Where Did It All Go Right? (24 page)

1.
Dad tells me that on the long drive to Yarmouth in 1973 we made him stop the car at Thrapston, which can be no more than 12 miles out of Northampton. That was our record.

2.
On the subject of secretion: I overdid it with some chocolate-covered fudge once in Wales and shoved the last piece behind Melissa’s car seat rather than admit I had been greedy. It stayed there until Melissa was old enough not to need the seat any more, or Dad changed cars, whichever came first.

3.
Remember that Uncle Allen Cave was a builder and self-made man who was encouraged to spend large sums of money before the end of the tax year. Somewhat conspicuously, he had a boat, and in later years a Jaguar XJS for dry land. And a full-size snooker table in a full-size snooker room (which he had, to be fair, built himself).

4.
International Super Cars and Tennis Aces I recall being particular favourites.

5.
‘Cooknoe’.

6.
‘Toaster’.

7.
Dynion
and
merched
, I think. The only Welsh – apart from
croeso
(welcome) – we learned in eight years.

8.
Our reward on the drive back was a consoling sit-down Wimpy. The Wimpy hamburger remained magical to us because we so rarely had one. How can a Big Mac hold the same spell today? It can’t. I have a feeling the burgers we ate on the front at Pwllheli weren’t Wimpys
per se
. We called them Wimpys just like people call vacuum cleaners Hoovers. I ate my first ever true Wimpy in 1973, when we were taken out for one as part of Paul Cockle’s birthday bash. (I rather sweetly describe the place as ‘the Wimpy bar’ in my diary.) It was here that I first encountered the mouth-watering menu: the Wimpy Brunch, the Shanty Brunch (fish and chips), the Brown Derby (doughnut and whipped cream) and that coiled sausage (never had one of those). The ‘Wimpy’ we had in Pwllheli was from an outdoor stand, cooked on a flat grill while you salivated. It was eaten sitting on a wall or a bench, and tasted all the better for that. And at least Mum didn’t have to cook it.

9.
Simon and I were the first Collinses to travel by air. In 1983, Mum and Dad decided in their customary benevolence that the pair of us could
fly
to Jersey while they took the car over on the ferry. (‘Twats!’ as I rather unkindly wrote in my diary.) I had a Bacardi and Coke on the plane and thought I was Spandau Ballet.

10.
See Chapter 14
.

nine

A Sip of Tonic

I warn you not to be ordinary
,

I warn you not to fall ill, and I warn you not to grow old
.

The best speech Neil Kinnock ever made, Bridgend, 7 June 1983

PAP REG DIED
while I was writing this book, the last of my grandparents to go. The angina got him in the end, aged 85, but at least he spent these last few years with all his sensory and mental faculties – indeed, Pap could remember stuff from as far back as the early 1920s, like the address where his headmistress lived (the corner of Forfar Street and Harlestone Road) and the specific Meccano set his parents bought him while off school with whooping cough aged six (the A1 set).
¹
A lot like me really. I have the
same
instinct to collect, horde and map, make sense of it all by keeping things close, knowing where to lay my hands on them.

They talk about putting your affairs in order. Pap left not a single loose thread. He died before Christmas 2001, but he’d already written out his Christmas cards and passed on the most recent minutes from his Pensioner’s Voice meetings. We all had him down as an organised man, but we had no idea. He had folders and boxes and files back at the house in Lovat Drive, neatly packed with papers and effects, all awaiting collection, as it were. But one of these folders was especially interesting, bulging as it was with memorabilia and cuttings relating to his grandchildren.

Well, grand
child
. Me.

This folder seems to confirm what I already knew: that I loomed large in the lives of Nan Mabel and Pap Reg. It’s a regular
This Is Your Life
: every single hand-drawn birthday, Christmas and Easter card I made for them down the years, letters and postcards I’d sent them, programmes I’d designed for sixth-form productions, local newspaper clippings about me and my drawing (‘Losing out on his art class’,
²
‘Budding artist’, ‘On-the-Spot Caricatures’
³
), me in the
early
Eighties local rock band Absolute Heroes (‘This school band is hoping to graduate …’), and me getting my first radio series in 1993 (‘Pop writer’s adventure on the airwaves’). There are even pages from the
NME
, including my debut in print – a film review of the yachting thriller
Masquerade
– from October 1988 (something I hadn’t even got in
my
files), and the handwritten notes for my best man’s speech at Simon and Lesley’s wedding, 23 March 1987. I don’t know how Pap got his hands on those, but when he did, he probably thought, ‘I’ll put these in the folder.’

