by Sue Perkins
I understand it now – after all these years of raging I get it. The more he could associate me with mere facts, the more reassuringly distant I became. The less he had to engage with the idea of me being a living, breathing human being that he loved – that he might have to see hurt or ill or heartbroken. I wanted to say to him – I’ve always wanted to say to him – There’s nothing you can do, Dad. That’s what life is. You can’t just cherry-pick the nice bits and block your ears to the painful bits. Plus, in insulating yourself against the bad stuff, you miss so much of the good stuff. Don’t you see?
Mum had fallen suspiciously quiet. I always think something is seriously wrong if she goes without speaking for longer than thirty seconds.
Finally she punctured the silence. ‘I think I’ve still got it.’
‘What?’
‘My diary from when you were born.’
What? You’ve got a diary as well. Oh God …
‘I’ll go hunt for it.’
‘Mum, it’s OK, really …’
She disappeared for some time. There was a scraping of boxes on the upstairs floor, then she reappeared brandishing a yellowing piece of paper.
It’s rare that I’m lost for words, but this was one of those occasions. It turned out that my mum is so good at cataloguing, she even managed to keep an hour-by-hour account OF HER OWN LABOUR. You don’t see that very often on One Born Every Minute.
The maternity unit of a busy London hospital. A fixed-rig camera looks down on a woman in the advanced stages of labour. There is the sound of medical equipment beeping.
Midwife:
That’s right, keep pushing!
The woman screams in agony.
Midwife:
Come on, you can do it! Nearly there …
Woman:
[panting] Please –
Midwife:
Remember, push down.
Woman:
Please, could you –
Midwife:
Push down.
Woman:
[getting weaker] Could you …
Husband:
She’s asking for something.
Woman:
Please …
The husband goes over to her.
Woman:
Please, my diary …
Husband:
She needs her diary!
He rushes over to a bag in the corner of the delivery room and retrieves a small notebook. She lets out another bellow as the pain rises again. He hands the diary over; she opens it and starts writing furiously.
Midwife:
I can see the head!
Woman:
[screaming] What time is it?
Husband:
It’s 19.31.
She writes this down. Then screams again.
Midwife:
Nearly there!
Woman:
What’s the name of this ward again?
Husband:
Magenta Four.
Woman:
Thanks.
She writes this down. One final, long wail of pain.
Midwife:
There you are! You did it! It’s a girl. It’s a lovely little girl.
Woman:
[to husband, pen poised ready for the answer] How would you describe the furnishings in here? Mustard? Taupe? Plain beige?
That’s how stoical my mum is. A mere seven stone in weight, slap bang in the middle of labour pains, shoved in a cold bath and left there until nearly eight centimetres dilated – and she still manages to get in a diary entry. Screw you, Samuel Pepys, you lightweight. Try commentating on the Great Fire with a bowling ball pushing its way out your arse with just a little gas and air, and no man, woman or child to comfort you.
Here is Mum’s entry.
Detailed, isn’t it? Except for the actual baby bit, you know, the important bit. That part, well – it’s just ‘Baby born.’ Notice I don’t even get an adjective. The staff do. The staff are ‘marvellous’.
‘Baby born.’ Ha ha ha.
Imagine. I lived with that.
I still think my favourite bit is when she has a bilious attack at 2.30 p.m. and thinks the best thing to do is have an orange. My mum is allergic to oranges. Always has been, always will be. Yet she thought that moment, that specific moment, was the right one in which to play Russian roulette with her digestive system. Unsurprisingly she has another bilious attack an hour later.
Question, Mum. Would an anaphylactic decide to have a handful of cashews just before their baby was born?
No wonder my sister Michelle thought twice about being associated with us.
Kindergarten and Junior School
Here are the things I learned from playgroup:
If you spend the whole of the lunch break cutting the heads off Barbie Dolls, you tend to be left alone by everyone for the rest of the afternoon.
If you know Anthony, then you are part of the cool gang.
If you are Anthony’s girlfriend, YOU RULE THE WORLD.
Anthony owned that playgroup. So much so, he didn’t even need a surname. Like all true leaders – Hannibal, Alexander the Great, Chico – a second, family name was superfluous.
The playgroup that Anthony presided over was brutal – feudal – like a toddler’s version of Game of Thrones. Justice was swift and merciless. Get on the wrong side of Anthony and he would bite your face, drive a buggy into your knees or smash a Fisher-Price My First Medical Kit over your head. The day he did the latter was, coincidentally, the day I discovered irony.
I don’t know why Anthony and I hit it off. Perhaps I was the much-needed moderate queen to his despotic king. Perhaps my pudding-bowl fringe screamed, ‘I was put on this earth to be your henchman.’ Perhaps he was just looking for someone happy to go around saying ‘Sorry’ after he’d battered and smacked his way around the group. I don’t know. All I know is that he hated everyone else. But he loved me.
