Nothing Alan ever did was right. Alan was stupid. Alan was slow. Alan would never amount to anything. Even his reading was childish. Why didn’t he like playing rugby or football or going out camping with the cadets? It’s true that Alan was not physically active when he was a child. He was quite plump and perhaps a bit girlish with blue eyes and long, fair hair. During the day he was bullied by some of the other boys. At night he was bullied by his own father. And here’s something else that may shock you. Elias beat the boys in the school until they bled. Well, there was nothing unusual about that, not in a British prep school in the seventies. But he beat Alan too, many times. If Alan was late for class or if he hadn’t done his homework or if he was rude to another teacher, he would be marched down to the headmaster’s study (it never happened in our private flat) and at the end of it he would have to say ‘Thank you, sir.’ Not ‘thank you, Father,’ you notice. How could any man do that to his son?
My mother never complained. Maybe she was scared of him herself or maybe she thought he was right. We were a very English family, locked together with our emotions kept firmly out of sight. I wish I could tell you what motivated him, why he was so unpleasant. I once asked Alan why he had never written about his childhood although I have a feeling that the school in Night Comes Calling owes a lot to Chorley Hall – it even has a similar name. The headmaster who gets killed is also similar in some ways to our father. Alan told me he had no interest in writing an autobiography, which is a shame because I would have been interested to see what he made of his own life.
What can I tell you about Alan during this time? He was a quiet boy. He had few friends. He read a lot. He didn’t enjoy sport. I think he was already living very much in the world of his imagination although he didn’t begin writing until later. He loved inventing games. During the school holidays, when the two of us were together, we would become spies, soldiers, explorers, detectives … We would scurry through the school grounds, searching for ghosts one day, for buried treasure the next. He was always so full of energy. He never let anything get him down.
I say he wasn’t writing yet, but even when he was twelve and thirteen years old, he loved playing with words. He invented codes. He worked out quite complicated anagrams. He made up crosswords. For my eleventh birthday, he made me a crossword that had my name in it, my friends, and everything I did as clues. It was brilliant! Sometimes he would leave out a book for me with little dots underneath some of the letters. If you put them together they would spell out a secret message. Or he would send me acrostics. He would write a note, which would look ordinary if mother or father picked it up, but if you took the first letter of every sentence, once again it would spell out a message that would be known just to the two of us. He liked acronyms too. He often called mother ‘MADAM’ which actually stood for ‘Mum and Dad are mad’. And he’d refer to father as ‘CHIEF’ which meant ‘Chorley Hall is extremely foul’. You may think all this a bit childish but we were only children and anyway, it made me laugh. Because of the way we were brought up, we both got used to being secretive. We were afraid of saying anything, expressing any opinion that might get us into trouble. Alan invented all sorts of ways of expressing things so that only he and I understood. He used language as a place for us to hide.
Chorley Hall came to an end for both of us in different ways. Alan left when he was thirteen and then, a couple of years later, my father suffered a massive stroke that left him semi-paralysed. That was the end of his power over us. Alan had moved to St Albans School and he was much happier there. He had an English teacher he liked, a man called Stephen Pound. I once asked Alan if this was the inspiration for Atticus Pünd but he laughed at me and said that the two weren’t connected. Anyway, it was clear that, one way or another, his career was going to be in books. He had started writing short stories and poetry. When he was in sixth form, he wrote the school play.
From this time on, I saw less and less of him and I suppose in many ways we grew apart. When we were together, we were close, but we were beginning to live our own, separate lives. When we got to university age, Alan went to Leeds and I didn’t go to university at all. My parents were against it. I got a job in St Albans working in the records department of the police force and that’s how I ended up marrying a police officer and eventually coming to live and work in Ipswich. My father died when I was twenty-eight. By the end, he was bedridden and needed round-the-clock support and I’m sure my mother was grateful when he finally conked out. He had taken out a life insurance policy so she was able to support herself. She’s still alive, although I haven’t seen her for ages. She moved back to Dartmouth, where she was born.
But back to Alan. He studied English literature at Leeds University and after that he moved to London and went into advertising, something a lot of young graduates were doing at the time, particularly if they had a degree in humanities. He worked at an agency called Allen Brady & Marsh and as far as I can tell he had a wonderful time, not working very hard, getting paid quite well and going to a lot of parties. This was the eighties and advertising was still a very self-indulgent industry. Alan worked as a copywriter and actually came up with quite a famous line: WHAT A LOVELY LOOKING SAUSAGE! It’s another one of his acrostics. It spells out the name of the brand. He rented a flat in Notting Hill and for what it’s worth he had plenty of girlfriends.
Alan stayed in advertising throughout his twenties but in 1995, the year before he turned thirty, he surprised me by announcing that he had left the agency and enrolled in a two-year postgraduate course in creative writing at the University of East Anglia. He had invited me down to London especially to tell me. He took me to Kettner’s and ordered champagne and it all came spilling out of him. Kazuo Ishiguro and Ian McEwan had both gone to East Anglia. They had both been published. McEwan had even been shortlisted for the Booker prize! Alan had applied and although he didn’t think he would be accepted, that was what had happened. There had been a written application, a portfolio of writing and then a tough interview with two faculty members. I had never seen him happier or more animated. It was as if he had found himself and it was only then that I realised how much being an author mattered to him. He told me he would have two years to write a novel of eighty thousand words under supervision and that the university had strong links with publishers, which might help him get a deal. He already had an idea for a novel. He wanted to write about the space race, seen from the British perspective. ‘The world is getting smaller and smaller,’ he said. ‘And at the same time we’re getting smaller within it.’ That was what he wanted to explore. The main character would be a British astronaut who never actually left the ground. It was called Look to the Stars.