Pete: My Story

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Pete: My Story
Pete Bennett

W**kers! Cheese! Eeezamanna! Pete Bennett, the 24-year-old Tourette's sufferer who shot to fame as winner of Big Brother 7, stole the nation's heart with his outrageous, loveable nature. Pete's incredible autobiography reveals what the tabloids didn't see. His story will make you cry, have you in stitches, and inspire you with its amazing honesty.Suffering with Tourette's Syndrome since the age of five, Pete was only properly diagnosed at 14. Here he talks openly about his agony growing up with Tourette's, and how he used humour and his musical ability to cope with his frightening attacks. Pete reveals his true feelings about his dad abandoning him when he was six, and his close relationship with his mother, Anne. Pete shares intimate details about his escape into wild sex parties, the horrific death of his best friend, and his thoughts of suicide until Big Brother 'saved his life'.From the moment Pete decided to enter Big Brother so his mum wouldn't have to work in a fast food chain, he had the entire nation glued to their TV screens. But beneath his quirky and hilarious antics, it was Pete's refreshing innocence and lack of fame-seeking that made him the most popular (and fancied) housemate Big Brother has ever seen.Heart-rending and moving, hilarious and outrageous, Pete's story is an unique insight into a truly inspiring individual.

PETE MY STORY

Pete Bennett

With Andrew Crofts

INTRODUCTION (#u80da8568-69d6-5a2b-91f8-ad9c966a4df8)

Being able to do this book is a brilliant opportunity, because I really want to try to explain to people what it feels like to be me. People have always made snap judgements about me. They might only have seen me walking down a crowded street, sitting in a school classroom or a pub, but that would be enough for them to decide that I was weird, or gay, or soft, or mad or very annoying, and I am excited to have an opportunity to paint a bit more of a detailed picture of how I got to be like I am.

I’m not the only person in the world with a few problems. Some people have far worse ones, and some have far milder ones. But we all start out from the same place, until things start happening to us. For some people the problems begin the first day they pop out into the world; for others, like me, they ambush us later on. When you see some guy walking down the street, talking to himself or shouting abuse at the gods, it’s easiest to just cross the road and walk on by, but the chances are he didn’t start out life like that. When he was born his mum and dad probably had very different plans for him, but stuff happened in his life, and probably in his head, that made him turn out different. It’s not often someone like me really gets a chance to tell their story to a wide audience, rather than to just a few doctors, psychiatrists and so-called experts.

Maybe some kids will read this book, and then they might understand better why some of the other kids in the playground act a bit different to them. Maybe they’ll feel it would be worth getting to know them better, rather than just shouting names and insults at them and knocking them down into the mud.

My mum’s had a fair bit of superficial judgement landed on her over the years too; you know the sort of thing – a single busking mother with two sons by two different fathers, plus some pretty funky style decisions. She’s got a bit of a mouth on her has Mum, and that hasn’t always endeared her to everyone, particularly people in official positions who didn’t quite get the whole Pete thing, but she still has the most gigantic circle of devoted friends, with me right at the front of the queue.

I hope there will be a few laughs along the way too, because we’ve laughed a lot over the years, when we weren’t crying or shouting with frustration.

Anyway, this is it, for better or worse, my story.

