Life's a Banquet Read online

  It just depends how you hold them up to the light.

  3.Travel guide

  Especially if you harbour a deep, unassuaged yearning to know more about Reading, Berks.

  With the leisure afforded by being financially fortunate, I’m going back to the places that marked the flashpoints in my life: the tarmac-scented streets of ’70s suburbia, the high-hedge-rowed lanes of my schooldays and the flights to far-flung places that cast me out, then pulled me back to where and who I am today. It strikes me that these trips to places I once knew are as much about understanding contemporary me as my past persona.

  I am looking for clues.

  Present day

  In the centre of Reading, by the old Kennet and Avon Canal, there is a shopping centre called The Oracle. It’s full of teenage girls saying things like, ‘I dunno, ‘Chelle, what d’you fink?’ On one level, I think it’s a fantastic place: it’s huge, warm, dry and packed with the sort of fast-food places that I’m only allowed to go to if my wife thinks I’m at the library writing books about elves.

  I have an office in nearby Henley-on-Thames, so coming back to the first house I remember today is conveniently close. I’ve parked the car behind the row of houses where we lived on the west side of Reading, in a sort of cul-de-sac of garages where I remember we kept my father’s Hillman Imp. Memories of that car are nearly all of being copiously sick all over the red plastic matting in the boot every time we ventured further than Basingstoke. Hot plastic and vomit has a smell that hangs about: after forty-five years, I can conjure it up in seconds.

  Car parked, it takes me a moment to get my bearings, then I spot a familiar alleyway. Walking along it, to where I’m pretty sure our old house is, I stop by a drain poking out of the tarmac path and find myself looking at it very hard, feeling my first ripple of happy-sad nostalgia.

  I’d forgotten all about it until just now, but this drain was once a big part of my life and it hasn’t changed a bit (why would it? it’s a fucking drain!). When I was about five, this marked the spot that was far enough away from our front door as to feel like we had made a break for freedom, but close enough that we were allowed to go here on our own. It’s simple and somehow exquisitely familiar, this conduit of mulchy water and memory. We spent hours poking things into it, chiselling the earth up around its square corners, or boring into the chewy macadam and making up elaborate stories about what lurked at its bottom. This is a very satisfying discovery and bodes well as a start for this book, which I’ve just decided will be drenched in bitter-sweet remembrance, like Cider with Rosie… but much funnier.

  As I walk around to the front of the row of red-brick two up two downs where we lived after we got back from Singapore, it is obvious that these houses – new when we all moved in – have not aged well: the brick looks cheap by today’s standards, lacking in any patina of age and already crumbling in places. The wooden cladding on the upper floors is also pealed and warped. But saplings have become trees, the gardens look cared-for and there is plenty of evidence of another generation of children (swings, bikes, trampolines) growing up happily here to give it all a cosy vibe. I could live here: it’s close enough to town to walk to any number of shops, but only about ten minutes from the M4; it feels safe; and, because we’re in England, there are at least three parks nearby and a pub.

  But growing up in early 1970s Reading was every bit as grim as it sounds. Where The Oracle stands today used to be a semi-industrial no-man’s-land of empty warehouses backing onto a canal with shopping trolleys and dead dogs floating about in it. It’s another good reason to like the new shopping centre.

  The early ’70s still had a post-war feel in Berkshire, as if there was enough coal fire grime, peppery gents who’d fought, tin advert signage and Bakelite knocking about to transport you back to 1940 in an instant.

  To go to school in the morning, I would walk quarter of a mile to the bus stop and take the Number 18 along the Oxford Road. Sitting on the top deck, watching the world go by through windows running with condensation, about one in four shops would be viewed by me with deep suspicion. Something wasn’t right about them. The mannequins in the windows were oddly contorted – as if preparing to carry out a tricky Twister manoeuvre, or do yoga – and they would be wearing ill-fitting underwear and always, to my mind, sporting an accessory that seemed out of place, like a hat (with just pants on!), or they were gripping something that may have been a duster or a small cat-o’-nine-tails. Aged six or seven, I knew everything there was to know about pirates, and these weren’t them.

