The fittings and fixtures were even more offensive. We had white cowboy doors between the pink kitchen and peach dining room. It was like a scene from the alternative ending of Brokeback Mountain, the version where they live happily ever after. The pièce de résistance of our new Hampstead house of horrors was undoubtedly the master bathroom. The bath had golden taps beside a spout in the shape of a swan’s neck and head. The water would shoot out of the swan’s mouth, like it was vomiting. The black loo was so over-stylized that it was actually unusable. The loo seat was angled in such a way that it pushed one’s bottom cheeks together, thus blocking nature’s course. It was difficult enough to poo with a vomiting gold swan staring at you, but the design fault made it physically impossible. It became a ‘show loo’, just for decoration. The whole house was a bit like that.
I don’t remember my father being around while the work was being done. He must have been making or editing his film. I know that he was also travelling to America a lot as he was putting together the sketch show Assaulted Nuts, which was co-produced by the US cable network HBO.
What I do remember is sitting in our newly converted loft playing with excess rolls of carpet and coming across my mother’s Filofax (an eighties must-have) and seeing a note to her from Steve, the builder with an iron chest. ‘I love you,’ it read. Why would Steve the builder love my mum? I was shocked. At this moment, my mother walked in. ‘Have you seen my Filofax, darling?’ She saw me sitting on the fluffy new carpet, the blood drained from my young face. ‘Are you all right, Michael?’
‘No,’ I said, barely audible. ‘The room is spinning.’
‘I know, Michael, that’s the stencilling. That’s the effect I’m going for. You’ll get used to it, it’s very trendy.’
I showed her the Filofax. ‘What’s that mean?’ I asked fearfully. Unfortunately, it had flicked to another page, 21 June.
‘The summer solstice,’ she explained. ‘That’s the first day of summer, I think.’
‘No,’ I said, riffling through the Filofax to find the incriminating page. ‘That. What does that mean?’
I thought confronting my mother with evidence of her adultery would be dramatic, but it was nothing of the sort. ‘I love Steve, we love each other. I thought you knew that.’
I genuinely couldn’t believe how blasé she was being. ‘No, I didn’t.’
‘We’ve been together for a while. Why do you think he’s always here?’
‘To decorate,’ I said truthfully.
I’m so glad we dug up this photo. Here is Steve, rag-rolling his way into my mother’s heart.
My mum chose to downplay the gravity of the situation. Either that or she was so in love with the builder that she was blissfully unaware that she was married with two kids. I thought for a moment that maybe these avant-garde painting techniques were responsible for my mother’s seduction. She did seem to be in a trance-like state. Maybe she was just Steve’s latest victim, and he was some kind of decorating Derren Brown using a combination of rag-rolling, stencilling and marbling in a series of gaudy colours to hypnotize housewives.
My memories of our final days in Hampstead are not only hazy, but also confused by the fact that a lot was kept from Lucy and me to ‘protect’ us. This was a messy divorce with kids involved, and I was one of the kids. My dad came back from America to a strange and hostile environment. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for my father. A man’s first instinct when he learns his wife is cheating on him is to attack the other man. ‘Who is it? Where is he?’ Unfortunately in this instance, it was Steve, the iron-chested builder. My dad could have punched Steve repeatedly in the stomach, and Steve wouldn’t have even noticed – he would have just carried on rag-rolling while listening to his Sony Walkman. Your partner cheating on you is bad enough. If she cheats on you with a bigger man, it’s the worst-case scenario. What are you supposed to do when you catch them together? ‘Hey, that’s my wife. Get off her or I’ll hit you, and then you’ll hit me and I’ll be hospitalized.’
What if your partner cheats on you with a hero of yours? At the time of writing John Terry has just lost his England captaincy for alleged adultery. But what if he was sleeping with the wife of a Chelsea season ticket holder who proudly wears a John Terry replica shirt, and it’s days before the European Cup Final? What would be the husband’s reaction then? Initially he would be shocked and angered by the infidelity of his wife before noticing his idol in his bed. ‘How could you do it this to me, you fu— There’s only one John Terry, one John Teeeeery, there’s only one John Terry. Look who it is, love, it’s JT!’
