Moments. Every word is true.

A summer holiday in France. Me, my two younger sisters, my father and his newish wife. I was about thirteen, the oldest of us siblings. Holidays were always rough because we had to spend so much extra time with our father who was a constant ball of anger.

His job was a travel writer, which had to be at the bottom of the journalism barrel. He could barely spell. He blagged all our holidays on the pretext of reviewing them and we had to endure obsequious hosts bending over to please him as he complained about absolutely everything. It was mortifying for us children, knowing that we were freeloaders and seeing him behaving so badly. We were in a constant state of fear and embarrassment.

This holiday was a little different. Instead of the usual cruise ships or package hotels, we were staying on a camping ground in the north of France. The tent was huge, very new and modern in the 1970’s, with long zips and several rooms.

One sunny afternoon we sat in front of the tent, trying to avoid interacting with our father. He sat on a folding chair and had filled an empty glass jar with water and sugar, making a syrup. This he poured onto the ground which was made up of small, rounded stones. He gathered a large supply of these pebbles in his lap and waited.

Very soon a multitude of wasps descended on the sugar drenched stones in front of him. He picked up his pebbles, one by one, and started throwing them at the wasps. He was a good shot and hit many of them. He delighted in the killing and broadcast his enjoyment to us, as if it was a normal activity and we should join in.

At the time I thought it was odd. As an adult now, I know he was just a fucking psychopath.

My formative years where spent in Southern Ireland, where I went to school and learnt a bit of Gaelic that never stuck. What did stick, however, were the words of the rebel songs. I have an almost autistic memory for lyrics and melody and I can still sing “Dublin in the Green”, “Wexford Town”, “The Fields of Athenry” and many more.

Our family moved back to London and started school and I had to lose my Irish brogue overnight. At the time the IRA were bombing mainland Britain and it would have been suicide to show any kind of allegiance to Ireland or any trace of Irish heritage. So, with the speed and adaptability of youth I started to speak with a London accent.

But I never lost my disdain for the English. The Dubliners and The Wolfe Tones had taught me all about the hundreds of years of colonisation and oppression and I was thoroughly inoculated with the Irish malaise of melancholy.

My mother had kept or made many Irish friends and she also identified with the rebels. I suppose that’s what you do when your home life is a dictatorship. One of her crowd was a drinker called Billy Braden. He looked very much like an English Major, with a tweed jacket and a pencil mustache. We called him “Uncle Billy” and enjoyed his company.

Uncle Billy told me once. “Ian, you have been born British and consequently won the lottery of life”. By his tone, I assumed he was being droll, and probably he was, but many years later I learned that the phrase was a staple saying of Victorian society and at that time not uttered with the slightest hint of Irony.

Billy was not your normal kind of uncle, he would tell stories that children should probably not hear. He taught me how to make bombs at the age of fourteen. I’m not sure why, maybe he was immature and wanted to impress a child, with his mustache and tweed and secret knowledge. But the lesson was real enough and to this very day I remember the instructions exactly. The pipe, the black powder, the crimping, the crocodile clips, the wire wool, the alarm clock timer. If you wanted, I could put one together right now. And it would work.

At the time I wasn’t concerned, probably even a little proud to be included in a deeply adult conversation. Today I wonder what he was thinking of, what did he want out of it? He’s been dead for many years, so I will never know.

I was sixteen and not getting on at home with a drunken and aggressive step-father. So I spent as much time as I could other places. I was self-aware enough to recognise that the impuIse teenagers have to leave the nest played a part in the equation. I worked a bit as a dishwasher and cleaner and had just about enough money to go out drinking on the weekends.

I had some school-friends who lived in a big, ramshackle flat in Richmond, Surrey. They were a shaggy family, all of them had dark, thick unkempt hair, like I imagined cave people would look. The atmosphere at their place was very relaxed, the parents seemed not to have a fixed job and their five children did pretty much as they pleased. I was welcomed into their flock.

Although they were obviously broke, their flat was huge with many large rooms on several levels, built the Victorian times with high plaster ceilings and thick pine floors. One of the boys showed me a small workshop in which lay piles of boiled bones and a small band-saw. This was the father’s trade. He faked model battleships made by French prisoners in the 18th century. The prisoners were often held in old hulks in English ports and they would fashion model ships from the bones in their soup rations and sell them to the locals for pocket money. Nowadays they fetch a high price in antique auctions, although I would not buy one, knowing what I know now.

I was allowed to sleep over some days and I did as often as I could, trying to balance a guilty conscience about imposing on them, and the desire not to be at home. I would wake up on a sofa in the combined living room and kitchen and wallow luxuriously in the funk of a nights accumulated blanket warmth.

In the background I could hear the clinking of large mugs of milky black tea, smell the burning of toast and hear the low murmurs of a family slowly waking up together. I so longed to be part of of that kind of tribe, the off-hand hospitality, the caring carelessness, the love of a family unit unspoken.

