Changes are coming, decisions have been made. The threats to send us back to Plymouth are more relentless. It is over. We are out. Boarding school and the army are presented as Mum and Dad’s only options for our future. I like the idea at first. It sounds like an adventure. I am good at new people and places. I have practice.
Christopher pleads to stay on at school for agricultural college, his grades have improved every year. He loves our neighbour’s farm and farming, is dug in deep in the village. He belongs here like no one else. I am too smart-mouthed, too strange, Lilian and Dudley too stand-offish. But Dad is insistent. Christopher is packed off early to the army. He will never forget or forgive them and I am not sure I do. In the summer of ’68, as the rest of the world seems set to change, our family fractures. It is sudden, savage, the shift.
AUGUST 5, 7.30AM. An early weekday visit to the allotment. I keep a shirt in the shed for watering or weeding, in case I have a meeting first thing and don’t want to be wearing mud. I am here to sow, easier in the morning air. I cut sticks and string, give the bed another hoe. There will be short rows, some with Mary’s seed and a couple of cavolo nero, lettuce, red mustard and rocket. A blackbird lays the soundtrack and a robin keeps me company. A few feet away, pigeons hang in the skeleton tree like vultures waiting for something to die. Within an hour or so the sowing is done. I water it in. The forecast is for rain but I can’t resist soaking the rest of the plot. The beans and squash are greedy and it relaxes me before the bus to work (no time to walk now). Mary will have her autumn leaves. I wander around, reluctant to leave. The corn looks as if it is ready to eat, the cobs are fat, but they will have to wait till Howard is back. A young black cat, no collar, passes by nervously.
1968. Battisborough House is set back from a cliff not far from Plymouth. It is a Kurt Hahn school, the Outward Bound man, whose most famous school is Gordonstoun, where Prince Charles has just been head boy. Its reputation is based on character-building. No one goes to Battisborough for its academic excellence, though it is there in its small class size and dedicated teachers. It is founded on a Germanic ideal crossed with an English public-school ethos. There is emphasis on activities. We wear two uniforms: navy blue for the morning and grey for after tea. No ties or blazers but open-neck shirts and sweaters and corduroy shorts (tough if, like me, you think shorts are for summer or primary school), long flannels for church. There are no girls, except a couple of teachers’ daughters who live on the grounds. I wonder if they are ever as longed for again. I date one, the same age as me. We kiss. I rub her skirt and shirt. There is to be no beating, an ethos from the headmaster, David Byatt, who leads by example. I am to test this resolve. The boys who are good at boarding school are the ones unbroken by starting there aged seven (there are, of course, casualties), followed by the boys who start at 11. The odds are against boys who arrive aged 14 because they cannot live at home and still call themselves part of a family.
I love my first year here, though it is at Battisborough I discover my Devon accent, a shock when the Sony machine replays my village burr, less of a shock when other boys mimic it. There is a maximum intake of 60 pupils, though it is down to 36, little more than a class at Kingsbridge. I absorb it all like tissue, the English classes of maybe eight, with a teacher who is interested. ‘You like Herman Hesse, try Günter Grass.’ Wives also teach. I am impressionable, eager, almost desperate to learn. It looks as if it will work. I jump a year in English, Maths and French (no psychopathic slippering here, a less messy exercise book). Every afternoon there are sports, though I am less keen on this. I hate rugby in winter. There are other activities – tennis at the courts of the local landowner’s house or gardening. I tend plants and trees and hide behind rhododendrons to smoke Player’s No 6, the schoolkids’ cigarette of choice. But the afternoons I like best involve cross-country running, unleashed like a lurcher over cliffs, across beaches and along my beloved south Devon estuaries, very nearly free. Battisborough is also where I learn more subtle social lessons, that class and cars matter. Frugality can be suspect. At the end of term a procession of vehicles comes to pick us up – wide Mercedes, fat American convertibles, and the air-cooled splutter of Dudley’s little Fiat 500, not yet the cult car it will become. But I am happy, I know I can adapt. I have done it before.
