my dressing gown. I am scared but I want the anger over. Christopher waits, the thought of (another) beating unbearable. Mum and Dad are sitting in the living room by the anthracite fire. He has a garden cane beside him, a few cream crackers and cheese, a blue mug of Ovaltine. It is almost as though he is worried he will need a snack to replenish his strength. I am bent over his knee, my dressing gown has been removed. I think I am crying. I am hit once, maybe twice, but he doesn’t have the heart. After half an hour of Z-Cars, I return upstairs, triumphant but tear-stained. Christopher is angry I’ve almost escaped. I am furious the next day when his sentence is rescinded. There is no justice.
JULY 27. I had to leave the allotment yesterday; it was too hot to garden. I had contented myself with moving a few sunflowers and courgettes. I haven’t grown sunflowers for a while; the last were self-seeded. They grew like Jack and the Beanstalk, creating a shadowy canopy three metres tall. But I discovered seed in the bottom of my bag and I couldn’t control myself. I pick through radishes. They are big, round and red like kids’ lollipops but eat like crisp, mustardy apples. I cut lettuce for lunch and chard for weekday dinners, and gather a few multi-coloured handfuls of beans. It is too hot to work: days of mad dogs and Englishmen.
First thing Sunday morning, I am back. It’s cooler now so I lift the last of the calendula, tying a favoured yellow flower to the wigwam to save for seed. I weed through vegetable beds and train sweet peas. Mostly, though, this morning is about watering. I might not get back now for a couple of days so I soak everything in. The allotment site feels a bit abandoned. I miss seeing Mary.
1964. Being in the church choir is unavoidable for a village boy in Aveton Gifford. Only posh and ‘problem families’ are exempt. It is an infallible way to tell. Every week we pull cassock and surplice over our Sunday best and add our unbroken voices to the service. I faint once in the summer when the air is heavy, and come around to the sound of my feet drumming on the raised wooden floor. Wednesday evening is choir practice. There is sometimes a wedding on Saturday. Dudley never goes to church. Lilian goes twice a year: Easter and Mothering Sunday, when the church distributes the bunches of primroses we have gathered in the week. My favourite service is harvest festival. Hymns about ploughing fields, altar bread shaped like a sheath of corn, a table of fruit, vegetables, flowers and a few random tins of soup.
I don’t much like the vicar and he doesn’t like me. I don’t do sports, play cricket or football in the vicarage grounds like other boys, although Christopher excels at both. I prefer my own company, which the vicar doesn’t trust. One Wednesday evening, waiting for choir practice to start, I decide to stay outside in the sun. Christopher’s plan to blackmail me is undone a couple of days later by a knock on the door. The vicar and the village policeman (it seems bunking off village choir is close to a crime in the Sixties) stand there. Dad doesn’t invite them in. They think he should know, the vicar says. Perhaps bad blood will out. A priest and cop have come to our house. I have brought disgrace. I return to church and the choir, lesson learned. Back to singing solo, back to Advent weekend afternoons touring old people’s homes in brown-face and a beard and crown, a king in a Christmas carol. The vicar is probably right, I think. A rebellion has begun.
Muhammad Ali is our first hero, still called Cassius Clay when we listen to his fights on the radio (the wireless, as Dad always calls it). Christopher at first prefers Sonny Liston, impressed by his brutal efficiency. Dudley disapproves of them both but despises Clay’s cockiness. I love his swagger. Christopher and I don’t share other heroes, except Eusébio in the football World Cup in 1966. Christopher is for mop-top Paul and Ringo, I am for George and John. We don’t often like the same music or people but Ali is a unifying force. Christopher admires him for his boxing; I love him outside the ring.
1965. Dudley is prone to strange schemes and fancies. The Christmas trees, the poor chinchillas he keeps caged in a shed. The barn is converted for battery chickens, stacked high like Tesco. There are two sets of lights, one white, one red. The sight of blood from a crushed or cut bird sends the house into a frenzy but switching the light turns the red blood brown and the birds soon settle. I am never quite happy in the barn, picking eggs, spotting corpses. The mis-sexed young cockerels are the first to go. Don’t call so loud and proud, I want to warn when they show off their crow. My dad will hunt you down.
One day, two white goats appear. Dad’s been reading Farmers Weekly. We drive them miles to be mated, the first step to producing milk. I have never come across anything that stinks like a stud billy goat and wonder why Lilian and I are watching while they have sex. Must be a farmer thing, I think. I became fond, though, of the nannies in the field behind the house, fascinated as their bellies balloon. I think their babies will be like having lambs (Christopher is forever coming home with stories of rejected young sheep being kept in an Aga drawer). The big day comes. I rush home from school. There are no cute baby kids gambolling in the paddock or nuzzling their mother’s milk. I am confused. They were male so I clubbed them, Dudley tells me matter of fact. When I ask where their graves are, he points to the cesspit. I think I hate him a little that day.
The main trouble with the goats is no one likes their milk. We are having it in tea, on cereal, on our porridge. We are spared from drinking it straight. Dad is the first to switch. I am soon back to picking up his milk from the farm. We kids have to stick with goat for a while: it is good for growing boys, he’s read. But one day they have disappeared, as though they never happened. I wonder why we don’t get to say goodbye. I don’t go near goat’s cheese for 20 years.
There is a photograph of me in my final year of primary school. I am sitting up straight, blond hair neatly combed, looking into the camera, superior smile on my face. Pure Midwich Cuckoo, pure Peter Drabble. The rescue operation appears complete. Like our river cottage, I have been rebuilt into something smarter. Gone for now the questioning eyes, to be replaced with overweening confidence. I am head boy at my small Church of England school, garlanded in gushing valentines and the 11-plus. Grammar school is next. There is also, though, an uneasiness about my last year there. A girl from the estate is humiliated in class. She renders the summer sky yellow, the wheat field blue. I like the painting’s boldness, its originality, but the teacher humiliates her, toys with her like a cat showing kittens how to torture mice. We are being taught about more than English and maths. This is a lesson in class, about who her parents are.
Christopher is becoming crueller. The hunted grows to be the hunter; the abuser rather than the abused. It is simple, the psychology. The Drabbles have withdrawn their favour. His hurt has to be displaced. He turns to shooting random birds and rabbits; breaking wings, breaking legs. He sends in dogs. He turns on Mum and Dad, snarls his anger. He turns on me. I am blinded by other loyalties, too young and stupid to see. He grows to like a fight, my brother; is more of a force at school (I have sometimes cause to be grateful). Ironically, by the time he is a boxer in the army, Dudley brings him back into the family fold. It is my turn to be exiled.
Christopher is already at secondary school in Kingsbridge, the local market town, learning to curse, spray power words around like cunt and fuck and twat. He is a Jenkins, running with a tougher town crowd, I am a Drabble, still tied to my village primary. By the time I get to Kingsbridge, the grammar and secondary schools have merged, the new comprehensive classes streamed. I am in 1.1, year one, top tier, Christopher in 2.5. Our drift apart is official, as if we are not brothers any more. What we had is almost invisible.
It isn’t until secondary school that I realise how old my mum and dad are. It is a year of Bob Dylan, The Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Sandie Shaw. BBC newsreaders sport longer hair, longer collars, wider and brighter ties. Dad watches The Supremes on TV and says unfortunate things. Other kids have posters in their bedroom, their fathers will grow their hair. Lilian and Dudley are 20 to 30 years older than the parents of other kids in my class, their lives forever defined by the war. Even their names speak of another century.
Each year of the mid Sixties adds a half-decade to the differences between us. The questions they have raised me to ask become more difficult. What about apartheid and Vietnam, I demand, though their politics
