Pete: My Story

When I was three or four, Mum was invited to join a theatre company called Impact and travel to Italy with them. Apparently the Italians are very into fringe theatre. The organizers said I could come too because there were going to be a couple of other small children in the troupe and so they were planning to take a childminder with them. Mum leapt at the opportunity and we spent six months touring around the north of Italy in the summer. I learnt to climb trees and they had an old broken record player that I was allowed to mess around with. We all lived together in a communal house in the middle of some lettuce fields. I wish I could remember more about it, it sounds like the most idyllic childhood summer possible when Mum describes it, but I have to rely on her version because my memories have mostly been blown away by events since then.

I always loved watching Mum on stage. She appeared in something called The Magical Olympic Games at the National Theatre on London’s South Bank, and she did a lot at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Pall Mall, just down the road from Buckingham Palace. I was constantly boasting about her to anyone who would listen; still am, as you may have noticed. No one else I knew had a mum who did such great stuff or hung out with such weird and famous people. Every kid watched Top of the Pops in those days, but not many could point to one of their parents on the screen.

She was really versatile, appearing with Paul Weller at Wembley one day and playing with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra the next. She could play anything. She was always having themed parties, like gypsy or Spanish, where all her friends would dress up and they would play music that went with the food, raising money for charities. She was often on Top of the Pops or The Tube, playing with The Cure or Texas or the Smashing Pumpkins. They don’t let kids into those television recordings, something to do with insurance, so I used to have to watch her on the telly just like everyone else. It made me so proud.

Carolyn, the other member of Humouresque, went off to play with Fun Boy Three, and then Mum got hired by the Communards, who were big at the time, having had ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’ at number one in the charts for weeks. Their lead singer was Jimmy Somerville, who was one of the first gay pop stars to come out of the closet and had a really distinctive falsetto singing voice. I loved hanging out with him and used to call him ‘Auntie Jessie’. Mum had to take me with her on one of their two-week tours because her childminder let her down, and the coach driver, John, used to look after me while the rest of them were on stage performing. The bus was always full of lesbians and poofs and the band’s cloney friends, and I was always the centre of attention. I mean, how cool is it to be on the road with a rock band even before your first day at school?

Mum had had a varied and dramatic childhood herself. My Grandad had been working as a civil servant in London when he decided he wanted a better life for his four kids than a council flat in Wandsworth, so he got transferred to Bristol and bought a little house in the country for them all to live in. He was keen on the idea of women getting an education and Mum was bright and did well at school, so it all went well until she was sixteen and she and Grandad fell out. Two powerful characters meeting one another head on, I guess: lots of middle-aged testosterone and adolescent hormones flying around and neither of them willing to give way. It ended up with Mum being chucked out of the house and spending a couple of years living rough, sleeping under the pier in Weston-super-Mare, or on other people’s floors until some friends of the family took her under their wing and helped her fulfil her dream of going to the Guildhall. Maybe that experience was the reason why she didn’t go completely mad when she found out how I was living later on in Brighton. She’d been through the same thing herself and knew that there are worse things than not having a home of your own when you’re young and finding your way in the world. People worry too much about where they are going to sleep each night; something usually turns up.

Mum was a bit of a romantic right from the start, always dreaming of how life should be, but things never quite seemed to work out right for her in the early days. Maybe she was just a bit too feisty for her own good. But if she hadn’t been so feisty maybe she wouldn’t have survived all the ordeals that were to come, and maybe she wouldn’t have fought so hard to get me a fair deal when everything started to go wrong.

The council estate Mum and I were living on in Peckham was a bit rough. I guess it was the sort of place the council put people who they had to house in a hurry (people like my punky single-mum for a start). Other people on the estate weren’t always quite as capable of keeping things together as she was. Quite a few of them had pretty much totally lost the plot.

