Terry and Jane, my mum and dad, were always described as a glamorous couple. Anyone who knew them when they were young in the early 1960s would agree on that, however much they might later disapprove of the way they both behaved. It was obvious to everyone that they absolutely adored one another; you might even say they were obsessed, and that it was their obsession with one another that led to so many of our problems.
If they were both the loves of one another’s lives, as they undoubtedly were, you would have thought that would have given us, their children, a secure start in life – but there were other darker elements of their relationship at work almost from the moment they met, which turned our family and our lives into a nightmare.
Everyone in the pubs that he frequented loved Dad. He was tall and handsome, with dark hair and a powerful presence about him. He was invariably immaculately dressed in a suit and tie and known for being good company wherever he was, never able to resist playing up to an adoring crowd of admirers.
Mum was only five feet four, but she had a perfect figure, slim but curvy, which she readily showed off with mini skirts, hot pants and tightly fitted tops, everything that was fashionable amongst the young in those days, even in Norwich, a good few miles away from ‘swinging London’. I don’t have any early memories of her but I’m told she was strikingly beautiful, with long jet-black hair, deep brown eyes and flawless skin.
Dad was the black sheep of his family, or so the legend was whispered, the one with a dubious past who never did the right things but who prided himself on doing the wrong things with style. He always claimed that he was conceived when his mother had a fling with another man during the war, while his father (his mother’s husband, that is) was away from home doing the honourable thing and fighting for king and country. If that was true it would certainly go some of the way towards explaining why Dad was so different to the rest of his family, and why we were always treated as though we were outsiders in some way that was never actually put into words. Having a different father to his siblings meant there was always a gap between them and him. His life seemed to travel on totally different tracks to theirs, partly from his own choice and partly because of the way he was and the things he believed. Maybe the fact that he had a different father was also the reason why Dad was his mother’s favourite, the one she would always stick up for no matter what he did.
Her husband, who was a farmer, got into a lot of debt when he came back from the war and, unable to see a way out, he shot himself in the shed at the bottom of their garden. Dad said he was the one who found the body when he was still just a small boy. No one else ever verified that story for me so I have no way of knowing if it was true, but I certainly believed it at the time. Maybe it was true. Whatever happened, I certainly didn’t have a grandfather on that side and Nanny lived alone in her bungalow a few miles away from us.