‘That’s what happens if you don’t listen to your old man,’ I told him, making things ten times worse.
Nathan had a few cars after that. His pride and joy was a black Vauxhall Astra, which cost him £6,000. He was completely in love with it. He would spend hours polishing and tinkering with it in front of our house. And then, one blazing hot day, when he had only had it for two months, I accidentally did something I’m not proud of.
The pollen count was unusually high so my hayfever was really bad. I was driving home after doing some errands when I was suddenly blinded by a strong burst of sunshine and had a sneezing fit, both at the same time. I tried to pull onto my driveway, but instead of hitting the brake, I slammed my foot on the accelerator and smashed straight into the front of Nathan’s new car. I was mortified.
Nathan managed to get it fixed thanks to his insurance, but I wasn’t his favourite person for a while after that, and I can’t say I blamed him.
Working on cars ultimately proved a bonding experience for us, though. Nathan had been completely obsessed with them from the very first moment he got behind the wheel. I knew quite a lot about motorbike engines so I was able to get to grips with a car engine pretty quickly, and we spent a lot of time tinkering with our respective cars on Sundays. It wasn’t uncommon for us to be working on a car all day long, while Anjie brought out drinks and snacks for us. It’s those Sundays that I really cherished with Nathan. As he approached eighteen we got a lot closer. In many ways I had more in common with him than I did with Danny. Danny was such an easy kid that you never knew he was there, but he preferred hanging out with his friends to his dad. As he matured, Nathan still remained pals with Danny, and he started to make more of an effort with Becky. When I watched him, I often thought that Anjie, his nan and I had all done a good job of raising him. I looked forward to seeing what he would make of his life.
The day he turned eighteen, I knocked on his bedroom door in the morning to give him a card.
‘Happy birthday, son. I’m taking you out for a pint tonight,’ I told him.
Nathan had never drunk or done drugs as a teenager – none of our kids did, as we wouldn’t tolerate that sort of behaviour – so he looked genuinely excited to go out for his first pint.
Our first stop was The Pied Horse, my regular haunt, and as soon as we got there I ordered a pint and put it in front of him.
‘Big moment, this – your first legal drink.’ I winked at him while he took a sip. ‘Happy birthday, boy.’
We spent the next few hours playing darts and pool, just him and me. I took him to three more local pubs before we went home and he enjoyed himself immensely, but he proved to be a bit out of his depth. After about eight pints, he was completely hammered and staggering as we headed home together. We tried to keep quiet as we got in, but we almost woke the whole house as we crashed through the front door.
When I got into bed, Anjie sat up and whispered, ‘What have you done to my son, Darren?’
I laughed. ‘He did it to himself, Anj. He’ll be suffering in the morning.’
And, sure enough, I was right. I woke up bright and early and started cooking the family a fry-up, when a bleary-eyed Nathan walked down the stairs.
‘All right, boy?’ I asked him, chuckling. ‘Bit worse for wear, are we?’
‘I’m dying, Dar,’ he croaked as he slumped on the sofa.
‘I’ve got just the thing for you. This will sort you right out,’ I said, handing him a plate loaded with food.
Nathan took one look at the greasy fry-up in front of him and turned green. He looked at me in alarm, handed back the plate and bolted up the stairs to be sick. I was laughing so hard I almost dropped his breakfast on the floor. It took him three days to recover fully, and it was something I brought up during our banter for years after. I hadn’t set out to make him ill, but as far as I was concerned it was a valuable lesson for him to learn.
Even though he was officially an adult, Nathan still occasionally needed his old man to help get him out of scrapes. A few months after his eighteenth, I was driving over to pick him up in Warmley when I spotted him standing outside one of the shops, waiting for me. I was just about to toot my horn to get his attention when I saw a six-foot-tall guy suddenly grab him by the throat and push him against a nearby wall. I didn’t have to think twice: I swerved the car into the kerb and turned off the engine before sprinting across the road.
