I used to have places all over where I could hide, so I climbed up onto the garage roof. From there I could see the house without being spotted, because it had a brick front that was a little bit higher than the slope of the roof. She came out with a strange man and they were physically all over each other. I had a sick feeling in my stomach, because I just knew it was wrong and I was terrified they’d be spotted.
“What if the neighbors see them?” I whispered to myself.
Then I wondered if perhaps everybody did that sort of thing at a certain age. Maybe they were
all
at it! I wanted to convince myself that everything would be okay, but deep down I knew that what I had just seen threatened everything that we had, because I understood how hard it had been for my parents to get a mortgage and afford a home together, and I knew this could tear us apart.
I kept things bottled up and hoped it would go away, but soon similar things started to happen again. I couldn’t believe it and at first I didn’t know what to do, but eventually I plucked up the courage to tell my dad. I thought he wouldn’t believe me, so I started keeping a record of what I saw by speaking into a cassette recorder. But when I told my dad it turned out he knew full well what was going on. He tried to explain it to me as best he could and said that things would be all right. It was the reason they’d been having all the arguments at night. I used to stay up late in bed to listen to Radio Luxembourg through a little earpiece and wait to hear what time she would come in. It would get later and later and later. I could hear the car pull up outside, and I would hold my breath and listen with a sick feeling inside as she came into the house. Then my dad would get up and I would hear their arguments. I was completely aware of it all. When you are a kid, you can’t sleep when something like that is going on, because it fascinates you as much as it upsets you. Their arguments got worse and worse until sometimes, as I said, I would get out of bed and try to break it up.
I think my dad forgave her several times. They were still trying to make a go of things when we all went off for a family holiday together at Butlins holiday camp near Scarborough before she left. I had passed my 11-plus exams and earned a place at Whitley Bay Grammar School, which was a big step up socially from the local comprehensive school. So as my first day at grammar school approached I was very chuffed and excited, and I certainly had no idea how suddenly my parents’ problems would come to a head. My dad saw getting into grammar school as a big achievement, too, and when we went into Newcastle to buy my new uniform it felt as if a whole new life was about to start all over again. I was right about that, although not for the reasons I’d imagined . . .
SHORTLY
before my mother left I found a silver ring hidden in the bathroom. I was looking for something else when I discovered it tucked away in the corner of a cabinet. It was a shiny little band, and I assumed it was something that someone had bought for my mother, but I soon had other ideas for it.
I’d left junior school over the summer, but I was in touch with a girl called Claire, and I wanted to pluck up the courage to ask her to be my girlfriend.
“Take the ring and give it to Claire,” a little voice said.
I knew it was wrong, but part of me was angry with my mother because the ring was almost certainly a piece of jewelry given to her by a man other than my father. I found a little box and put the ring in it with some cotton wool. But I never got to give it to Claire or go out with her because when my mother discovered it was missing, she summoned me to the bathroom to confront me, and it led to a terrible fight between us.
“How dare you take it?” she raged, after I confessed.
“Why not? You don’t care about us,” I shouted back.
Soon we were screaming at each other at the tops of our voices as she continued to discipline me for meddling in her stuff. I stepped backward, lost my footing, and suddenly found myself tumbling down the stairs. I landed in a heap at the bottom and hurt my back.
Just then, the front door opened and my dad walked in from work, his tool bag over his shoulder, to discover us amid the mayhem.
“What the hell is happening?” he demanded.
My tumble down the stairs had been an accident, but I think my father harbored suspicions that she’d pushed me. When I was a very small child, I’d fallen over and suffered a cut above my left eye while I was alone with her. The wound had needed eleven stitches and my father gave me the impression that he felt the circumstances in which I’d fallen had never fully been explained.
Eventually we all calmed down and the row diffused, but the tension didn’t go away.
MEANWHILE,
I knew a couple of other local lads who had won places at grammar school. When our first day arrived, we all got onto the bus together with our kit, each of us with a cap and satchel.
No matter how hard I try, I can’t remember what my mother’s last words were to me that morning. (Maybe there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to.) But I do know that I didn’t suspect anything. As I recall, she just treated everything normally, making sure I was in my new uniform, that I had all the things I needed, and that I got down to the bus stop on time. One of the other lads knocked for me and we were on our way, full of excitement. The grammar school itself was great; it had a big new sports hall and lots of impressive walkways that were all raised above ground level. There were language labs and cricket fields and almost every facility you could possibly wish for. Even the teachers were fantastic. So coming back on the bus that day as a kid I felt as though I had been given so much.
Then when I got back there was nobody at home, which had never happened before. I didn’t even have a key, so at first I went round the back to investigate, but I still couldn’t get in.
In a certain sort of way, I think I knew what had happened because there was no electric heater on inside, there was no sound from the telly, and there were no lights on. It wasn’t exactly as if a bomb had gone off, but it was so different from what I would have normally encountered at 4:30 p.m. in the afternoon that I knew something was up. Bewildered, I went and phoned my dad at work. He didn’t have any idea where my mum had gone, so he told me to go to my aunty’s house, which was about a mile away.
What happened next is a bit of a haze, but I must have gone and picked my little brother up from his school on the way because I remember we arrived together. My dad met us at my aunty’s place and it was then that we went home and went into the house, all three of us together, and we discovered it was empty and all the suitcases were gone. The missing cases were the first thing I noticed, because that morning they had still been on top of the wardrobe from when we’d been to Butlins. Even the mantelpiece, where she used to have bits and pieces of china, was just bare now. All the little things about which she’d been excessively tidy, and which we’d argued about so much, were gone.