I was four or thereabouts. We were living in a little village call Union Hall in West Cork, Ireland. My father had moved us here, on the lam. He had written a shitty kiss and tell book in England that made life too hot for him there and had moved to the back of beyond in the mistaken belief that in Ireland authors didn’t pay taxes. But you had to be a good writer, so his plan fell through.

In the garden there was a swing. With a wooden slat for a seat. The ropes were thick, as thick as a pair of thumbs, the individual strands stuck out like little, fat fingers and as I leaned back and looked upwards, the ropes stretched all the way to heaven.

I was torn from my flight by the presence of my father and his random anger.

“How many times have I told you not to do….?”

Something. I didn’t know what, but some small childhood sin that seemed very important to him. The pettiness of the psychopath. I realised quickly that the question wasn’t rhetorical, not something I could brush off with a vague answer. I had to give the exact number of times that I had transgressed, even if I had no idea what it could be. So I gave it a stab.

“Six times?”

And that is my first memory: tailoring my answer to appease an arsehole. Being dragged from a reverie to face the unreasonableness of life.

I was in a deserted Covent Garden with my unstable friend Gavin. We were both in our early twenties and just back in London from Toronto. Early eighties. Gavin played guitar, I played drums and wrote lyrics and together we were going to break the music world somehow. Gavin introduced me to squatting and was way tougher than me. But he was mentally unwell and would lose it occasionally, which unnerved me.

It was just after 11 in the evening and we had been drinking. We probably didn’t have enough money to get well-oiled, but were eager for more. All pubs in London closed at 11 at the time, a remnant from the first world war when strict and odd licensing laws were imposed to stop munition workers from getting drunk and botching their work.

We were walking down a brightly lit side street and discussing if we could find an after hours club when a gang of 8 young men caught up with us. “Did we know of a place where they could get a drink?”. Gavin told them that we were heading to Soho to find a waterhole and they tagged along.

This made me nervous as they were a rough bunch, all talking cockney and they smelled of trouble. If only Gavin had not invited them, I thought.

We hadn’t got more than twenty yards when four of the gang grabbed me and threw me on my arse into a doorway.

“Give us your fucking money, or we’ll cut you!”

I could see their arms drawn back, ready to stab. I had very little money in my pocket and really didn’t want to hand it over.

“I haven’t got any fucking money!”

They shouted more and made ready to stab. I got angry and reached up between the outstretched knives, grabbed a pair of lapels and hauled myself to standing position. I berated them. “What the fuck are you doing? We invited you for a drink and now you pull this?”

I should make it clear that I am not a fighter or proficient in any way at protecting myself, so my reaction was entirely spontaneous and probably life-threatening. But to my surprise they were chastened and we started to talk.

It turned out that they were from the Old Kent Road in the East End, and that was where I was currently living. I sat down on the bonnet of a parked car and we talked some more.

After a couple of minutes the other four turned up, with Gavin leading them in a half-trot a few yards ahead. They had obviously run around the block after him and all were puffed out.

They came towards us and when Gavin got abreast of our group he shouted “Run!” and took off.

I didn’t move but pointed to the cowboy boots I had on my feet, ever the fashion icon. “I’m not running in these!”.

The four latecomers got to us and instead of running after Gavin they looked with interest at me. “Let’s do him.”

My four new acquaintances glanced at me and said “No, he’s alright” and then all eight ran after Gavin,

I stood there alone wondering what just happened. I found Gavin later that night, he had given them the slip.

It was the first day back at school after the Christmas holidays. I was 14 and the school was a comprehensive, just outside of Richmond, Surrey. A rough place, its’ catchment area was full of council houses with working class families, many moved from the bombed-out dockland areas after the second world war. The government policy at the time was to split up the riff raff amongst “New Towns” all over the country to pulverise their collective bolshieness. The boys supported Chelsea, Millwall, Spurs, Arsenal, and other shitty London clubs with violent supporters. The predominant atmosphere at the school was one of aggression and “gobbing” was popular, with some lads virtuosos in the art of hawking fat balls of spit over incredible distances at unfortunate pupils.

We gathered in a lecture room, not our normal classrooms, for the start of term. Two male teachers walked in, with their corduroy jackets with the wide lapels. One of them faced the assembled hooligans and said “Right, it’s off the B and H, and back on the Number 6”.

B and H meant Benson and Hedges cigarettes, which came in a flashy gold packet and were relatively expensive. Number 6 came in a shoddy packet and were the cheapest make. I tried smoking them once and even my inexperienced teenage taste buds could tell they were rubbish.

The phrase has stuck in my mind ever since, poetic in its brevity and simplicity, yet brutal in the assumption that those 14-year-olds all were smokers. Which I guess most of them were.

1981 I guess. Can’t remember too much but I had been waiting on tables somewhere and a coworker suggested we head to a strip club. Never having been in one I went along, not wanting to appear chicken.

It was just as sleazy, dark and lugubrious as I had imagined. Candles on the tables in red, artichoke-shaped vases, strippers on small stages with visible track marks on their skinny thighs.

