Semi-Detached (3 page)

We’d
have run on down the path, now eradicated. One second and you were in the
woods, thirty seconds and you were gone. The undergrowth was surprisingly
dense, good for camps and ambushes, but scratchy to push through in shorts.

Just
along the way, heading west, the path crossed a ride cut through from the back
of the main hospital building, lined with massive rhododendrons. There was some
unwritten rule that we were never to be seen by the hospital staff, and most
particularly the patients. It would give them some sort of fit, apparently So
when we decided to climb the giant larches, we had to scoot across to get to
them.

A
family gang, as opposed to a school gang, involves a variety of ages, including
an unwanted baby figure, who has to be held by the hand, one of the boys from
the Benicky family, several girls and an older brother who goads the younger
brother (me) into life-threatening situations.

‘We
could get to that branch.’

‘I can’t
reach.’

‘You’re
not scared are you?’

The
lower branches were prone to snap off, but they were frequent, rather too
frequent, in fact, because we had to take risks to wiggle between them. Nobody
had ever climbed this tree before. That was obvious. We kicked off clouds of
green dust from the tops of the branches. It was so thick we were not really
able to see anything, except if we looked down, the upturned faces of the
girls, now too small to register as anything but a smudge of concern. But I
distinctly recall, when we finally got right to the top, that this was the
highest tree we had ever climbed, high enough to see right over the top of the
hospital, beyond the cricket field on the other side, down to the valley of the
Rother. In truth, it was rather higher than we wanted to be. It began swaying.
And after the moment of triumph, a wash of panic came sluicing up. The whole
superstructure suddenly seemed fragile. So I gripped tighter to the only bit
that really seemed substantial, the trunk itself.

‘Put
your foot down.’

‘I can’t.’

Then
everybody started panicking. The branches seemed an enormous distance apart. It
was impossible to stretch down to the next foothold without releasing the iron
hug on the trunk. And that was the only thing that stopped me falling.

‘I’m
stuck.’

‘You’re
not stuck.’

Not
that he knew. He started crying before I did. He was the one who was going to
start shouting at me, because he was the one who would have to tell my father
that he left me at the top of a hundred-foot larch tree.

‘Let go
of my foot!’

‘Let me
put it down. You’ll be all right if you can get your foot on to this branch.’

After
about five minutes, I was. But the way down was horrific. The scratches from
the twigs began to really hurt. There was inevitably a horrible skip on a
green-covered branch, which wrenched an arm socket and crashed me on to my
crotch, so it brought tears stinging.

‘Don’t
start crying.’

‘I’m
not.’

Then on
the ground you actually could start crying.

‘He
made me do it,’ was a useless excuse. ‘If he told you to put your hand in the
fire would you do it?’ This didn’t require an answer except to shake the head
and stare resolutely at the ground, but the honest answer was probably ‘yes’,
especially if he had got away with it without hurting himself.

We once
went to some house further up the hill, and I was sent off with the son, a brand
new acquaintance (while the adults drank gin and tonics). He took me through
the farmyard and stood me in front of a long barn with a row of upper windows,
yards long. It was a dappled-sunshine day He leaned down, picked up a stone,
said, ‘This is fun,’ and threw it straight through a pane of glass. It was fun
actually. They were big panes and collapsed with an exemplary destructive
implosion, so we worked our way along the building, taking it in turns to
demolish the lot. As we reached the end I glanced up to see my pal’s father
stomping round the corner of the barn. There is a sort of level at which you
can understand, even excuse, the fury of your own parents (blood counts for a
lot) but there is an unspoken rule amongst the badly behaved that dads don’t
bawl out other people’s children. Your own parents, hot with embarrassment and
shame, can usually be counted upon to redouble any hand-me-down annoyance. But
here was my friend’s father in the throes of a full screaming fit at me. Me! It
must have been bad. I was left quaking for the rest of the afternoon, though I
noted that the scion of the house got over it fairly briskly.

Is it
only because these traumas are lodged like burrs in my hairy subconscious that
it felt like our lives were one scurrilous outrage after another? We ate all
the peas in the vegetable garden at Jimmy Summers’ house. When I was three, I
chopped the heads off every tulip in our front garden. I went on the run in
Chichester. I broke my arm attacking a swan. When I was six I reached up and
pulled down a poster stuck on a tree in Bosham, just for the thrill of it. I
had seen it done in a film. It was what cowboys did to ‘wanted’ posters. Nobody
ever found out.

We must
have been good sometimes. After all, the fury of all adults, and my father in
particular, was something to be avoided if possible. A good spanking was hardly
as common as in the
Dandy,
but I remember once being offered the choice
between missing television and having a smack. My father laughed when I chose
the beating.

Forty
years later, in the end, I found the path again. I walked up the road, skirting
round the new plantation, and turned south. A few yards through some overgrown
rhododendrons and there was the unmistakable view of the back of the hospital.
So the little track leading west must be the path, the path where I learned to
whistle. It was nothing. The larches had gone. Twenty yards through what was
now overgrown scrub and I was standing on ‘the cliff’.

The
hospital was built to be a sustainable community, which in the 1960s meant a
self-contained community. There was an incinerator block with a tall chimney
and a hooter that sounded at twelve for lunch. Round the back and down a set of
steps were the kitchens. My father used to take me there to meet ‘chef’, who
liked to escort me into his cold room and feed me scraps of over-cooked pork or
cold chipolata sausages. I have grown up with a dread of hospitals and
especially the greasily polished kitchen departments. This was the real morgue:
the heavy door that threatened to seal you in the gloomy, yellowy-grey room
with its metallic shelves and hanging carcasses. I didn’t like the noisy
clatter of battered baking trays, the pale, fleshy hands of the largely Italian
staff who grabbed my hamster cheeks and pinched them hard —to get a reaction
presumably — out of a sudden welling of affection probably — but all alien and
noisy and utterly unappetizing.

