Semi-Detached (7 page)

‘Shut
up you,’ and ‘Keep up you idiot!’ were of limited assistance, and a Chinese
burn and dead-leg didn’t help much afterwards. The utter misery of the
experience was only matched by the three-day tech-run for
The Wind in the
Willows
at the National Theatre thirty-five years later, when I realized
for the first time that most of Toad’s dialogue would have to be shouted over
hordes of violin-playing rabbits bounding across the stage and a full-sized
gypsy caravan trundling into view.

My
father could just about be persuaded to turn up to these occasions. He made a
point of avoiding speech days most of my life. By then he was already engaged
in the great do-it-yourself project of the Midhurst years.

His
closest friend on the staff of the hospital was a man who went under the
slightly alarming nickname (from a patient’s perspective anyway) of ‘Jab’. J.
A. Boulton wasn’t a doctor. He was some sort of administrator. These were still
the days when doctors ran the show All ranks of hospital staff, and most
certainly the general public, were subordinate, expected to bob in the wake of
‘Doctor’, a super-powered dreadnought, cruising through ward and sitting room
alike, one hand permanently extended for motes.

They
got hold of a
loft, above a shed with a green door, just across the road
from the piggery and its hooter-chimney, and down the lane from the hay barn
fortress. Below housed the sanatorium fire engine. Up above, they began a
marathon
of wood-working.

We were
sometimes taken there by an exasperated mother trying to shoo her biggest
charge back to dinner. I can recall the two men, at men’s work, with black
slicked hair just fallen forward in a dishevelled lick, in their braces and
shirt sleeves, which were white under a
single naked light bulb. There
was a low roof, and the red curls of mahogany on the floor gave off a strong
acid smell. Gradually, am Enterprise sailing dinghy filled the entire space. It
seemed huge to us. It would have seemed pretty huge to Uffa Fox, the designer.
Jab’s navy connections meant they got their wood from an MTB company in
Portsmouth who provided everything with an extra quarter of an inch allowance
all round, to allow for later honing and planing. On hundred-foot ships, the
margin was negligible. On a twelve-foot dinghy the margin was a liability. The
racing dinghy became, like my father, a little heavier than was strictly
necessary.

Heaving
this solid lump across the ‘hard’ at Bosham in Chichester Harbour became the
first of many minor tribulations of the yachting experience that my parents
failed to rise above.

Quite
why my father, not naturally inclined to react to minor set-backs with
equanimity, and, indeed, slightly neurotic about heath and safety factors (such
as the ease of death by drowning, significant injury from flying tackle or
disease from polluted waters), decided to take to the high seas is still a bit
of a mystery. I suspect it was the woodworking that lured him initially. By
the time that Jab had discovered that the cumbersome hulk was bound to lose
races, my father had realized that his new hobby could set him adrift from
polite society. In fact, apart from bumping into other boats (only
necessitating the tersest of exchanges) he need never have anything to do with
anybody else at all, ever, except his family So from the earliest days we were
roped in. (Literally, to begin with.)

The
dark blue Enterprise didn’t really last very long. They must have lugged it up
and down the hard at Bosham and into the Itchenor river a few times, and we
must have got in the way, because little children always do. So I can remember
being plumped down in the centre of the boat next to the centreboard casing and
being able to reach out and tweak the swollen mandarin oblongs of plastic
buoyancy bags lodged under the thwarts. They were tied in place with bright
white webbing strands that smelled new and later, when sucked, were salty to
taste. Or we played with the sheet ropes and pretended they were snakes.

Normal
rebellious infant behaviour just evaporated. We knew this was a different state
of existence. Not just because of the racket, but because the parents had
become other beings. My mother, dressed in rather too tight slacks and a
short-sleeved shirt, had the urgent look of a determined Cossack on a Russian
propaganda poster. She was attentive to my father’s every wish. It showed in
her expression. And he had taken on a fervent watchfulness, his eyes darting
around in a lively imitation of a startled squirrel, gripping on to the tiller,
suddenly turning and looking behind him, reaching forward to whip off a rope
while issuing curt instructions to Mummy, who responded with impressive speed. ‘Pull
her up now! … let go the rope. Get back.’