Contents

Title Page (#u9fb02e87-285f-5478-bad9-bd843e33ee74)Introduction (#u3ebb6461-567b-5e22-bf31-17e2c654dd52)Chapter One: A Bit Of A Bad Start (#ua126e9d1-7d02-5b8a-822b-344912ffbe31)Chapter Two: Rock And Roll Baby (#u1a37f009-61ae-50ed-95c5-ede53b1adc0f)Chapter Three: Baby Minders (#uf642090a-0eee-54dd-b31d-c6702380ef7c)Chapter Four: A Visit From An Angel (#u42ee4ffb-c17a-5754-bac3-65138c4ee506)Chapter Five: Animals And Graveyards (#ubbf18c0b-d714-5fa7-97a9-62677bde56cf)Chapter Six: Dave (#u3393cc78-cc51-5cfd-ad78-18d213e65b37)Chapter Seven: Warning Signs (#u8e26afeb-e5e3-53a7-baee-c8afff7f8b0d)Chapter Eight: A Family Unit (#ue2379533-9a13-5576-bac8-ec715ec19a5e)Chapter Nine: The Explosion (#u33067b25-56dd-5457-ab97-9206f74f583d)Chapter Ten: The Padded Cell (#u0340a4f8-7293-5319-a890-b3c12b0778cb)Chapter Eleven: Bollocks! (#u653e120d-0921-5108-9ff5-8612412186f5)Chapter Twelve: Thoughts Of Suicide (#udb04aad3-a355-5804-bf6c-4fd27ae28dec)Chapter Thirteen: Special Places (#uff936d41-0874-5883-9a86-e4f036faa4f4)Chapter Fourteen: Obsession (#ue9f8fd6d-5f67-5286-970e-974046f2e00d)Chapter Fifteen: Dressing Up (#uddf34d6a-ff12-57fa-bf1e-68f8e8d0c02d)Chapter Sixteen: Falling In Love (#u7907173c-2b76-5d94-b760-d55a303c1871)Chapter Seventeen: Brighton (#u0bca7c9b-ac0c-572f-9956-11d24b077ff0)Chapter Eighteen: Perfect Pete (#u5cd979fc-5728-5596-8276-72ccc75bbceb)Chapter Nineteen: Through The K-Hole (#u5c578c25-efa4-5c70-868a-91c8a7cbc5b1)Chapter Twenty: Joolz (#u22fdcbdb-c433-5631-b708-b486789d0ba0)Chapter Twenty-One: Fetish Parties (#uafc8e096-1bf9-5994-9fa1-7f7f3fecc8b0)Chapter Twenty-Two: The Night Of The 23Rd (#u4c2cb877-cdaa-5d67-abde-92812a02d4b7)Chapter Twenty-Three: Heaven And Hell (#u927962ab-1b35-52b7-aaba-0362aed560d6)Chapter Twenty-Four: Cracking The Code (#ue7c563c8-17fc-522d-a04b-54617521357b)Chapter Twenty-Five: Big Brother (#ufca4de68-3ed1-5868-b814-a266511e8e61)Epilogue (#ub67181b6-50ff-5c1e-989b-518264d512f7)Copyright (#ua53c7653-4242-5dc6-8954-83143bb4f36f)About the Publisher (#u47f33a4d-ce9d-56d0-87cb-fdf88d95edaf)

CHAPTER ONE (#u80da8568-69d6-5a2b-91f8-ad9c966a4df8)

A BIT OF A BAD START (#u80da8568-69d6-5a2b-91f8-ad9c966a4df8)

I love my life, but it did get off to a bit of a dodgy start. I definitely wasn’t keen to come out of Mum’s belly. I probably felt safe and had a premonition of some of the stuff that was on its way once I hit the fresh air. I was about two weeks late popping out and Mum and Dad were sitting around in the hospital for a pretty long time, just waiting for me to decide I was ready to make my first dramatic entrance. Apparently there had been one giant explosion of a contraction and then just pure agony for Mum and no more action from me. I wasn’t going anywhere. I stayed stuck there for the next seventeen hours, just couldn’t get out, or didn’t want to. I mean, why would I want to? Pretty cosy and safe in there, I should think.

I was taking so long getting my act together Dad got fed up with waiting and went home for his breakfast. Probably a bit of an attention-span problem going on there. I can understand that. I always have trouble sitting still waiting for something to happen.

A couple of foreign nurses, without too much English between them, were keeping Mum company, just watching the clock drag round, waiting for their shifts to end. One of them was so bored she was cleaning her ears out with a matchstick and examining the results before wiping it on the bedclothes.

‘Ma babies all popped out like stones from peaches,’ the other one kept saying, as if Mum was being deliberately lazy and messing up their day on purpose. ‘Why don’t you push, dahling?’

