That was how they spoke to each other most of the time. As far back as I could recall, I’d never heard them use each other’s first names. I was at a family party when I was eighteen and someone called my mother from across the room.
‘Helena.’
I remember thinking, ‘Oh yes, that’s right . . . it’s Helena.’
*
In the end it all got too much at home and my mother took an overdose of tablets and tried to commit suicide. I knew my mum was taking tablets ‘for her nerves’. Everything got ‘on them’. My father obviously. My grandmother when she took his side (so, every time). Me when I argued with her, or when I played The Jam too loudly. She was forever popping pills. I just thought that’s what adults did. I guess she just cracked one afternoon. I was in my room listening to music when I heard a commotion in the hall. I came out and saw a blue light flashing outside. Two men emerged from my mother’s room guiding a bed on wheels through the front door. My mother was on the bed. She was out cold. One of the men saw me as he went past and gave me a look of pity. I can still see it now.
Nowadays, if a trauma like that befell a family, one would hope that a wide range of health care professionals would get involved. Social workers and mental health practitioners and perhaps drug dependency counsellors would swing into action and provide all manner of assistance and support. Back then, while my mum may well have got some help at the hospital she was taken to, no one said anything to me. I probably could’ve used a chat about the whole episode but I didn’t know how to bring it up or even whether I should. My dad never mentioned it and I went back to school the next morning.
It was thought best that I should go and live with my Aunt Irene in Redbridge in Essex for a couple of weeks. I certainly wasn’t capable of looking after myself and if it had been left to my dad to feed me, I’d have starved to death. I’m not sure who was looking after Beverley but I think she was shipped off somewhere as well. I have no idea who looked after my father. He was less capable of looking after himself than my sister and she was only seven.
My aunt Irene also never talked about what had happened. The adults in my family seemed to think that my mother’s attempted suicide was best dealt with by not acknowledging it at all. In truth, I didn’t mind being in Irene’s house. It was very neat and tidy and it smelt clean. There was a baby grand piano in the lounge and a lot of books. Irene was married to a gentle and very sweet Canadian guy called Alvin. He told me jokes to try and cheer me up. They might have been funny in Canada. My cousins, David and Barry, were a little older than me but I got on with both of them. It was an OK place to hang out for a few weeks. No one was shouting at anyone else and the food was great. My aunt made amazing chicken soup. She kept asking me if I was fine. I was fine. I liked chicken soup. The journey to school took a bit longer but I didn’t care. I’d have been happy to move in indefinitely but at some point, adults decided that it was time for me to go back to West Hendon.
Home was a more subdued place when I got back. No one spoke about what my mother had tried to do but there was a little less shouting and screaming, at least for a few months. I now realise that my mother was monumentally stoned on anti-depressants. I also now realise that I could’ve used a few myself.
Things didn’t improve. The arguments slowly got going again. My dad was incredibly angry that my mother had tried to kill herself. Mainly, he was angry with the fact that for once, he wasn’t the centre of attention. This changed soon after. At the time, he was working at the Post Office sorting depot at Mount Pleasant in King’s Cross. One afternoon, he didn’t fancy going back in after lunch. Most people would’ve gone to their boss, told them they were sick and taken the rest of the day off. My father went to a phone box and, in a Northern Irish accent which to this day he point blank refuses to do in front of me no matter how much I beg, called in a bomb threat. This was in the days when phoned-in bomb threats were the IRA’s preferred method of warning the public. They had to be taken seriously, even if, as in this case, the supposed IRA bombers accent was the most suspect thing about him. Thirty thousand workers spilled onto the street and a major search took place. Nothing was found of course. I guess it’s difficult to locate a dodgy looking parcel in a sorting office. My dad got the afternoon off.
The first we knew about all this was late one night when my mum and I were sitting at home watching the film Gyspy on TV. We were starting to wonder where my dad had got to when there was a knock at the front door.
I was despatched. ‘Could you see who that is, luv?’
Standing in the doorway, filling it really, was a massive policeman. I thought about the poster in my room.
‘Is your mother in, son?’ he asked.
‘Yeah. What’s going on? Is it my dad?’
‘Just get your mother,’ he said.
The way he said it, I honestly thought my dad was dead. The policeman must have seen something on my face.
‘He’s fine, son. Just get your mother’.
I went to get my mum and she went to the front door. I heard snatches of the conversation.
‘He’s what?’ and ‘For fuck’s sake.’
Two minutes later, she came back into the living room.
‘Your father’s been arrested,’ said my Mother. This was one of the more surprising moments of my life. Ken was a difficult man, and for my mother a nightmare to live with, but I’d never envisaged him as a criminal. He was a child trapped in a man’s body.
‘What for?’
‘Terrorism offences,’ said my mother and I couldn’t have been more astonished if she’d said that he’d be trying to foment a revolution in Latin America. Che Kenneth. I went to ask for more details but my mother held up her hand as if to say, ‘I can’t talk about it anymore’. There wasn’t much we could do at that point so we watched the rest of the film.*7
Over the years, I tried to speak to him about it but he always changed the subject. Even to someone as preternaturally immune to shame as my father, this episode was a bit embarrassing. But as time has passed and it’s been established that this was a minor blip in an otherwise crime-free life, he’s been more willing to open up.
‘You were really unlucky to get caught the first time you did it,’ I said to him recently.
‘Oh no, it wasn’t the first time,’ he said laughing. ‘I did it ten or twelve times. And I wasn’t the only one.’ (To this day, I’m not sure if he was joking). No wonder Britain was struggling in the late 1970s. The threat of terrorism was real enough without idiots phoning in non-existent bomb scares just to get the afternoon off. If you had trouble receiving your post around that time, this may have been a factor. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that my father and his workshy mates were a small part of the reason why Margaret Thatcher got elected. I can only apologise.
He told me that he had a bomb threat routine. I guess when you do something as often as my dad phoned in bomb threats, it becomes routine. He’d work in the morning in his normal fashion. At least as normally as anyone who was planning an act of terrorism can do. He’d then go off for his lunch, find a phone box, phone the office and say there was a bomb planted somewhere in the building and they had fifteen minutes to get out. I asked him why he did it.
‘I wanted to spend more time with your mother and sister,’ he said.