AUGUST 8. Glorious. Crimson sky. Every day, autumn tightens its grip. Timing is important, crops for winter have to be established before the light and warmth fade too far and energy retreats. Autumn and winter salad mixes must go in, late radishes and hardy herbs. Plans, such as they are, start to be formulated in my head. There is a thought of green manure this year: clover, physalis, vetch. The question is how much of the plot should be covered and what Mary wants. There will be digging to do, a war on weed.
1968. Dad isn’t one for swearing, an occasional bloody if Mum isn’t around. So when Christopher tells me what bugger and prat mean it sounds implausible. The only time with Dad is once in the car when he crashes the gears. We’re alone. I am 14. Old enough to hear him say fuck.
All change. We cannot find your mother but we have found your sister Lesley and your father, the care worker tells me (this use of ‘care’ in ‘children in care’ a Goebbels-like lie). Things are drifting dangerously at home, Christopher is unhappy in the army. I am away at boarding school. Dad has sold Herons Reach to Lilian’s nephew, who wants a bolt hole from Kuwait. Gone the river, gone the field, broken the sense of security. Dudley is clearing the decks.
I am wanting to know more about Alan Jenkins. Mum and Dad are probably resentful, though they have never said so. It is as though it is a matter of poor manners and ingratitude, not identity. Asking is discouraged throughout the system. It is wrong, the ‘right to know’. I am searching for an escape plan. If one door closes, can another open? But if Lilian and Dudley don’t want us, why would anyone?
A photo strip arrives at school of a skinhead girl grinning into the camera. I pore over it. Can I see a likeness? It will be a first for me (Christopher and I are never alike in looks or temperament, though tightly bound together like corn). Most families share the same eyes, smile, same mouth. They swim in a sea of recognition, reassured of where they belong. I think I have always been longing for a face that could be connected to me.
My sister and I exchange excited messages. Lesley writes of her life in Basildon, a new town in Essex, with her – ‘our’ – dad. I show off from my posh Devon school.
I cannot discuss it at home, the wheels are coming off. But I pine for Lesley’s letters, like adolescent love.
I have long wanted a sister, someone soft. Perhaps finding a dad is less important because Dudley has filled that space. A mum, though, is different, a primeval pull. It isn’t anyone’s fault, just how it is. Maybe, as we get older and more male, Lilian still mourns the baby girl she never had.
I worry why she isn’t more affectionate. Kisses, quick cuddles are for when I am sick. I had divined early on that it was because she was too thin, her breasts couldn’t carry enough chemicals for love. Other boys’ mums are more curved, more tactile, invite you in, feed you, sit on the same sofa as their sons. I am envious of friends who are held. It has been a long time. I am in need of mothering.
There isn’t, though, a mother to be found, the care worker says. For now, a sister and a father will do. Letters are exchanged from our twin alien worlds. Lesley’s handwriting is neat and loopy, sometimes comes in green ink.
For the first time, the end of the summer term means a train on my own to London and not a short Devon drive. I am at Paddington Station and my name is called over the Tannoy. Will I come to the station manager’s office. I am sick, a little scared. We would have had counselling for it now, this seismic shift in who we are. The tidal pull of blood and belonging.
Suddenly we are in the same room, family parted 10 years before. Lesley with her Prince of Wales pattern skirt and long, green nails, her Essex accent and smile. With my dad, Ray, it is different, something is wrong, though not from his s
ide. He isn’t the man I expected to see, the one I’ve been waiting for. I rationalise it later: how could anyone live up to the hope, the longing I have buried? I had Hollywooded the moment: the glamorous sailor back from the sea, the white fence with Mum and me waiting. Ray is taking me home, what more could I want?
Basildon is impossible. A New Town, an east London overspill, surrounded by a ring of factories: Ford, Ski yoghurt, Carreras cigarettes. Lesley, my sister, is called after Dad, Leslie Ray. I am a village kid from Devon, who has nearly been to London once on a long day trip to Heathrow Airport with Sunday school (people used to do that, a glimpse of the future and the rest of the planet through pilots and ‘aeroplanes’). Otherwise my world is limited to a twice-yearly trip to Plymouth, once in summer to buy shoes and again before Christmas to buy the Norwegian sweater (mine in blue, Christopher’s in red) that is always our present. We have lunch in the department-store restaurant, maybe a film if there is something suitable.