There was a girl standing nearby, screaming, ‘That’s not him! Get off him!’
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing to my son?’ I bellowed, before using all my strength to yank the guy off him and punch him hard in the jaw. He dropped to the ground and I turned to Nathan.
‘Get in the car,’ I yelled, and we legged it. The guy was bigger than both of us put together, and I didn’t want to risk finding out what he might do when he got back up again.
Once I had driven away, I turned my attention to Nathan. He was visibly shaken.
‘You all right, son?’ I asked. ‘What was all that about?’
‘No idea,’ he replied. ‘I don’t even know the guy.’
I was fuming that anyone would dare touch him when all he was doing was standing innocently in the street. As we drove back, Nathan turned to me.
‘Thanks, Dar,’ he mumbled.
‘You don’t have to thank me,’ I answered. ‘I was only defending my boy.’
That’s exactly what Nathan was to me – my boy. To him, I was the only father figure he had ever known. We’d had our ups and downs, but on the whole I thought we had a good father–son relationship. Our blended family showed time and time again that DNA meant nothing. We supported and looked out for each other no matter what.
Although we generally got on well during Nathan’s teenage years, we also locked horns sometimes. All teenagers tend to behave appallingly from time to time, and Nathan was no exception. One of these incidents occurred when his nan Margaret and granddad Christopher went away for a few days. Unbeknown to us, Nathan decided to have a huge party in their house, inviting all his friends.
Anjie received a frantic phone call from him the next day.
‘Don’t be mad, Mum, but I had a party last night and it got out of hand,’ he blurted out. ‘You have to help me put it right.’
Anjie hung up the phone and looked at me, shaking her head in despair. ‘We’re going over to my mum’s house,’ she said. ‘Grab some bin bags.’
When we got there, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was a complete bombsite. The inside doors were completely ripped off their hinges, the sofas were slashed, there were picture frames smashed on the floor and fag butts stomped into the carpet. There was the telltale stink of spilled alcohol and pools of vomit everywhere. I felt sick just looking at it. The worst thing was, Nathan’s nan was due to get home that evening.
‘We haven’t got enough time to clean all this up!’ I shouted. ‘What the hell were you thinking?’
‘Please,’ he pleaded in desperation. ‘I have to fix it. Please help me.’
It was obvious that Nathan was completely bricking it, so I started to feel sorry for him and we agreed to help. Luckily, I had my toolkit in the car, so I managed to fix a few of the doors while Anjie and Nathan got to work cleaning up. We spent a whopping nine hours in that house trying to sort it all out. I smuggled away dozens of bags of damaged items and rubbish in the boot of my car. We did a pretty good job, but Nathan still had to face the music when his grandparents got home. There were too many broken items to pretend it never happened.
‘Sorry, boy, but you have to face them on your own,’ I said when we had done all we could. ‘The rest is down to you now.’
Needless to say, Nathan had an almighty tongue-lashing from his grandparents when they returned. Strangely enough, after that Anjie and I never accepted his offers to look after our house while we were away!
Nathan was eighteen when he started seeing his first girlfriend, but it only lasted a few months. He often complained
to us that all her friends were male rather than female. Despite his confidence around his family and close friends, I think he was quite insecure when it came to girls. He certainly seemed to get jealous very easily.
When he and his girlfriend broke up, Nathan started to act very oddly. He insisted that she owed him money, and he used to hang around outside her house in his car. Anjie and I were horrified when we heard he had been moved on by the police.
‘Will you stop stalking her, boy?’ I said angrily when he got home. ‘You’re being creepy. Just walk away, Nathan. Sort yourself out.’
‘She owes me £400, Dar,’ he mumbled.
To be honest, I think the money was just an excuse. I think he would have hung around stalking her anyway. It ended up with Margaret, his nan, having to go and talk to her mum about it, as his former girlfriend was starting to feel afraid of the way Nathan was acting. We were worried about his behaviour too, although we just thought it was a phase he would grow out of.
