More Than You Know
We were still living at the police house in Mitcham when we first started noticing the man who was making our mum smile again. For the initial few times, we only saw Tony briefly to say ‘Hello’. Over a few weeks, he started seeing Mum more often, and then one night we heard our dog Tiny barking frantically and realized that Tony was coming up the stairs. He calmly walked into our bedroom, introduced himself to us and – rather brilliantly – told us a story. Looking back, it must have taken some courage for him to do that and likewise for Mum to let him, but it was a lovely gesture and I can remember the tale as if he had only told it yesterday.
It was about a magnificent bird in a forest, the fastest and most beautiful bird of all, which for some reason had lost its feathers. The bird was very sad but all the other animals in the forest saw this and decided to collect together bits of their own feathers and fur for him. Tony told the story so well; I remember lying there entranced, desperately wanting to know the ending. Then, Tony explained, using honey from the bees the animals stuck this collection of feathers and fur on to the bird, which once more became the fastest and most beautiful creature living in the forest. It was a happy ending for the bird and I remember that moment, it was very peaceful.
It was such a simple and lovely story. It was a long time since we’d had a man come in and say goodnight to us. Tony is a peaceful and calm person, he doesn’t get fazed easily and it was the first moment for as long as I could remember where there was an element of order and peace in our life.
There was one aspect of Tony that was out of order, however, and that was the dodgy tartan trousers he used to wear (he knows I have to reveal that). At first he also drove a rather nice 7 Series BMW and then an E-Type (he owned a garage at the time), both of which were dream cars to us two boys, given how little money we had at home. One day Tony explained that regretfully he was short of money as well and would be swapping the BMW for a Morris Minor. That’s quite some leap backwards. So, after a brief flirtation with leather seats and sports trims, it was back to Skintsville in the Goss household.
Although Tony brought a sense of peace and calm to our house, I didn’t really feel any more secure. Unfortunately, he was going through a divorce, like Mum, so he had no money either. However, what he also brought into the house was Carolyn and Adam, his two children and, with their entry into my life, I have at times felt like the richest boy in the world.
When I first met Adam, he looked like a gargoyle: he had the biggest mouth. I used to think that he could swallow an apple whole. Over the years, his mouth has stayed pretty much the same size, but the rest of his body has caught up.
He was really only a baby when we first met, six years old. I don’t know how I can accurately explain my initial feelings towards them but he and Carolyn just fitted. We seemed tailor-made for each other. We never ever had any problems connecting. Two families colliding like that can produce a source of great tension, but with Adam and Carolyn there was only ever a tangible sense of gain when they came into my life. I thought ‘Wow! We have a bigger family now!’ It felt like we were a little bit less destructible.
With Adam, we felt very connected. He would always be pulling funny faces, keeping us laughing. Actually, back then he was very frail, he had really severe asthma, wheezing all the time and his health suffered terribly. However, this didn’t stop him playing around and being a lot of fun to be with.
There was also a swift emotional connection with Adam’s sister Carolyn. I’m quite a tactile person, Carolyn was too and she was very kind with it. She was such a beautiful person, even at the tender age of seven she wanted to do more for the world. She was very clever too – she went on to pass ten ‘O’ levels and three ‘A’ levels before lining up a university degree. They both reminded me of Tony. It might sound an obvious statement to make, but Carolyn was like a girl-version of Tony and Adam was simply a boy-version of Tony.
Previously, I’d felt quite vulnerable. We all did at times, me and Mum and Dukus, as I often called my twin brother (he would call me Maffy). When I say I felt vulnerable, that is not because of my dad not being there, it is just the way I felt. Then Adam and Carolyn arrived and I suddenly felt that there were a few more people in the gang, a bigger team, we were a little bit less vulnerable. I also sensed that Adam and Carolyn were, like me and Luke, rather weary. They had gone with their mother when she and Tony had split up and there had been much pain on both sides. Of course we were only young so we would still lark about, but there was definitely an unspoken acknowledgement of being a little bit bruised from the break-ups.
