I Owe You Nothing. Luke Goss

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СКАЧАТЬ the cottage straight and, although it was never completely finished, when we moved out it was a very attractive and picturesque home. We never really got to grips with the garden though: it was waist deep in nettles when we moved in, and then one day when I returned from school it had all been ploughed up. It looked like a muddy field, with deep furrows across it. It stayed like that until we left.

      We went to Fairlands School, our first secondary school. We made friends and we were not unhappy, but we always felt we were outsiders. Our strong London accents made for a communication problem with the local kids, who had country accents as broad as ours. Some of them asked us if we were Australian! We had to learn a new language: ‘daps’ meant trainers, ‘scrap’ was a fight. Because we were already very interested in clothes and always believed in personal hygiene (Matt and I were using deodorants and anti-perspirants before most boys had heard of them), we tended to be more popular with the girls than the boys. That made us even less popular with the boys, but we were already tall and strong (five feet ten inches by the time we were eleven) and we defended ourselves pretty well in any punch-ups.

      For a time I went out with a girl called Karen, who was a year older than me and the most popular girl in the school. One day her sister phoned up and said she didn’t want to go out with me any more, and I found out later that behind my back Matt had been round to her house and chatted her up. It didn’t always work that way, though: I took great delight one day in introducing him to my new girlfriend, a girl called Nicky: she’d been going out with him the previous week!

      When we were told by Mum and Tony, a year after moving to Cheddar, that we were going back to London I had mixed emotions: I didn’t want to leave my girlfriend, a small, pretty blonde girl who I thought I was devoted to at the time, and, much worse, I did not want to be parted from our puppies, Bill and Ben, who had to be given away. But I did want to get back to the city.

      It was Tony who had the worst time down there. He could not find work. The good life is great if you have lots of money: when you are trying to pay back a loan and support yourselves, it can be a nightmare. Tony travelled as far as South Wales to work, but could find only casual jobs. Village people don’t exactly open their arms to outsiders and he found it difficult to fit in. At times he had to hunt around the garden for firewood to keep us all warm.

      He tried lots of schemes to make money, and we all trudged miles sticking leaflets through doors for him. We had great fun helping him to train as a double glazing salesman. He did a course, and then he practised knocking on our door and trying to sell to Mum or Matt or me. We loved it because it was an excuse to open the door and be rude to him, which most kids would enjoy. I know that whatever else becomes of me, I could always work as a trainer for door-to-door salesmen: I perfected all sorts of excuses for not buying from him. When he had to do it for real, the whole family went out in the car with him and literally pushed him up the first drive.

      Mum and Tony protected us from the worst of it, but they were at a very low ebb during that year in Cheddar. They used up all their savings, they could not afford to pay Tony’s father the money they owed him, and Tony was so unhappy he was close to a breakdown. He’s definitely a city person; country life was not for him. Unknown to Tony at the time, and because she was desperate, Mum went to see his father and asked him to give Tony a job, which he did.

      We sold the house in Cheddar and made sufficient profit to pay off the debt and put down the deposit on a house in Camberley. Mum chose the house by herself: Tony told her to get on with it. But there was a hiccup, and the purchase of the original house they were buying fell through at the last minute. Mum rushed around and found another, but we were unable to move in for a few weeks, so when we first moved back to London we were once again living in a caravan, this time on a site at Henley. I hate caravans and I cannot for the life of me imagine why people go on holiday in them.

      Because we were enrolled at Collingwood School in Camberley, and because Mum did not want our education to be messed around any more by changing schools, she drove us to Camberley from Henley every morning in the rush hour, a round trip of one and a half hours, which she repeated every afternoon.

      It was while we were in Cheddar that the relationship between Mum and Dad had gone through its most critical and unpleasant phase. There had been disputes between them before, over maintenance payments, and they both felt they had grievances. As I have already said, I love Dad and have a great relationship with him now, and I have also tried to understand why he behaved the way he did. But he admits himself he was way out of order in some of his actions, both to us and to Mum. Even today, with so much water under the bridge, I can feel a physical pain when I think about it.

      Dad received a bad school report about us and was very angry. He assumed that we weren’t trying: we were, but we had moved about so much that our schooling had been disrupted. He wrote to us: it was a typed letter and it was a ‘harsh, dogmatic attack’; those are his own words to describe it and he accepts that he should never have sent it.

      We each received identical letters and we were desperately upset. It was as formal as a letter to a bank manager, but much nastier. He even signed it ‘Alan Goss’. To me, it seemed like yet more proof that my father did not love me. A child does not understand about marriage breakdown: when one parent leaves, the child always imagines that in some way they are at fault, that the parent does not love them. Not enough was done to compensate for that; Dad never went out of his way to explain it to us, nor did he demonstrate his affection physically. So when we read the letter we were convinced that he did not love us. We were so upset that we did not go to school that day.

      Mum went berserk and there was a loud slanging match down the phone. She said that she would not let us go to stay with Dad: he and his wife Margaret had recently moved to a house that was big enough for us to visit, and he wanted us to spend a week with him for the first time since he had left home. Dad retaliated by taking Mum to court, claiming that she was refusing him access to see us: this after he had been dissuaded from dropping out of our lives altogether a couple of years earlier. Mum explained to the court that she was not denying him the right to have his children stay with him, she simply wanted him and Margaret to build a closer relationship with us before we were taken off to stay with a woman we did not know in an unfamiliar house. The court agreed, and ordered Dad and Margaret to travel to Cheddar and see us at least three times before we could stay with them. They did it within ten days, and we went to stay with them for a week.

      Margaret made a great effort to welcome us. She cooked our favourite foods, made me my favourite tuna and mayonnaise sandwiches, and we in turn behaved ourselves and the week passed very well. I remember being so nervous before we went there that I felt sick, but at the end of the week I had developed an affection for her. It was the only time that things worked out between her and us though, and I cannot really explain why. I suspect we were all trying too hard that week and in real life nobody can keep up that level of effort. Dad says we were cold, sullen and withdrawn on our next visit: we probably were. We were eleven years old and wracked with guilt about enjoying being with Dad; we felt it was a betrayal of Mum, even though she did not consciously impose that view on us, and I think we just put the shutters up on our relationship with Margaret.

      Mum says, ‘Watching them going off to stay with another woman tore me apart. I tried hard not to let them know how I felt. I genuinely wanted them to get on well with their Dad because blood is thicker than water. But I’m sure they sensed how unhappy I was seeing them go.’

      When we moved back to London, just before we went to the caravan, we stayed with my granddad; I have some lovely memories of that time. Granddad has been the most constant father figure in my life, always there for me whenever I needed him. While we were there, Dad did not know where we were living: he found out that we had left Cheddar by contacting the school, because in all the rush to get back to London nobody had given him our new address. He was livid, and applied to the court for care and control of us (he and Mum had been awarded joint custody at the time of the divorce).

      He СКАЧАТЬ