Fathers and Sons Page 13

  I thought of the one remaining chocolate.

  ‘Well…not exactly. I left–’

  ‘Go to your room and wait.’

  My mother grimaced. ‘Chris, no. It’s only a few sweets, for heaven’s sake. We can…’

  But her husband had already left the room. I walked silently up the stairs and waited in my bedroom, listening to the grinding of the shed door and trying to breathe normally.

  My father came in with the cane.

  ‘Wait, Dad, I was only–’

  ‘Take off your shirt.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Now.’

  This was new. I reluctantly pulled it over my head and at once the beating began. But after the first agonising strokes, delivered randomly across my chest and waist, something deep inside me revolted. I rushed at my father, kicking and punching him and trying to grab the bamboo. He thrust me off easily and a bizarre chase ensued, with me hopping round the room and over my bed, the cane whistling through the air behind me and occasionally making stinging contact.

  Finally my father–not the fittest of men–gave up, completely out of breath. He hurled his stick at me and stormed out. I threw it back at him and collapsed on my bed, shocked and in tremendous pain.

  The noise of the encounter must have filled the house. As did the colossal row which now took place between my parents. Elizabeth crept into my room. ‘Mum says she’s going to call the police.’

  The row stopped suddenly and a few moments later my mother appeared in front of me.

  ‘Put the light on, darling. I want to look at you.’

  I realised I had been sitting in the growing dark and switched on my bedside lamp, its shade askew after the exciting events of a few minutes before.

  My mother stared at my upper body.

  ‘It’s all right. It’s all going to be all right. I’ll just go and fetch some Green Ointment from the bathroom. Stay there.’

  Green Ointment was the Savlon of its day and our family swore by it. My mother came back and dabbed it along the multiple weals on my arms and body, and on the fingers that had been bruised trying to snatch away my father’s stick.

  ‘Wait here, my love. I’ll be back with some hot chocolate in a minute.’

  She went back downstairs again and this time the only voice I could hear was hers, a low, endless monotone which for some reason my father did not interrupt. I fell asleep before the hot chocolate arrived.

  Next morning was a Friday: PE day for my class. There was no question of my being allowed to go to school. Although none of my injuries were serious, the marks left by the bamboo were livid and there could be no explaining them away. The police would be informed.

  My father was silent at breakfast. My mother did the talking.

  ‘Your father is extremely ashamed of himself. He will be apologising to you later, but I am going to tell you something first. He has promised me faithfully never to hit you again. He knows what will happen if he breaks this promise. I don’t believe he will, otherwise we wouldn’t all be sitting here now.’

  My father cleared his throat and looked at me for the first time. ‘I have to go to Shrewsbury this morning, to pick up an American car. It’s one of the new Ford Mustangs. The company are lending it to Prince Philip. I thought I’d stop off at Shawbury on the way. Would you like to come?’

  An hour later we were belting up the M1 in a green-striped Lotus Cortina. It seemed as if my father’s total loss of control the night before had shriven his soul because without moving his eyes from the road ahead he began to make the humblest apology I have ever been offered. I instinctively believed he was truly sincere, not just in his anguished regrets, but also in his passionate promises never to hit me again.

  I was right to trust my judgement. He never beat me again, or threatened to. As we swept towards Kiln Farm, my father tried to explain how he thought his rages were something to do with his boyhood. He wasn’t making excuses, he said, there were none to make. And after the apologies and promises, his conversation increasingly became more with himself than with me. I was not yet ten, but I detected, for the first time, the childhood source of his sporadic rages. It was an explanation that made sense even then, long before I traced the thread of betrayal and rejection running between the generations that preceded me.

  Looking back after all these years, I see my father’s violent outbreaks towards me as a kind of descent into madness. Other children have it harder; there are far worse forms of abuse than being caned. Thanks to my mother’s stand and his own nascent if belated insight, my father finally fixed the last part of him broken by his childhood. I long ago forgave him my involuntary part in the process.

  And I got to ride back to London in a Mustang.