Divorce is just something that happens in life, you can’t say who’s right and who’s wrong. What you can say is it’s a fact that when parents split up, emotional upheaval is the inevitable result. Whether parents like it or not, such events do affect kids. It hurts them. They are not stupid, they want to do the right thing for their parents, be there for them and not whinge, but this also means that they have quite evolved feelings of pain and confusion.
When you put a couple of new kids into the mix, it can often polarize emotions and cause even more friction. However, for me at least, it created this strange reassurance that I wasn’t the only one feeling a little battered. Within a matter of a few weeks, whenever I knew Tony’s two kids were visiting I would be shouting, ‘Oh wow! Adam and Carolyn are coming round!’
And yet, for all the pain that Adam and Carolyn had obviously gone through, part of me was oddly glad that their parents had split, at least in the sense that it brought Tony to my mum. I couldn’t love Tony more. As a boy Tony was in a cast for two years from the waist down – the doctors didn’t know if he was even going to be able to walk again. He’s since had two hip replacements but has never moaned about his pain; that’s not his style. Tony is not the tallest man in the world but he has not a shred of a Napoleon complex about him. Although he is quite a small guy, mentally he is a rock. I am so lucky, he’s a great step-dad.
When my dad came to see us, I do remember some good times. We went down to the local swamp one afternoon and caught a load of frogs. We triumphantly took them back to the house and made a rock pool for them out of a plastic container, some stones and tap water. It was the summer of 1976, which was the hottest English summer for over two hundred years. There was something about that summer that seems to have stuck in the minds of many, many people. It wasn’t a good summer for my frogs, though. I went out to play one day and innocently forgot to top up their water. When I came back there were just these raisins with legs stuck to the rocks! There wasn’t a drop of water left, it had all evaporated, leaving behind this sorry collection of green Californian raisins with legs. I was gutted.
Like most young boys, we got up to lots of typically cheeky behaviour that warms my heart when I recall it. Just silly, innocent childhood stuff like kids do. I remember having a look at Jennifer-who-lives-opposite-the-corner-shop’s bum and front bum. She had one of each, we were amazed to learn. Me and Dukus hid in a wardrobe which had no doors, at the back of our garage, with Jen in the middle, and we showed her our bums and she showed us both of hers. Jen had her knickers down when my mum walked into the garage. All three of us stood stiff as a board, terrified that Mum would find us with Jen showing us her bits. Luckily, Mum left and we had got away with it.
There were two girls next door with whom we had a little bit of a schoolboy feel, but I wasn’t too keen because they had noses like rabbits. Worse still, they actually constantly twitched their noses like rabbits, it was very disconcerting for a little boy. Even now, when I think of them, I can’t remember what they actually looked like, I just remember thinking of them as rabbits. Proper rabbits.
Dukus and I would often throw darts the length of the playing field but one time I didn’t get out of the way quickly enough and it stuck in my rib. I went indoors and showed Mum. She just calmly pulled it out of me and said, ‘Go on then, carry on playing.’
We finally moved from Mitcham to a house in Herongate Road in Cheshunt, which Tony and Mum had managed to buy. Yet again Luke and I had to start another school, this time St Clement’s Church School. By then I enjoyed sports and particularly excelled at athletics, specifically the long jump, triple jump, high jump, javelin, discus, 800 m, 1500 m and the relay! I also played rugby (Luke and I were both second row) and a little bit of football. I went to gymnastics a couple of times but only to see the girls in their leotards. We both liked to trampoline into the pits but that was about the extent of our gymnastics career. I was very useful at rounders and that provided me with my biggest single sporting highlight of my schooldays. One sports day, my team was way behind when I came up to strike. I amazed myself and all my team by hitting eight consecutive rounders, one after the other. I just kept belting the ball for miles. As a result, we came from behind and won and the rest of the team carried me round the school playing field in celebration, chanting ‘Two, four, six, eight, who do we appreciate? Matt!!!’ When you are just a kid, moments like that stay with you, it was really special.
They are particularly special when you are constantly struggling to lay down some foundations, to make friends and to settle in. St Clement’s was my third primary school so by then I was getting used to the stigma of being the ‘new boy’ all the time.