There was a nine-year-old kid living a few flats down, for instance, who used to come knocking on the door each day begging for food. He was looking after his eight younger brothers and sisters because his mum and dad were both alcoholics and not much good for anything. Mum would always give him something, and one time we went down to their flat for some reason. I was shocked to see how they were living, with pigeons roosting in the bedroom. Most of the kids were naked, rolling around on the floor, not even speaking properly, just grunting at one another like they had been transported through time from the Stone Age. Even when they were dressed their clothes stank of piss.

Their mum came round one evening and told us her husband had been taken into hospital and asked Mum to look after all the kids for her while she went to visit him. She didn’t reappear till the next day, by which time Mum and I had rummaged through all my old clothes and found new stuff for them to wear while their own clothes went through the washing machine, several times. One of the girls had knickers that were so old they disintegrated when she took them off. Her mum accused Mum of stealing them once she got her home and discovered they were missing. It turned out the dad hadn’t been to the hospital at all; they’d just gone down the pub together.

Everyone on the estate was fed up with the family’s constant begging and after a while their flat was burnt out and they had to be re-housed in a new area where they could start afresh. The mother came back to visit us later and told us that the smallest baby had died of an ear infection. I was really upset, having looked after it for that day and got to know it.

‘Ah,’ she casually dismissed my tears. ‘I can always have another one.’

The dad took a bit of a fancy to Mum and came to the door having tried to drown out the smell of unwashed clothes and beer with gallons of cheap aftershave, and told her he had £110 saved in the bank and thought they should get together. Mum went mad, yelling at him that if he had that kind of money he should be spending it on his children, not on trying to get his end away. I was shocked, I’d never seen her so angry about anything. I was really glad I had her to look after me rather than some of the other women I saw around the place.

CHAPTER THREE (#u80da8568-69d6-5a2b-91f8-ad9c966a4df8)

BABY MINDERS (#u80da8568-69d6-5a2b-91f8-ad9c966a4df8)

Mum’s biggest problem, once she had me, was finding affordable babysitters when she went to work. I don’t think people ever minded having me because I was always a pretty happy kid, but most people around our way had enough trouble caring for their own children, never mind someone else’s. There was a lovely Indian family who I used to stay with quite a lot. Mum even bought a set of bunks so I could sleep over there without putting any of them out of their beds. Their mum was called Rosen and she made great curries.

Mum took me out with Rosen’s kids one day and a white van driven by a couple of men cruised past. One of them leant out the window and shouted abuse at us, assuming we were all Mum’s children, spitting at her before accelerating off. I couldn’t understand why anyone would be so horrible to a woman with small children. Mum tried to explain to me about racism and how some people hated other people simply because they had different-coloured skins. I remember it making me feel sad, but also puzzled because I really liked people who were different and new, interesting and surprising. I liked Rosen’s family because the women wore swathes of brightly coloured fabric and their house was full of exotic smells. I liked the way they talked with their musical-sounding accents and the pictures they had on their walls.

Bit by bit over the coming years I learnt about the National Front and their hatred of anyone who wasn’t like them. At the same time I was aware I was also growing to be more different, and therefore more vulnerable, myself. Mostly I liked the way I was, but I didn’t always like the reactions I got from other people.

When I was about four, Mum went on another short tour with the Communards, and left me with a different local family for a few days. When she came back she found me playing on my own in the car park outside their house. The lady who was supposed to be looking after me had left her front door open so she could watch me, but had fallen asleep on the sofa. Mum went berserk, ranting and raving that anything could have happened to me while she slept. She must have been very torn between her need to make money, her love of music and performing, and her maternal urge to look after me herself all the time.

The same family had a pit bull terrier. I always loved dogs and wanted to cuddle them all the moment I saw them, but this mean bastard had other ideas as I threw my arms around its neck, and sank its teeth into my face. Luckily it missed my eye but it ripped open my top lip and there was blood everywhere. Mum was there at the time and rushed me down to the hospital, where we sat for several hours with her holding my lip on, waiting for the surgeon. I was shaking uncontrollably and crying but Mum always stayed incredibly quiet and calm in these crises, although she fainted dead away once the whole thing was over.