  Even though I was still only nine, I could tell that my father’s apology was sincere. I was in no doubt he was frightened. I took what my mother had said the morning after the final thrashing as an implicit threat to go to the police, and a few years ago she confirmed to me that was exactly what she meant. She had been explicit about that in private with my father, also telling him she would leave him on the spot if he ever took a cane to me again, and bring my sister and me with her.

  But most of all, he was ashamed. He had lost control and belatedly been forced to confront his behaviour, and how grotesquely disproportionate his punishment was to my ‘crime’. He was also reflecting on the violent retributions he had taken on me over recent years and those weighed heavily on his conscience too. All this he later confessed to my mother.

  As we sped south in the red and cream Mustang, attracting startled looks from other drivers all the way back down the motorway, I instinctively trusted my father’s promise that he would never beat me again. I put my faith in him, as sons do when their fathers make solemn vows to them. And as time went by and the cane remained absent from its cobwebbed corner in our garden shed, I realised an unpleasant chapter had definitely closed. The bond of trust between my father and me was restored, never to be breached again.

  I sometimes wonder if I have over-sentimentalised this episode, been too quick to write off the debt my father incurred. These were, after all, a series of savage assaults on a child for which he was never brought to book or punished. But the reason I forgave him then–and now–is, I think, because the contrition he displayed was without artifice. Children know when they are being emotionally manipulated, even if they are powerless to do anything about it. My father was truly humbled by the realisation of what he had done. I could see that. And perhaps my automatic act of forgiveness transferred a degree of power and control from father to son.

  I don’t think this unpleasant interlude in my childhood had any particularly lasting effect on me. I don’t wince when I pass a bamboo trellis, I don’t have bad dreams in which I am being beaten. I harbour no dark fantasy of swishing a cane myself. Children are adaptable creatures and live in the present. I dealt with the thrashings as best I could while they were happening and, when they stopped, mostly forgot about them.

  And now there was a considerable distraction from the receding unpleasantness. It was 1966 and England was hosting the World Cup. Excitement at Dagenham Road was intense. My bedroom began to fill with World Cup paraphernalia: posters of the star players; collections of swap-cards featuring the entire home team; and sundry incarnations of the tournament’s mascot, a cheerful stubby cartoon lion called World Cup Willie.

  There were only two television channels then–BBC and ITV–and both had their own listings magazines, which scorned to mention their rival’s programmes. So, like most households, we took copies of both: the BBC’s Radio Times and the commercial channel’s brasher version, TV Times. As the first international clashes neared, both magazines became heavily dog-eared and annotated–largely by my mother, who left reminders for herself in the margins.

  ‘England v France. Beef casserole. Prepare in afternoon and serve at half-time.’ Or: ‘England v Portugal. Sandwiches before kick-off, soup and rolls at full-time. If extra tim
e, Shredded Wheat for Chris.’

  My father and I hosted daily conferences at the breakfast table to discuss England’s prospects, during which my mother and sister were generously allowed to listen, and even to make the occasional contribution. My father knew the England striker Jimmy Greaves very slightly, through a business connection with Ford, and we talked about the Spurs player as if he was an old family friend. Jimmy would do this, Jimmy would almost certainly not do that, and so on.

  Jimmy actually did nothing much at all and, after an early injury, was dropped by the coach, Alf Ramsay. The Madeleys were unimpressed with their man’s replacement, a toothy West Ham player called Geoff Hurst. We doubted he could fill our hero’s boots.

  The tournament progressed and so did England. My father and I were quite certain victory would be ours, and tried to mask the heavy burden of responsibility we carried, when in front of the womenfolk.

  Actually we knew virtually nothing at all about football and much of our early morning discussions about tactics came straight from the back pages of the Daily Express. One morning I quietly assured my sister that she need have nothing to fear from that night’s game with Portugal and their dangerously talented goal-scorer Eusebio. England’s celebrated defender, the toothless Nobby Stiles, would ‘tuck Eusebio up’.

  ‘What do you mean, tuck him up?’ she asked.