I think Mum has a bit of gypsy in her, she’s got that bug – her Granny Rampton was a Romany gypsy. I’ve never been one to complain to my parents, ‘Why did you do this? Why did you do that?’ I adore the ground my mum walks on. But I don’t think, given the choice, I would travel around so much if I had kids. Don’t get me wrong, we had an amazing upbringing, but I never had the chance to really connect anywhere, I never felt that anywhere was my home. I never felt particularly safe, there was an underlying sense of being afraid.
It wasn’t a physical fear of being bullied. Luke and I could look after ourselves in any schoolyard and we were never pushed about, it just didn’t happen. We both have that streak in us to be able to look after ourselves, and I am sure Luke felt that he looked out for me, and I felt that I did the same for him. I definitely had quite a few fights at school, but I also knew the law of the playground jungle and chose my fights with care, careful to realign my ‘rep’ every now and then with a choice new opponent! So, no, we were never bullied.
Yet I remember always being petrified walking into another new school. It was just so unsettling. I never had the same friends for very long, I would work at it and make some great friends and then we would move again – yet another new address. That was hard. It’s funny how you can crave what you don’t have. People often talk about travelling as the Holy Grail of a lifestyle. But for me, it’s really lovely when I hear people talk about their childhood home, the place where they grew up with a big garden and their friends round the corner. I can’t even fathom what that would be like as a kid, we just didn’t have that. It sounds idyllic.
Like millions of people who watched the hit TV show The Good Life, Mum and Tony wanted some of the same. It was very common where I was brought up in London for people to want to get out, to seek that cherished escape to the country. In addition to that impulse, Tony and Mum weren’t too happy with the schooling available to us in Cheshunt, so after a few months considering their options, they decided to up sticks and head for Cheddar in Somerset. They found a home with the delightful name of Jasmine Cottage in Tuttors Hill and that was where we set up home next. We would live there for one day short of a year, when we were eleven.
I hated it. Cheddar is not a great memory for me. We were both caught up in fighting a lot because we were from ‘The Smoke’. It was such a clash, us turning up with our Sta-Prest trousers, Doc Martens and waffle cardigans in this sleepy Somerset tourist destination; and it wasn’t just the kids down there who were worlds apart from us. I remember one day talking to the school games teacher:
‘Sir, you got any trainers, sir?’
‘Trainers?’ he replied. ‘What are trainers? We call ’em daps down ’ere.’
We might as well have been in a different country.
Starting Fairlands Middle School would have been difficult enough for any child, but having just moved to the area from a city exacerbated that ordeal a hundredfold. Much of the time, Luke, Adam and I hung out together, often nicking fudge from the local shop. I think it says a lot about a town that a shoplifter’s main bounty is fudge. One day we thought we’d up the ante a little bit so Adam nicked a Rubik’s cube, only to be caught almost immediately by Tony, who was distinctly not impressed. Tony marched Adam straight back to the shop and made him apologize on the spot. So now the outsiders had a serious lack of street cred. We still laugh about that today, although Carolyn was not very amused!
We did a bit of poaching for trout as well. We didn’t have proper fishing rods, just this solitary basic reel. We told our few mates to meet up one day and the five of us headed down to the river to take it in turns dangling the line over a bridge. The first boy quickly got a bite and began to pull the line out of the water when SNAP! it broke. The second guy stepped up to the plate and not ten minutes later the same happened again, he got a bite, he pulled on the line and SNAP! it broke. By now, being five young lads, we were thinking there was some kind of freshwater Jaws down there, we just had to catch it, the excitement was mounting. So I went and got the strongest fishing line I could find, thicker than a guitar string; I was thinking to myself, This stuff could lift a car, it is not going to snap on me. Sure enough, a few minutes after I gingerly dangled the line in the water, I got a bite. I am not joking when I say it was almost like cheese-wire cutting through my fingers. After a titanic struggle, I finally pulled this fish out of the water and it was a huge catch. To this pre-teen blond London boy, it looked like the mother of all trout. I was beside myself with pride and excitement and immediately started sprinting home – I knew that Tony loved trout and I was desperate for him to see it. On the way back, an American tourist stopped me in my tracks and said, ‘Hey man, I’ll give you fifty bucks for that,’ and I blurted out, ‘Oh no! I’m taking it back to Tony!’ and just carried on running without even breaking my stride.
