I Owe You Nothing. Luke Goss

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СКАЧАТЬ or changed the bed. She remembers feeling very alone during the eight months they lived at the Brockley flat after our birth.

      But there were some good times as well. Mum has a really great singing voice, and they shared the same taste in music: Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight and the Pips, the Beatles, James Taylor. Wherever they lived, and however little money they had, my parents always surrounded themselves with music. Dad would get his guitar and his harmonica out, and Mum would sing. Because she was shy, she preferred to sing in the dark: they would lie in bed together singing. Even before we were old enough to remember it, Matt and I were surrounded by music.

      Soon we moved from the flat in Brockley to a ground-floor maisonette at Hither Green. It was bigger and better than Brockley, although the tiny boxroom bedroom that Matt and I shared was damp and Mum constantly had to redecorate it.

      For the first year of our lives, me and my brother were both bald, and then we sprouted a mop of blond, downy hair. We had big blue eyes and dimples. Mum says that wherever she took us, people stopped her and commented on how lovely we were. I’m sure that all parents of twins will know what it is like: one baby gets a lot of attention and fuss made over it; two are guaranteed twice the attention and twice the fuss.

      Mum was completely wrapped up in us: ‘They were my saviours, they made my life worth living,’ she says. ‘We used to giggle together all the time, and I’d be so busy talking to them as we walked along the street that more than once I pushed the pram into a lamp-post. I loved them to pieces. My mum adored them, too. They were her first grandchildren, after all, and she was forever buying them clothes and toys. I’d go to see her once a week and she’d make sure I had a huge meal – she knew that money was tight and that I’d be making sure that the boys and Alan had everything, without worrying about myself. I never had to tell her, she just knew, and there would be a package of things for me to take back home with me.’

      Dad was now working as a hosiery salesman, and he was also doing evening jobs to raise more money. It was while he was knocking on doors doing market research for Gillette that he met a man who is still a friend of his to this day, and who sparked in him an interest in joining the police.

      ‘This chap admitted bluntly that he had joined to get a police house and to have job security. He suggested that if I was interested I should try the City of London police, not the Metropolitan Police. I was worried about it, I thought we might alienate family and friends by joining the police. But Carol was philosophical: she said that if we lost friends because we needed good housing and a steady wage, they weren’t worth having,’ he says.

      It took a long time for Dad to be accepted. The police force weren’t too happy about his employment record, but eventually they accepted him for training, when we were two and a half years old. Mum was very pleased and proud, and thought that life was going to get better for us all. She didn’t realize that her problems were just beginning.

CHAPTER TWO

       Just Another Tear

      It was the most violent thunderstorm I have ever seen. I was four years old, and terrified. I huddled on my bed with my brother Matt, both of us crying. Suddenly a flash of lightning crackled across the window, lighting up the room. In the brightness I saw my mum and dad, standing by the French windows, side by side. Just the sight of them made me feel warm and safe and secure. It was one of those lovely childhood feelings when you know, deep down know, that because they are there, everything will be all right. You cannot be harmed while your mum and dad stand guard, and they were standing by the window guarding Matt and me from the storm. I stopped crying and snuggled down to sleep, a happy little boy.

      Three weeks later my childhood happiness would be shattered: my dad left us, for good.

      The storm broke in Majorca, on the only foreign holiday we ever went on. It was the summer before my fifth birthday, so I was old enough to have clear memories of it. It was a week of perfect fun: swimming, playing, Mum rubbing suntan oil on our backs. It felt like a family should feel.

      Unknown to me at the time, the holiday was a farewell gesture from my father. When my parents had booked it, they did not know they were going to split up; but by the time we all went away, Mum already knew that when we got back Dad would be leaving. I think going on the holiday was probably a mistake. On the one hand, it gave us some happy memories to treasure of our parents together, but on the other hand it lulled us into a false sense of security. However young we were, my brother and I had some inkling that things were not quite right, we were aware of the friction: but seeing them playing happy families on holiday in Majorca soothed any doubts we had, and left us unprepared for the shattering blow of Dad leaving. Looking back on the memory of them both standing at the French window while the storm raged is particularly poignant because to me it summed up all the happiness and security that a child has the right to be given, and it left an indelible image of their togetherness, which made my sense of loss so much more acute.

      Things had not been going well for Mum and Dad from the time that Dad joined the police, more than two years earlier. He was sent away to Oxford for three months training, and that was a lonely time for Mum, as Dad only got home at weekends. But when the course finished, she was determined to see his passing out parade: she was very proud of him. She had saved some money for the train fare, she borrowed her sister Ann’s boots so that she looked her smartest despite the tight budget we lived on, she dressed my brother and me in our best clothes and set off for Oxford. We were nearly three years old, so we were a handful to control during the journey and the ceremony, but Mum was determined that we should see Dad’s big moment.

      She arrived to an uncomfortable reception. Dad asked her if she had received his letter: apparently he had sent her a six-page letter telling her that he thought their marriage was over and that he would not be returning to live with us after the course. Mum had not received it before setting out. Not surprisingly, there was a huge row and a terrible journey home for us all. Mum at least had the satisfaction of forcing Dad to tell her to her face, but none the less she was devastated. She had honestly not realized that there was anything seriously wrong with the marriage, and she loved Dad very deeply.

      ‘I had a boyfriend before Alan, but Alan was the first real love of my life,’ she says. ‘I was young and inexperienced, but I believed that marriage was for ever and that children need a father. I wanted him back and I was so miserably unhappy.’

      We went back without Dad to the maisonette in Hither Green, and he was still away at the start of 1972, the year of the miners’ strike when the whole country went on to a three-day working week, and when electricity supplies were cut off for long periods each day. The flat at Hither Green was all-electric, and it was cold and damp at the best of times, so my great grandmother said we could go and stay at her flat. She moved in with her daughter, my gran, and we took over her home at Nunhead, which is between Lewisham and Brixton. Mum walked there with the two of us, a suitcase full of clothes, and our cat in a bag. We must have looked a sorry sight.

      Our new home was in a big old block of flats in a tough area, a place where kids put lighted matches through the letter box for sport. Mum was ill while we were there, and she remembers it as the worst period of her whole life. I don’t remember it at all, although I have clear memories of my great grandmother, who died when I was seven.

      After we’d been there a few weeks my dad decided to come back home again. He and Mum talked, and in the end determined to give their marriage another go.

      ‘I hated being away from my kids, I really missed them very badly, missed knowing what they were up to every day,’ he says.

      Dad by this time qualified for a police house, so СКАЧАТЬ