It was
probably from those earliest moments of sailing, with three tiny children
crammed in the bilges, with my poor mother steadfastly accepting that it was
not her place to fully understand what was going on, that my father adopted his
lifetime habit of Jonah-like exaggeration and hyperbole in order to rule his
ship of doom. ‘Keep your hands in. You’ll have them off. Don’t rock the boat!
You’ll have us over!’ All designed to frighten children into wide-eyed
submissiveness, until such time as we were safely past the few moored boats and
we could be allowed to sit up with the adults. ‘Hold on! Sit still! Get ready
to go about!’

It was
captaincy by paranoia. And having effectively dragooned us as scugs, he never
abandoned the habit as we grew older. ‘Mind the gybe! The boom will have your
head off! Keep your fingers well clear of the anchor chain, now! Don’t go too
near that boat, we’ll hit her!’ And though the wind was slight and the gybe
would have been well signalled, although only a village idiot would stick his
hands in the chain box and the said boat was two or three hundred yards away,
we grew to accept that this was the modus operandi. He saw potential accidents
and disaster everywhere. Later, in motorcycles, ladders, pints of beer and long
hair; for the time being in boating, swings, roads, bicycles and staircases. He
was a doctor. They were all lethal. But this was more than wariness. This was
control. Daddy saw the consequences and Daddy needed to point them out. We
never capsized. I remember once he banged a finger and I recall the misery of a
small child seeing his father-hero in pain, borne bravely I may add. But
otherwise we sailed through it all, as a slightly less hysterical man might
have expected to do all along, given that we were, after all, in a sailing
boat.

It was
interminable stuff. Sitting on the floor lasted several years at a time.
Sailing down the river, keeping still and out of the way, took a couple of
decades. But eventually we reached our paradise: West Wittening.

Wittering
was little more than a spit of dunes at the mouth of an estuary. You could walk
to it, if you were dogged (and to begin with my mother was ordered to do so, ‘pushing
that bloody pushchair’), but it was largely the playground of the water-borne.
There was a steep shelving beach of sand (‘Be careful now! I don’t want anyone
drowning themselves’). On sunny weekends the curve of the bay filled up with
boats, until it became a complicated, not to say fraught, business to anchor
there. Ashore, we would huddle under the shelter of the dunes attending to what
united the Rhys Jones family most: lunch. Tupperware boxes of sandwiches, gala
pie, sweet and slightly gooey liver sausage, home-made Scotch eggs and a
faux-wicker-patterned tubular thermos of asparagus soup. This was one of those
treats of industrialized grub that tasted better than any fresh original
(sardines, canned tuna, tinned peaches and baked beans being the others). To
the children the picnic fulfilled the requirements of being sweet and mushy ‘food’
— not gristly parts of a sheep’s anatomy, or those ‘cabbages on stalks’ with
the wet, slightly sulphurous taste (Brussels sprouts) that we got at home. I
utterly refused to eat cabbage until I was past ten.

Then
after lunch there was a visit to the red ice-cream boat. Luckily, my father’s
interest in ice cream was a match for any four-year-old’s. He seemed not to
care that the belching ‘Mr Whippy’ machine excreted a fluffed-up spew of
aerated lard that could have greased a Russian half-track. The more synthetic
the confection, the more it reminded him of his childhood and Glengranogg on the
Cardigan coast, where his family had a holiday cottage and where the ‘ice-cream’
was made of powdered milk and baking soda. When, as a teenager, I went to
Florence and raced back to England with the news that ice-cream could be made
of real cream, with proper chocolate and hardly any salt, I never really felt
that my enthusiasm paid off. He wasn’t seeking the ultimate ice-cream heaven,
he was looking for the nursery.