It took at least ten minutes to run all the way back home. I burst into the kitchen and put this beast of a fish in the sink . . . and it was still alive! This thing just would not die. My grandad was there so he started smacking it over the head and still it wriggled around. I’m ashamed to say that in the end we just whacked it in the freezer. That did it. I still feel a bit guilty about that. We kind of murdered it, accidentally on purpose.
We had some bad luck with animals in Cheddar too. We had a goat called Mary. The back garden of Jasmine Cottage was about an acre, and was totally overgrown and covered in nettles and weeds. We brought in some electric ploughs and rotovators to remove it all but they just weren’t strong enough. Then we sent in Mary. Within a fortnight it was all gone. She would eat a mountain of nettles or weeds and look up as if to say, ‘Next!’
Tony loved Mary. Every morning he would go out to feed her, disappear for a good few minutes and he would have love in his eyes when he came back! I reckon there was a bit of a crush going on there, both ways! We would have goat’s milk on our cornflakes, too.
One day we came back from school to find a vet trying to save Mary’s life. She was pregnant and there had been complications which required a caesarean. The intervention was not a success and both Mary and the kid goat died. It was really gruesome and we were all devastated. Tony was gutted at the time but laughs now when he remembers trying to work out if you should bury a goat ‘horns up’ or not!
We also had a cat called Jessica, as well as two dogs, Bill and Ben, who would actually pull Luke and me along on our bikes and skateboards. Those dogs were gorgeous, and absolutely mad. We also had a beautiful Yorkshire terrier called James, the love of my mum’s life, but he was run over and poor Mum found him on a wall, just lying there dead, where someone had placed him after the accident. Mum was distraught. So for many reasons, Cheddar was not a beacon of happy memories for me.
It wasn’t all bad there, but the fleeting brighter moments were suffocated by missing London and not liking our peers. I pretty much kept myself to myself. Life there just didn’t feel right – it was a beautiful place, but the kids were just wankers to us because we were from London! However, one pool of happiness within the muddy water of life in Cheddar was Bridget, the prettiest girl in the school. One day I was leaving school for home when a girl came running up to me and said, ‘Matt! Matt! Bridget really likes you,’ and I said, ‘Who’s Bridget?’ At that moment, the school coach drove past and as it headed off slowly up the lane, I could see the whole back row were looking out of the window at me and this girl.
‘Bridget’s the girl in the middle,’ she said.
‘Bloody ’ell! That’s Bridget?!’ I was stunned. Everyone fancied this girl, she was gorgeous.
Bridget’s messenger friend immediately gave two thumbs up to the back of the coach and the entire row of girls just exploded. It was a surreal moment, because up until then I had just felt invisible, I didn’t think anyone had even noticed me. I was delighted.
Within a week, we were snogging in Farmer Giles’s barn (complete with my teeth-brace, which I had until I was sixteen). Luke was snogging some bird in there as well. To this day, there’s nothing like snogging when you are a young teenager, it was the best thing, and you’d snog like ten girls in an afternoon. Anyway, Farmer Giles was pretty notorious in the narrow streets of Cheddar for having a Morris Minor pickup with a man-eating German Shepherd dog prowling in the back. This animal would actually reach out and try to nip you as his owner drove past. Pretty quickly you’d learn to dive into a shop doorway if you heard the stuttering rumble of Farmer Giles’s Morris engine. This dog was the stuff of legend – I once saw half a Jack Russell that had been part-eaten by this dog.
We knew that we were in the lion’s den by snogging away in this barn, but we figured it was unlikely he’d come back while we were actually there. Wrong. Like startled rabbits, we all jumped to our feet in unison when we heard Farmer Giles’s van trundling into the yard and towards the barn. There was only one course of action – we scarpered. I vividly recall running at full pelt across a field, lips numbed from hours of snogging and legs chafed from hours of dry humping through jeans, with the giant German Shepherd rampaging after us, drooling at the prospect of a kill. Eventually, after what seemed like an interminable and enduring panic, Farmer Giles finally called his dog off the chase. It was one of the scariest moments ever, like some twisted horror-version of Last of the Summer Wine.
