Stockwood is a windy plateau with steep slopes descending on three sides. It stands on the south-east edge of Bristol, where the city bleeds into countryside. The Domesday Book lists it as hunting woodland. During the Second World War it was a Starfish site.
Starfish sites were developed in 1940, after the Luftwaffe laid waste to Coventry. They were designed to attract enemy bombs away from positions of strategic importance. By December, the Stockwood fields were piled high with incendiary materials; great heaps of anything that would burn. In a single air-raid, the site drew fifty-nine high-explosive bombs. It must have looked impressive, all that tonnage, blazing away in those empty fields.
After the war, they built a housing estate where the bombs had fallen. The estate was typical of post-war architecture. Pebble-dashed council houses ran up the steep hills; on the plateau were semis and detached houses designed by builders called Wimpey, Laing’s, Federated.
We lived at 63 Bifield Road. It was a Federated Avon model, complete with ‘feature-built serving hatch with mahogany laminate finish’. Stockwood was a working-class dream of suburbia.
Dad rented from a housing association. In the house lived my mum, my dad, my sisters and my brother. I was a nervous child, scared of the dark, and I was an irksome mummy’s boy.
The younger of my sisters was called Caroline. She was ten years older than me, a pupil at Brislington Comprehensive School. She wore knee-length, stripy socks and a butterfly clip in her hair. She liked David Cassidy and David Essex.
Sometimes in the afternoon she came home with a few friends and they took me upstairs and used me as a doll, dressing me in girls’ clothes and putting ribbons in my hair. They wheeled me round in a pram. To ensure my cooperation, Caroline confided in a grave whisper that the Daleks were downstairs. They had killed Mum and Dad and everybody else. So I had to be quiet or they’d hear me. The Daleks were shrieking pepper-pots who appeared on Dr Who. They sought the destruction of planet Earth but lacked a technology enabling them to climb stairs. So I was safe, as long as I stayed up there, with ribbon in my hair.
I knew Caroline was lying. I hadn’t heard any zapping lasers or agonized death screams. But it was quiet downstairs. It was easy to imagine the Daleks wheeling themselves into position, round the corner, ready to surprise me.
Sometimes, Caroline was my babysitter. We watched The Incredible Shrinking Man. At the end, after a terrible battle with a giant spider, the dwindling hero grew so tiny he popped out of existence. My horror was vertiginous.
When the credits had faded, it was intensified by Caroline’s whispered confidence: we were shrinking, too.
It was night, and we had become tiny. We were trapped in a dolls’ house at the dark end of the garden. Outside, the night was rich with giant spiders and monstrous ants.
In the concrete toilet-block of a holiday camp outside Dawlish Warren, a wasp stung my arse. I stumbled back to the caravan, shorts round my knees. My face and T-shirt were smeared with tears and ice cream and fragments of Cadbury’s Flake. The wasp followed me. It stung me twice more on the exposed arse, and once on my neck.
During the same holiday, I joined my parents, Caroline and a large group of holidaymakers in the ‘Hokey Cokey’. We screamed and ran, hands joined, to the centre of the room. And we screamed and ran, half-stumbling back again.
My brother, Clive, clashed with my father about his motorcycle and his long hair. Caroline listened to David Cassidy in her room and sulked about boys. Lin, my other sister, got pregnant.
And Ed had a lover. He forced his way into the house and attacked my dad as I grovelled in the corner.
Even with Dad in a hospital bed, Mum denied having an affair. She swore it wasn’t true. And Dad believed her. He had no choice but to believe her. So he sued the man for assault.
It was only under under cross-examination that Mum admitted adultery. It hadn’t been a fling; it hadn’t even been an affair. The man had been her lover for a decade.
Dad sat there and listened while those ten years rushed out of him like air.
When it was all over, Mum promised to make it better. And Dad loved her. So he crammed it all inside him–the lies, the adultery, the beating at the hands of a man who had cuckolded him for a decade; he packed it inside him like wadding, and he took her back. I don’t know if it took courage to do that, or weakness; I don’t know if it took pride or self-hatred. I do know that it took love.
But something secret bubbled inside my mother, like mud in a pool. And, a few months later, she met another man. No one knew who. Someone from work.
Whoever he was, she very quickly left us for him. She left her family–her husband, her four children, her first grandchild, a boy–without a forwarding address or a goodbye. Without even a note.
She faded from the empty house like an apparition, as if she had never really been there at all.