fields covered in snow, and sitting on my grandfather’s lap – he had a small lozenge-like growth on his jaw and when I or my sisters pressed it he made a funny prolonged quacking noise, as if we were pressing a front-door buzzer. I remember my grandmother’s smiling, excited face when she greeted us at the front door of the Manor House, her placemats featuring scenes from classical ballets, the dark, shiny sideboard with two cupboards you opened by sliding a short wooden arrangement left or right, to the right if you wanted to get into the left side, and vice versa. I remember a television on tall, spindly, 1950s legs, built into a wooden case with ‘doors’ made of thin vertical slats of wood. When ‘open’ they disappeared into the sides of the box. You ‘closed’ the television by sliding them out with two thin gold-coloured metal finger-grips, designed to match the petite round ‘feet’ on each leg.

  I remember lying in my bedroom studying the wallpaper at about the age of five. For some reason a design of climbing pink roses had been deemed suitable. Delicate buds sprouted from a thin green stem that twisted from left to right. Every foot or so the pattern repeated itself but the join was hard to discern and it was only a slightly quirky slip of a bud barely out of its green casing that gave the game away. The overall effect was of a wildly glamorous sequence of rose stems bursting forth on every available inch of wall space. In the small boxroom of the flat that was quite overpowering.

  I had an Action Man (the first of many), while my sisters had Sindy dolls. They had boxes full of outfits with matching shoes and accessories, and my Action Man had a choice between camouflage all-in-ones or black slacks with matching polo neck. It was a ridiculous situation and I did the only thing I could. Very soon my Action Man was Surbiton’s first cross-dressing experiment. (I blame the wallpaper.) Stretch fabrics looked particularly fetching on his well-toned torso and rippling limbs.

  There was a girl who lived at the flats who wasn’t quite right. She’d fallen out of the window as an infant and couldn’t speak properly. Chains were put on all the windows. Judith’s parents weren’t going to let such a terrible accident happen again. But she had a fantastic dressing-up box, and whenever I went up to play we draped ourselves in oversized ballgowns and eased our feet into diamante slip-ons.

  At the flats there was also a boy about twice my age I shall call Glen. I used to follow him round. He had a sweaty smell about him that excited me in a way I didn’t understand. I spontaneously asked him for a fight once, not because we had fallen out but because I wanted him to touch me. He said no and then he stabbed a stag beetle with a stick and spread its creamy white innards across the pavement. I liked him even more after that. Years later, as I performed a sex
act on a glass collector in the toilet cubicle of a Sheffield nightclub and experienced once again the life-affirming wonder of the male ejaculation, I thought spontaneously of Glen and the stag beetle’s innards.

  The local sweet shop was called Frank’s. It was run by three brothers who happened to be midgets and stood on boxes to reach the till. If you wanted something from a jar on the top shelf you had to wait until someone tall enough to reach it came in. Frank and his brothers later appeared in the film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Obviously the confectionery business was just a stop-gap for them.

  Three young children is quite a handful for any mother, so washing, dressing, breakfast and bedtimes were all achieved on a rota system. I’m not sure where I came in the feeding and dressing stakes but I was always last in the scummy lukewarm bath and first to bed.

  I ATTENDED SEVERAL primary schools, starting aged four at Arundel House in a smart red-and-yellow striped uniform. When I was three my mother had sent a photograph of my sisters and me to Father Julian, along with a letter in which she asked what school he thought she should try for. How expensive was Downside, for example? She still has his reply.

  Talacre Abbey,

  Prestatyn 2.2.63

  Dear Brenda,

  Thank you so much for the lovely photograph of the children. Julian certainly does look brim full of character and intelligence and I can understand you wanting to give him every chance. But Downside really is fantastically expensive. I believe it costs £1,000 to keep a boy there for four years, and this would be on top of about six years at preparatory school.