Let me tell you a story, now I’ve got your attention.
Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.
Once upon a time there were two little girls born to a young mother who named them not for the rose trees in the Grimms’ tale, Snow White and Rose Red, but for the beautiful film stars she would rather have been herself.
The mother was already sad, because she realised she hadn’t married a king but a total tosser with a roving eye and a gambling habit – but she quite liked her two daughters. They made her smile, and the older one was very good at taking care of the younger on the days the mother couldn’t get out of bed.
Only when the king disappeared with Lynnette from the Cordor estate, the mother was so distraught that she couldn’t stop crying, and soon after she became well and truly hooked on pot and then on mother’s little helpers.
Easily done. Valium was all the rage in the late 1970s...
When even the dodgy doctor on the high street refused to fill yet another prescription, she asked her Uncle Rog for help. He lit another fag and sniffed: Go down the Breakspears in Brockley – you’ll get anything there.
Unfortunately that day the dealer in the pub wasn’t the usual bloke but a new one: a handsome, stress-wise type, pretty eyes and sneering mouth. ‘I can do Valium today, love, and if I ever can’t, think about a hit of smack instead? Does the same sort of thing, don’t it?’ Then he gave her a kiss. ‘You’re very pretty, ain’t you?’
And so it was that the mother fell for a man worse even than the horror dad of her two girls.
She kept off the heroin for a while – she wasn’t daft. But when the pills began to not quite do their job, well…
And so the older girl – the quieter, gentler one – kept looking after the younger, who was a right little livewire, and somehow they stumbled through their childhood together – until they met the bear. But that’s another story, for another day.
* * *
Bit clearer?
And make of that what you will, but just know this: if you grow up at the knee of a woman so out of it she can’t remember to feed you every morning or take you to school; if you know that she kind of can’t help it herself, but she’s failing as a parent, except you’re too young to actually manufacture that thought properly, so you just think, ‘Oh that’s our Mum, she’s spaced again,’ and you still love her anyway, though you couldn’t define love if you were asked to; if you still hope she’ll love you, despite the fact she’s so off her head most of the time that she wouldn’t know what love was if it jumped out and punched her on the nose – a broken nose, broken more than once from fighting with fellas or falling on her face – well if you go through that for a bit, it will affect you. Yeah, it will.
We are a product of what we grow up in. Not necessarily always our genes, it turns out – but a lot about our nurture.
Oh yeah, I see your face now. You’re thinking, what the hell – how are they both walking and talking, let alone breathing, if they came through this?
Are you judging me? Well judge away, mate.
We were lucky. We had our nan. In the end she came and got us. Before the social got involved she took us away, and she did the rest of the parenting. We saw our mum occasionally, when she was clean, which got more rare until eventually she died. There was the terrible methamphetamine phase when Nan went on holiday with Sheila from bingo for a bit of a rest. We spent much of that week hiding in the cupboard beneath the stairs.
After that we saw our mum a few times a year – and our nan, and Great Aunt Margaret, made sure we were washed and fed, loved and schooled.
So. We survived. Just about.
But it made us what we are today.
I survived, largely cos of Jeanie. Because before Nan stepped in, Jeanie made sure we got food and got to school on the worst days, the days when our mum was comatose or had cried into her pillow all night till she couldn’t see straight.
Now they’d call it ‘bipolar’ I guess or clinical depression or some such. There were reasons for her behaviour; she hadn’t had a good time either. There were doubtless reasons she turned to the drugs and drink. But no, I don’t want to go into all of that now.
Our dad? He was just a reprobate and a charming one at that. He took after my granddad, my nan’s late husband – a sailor in the Merchant Navy and never at home till he died early.
Our dad literally had a woman in every tower block this side of the Thames, and that side too, along with many a scheme to get rich quick. In the end he offed and didn’t get rich at all, as far as I know.
No. No idea – could be alive and kicking, could be six feet under. Do I care? Not really.
You don’t miss what you never had.
Do you?
So. Don’t look at us like that. We didn’t do so badly, I don’t think – but we didn’t do relationships well, either of us. We didn’t get it.