Basildon is bewildering. Identical estates laid on an identical grid, but I stay for the summer holidays, hanging around the record store to listen to music in booths or at the swimming pool by Ray and Lesley’s flat, if I don’t get lost (I am always lost). I am fascinated by Lesley, the way she speaks, the way she’s dressed, her taste in skinhead music, her feather-cut friends, the soap operas she watches. My relationship with Ray is more complicated. He won’t talk about my mother, show me photos, even tell me her name. He refuses to speak about his life with her or his wedding. ‘You must never ask me, it is better you never know!’ It feels odd to hit a wall so soon.
Ray is a cook but also a Pentecostal evangelist to be seen proclaiming the name of the Lord in Basildon town centre every Saturday. It is like living in a soap series I have never watched but Lesley does, Crossroads or Coronation Street. The connection to the past I have pined for still feels far away. I finally have sex, though, with a girl from the swimming pool on a piece of waste ground outside town. She is older, has more body hair, but it is a bit boring. Another disappointment, another longing unresolved.
1987. I am in need of a birth certificate for a new passport but it seems I don’t exist. Alan Jenkins born on my birthday isn’t to be found. I am confused, so ask at the enquiries desk. Search the adoption register, the man says, if you are not there, your birthdate is wrong. Most of my life I have carried the understanding of caste, that although they had changed my name, had played our parents, the Drabbles didn’t adopt us. I was never sure why we hadn’t made the grade. I was proud to bear the mark of foster child but adoption is another level of belonging, gossamer close to never having to worry about being sent back, no longer on sufferance. A family of your own. A place to stay.
I search the adoption register. And immediately there it is in black and white. All this time, my history mouldering, smouldering, in this London room. Alan Jenkins’s certificate. Adopted by Leslie Ray Jenkins, it says, at 12 months old. I am lost. I had wanted a passport, a long-haul holiday, not the fabric of who I am to lie threadbare in my lunch break.
The missing feeling at 14 when we’d first met at Paddington Station wasn’t a fantasy; something really wasn’t right with Ray. But why adoption, not an affidavit? He must have married my mother. I switch certificates, search marriage registers, turning pages for the quarters before my adoption date. Of course she is here: Lesley Raymond Jenkins marries Sheila Irene Beale. Cafe waitress. My mother. Her name at last, like a faded photo. Radioactive information. Identity uranium.
The next step is logical but I don’t know if I am ready. Should I come back with someone?
Back to the birth register. And here is Allan Peter Beale, born 15.01.1954, with the note: ‘see adoption register’. Me. As a baby. A penned dash on the page for a father’s name. Unknown. I knew I had been Alan Jenkins, Peter Jenkins, Peter Drabble, then back again, the coat as originally cut. Back to where I had started. Or so I’d understood. But now there is another avatar. Baby bastard Allan with two l’s. Born Beale. I order the certificates, return to the office confused, elated, angry. Maybe also relieved. The guy ropes that have grounded me are again frayed.
AUGUST 10. The tail end of Hurricane Bertha arrives from the Caribbean tomorrow. Seems we always have a mini monsoon in high summer now. Today is mostly about tidying, and cropping a basket full of beans. There are too many to eat so I will share them with family and friends. I really need Howard here with his hungry kids. The weight of the blue Blauhilde vines is wrestling a wigwam to the ground. I pile in a metal pole and tether it, like trying to tack a sailing boat against a heavy wind. The chard are like giant rhubarb. One leaf and stem may be a meal for two. I thin through the chioggia. I crop lots of lettuce. The plot is embarrassingly abundant, producing more than we can eat. I have taken to passing out parcels at work like a Red Cross mercy mission; colleagues will soon start hiding. We are mostly living on greens, beans and rice, slaked in tamari sauce and sesame oil. It makes me oddly happy and reminds me of Anglesey.
