She was there on the morning when the letter came offering me a place at Cambridge.
For many years I was prickly with Mum. I found her inside-out grief hard to witness and her religious zeal hard to understand. It was easier with Dad. He never required me to be honest, only complicit, which is much more fun, and fun is what you think you need when the world is falling down around you. Not brokenness and introversion. I realize now that what my mother was trying to do was to deal with her grief, to engage with it and accept it, rather than bury it or ignore it or drown it in wine. She wanted to talk about how she felt; we preferred to drink and take drugs so we didn’t feel at all. It is only as I have got older that I have realized her path was the healthier one.
My relationship with my mother has become much easier since the birth of my children. Mum helped look after both my girls when they were small, enabling me to go back to work. Once she recklessly freewheeled down our steep road after a night of snow so that Mike and I would not miss a day in the office. She loved looking after babies once more – a second chance. She liked to take them to Costa Coffee on the high street for babyccinos, and would spend hours playing cuddly toy catch with Hebe. No one was more moved than her at how like Candy Minna looked.
But I still find my mother’s vulnerability hard to witness.
‘Shall I come and see you for lunch next week?’ I say. ‘Just the two of us?’
We are rarely alone together.
‘That would be lovely,’ Mum says.
So much has been unsaid between us for so long it feels like the scary, challenging parts of our history have become ossified, hardened, that they will need to be chipped away at to be released, a hard and painful process requiring sharp tools and the possibility of injury. How can I ask the questions that have been lodged in me for so long that they are a part of me, how can I find a way for Mum to hear the questions without feeling as though I am judging her, or answer them without dissolving into sadness?
But it is my job to ask difficult questions. I do this all the time, interviewing celebrities about their complicated childhoods and professional struggles. I don’t swerve probing questions when there is a Dictaphone on the table. So maybe this is the answer. If I frame my conversation with my mother as an interview it will be easier for both of us; the act of recording will give us the distance from the past we need to return to it and the Dictaphone will be a non-judgemental third party. I will be the interviewer and my mother will be the subject.
An interview with Jan Hodge, conducted at Yeha restaurant in Norwood Junction
Do you remember when you first met Dad? You were standing on the Embankment, weren’t you, after a party, and Dad picked you up in his Campervan?
That’s right. There were eight of us models standing in full evening dress trying to hitch a lift and he was the only man with enough balls to stop. He took us to the Roebuck pub on the King’s Road and all his friends gravitated towards us. I didn’t speak to anyone; I just stood there and laughed. Then he took me to Tramp [the nightclub in Mayfair], and I was wearing a very low-cut frock, and you know when you go down the stairs at Tramp there’s an area where people sit and he placed me there because there was a light that shone directly on to me. He placed me there to show off my breasts to everybody.
Did you think he was funny?
Yes, I thought he was funny and I liked him, so much so that I slept downstairs on the floor at home in Woodford Green in case he rang after that first date.
Was he the first person you fell in love with?
I definitely had strong feelings for him from the beginning.
The thing that I have always thought was that you were such an introvert and he was such an extrovert, that you felt shy, whereas Dad could do all the talking, and that was part of the attraction.
Yes, that’s right.
And you shared a sense of humour.
We did.
And you were both from the suburbs and inhabiting this glamorous Chelsea world but not quite part of it, only allowed to be part of it because of your beauty and talent.
We were both very good at what we did. And yes, that sort of sums us up. We really were in love. Your dad was fairly brassic when I met him, but he always took me to nice places.
He always believed in the show, didn’t he?
Yes, it was always about the show. He used to take me to lovely restaurants on the King’s Road when we first met.
And were you trying to get pregnant?
No, but I think your dad was trying. He wasn’t at all sad when I told him I was pregnant. There was never any question of him trying to back away or back out of it. He asked me to go and live with him pretty quickly after I told him. And I did.
And did you know that he was using drugs at the time?
I didn’t know anything about drugs when I met your father. I’d never had a drug. I’d never indulged in such things. Never had the urge. I think I’d taken one drag of a reefer once. I didn’t like it. He actually asked me to take drugs with him the day after we got married. You’d gone down to my sister.
So he waited until you were married before he revealed that part of himself?
Yes, he saved that until after we got married.
And what was the drug that he wanted to take with you?
Cocaine.
And what did you say?
I did it.
And were you on your honeymoon?
No, we were just in Chelsea in the flat for a few days and your father went demented. He had a really good time. He thought it was great.
I think the other thing that Dad did was that he compartmentalized things. So to him his lies weren’t lies, they were just compartments.