  The working girls on the corners in all weathers had no heroin chic, just very painful-looking cold sores and skinniness that inspired the mixture of fear and pity I usually reserved for the homeless in the centre of town who hung out by WHSmith.

  Even by my parents’ relaxed parenting standards, this was an alarming and possibly quite risky daily journey. I didn’t know this was the Reading red-light district, I just knew I didn’t like this part of the journey to school, past the sex shops and prostitutes to my stop by the newsagents (now a pharmacy) where I had to get off the bus and walk up the road in my bright red Catholic school uniform.

  My father had left the armed forces in about 1971 and I imagine my parents had some adjusting to do. Life spent drifting between the officers’ mess and country club in Singapore, where he served with the Gurkhas, had been swapped for a new-build semi in an insalubrious part of town and a daily commute to London on a perpetually tardy line run with decrepit rolling stock. His military career had been an entirely peaceful one and I do wonder if this was not a big part of why he left. The official line was his ambition of becoming a general looked unlikely when he had to go back to his main regiment, the then Green Jackets, and compete with a huge infantry corpus of other thrusting officers for the top job. I’m not sure I buy that: some soldiers are suited to the pink gin, golf and MG lifestyle; married quarters, army wife, the mess the centre of one’s world; twenty moves in a career, but the same faces in each… and more gin.

  Others want to fight, and I strongly suspect this was my father’s ambition when he joined.

  So, he left and took a job with Dewar’s Whisky in London on the bottom rung of the sales and repping ladder. They can’t have paid very well, because my parents, my brother and I ended up living where we did.

  Genteel poverty makes me think of crumbling vicarages, Labradors for central heating and a sort of dignified respectability. You can hold your nerve as long as the Aga doesn’t pack in. The reality – for us – was more boring: it meant eating a lot of cheese sandwiches devoid of butter, and not quite fitting in anywhere, really.

  The estate we lived on had only just been thrown up and opposite was a brownfield site that had started to be developed virtually the day we moved in.

  Even at that age it was obvious that we were outsiders. My big brother didn’t have a gold stud earring, nor did we own a skinny Adidas T-shirt between us, or have a dad who drove a van with tools in it. Instead we had to walk into town via one or two council estates wearing identical blue corduroys and Arran sweaters with bobbles, the shame of which I still carry with me today. By the time I was six, friends on the estate and parents of friends were remarking that we were posh and, in a largely socialist Britain at the time, this was not a good thing.

  Nowadays it’s OK to be upper middle class and beyond: we have Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and the Queen. You can be posh unashamedly (Rees-Mogg) and even ironically (Boris Johnson). Back to 1973: being posh just meant you were an effete dickhead.

  Not fitting in was coped with in different ways by Charles and me: I got stuck into being a bit naughty, Charles just got stuck in – that is to say, he took to carrying a large stick about the place and hitting people with it. Eventually, a posse of mums turned up at our door to complain that class war was fine as long as the toffs didn’t fight back. My mother, true to form, talked at them for a very long time. Long enough for those mothers to realise that they were not going to get an apology, and they began to drift off in ones and twos, until the last couple of mums left on the doorstep were invited in for tea and turned.

  Back here today, I’m attracting a few sideways looks from passers-by, which is understandable as I’ve been squinting up at my old bedroom window for a while. In future, I decide I will remember to bring Cooper, our springer spaniel, on these trips. There’s something about having a dog with you, in England in particular, that immediately makes it OK to loiter about almost anywhere. If I go for a walk in the countryside, on my tod, lone female walkers will (understandably) cross muddy fields full of menacing cattle to avoid me; however, if I’ve got the dog they will come over and natter. This is fine by me – chatting is my third favourite pastime – but it’s obviously nonsense: having a dog does not make me sane or safe, but it does break the ice.

