Stuart (20 page)

reads the heading of the first.

There is something odd about this, which I don't catch at first.

Below, the sheet is divided into subjects, leaving an inch of blank space for the teacher's remarks. This is the next surprise: they are excellent. It's no wonder Stuart didn't trust them. Nobody could connect the man now loping across the city with two suicide scars around his neck with the six-year-old goody two-shoes who smarms across this piece of paper in dark blue Biro.

And, in summary, at the bottom of the page, in pale blue:

The next report is in a different hand. Aged seven: ‘Stuart enjoys arithmetic and has made good progress.' ‘Stuart's comprehension is good, whether of the written word or of stories.' He ‘has a lively mind', he ‘adds much to the class discussions'. Aged eight: ‘Excellent progress', ‘remarkable progress', ‘very good work', ‘very creative', ‘great understanding'. In PE, Stuart ‘has done particularly well at swimming and archery'–rather an alarming sport in a school for the disabled, one might think.

Aged nine, he changes his name.

I see what is wrong with the first report now–the name, ‘Stuart Turner'. After this it never reappears in his life, except on his collection of official documents and, ironically, at moments when he wants to disguise himself.

‘One night,' explains his mother, ‘Stuart was about thirteen and had got it into his head that it was his stepfather's fault that I'd left dad. I sat down with him and I said, “Look, we were living, you and Gavvy and me, on our own when I met your stepdad. Rex weren't there,” I said. “Your stepdad's not the reason that Rex's not here now. I've never told you about your father. I've never run your father down to you. What's gone on in marriage was between me and him, I always thought. But I'm gonna tell you a few home truths now, just what it was like.” So I told him that night and he looked at me, I can remember him just sitting with his head down and he kept looking up and I said that was what life was like. He was amazed.'

‘Did you tell him about the violence?'

‘Yes.'

‘That he beat you up?'

‘Yes. You've got him on such a pedestal, I said, because you thought your dad would make everything right.'

It was a few years after this conversation that Stuart came out of his six-month sentence in Send Boot Camp (where beatings occurred daily) and went to visit Rex in Portsmouth and Rex beat a woman up in front of him. ‘That's why he went mad. He'd put his dad on a pedestal and then finding that Rex proved right what I told him–Stuart did have a job coming to terms with that.'

‘Did these things happen when Rex was drunk?'

‘And when he was sober, but far worse when he was drunk.'

‘What provoked him?'

‘Nothing. You couldn't put a finger on anything. He was just so unpredictable.'

‘Why didn't you leave earlier?'

‘Because in them days, thirty years ago, there wasn't the help for women on their own with kids. And your loyalties are that you try and keep the family together. And you just think that they'll change. And you're young, you're naive and excited and bloody stupid. You are! I've never seen anything like that behaviour. I didn't come from a family like that. I don't even think my mum and dad argued, certainly never in front of us kids. Rex didn't care about anything. I just found it totally amazing. Karen says to me, “Ah, Mum, I've always liked naughty nice boys, haven't I?” Yes, I understand just what she means! “It wasn't all bad, Stuart,” I says. “There was obviously good times, it wasn't all bad. Dad and I had some good times.” '

In my view, Rex Turner should have been dispatched at birth. He was a savage. Stuart's grandparents heard the screams from two houses away when Rex kicked their pregnant daughter in the stomach. One of brother Gavvy's first memories was of leaning over the banister, aged three, trying to crack his father on the head with a broom as he beat their mother up. Rex was a man who injected poison wherever he went, and for generations after he'd passed.

‘But what right have I got to condemn him?' says Stuart. ‘Everything he did, I did worse.'

Stuart's mother met his stepfather, Paul Shorter, in 1973. A burly person with tattooed forearms, Paul was first a plasterer, then took a job welding lorry axles. Paul was a kind, placid, hardworking man, untalkative to the point of muteness, and loyal. One time, says Stuart, ‘Paul, me dad–I call him me dad–and Mum had a serious car accident. This was driving me to see the headmaster because I was being real disruptive in school. Me dad went to brake at the junction, and the brakes went on the car, and we went out on to the main road, hit a lorry, practically head-on, ripped the whole side of the car off, car somersaulted from front to back, then ended up in a ditch upside down. Paul had done all his back in but he got me mum out. They had trouble finding me, but he got me out, then he collapsed himself. So obviously he did care about me.'

Another time, a friend of Paul's came to the house. The friend was having troubles with his wife and worrying about leaving his children. ‘It don't matter for you if you was in my position,' the man reflected, ‘because Stuart and Gavvy aren't your sons.'

