Pete: My Story

So he put her in a pumpkin shell

And there he kept her very well.

Teachers were always singling out my pictures and telling me they had never seen anything like it for a child of my age. It was nice to be good at something, but I couldn’t really take credit for it because it was a natural talent. I didn’t have to work at it or anything; I could just do it. The pictures were clear in my head and my hands were able to reproduce them on paper. I remember a green painting, all covered in tadpoles, which I did when I was about five, which everyone thought was brilliant. I always feel calm when I’m drawing, as if everything is right in my universe.

Pushed into a corner by her breakdown, Mum decided she had to choose between rock and roll and bringing me up properly as a full-time mother. So rock and roll got the push for a few years and Mum joined a folk group at the local church so she could keep up with her music and be with me. During her breakdown she had been seeing a series of numbers flashing in her head all the time, popping up everywhere she went. She couldn’t understand what they meant but when she walked into the church for the first time she saw the same numbers on the hymn board, like a sign telling her that she was on the right path and had arrived at the right destination. We’ve both had a lot of those sorts of experiences, lots of visions, premonitions and signs, some of them spooky, some of them shocking, some of them really comforting.

Mum seemed to just want to disappear during that period, as if she didn’t want anyone to look at her or be attracted to her. She would deliberately wear boring clothes, which was a radical move for a woman who used to change the colour of her hair as often as most people change their knickers. I quite liked the God Squadders she was hanging out with now, even though they were incredibly straight compared to us and the sort of people we had hung out with before. They all seemed to be dead keen to save our souls from eternal damnation, which was kind of them.

We went on a pilgrimage with them one year, walking in the rain all the way from Epping to Walsingham in Norfolk where there is a famous shrine to the Virgin Mary. They call it ‘England’s Nazareth’, apparently. The shrine had been there since 1061, even before William the Conqueror. (See how educational the trip was?) Anyway, we had to take turns carrying this great big cross, and I got to have my go as well, walking barefoot on the wet roads like some dramatic biblical figure. I loved it, even though the walking made my knees swell. It took four days and we had to carry our rucksacks and sleeping bags on our backs. I loved the whole travelling experience, out on the open road with its constantly changing scenery, part of a friendly group of people.

The only thing I didn’t like was all the dead animals we passed. Every dead bird or squashed hedgehog would have me crying for miles, and when we came across the skeleton of a deer I was beside myself, thinking of Bambi’s mother being killed by the hunters in the forest. It was the first time I had been faced with mortality and it made me uneasy.

When we finally got to Walsingham the shrine was lit by thousands of candles and looked magical and otherworldly. I just stood and stared at all the little flames flickering in the shadows, basking in the quietness and coolness inside the ancient walls.

The first Christmas after Mum had joined the church, when she was still feeling too fragile emotionally even to go busking, she warned me that we weren’t going to be able to afford any presents, or even a proper Christmas lunch that year. I think I was a bit disappointed, but not mortified. Then the day before Christmas Eve a couple of elderly ladies from the church came knocking on the door with a hamper. They told us they had a list of the needy living in the area who they distributed these gifts to and they had decided we would be worthy recipients. I think Mum was a bit shocked to think that we looked that desperate, but she was still too grateful for the hamper to protest. The moment they’d gone we were excitedly tearing it open and Mum was weeping with joy at the sight of so much food. It had everything we could need for the celebration, from the turkey to mince pies and Christmas pudding.

Although I liked the people at the church, I wasn’t quite sure about the whole believing-in-God thing. I was quite willing to believe in angels, since I had actually met one, and happy to keep an open mind, but I can’t say I exactly had ‘faith’ in a way any priest would have approved of. The question I decided I wanted to ask God, if I ever got to meet him, was how did he make himself. A variation of the old chicken-and-egg and which-came-first puzzle, I guess. When I did finally get to meet him, many years later, I forgot to ask the question in all the excitement. I wasn’t quite sure, either, why we had to stare at statues dripping with blood when we were at school. That part of it all seemed a bit spooky to me.