To say my dad didn’t take it very well would be an understatement. It was as if life had kicked him in the nuts after he’d worked so hard for everything. We had just had a new kitchen extension built, and he went in there for a bit on his own, just to pull himself together for a little while. My brother and I sat in the living room in silence. I assume my father was in the other room weeping, alone. I don’t think my brother really had a clue what was going on because he was only about seven, but later on it would hit him very hard, much harder than it hit me.
My dad came back after he’d composed himself, and he was very calm when he spoke to us.
“Well, what we have to do now is get your gran to come up, because she would want to be here,” he told us. His words were practical, not emotional. It was his male Northern dignity that kept him going.
Soon another aunty and an uncle drove up to the house with my nan, and she made some dinner. I’m pretty sure she cooked mince and dumplings, because she always used to make that for my dad when he was miserable, and we tried to put a brave face on things while we ate. All of his family were kind of aware and had come that night to show support, but the next day I knew I would be expected to go to school as if nothing had happened.
“It’s my second day at school and I am not missing it,” I said.
“You’re right, you can’t miss it,” replied my dad.
It was the timing of everything that hurt the most, because I couldn’t believe my mother cared so little for me that she’d chosen to vanish on my first day at school. You feel physically painful when something like that happens to you. My dad knew that I had a good insight into it all, although at the time I was still clinging to the thought that she’d come back after a few days. I think I talked to him about it that night, but we were both very tired and we didn’t discuss it in much depth. We didn’t need to; I understood. I knew exactly what had gone on, but it was much more difficult for my little brother.
The next morning I got my thruppence for the school bus, and off I went. My father went to work as normal, as well. I guess it was a cultural thing that had been learned during the war: “They might drop bombs on us, but we’ll keep going no matter what.”
After four or five days went by, I realized my mother wasn’t going to return. It was as if she had been swallowed by a black hole. That’s when my dad and my grandmother had to explain things to my brother, Ronnie. I somehow managed to find this funny little Off switch that allowed me to cope. I suppose it was a defense mechanism, although I would often run through things in my mind to see if I’d done anything that played a part in her decision to leave us.
“Why did she do it? What did I do? Am I to blame?” I’d ask myself.
Sometimes at night I would also worry about something happening to my dad; then my brother and I would be left on our own with nobody to look out for us. But in a strange way, despite all the pain, I was glad it was finally all over, because it meant we wouldn’t have to keep shutting our eyes and pretending it was going to work out with my mother. I know for a fact my father forgave her for her behavior a couple of times, and he just kept saying that maybe things would be all right.
But things were not all right, at least not in that sense. It was eight months before I heard from my mother again. Later on in life, as an adult, I found one of the things I grew to hate about being on the road with a band was being apart from my own children; after seven or eight weeks of not seeing your kids it feels unbearable. So I often wonder how my own mother could have gone so many months without getting in touch. For me it seemed an eternity, because when you are a child the days seem longer and eight months seems like eight years.
You can process a lot at that age without knowing it. Suddenly I was interested in a whole new world filled with girls and guitars and football and all the things boys are crazy about when they’re setting off on that whole teenage ride that lies ahead. It’s probably no coincidence that the Christmas after my mother left, my dad bought me my first electric guitar. I used to spend every Saturday going up to Newcastle in order to go around all the music shops just looking at the guitars and thinking
if only
. They were replicas of the ones I’d seen rock stars use, and they cost £19.95. Sometimes the shop owners would let you have a go on them. By now I’d really got to grips with the guitar book, so it was my dream to own one. My dad must have seen this, and maybe he wanted to make things up a bit for the fact that Mum had left us, so he gave me £20 for my Christmas present. We went up to town, and I belted out “Smoke on the Water” by Deep Purple in the shop while my dad watched and listened. He asked the assistant if I was any good, and I was flattered by the answer.
“Good? He can play better than most of the grown-up blokes who we get in here!” said the shop assistant.
I suppose I’d just passed my first audition. My gran gave me £10 on top of the money I had from my dad, so I managed to get a little amp to go with the guitar, and that Christmas became known in the family as the “Electric Guitar Christmas.”
We were obviously still very raw over my mum’s departure. I used to discuss it a lot with my dad. He was furious and angry and hurt, but he would talk about it in a controlled way, not in a violent or an aggressive way, and I never saw him react angrily or do anything like throw stuff around the room. In a way I think that helped me, because he could articulate his frustrations and anger and I could relate to that and agree with him. It was as if he was speaking for both of us. I channeled a lot of my own anger into playing guitar. I would really thrash it for hours on end, and I became completely obsessed with it. I must have driven everybody mad with the noise, but my father never said a word. I think he was glad I’d found something I could focus on, and I doubt I would have had that sort of freedom had my mother been around.
IT
was inevitable that my parents would divorce, which was something people just didn’t do in the early seventies. We grew up watching
Coronation Street,
a cozy English TV soap opera and people in the fictitious Northern town where it was set just didn’t do things like that, it was a complete taboo. Cullercoats was like
Coronation Street
with fish.
It was difficult at school because I didn’t know whom to confide in, but when I did I soon found out that plenty of my mates came from families with similar problems.
But the truth is that by the time my mother contacted us again, I wasn’t exactly missing her. Life had improved because there was no more tension. When she finally got in touch, it came in the form of a handwritten letter, which my father showed me one morning out of the blue. I remember being struck by how matter-of-fact the tone of her note was. She simply told us where she was living and said it was our choice if we wished to get in touch. There was no explanation of why she had abandoned us, but what really shocked me was the fact she’d been staying just a few hundred yards away from my grammar school. I wondered whether or not she’d watched me getting off the bus on all those winter mornings, and I questioned how it was that I’d never spotted her myself. She must have seen me coming and going; it would have been impossible not to. I was angry with her, too, for trying to put the responsibility about whether or not to see her again onto my shoulders.