In the end an Egyptian lady-doctor sauntered into the room to see what was going on, or not going on, and realized that Mum was close to death. Suddenly everything changed, alarms started ringing and she was rushed off to the operating theatre. A few minutes later I was brought out on to centre stage by Caesarean.

So there I was, safely delivered and ready for whatever life might want to throw at me. A healthy eight pounds ten ounces and glad to be alive from the first moment I drew breath. No reason for anyone to worry there, baby delivered, job done, let’s all go home. Mum put my surname down on the birth certificate as Bennett, because she believed Dad was going to marry her. To be fair to her he had asked, so she had every reason to be optimistic, but then he announced he was only joking. I suspect Mum didn’t exactly roar with laughter at that one. His name isn’t on my birth certificate at all because he didn’t manage to turn up in time to sign it, having had a bit too much cider in the pub according to Mum. She generally tells it like it is, does Mum.

Mum hadn’t realized she was pregnant with me till she was already five months gone. Apparently she’d been taking the Pill, but she had a dodgy Indian take-away one evening, and being sick must have shot the pill back up before it had done whatever it was supposed to do to discourage my conception. A bit of divine intervention there. I’ve always liked a good curry myself, and I am deeply indebted to the whole culinary species for my presence on Earth. If Mum had decided to have pasta or a McDonald’s that night I guess I would never have happened.

So there I was, a bit of an unplanned event, although Mum assures me she’d always wanted me. She probably should have guessed she was pregnant a bit earlier, like the day when she felt violently sick on the bus, jumped off and threw up all over the window of a carpet showroom, under the furious gaze of half a dozen disgusted shop assistants. Mum was a full-fledged, scary-looking punk rocker at that stage, so it must have looked like a bit of a political statement, spewing up over a bourgeois retail outlet. They probably thought she had done it on purpose.

Mum is a really brilliant musician and it’s not just me, her proud son, who thinks that. She went to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama for four years, studying to become a concert violinist. Despite all the piercings and the spiky, multicoloured hair, leather clothes and fishnets, she was always very serious about her work and her art. She was really good at the violin, won a scholarship and everything, and she loved classical music, but it was punk music she really loved to listen to – Billy Idol alongside Yehudi Menuhin. She must have stuck out among the other young prodigies like a septic finger.

There was only one other punk in the college, an opera singer called Anna, who was Mum’s best friend and Rod Steiger’s daughter. Steiger was one of the biggest Hollywood stars of his day (he was the one in the famous scene with Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, in which Brando’s character says ‘I coulda been a contender…’ He was playing Brando’s brother). Anna’s mum was the actress Claire Bloom, who had also trained at the Guildhall.

Mum was always short of money and had to make as much cash as she could at the beginning of her career by busking around the streets of London, meeting very different types to the ones studying at the Guildhall, and loving it. There was a pub on the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road called the Tottenham, under the towering shadow of Centrepoint, where a lot of the alternative music people used to go at the beginning of the Eighties, people like Boy George who hadn’t yet made it big with Culture Club, and the girls who would later become the hit group Bananarama. None of them had become stars by then and hung around the pub planning their big breakthroughs. Mum and the other buskers used to meet in the Diamond Dive, a little spit-and-sawdust concert hall downstairs at the Tottenham, to take acid, play music and socialize. That was where she met my dad.

‘I was going in there one lunch time,’ is how she explains it to me, ‘and there was this gorgeous-looking punk standing outside, six foot two and like a cross between Adam Ant and Billy Idol, spiky black hair – the most gorgeous bloke I’d ever seen. So I pinched his leather-clad arse as I went past. I didn’t think I had a chance in a million of going out with him. “Hello Gorgeous,” I said and to my amazement he started chatting me up.’