Most of the Christian meetings we went to happened in a nearby fourth-floor council flat, where the leader of the group lived. When he moved to a house closer to the church Mum and I went round to clean the flat up for the next tenants. When they arrived they were really scary, the complete opposite to the clean, sober Christians before them. I couldn’t stop myself from staring, open-mouthed, every time we went round there. The mother of the family was huge and smelly and had no teeth because, she told us, her husband had knocked them out with a baseball bat. The family had a couple of evil-looking Dobermans, called Satan and Lucifer, which they never took out of the flat, allowing them to crap and piss wherever they wanted indoors. The dogs suited their names perfectly, true hounds of hell, always growling under their breath and watching me out of the corners of their eyes as if waiting for their chance to pounce. The flat got to such a state that the dog pee was seeping through the ceilings on to the neighbours below, dripping down their walls. The family had a son, who wanted to be my friend. He had a big dent in his head.

‘What happened to your head?’ I asked.

‘The telly fell on it,’ he informed me.

Another neighbour’s husband died and everyone clubbed together to buy a big wreath of flowers to display in his memory on the landing outside the flats. My new-found, dent-headed friend was caught nicking it and trying to squeeze it in through his mother’s front door.

My real best friend at the time was Leon from upstairs and we used to play with our He-Man dolls together, or dress up as Spiderman (or Darth Vader once I was hooked on Star Wars). Leon’s mum was really nice too, and had a successful job of some sort, which made other people on the estate so jealous of her they eventually torched her car. We went to CenterParcs together for a holiday, just like two normal families.

Things were seldom normal back at the flats. One morning, at about six o’clock when it was just getting light, Mum and I heard screams and gunshots outside. Mum phoned the police and we crouched together on the balcony, watching through the railings as police cars screeched into the courtyard below. The place was deserted apart from one lone black man who looked like he was peacefully making his way to work. The police all leapt on him, pummelling him to the ground.

‘That’s not fair,’ I whispered to Mum. ‘He’s not doing anything wrong.’

‘I’m going to say something,’ Mum said, standing up to shout some sort of abuse at the police (she’d had a few run-ins with them herself while out busking and wasn’t a huge fan). Just at that moment, however, they pulled a sawn-off shotgun out from under the man’s coat and Mum sank quietly back down next to me. Apparently he’d shot some woman in the block over a drugs deal that had gone wrong.

The local papers that week said that the arrest had been made due to ‘a vigilant neighbour’. Mum decided we should keep a bit of a low profile for a while.

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

ANIMALS AND GRAVEYARDS (#u80da8568-69d6-5a2b-91f8-ad9c966a4df8)

Lots of this stuff I don’t remember any more, at least I don’t think I do. I’ve just heard Mum and other people talking about those times so often that sometimes I find it hard to remember which pictures and stories are really lodged in my memory and which ones are merely preserved in old photos or family anecdotes.

The first real thing I clearly remember was watching Mum being hit by her boyfriend. I don’t remember the details of us living with him, or anything else about him, I just remember lying on my mattress in the corner and seeing her flying across the room. There was a lot of blood on her face.

She didn’t hang around with that bloke long after that – Mum wasn’t one to be a victim like the sort of battered women she sometimes met around the flats. I remember being upset by the incident, but not really frightened. I don’t think I felt in any danger myself and I think I trusted Mum to be able to sort it out. I just watched it happen, like I might watch a cartoon on the telly. People are always being hit in cartoons and they just get up and keep going, which was pretty much what Mum did. I was drawing pictures of her, all covered in blood, for months afterwards.

After that Mum said that was it for her with men. ‘Sod the lot of them.’ From then on it was just her and me and she didn’t have another boyfriend for nearly ten years. Dad got back in touch when I was six. I don’t know what made him suddenly think of us, but he said he wanted to see me again, which was cool. Mum wasn’t best pleased with him because she only ever got one tenner out of him for maintenance all through my childhood, even though she was having to work so hard to make ends meet, but she wanted me to be in contact with my dad if possible, so they made an arrangement for him to pick me up from the flat.

I had no memory of him but when he turned up I thought he looked really cool, with a really good image, very trendy. He didn’t look like most other people’s dads, which I liked. Mum was still a pretty wild punk then, still wearing the leather jackets, still changing her hair colour all the time, still looking like some Billy Idolette, but Dad had mellowed his image down a bit from the glamorous punk that Mum had first met.

Neither of us was quite sure how to handle our first father–son day out, so we went for a walk. It felt great to have a dad with me, even though he didn’t feel particularly like a dad, just a big man who had turned up from nowhere.

‘Let’s go in there,’ he suggested as we passed the gates of a graveyard.