‘I know, I’m having sex with him.’
‘You all right, JT? Can I get you some water or something? He’s got the final on Wednesday night, so you should go on top, love. He’s got to save his energy. Careful, darling, mind his metatarsal, that’s six weeks out, that is.’
The marriage was over. They weren’t happy. My dad was working hard, my mum was playing hard, and when they were together they were arguing hard. They were from different generations and the gap was never going to close. A friend of my mum said to her at the time of the separation, ‘Children grow up and leave home, and that’s all you’re doing.’
My grandmother was thrilled to learn that the marriage was over and swigged from a glass of fine champagne. ‘Daarling, you are doing the right thing, he vas no gud for you. Start egen, I vill help you vith money.’ Then my mum told her about Steve. She choked, vintage champagne spluttered from her mouth and through her nose ‘Vot? The builder? I’m feeling faint, Jim, Jim, get my pills …’
I haven’t really gone into much detail about Grandma’s rich husband Jim. For all his business prowess and swollen bank account, he was very much a secondary figure in my grandmother’s home. He acted and looked like a butler, very English, very proper, very upright. He occasionally smirked or scowled, hinting towards true feelings that he never voiced. He fetched my grandma’s pills. ‘You’re telling me you are in luv with the rag-rohleeer?’ she continued. ‘Vell, you vont get a bean out of me. He is after the money, and he’s not getting any.’ My grandmother believed everybody was after her money.
In hindsight, I think my parents’ marriage breakdown was inevitable. I’ve met them both, and they genuinely had nothing in common. I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did. Although my mum was spending a lot of time with Kenny and his friends, it was only a matter of time before she met a heterosexual man. People who are single are often encouraged to ‘get out there, don’t just wait for Mr Right to come knocking on your door’. Well, in my mother’s case, Mr Right smashed the door down, installed a new one, then painted and rag-rolled it. They were in love and determined to start a life together, a life with Lucy and me. My home was broken. The Hampstead house was put on the market.
Let’s just put the divorce to one side for a moment. Park the divorce. I want to talk about house prices. It was 1983 and we owned a substantial house in Hampstead. I also want you to put the décor of the house to one side. Park the décor. Park it next to the divorce.
Because of a wonderful website, with which I became obsessed when I was house hunting called houseprices.co.uk, you can now find out the price of homes sold anywhere in the UK. We sold our Hampstead house in 1983 for £330,000, a substantial amount of money at the time, even today. At the peak of the market in 2007, the same house was sold for £4.2 million. Here’s a question: why the fuck didn’t the Tarot card reader mention that? The house increased in value by £160,000 a year. Would this knowledge have saved my parents’ marriage? (I’ve just un-parked the divorce.) I don’t think so. But maybe it would have prevented them from selling their goldmine with hideous interior. (I’ve just un-parked the décor.) For that kind of money, Steve could have built a dividing wall and they could have split the house. Lucy and I would still live with both our parents, and in twenty-five years we would all walk away millionaires.
It wasn’t to be. The house was sold, bizarrely, to the Osbournes. Any relation
? Yes, it was them, the actual Osbournes. Sharon and Ozzy and little baby Jack. Kelly Osbourne had just been born at the time. This is from Sharon’s autobiography: ‘Ozzy arrived for the birth and I took him to see somewhere I found in Hampstead. It was Victorian, semi-detached with a garden, not enormous but somewhere to put the pram … It needed a lot doing to it, but the price was good and it had great potential.’
This is an historic moment: the overlapping of two celebrity autobiographies. It’s interesting, the different perspectives. For Sharon, the house was ‘not enormous’; for me, it was ‘enormous’. Sharon felt it ‘needed a lot doing to it’; for me, it was ‘hideous’. It also said in her book that it was the first place that felt like a family home. The house certainly had the potential to be one; unfortunately, we were the wrong family. I doubt that when my father bought all the different flats and sat down with his architect, he said, ‘I want to create the perfect family home, for the Prince of Darkness.’