Luke and I weren’t the only ones who didn’t settle in Cheddar, Tony really disliked it too. Before a year was out, the decision was made to sell up and move out. I can’t say I was disappointed, even though the prospect of starting at yet another school wasn’t a bright one. I was just glad to be leaving. So we packed our suitcases, left Jasmine Cottage and headed back to London.
A few days after arriving back in the capital, I said to a kid, ‘You got any daps?’
‘What the fak are daps, mate?’ he said. ‘They’re called trainers up ’ere . . .’
THREE
Some Roses In My Cheeks
We’d sold Jasmine Cottage when we left Cheddar, but hadn’t yet bought a house back in London, so for about two months we lived in a caravan. I was just about to start secondary school, which is such a formative period of childhood, and here we were living in a caravan. I hated living on that site with its cold, concrete communal shower stalls and cramped spaces. Yet, even though I wasn’t a fan, I knew that we were only there because of circumstances, a moment in time, and my mum’s continued dedication to Lukie and me far outweighed any dislike I had of my temporary home. I could have lived anywhere as long as I was with Mum and Luke.
Looking back, knowing how hard life was for her at times, my mum was just a tower of strength. She would drive us ninety minutes to school in Camberley every day then just after lunch get back in the car to pick us up again. It was such an effort for her but she never batted an eyelid.
Unfortunately, my dad’s perception of the situation was different. He decided then that these were not the ideal circumstances for two children to be in and announced that he wanted custody of us. It was a heavy moment for my mum.
Dad was elusive at times when I was younger, or that’s what some of my memories tell me. I didn’t quite understand him then. It is hard for me to talk about these things because I love him so much and as adults we are great friends. He is sensitive to those difficult times, understandably, but I am often put in a position when I am asked questions about such things, so I will try to be as respectful as I can whilst still recounting the history.
As an adult, I can probably understand Dad’s perception of our temporary caravan lifestyle, his feelings came from the right place. But life’s not always about perception, it’s about finding out the facts, and certain situations are not always exactly how they appear. Despite how it might have looked, I loved my mum desperately, so I was essentially happy at the site and, although I didn’t like it on the surface, I didn’t feel any less safe because I was in a caravan. When the custody issue was raised, it was an intensely fearful moment for my mum, I know that now, but I don’t have explicit memories because I was only a kid. All I knew was that I was very happy as long as my mum was with me. So, when I heard I had to go to court, it was no problem. I just thought to myself, I will go and tell the judge how I feel, which is that I am not going anywhere. I love Dad but I do not want to leave Mum.
So that was what I did. Luke was exactly the same and there didn’t seem anything else to discuss. That’s as simple as it felt to me at the time. We were old enough at that point to say to the judge, ‘No, I want to live with my mum,’ and as I recall it, our frankness resolved the issue.
What I will say from that experience and having seen the effects of such predicaments on children and parents, is that if it is at all possible for couples who have separated to keep a line of communication open, even if it is formal rather than friendly, then please try to do so. After that issue was settled and we stayed with Mum, communications between her and Dad opened up a little bit – prior to that they had sometimes been quite constricted (it is strange as an adult to think they were once so deeply in love). Better communications in these circumstances will eventually benefit the children, no question.
As I’ve mentioned, while we were living in all these different places, the one constant that never wavered was my grandparents’ flat in Crawford Road, Camberwell, the one place that felt like ‘home’ to me as a kid. When I remember Crawford Road I think of white pepper. My grandad used to put stacks of white pepper on his roast dinner.
In that flat I saw my mum happy, her mood would change when she got there and so that was uplifting for us too. I would love going round to find my Aunt Sally at home. Even though Sally was a gardener at Buckingham Palace, she used to dress a bit like a hippy and always had an afro comb which she would be pulling through her hair. She would buy a new pair of gleaming white plimsolls, come straight home and bury them in the garden for an hour. As a little kid, I was absolutely bemused, but now I understand that she wanted them to look worn-in.