They had a drink and Dad asked her if she wanted to go out with him for a proper date that night. They agreed to meet by the jukebox at 7.30, and when she got there she found another friend, a gay New Romantics fan called Scottish John, sitting at the same table. She was eagerly telling him about her date, and found out he was also waiting for a hot date. Both of them were in a state of high excitement and it wasn’t until Dad came strutting over in all his glory that they realized they were both waiting for the same bloke. It turned out Dad had a bit of a warped sense of humour and had been watching them talking from across the room. Scottish John wasn’t too happy to find out he was being wound up, because Dad wasn’t gay, but at least it meant Mum got her date that night. He was called Mark Bennett and the rest of the evening must have gone well because they became a couple.

Mum was living in a squat at the time, and Dad had a room in Brockley in south-east London, so it made sense for her to move in with him. He might have had a roof over his head, but Dad didn’t have much of a plan for how he was going to make a living, apart from having a strong belief that sooner or later a film producer was going to spot him walking down the road, would see his potential and turn him into a film star. Funnily enough, it did actually happen in a way when Derek Jarman, a famous avant-garde gay filmmaker of the time, did spot him in the street, took him home to his flat and got him pissed. Jarman had made a famous film about punks called Jubilee, starring Toyah Wilcox and Adam Ant, so this could have been the moment Dad had been waiting for. Unfortunately he had a bit too much to drink, puked all over the great director’s carpet and got thrown out, so he missed his big chance. (It did at least mean he preserved his honour, of course.)

He and Mum must have made a formidable-looking couple. They both loved to dress up and sometimes he would even paint a white stripe across his nose, making himself look even more like Adam Ant. He was definitely a man of his time, and a bit of a peacock.

Earning the money, however, was down to Mum, so she used to busk with her friends Gini and Carolyn around the tube stations, calling themselves Humouresque. Green Park was the best site and they took turns there with all the other acts vying for the attention of tourists, shoppers and day-trippers, trying to collect as many coins as possible before the end of their shift. Business wasn’t too bad, partly because they were really good and partly because the sight of three outrageous punk girls playing classical music was new. Years later Nigel Kennedy, the renowned soloist, told Mum he’d got the whole idea for his own famously scruffy image from watching them when they appeared on the Russell Harty Show.

I don’t remember anything about Dad at that time to be honest. Mum says he was a bit mental. He used to be able to talk in dozens of voices at once, like Robin Williams does in the Disney version of Aladdin, when he plays the genie. I can do that too, so maybe I take after him in more ways than just looking like him. Maybe Dad had a touch of the Tourette’s, even if he didn’t have the tourettey movements like I have. Once you start looking for Tourette’s you can end up seeing bits of it in pretty much everyone, especially men.

He certainly wasn’t much good at getting jobs in those days. He tried being a milkman, but gave that up. He did have a typewriter though, and used to put a lot of time into composing letters of complaint about products and sending them off to the manufacturers concerned in the hope of getting some offer of compensation. That particular business venture didn’t meet with much success and so Mum’s busking was still all they had to live on. And once I was born poor old Mum still had to fork out for babysitters out of her money because Dad was always mysteriously too busy to look after me for her.

I guess they were never a match made in heaven. They’d even got a bit pissed off with each other during the pregnancy and Mum had stormed off and got another flat with Gini, which immediately made Dad want her back. While I was turning into a full-sized bump inside her she was living in a room in Queensway, being harassed by a nasty Greek landlord who wanted to get her and Gini out. He smashed a plate glass window, poisoned the goldfish, put superglue in the locks and tried all the tricks he could think of to make life unbearable for them, but Mum was not one to be intimidated easily. She didn’t intend to be put out on the streets with a foetus inside her, so she wrote a letter to her MP and got allotted a council flat in Peckham. She and Dad decided to give their relationship another shot and he moved back in with her to be there for my arrival and to have a go at the whole happy families thing.

While she was waiting for me to arrive Mum wanted to call me Sebastian, after a line in a song by Cockney Rebel, but she changed her mind once I was actually there.

‘You’d been through such hell coming out and you seemed so calm about it all,’ she told me later, when I was old enough to understand. ‘I remembered something from my Catholic childhood about St Peter being called “the Rock”, so I thought I’d call you after him.’

So that was me, ‘St Peter, the Rock’, finally out into the world and ready to roll in Peckham, deep in the heart of South London.

