I Owe You Nothing. Luke Goss

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СКАЧАТЬ was claiming that Mum was an unfit mother. Mum received the letter from the court making these allegations when we were living in the caravan at Henley. That morning, driving us to school in Camberley, she hit a bus and wrecked the Jag. It was an old car by then, but she really loved it. The accident was totally her fault; she couldn’t concentrate on the driving because the words ‘unfit mother’ were pounding through her brain.

      I detested my father at this point. It was bad enough as a family having to live in a caravan, but to have the added grief and pain of his court action was dreadful, and there were times when Mum and Matt and I all clung together, crying.

      The court arranged for a welfare worker to visit us and assess whether or not we were being properly cared for. By the time she came, we had moved into the house in Camberley. Matt and I had chosen the colours for our bedrooms: his was red and white stripes and mine was green and white. The day the social worker came we dashed in from school as usual, and Mum didn’t tell us who the lady there was, although we soon guessed when we were asked to show her round the house. We were so obviously well-cared for, the social worker decided very quickly that the whole thing was a waste of court time.

      My father’s point of view was that we were leading very unsettled lives and that our schooling was suffering. He thought the caravan was an unsuitable place for us to live and did not realize that it was only a temporary home. There were some very angry scenes between him and Mum at this time, and we were not sheltered from them. Our loyalty was with Mum, who had been there for us all our lives, and that partly accounts for why we became as difficult as we did with Margaret.

      Living in the kind of jigsaw puzzle family in which we grew up is now very common: almost half of all school children in Britain today come from a broken family, and there are literally millions of kids struggling to come to terms with step-parents, half-brothers and -sisters, stepbrothers and stepsisters, several sets of grandparents and all the other baggage of multi marriages. Our situation was probably no better and no worse than the average, and I know that the other people involved – Mum, Tony, Dad, Margaret – were also in a lot of pain, but that didn’t make things any easier.

      Looking back now, Dad accepts that he handled this stage of our lives badly.

      ‘My marriage to Margaret was good for me in many ways, so I shut my eyes to the fact that she had problems with my kids. She did talk to me about it once, and I understood it wasn’t easy for her to have a sort of part-time relationship with two boys who clearly resented her existence.

      ‘When Carol and I were together, we never argued about the way the children were being brought up: even now, after many years of being divorced from her, I think Carol did a remarkable job with them, and must take credit for the fact that they have turned into two caring, decent, honest young men. There were problems between Carol and me over the years, as is inevitable perhaps when there has been a rather bitter divorce, and there was a time when I was very worried about the conditions they were living in. But looking back, I think she did the best possible job in view of all the upheaval and moving.’

      It was soon after we left Cheddar that Matt achieved a milestone in his life: he stopped wetting the bed. I wet the bed until I was about five and a half, then I stopped until I was seven when I became disturbed at Tony’s arrival in our lives, and I wet every night for another year. By the time I was eight I was dry at night, but it took Matt longer. The problem could be equated with the traumas in our lives: I expect that’s what the amateur psychologists would say. But I’m not so sure. I was old enough to be aware of it, and so was Matt. I came to the conclusion that Matt simply went into a very deep sleep every night, much deeper than most people. He is a very dreamy person even during the day: if you want to attract his attention you often have to say his name four or five times. I think he stopped wetting the bed when he reached an age where he may have started sleeping less deeply, because we were at secondary school by then, and had busy lives and more pressures than a small child has.

      I’m not claiming to have any solution to the problem but I believe it should be talked about, because I’m sure there are lots of kids who are deeply embarrassed by it. It’s treated like a taboo although in reality it is probably very common. There are lots of parents, too, going through hell because of it, blaming themselves and getting angry with their children. I’d like to tell everyone to relax about it. It will eventually go away, and the less everyone gets on to the kid about it, the sooner it will happen.

      Some parents think their kid is too lazy to go to the toilet in the middle of the night. Let me tell you, no kid is so lazy that he wouldn’t walk the twenty yards to the toilet when he knows what will happen the next morning if he wets the bed. Nobody does it through choice, nobody. You wake up in the morning and you lie still, and for a moment or two you can convince yourself that you haven’t done it, and then you roll over and hit that horrible cold wet patch. It’s disgusting. You hate yourself.

      I’ve seen Matt work himself up into a terrible state, chanting to himself before bed to try to make himself wake up, and yet he still wet. He went through hell. Mum bought a device with a buzzer that sounded the minute even a drop of water touched the sheet: many a night I’ve woken up, in the next room, to hear Matt’s buzzer going off and he was still sound asleep. I’d have to go in to him to wake him. Then he might climb into bed with me – and sometimes, before morning, he’d wet again, in my bed. It made him so utterly miserable. I’ve seen that panicky, frightened look on his face so many mornings and I’ve hated it.

      You can try all the tricks that people suggest, nothing works. You can go to the toilet ten times before you go to bed, you can stop drinking five hours before bed, your mother can get you up and take you to the toilet when she goes to bed. Nothing works. You could be in a desert, seriously dehydrated, and you’d still wet the bed. It is not something you can control.

      Tony had the idea of putting a chart up on the wall in our kitchen, with ticks and crosses for when we were dry or wet. Gradually my crosses changed into ticks, but Matt’s stayed as crosses: I don’t think that helped him.

      I understand what a terrific burden it is on a mother, having to wash sheets every day. But as soon as the kid is old enough, I think the parents should get him involved in washing his own sheets. They should try not to see it as such a big chore that they end up taking their anger out on the child, giving him an even bigger hang-up about it.

      It caused problems for Matt right through his childhood. He could never go away on school trips or stay over at a friend’s house – and I never did, either. We always made a joint excuse. I would never have gone without him, I always felt his problem was mine, too.

CHAPTER FOUR

       Try

      My Mum, Tony and I walked up to the counter of the music shop in Fleet, near our Camberley home. The assistant said, ‘Hello, Mr Phillips, do you want it now?’ He pulled up from behind the counter an electronic drum kit. I couldn’t believe my eyes, and I was so excited my legs were shaking. It was the best, the greatest, most wonderful present I have ever been given. My mum says I carried it to the car with such reverence, as if it were a crate of delicate china.

      I was twelve years old, and they had scraped together the money to buy me a £400 kit, with eight pads. I had dreamed about owning a drum kit all my life, from when I was a toddler and drove Mum mad banging spoons against saucepan lids. I had been in trouble at school and at home for endlessly drumming rhythms with my fingers. I had fantasized about having my own kit, and now I did. It was a terrific gesture by Mum and Tony because they could ill-afford the money at that stage of our lives, after we had just returned from Cheddar. They had even been considering paying for it in instalments, but in the end had managed to put all the money down at СКАЧАТЬ