‘OK,’ I agreed cheerfully. Why not? It looked like an interesting place and I didn’t remember ever having been in there before, although I must have been to the graveyard with Mum when I was tiny, to return her unwanted gravestone present from Johny. We spent a wicked hour or two looking at inscriptions and reading poems about missing loved ones, about walking with the angels and all the rest. I’d learnt to read by then from studying Garfield cartoon books, so I could make out most of the words on my own. Mum wasn’t much impressed when we got back and told her where we’d been.

‘Why can’t you take him bowling or to the park like a normal dad?’ she wanted to know. She can’t have been that surprised though, having spent so much of her own youth in punk pubs, or with goths in the Batcave. Had she forgotten that she and I had gone to the torture museum as a Christmas outing when I was really tiny? I have a feeling pretty much anything Dad could have done that day would have pissed her off.

We had to face it; none of us was that good at being normal, but I wasn’t bothered. I thought it was all cool. Even then I loved people who were a bit nuts. Dad made another date to come the following week and I got myself all ready and waiting by the door in my duffel coat, wondering what we would do this time. The appointed time ticked past, the tense silence eventually shattered by the phone. It was Dad calling to tell Mum he couldn’t get there because he was in bed with some other woman. I guess he was trying to punish Mum or something; there must have been a grown-up agenda going on that I knew nothing about. Not surprisingly this news really, really pissed Mum off. She said she didn’t care who he was in bed with, but he shouldn’t be letting me down. I cried a lot for a while, but got over it pretty quickly. There was too much interesting stuff going on in the world to worry about the bad for too long. I never liked stress, always preferring to move on and find something more cheerful to do or think about. Dad and I didn’t see each other again for another ten years after that.

I loved going to stay with Nan and Grandad in the West Country. They had a garden and a paddling pool and all the things that children think are so magical, all the stuff that we couldn’t have on a council estate in Peckham.

When I was about three we all went to the beach at Weymouth, with Mum’s friend Virginia Astley. Virginia was a very successful singer, who Mum had met at the Guildhall at the same time as Anna Steiger. She played the flute and they sometimes used to busk together outside Kensington tube station. Her dad had been the composer of theme tunes for Sixties television series like The Saint and Danger Man. Her elder sister had married Pete Townshend of The Who and he made a video of us at a party once, with Mum dressed as a bumblebee. Anyway, Mum and Virginia had gone off to the shops to buy something, leaving Grandad in charge of me. Seeing he was distracted rolling himself a fag, I wandered down towards the jetty, which I thought looked interesting, jutting out into the water. It was much too high for me to be able to climb up there myself, so I just held up my arms and looked pleadingly at a passing woman. She took pity and lifted me up. By the time Mum and Virginia got back I’d disappeared from sight and Grandad was a nervous wreck, certain that his negligent child-minding skills had caused the death of his grandson. They were all certain I had been abducted or drowned or something – instant paedo-alert as usual. Virginia was a bit psychic and suddenly shouted, ‘I know where he is.’

She leapt up on to the jetty and ran out to the end where a group of bigger boys were jumping down twenty feet or so into the water. I was just about to take my turn, poised to launch myself off into the unknown when she got there, barged through the crowd of boys and grabbed me as I teetered on the edge. I suspect I owe her my life for that little mercy dash. Cheers, Virginia!

On a much later visit to Nan and Grandad we all went to a Sunday market in the local town. It was really interesting for me, not like anything I’d seen in South London, lots of country crafts and homemade produce. There was a stall selling live rabbits for pets. I’d had a white rabbit before, but it had escaped and disappeared and I really wanted another one to replace it.

I convinced Mum that it would be OK to keep it on the balcony of the flat and, against her better judgement, she gave in – it was hard for her to resist such a cute fluffy little thing when it was actually sitting in her hand. We bought him, christened him Buck, and took him home to London at the end of our stay. Within a couple of weeks he had doubled his size and he just kept on growing. It was like some sort of alien life form, threatening to take over the world. The balcony became a sea of poo and pee. Our family pet was a giant, furry, crapping machine. Even though Mum did everything for this ever-expanding fur-ball, cleaning up after him, shovelling food into him, he seemed to hate her with a terrible vindictiveness. She became terrified to go near him. He would stare at her malevolently and then pick up his plate in his mouth and smash it down on the floor in front of her, as if determined to show her who was boss.