CHAPTER TWO (#u80da8568-69d6-5a2b-91f8-ad9c966a4df8)

ROCK AND ROLL BABY (#u80da8568-69d6-5a2b-91f8-ad9c966a4df8)

It started to look like Mum’s career was going to save the family finances. Siouxsie and the Banshees, who were a big post-punk and goth band at the time (they had also starred in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee film), asked her and her friends to go on tour with them. Siouxsie, who came from the same Bromley area as David Bowie, had always been controversial, wearing bondage and fetish gear on stage and getting into trouble at one time for wearing swastika armbands. The Banshees were a huge influence on a lot of other acts that followed. This was a big-name group and they were going to pay Mum £490 for ten days’ work, which was a lot since Dad had so far only managed to get about £17-worth of vouchers out of all his letter writing. I was around nine months old by then, so Dad thought he might be able to cope with looking after me. He got his mum in to help him and, as far as I can remember, nothing drastic went wrong, although they probably wouldn’t have told Mum if it had.

Then Mum got a booking to play with Marc Almond and Soft Cell for a night at Drury Lane, having met Marc at the Batcave, a gothic club just off Carnaby Street in Soho, where a lot of the punk music people were choosing to spend their nights off.

Mum and Dad had a bit of a row over her paying for a babysitter for the night and it ended with Dad making off to the pub with the money allocated for the babysitter, leaving me rolling gently down the hill in my buggy with Mum running after me. I think that was probably the moment when Mum decided it was time to have a go at being a single mother. Not too sure whether Dad walked out or was kicked out, but he definitely wasn’t around any more after that. His disappearance didn’t have any great effect on me at the time since there were always plenty of other interesting-looking people lurking about in our lives to look after me and distract me from the spontaneous combustion of my nuclear family unit.

Mum and I spent a lot of time with Marc Almond back then because Gini ended up marrying Dave Ball, who was the other part of Soft Cell, and Mum started living with their manager, Steve Ø, who had lots of other successful acts on his books at the time as well. That particular relationship didn’t last that long, I think, although her friendship with Marc Almond has lasted a lifetime.

Despite the starry names she was working for, the gigs were only sporadic, not enough to ensure there was food on the table every day of the week, so Mum and her mates still had to keep going with the busking when the cash ran out. They used to take me with them sometimes, popping me in the buggy and letting me conduct along to the music in the hope of attracting a few more coins to fall into their violin cases. Apparently I was always happy and laughing as a baby and willing to go along with whatever was happening, so I was probably a bit of an asset in the ‘cutes’ department. There’s nothing like a cheerful-looking kid to get the donations flowing in. It was my first taste of performance art and I had no complaints about all the attention I was getting either.

I even went on the Russell Harty Show with them and had my picture taken with Pat Phoenix, who was the big soap opera star of the day, famous for playing Elsie Tanner in Coronation Street (sort of like the Barbara Windsor of her day). Anthony Booth, Tony Blair’s father-in-law, was on the bill too, being one of the stars of the comedy series, TillDeath Us Do Part. Russell Harty was a sort of camp version of Michael Parkinson and his show was one of the biggest chat shows in the country, a bit like getting invited on to Jonathan Ross these days. The most famous moment was when the androgynous New York model and disco diva, Grace Jones, slapped him around the head on air for turning his back on her in order to talk to another guest.

Mum and her group would do a lot of street entertaining in Covent Garden as well. She used to dress up as a bee to play ‘Flight of the Bumble Bee’ and stuff like that. When there was a competition to find the ‘Busker of the Year’ the only people who were better than them were a six-piece band called The Vulcans, who used to wear white coats and clown around singing funny songs. Mum and I used to go everywhere with them and I became like their group mascot. They would use cardboard boxes as a drum kit and I would hide inside one of the boxes so that I could spring out at the end, like Marilyn Monroe coming out of President Kennedy’s birthday cake. The audience loved it and I loved their applause and their laughter. One of the Vulcans used to do a song about a thick bloke called ‘Neanderthal Man’, while playing a ukulele and wearing a silly hat. One day, hungry for another dose of the limelight, I climbed on to his foot and clung to his leg like a little monkey as he dragged me around behind him, still singing. It went down so well with the crowd that they kept it in the act. I was carving out a career for myself before I even knew what a career was.