Anthony’s modus operandi was to be the first to everything: every toy, every experience, every break-time snack. I remember the teachers once organized a tea party. A vast array of sandwiches and scones and cakes sat on a gingham tablecloth behind glass doors in a prescient sign of what awaited me in adulthood. No sooner had those glass doors opened than Anthony steamed in, elbowing everybody out of his way, whereupon he firmly pressed his dirty thumbs into every snack in sight. There wasn’t an egg-and-cress bap without his DNA on it, nor a square of Nimble without his fingerprints embedded deep into the dough.
I looked on with a mixture of awe and dread. It was like watching a rogue Staffie cock his leg against the opulent fruits de mer display at Harrods Food Hall – half of me was appalled, the other half applauded the sheer, glorious chutzpah of it all.
Anthony’s finest hour came when the playgroup’s new slide arrived. We’d been promised this new toy for weeks, and there it was in all its magnificent wooden glory. His eyes burned as he saw it wheeled into place. I could hear the cogs of his brain whirring, trying to figure out how best to stamp his authority on his peers once and for all. The teachers moved the slide into its new home, and just as they stood back to admire their work Anthony launched him
self at the steps for the inaugural descent. Before the teachers could so much as shout his name, he had made his way down the chute and was standing for applause at the bottom.
Immediately I knew something was wrong. Pure instinct. Like when a rabbit sits up, alert in a field, and knows it’s being stalked. Something told me I didn’t want to go down that slide any more, and so I let my friends jostle past me to the front of the queue. Sure enough a few seconds later there was a loud cry. We all crowded around the slide to find a poor girl called Melissa stranded midway down, legs akimbo, buttocks seemingly glued to the wood.
I shot a glance at Anthony. The front of his trousers was soaked through. He had wilfully, deliberately pissed himself all the way down the slide. One thing I did know: wet slide, no glide. Not so much a scorched earth as a damp chute policy. And very effective it was too. Nobody but Anthony ever went on it again.
I don’t know what happened to Anthony. He disappeared from my life as forcefully as he’d arrived. Back then he was deemed a ‘little character’; nowadays he’d go by the slightly longer label of ‘attention deficit hyperactivity disordered, oppositionally defiant’. I imagine he’s now either in a penthouse office at Canary Wharf running Europe’s finances or drawing pictures with crayons using his feet in a rubber room somewhere in a secure facility. With Anthony it could have gone either way.
After playgroup, Mum and Dad decided to send me to the local Catholic school.
Dad:
Ronnie Corbett’s children were at that school with you.
Me:
Is that pertinent?
Dad:
No, it’s name-dropping.
The school in question was a little convent outfit in Sanderstead, just where the concrete of Croydon met the manicured park life of Surrey suburb. There were trees and front lawns and everything felt neat and clean.
The most exciting thing that could possibly happen at our school (or indeed I imagine at any school) was someone cracking their head open on the playground. We’d heard about this – someone said, ‘Nicholas fell and cracked his head open.’ Open. We imagined a head split in two, with blood and brains spilling out of it, and sat around in gangs at break praying for it to happen until the sight of a wimple sent us rushing back to class.
The nuns were a terrifying bunch led by Head Horror Sister Mary Dorothy. Sister Mary was old-school strict with an old-school belief in right or wrong – and by old-school I mean MEDIEVAL. It was bad enough I was a brunette (mildly satanic) with short hair (sorcerer’s overtones), but the crunch point came when she discovered I was also left-handed (aka the full Beelzebub). Every time I sat down to eat in the school hall I found myself surrounded by wimpled women telling me to swap my cutlery around. Nineteen seventies beefburgers were rigid offerings at the best of times, but try cutting into one with a weak right hand that has never used a knife before. My brain would hurt and my fingers ache, but every time I tried to swap the utensils back, the nuns would descend again until I became exhausted and confused and tearful.
I started getting skinny. I started resisting going to school of a morning and became paranoid at mealtimes, wondering why my parents didn’t swoop on me when I picked up my knife and fork in my usual fashion. Finally, Mum managed to get the truth out of me. Dad went very quiet. You only ever worried about Dad when he went very quiet. The next day he went in and ‘had a word’ with Sister Mary Dorothy, which involved backing her against a wall and telling her to leave his daughter alone. Effectively, he went a bit Liam Neeson on her ass. It’s easy to see why – ask my dad to splay his fingers, and two on each hand are battered out of shape courtesy of the ceaseless rectifying ministrations of the Brothers of Holy Joe’s School for Boys in 1940s Beulah Hill.