For the most part, he did seem to grow out of being weird around girls, but none of his girlfriends seemed to last very long. I don’t think that’s at all unusual for guys in their late teens, but there was another incident when Nathan was nineteen that both annoyed and worried me at the same time.
I was working on my car in the driveway one day when he pulled up outside the house. I glanced into his car and saw four very young girls sitting inside. At a glance I could tell they were no older than around twelve. They were all giggling.
‘Who the hell are they?’ I asked Nathan, thinking this was a prank and he was trying to wind me up.
He looked at me blankly. ‘Oh, just some girls who wanted to go for a drive.’
I couldn’t believe that he had picked up some random young girls off the street and driven off with them.
‘What are you playing at, boy?’ I demanded. ‘I don’t know what’s going on here, but this is odd. They’re children. Get in the car and take them back to wherever you found them. Take them back to their parents.’
My reaction made Nathan laugh at first, but when he realised I wasn’t joking he shrugged, got back in the car and drove off. I assume he took the girls home, but we didn’t see him for a few days after that, as he was back at his nan’s and he refused to talk about it afterwards.
I couldn’t get my head around why he’d thought it would be a good idea to take some young girls out in his car, and I eventually decided that he had done it to wind me up. A niggling little doubt was planted, all the same. Did he have some weird ideas about girls? Eventually, I decided he was just a normal teenager trying to find his way in the tricky world of relationships with the opposite sex.
Chapter 5
Becky’s teenage years
FRIDAY, 17 APRIL 2015
Hundreds gather to say goodbye to the ‘Angel of Bristol’, Becky Watts: Hundreds turned out this morning for the funeral of Bristol teenager Becky Watts. Almost two months after the schoolgirl’s disappearance and brutal death horrified the city, people came together to celebrate the ‘shy but big-hearted’ teenager’s young life with a fitting send-off – thanks in part to £11,000 of donations towards the service from far and wide. Mourners and supporters – some wearing T-shirts featuring a photo of the 16-year-old – lined the streets outside St Ambrose Church, showering the horse-drawn carriage bearing her coffin with pink roses as it passed. With the church packed to the rafters, scores more watched proceedings on a big screen outside as a moving service included stories of Becky’s younger days and her great kindness. Her father, Darren Galsworthy, paid an emotional tribute to his daughter, through the Reverend David James. He said: ‘As you look down from heaven, just look at what your short life has achieved – not bad for a shy girl. You will forever be in our hearts and thoughts. Rest in peace, Angel of Bristol.’ Following the service, people cried and clapped as Mr Galsworthy released a dove into the skies above her coffin, before the family left for a private burial at Avonview Cemetery.
Becky had a hard time starting secondary school. Hope, her only friend from Summerhill Primary School, went to a different secondary, and she struggled to make any new friends. She was confident at home, but painfully shy around other kids. Even when we were away on holiday and there were lots of other children running around, Becky wouldn’t mix with them. She was never very good at introducing herself into friendship groups and reading other children’s body language, so as a result she was often left out their games. She’d just spend a lot of time on her own, or with her family.
Anjie and I hadn’t been particularly worried about this when she was at primary school because she had Hope, and she was also close to her cousin, Brooke, but from the minute she started secondary school, Becky found herself the subject of teasing by several different groups of girls. I suppose her lack of self-confidence made her an easy target.
I didn’t know anything about it until a few months into the new term. When she came home from school one afternoon, Becky threw her bag on the sofa and plonked herself down next to Anjie, as she always did.
‘Hello, love,’ I ventured. ‘Had a good day?’
She shrugged in response.
‘Why don’t you ever bring any of your new friends to the house?’ I asked, and to my surprise Becky burst into tears.
Anjie and I looked at each other warily. ‘Oh no,’ she said, putting her arm round Becky. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘I don’t have any friends,’ Becky sobbed. ‘Nobody likes me.’