1973. I am 19 and a small group of us has escaped the city to live in a slightly hapless eco commune. Keen to grow organic vegetables on the edge of the Irish Sea, we are young, with energy and optimism. You can’t say the same about Anglesey. It is the era of arson, of Welsh nationalists burning out second homes. Anglesey in the Seventies doesn’t much like the English. Local people particularly don’t like long hair or Asians or people who are black. We are a metropolitan mix of these, so they don’t much like us, or our organic veg. There is a countryside disconnect between the surrounding seas and land and what people eat. The supermarket reigns supreme, shopping is done on price. It is the early days of genocide farming – three chickens for less than a fiver, local small suppliers closing in the onslaught of multiple rows of packaged foods. They don’t always help themselves much. Our village shopkeeper switches from English to scandalised whispered Welsh when we walk in with velvet coats and smelling of sandalwood oil and exotic sex. My mixed-race girlfriend is spat on in the street. Angela is from Cardiff, Welsh-born, but I tire of facing down packs of racist young men bored at the bus station. It seems our rural idyll models itself on Mississippi, not the Druid holy island we have been naively hoping for. The dream has died. Angela is lonely and pregnant. In love with someone else. She runs away. I follow her to London like a lovesick puppy. A couple of years later, the friends who stay cut their hair, swap Afghan coats for leather jackets and become the Ruts, a punk band that has a hit with ‘Babylon’s Burning’. They don’t mean Anglesey holiday homes.
1968. I am still unsure what sparked my early rebellion: finding my sister; Dudley selling Herons Reach and what it meant; Lilian’s increasing threats to send us back; the world outside the boarding-school walls. But the puberty pupa is cracking and the moth is flexing its wet wings. It may have been Vietnam, apartheid, the Paris riots, Mao, a need to connect with the world from Prague to Peking, to Chicago. But in the end it is hair. I am sick of feeling threatened like a failed asylum seeker. It is as if a bag has been placed over my head and I am standing on a rickety chair with a rope in my hand. I am in trouble at school for writing to the Cuban and Chinese embassies. I wanted a poster of Che Guevera, a copy of Mao’s little red book. In my Marvel comics they are the comic enemy, but they don’t feel like mine. The music I listen to has become more introspective – Dylan, The Doors – my reading, too. The trouble starts quietly at first, with a conversation about haircuts. The Easter holidays are only a couple of weeks away and the school has the barber in. Kids are coming out of the room with military short back and sides, like Elvis in the army. A small group of us stages a haircut strike. One boy shaves his head into a Mohican as a protest. He looks very odd in shorts. Our group quickly grows to a dozen, a third of the school. It is a scene from Lindsay Anderson’s If: a fight for influence between us and the teachers and senior boys who really run the school.
First a few words about discipline: instead of beating at Battisborough, there is a system called ‘penance’, based on time, according
to the offence. This can be handed out by boys: up to 15 minutes at a time by middle-ranking prefects to up to an hour by the senior group or teachers. Running in school can cost you, say, 15 minutes; disputing it an hour. Your time is totted up at Friday lunch and read out over tea. Your first 15 minutes are free. Up to an hour, you get up early on Saturday morning and run in singlet and shorts. If your penance is more than an hour, you copy out the Encyclopaedia Britannica on Saturday evening until you have served your sentence. Any weekend away will have to wait. Character building, they call it.
A haircut strike could never end well but it seems vital at the time – not to go home like a soldier, head shaved high, when your friends’ hair curls over their collar. So we refuse. The prefects threaten. The kindly headmaster pushes a boy across the room. We are stubborn. Four of us borrow money and run away. A friend lives in Plymouth so we pitch up at his flat. There is lots of shoulder-length hair, hippie girls and the wild stink of weed. We smoke our first joints. Someone has a spare acid trip, so we cast lots. Mohican boy wins. A couple of hours or so in, the deputy head’s wife arrives. They knew where we were. We haven’t been discreet. She has been authorised to offer a deal. The school cannot misplace four pupils. What would they tell their parents? She says we can go to our own barber at Easter if we go back with her now. Mohican boy is in no shape for school but the rest of us agree. He will follow tomorrow. No cut. No recriminations. We return, we think, in triumph, eat late-night bacon sandwiches in the English teacher’s house. By the next morning, the senior boys – shorn like sheep – have lobbied the head. Mohican boy is expelled, never to be seen again. The school, as we see it, has reneged on the deal but all the kids go home that Easter weekend with lurid stories of rebellion, dope and LSD.
Plot 29 Page 5