When the surgeon did eventually get round to us Mum and four nurses had to lie across my body to stop me fighting him off as he set to work with his needle and thread. She made them put in an extra stitch after they thought they had finished because she was so determined I wouldn’t end up scarred, which didn’t endear her to them, or me at the time. Despite her best efforts there’s still a tiny scar, but you can hardly see it.

The babysitting problem was eventually solved by the intervention of Mum’s cousin, Poofy-Cousin-Marcus, who had already helped bring up his brother’s four kids when his brother was away at sea, so he knew what he was doing when it came to nappy changing, kids’ meals and nursery school runs. He was totally happy mincing around the kitchen all day, scrubbing and bleaching. He stayed with us on and off for years and I caught him slipping money under my pillow when my first tooth came out and was convinced from then on that the tooth fairy was a balding poof with glasses and painted-on eyebrows. He was great, throwing himself into the role of nanny with gusto and filling all my criteria for being different, interesting and funny. He was completely happy gossiping with the mothers at the school gates, or showing off how white he had managed to get the wash that day.

‘Mmmm,’ I heard him purring at a neighbour who was pegging out her washing on her balcony one day. ‘Yours haven’t come up quite so white this week, have they, love?’

One of his boyfriends broke his heart while he was living with us and he disappeared into his bed for about a week, unable to face the world. As it was his birthday, Mum and I sorted him out a cake with a candle to cheer him up, taking it in to his bedroom. He emerged from under the sheets to blow the candle out.

‘So,’ Mum said. ‘Make a wish.’

‘I wish I was dead,’ he shrieked, whipping the sheets back over his head.

I remember going into his bedroom once and pulling his bedclothes off to wake him up, just as he let out a gigantic fart. Cool!

Mum continued to take me on tour with her from time to time. We went to Germany for six months with a band called Rausch when I was about six. They were a very dark bunch, surrounded by lots of drugs, which Mum didn’t like. She was always lecturing me about not doing drugs, especially cocaine, which she said made people sadistic and cold and evil. It wasn’t a particularly happy time for Mum but I enjoyed myself. I always enjoyed myself. We were in Berlin just before the Wall came down and the whole world changed in one night. Mum had been predicting it would happen, having seen it in a vision. I remember watching it coming down on the news and knowing it was important because everyone was talking about it and celebrating, but I didn’t really understand why. What was a Communist?

One of the band members in Germany really took to me and would laugh every time he saw me, calling me ‘Charlie’.

‘Why are you calling him Charlie?’ Mum wanted to know. ‘His name’s Pete.’

‘Because he is like Charlie Chaplin.’

He wasn’t the last person to say that and I liked the fact that I could make people laugh by clowning around. It always felt good to be the centre of attention, particularly if it was happy attention. All the world loves a clown.

CHAPTER FOUR (#u80da8568-69d6-5a2b-91f8-ad9c966a4df8)

A VISIT FROM AN ANGEL (#u80da8568-69d6-5a2b-91f8-ad9c966a4df8)

I was always a bit of a daydreamer, drifting off into a world of my own whenever there wasn’t anything going on that was interesting enough to hold my attention. I didn’t see a problem with it, still don’t. I think it’s good to be able to keep yourself entertained inside your head, but sometimes it can get you into trouble – in school classrooms, for instance, or when you are meant to be doing something other people think is important.

I was supposed to get the bus home from school so Mum could meet me off it at the other end. One day I simply forgot to get on, because I was so distracted with my own thoughts and with watching whatever was going on in the street around me. When all the other kids poured out and trotted off to meet their waiting mothers, Mum realized with a sinking heart that I wasn’t among them and immediately freaked out, convincing herself I’d been abducted by a paedophile ring (a common fear among mothers of temporarily missing children, I guess). She ran to find a friend of hers, a disabled woman who was able to drive, and begged her to give her a lift up to the school to search for me. The poor flustered woman rushed out in her wheelchair and they piled into the car together.

