were adamant about this new routine. By trying to save me, they were unwittingly planning another potential casualty.
So, every night a live flame was placed on my bedroom mantelpiece, next to a few cuddly toys and old Airfix model boxes, to burn until the following morning. Above it were posters stuck on with dried Blu Tack that always came down, and around it were all sorts of other very-willing-to-ignite articles and tubes of glue. I guess it was bound to happen at some point. I’m not an expert on house fires, but it seems like in the 1970s just about anything in your bedroom could catch alight rapidly.
If you have suffered a house fire at night in your youth, you may never sleep soundly, no matter how old you become. You wake to any noise. Since the night my room caught fire, I have always been a very light sleeper.
I am not sure how I woke up. There was so much smoke, I should have been unconscious. I found myself sitting up in bed watching the magnificent display of huge orange flames burning up the curtains at the side of each window. The flames were so hot and I only had the covers to keep the heat away. Everywhere I looked it seemed there were flames licking everything, and I was having trouble staying focused as my blanket and sheets started to catch fire at the edges.
In such a situation, you might want to scream as loudly as possible, but my voice was hoarse and weak from the smoke, and I felt confused and dizzy. It was a miracle I was sitting up in bed at all.
It wasn’t long before I couldn’t really see anyway; I was short of breath and unable to move. I wanted to scream but I couldn’t. There was so little oxygen that nothing seemed to work in my body. Doesn’t anyone know I am going to die (again)? I thought. I want my dad, my mum, anyone.
In a house fire, you’re likely to pass out and suffocate long before you fry, but I was awake as the flames worked their way up the wall, sizzling the woolen blankets in search of their grandest prize of all—a human life.
The noise was terrifying. Cracking, spitting, small things in the room popping, wooden curtain poles falling off the walls: you never forget the deathly noises of being so close to a fire.
Where’s my mum? Is there no one there? Where’s my dad? Are my parents dead too? Help me, please, God, help me.
I could think but not act. I was going to pass out, be the fuel and not the victim.
My mum always slept heavily, as she was likely unconscious from the bottles of anything she had left that day. My dad was a big man with a heart of gold. Though none of us knew it, he was soon to be struggling with cancer. Was I going to be the one welcoming him to heaven first?
There was a huge crash. A wall coming down, a ceiling, I don’t know. A blast of some sort? I heard screaming, my name being called out. My bedroom door flew off its hinges, and this time it was Dad’s turn to save Angus. My angel and my hero stood strong at the doorway, and what a magnificent display it was to see him there with the door lying on the floor at his feet.
He flew across my room to rescue me from that burning hell. I was in my dad’s arms, wrapped up in a cold blanket and whisked down the stairs to the sounds of sirens and the imminent arrival of the emergency services.
After being close to death a few times, I am not scared of it. I should be dead, so I just think I am lucky. Anyway, it’s not the length of the life that matters, it’s how much we can teach before we die.
It turned out it was only a fire in the bedroom and hadn’t spread at all, so what seemed like the whole house burning down to me, was just the curtains and a few posters. My father extinguished it easily, and it wasn’t long before things were back to normal. Though my school friends were never sure what to expect when I next came into class. This time, they really thought I was a spectacle returning to school after being starved, baked, and asphyxiated. There was never a normal entry to school for me at any time, something I just got used to. I guess nothing has changed, even today.
The lung infection and the house fire left a half-baked, nutritionally starved, candy-laden kid on the block; my general health was affected even a few years later. And as the time passed, I had to watch out for another hazard—the less conventional ways of cooking my mother employed.
Eating was another near-death experience. It was almost a race to see who would go first: my dad, mother, or me. We were all truly excellent candidates for what now seemed to be regular appointments with potential death.
Chapter 2
Candy to the Rescue
And so, we all made it, together, for another four years after the fire. My mother was suitably satisfied that we, including the dogs, were still enjoying the added bonus of being alive. I am sure that by this time she knew of my father’s illness, which must have started when I was nine, and which only made her drinking worse.
Dinner at home was a fairly suicidal affair if you weren’t careful. It was an achievement to make it from six years old to nine in my house. In between rescuing the mail and having a candy fix, my new survival test involved fighting an enemy that was smaller than a raging inferno—the bacteria in my food, in what little eventually found its way to my plate. My mother didn’t have much time to cook, as she was busy trying to work, too.
The problem with publishing is that there is never enough advertising to go around. It’s still the same today; selling magazine advertisements is a high-pressure job. I have sold millions of pounds’ worth, and it’s still just as hard convincing someone today to buy something they don’t really want as it was then. She was always going back to the phone or her homemade minibar and giving either a go, and they were both brilliant distractions from cooking.
Meanwhile, I was always going hungry and my poor father was getting weaker by the month with his cancer. Often, cooking occurred only when my mother remembered to, and it was quite an education. Every now and then we enjoyed a truly great meal, as she really could cook once upon a time, but sadly the drink molded her into the very last person you would want to accept a dinner invite from.
I used to have to do a kind of excavation job on my dinner plate to see what was waiting for me among chunks of raw garlic, orange or lemon peel, and hundreds of cloves or countless peppercorns (she always spilled the packet). Or worse still, I would be presented with reheated food that was several days or even weeks old, in which case it was not unusual to find myself sharing a plate with the occasional maggot or other insectoid dinner guests.
My mother’s disastrous cooking techniques advanced considerably, especially in the evenings when she really could not even recognize the contents of the cooking pots she was tending to. She continued to add ingredients at random times, as she couldn’t remember how long had passed since she had started cooking, or if the gas burner was on at all.
She liked curry, so you can imagine how hot some of those dishes became when she cooked with triple doses of chili powder. To this day, my brother and I like a hot curry. I also continue to check my food for bugs (cooked or alive) that might have taken a liking to my dinner or anything else: from stones or hundreds of peppercorns to household items like lids of ingredients jars or random items of cutlery that might have accidentally fallen into the cooking pot.
Mum sometimes even forgot she was cooking at all, and would wobble straight past the burning pots to the end of the kitchen, where a convenient gin bottle was handy to help her through the day. She never forgot about that.
It was a fine occasion to have the real meal deal