I got
lost once in the dunes. It was a great place to play, somewhere that adults
could hardly be bothered to go. I would wander off. The sand creamed up between
the toes and crumbled around the ankles, silver and hot on top, cooler and
darker underneath. Sometimes the dips were disconcertingly deep. Once, far up
the seaward end, I crested a dune and came upon a grown-up lying totally ‘bare’
in the spiky grass. He was arched on his back and my eyes were drawn to the
massive pink flushedness of his jutting erection. It was quite a surprise. Did
I, at six, feel anything sexual about it? I think I did. Was he lying there
waiting to present himself to a passing little boy? Possibly He didn’t seem to
want to cover himself up or roll feverishly over on his front, as any
self-respecting, embarrassed wanker might. So I suppose he was showing it to me.
I never reported the event to anyone. I was complicit in it, just in passing
by, just in looking, just in being there. It was certainly not something I
would want to explain to a grown-up.

After
all, we all liked to look. We had a maid or au pair at one time. She was blonde
and had a round face and wore full-bottomed fifties skirts. She fell asleep on
the lawn one day, in hot sunshine, and I distinctly remember the huge
excitement brought on when Jimmy Summers and I tried to peer up her skirt. What
were we doing? We had no idea. My first sex education was years ahead. Even the
rudimentary details were years ahead. She woke up and chased us away.

The
argument over ‘the rudest word’ that took place between my brother and myself
must have happened much later. It was overheard by my sister, who threatened to
tell my mother. We persuaded her that ‘c**t’ was indeed the rudest word you
could say, but only meant ‘Wellington boot’, not a particularly inspired
improvisation, and she inevitably told my mother she was putting on her c**ts
in the rain.

Had we
had any grasp of any reality, I would never have lied so badly in the affair of
the man on the bus. Every day after school, we took a big green bus into the
centre of Midhurst and then waited, opposite a handy sweet shop, for the coach
that took us the few miles up the hill to the sanatorium.

Sometimes
we bought sweets at the sweet shop while waiting for the second stage. But on
this particular day I had half a crown. It was a huge sum of money — twelve and
half pence, in decimal currency.

So we
bought stuff. Half-penny chews were big, but penny chews were enormous blocks
of ridged edible plastic. There were probably sherbet dips, a yellow
paper-wrapped drum of sherbet with a stick of liquorice that you dipped in the
stuff and licked. Gobstoppers changed colour as you sucked them, and had to be
taken out all wet and sticky to look, until you finally got the aniseed taste
when you crunched up the little bit right in the middle. We bought all these
and crossed the road to the bus stop with full blazer pockets.

While
we were waiting my father rolled up in the car.

This
was highly unusual. He must have had an afternoon off or gone to visit some
patient in another hospital. He was very pleased to see us, as fathers always are
when they are doing nothing and can drive their children with no trouble to
themselves. We all jumped into the back of the car, where my brother and sister
blithely carried on munching and chewing.

‘What
have you got there?’

‘CHEW,
SUCK, ummm … sweets! CHEW, STUFF, RUSTLE.’

My
father tried to glance back over his shoulder. Fathers, especially fathers of a
medical persuasion, have a low opinion of sweets and generally make comments
about fillings, and making sure that you clean your teeth, except, of course,
when they are eating them themselves and handing them round, which anyway they
only do as an afterthought.

I had
already tried to stuff my sweets out of sight.

‘Ha ha.
So where did the money come for all these sweets, then?’

There
were more chomping and thwacking sounds from my brother as he tried to loosen
his overladen mouthful of goo, but my sister managed to find enough of a gap in
her maw to articulate her innocent evidence.

‘CHEW,
SCRUNCH, CHOMP … Griff had … CHEW, SWALLOW … half a crown.’

Even
though I had no idea what to call it then, I could feel the nemesis
approaching.

‘Half a
crown? Where did that come from?’

The
answer was simple. It came from Charles Hume’s money box. We had been playing
up in his well-appointed bedroom filled with envy-inducing toys and he had
shown me his frog, which had a slot in the top and a screw plug in the bottom
and was full of half crowns. When he took them out they fell on the shelf. He
had piled them up in at least three towers. Then his mother had called him downstairs
and I had simply, in a dreadful impulse, taken one of them and put it in my
pocket.