  Getting along with my peers when I was small, generally meant playing the fool as my stock-in-trade. It endeared me to other children, but not always adults. Famously, I was smacked by my granny on holiday in West Bay. It’s a testament to my overall annoyingness that someone as kind and gentle as Granny Bennett, who had never raised a hand to a child in her whole life, was moved to wallop me – having spent three straight days in my company.

  Whether or not being spanked shut me up, I don’t really remember: probably for at least five minutes out of sheer surprise. I doubt it, though – very little did shut me up, with the possible exception of Blake’s 7 and Top of the Pops.

  At my first proper school, English Martyrs, they sent a letter to say I was hyperactive and needed special treatment.

  My mother was around there within the hour to explain that in no circumstances should I be given any more attention than the bare minimum to dispense an education, as anything else would just play into my hands.

  Whether I was hyperactive or just a pain in the arse is hard to tell. Aged about six, I wound up in hospital with a case of constipation and vomiting that was so severe the doctors thought I had an appendicitis. The real reason for the state I was in is that I had decided pooing was a waste of precious time and so I gradually cut back until my large intestine resembled a boa that had just swallowed a goat. Several suppositories later, now feeling as light as air, I was driven home in total silence, put on a diet of bran and prunes and made to sit on the loo for half an hour after breakfast every day. Whether I needed to go or not.

  So, I’m going for the pain in the arse theory, as this is what I usually got for being how I was, and life repays in kind as a rule.

  This need to be on the move all the time (whilst providing a running commentary to anyone who will listen) has more or less carried on until this day. I am deeply perturbed by the passing of time and the possibility that I may be wasting it; I look about and see other people engaged in different activities and wonder if I might be missing out. I can usually be relied on to grab at the flicking tail of opportunity and tug without thinking about the consequences.

  The upside is I can get away with five or six hours’ sleep a night, much less if need be, and I get a lot done. The downside is that people around me for more than half an hour tend to switch off, even if I’ve got something really important to say. BUT I have learned to take a book into the loo – to take my time or suffer the consequences. So, that’s something.

  But Reading wasn’t all bad and, anyway, kids – as the most disenfranchised, downtrodden and un-polled members of our society – tend to come with the built-in resilience to take things in their stride1.

  Frankly, it could have been much worse. It’s only hindsight that makes me feel a bit sorry for the child I was: the fuel shortages, the strikes, Matterhorns of rubbish and Jimmy Savile virtually everywhere. At the time, it was just life, and there was enough that was new and interesting to ride over the bumps. We were still allowed to have a deep personal relationship with tarmac and cycle within a ten-mile radius of home. I’m pretty sure we did spend more time playing outside with friends… and enemies, and learning to cope with these was the first great lesson, long before I learned to harness the hyperactivity into something useful.

  One of the best things about our estate was its proximity to my maternal grandparents (of Slough and vicarage-pinching fame). I’m walking the short distance there now, down the A4 to a virtually identical estate of small red houses. Along the right-hand side of the road there are much larger, double-fronted Victorian terraces with leafy front gardens and nice hedges. I remember a lot of these being individual flats, but they’re now offices and private outpatient clinics, which is a sort of gentrification, I guess.

  Granny and Grandpa Budd (as opposed to the imaginatively named Granny and Grandpa Bennett) lived about five minutes’ walk from ours in a slightly larger shoebox. My abiding memory of walking there is the smell of creosote from the rows of fences portioning off pocket handkerchief gardens with identical sheds, also liberally creosoted once a year.

  You can do a lot in life if you know where you’re from and whether you’re loved, and both sets of grandparents provided this in heaps.