That’s right. It was interesting because we did discuss what was important to us, where marriage was concerned, before we got married. And it was fidelity. I was faithful right the way through the marriage, and he was until Twinkle [my mother’s name for Julia]. And there were such extenuating circumstances. Any man who had given his daughter the kiss of life and had water and blood come back into his mouth and then she died was not going to be normal, were they? And I’ve always given that leeway for his behaviour, but I just couldn’t live with it, and you didn’t want to.
It’s really hard, isn’t it, trying to forgive someone for doing something unforgivable and knowing the context for those actions, and also still loving them at the same time.
I never stopped loving your father, and he did love me. But he was an addict and that was all there was to it. The best years of our marriage were when he got clean and I got sober. We had great times.
And it is such a tragedy that Candy died, for so many reasons, but one reason was that when she died that ended the family.
That’s right. I can understand that he never got over it, what happened that night.
So, let’s go back again. You got pregnant, got married, had me.
And we were both very happy; we both exchanged the same sentiment to each other: thank you, for you.
And you were living in Elm Park Mansions, and you were working as a model, and Dad had his hairdressing salon in the King’s Road, Gotama, which he opened after he came back from Marbella.
Yes, and everything was all right, but it wasn’t all right for very long, because he soon had money problems because he was just not a good businessman. Gotama went down quite quickly because your father had started using [taking heroin] quite heftily.
When did you become aware that his using was causing problems?
When he went to bed and stayed there for three days. You were still about two. That was when he came to understand that Gotama was going to go under. He was depressed. It was a loss.
It was how he responded to loss and pain, wasn’t it, seeking oblivion?
Yes. But he rallied from that and started to do freelance hairdressing and he was doing well. We sold Elm Park Mansions and moved over the river.
When do you think he started dealing drugs?
; After Candy was born.
Oh, really, not before?
He could have done it on the side without me knowing. But it was when Candy was four and you were eight that the police came.
And that was the first time you were really aware of what was going on?
No, I knew before, but I used to get drunk and go to bed.
Because you didn’t want to think about what was going on in the sitting room?
That’s right, and you used to go out and clean up after them.
And did you know that I was doing that?
I did. And it used to really worry me. These days you and Candida would have been taken from us. You should have been then, to be honest. Although I am really glad you weren’t.
Me too. It’s a strange thing, because you think: Where were social services? But actually I am glad that social services didn’t intervene.
We could both still put a show on and behave like normal people.
I had clothes, I had food, I went to school.
You had toys, you were clean, all of those things. And the same with Candy.
Part of what I’ve been trying to do is unravel everything and put it in order in my own head, because it is so complex and complicated. I have been thinking about you and Dad and the things that brought you together and the things that pulled you apart, and the differences in your responses to things, and one of the things that I have found hard to understand was how these things were allowed to continue [I am referring here to when I was sitting up with my father and the junkies] but I suppose you were thinking: We are just about getting by, we are just about holding on, and I am scared of the things that are going on in the living room, but I can’t stop him doing them.
That’s right. I was a functioning alcoholic. And it was quite a terrifying thing because I knew that when people are dealing, other people will come and beat up the whole family, you know. There were things like that I was really terrified of.
I do remember one time someone coming and banging on the door and trying to break in and Dad holding the door shut and shouting fuck off.
Oh, I didn’t know that. I don’t remember that. But I suppose it would have been someone wanting money or drugs or something. I mean, your father’s heart was good.
And what was it like when Candy was born? What was home like?
Well, as I have said to you, because she was the first child of his who was actually born in wedlock, your father was besotted with her. He was weirdly old-fashioned. When we found out about Twinkle, he said to me: Candy would have understood. It’s the first thing he said. And I said, Don’t be so bloody stupid; she would have kicked you in the balls. I think he thought Candy was his soul mate, and I think that is why he couldn’t recover at all. Not to say that he didn’t love you, because he most certainly did, he adored you, but there was this special thing, because he was so stupidly old-fashioned. It never made a blind bit of difference to me. I rarely remembered that was even the case, and anyway you had your father on your birth certificate and everything.
And what was I like as a child?
You were quite independent, but you just enjoyed normal things, you enjoyed being read to. I always took you off to mother-and-baby club and you always enjoyed that. You always had little friends. I always thought after Candida died that you were sort of God’s gift because any other child would have made life even harder.
This conversation is a revelation. It changes the way I think about both of my parents, how ill suited they were, and yet how suited, the similarities of their backgrounds, of their outlooks, their childish sense of humour, the balance of his extroversion with her shyness, his deceit with her honesty. They were beautiful and young and in love and because they were in love they made a family. Their meeting might have been a matter of chance, but having a child, that was choice.
