with the nylon sheets and rough blankets that smell of corned beef. Ugh! I’ll never forget the texture of those scratchy blankets up against my skin – it was like having sex with a leper. (Not that I knew about that then.) And then I was rudely awakened by the caravan rocking.
My indignation was soon replaced by fear, and with my runaway imagination I just knew it was a gang of thugs trying to tip us over into the sea.
I called out to Mum: ‘Someone’s rocking the caravan. Help!’
‘Just go to sleep,’ she said.
‘No, no, it’s rocking even more. Help me! Please, someone!’
‘It’s the wind. Go back to sleep!’ shouted Dad, oblivious to the gang of ne’er-do-wells intent on killing us.
I realised that my parents, normally so vigilant about strange noises and goings-on, really didn’t care. All I could hear from their room was giggling and muffled laughter, as the caravan rocked even more.
I don’t know what finished first, the caravan’s rocking or the commotion from my parents’ room, but at some point I must have drifted off. When I brought it up in the morning, my questioning came up against a wall of silence and I was left contemplating the mystery whilst eating my grapefruit.
Every time I look in the mirror there is a reminder of my holidays in Great Yarmouth, and it’s not my glowing skin and sun-kissed hair, it’s my teeth. I had been mucking about, as most six year olds do when they’re on their holidays. The windswept beach was a no-go area, and with the potential for it to piss it down at a moment’s notice we had stayed close to the caravan. I had climbed up onto the caravan hook, those horrible metal things that you attach to the back of your car, and had slipped off, banging my mouth so hard that I had to be rushed to hospital and have my gums sewn up. I can remember Dad scooping me up in his arms and Mum, pregnant with my brother Gary (all that caravan rocking had taken its toll), running behind me. I can’t remember much more of that night, but I can remember it starting to rain (what a surprise!) and my parents anxiously trying to flag down a car to take me to hospital.
Once the drama was over, the doctor told Mum that when my adult teeth came through they would either come through black or crooked or both. My poor mother was beside herself. But although my teeth do look as though they’re having a party, I always remind myself that it could have been so much worse: they could have been black stumps poking out my mouth. Thank God for small mercies.
My teeth have always been trouble to me, though. They’re my Achilles’ heel. I don’t know if this is possible, but honestly, I’ve started resenting my own teeth. I know you need them to bite and chew, but they don’t half piss me off. Impacted wisdom teeth, extractions, root canal work – I’ve suffered them all. I chipped one piece off a tooth when I was 12, when someone accidentally turned and whacked a fishing rod in my face.
‘Look,’ I said to my dentist, a lovely man called Lance, ‘why don’t we just cut to the chase and have them all out and fit dentures?’
He smiled sweetly. ‘That won’t be necessary.’
No, of course not. That’s because he knows full well that if I do have dentures his profits will plummet. My crooked white teeth are his pension plan; whenever he sees them coming through the door he thinks, ‘Holiday home!’
The saga of my ill-fated teeth continues. Only last month I was nursing a gaping hole in my gum where a tooth cracked when I was having a crown fitted. The only reason I needed to have the crown fitted in the first place was that after bypassing a Snickers and going for a ‘healthy option’ bag of apricots, I bit into one that hadn’t been pitted and ended up cracking a tooth and killing the nerve. Then I had no choice but to have it extracted. However, Lance is planning to fit me a porcelain crown, an exact copy of my original tooth, he assures me – which I am dreading because when you have teeth as big as mine, it’ll be like sucking on a urinal.
* * *
Back in Northampton, though, in the distant days of childhood, home was a happy place. Mum eventually gave birth to Gary, and so when he was older I had a brother to play with. She had actually asked me the year before, when I was playing with my Evel Knievel figure in the garden, whether I would like a little brother. I can’t remember what I said, but it looks like they went ahead with it anyway.
Even though everything seemed so warm and homely, I still managed to suffer, though, because I was so accident-prone. I remember jumping out of bed on a Monday morning, excited because I had a whole brand new week of school. My family was having new carpets fitted and had taken up the old ones. In my eagerness to run downstairs, I caught my foot under the carpet gripper and ripped all my toenails out. I was in agony and instead of going to school and doing fun things, I had to lie on the settee watching Pebble Mill at One like a prisoner of war.
As with all kids, I was into He-Man and Star Wars, and any money I received would go to buy a figure that I could act out scenes with. Francesca across the road, who was my age, had great girls’ toys, so we would often pool our resources and make up our own fantasy world. For nearly a year Barbie and Skeletor were co-habiting in Castle Grayskull without a care in the world. Our Castle Grayskull was actually a more feminine affair than usual. Under Francesca’s watchful eye, it had a pink chest of drawers, pink curtains and a big pink double bed.
Contrary to what you might think, I scorned the pink frilliness of Barbie’s world and chose to have ‘wars’ with soldiers. Fuelled by Saturday afternoon reruns of Sinbad, I would always have my sword and scabbard at the ready, and if I couldn’t find those, a stick. Looking back, I wish that now I had a tenth of the energy that little Alan used to have. I was a bag of energy, full of beans, always making loads of noise, so much so that Mum cut the tongues out of my Hungry Hippos.
The only glitch in this boyish world that I threw myself into was the time I asked Mum to help me write a letter to Jim’ll Fix It to ask if I could meet Wonder Woman. I knew her name was Lynda Carter, my mother’s maiden name, and I prayed that she was a relative and that at a family wedding she would turn up, obviously dressed as Wonder Woman, and I could meet her and tell everyone I was related to Wonder Woman. Surprisingly enough, she never turned up – it seems Lynda cares more for her career than she does her own flesh and blood.
It was around my eighth birthday that I started having an unhealthy interest in birdwatching, too. For the next three or four birthdays, I asked for binoculars and books on birds – I even subscribed to a birdwatching magazine. Every month, I would become enthralled by the exotic birds that would grace the glossy front cover. Frustratingly, it would always be a flamingo or a frigate with its beautiful red plumage. This was particularly mean as well as misleading to the keen bird-watcher, as such cover stars were native to such tropical paradise as the Galapagos Islands and there was no way a landlocked ornithologist like myself would ever come across one. I would have to make do with the Canada geese and pied wagtails that I saw at Pitsford Reservoir.
One time we got a free tape of birdsong, that you played to get yourself acquainted with the different calls that you would hear when you were in your hide waiting to see your first bird. The twittering coming from the stereo speakers didn’t really have much of an effect on me, but Big Puss went mental. His eyes as big as ball bearings, he stalked the stereo, ferociously intimidating, hungry for bird-meat. In the end, when he couldn’t find a bird, he just jumped on me and bit me instead. He was ruthless, a tireless killer and also a sexual predator, and although he had been castrated he still liked to make love to inanimate objects. My teddy bears, my slippers. He would bite the head of my He-Man and grind mercilessly, making a horny purring sound like a next-door neighbour using a strimmer.
This