  I had no idea. ‘Er…you know, tuck him up. A bit like when you make an apple-pie bed, sort of thing.’

  ‘What, so he can’t move and falls over?’

  ‘Um, something like that, yes…er…don’t worry, Liz. You’ll see tonight.’

  I quickly changed the subject.

  As my father and I had predicted all along, England made it to the final against West Germany. Unashamed xenophobia reigned.

  ‘If we managed to beat Hitler, we can beat that shower,’ my father told me, shaving on the morning of the big game.

  As it was just the two of us, I allowed my doubts to show.

  ‘Yes,’ I said uncertainly, ‘but they’ve got to the final, haven’t they? They must be pretty good. Anyway, surely most of them weren’t born until after the war?’

  My father snorted and flecks of shaving foam speckled the mirror.

  ‘Only up to a point, only up to a point. Anyway, you never hear them talking about what their fathers did during the war, do you, eh? But we’ll beat the Jerries all right, don’t you worry. They’re obsessed with efficiency, the Germans; can’t think on their feet like us. Look at Dunkirk…’

  And we did. The final whistle blew and we all yelled ourselves hoarse. My father and I shook hands in mutual congratulation. Naturally, we modestly forbore to claim credit for our victory. But we knew what we had achieved.

  I raced to the front door and opened it, half-expecting to see cheering crowds and impromptu street parties. Dagenham Road looked as if a neutron bomb had been dropped. There was no sign of human life, no cars or buses, cyclists or pedestrians. Everyone was locked in joyous communion with their television sets. I rushed back to ours and there was Nobby Stiles, prancing around with the lid of the trophy on his head like a schoolboy’s cap. He’d tucked everyone up, all right.

  Years later, Judy and I interviewed a man who had suffered a serious head injury in 1965. He lay in a coma for a quarter of a century and then surprised doctors by slowly regaining consciousness. He knew nothing of the world since the accident, and his wife, who had stood by him all that time, was doing her best to fill him in on what he’d missed–the end of the Cold War, computers, the Falklands War, that sort of thing. It was, she told us somewhat wearily during the conversation with them both, an uphill task.

  A light went on in my head.

  ‘Have you told him about what happened in the 1966 World Cup?’ I asked her.

  She turned to her husband. ‘Have I, dear?’

  He thought for a moment. ‘I don’t think so. I remember that we qualified…’ He looked at me. ‘How did we do?’

  I savoured the moment and then said, ‘We won.’

  He burst out laughing.

  ‘No, seriously–how far did we get?’

  ‘Honestly–we won. We beat West Germany 4–2 in extra time. Geoff Hurst scored a hat-trick.’

  I can still see the look on his face. He must have been the last man in England to get the news.

  I was ten that same year. My parents threw me a birthday party to celebrate their son reaching double figures. About a dozen friends–all boys–came, and things quickly descended into anarchy. My father had insisted on personally organising a treasure hunt. Ten objects had to be found, and the first team back to base won a prize–a crisp green one-pound note, improbably wrapped in silver foil.

  It says much about the more trusting mood of those days that the treasure hunt involved boys pairing off in hunting packs of two and being encouraged to roam the district unsupervised, in search of discarded bus tickets with specific serial numbers, branded paper bags from certain shops, pond weed from the deep gravel pits half a mile away, and other bric-a-brac. All this involved crossing busy main roads and taking buses to Romford town centre and back again. Lots of my friends were still only nine, but it was taken for granted that they were perfectly competent to do this, and would be quite safe.

  Hard to imagine today.

  In the event, almost everyone arrived back simultaneously at the house with their nine pieces of treasure. We were handed the envelopes containing the tenth and final demand, couched in rhyme, like all the others.

  Now comes the Holy Grail

  Your final journey on this trail.

  Thus you must go searching for

  Not hay–but proper yellow straw.

  This was a serious miscalculation on my father’s part. After a moment’s collective thought, a great shout went up.