The other thing the nuns loved to do was make you finish your food. Not because there were starving kids in the world – oh no, they didn’t seem too concerned with all that. No, they simply wanted to see a five-year-old face down in cold tapioca or collapsed in a puddle of viscous, greasy gravy.
One day I got locked into a war of attrition with a starchy ball of Smash instant mashed potato, which had been delivered lovelessly from the clutches of an ice-cream scoop. It sat there, and so did I. Neither of us moved. Neither of us was going anywhere. Sister Mary Dorothy did her rounds of the hall, wordlessly peering at our plates and dismissing those lucky enough to have finished. I had not finished. As she walked by, I nonchalantly flicked a lump of potato off my fork, which landed, by accident rather than design, just feet in front of her.
She carried on, polished shoes clicking on the polished floor, until her toes hit the tattie slime.
The rest was pure poetry.
My classmates watched as the Bride of Christ skidded, feet outstretched, until the wall provided a brake. There was a crunching sound and then silence.
‘Has she cracked her head open?’ said Thomas, the kid next to me.
‘Maybe.’
‘I think she has. She’s cracked her head! She’s cracked her head!’
A ripple of excitement went down the table.
I quietly picked up my fork with my right hand and let a little smirk cross my face. If you’re going to be treated like a devil, you might as well behave like one.
Lesson learned.
Pets
28 MARCH 1975
A girl in a psychedelic dress, sporting a pudding-bowl haircut, approaches her father. She looks like Damian from The Omen, if Damian were a girl and liked psychedelic dresses.* Her father is busy ‘doing stamps’. No one in the family knows what ‘doing stamps’ means, but it seems to involve him spending a lot of time in the box room drinking whisky and sobbing.
Girl:
Dad?
Dad:
What is it?
Girl
Can I have a dog?
Dad:
No.
Girl:
Dad, pleeeeease.
Dad:
I said no!
Girl:
[a single tear forming] But why?
Dad:
Because pets die and leave you despairing and alone. [Pause] Pets are pain, Susan.
There is a profound silence. The girl walks slowly away.
I was six years old.
Over a decade after I left home I discovered that my dad, as a boy, had owned a cat. He fed it raw fish every day, and it slept on a rug at the foot of his bed every night. I don’t know the name of the cat, because even seventy years on he finds it too sad to talk about. It is merely Cat. Nameless. Generic. All I know is that when Cat died, my dad never, ever got over it.
That’s what pets were to him – unimaginable solace and unimaginable pain – in sparing us the latter, I guess it never crossed his mind he might have denied us the former.
I grew up in a nondescript road in a nondescript borough of London.
Croydon – twinned with Mordor.
It’s less of a place, more of a punchline.
Croydon was like an airlock in the middle of the A23, a place neither one thing nor the other. It wasn’t close enough to the city to feel like London proper, nor far enough away to feel like the bosom of green-belt Surrey. It was the poor relation of both town and country, mocked, maligned but with an enviable degree of office space. It was a place you went to get to somewhere else. It’s all relative, of course. We’d come from Peckham, so it was paradise.
To give you an idea o
f what Croydon felt like … Every year there was a funfair on the Rotary Field. A sense of torpor hung in the air. The skinheads couldn’t be arsed to spin the waltzer. Candy didn’t floss. Bunting wouldn’t flap in the breeze. Kids would risk injury standing under the swinging pirate ship in order to catch the coins as they dropped from upturned pockets. Every year we all queued religiously for the centrifuge ride. You know the one – it looks like a giant salad spinner in the sky. We queued and we queued and we queued. Why? Because word had got out that John Daniels’ dad had detached his retina on that ride. That’s the kind of place Croydon was in the 1980s. You joined a long queue of people waiting to spin themselves blind.
We lived on a wide road lined with silver birch trees, which held sway from my earliest memories right up to the time Michael Fish murdered them in 1987. A jumble of bungalows, 1930s semis and mid-century monstrosities lined the route like broken, wonky teeth. It must have all looked rather lovely once upon a time, when the suburbs were in bloom, but this was the 70s, and now concrete was king.
We moved there when I was barely nine months old, but I’ve seen photos of what our house looked like when my folks took possession of the keys. The outside was a dull cream, with coils of paint hanging from the bay windows like Hasidic curls. Green slate tiles, which resembled fish scales from a distance, decked the roof, and inside sagging ceilings held on to antique brass light fittings as if for dear life.
My parents set about getting rid of all that ‘old stuff’ as soon as possible – after all, it was the 1970s, and the phrase ‘original features’ was right up there with ‘Baader-Meinhof Gang’ and ‘Vietnam War’. So out went all that junk and in came proper stuff – polystyrene ceiling tiles, neon strip lighting, endless miles of teak sideboards and a swirling Axminster carpet that gave you a window into what mild epilepsy might feel like.