I was gutted for her. I had been hoping that after years of being a bit of an outcast at the primary school, she would come out of her shell a little when she got to secondary school. It seemed it wasn’t going to be that easy. We talked to her for ages that evening, trying to boost her confidence, telling her that she was a lovely girl and it wouldn’t be long before everyone else realised it.
Danny was in the same school so I secretly asked him if he and his friends would keep an eye out for any trouble if they saw her in the corridors, and we crossed our fingers and hoped it would get better in time.
But it didn’t. One evening, I came home to find Anjie and Becky cuddled on the sofa again, Becky’s eyes red from crying.
‘What’s happened?’ I demanded, horrified, and Anjie shot me a worried glance.
‘We’ll talk about it later,’ she said firmly.
I nodded and left them to it. Anjie was always much better at handling stuff like that than I was. Once she had calmed down, Becky went up to her room and Anjie came into the kitchen to have a chat with me.
‘Becky’s still being bullied,’ she said. ‘They are picking on her looks, her weight, everything. She had her brand-new jacket ripped off her back today.’
‘I’ll take the day off work tomorrow and go to the school,’ I said. Frankly, I felt like finding the culprits and giving them a piece of my mind, but Anjie shook her head.
‘I’ll go and speak to the school,’ she said. ‘And if that doesn’t work, I’ll send you in later.’
That’s how it worked with us. Anjie was the calm, collected parent while I tended to be more like a bull in a china shop. I must admit, her approach often worked better than mine, but I couldn’t stand the idea of anyone treating Becky like that. It made me feel sick to my stomach.
Anjie spoke to staff at the school, who promised to look into it, but still Becky was coming home in floods of tears almost every day.
‘Why don’t people like me, Dad?’ she said, weeping, time and time and again.
It’s a heartbreaking thing for any parent to hear. We all want our kids to be popular in the outside world, but it’s difficult to give advice on how to fix things when they get off on the wrong foot. I felt frustrated and powerless that I couldn’t wave a magic wand and make it all better. I didn’t know how to answer her increasingly desperate questions except to reassure her that she was a lovely person and things would work out in the end.
‘Why am I so fat and ugly?’ she muttered whenever she caught sight of her refl
ection in a mirror.
I didn’t know where that had come from. Becky was extremely pretty and in no way overweight. At eleven years old, she had the normal amount of puppy fat for a girl of her age.
‘You are absolutely perfect,’ I told her, looking straight into her eyes, but I could see my words didn’t mean much. It wasn’t my acceptance she craved.
Anjie and I went up to the school several more times to speak to the staff about what was happening, but if anything our intervention made things worse. When the teachers got involved, the girls who were bullying Becky vowed to make her life hell. It wasn’t long before their bitchy comments about her weight started to take their toll.
I was getting ready to do the weekly food shop one Saturday afternoon when Becky bounded down the stairs and handed me a shopping list.
‘What’s this, Bex?’ I asked.
‘It’s a list of the foods I want to eat from now on,’ she said. I glanced at the list and saw it was just loads of low-fat, ready-made meals.
‘OK, love,’ I said doubtfully, ‘but this is crazy. You’re not fat at all and these meals aren’t particularly good for you.’
I must admit that this was shaky ground for me as a man. I’ve never really understood why women link their weight to their self-worth, and I found myself struggling to find the right things to say to make Becky feel better about herself.
‘Dad, I just want to lose a bit of weight,’ she said. ‘That way I won’t get bullied any more.’
I didn’t see the harm in humouring her for a little while. If she needed to feel that she was regaining control over the situation by losing a few pounds of puppy fat, then so be it – even though buying the ready-made meals she wanted virtually doubled our food bills. I tried to encourage her to eat healthy foods too, but after a few weeks I noticed that she wasn’t even finishing the ready meals I was buying for her. I walked into the kitchen one evening to find her scraping the last of her chicken curry meal into the bin.
Becky Page 6