The main attraction of the joint was being able to drink after all else was closed. So I drank and got drunk.

At one point I stumbled into the men’s toilets and pissed. Besides the wash basin was a battered vending machine that sold “cologne”. It cost a quarter. Intrigued, I slipped a coin into the slot. I couldn’t understand how they were going to administer the scent and I imagined it would fall out of a tray in a very small vial.

Curious, I leaned in and studied the machine. The only instruction was to press a button. So I pushed it hard and a spray of cheap perfume shot out of a nozzle and right into my eyes.

I was living in Miami, my first time in America, 18 years old. Early 1981, John Lennon had been shot and killed a couple of months previous and the radios were playing The Beatles constantly, which suited me perfectly. I had a small cassette player and listened to The White Album constantly, my favourite track being “Happiness is a Warm Gun”. I had stayed for a while in snazzy Coconut Grove with friends but after a while felt the need to get my own place. I rented a garage room at an highway intersection from a couple of lesbians who preferred that I stayed in the garage. It was a very boring existence and I spent most of my time working illegally at a couple of pizza restaurants. When I got “home” I would cross the intersection and shop at the Seven Eleven for TV dinners and Bugler cigarette tobacco which came in an old-fashioned blue and white paper package with papers included. The Indian guy behind the counter seemed to be at work all 24 hours. We talked a bit. We talked often, he seemed pleasant.

One day I was lying on my mattress in the garage when the two women burst in. They had heard someone wandering around the garden and feared it was a thief. They pushed a revolver into my hands and sent me out. I had never held a gun before, let alone fired one, so I am not sure what use I would have been. Looking at the holes in the chambers I could see that the bullets were hollow-points, fat lead donuts. I had heard of these and knew that they were designed to cause of lot of damage.

After a cursory look around the garden I saw no one, thankfully, and could go back inside and relieve myself of the gun, having acted suitably heroic.

A couple of days later I was lying on my mattress, watching the small TV the women had provided. Outside I heard a lot of noise from sirens and engines. Looking back at the TV and the news show that was playing, I learned that the Indian guy behind the counter of the Seven Eleven across the street had just been shot dead in a hold up.

When I was seven, we lived for a short while in Battersea, London. Prince of Wales Drive, facing Battersea Park and past that, the Thames. A dingy flat made all the gloomier by the constant petty sadism of my father. His method of blowing up at any fault I made didn’t help me learn to read and I still couldn’t master it, to his disgust. I went to primary school close by, shoddily put together, one floor, on the lot of what must have been a bombsite. London still hadn’t been rebuilt entirely after the war.

At this time the moon landing happened, and my father bought a small black and white TV to watch it. We woke up in the early morning and I remember the crackling of the talk-back from Neil Armstrong as he hopped on to the dusty surface of our nearest planet, white light flickering all the way back to our grey parlour.

At school I blossomed a little with a sympathetic lady teacher who gave me the encouragement I hadn’t experienced before. I even wrote my first poem after watching my first snow flurry past the large single pane windows of the prefab classroom: “Snow, snow, you come and go…”

I remember reading a word properly for the very first time. In the bathroom at home, taped to the wall, was a brochure for a ship we would be traveling on. “Oriana”. The letters suddenly melted into focus before my eyes, and I mouthed the syllables to myself: O RI A NA… Oriana! I realised I could read, and on my own, with no one standing over my shoulder to make me nervous.  I had cracked the code and was filled with the spirit of independence and achievement.  

Many years later I thought about the incident and realized that the middle of “Oriana” contains my name at the time: Ian.

I was living in Ham, close to Richmond, Surrey, in England. I must have been about 12. I went to school at a comprehensive, Greycourts it was called. The pupils were a mixture of middle class kids from the local semi-detached suburbs and and very rough, working class children from the “estates”. After the war, the government had rehoused families from the bombed out docklands all over the country, probably to water down their collective bolshieness. These kids spat a lot, supported London teams like Chelsea, Millwall, Spurs. There was a lot of bullying.

In the grounds of the school there were several portacabins bolted together as a temporary setting for the Swedish School. The Swedish children learned and existed here with no contact with the English pupils at the comprehensive.

One day they had left, moved on to better accommodation. The cabins were empty. One lunchtime playtime all the pupils were outside, milling around the portacabins, looking through the windows, which were quite high up. Suddenly someone threw a stone through a window and it exploded into pieces. Another followed suit, another and another and a frenzy took place. Every window was bricked. I might even have taken part, I think almost everyone did. Teachers ran out and ineffectually tried to stop us. Every time they ran around one side, the kids increased the bombardment from the other.

At some point every window was a mess of shards and there was nothing left to stone. So we all stopped and moved along. There must have been about 200 of us. I don’t think the teachers managed to pin anything on any particular student. They just stood there aimlessly, having just witnessed ten minutes of unmotivated rage from their pupils ending just as quietly as it had started.