I Owe You Nothing

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Whilst he was in his teens Dad taught himself to play the harmonica and the guitar. By the time he was twenty the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were dominating the charts, and Dad was singing with a band, or a group as they were called in those days. It was a group which never had a name, and they only played one gig – disastrously. They used to practise at the Heal’s furniture store canteen, because the lead guitarist worked there. They were booked to fill in when the main group took a break during a dance at the Heal’s social club, in Kent. After watching the main group fail to get anybody up on their feet to dance, Dad knew they were on to a loser.

By then he was going out with Mum, and she and the girlfriend of one of the other members of the group gamely danced the whole time they were playing, although they were the only ones on the dance floor. Dad now admits this might have had something to do with the fact that they were dreadful.

It was in 1967 that my mum and my dad met; she was just twenty-one and he was twenty-three. Regardless of all that was to happen later between them, they were very much in love at the beginning – in fact, it was almost love at first sight. My mum was visiting her gran in hospital. As she walked down the corridor with her sister she saw Dad coming the other way, and they fancied each other instantly.

‘He was very attractive, and we gave each other the eye,’ says Mum. ‘When I came out after visiting-time he was waiting, and we started chatting. I’d just finished with another boyfriend who I knew was watching, so I played up to Alan like mad.’

They went out together for quite a few months, and by Christmas 1967 Dad proposed. They decided to get married the following September, but Matt and I changed their minds about that. When Mum found out she was pregnant they brought the wedding forward to April.

‘We didn’t get married because Carol was pregnant: we simply brought it forward. We’d already agreed we wanted to be married and I suppose after that we threw caution to the wind a bit,’ says Dad. ‘It was a surprise when Carol became pregnant, but not a nasty shock. We were both pleased: it was just sooner than we’d planned.’

Their main problem was finding somewhere to live. Then, only a week or two before their wedding day, they found a one-bedroom flat at the top of a house in Brockley. They didn’t let the landlady know that Mum was pregnant and managed to get away with it as Mum stayed slim for quite a few months – remarkable when you consider that she was carrying twins. Eventually the landlady found out there was a baby on the way and though she wasn’t heartless enough to throw them out, she certainly didn’t make life easy for a young mother. Although there was a big wide hall in the house, she would not let Mum leave a pram downstairs.

For the first three months of their married life Mum was able to carry on working, first as a hairdresser and later as a telephonist. But it hadn’t been an easy pregnancy: Mum had anaemia, low blood pressure, renal colic and, when she was three months pregnant, a threatened miscarriage that meant she had to spend two weeks in hospital.

She admits now that she knew nothing about babies and how they were born. ‘We went to a film about childbirth at the hospital,’ she says. ‘I assumed that by the wonders of nature the stomach opened up, the doctor lifted the baby out, and the stomach closed up again, an everyday miracle. When I saw what really happens I passed out. Alan had to get me outside. He drove to the nearest pub, dashed in and brought a double brandy out to the car for me. It seems incredible now that I could ever have been so naïve.

‘It was supposed to be the swinging sixties with everyone being permissive. But nobody had ever bothered to explain the fundamental facts of life to me.’

Soon after learning about it, Mum had to go through it. After we were born she spent ten days in hospital, and then went home to the flat in Brockley without her babies. We stayed in hospital for another month. She says:

‘It was a very strange experience, walking out of the hospital without them. I felt dreadful. I spent hours travelling back there to see them, and I was always pestering the life out of the staff on the phone. I remember one day being told that Luke was out of his incubator and holding his own. Matthew had also been taken out but then had to go back in.

‘I spent the weeks when they were in hospital getting ready for them at home. The pram had to be changed for a twin one, and I had to get lots of extra clothes, nappies and everything else.

‘Then, when they came home, it was a matter of survival. They were being fed every three hours, day and night. I was so, so tired, and there was no help. Alan was scarcely there – he was working very long hours. It was very hard work and I was very lonely. I had a boiler for the nappies, and the kitchen seemed to be permanently full of steam.

‘If I took them out I had to first carry the base of the pram down three floors to the hallway, go back for the body of the pram, go back again for the first baby and then make a fourth trip up and down for the second one. Coming back in I had to repeat the same procedure. I was dying of tiredness.

‘But despite that, I adored having them. I sat for hours by their cot – they shared one at first – just watching them.’

At this time Dad had a job working for a firm that supplied and stocked kiosks selling souvenirs all over the tourist areas of London. It paid well and gave him a car, but the hours were appalling. He worked for thirteen weeks with only one day off, and that was the day we were born.

He remembers coming in one night, late, and disturbing us. ‘The noise of me coming in woke Luke and Matthew. Carol automatically started to climb out of bed to see to them. Her eyes were closed and she was operating on automatic pilot – she was so tired. I did the feeding and changing for her that night: it took me three hours, and by that time they were ready to start again. I don’t know how she coped, but I have nothing but admiration for the way she did. I know I wasn’t around enough to take any pressure off her.’

Things were already starting to go wrong between my parents. Mum remembers when she came home from hospital after having us and found that Dad had not even washed the dishes from the dinner party on the night she went into labour, or changed the bed. She remembers feeling very alone during the eight months they lived at the Brockley flat after our birth.

But there were some good times as well. Mum has a really great singing voice, and they shared the same taste in music: Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight and the Pips, the Beatles, James Taylor. Wherever they lived, and however little money they had, my parents always surrounded themselves with music. Dad would get his guitar and his harmonica out, and Mum would sing. Because she was shy, she preferred to sing in the dark: they would lie in bed together singing. Even before we were old enough to remember it, Matt and I were surrounded by music.

Soon we moved from the flat in Brockley to a ground-floor maisonette at Hither Green. It was bigger and better than Brockley, although the tiny boxroom bedroom that Matt and I shared was damp and Mum constantly had to redecorate it.

For the first year of our lives, me and my brother were both bald, and then we sprouted a mop of blond, downy hair. We had big blue eyes and dimples. Mum says that wherever she took us, people stopped her and commented on how lovely we were. I’m sure that all parents of twins will know what it is like: one baby gets a lot of attention and fuss made over it; two are guaranteed twice the attention and twice the fuss.

Mum was completely wrapped up in us: ‘They were my saviours, they made my life worth living,’ she says. ‘We used to giggle together all the time, and I’d be so busy talking to them as we walked along the street that more than once I pushed the pram into a lamp-post. I loved them to pieces. My mum adored them, too. They were her first grandchildren, after all, and she was forever buying them clothes and toys. I’d go to see her once a week and she’d make sure I had a huge meal – she knew that money was tight and that I’d be making sure that the boys and Alan had everything, without worrying about myself. I never had to tell her, she just knew, and there would be a package of things for me to take back home with me.’

Dad was now working as a hosiery salesman, and he was also doing evening jobs to raise more money. It was while he was knocking on doors doing market research for Gillette that he met a man who is still a friend of his to this day, and who sparked in him an interest in joining the police.

‘This chap admitted bluntly that he had joined to get a police house and to have job security. He suggested that if I was interested I should try the City of London police, not the Metropolitan Police. I was worried about it, I thought we might alienate family and friends by joining the police. But Carol was philosophical: she said that if we lost friends because we needed good housing and a steady wage, they weren’t worth having,’ he says.

It took a long time for Dad to be accepted. The police force weren’t too happy about his employment record, but eventually they accepted him for training, when we were two and a half years old. Mum was very pleased and proud, and thought that life was going to get better for us all. She didn’t realize that her problems were just beginning.