The Goldberg Variations

For her the kitchen in the basement was less a domain than a prison where three meals had to be prepared each day and served on a table at which the places were always neatly laid – once the washing-up was finished it was usually time to start cooking again. She was never quite alone down there, even when we’d all gone to bed and Dad was off at a football match or upstairs watching Kojak. Something was incarcerated with her that would sometimes vent its frustration by hurling things around and occasionally make an unwelcome appearance; a small child she sometimes mistook for one of us, that only she had ever seen. In time Mum’s poltergeist became Dad’s scapegoat when no one else could be blamed for the not infrequent disappearance of his personal possessions, as if he subconsciously perceived it as the agent of her ill will.

‘There’s no other explanation. It’s been polted,’ he’d complain, though it struck me that the confusion of competing files, bags and newspapers in his study, where items as large as footballs could remain hidden for weeks, was a far more likely explanation. The poltergeist’s unhappy presence somehow reflected her own predicament, tied below stairs. It frightened a couple of au-pairs; one ran up the stairs screaming after a mirror was lifted off its hook and thrown to the floor with a crash. But though we were told it drew on our childish energy, we only saw the effects of its actions once, when a loaf of bread mysteriously rose from the work surface and hovered in mid-air before falling to the floor. Even Dad was upstaged that evening.

I was envious of Mum’s relationship with the poltergeist. It meant she was capable of inhabiting worlds denied the rest of us. I knew Mum had special gifts. She understood the healing qualities of music, when our imaginations had been over-stimulated by tales of entities such as the poltergeist in the basement. Once or twice it appeared in the hall, though that was as far as it went. Something was tying it down, preventing release into the realms she and it would have preferred to inhabit. I guess it came to remind her of that fact, as much as to sympathise with her sense of captivity. Confronted with such a reflection of her own dilemma, no wonder she felt afraid.

VARIATION ONE – The Football Hooligan (#ulink_2b5cea51-6e57-5fdc-9842-d5d473956a4b)

There’s no need to be afraid in the hall. You just have to pretend to be the ghost who might meet you there

(from The Ego and its Mechanisms of Defence by Anna Freud)

‘The main trouble is that he has never really accepted the arrival of the twin brother and sister, who were born when he was two years old. Their birth threw him into turmoil which manifested itself in many obvious and wretched ways. He became and has remained heavily dependent on and involved with me. There is a predilection for sadomasochistic situations and the beginnings of a pleasure in the idea of whipping. Also he shows a potential for pervert tendencies such as a compulsion to look at and to feel girls’ pants. While he tends to be bullying and aggressive at home he is on the whole placatory and nervous at school, and not very popular. In his actual work he is doing well, showing a special interest in History and English.’

Pamela Glanville to Dr Winnicott, letter, 1967.

Early history is the bastard child of personal recollection and other people’s anecdotes. Its objects, like the ghosts and monsters that flit in and out of view in old penny arcade machines, are glimpsed fleetingly. Some, including my own family, employ psychotherapists to bust these machines and compel their images to stay in view long enough to be assessed and analysed. I was sent off to track mine down at eight, when Mum wrote her letter to Dr Winnicott, but I can’t say I came away with a more focused picture of childhood than those who never had the benefits of therapy. To me childhood is still a lost play of which scant tangible evidence remains; fragments quoted by others, discovered on papyrus, inscribed on stone.

An early talkie is probably the oldest piece in my archive. Stripey-uniformed nanny Jeanette buckles my harness abruptly with jolts and bumps and hauls me behind her as she pushes a pram containing my new twin brother and sister towards Kensington Gardens.

‘You’re not walking properly!’

Whack! Her hand comes down across the side of my face like a whip: it stings. My check goes warm, almost comfortingly so. I still can’t keep up.

‘You’re not walking properly!’

Whack! This one catches me across the side of my head and makes me think about what I’m doing with my feet. Although I try to correct them, I find myself stumbling and tripping. Again and again her hand comes down. Much fainter is the reel of her shoving me against a stone step and smashing my tooth. The incident where she hurled me across the kitchen with such force that I hit the wall, landing half-conscious on the floor is someone else’s first-hand testimony. The cleaning lady witnessed it, but she didn’t want to cause any bother so she didn’t tell Mum. When I told Mum about the regular beatings, nanny Jeanette denied it vehemently and she believed her.

Five years later Mum felt compelled to write a letter that should have led to me being watched by Special Branch for the rest of my useful life.