There
had been fields of Brussels sprouts and pig sties too, which must have been
part of the total operation, I suppose. My brother William was old enough to be
taken down to see a litter of piglets born. I only remember the morning after
and being led down to where they lay, like us with our father in bed, in the
smelly straw under a hot lamp. The pig shit and dirty, low-ceilinged hovels
were more appealing than the hospital.

And
there was a hay barn. This was on ‘the cliff’ which overlooked the offices of
the sanatorium. The cliff was ours.

It was
here we discovered something smelly in a milk bottle and took it in turns to go
and look at it. I think it was probably a premature pig, at least I hope it
was. But up there in the undergrowth, where we were in charge, we could keep an
eye on the comings and goings and take our own time over exploring things,
including boys and girls things.

Though
I left this place before I was seven, I had already taken part in some complex
games of Doctors and Nurses in the elder bushes behind the hay barn — unusual
scenarios of a melodramatic nature that needed one of the little girls to
injure herself, requiring ‘doctors’ to examine her bare areas beneath her
dark—blue knickers, sometimes using a twig or leaves. I forget the names of the
girls, or who initiated the games, but they fired up the pangs of curiosity and
added significantly to the layer-cake of guilt. And the girls were much keener
on the play-acting than we were. It was almost as if the chance to satisfy
curiosity was the price we exacted for taking part in the silly play-acting
games in the first place.

We much
preferred to be inside the barn. It was totally forbidden, but never seemed to
be visited by anyone. It was piled full of straw-bales. At the risk of white
ridges in the fleshy parts of the fingers, these could be lugged around in the
half-light by the two strands of thin baling twine to make first a tunnel and
then, after hours of work, secret inner caves. We had hardly settled
triumphantly in one room of bristly benches before somebody would start yanking
at another bale.

Later,
when the recriminations came, it was pointed out that the entire heap could
have collapsed at any moment, smothering us, in a tragic disaster from which
our mothers in particular would never have recovered. We had not, apparently,
been thinking about them at all. That was true. We had worked our way through
the straw building blocks until we came up against the planked wall of the
barn. The sunlight struck through the slats and a knot gave us a spy hole
through which we could see the woods, and the path snaking away through the
pines. For once, there was actually someone coming along it.

We
spied on an old man (probably in his forties) pushing a bicycle. It was laden
with panniers. There was a large basket filled with parcels at the front and a
wooden box fixed to the rear. He propped his bike up against a tree and walked
off down the hill towards the sanatorium offices. He had sideburns. Like a
cowboy.

I blame
television. He was inadvertently acting out the scene of the man who thinks he’s
on his own in a clearing in
The Last of the Mohicans.
Virtually
every
day we sat in front of the black-and-white television in the brown, shiny bakelite
box with an armoury of ‘Lone-Star’ cap-revolvers and Winchester repeater rifles
close by on the sofa, in order to shoot down the ‘baddies’. On long journeys,
we would attempt to drive our young and exasperated mothers out of their minds
by humming the six notes from the theme from
The Alamo
under our breath,
until the mummies suddenly boiled over, brought the car to a halt and turned on
us with undisguised fury.

The man
was a bicycling grocer. We were Apache. So we raided his pack. We sneaked out
of the barn and were probably just going to have a quick look, but the basket
was packed with sausages. This was too much. They were beautifully pink and
squishy We had to hang them in strings like Christmas decorations all over the
nearby trees. What else could we do? Well, we had to stick pine needles in them
first, obviously, to make them prickly I know this because, as I write this, I
can suddenly recall sticking the thin, bifurcated spikes of pine needles into
pink, yielding sausage meat somewhere, and when else would I have done that? I
can still remember the pungent whiff from the packets of tea in the panniers,
oblong boxes with pale blue markings. Inside there were grease-proof paper
bags. We tore them open. It was ordained. We had to scatter the useless stuff
all over the pine needles then and trample them about a bit. We stuck all the
cigarettes in the trees. We didn’t steal anything. We simply vandalized the lot.
Then we went back in the barn and waited. The excitement of the exercise was
the opportunity to appear from nowhere, wreak havoc and then slip away to watch
the result. It was a real adventure raid, not a pretend. That’s what made it
good.

I don’t
even remember whether he railed, jumped up and down or looked mystified;
probably the lot. But it was easily worked out, by a
process of
elimination, who did it. Apart from the kids who once set a dog on me, there
was no one else it could have been.

Weeks
later, we overheard a scrap of comment (while they were drinking gin and tonics
and giggling about it). When my mother offered to buy the stuff, the man
pretended that we had destroyed far more than we actually had. Not only that,
but after she paid for it, he wanted to keep it. ‘Probably going to sell it,’
my mother said, and the other mothers snorted. So, he was untrustworthy, and we
were on the right side, and that was all right. But we still knew it was better
to say nothing.

The
naughty child knew that if he could just endure the lecture, stand still, wipe
the smirk off his face, look abashed, even squeeze out a tear, then the raging
parent would fall prey to exasperation soon enough. A mournful walk across the
garden, head down, and then as soon as you were safely round the bamboos, run!
As long as my brother didn’t seek retribution, the matter was forgotten, the
woods closed around again, and it was straight back to the camp for a few
moments kicking dirt while the shame evaporated and someone suggested
something else, like ‘an explore’.

The
barn has gone. The piggeries have gone. There is a new housing estate where ‘the
staff’ lived. Sheltered by the nursing home, some of the huge firs have
survived, but the whole place looks suburban and containable now. What had
seemed a continent was little more than an extended back garden, even then,
though we still managed to get lost easily enough.