Psychovertical. Andy Kirkpatrick

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СКАЧАТЬ mess for lunch, where there were pictures of mountains, and walls full of plaques, polished ice axes and mountaineering mementos. On one wall was a giant picture of Mount Everest, with its camps marked, part of an upcoming military expedition. Standing there in my best clothes, I felt I was in a special place, a place of men. Even to a five-year-old, there was such a feeling of being wrapped up in the military, of being one institutional family. I can understand how soldiers can carry on fighting in wars that they feel are unjust, or illegal. It was a home.

      I was a very physical child who was always running, climbing and generally getting into the type of trouble that such kids usually do. My clothes were always a collection of patches, ripped, scuffed, torn and then mended, with shoes lasting me no more than a few weeks, meaning cheap rubber wellies and shorts became the only answer for my despairing mum. My legs were always brown with bruises, and scabby. The arrival of my brother Robin had given me another person to play with, but, because I was a rough child, Robin would often come off worse: falling off, falling down, being hit, knocked out or generally injured in any playtime we had. One of my strongest memories is of my mum slapping me, my brother standing crying behind her, while she shouted, ‘Your brother must have rubber bones.’ It was a phrase repeated so often I actually believed such a thing was possible, no doubt further adding to Robin’s misery. I used to think that our family were borderline freaks, as not only did my brother have rubber bones but my mum also had ‘eyes in the back of her head’.

      Other children were not fortunate enough to have rubber bones, and for a while I was in big trouble after pushing a twelve-year-old girl off the top of the slide and breaking her arm. I wasn’t a bad child or a bully in any way, only a child who ‘always took things too far’.

      I was a very happy-go-lucky boy, but Robin was less easy to please. My mum would often tell him to stop whining, sometimes slapping him on the legs and telling him ‘Now you have something to whine about.’ She often put the disparity in our characters down to the fact that the doctor had run him under the cold tap as soon as he’d been born, a shock he’d never quite recovered from.

      My mum had met my dad at a dance, and they were married not long afterwards. She was also from Hull. She had wanted to go to art school, but instead had been forced to give up such fancy notions and work in a bakery. I suspect this had had a major effect on the rest of her life, as she would often tell us this story, wanting us never to compromise what we wanted to do. My mum was far from pushy, but she always told us that the world was our oyster—not that I ever really understood what that meant.

      What she wanted most of all, though, was children, and I had been her firstborn, in 1971, Robin coming along a year later. Times were hard for her, with my dad’s pay low, and she would often repeat the phrase, ‘I don’t know how we’ll make ends meet’, which I mistook as ‘hen’s meat’, often wondering if hen’s meat tasted just like chicken. Although we were poor, my mum hid it well, and did things that were free: going for walks, playing on the beach, drawing and painting, and giving the priceless gift of a parent’s attention. My mother’s side of the family had been craftsmen, her father a carpenter, his father a head gardener, her great-grandfather a stone mason. From her I learnt to draw, something that would prove invaluable later in life. I scribbled on anything at hand as soon as I could hold a crayon.

      Like my dad, my mum wanted fun and adventure, and a life less ordinary than the one she had left behind in Hull, but not at the cost of security for her and her kids.

      We lived on the military estate on the edge of the camp, not far from the beach. Even at the age of five I was a bit of a loner and a daydreamer, happy to be by myself, playing for hours in the garden, making up imaginary worlds. I was lucky enough to have the freedom to do my own thing and wander around the estate by myself, in the days before people even knew anything about pedophiles, where there were only ‘funny men’. I was only reined in after I went missing one day and didn’t come home for lunch, and the whole camp was mobilized to look for me. Several hundred soldiers and airmen combed the sea shore, fields and rivers looking for my body. In the end I turned up asleep in a collection of hay bales a few hundred metres from our house. My mum belted me with relief, shouting, ‘I was worried sick,’ a phrase that was now added to her daily litany.

      After that I had to stay with Robin, although this almost cost him his life on more than a few occasions.

      My worst youthful scrape, and one of my earliest fully formed memories, was going to our next-door neighbour’s house with Robin to look at their aquarium. It stood on a wooden stand near the front door, looking like an enormous TV filled with fish. We would stand with our noses pressed up against the glass, and watch the fish race around. On this day, my mum stood talking on the doorstep to the couple who owned the fish, my dad being away on an expedition. She had probably taken us around to see the fish as a distraction because I was missing him.

      We were playing our usual fish-spotting game, eyes tracking the red, blue and purple flashes darting around the tank. The couple who owned the house would always tell us that we had to be careful as the tank held piranhas, and that they would bite us if we got too close. I always wondered if they really would. If I were to stick in my hand, would the flesh be ripped off it in seconds like I’d seen in an old film once on our black and white TV?

      I wanted to find out if it was true.

      The fish darted away from the glass as I moved round to the side of the tank, trying to grab the top so I could pull myself up and dip my hand in. I would probably have lifted Robin up so he could dip his hand in, but already he had learned not to get involved in any of my games and would probably have started crying.

      Being small for my age I found the tank was too high, so, looking for another option, I saw that I could maybe climb up between the wall and the tank, using the skirting board as a foothold. I started by squeezing my leg in, my welly sticking well to the edge of the skirting as I tried to squirm up the gap, which widened as I pushed in.

      I looked through the glass as I moved up, seeing through the drifting green murk my brother’s tiny face, his eyes fixed on the dancing fish. I pushed up. I slipped back. I pushed harder.

      The tank moved . . . then moved some more . . . then crashed over onto Robin. An explosion of glass and water shot through the porch, a tsunami raging out of the front door and knocking everyone off their feet.

      There I stood, my back to the wall, looking down at the floor littered with glass, pebbles, soggy green plants, twitching fish and, right in the middle, the tips of two small red willies—my little brother.

      Incredibly Robin made a swift recovery, and after a night in the hospital he left with only a few cuts, being declared by the doctor as having a very strong heart.

      Personally, I put it down to his rubber bones.

      Not long afterwards my sister was born. My mum had always wanted a daughter, and had become so desperate she’d taken to clothing Robin in dresses when he was a baby. Joanne was born in 1976 and from the beginning everything changed.

      She never stopped crying, screaming non-stop for six months. The calm, fun house I’d known existed no longer. Mum and Dad became steadily worn down, tired and strung out. My dad could escape but not my mum.

      Then one day my mum took us all to the hospital, and I can remember me and Robin waiting in the hallway while she talked to the doctor. Then I could hear her crying and screaming, appearing in the hallway distraught. They had asked her if either I or Robin had dropped Joanne. It appeared her hip was broken. Soon, though, it was discovered she had been born with an undiagnosed congenital hip defect, meaning she had no hip bone, and had been in terrible pain since her birth.

      Soon after that, Dad was posted to another camp in Llanwrst on the edge of Snowdonia and a few weeks later СКАЧАТЬ