  My grandfather was a retired officer in the Royal Engineers and, in those days, it was hard to meet anyone grumpier, or more tight-fisted. He had been known to wash up cling film and dry it painstakingly for re-use. At the time, I thought sitting in a corner of the living room watching the golf all day – breaking off to bark at my brother and me for making noise – was par for the course if you were old. However, about fifteen years later, he metamorphosed into another person altogether. He had a pacemaker fitted and his knees done, so he was able to walk about, and his temper improved overnight – as I imagine it would.

  So now I know his bad grace was down to the fact he felt like shit. But Grandpa Budd lived until he was one hundred, and for the last twenty years of his life I was proud to call him one of my best friends in the world. I’m not sure why we got on so well in later years – in many respects we were very different people and, as a rule, old people don’t like me: put me in front of anyone over the age of about eighty-seven and they’ll be complaining it’s time for their nap within five minutes.

  The fact he lived such a long life is also a minor miracle and gives rise to a theory of mine about longevity: the harder one’s life, the longer you live – provided you don’t actually get shot at some point.

  Francis J Budd was born at the start of WWI, the son of a meat wholesaler in Hastings, and remembers the troop ships going to northern France, hearing the guns and being very frightened about Spanish flu. He grew up just in time for WWII, where he dismantled unexploded bombs in London during the Blitz. As an officer, his life expectancy during the early part of the war was less than ten weeks; the main problem, he told me, was that nobody had any idea how to diffuse a German bomb. The only tactic they had at their disposal (in bomb disposal) was to dig it out, load it onto a truck and drive like hell until they got to Epping Forest. Once there, they would set it off, then go back to the East End and start again. The reason officers lasted so little time was that one had to be present during the disposal process – to supervise the squaddies who would probably get themselves blown up all wrong, left to their own devices.

  As you can imagine, dislike of the people dropping the bombs ran very high during the Blitz. Grandpa told me of a German parachute coming down a few streets away from where they were working one day. By the time they had driven around the narrow Victorian streets to get to where the airman had landed, the local housewives had come out into the road, armed with knives, and chopped the man to pieces.

  Bomb disposal did not stop after the Blitz. My grandfather was in the first wave of troops crossing to Sword Beach during D-Day and was put to work making safe the booby traps the departing Nazis had left in people’s homes for when they returned. This, I must confess, I do not understand: the war was lost and these were civilians. To lay bombs in ordinary people’s porches and front rooms seems a petty act of murderous revenge on folk who’d already been through a lot and one that had no bearing on the outcome of a conflict that was drawing to a close. In Caen, the German engineers set up booby traps on top of booby traps, for good measure.

  His duties took my grandfather all the way to Berlin. He spoke with great admiration of the remaining occupants of the city who were already clearing up the rubble and rebuilding whilst the Allies were still flushing out the last of the Reich. After being demobbed he started work with the firm of architects which designed the art deco clock you see when you come into London on the M4.

  But civilian life did not suit him, so he joined up again and saw active service in Malaysia and Nigeria. About sometime in the 1960s I think he could have been forgiven for deciding the world was a madhouse and humankind was heading for oblivion. All he had known from an early childhood spent within earshot of the great howitzers on the Western Front, until now, was war. And Slough. However, I never heard him complain (about that, anyway – he moaned for weeks when I once reversed the charges to call him from a payphone at my boarding school).

  I went to see him very shortly before he died in 2015 and we chatted easily over tea and cake until it was time to go. Even then, he was sharper than most people half his age and gave better, more objective advice than anyone I know. He was shortly to be awarded the Legion d’Honneur, France’s highest order of merit, for his part in the Normandy landings. I asked him if he’d seen Saving Private Ryan and he waved away the whole idea of looking back on that period. In all the time I knew him, he never went to any of the D-Day reunions or military parades on Poppy Day. It was only rarely that he mentioned anything about the war, and it was usually anecdotal events that could have happened in peacetime. To be honest, I’m not sure it wasn’t his way of gently taking the piss; so when I asked him about Northern France in 1944, he’d launch into a long pointless story about borrowing a bicycle.