Mum was trying to keep calm and allow her friend the time she needed to get going, but pictures of all the things that could have happened to me were crowding into her brain, making her a bit frantic. By the time they were on the road she had managed to panic her friend so much that she crashed the car, smashing the windscreen and dissolving into tears at her failure to complete the mission to rescue gallant Little Pete from the ‘evil paedos’. At that point Mum abandoned all pretence at being patient, leapt out and legged it the rest of the way on her own, leaving her friend shaking and crying in the car. When she found me happily wandering around the school playground humming to myself, staring up at the sky, she was not pleased. I think she might even have given me a bit of a swipe around the back of the legs to try to wake me up a bit.

Although I didn’t know anything about it at the time, the stress of touring and feeling guilty about leaving me, plus all the worry about money, was getting Mum down, and around this time she had a nervous breakdown. She became convinced she’d met the Devil and she had some sort of religious conversion back to the Catholic Church that she’d been brought up in. As far as I was concerned we had just made a whole new set of nice friends down at the local church.

A couple of religious Irish women then frightened her by accusing her of condemning me to hell by not getting me baptized. She was due to go on tour in Japan with an Indie rock band called the Woodentops the next day and she was terrified something would happen to me while she was away and I would go straight to hell and damnation before she had time to do anything about saving me. Unable to get a priest to come out in the middle of the night to perform the ceremony, she baptized me herself while I was asleep. I wasn’t aware of what she was doing but while she was splashing around my bedroom with some holy water she’d mixed up herself, I had a dream in which I saw a huge golden angel.

‘From now on you have to take my name,’ the angel told me. ‘My name is Michael.’

It was a really cool dream, and I told Mum about it before she set off for the plane the next morning, leaving me in the care of Poofy-Cousin-Marcus. On the way to the airport she stopped off at the church to find someone to tell her who the angel Michael was.

‘That would be the Archangel Michael,’ a man told her. ‘He’s the one who led the fight against the Devil in the beginning of time.’

Since she was still convinced she had been having some personal trouble with the Devil, this put her mind at rest a bit, although she was still feeling bad about leaving me so much. I can still remember that dream vividly, even today when so many other memories have vanished, and for ages afterwards I would draw pictures of the Angel Michael, although I started to add wings to make him conform a little more to stereotype. Although he didn’t have any wings in the dream, he was surrounded by a heavenly golden light, which was how I knew for sure that he was an angel. From then on I took Michael as my middle name. Later a priest insisted on baptizing me again himself, not willing to accept Mum’s DIY version as the real thing, but it wasn’t as good as when Mum did it, and I didn’t get to dream of any angels that time.

I’ve always been good at drawing. It’s just something I’m able to do. When I was about two I drew a picture called ‘The Shouting Man’, a bit like a primitive version of ‘The Scream’ by Edvard Munch. It was an oval shape with a vortex for where the mouth should be, quite scary and angry-looking, a bit like a baby having a wailing tantrum, which was something I never did myself. Maybe I was holding the anger in, even at that age, and the picture was the only way for it to escape. Now I am ‘the shouting man’ for real, letting everything out all the time, unable to bottle anything up inside for long, so maybe I was having premonitions even then of what was to come. Maybe there was already something taking root inside my head, a troublesome thought behind the façade of the cheerful, amiable little boy. If there was I have no memory of it.

When I had difficulty attracting Mum’s attention to what I was saying because she was so preoccupied with her worries, I used to draw the shouting man and wave the picture in front of her, the words ‘Mum! Mum!’ coming out of his mouth in a bubble, like in the comics I read.

Mum showed the picture to a friend once.

‘You should be ashamed,’ the friend told her. ‘What kind of a terrible mother are you? Imagine having a kid who has to draw a picture just to get your attention.’

I didn’t want to make her feel guilty; I just wanted to be noticed. I thought she was a great mum – she always called me her little ‘Peter Bumpkin’. I just wanted to talk to her and tell her about all the stuff that was going on in my head. But all kids do that, don’t they? They burble on in a constant stream of consciousness while the adults around them zone out and give the odd grunt in response in order to give the impression that they’re listening.

I don’t know how I became Bumpkin with a ‘b’ because it started with a nursery rhyme.

Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater

Had a wife but couldn’t keep her.