… a compulsion to look at and to feel girls’ pants – another ghost 1 can freeze-frame. The moment the girls lined up to have their arithmetic books marked was always the highlight of an otherwise dull day. When they were all in position I’d crawl forward on my hands and knees, looking up their skirts for the statutory grey knickers. Or else, I’d deliberately misbehave and have myself thrown out of Scripture, partly because I wasn’t very good at drawing sheaths of corn, but chiefly because I knew the older girls would be doing gym then. I’d roam the corridors of the school, until I reached the hall through whose windows I could enjoy visions of pretty girls vaulting over horses and running about in their underwear.

After five, the images linger long enough for me to examine them without the crutch of hearsay. We had a succession of au pairs: Sylvia, Maria, Gerda, Brigitte, Ulrike. I remember Mum crying in the kitchen and holding her in the familiar squidgy embrace, feeling her tears roll down my cheeks and the shock of emotional reversal.

‘Your father’s always been the same, I was even warned about him, dancing off with other girls at parties.’

She’d tell me of the time she caught him ‘smooching with some silly girl’, and how she put on a Highland fling, grabbed a man at random and reeled past, bumping into him as hard as she could. She laughed at the memory and I guessed he’d seen the funny side too.

‘Always the same type. He won’t change. Once a womaniser …’

A word that acquired heroic status in my mind. Other boys could be engine-drivers or firemen, I wanted to be a womaniser.

I worshipped Dad. He was always around, as he worked at home. Page upon page emerged like the product of a twenty-six legged centipede dipped in ink. So long as I was quiet he’d allow me to sit with him, overlooked by a John Bratby painting in chunky, thumb-nail deep oil that years of indoor football eventually chipped away. Around the time I was able to translate its abstract shapes into men playing billiards, there’s enough primary evidence and eyewitness testimony for my history proper to begin.

Now that I’m six I’m as clever as cleverAnd I wish I could be six now for ever and ever

sang Christopher Robin, and I believed him. All year I’d been reciting those lines as a mantra that promised to see off the ills of infancy. I’d crossed the first threshold and I could see rewards beyond it. Good things happened in autumn. Boots and hats and coats and gloves and scarves smothered me against the foggy foggy dew Dad often sang of. The trees painted their multi-coloured pictures and every footstep was an adventure in which you might crackle, crunch or slide. Each week Mum and I walked to the Kensington children’s library. Our jaunts recalled the golden days when I had no sisters, no brother Toby, a time before I was wrenched from Mum’s lap and hurled into the world of the nanny beyond. Our twenty-minute walk was the magic of the annual journey to Santa’s grotto repeated every week, and the books Mum and I chose, tales of witches, ghosts and other creatures living in fantastic realms, comforted me until the next visit. At night I kept my world alive even when the lights went out, continuing my reading with a torch under the sheets.

Dad started taking me to football matches. I’d sit with him in the press-box, for the first time allowed into a world that had been exclusively his. Not that I was entirely ignorant of it. I could name every team in the country, plus dinosaurs like Wanderers, Blackburn Olympic, and The Royal Engineers. I knew all the F.A. Cup winners, year-by-year, League champions, Charity Shield opponents, but my one love was Manchester United. I don’t know why. It never occurred to me that they played a very long way from west London as I assumed that the entire universe bordered Holland Park Avenue and that if you went past North Kensington you’d fall off the edge. It didn’t matter that my first game was Chelsea v Nottingham Forest. Even now I can visualise an all-blue Osgood streaking through helpless red shirts to score the only goal of the game. A comforting, enveloping mist came off the damp wooden seats, the playing turf, from the mouths of ranked journalists, and the mugs of tea served at half-time. In those days, the players were as magical as the immortals I read about by torchlight. In my second game I saw Rodney Marsh score a hat-trick in a 4–0 QPR victory over Watford. His name echoed round Loftus Road to the accompaniment of a massive bass drum. I then started watching Dad’s own team, Chelsea Casuals, on the pitches in front of Wren’s Royal Hospital alongside the Chelsea pensioners in their magnificent red and navy uniforms and wondered how long it would be before I’d be able to play for them myself.

Sport was always the bond between me, Dad, and eventually Toby. It was one that divided the family on gender lines. One day Dad appeared in the nursery with a long, green box.

‘Okay, kid. Let’s see what you’re made of!’

His grin revealed a wolf’s crowded jaw in all its splendour.

The pine table in the nursery where we normally ate our cornflakes was about to be transformed into a ping-pong table. Dad ripped apart the cardboard and hurriedly assembled the net with the eagerness of a lynch mob erecting a gallows. I juggled the ball on my bat. Having seen off all comers at a party recently, I was feeling pretty confident.