When the guys in the Vulcans found out that Mum and I were going to be on our own for Christmas one year they invited us to spend it with them in Portsmouth. We drove down to the coast in the back of their van, singing songs and bouncing around on blankets, since there weren’t any seats. We all went on an outing to the torture museum on Christmas Day. There was an implement for screwing down a woman’s tongue so she couldn’t talk – a bit harsh, I thought, but very interesting!

Another day we all watched a video of Grease together, three times in a row, singing along to the songs. It immediately became my favourite movie. It was nice to sing some new songs because most of the time Mum and I would be pogoing round the flat on our own to Billy Idol’s Whiplash Smile album. ‘Dancing with Myself’ had been both Mum and Dad’s favourite record even before they met, and constant exposure made it mine too.

Mum had another interesting friend called Johny, who was in a goth group called Band of Holy Joy. He stole a gravestone, complete with stone angel, and gave it to Mum as a birthday present one night. Neither of us was too keen to have it in the house, so we smuggled it back into the graveyard together the next day.

When I was three or four, Mum was invited to join a theatre company called Impact and travel to Italy with them. Apparently the Italians are very into fringe theatre. The organizers said I could come too because there were going to be a couple of other small children in the troupe and so they were planning to take a childminder with them. Mum leapt at the opportunity and we spent six months touring around the north of Italy in the summer. I learnt to climb trees and they had an old broken record player that I was allowed to mess around with. We all lived together in a communal house in the middle of some lettuce fields. I wish I could remember more about it, it sounds like the most idyllic childhood summer possible when Mum describes it, but I have to rely on her version because my memories have mostly been blown away by events since then.

I always loved watching Mum on stage. She appeared in something called The Magical Olympic Games at the National Theatre on London’s South Bank, and she did a lot at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Pall Mall, just down the road from Buckingham Palace. I was constantly boasting about her to anyone who would listen; still am, as you may have noticed. No one else I knew had a mum who did such great stuff or hung out with such weird and famous people. Every kid watched Top of the Pops in those days, but not many could point to one of their parents on the screen.

She was really versatile, appearing with Paul Weller at Wembley one day and playing with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra the next. She could play anything. She was always having themed parties, like gypsy or Spanish, where all her friends would dress up and they would play music that went with the food, raising money for charities. She was often on Top of the Pops or The Tube, playing with The Cure or Texas or the Smashing Pumpkins. They don’t let kids into those television recordings, something to do with insurance, so I used to have to watch her on the telly just like everyone else. It made me so proud.

Carolyn, the other member of Humouresque, went off to play with Fun Boy Three, and then Mum got hired by the Communards, who were big at the time, having had ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’ at number one in the charts for weeks. Their lead singer was Jimmy Somerville, who was one of the first gay pop stars to come out of the closet and had a really distinctive falsetto singing voice. I loved hanging out with him and used to call him ‘Auntie Jessie’. Mum had to take me with her on one of their two-week tours because her childminder let her down, and the coach driver, John, used to look after me while the rest of them were on stage performing. The bus was always full of lesbians and poofs and the band’s cloney friends, and I was always the centre of attention. I mean, how cool is it to be on the road with a rock band even before your first day at school?

Mum had had a varied and dramatic childhood herself. My Grandad had been working as a civil servant in London when he decided he wanted a better life for his four kids than a council flat in Wandsworth, so he got transferred to Bristol and bought a little house in the country for them all to live in. He was keen on the idea of women getting an education and Mum was bright and did well at school, so it all went well until she was sixteen and she and Grandad fell out. Two powerful characters meeting one another head on, I guess: lots of middle-aged testosterone and adolescent hormones flying around and neither of them willing to give way. It ended up with Mum being chucked out of the house and spending a couple of years living rough, sleeping under the pier in Weston-super-Mare, or on other people’s floors until some friends of the family took her under their wing and helped her fulfil her dream of going to the Guildhall. Maybe that experience was the reason why she didn’t go completely mad when she found out how I was living later on in Brighton. She’d been through the same thing herself and knew that there are worse things than not having a home of your own when you’re young and finding your way in the world. People worry too much about where they are going to sleep each night; something usually turns up.