There are items relating to the other grandchildren – a cutting about Dean and his radio-controlled cars, one about Simon qualifying as a soldier after 42 weeks’ training at Shorncliffe, and the announcement of Charmaine’s birth – but I’m afraid the bulk of it is me. Now you might say, well of course it is – I’m the one whose cartooning got me in the
Chronicle & Echo
, I’m the one who knuckled down and made all those Christmas cards for at least ten years – but the truth is not so easy to explain away.

Nan Mabel and Pap Reg systematically spoiled me for the better part of my formative years, not with expensive gifts and lavish feasts (they didn’t have the money) but with attention, quality time and special interest. As the first grandchild of four, I had automatically earned a special place in their hearts without even lifting a finger. For that we can forgive them: it happens, I was a novelty. But I always assumed that the newborn snatch the limelight from the already born. Doesn’t parental – and grandparental – affection unconsciously shift on to the youngest, the freshest, the cutest? Not in our case. Nothing could convince Nan and Pap that Simon or Melissa were as cherishable as me. Pap called me his ‘pidge’. It was short for pigeon: ‘Alright, m’pidge.’ I didn’t hear him call anybody else this.

Unfortunately Nan was in hospital when Simon was born in 1967, and as such she never really bonded with him as a baby in the way she had with me, or so Mum reckons. Perhaps Nan was unconsciously bitter that the new baby took up so much of Mum’s time when
she
was unwell. Either way, it led to a more remote relationship with Simon as he grew up. Again, can’t be helped. Circumstance.

But the fact remains: blatant and immovable favouritism held sway in the court of Collins. Nan and Pap made no secret of the fact that I was the anointed one in their eyes. It started out harmlessly enough – buying me my first watch, taking me to Blackpool – but ended in black farce, with Nan ‘whittling’ to all and sundry about me living down in perilous London, while all along Simon was on patrol with his unit in Northern Ireland, many years before the ceasefire, something that didn’t seem to concern her. (I won’t implicate Pap in this – he wasn’t the whittler.)

As the Pet Shop Boys pointedly asked: what had I done to deserve this?

* * *

I was lucky enough to have all four grandparents around while I was growing up, and although I didn’t appreciate them as
people
until I was out of my teens (which kid does?), I enjoyed their presence throughout my early years, and not just because they bought me comics, although that was a factor.

It was Dad’s parents who got to be called Nan and Pap Collins, family name and all that, but in a way Nan Mabel and Pap Reg were the lucky ones: they got to be identified by their given names. More personal, they were Mabel and Reg. The other Nan and Pap weren’t Bill and Win, not to us. However, here’s a bombshell: when we were younger, we preferred Nan and Pap Collins to Nan Mabel and Pap Reg.

I am filled with the deepest remorse at the memory of this defining incident, but here it is. It happened on the doorstep at Winsford Way back in the days when the estate was still a building site. Mum and Dad were taking Simon and me to Nanny and Pappy’s (to use the juvenile). Simon asked which Nanny and Pappy. They told him: Nanny and Pappy Collins. He asked which ones they
were
. I told him:

‘The
nice
Nanny and Pappy.’

Clang! Mum soon put me right on my
faux pas
. Both Nannys and Pappys were nice. And of course she was right – they were – it was just that Nan and Pap Collins were more
obviously
nice:
rounder
, sillier, less tidy, more chaotic, and they had pets: a sweet little dog called Sally, replaced by Butch, who we think was abused by its previous owner as he hid whenever he heard the swoosh of a golf club on telly.
⁴
Nan and Pap Collins lived in a late Victorian terraced house, slightly worn and jerry-built (Pap had literally fashioned his own lean-to ‘extension’ out of wood and corrugated plastic sheeting). This was a fun place, full of stuff, with a musty, scary cellar where Pap made ramshackle things and effected make-do repairs. Once, on
Play Away
, they showed you how to make a dynamic-looking bouncing marble track out of jam jars with old pieces of balloon stretched over them. Pap Collins had made one for us the very next day.