  ‘The rabbit!’ There was a stampede down to the bottom of the garden and the hutch where my sister’s black and white Dutch bunny, Flopsy, lived. The wood-and-wire door was torn open and half a dozen grimy hands groped inside for the straw on which Flopsy usually dozed, but now lay quivering in terror. After a few seconds of grunting, panting and fighting, everyone thundered back to the house. Behind them, Flopsy lay on his back, eyes staring, unseeing, towards the ceiling of his little home. Elizabeth, who had followed the raiding party down the path shouting, ‘No, no, stop’, pulled her pet out from the ruin of his home. Flopsy had died, instantly, from shock.

  My best mate Nigel Woods pocketed the prize anyway and everyone went home, a bit subdued, but not that much. It had been a great party.

  After we’d waved the last of them goodbye, Elizabeth and my mother turned on my father, and I crept out of the house until things had calmed down.

  Flopsy was interred under the pear tree.

  Meanwhile I was growing up. Rush Green Junior gave way to grammar school–Coopers Company, on Tredegar Square just off the Mile End Road in Bow. It was a ghastly place, living on its past reputation as a guild school established by the Worshipful Company of Coopers in the mid-1500s. By the time I got there in the second half of the twentieth century, Coopers was a bizarre battleground; a freakish blend of public school-style tradition and modern yobbery. Staff were baffled and intimidated by the gangs of skinheads who dominated the classrooms. Discipline was in tatters. Most of the boys were from the East End–I was one of a small contingent who commuted in from the suburbs. Our ‘posh’ accents–Ha! Essex boys, we!–marked us as outsiders. One by one we were picked off. I kept a low profile longer than most, partly because I was in the school rugby team. But once the other pariahs had fled in terror to schools back in their native suburbia, my turn came.

  Coopers had a knife culture long before the current street vogue for carrying blades. One day when I was fourteen one of my few remaining friends whispered that I was going to be ‘rumbled’–cut–on my way to Mile End Tube station after school. I knew he was unlikely to be joking; things were getting increasingly out of hand. One boy had been beaten unconscious outside
the school gates with a metal chair leg; another had been shot point-blank in the mouth with a .22 air pistol.

  Staff were in denial about the steady rise in violence at Coopers. When I went to the headmaster’s office to put myself under his protection, he dismissed me out of hand. The choice lay between having a verbal confrontation with him, or a metallic one with his pupils and an exciting trip by ambulance to Whitechapel Hospital. I chose the argument. I insisted on phoning my father at Ford’s head office in Brentwood.

  Like most schoolboys, I had kept the fact I was being bullied to myself. I didn’t see what my parents could do about it. In any case, like most adolescents intimidated by their peer group, I felt as ashamed as I did frightened.

  My father must have been surprised to get a call out of the blue from his son informing him that a casual stabbing was in the offing. But he was urbane.

  ‘Well, we can’t have you coming home with puncture wounds,’ he said reasonably. ‘Put me on to the head, will you?’

  Their conversation was brief and mostly conducted at the other end. The headmaster replaced the receiver with a curt: ‘Your father will collect you in an hour. You are to remain in my office until then.’

  Dad arrived soon after school finished for the day and as we drove past Tredegar Square’s scruffy park, we spotted my persecutors lurking in the bushes. My father grunted. ‘That’s your last day at Coopers. You won’t be seeing that lot again.’

  ‘Isn’t that…a bit cowardly?’

  He glanced at me. ‘Don’t be idiotic. Even at Denstone I never thought I was going to be stabbed.’

  You could say I left Coopers at knifepoint, but I would probably have changed schools anyway. We had recently moved out of Greater London to rural Essex. It was a long haul every day in and out of the East End, although I could do most of my homework on the train.

  I transferred to Shenfield Tech, soon to become one of the first of the new comprehensives. Shenfield was a ‘mixed’ school–what we now call co-ed–so, for the first time in three years, I was in the same class as girls. Teenage girls. I was completely tongue-tied with them and for months barely spoke a word to the lithe beauties who eyed me coolly across the classroom.