I always felt loved. I went to friends’ homes where there was so much material wealth, so much security, so much normality, so much of what I desired, and yet often not enough love. Perhaps that was why I always wanted to come home. Our scrappy, mad, chaotic family was filled with love and fun and when it was good there was nowhere else I wanted to be.
32
2009, London
It was strange to be in the flat without him.
I sat on the sofa, his sofa, the one with the best view of the television. I brought my feet up, leant my back against the armrest, sitting in the place he always sat, settling in the space made by his body.
It was morning. I was here by myself. I didn’t want anyone else with me. They kept calling. I looked at their names but I didn’t answer.
The flat still smelt of the food Mike had ordered the night before, the silver foil dishes lined up on the coffee table between us, the meat curries cooling and congealing. Someone broke off an edge of poppadom and chewed it. There is an instinct to feed the newly bereaved. I still had the KitKat that a friend had bought me after I got the call.
Maybe I would lose weight.
‘You should see him,’ said Sarah, still his best friend after all these years, although he’d stopped calling her Lady Sarah. ‘He’s in the bathroom.’
I didn’t want to.
She held my arm, trying to pull me up the stairs. ‘You should see him.’
‘I don’t want to. I can’t. Maybe in a bit.’
‘He was on the loo,’ she said, her voice raspy. ‘The door was locked. I bashed and bashed at it with that fucking bronze elephant of his. He was meant to be meeting us for dinner, for Chrissy’s birthday. He was meant to be collecting the birthday cake. He didn’t answer my calls all day. So I came round.’
I wailed like an animal when I got the call from Sarah. The whole office turned to see what was making the terrible sound.
They led me outside, holding me by the elbows. They’d called Mike, who was working in the same building. The KitKat was in the pocket of my velvet coat. Mike hailed a black cab for us.
‘I am disintegrating,’ I said to him.
I understood what it meant then: falling to pieces. That is how it feels. We are so fragile, we humans, our cells bound together by subtle energies. We come apart easily.
It was Friday. I sat in his spot, on his sofa, my legs up in front of me, the television on, daytime television, Cash in the Attic, something mindless; he loved that sort of thing. I didn’t know where to start. His body was at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. The paramedics had arrived while we sat there with the curries.
‘You should look at him, this is your last chance,’ Sarah had said.
‘I don’t want to.’
We sat in silence as the paramedics banged and bashed around, getting his body out of the loo and on to the stretcher on the small landing in front of the bathroom. They carried him downstairs. I stared at the curries, brown and lumpen. They carried him out of the flat, taking him down in the lift to the waiting ambulance. There was no urgency.
Now I sat in his spot. On the table was a bronze tray arranged with his knick-knacks, ammonites and shells, fake jade, strange ephemera. There was a ring; it was soft gold set with a large lapis lazuli, the blue flecked with tiny particles of gold. I had admired it before.
‘It’s really old, that,’ Dad had said. He didn’t tell me where he had got it from; he’d probably stolen it from one of his rich friends. Seen it, desired it, taken it, reasoning that they had so much they wouldn’t even notice it was gone.
I slid the ring on to the third finger of my right hand.
What would I do with all his stuff? Where should I begin?
His body. They had taken his body to the hospital mortuary. He hated hospitals; he never wanted to end up in one. I could sense his impatience to leave that cold place where no one looked their best, where no one could even pretend that life was grand.
Put a cushion over my face before it comes to this.
I found a funeral directors on the internet. I called them and began to make the arrangements. Set the wheels in motion.
It was
as complicated as organizing a wedding, but you only have two weeks to do everything and you are ruined with heartbreak.
I took my favourite paintings off his living-room walls, called a cab and took them home with me. That night I smelt of dust and despair when I sang baby Hebe to sleep.
He’d come to the hospital to see her when she was just born; he turned up stinking of fags, eating a sandwich, spitting it all over me, my sheets, my new baby.
‘Do you know what, it’s as bad as being black, being left-handed,’ he said.
‘For fuck’s sake, Dad, that is such a stupid thing to say,’ I whispered.
I was in a shared ward in King’s College Hospital. Every other woman in that ward was either African or British Caribbean, as were so many of the brilliant and kind nurses who looked after me.
‘But it’s true!’
‘Just shut up!’
He sat on the end of my bed and cradled Hebe. ‘Aren’t you lovely?’ he said.
The last time I saw him he came to Crystal Palace to have lunch with the two of us. We went to the cheap Italian place. He had finally accepted that he wasn’t rich.
‘I wish I was a swallow,’ he said. ‘I hate the winter. I wish I could fly away and spend it somewhere hot, and then I could come back here in the summer. Or maybe I could be a hedgehog, then I could hibernate it all away.’
The Consequences of Love Page 19