I had obviously never heard of Ozzy Osbourne. It may not come as a shock to you to learn that I never went through a ‘heavy metal’ phase. For all I knew, Black Sabbath was just another date in my mum’s Filofax. Before the MTV television series that endeared Ozzy and his family to the world, he was primarily known for eating the head of a bat. When my mother told me to tidy my room ‘because a man who bites the heads off bats is coming round to look at it’, I thought it was a threat. I’ve never cleaned my room so well in my life. Inspired by my mother’s Capri cleaning, I usually just threw rubbish out of the window, but this time I had the place immaculate. ‘All right, I’ll do it! Please don’t let the man bite my head off.’
The proceeds of the house sale were divided equally between my parents so each could start a new life. My father rented a house belonging to friends in Hertfordshire, and my mum, Steve, Lucy and I bought a house in Golders Green. So that was it, a new chapter in my life was beginning. Annoyingly, this is my autobiography and I haven’t actually reached the end of the chapter – bad planning on my part. I feel I need to introduce Steve to you properly, as he now looks all set to become my stepfather. No, maybe I should end the chapter here.
I think I will.
7
A new chapter in my life had begun. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was Chapter 7. There was a new man in my mother’s life, and because I was only seven years old and Lucy five, there was a new man in ours as well. We were the baggage that my mother came with.
Steve was pretty much the same age as my mum and looked almost identical to Patrick Swayze. Much to his embarrassment, his mother entered him into a Patrick Swayze look-alike contest by sending in a photo. He came second. I genuinely don’t know how he didn’t win; either it was rigged or the real Patrick Swayze entered. Steve was often mistaken for the Hollywood star in the most unlikely locations. ‘Oh my God, are you Patrick Swayze?’
‘No, do you really think Patrick Swayze would be buying paint in Wickes on the North Circular? Oh, look over there! It’s Tom Selleck looking at drills.’
Steve was young, more Point Break than Donnie Darko. He was an aspiring painter in the artistic sense but was painting in the painter/decorator sense to make ends meet. He grew up in Brixton with its predominantly West Indian community. He spoke in Jive as a party trick. His father was an electrician and his mother a dental nurse. On his first day of school he wore shorts, not knowing that the ‘all boys should wear shorts’ rule was ignored by every other boy at the school. This trouser-length faux pas led to him being ridiculed and locked all day in the cupboard that housed the fuse boxes and electrical meters. When Steve finally made it home, his father asked, ‘How was your first day at school?’
‘Much like your day at work, Dad, except I didn’t have a torch,’ he replied. The following day, now wearing trousers, he approached the largest of the bullies who had locked him up and punched him in the mouth, knocking several teeth out.
The father of his now front-toothless victim squared up to Steve’s father at the end of school. ‘Hey, your kid has knocked my kid’s teeth out.’
‘What do you want me to do about it? I’m an electrician,’ was Steve’s father’s now legendary response. ‘You want my wife for that. She’ll book you in for an appointment with the dentist.’
For all the punching in the stomach and ‘history of violence’ on his first day at school, Steve was and is the gentlest man I have ever met. He likes stamp-collecting and bird-watching and is extraordinarily passive and sweet-natured. Lucy and I liked him immediately. You might have expected the opposite reaction. Here was a man breaking up my family. But I didn’t see it that way. My parents were so unsuited to each other. It was now warfare. The last thing I wanted was for them to be together. How can two people who hate each other make a happy home?
Lucy and me hanging out with Patrick Swayze (Steve) on a summer’s day, reading magazines and killing ants.