Mum was a bit of a romantic right from the start, always dreaming of how life should be, but things never quite seemed to work out right for her in the early days. Maybe she was just a bit too feisty for her own good. But if she hadn’t been so feisty maybe she wouldn’t have survived all the ordeals that were to come, and maybe she wouldn’t have fought so hard to get me a fair deal when everything started to go wrong.

The council estate Mum and I were living on in Peckham was a bit rough. I guess it was the sort of place the council put people who they had to house in a hurry (people like my punky single-mum for a start). Other people on the estate weren’t always quite as capable of keeping things together as she was. Quite a few of them had pretty much totally lost the plot.

There was a nine-year-old kid living a few flats down, for instance, who used to come knocking on the door each day begging for food. He was looking after his eight younger brothers and sisters because his mum and dad were both alcoholics and not much good for anything. Mum would always give him something, and one time we went down to their flat for some reason. I was shocked to see how they were living, with pigeons roosting in the bedroom. Most of the kids were naked, rolling around on the floor, not even speaking properly, just grunting at one another like they had been transported through time from the Stone Age. Even when they were dressed their clothes stank of piss.

Their mum came round one evening and told us her husband had been taken into hospital and asked Mum to look after all the kids for her while she went to visit him. She didn’t reappear till the next day, by which time Mum and I had rummaged through all my old clothes and found new stuff for them to wear while their own clothes went through the washing machine, several times. One of the girls had knickers that were so old they disintegrated when she took them off. Her mum accused Mum of stealing them once she got her home and discovered they were missing. It turned out the dad hadn’t been to the hospital at all; they’d just gone down the pub together.

Everyone on the estate was fed up with the family’s constant begging and after a while their flat was burnt out and they had to be re-housed in a new area where they could start afresh. The mother came back to visit us later and told us that the smallest baby had died of an ear infection. I was really upset, having looked after it for that day and got to know it.

‘Ah,’ she casually dismissed my tears. ‘I can always have another one.’

The dad took a bit of a fancy to Mum and came to the door having tried to drown out the smell of unwashed clothes and beer with gallons of cheap aftershave, and told her he had £110 saved in the bank and thought they should get together. Mum went mad, yelling at him that if he had that kind of money he should be spending it on his children, not on trying to get his end away. I was shocked, I’d never seen her so angry about anything. I was really glad I had her to look after me rather than some of the other women I saw around the place.

CHAPTER THREE (#u80da8568-69d6-5a2b-91f8-ad9c966a4df8)

BABY MINDERS (#u80da8568-69d6-5a2b-91f8-ad9c966a4df8)

Mum’s biggest problem, once she had me, was finding affordable babysitters when she went to work. I don’t think people ever minded having me because I was always a pretty happy kid, but most people around our way had enough trouble caring for their own children, never mind someone else’s. There was a lovely Indian family who I used to stay with quite a lot. Mum even bought a set of bunks so I could sleep over there without putting any of them out of their beds. Their mum was called Rosen and she made great curries.

Mum took me out with Rosen’s kids one day and a white van driven by a couple of men cruised past. One of them leant out the window and shouted abuse at us, assuming we were all Mum’s children, spitting at her before accelerating off. I couldn’t understand why anyone would be so horrible to a woman with small children. Mum tried to explain to me about racism and how some people hated other people simply because they had different-coloured skins. I remember it making me feel sad, but also puzzled because I really liked people who were different and new, interesting and surprising. I liked Rosen’s family because the women wore swathes of brightly coloured fabric and their house was full of exotic smells. I liked the way they talked with their musical-sounding accents and the pictures they had on their walls.