Paul flipped: ‘Don't you
ever
say that again!' He pounded his finger on the kitchen table, ‘They
are
my sons!'

Paul took the battered Turner family to a new house, on the other side of Cambridge, in a village called–

‘If you don't mind, we'll change the name,' interrupts Stuart hurriedly.

‘–Midston?' I improvise.

Stuart nods. ‘I've caused me mum and dad enough grief as it is. Can we leave them out of it now?'

A few days after Judith married Paul, Stuart and Gavvy secretly agreed to honour the new husband. The first Judith heard about it was when the headmaster at the Roger Ascham rang up and asked if it was all right to address her son as

I throw on some clothes to leave my bedroom for half an hour, and walk across to the university library.

In one of Stuart's reports, the composition teacher has written that Stuart has

Ladybird 7a turns out to be part of the Key Words Reading Scheme, and is called
Happy holiday
.
^*
It's on restricted access. I have to examine it in a special room of the library reserved for books with weak bindings and publications of a sexual nature.

Happy holiday
is the story of two children, Peter and Jane, who go to the seaside to visit their aunty and uncle. The cover shows Peter and another boy standing in a municipal pond, in shorts, showing off their motor boats.

‘It was good of Uncle to buy you a new boat,' says Jane.

‘Yes,' replies Peter, ‘and it was nice of Aunty to let you have her old doll.' He looks a little incredulous in the facing picture. ‘I hope you like it,' he adds.

As the blurb on the inside cover announces, ‘
Happy holiday
embraces…the natural interests and activities of happy children', like flying kites in the hills, balancing on seaside donkeys, leaping among the surf, whisking out on a motor boat–all the interests, in short, that the dribbling, callipered, wheelchair-bound pupils of the Roger Ascham could not do.

‘It is fun here,' says Peter, picking up a crab, ‘I always want to run and jump when I am on the sands.'

The preceding volumes seem to be devised for torture.
Play with us
–Oh, but not you, Wobble Legs.
Things we do
–Oops, things you can't.
Where We Go
–Not the same place as you Spags and Divvies, that's for sure. To ensure these cheerful messages were fully understood, teachers could buy ‘flash cards' and make the cerebral palsy children chorus the words.

‘I like Peter.'

I wish he'd die.

‘I like Jane.'

Why doesn't she break her back?

‘They like to play.'

Go do it on the train tracks.

And, accompanied by a painting of Peter and Jane flinging back and forth on a swing: ‘Up they go. Up, up, up, they go.'

The Ladybird books are not entirely other-worldly. The series editor understood that the readership came from varied backgrounds and would have varied futures: towards the end of the volume with the swing painting there is a page of important, helpful information.

‘Look, Jane, that is a Police car.'

‘It says POLICE on it.'

In 3b,
Boys and girls
(no cripples, please), Peter and Jane are at it again, bounding into the air on a trampoline.

‘Look at me, Jane. Look at me. Up I go. Up and up and up I go.'

Two pages later, even the pet rabbit jumps.

Cambridgeshire in the 1970s has a flavour of the 1870s. Because the family could not afford holidays for themselves, in the summer, from July until September, Judith did casual agricultural labour in the fields, planting in leeks, thrusting them into the soil under the scalding sun, being pernickety among the strawberries, gathering second-harvest potatoes in the leafy autumn.

‘In them days, the only employment women without qualifications could get in the country around here was on the fields,' says Stuart's mother.

Some of Stuart's first memories are of these fields: ‘sitting on the front of a tractor all day steering it', closely guarded by the nervous foreman ‘what were doing about two mile an hour'.

They worked in rows. For potatoes (the most common crop) each woman took on one ridge of earth that stretched the length of the field, while the children rioted or (the unpopular ones) joined in. Toddlers were piled by the hedge. It was blank, exhausting work. One hour, two hours, four hours would go by and you'd have thought of nothing. Just emptiness, rows and rows of female emptiness, baking in the sun, picking spuds. It was quite pleasant, really.

The tedium of the day was broken by moments of gentle unexpectedness. Sometimes the machine that had gone ahead, shaking up the ridge to release the crop, would have sliced through a potato and its sheer face would glisten like honey beneath the clog of dirt. A weevil might scuttle between the sods. It was remarkable how few worms there were: so many potatoes, but no life. Farms prolific enough to require bussed-in teams of labourers have stillborn soil.