‘Ready, kid?’

He served the ball gently and it bounced across the net, high enough for me to be able to smash it down on his side.

‘Pretty good, kid!’

It was all going as I’d expected until I began to serve. The ball flew off the end of the table and under the battered red couch by the wall.

‘The table’s not long enough.’

‘Excuses, kid.’

My game worsened with my growing frustration until, gradually, I mastered the short length of the breakfast table and Dad’s gentle returns left plenty of room for winning shots.

‘Okay, kid. How about a game? Play for service?’

Dad bounced the ball across the net and I returned it with ease, but my next shot spun off against the window.

‘My serve.’

Dad chopped at the ball and it came across the net gently enough, but, as I attempted to return it, the ball spun off viciously and hit the window.

‘1–0,’ beamed Dad.

For some reason his serves were now impossible to return. o–5 down, it was my turn to serve. I bounced the ball swiftly across the table where it clipped the end, veering beyond his reach.

‘Blast!’ cried Dad, his smile metamorphosing into a grimace. When my second serve achieved the same result, he flung the new bat down on the ground. I was concerned he’d break it. The next three serves were as fast and efficient as I could manage, but on each occasion my attempt to return resulted in the ball flying off in the opposite direction from the one I’d intended. As the score piled up against me, I simply couldn’t understand why my shots were all miscuing. The tears welled behind my eyes as Dad’s expression grew more and more triumphant.

I couldn’t be six for ever and ever, so I was sent to The Hall, a pressure-cooker preparatory school in Hampstead where pink blazers emblazoned with black iron crosses made us targets for the kids from the local secondary modern.

… he is on the whole placatory and nervous at school and not very popular. My parents attacked this dilemma with a fork – psychotherapy on one prong, martial arts on the other. At the judo club in Vauxhall I came across kids like the ones from the secondary modern and got on fine. When they discovered I could stand on my head for five minutes at a time, everyone was summoned to watch my feat. Although they may have been smiling at a freak show, from my upside down vantage point even the glum faces were smiling. I could have stayed there for hours. I also learned Tai o Toshi, which I used to defeat the school bully. Heavy wooden desks and chairs flew in the hurricane of our combat.

There’s a motto shall ring in the ears of allWho e’er have spent their youth at The Hall.It’s a call to the sluggard, the dull and the wise,A call we cannot and daren’t despise.So now and for ever raise the call Hinc in altiora, up The Hall!There are overs and unders in life all through,In after life you’ll get your due.If you keep up the struggle and never stopAt the last Reading Over you’ll come out top

I found this ancient piece of bombast beneath a pile of neglected sheet music. ‘Overs’ and ‘unders’ and ‘Reading Overs’ were still the yardstick by which academic success was judged forty years later. Everything we did was measured so we need be left in no doubt as to our level of achievement at any given time. Everything I enjoyed was tarnished by the incessant competition. In a school of three hundred there were 120 prizes and cups to be won. (I once sat down and counted them all just to make myself more miserable.) With such a ratio I should surely have won something. It was hard to believe Mum, Dad or any of my supporters and backers when all my best efforts failed to convince successive Hall judges and juries. Praise was mere flattery until quantified by competitive success, and Dad’s anguish and irritation at each fresh defeat seemed sharper than my own. I felt I was failing him dreadfully. Conversely, on the one occasion when I did have some success, achieving an ‘over’ in every subject and gaining a gold star, my excitement was drowned in the torrent of his delight. I began to feel that achievement was his way of defining me. I’d listen to him discussing what I’d done, as if my actions were separate from their agent, and my existence could only be checked in terms of them. Being me simply wasn’t good enough. But that was how he’d been brought up: each novel was a scalp for his mother’s belt, worn at Bar Mitzvahs, weddings and funerals. Every Sunday, after the publication of a new novel, our stomachs experienced a collective tingling in anticipation of the reviews. He judged his work by them, and I knew that no matter how much he disparaged the scornful ones, they were the ones he believed.

Football was where I felt it most acutely. Dad never stopped assuring me of my ability, and while I could bounce the ball on my foot for twenty minutes at a stretch, swerve round defenders and strike goals, it was something I preferred to do in the playground, where there were no white lines and circles to circumscribe my enjoyment and no one lost their temper if you missed an open goal or shouted if you failed to save one. Playground football was fun, and one of the boys gave it colour with versions of chants he’d picked up from the Chelsea Shed.

Over there, over there.In pink and black,A load of crap

Not one you’d have heard tumbling readily from the lips of the Fulham Road barrow boys.