Now it’s not that Pap Reg
couldn’t
make us toys, just that he
wouldn’t
, and
didn’t
, repressed perhaps by the iron rule of Nan Mabel.
⁵
He had been a tool-maker by trade, don’t forget, and his first ever job, aged 14, was producing and assembling parts for model trains at Wintringhams, but at Lovat Drive he had no cellar full of junk like jam jars and old balloons.

Nan and Pap Collins did not whittle. Their house at Adnitt Road was clean but not fussy like Lovat Drive (blimey, even the street names spoke volumes: one hard and bruiserish, the other fragrant and idyllic). Both sets of grandparents were of stout, working-class stock, but only Mabel and Reg had gone up in the world, with Pap’s union job. Pap Reg drove, he had vehicular independence and they took themselves on holiday to Wales, Exmoor and Minehead (they even flew to Jersey and Canada).
Nan
and Pap C went on holiday by coach to the Isle of Wight and Bournemouth, or else Dad drove them.
⁶

The house at Lovat Drive, a trim 1939 bungalow, had a front and back garden, with a hedge and a wall and a garden path and a side entrance. The front window at Adnitt Road looked out on to the street and the back garden was more of a yard. Guess what – we played in the back yard, we rarely
went
into the back garden. Pap C, true to form, even made us a slide from scratch.

This is not to say we didn’t enjoy going to Lovat Drive. We did. Nan and Pap kept some really nice Dinky toys there for us, and of course, they were first in the family to get a colour television! It just wasn’t a place where much
matter
was displaced.

Nan Mabel could be uptight, Nan Collins seemed to have a constant smile on her face (what a great dinner lady she must have made), and she would greet us all like homecoming heroes the minute we stepped through the door. Nan Mabel would be worrying that we were ‘bringing dirt in’. Symbolically, the front door at Adnitt Road was always open (until Dad subsequently convinced them that they should probably lock it).

So, even though it was sinful to describe one set of grandparents as the
nice
Nanny and Pappy, their open-door policy said something inviting about their world. Nan and Pap Collins had lots of seven-inch records, things like ‘Little White Bull’, ‘March of the Mods’ and ‘The Laughing Gnome’, and what’s more, we were allowed to ‘put them on fast’ by switching the dansette to 78 rpm. To be at Adnitt Road was very heaven.

So why did I spend a lot more time at Lovat Drive?

‘I came to Nanny’s house to sleep’ is a recurring phrase in my diaries. It was a tradition: I would go to Nan Mabel and Pap Reg’s house, on my own, and sleep over, usually for two nights in a row, creating a mini-break. In effect, I would get to be an only child for a couple of days, see what Dean’s life was like. It was a fact of my
life
: come the school holidays, I would be packed off to Lovat Drive, where, among other things, I would be allowed to stay up late and was usually bought a gift of some nature, an Action Transfer or later an Airfix model. It was a hermetically sealed little world. No harm would come to me here, no siblings would encroach upon my limelight, and the chances are, one of Nan’s jolly neighbours like Mrs Brinclow or Mrs Hanson would come to visit and tell me how good my drawings were.

In February 1973 (half-term), I stayed with Nan and Pap for three days and I was allowed to stay up till 9.00, aged seven, to see
Bless This House
. In 1974, I note that I ‘came to Nanny’s house to sleep’ twice in one month, for the weekend 8–10 February (during term-time!), and from Sunday to Tuesday, 24–26 (half-term). ‘I stayed up till 9 o’clock,’ says the entry for the 25th, ‘and played cards with Pappy.’ It’ll have been Rummy or Draw the Well Dry, and a sip of tonic will have been involved.

Pap Reg gave me my first-ever taste of beer. He called it tonic, and I liked that. Didn’t like the beer, but I took it anyway, perhaps aware that it was a rite of passage. In the summer, Nan and Pap would invariably drive me out to a pub, and we would sit in the garden and I’d have a bottle of Coke with a straw in and a packet of crisps. At a time when neither Coke nor crisps were the kind of thing you had in the house, this was a rollercoaster ride of extra-curricular pleasure.

In April 1974 I was back again (this time at the Easter holidays), doing ‘some Spirographing’ on Sunday, visiting Oakley Garden Centre on Monday, and coming home on Tuesday. Dean would often come up to Nanny’s too, although he rarely stayed overnight. You’d think Lovat Drive was miles away from home – but it’s only the other side of the town centre. Ten minutes by car.