When he stood on his hind legs Buck was about three feet tall and he would attack anyone who dared to come near to him apart from me, so I would hear nothing said against him. I loved him with a passion. I was sitting on the balcony cuddling him one day when something happened to make my elbow suddenly jerk and smash the patio window. It could have been an early spasm, or it could have been Buck making a sudden movement, but either way there was now a hole in the glass. Once she’d stopped tearing her hair out, Mum made a good job of patching the hole up with cardboard, but the next day, while I was at school and she was at work, Buck forced his way through the flimsy defences and into the house.

That evening when we got home the fluffy invader had made the final move in his takeover plan and we spent hours chasing him round the flat as he dived under the bed and armchairs, snarling at Mum as she struggled to flush him out. In the end she forced him out into the open, threw a sheet over him and fell on top of him, wrestling him into submission. Over the following hours we discovered that he had chewed through virtually every wire in the flat; the stereo, the iron, everything was fusing and blowing and giving off sparks as we tried to plug things in and switch them on. Mum went completely mental.

The next day, while I was at school, she felt guilty for shouting, so she went out to the local Peckham market to get another little rabbit, figuring that maybe the evil giant was just pining for company.

The moment Harry, the new rabbit, came out of his carrying box and spotted the brute of the balcony, he leapt on to his back and started rogering away like a lunatic. Like so many bullies, Buck crumpled instantly once his bluff was called. He cowered down, looking wide-eyed and terrified and just sat there taking it. It went on and on and on. Harry just never stopped, day and night, until all the hair had been ripped off Buck’s back and he was shaking like a nervous wreck. The newcomer had also brought fleas into the house, which ganged up and bit Mum half to death. She decided this was my fault now, too.

We were due to go away on holiday and Mum asked a friend of mine, Zoe, to look after the rabbits while we were gone. When we got back Harry had disappeared and Zoe confessed that she had been standing up on the balcony just before we arrived, playing with him, when he had given a gigantic kick and propelled himself to freedom over the balustrade. She and I set off to see if we could find him in the grass near the buildings, but all I managed to come up with was his head and chest, a local cat or dog having eaten the rest. Like the road kill we encountered on the way to Walsingham, this stark illustration of how quickly death can strike reduced me to a sobbing heap. Mum was having some people round for supper that night and she made them all swear not to mention the missing rabbit, but one of them wasn’t able to keep it in – another Tourette’s victim, maybe?

‘So, Pete,’ he said, ‘what’s this about a rabbit? I hear there were some remains found?’

I rushed from the table in renewed floods of tears at the tactless reminder of my bereavement.

After that Mum decided that maybe Peckham wasn’t the best place to keep rabbits, so we took Buck back down to the West Country to a friend of Nan and Grandad’s who had a smallholding with a pen full of rabbits. I felt very sad seeing my half-bald old friend lolloping off into the crowd, but Mum looked distinctly relieved.

Mum had got well into the Church by then, having found that one of the best ways to stop her panic attacks was to repeat the Lord’s Prayer over and over again. A bit like having a tic, I suppose. She was exhausted from all the stress of her years on the road and from being a single mum, struggling to get enough money for us to live, and her religion seemed to soothe her, the Church making her feel like she belonged to a community. It suited me fine. I liked the singing and I liked watching Mum playing the violin in Frets, the clubroom behind the church hall.

Constantly on the look-out for ways to make some extra money while still being there for me, Mum got a job working for a lady called Heather, who was a high-flying Fleet Street journalist. Her job was to cook and help look after her children, AJ and Dean. She was going to be a sort of housekeeper, I suppose. It was a great gig and Heather quickly became one of our best friends, which always seemed to happen with anyone who came into Mum’s life. I used to love going round to Heather’s house. They had a dog called Bonzo and, even though the pit bull had tried to eat my face, I still loved dogs.

‘Can we get one?’ I kept nagging Mum. She kept promising that one day soon we would go to Battersea Dogs’ Home and find a suitable one, but we just never seemed to get round to actually making the trip. One afternoon AJ was having a confirmation party and we were all sitting around in their house. I think Mum and Heather might have been a bit pissed on champagne; they often seemed to have a bottle on the go when they were together. I kept hearing someone tapping at the front door, but I didn’t think it was my place to answer it – it wasn’t my house after all.

‘There’s someone at the door,’ I kept saying.

‘Then go and answer it, for God’s sake,’ Heather said, irritably, obviously having had enough of children’s voices for one day.

Shrugging, I made my way down the hall, but when I got there I could see through the glass that there was no shadow. It was like there was no one there. It seemed spooky and I didn’t like the vibe. I hovered around for a moment, trying to pluck up my courage, but failed and went back to them to confess my failure.