I Owe You Nothing. Luke Goss

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СКАЧАТЬ to make judgements about us based on one-day visits; we were rapidly becoming strangers to each other.

      He says now that he didn’t see us more often because he encountered a lot of hostility from Mum. I’m sure that’s true: her life had been devastated by him walking out, and she wasn’t about to put down a welcome mat for him. But I believe he should have persevered for at least the first two or three years, seeing us more regularly, for our sakes. As it was, he copped out and let his visits slide, so that when we did see each other it was such hard work for all of us. At the end of the day we used to say goodbye with a little peck on the cheek, when all along I was desperate for him to fling his arms round me and hug me. I used to walk into our house with tears in my eyes, trying hard not to let him see them.

      I don’t believe that the break-up of any marriage or long-term relationship is entirely black and white: there are faults on both parts and I have tried not to take sides between Mum and Dad. But I do know that in terms of bringing us up on her own my mum was brilliant, and my dad was just not there, however much we wanted and needed him.

      When you have a child you immediately become a fully-fledged parent. You don’t have any training courses, you don’t have to produce a CV or any other certificates, you are what that child has got. You are taken for granted by that small person you have created; that’s part of the deal of being a parent. It’s a responsibility you have to take very seriously, no matter how difficult it is at times. You can’t cop out, like my dad did. Even though I now understand everything better, I know what he was going through and I get on with him brilliantly today, in spite of this there are still huge, unresolved miseries inside me when I think back to those years.

      If we were suffering, so was Mum. ‘I don’t fall in love easily and I don’t fall out of love easily,’ she says. ‘It takes me a long time to turn. But part of me wanted the marriage to end because at least I would know where I stood, we had been messing around for so long trying to keep the thing going. I was terrified of being on my own with just the boys, petrified. It sounds cowardly, but it’s the truth. I didn’t want the loneliness, the poverty. I didn’t even feel secure in our home, which was a police house.

      ‘But it was a question of dusting myself down, and doing my crying when the boys were in bed. But they did know how upset I was, and they did their share of crying, too. I didn’t hide from them the fact that their dad wasn’t coming back: I thought that if I lied to them they would have nobody left in the world they could trust.

      ‘They became very insular, very dependent on me. I once went down the road to the phone box, which you could see from our house, to ring my father. I’d only been gone a couple of minutes and I could hear them crying. They were at the end of our path looking for me, clinging together with tears pouring down their faces. “You won’t leave us, Mummy, will you?” they kept asking. It was heart-breaking. It cracks me up even now to think about it. I just had to give them hugs and hugs to reassure them.

      ‘Alan and I were probably both too young when we married, but he was able to pick himself up and walk away from it, doing his growing up somewhere else in a way that suited him. I was forced to grow up and get on with life because of the children. But I would never, ever change places with him: he missed out on so much joy by not being with Luke and Matthew.

      ‘If we had stayed together, the boys would have had a tougher upbringing and may not have turned out the way they did. I don’t regret my marriage to Alan: I loved him, my children were conceived in love and born in love – how can anyone regret that?’

      We had started school by the time they split up, at first going to St Mark’s Junior School in Mitcham, but transferring after a while to Beechholme, also in Mitcham. One of my happiest memories is of being met by Mum at the gate and going home to sit on her lap with tea and biccies. It was a ritual that I loved. It sounds like something out of Little House on the Prairie, but it’s true. I fell in love with my first teacher, who had glasses and long hair, and I sobbed when I had to leave her class.

      We were typically naughty little boys in those days. I can remember dunking my head in a puddle to try to catch a cold, so that I could stay home from school. Unfortunately a woman saw me and followed me home to tell my mum, and I was in trouble. Another time Mum nearly caught me and a girl called Jenny showing each other our naughty bits in the garage – we hid in a wardrobe that was stored in there, terrified of being caught with our pants down. The garage, which was at the back of the house, was a favourite place. We spent all our pocket money on bubble gum and practised for hours trying to blow bigger and bigger bubbles.

      Money was very tight. We were offered free school dinners, but Mum was too proud to accept them. She put cardboard in her shoes and borrowed a friend’s sewing machine to make our clothes, to save money. One day, in desperation, we went in the pouring rain with Mum to the phone box so that she could ring granddad and ask him for some money. She called me into the phone box because I was getting wet outside, and as I went in I noticed something that looked like a pound note on the floor. When I picked it up I saw that it had the Queen’s head on both sides – I was very disappointed, because I thought it must be toy money. But when I gave it to Mum she realized that it was two pound notes stuck together, probably worth about ten pounds today, and enough to buy us all some food for the rest of the week. We all hugged each other in delight.

      Mum got a part-time job working in an employment agency in Streatham. Her boss would not let her leave the office five minutes early to catch the bus back to Mitcham, so when she finished work she literally had to run all the way to be sure of being at the school gates when we came out: we were so insecure we would be distraught if we could not see her face among those of the other mums.

      When Dad first moved out he went into rented accommodation in Finchley, sharing a house with some people much younger than him, but he was already seeing Margaret, the woman who was to become his second wife and our stepmother. They met on the train when he was travelling to work from Mitcham. She was also married, but was separated from her husband, and before too long she had bought a flat in Sutton where they lived together. It was a while before we met her, and it was never really an easy relationship.

      ‘Both the women in my life were unhelpful with my relationship with my sons,’ says Dad. ‘It was understandable from Carol, she felt a great deal of animosity towards me and she made it hard work for me to visit them. I could see how they were affected by the bad feeling. I was also given a hard time at home afterwards from Margaret, who I felt resented the time I spent with them. In the end it was too taxing, too sad, too hard to go back each week, and I cut my visits down to once a month, and then every six weeks, even every eight weeks. I can see now that Luke is right, I should have worked harder at being with them more. But I never actually stopped seeing them, even at the risk of my relationship with Margaret, and even after being told by their teachers and doctor that my visits were too upsetting for them. It was not a good situation, but it was probably typical of many, many broken marriages where children are involved.’

      Dad married Margaret in 1976, and we weren’t told about it or invited to the wedding. Luckily for us, Margaret did not have any children from her first marriage, and she and Dad did not give us any little half-brothers or sisters: I don’t know how I would have coped with sharing him with other children, especially knowing that he was living with them and therefore much closer to them than he was to us. I know lots of kids have to live with that situation, but I’m just grateful it didn’t happen to us.

      Mum had also met a man six months previously who was to become our new stepfather, and play a very large role in our lives: Tony Phillips. She went out one evening with a crowd of her girlfriends and found herself chatting to a man with ‘twinkling eyes’, as she describes it.

      ‘I didn’t fall in love instantly, but I thought he was very cute and I was attracted to him straightaway,’ she says. ‘I’d tried going out with one or two other fellas after Alan left, СКАЧАТЬ