Our Golders Green house was built in the 1930s. It required some work, but Steve was determined to do it all himself, not just to save money but also because his new girlfriend had a history of sleeping with contracted builders. It was detached with four bedrooms, a small kitchen, small living room, dining room and one bathroom. It was perfect for a young Jewish family. The main drawback was that none of us were Jewish. My mother’s father was Jewish (remember Laszlo, the Hungarian scientist whose sister’s son was Uncle Peter, the guy who gassed himself in the face?), but one Jewish relative is not enough to make you particularly welcome in the neighbourhood.
Although the house was a good size for the money, He-Man builder Steve could easily do any work necessary, and though it was only about two miles from our old Hampstead house, it was like moving abroad. I felt a bit like Harrison Ford in Witness. Golders Green is properly Orthodox Jewish. Everyone has skullcaps, long hair with side-curls, all black clothing and Volvos. Volvos are very popular with Jewish people; they refuse to buy German cars (with good reason) so BMWs, Mercedes, Audis, Volkswagens and Porsches are all out of the question. There are of course many other good-quality cars that aren’t German, but everybody in Golders Green seems to go for the Swedish Volvo. The Volvo, of course, is famed for being the safest and strongest vehicle on the road, so if they saw a Nazi, they could run him over with minimal risk to themselves.
I don’t think we did ourselves many favours when we first arrived in my mother’s new BMW 3-Series with Kraftwerk playing on the stereo. Adjacent to our new home was some outside space, a park that my mother christened ‘Dog Shit Park’. She told the neighbours she’d christened it ‘Dog Shit Park’, but they just slammed the door: ‘We don’t believe in Christ.’ The council wasn’t as stringent with dog fouling in those days. In the mid-eighties most of the dogs didn’t even have collars, as all the punks were wearing them.
Golders Green’s high street was an excellent shopping parade, if you’re kosher. There are shops and bakeries that not only seem to have been there since the beginning of time, but have the same people in them. Grodzinski’s was a coffee shop that had the same collection of old Jewish ladies, in the same seats, sipping the same coffee, every time I walked past. The high street seems to be in some kind of a time warp. Chains of shops would go out of business elsewhere but remain open in Golders Green. I think today there are still a C&A, Wimpy, Cecil Gee, Woolworths and Our Price.
The best thing about Golders Green, and the reason I still go back, is the I. Warman-Freed chemist. Most chemists keep regular business hours. Boots, for example, is usually open from 8.30 a.m. to 6 p.m. So you have to fall ill, or require any form of medication or remedy, between these hours. If you have a cold sore and want to adhere to the advert that tells you to buy Zovirax ‘at the first sign of tingling’, you can’t outside certain times. In fact between 6 p.m. and 8.30 a.m., every ailment known to man must be treated with Nurofen from the petrol station or a visit to Casualty. It’s a wonder this situation is tolerated. Well, there is one group of people who would never tolerate such a state of affairs. Jews. Which is w
hy smack-bang in the middle of Golders Green Road is I. Warman-Freed, the all-night chemist. I don’t know who I. Warman-Freed was, but he certainly understood the neuroses of Jewish people. You know when the Harry Potter books are released and people of all ages queue around the block? Well, the I. Warman-Freed pharmacy counter is like that twenty-four hours a day.
During the week, I lived in Golders Green in what felt like an FBI witness relocation ‘safe house’. On the weekends Lucy and I would stay with our dad in his temporary accommodation. Strangely, it’s from this point on that my memories of my father are much stronger. He was obviously very busy with work prior to the divorce, but now in his ‘weekend dad’ capacity, he made the most of our time together. Being apart from his kids was heartbreaking for him and he desperately wanted to make us feel we had a new home with him as well as in Israel – sorry, Golders Green. Seemingly within minutes of his separation from my mother, there was a new lady in his life.
While my mother was being romanced in plaster of Paris by Steve in scenes not dissimilar to the film Ghost, my father had met a twenty-seven-year-old Floridian sweetheart during his frequent visits to America. I’m not aware of the details; all I remember is that Lucy and I went to visit him in his rented cottage, and there she was, Holly Hughes.
Life and Laughing: My Story Page 7