Bit by bit over the coming years I learnt about the National Front and their hatred of anyone who wasn’t like them. At the same time I was aware I was also growing to be more different, and therefore more vulnerable, myself. Mostly I liked the way I was, but I didn’t always like the reactions I got from other people.

When I was about four, Mum went on another short tour with the Communards, and left me with a different local family for a few days. When she came back she found me playing on my own in the car park outside their house. The lady who was supposed to be looking after me had left her front door open so she could watch me, but had fallen asleep on the sofa. Mum went berserk, ranting and raving that anything could have happened to me while she slept. She must have been very torn between her need to make money, her love of music and performing, and her maternal urge to look after me herself all the time.

The same family had a pit bull terrier. I always loved dogs and wanted to cuddle them all the moment I saw them, but this mean bastard had other ideas as I threw my arms around its neck, and sank its teeth into my face. Luckily it missed my eye but it ripped open my top lip and there was blood everywhere. Mum was there at the time and rushed me down to the hospital, where we sat for several hours with her holding my lip on, waiting for the surgeon. I was shaking uncontrollably and crying but Mum always stayed incredibly quiet and calm in these crises, although she fainted dead away once the whole thing was over.

When the surgeon did eventually get round to us Mum and four nurses had to lie across my body to stop me fighting him off as he set to work with his needle and thread. She made them put in an extra stitch after they thought they had finished because she was so determined I wouldn’t end up scarred, which didn’t endear her to them, or me at the time. Despite her best efforts there’s still a tiny scar, but you can hardly see it.

The babysitting problem was eventually solved by the intervention of Mum’s cousin, Poofy-Cousin-Marcus, who had already helped bring up his brother’s four kids when his brother was away at sea, so he knew what he was doing when it came to nappy changing, kids’ meals and nursery school runs. He was totally happy mincing around the kitchen all day, scrubbing and bleaching. He stayed with us on and off for years and I caught him slipping money under my pillow when my first tooth came out and was convinced from then on that the tooth fairy was a balding poof with glasses and painted-on eyebrows. He was great, throwing himself into the role of nanny with gusto and filling all my criteria for being different, interesting and funny. He was completely happy gossiping with the mothers at the school gates, or showing off how white he had managed to get the wash that day.

‘Mmmm,’ I heard him purring at a neighbour who was pegging out her washing on her balcony one day. ‘Yours haven’t come up quite so white this week, have they, love?’

One of his boyfriends broke his heart while he was living with us and he disappeared into his bed for about a week, unable to face the world. As it was his birthday, Mum and I sorted him out a cake with a candle to cheer him up, taking it in to his bedroom. He emerged from under the sheets to blow the candle out.

‘So,’ Mum said. ‘Make a wish.’

‘I wish I was dead,’ he shrieked, whipping the sheets back over his head.

I remember going into his bedroom once and pulling his bedclothes off to wake him up, just as he let out a gigantic fart. Cool!

Mum continued to take me on tour with her from time to time. We went to Germany for six months with a band called Rausch when I was about six. They were a very dark bunch, surrounded by lots of drugs, which Mum didn’t like. She was always lecturing me about not doing drugs, especially cocaine, which she said made people sadistic and cold and evil. It wasn’t a particularly happy time for Mum but I enjoyed myself. I always enjoyed myself. We were in Berlin just before the Wall came down and the whole world changed in one night. Mum had been predicting it would happen, having seen it in a vision. I remember watching it coming down on the news and knowing it was important because everyone was talking about it and celebrating, but I didn’t really understand why. What was a Communist?

One of the band members in Germany really took to me and would laugh every time he saw me, calling me ‘Charlie’.

‘Why are you calling him Charlie?’ Mum wanted to know. ‘His name’s Pete.’

‘Because he is like Charlie Chaplin.’

He wasn’t the last person to say that and I liked the fact that I could make people laugh by clowning around. It always felt good to be the centre of attention, particularly if it was happy attention. All the world loves a clown.