Look Back in Hunger Read online

  Once this betrayal had occurred, much as I wanted to be forgiving, I just could not manage it, and I would constantly find myself ruminating on a way to physically or emotionally damage my erring partner. I eventually let him into my messy bed-sit with the very shiny walls and he prostrated himself and begged for forgiveness, insisting that the scenario which I had witnessed was purely a goodbye kiss and he was finished with the woman for ever.

  In some ways, I suppose it was justice because a previous girlfriend of his had been less than happy about my appearance in his life and had made her feelings plain on a number of quite scary occasions.

  We rumbled on for a bit, but it dawned on me that the scene with the woman in the smoky bar had probably not been a one-off. But I was seventeen years old and I knew that my attempts to resist his charm, for charming he was, were just not going to work if I was always on tap, as it were.

  You have to bear in mind that I thought he was charming because I was mad about him. I mean, some women manage to fall in love with murderers, so it is not the personality, necessarily, of the individual—it’s your attitude towards him. To me, at the time, Dave was the perfect man: elfin, funny, bright, sparky, unpredictable, entertaining and enormously attractive. When it came to what he had done, he had just the right mix of regret and a take-it-or-leave-it attitude. And, of course, I fell for it, in a hook, line and sinker kind of way.

  So I made a radical decision. I had plenty of time to think about it, as my life was fairly empty. My exams were finished (let’s just say the marks ‘D’ and ‘E’ were good friends of mine) and my job in the civil service had crumbled to nothing following an incident at lunchtime, when I had gone to the very inexpensive club bar, had quite a few beers and been discovered asleep and dribbling on my desk in the middle of the afternoon. I was hauled up in front of the boss who spelled out the message that if I did not leave, I would be sacked.

  I left.

  So, while my duplicitous love was in London for the week, I hired a van, packed all my stuff into it and moved out of the bed-sit, leaving the few things that belonged to him and no forwarding address.

  I returned to the place where I had always been so comfortable—Tunbridge Wells. I still had some very good friends from school. I knew I would be able to find a temporary place to live and a job and continue my life safely away from the source of my emotional torture.

  After a relatively short time, I managed to get a job in a pub on the famous Pantiles, a historical pedestrian shopping street beloved by the Regency mob, which had a spring at one end where the dodgy-of-health would fill up bottles with water and hope that necking the stuff would make them better. My best friend Andy worked in the pub with me, and the couple who ran it, even though they were only in their mid-thirties, became like my second mum and dad.

  I had known Andy since I was at school and had been introduced to him by a girl in my class, Jill. He was gay, enormously generous, funny, kind and is in my list of top five nice blokes of all time. His mum and dad used to run a grocer’s shop in a village outside Tunbridge Wells, and I spent many a happy time at their place, one of the huge joys being that we were able to nip into the shop whenever we fancied and pick any bar of chocolate we wanted. Good job I wasn’t brought up in a shop, I’d weigh fifty stone by now.

  Andy knocked around with another gay guy called Paul, who also became a good friend. He could not have been more different—mercurial, thin, pretty and occasionally spiky. They were ‘just good friends’ but were a perfect foil for each other. Andy was big too and, at the time, had masses of frizzy blond hair. He always smelled gorgeous, as most gay men do, and wore fantastic seventies white suits and crocodile-skin pointy shoes. Most of my memories involving him are peppered with great, big, uncontrollable laughing sessions. The joy of having gay friends is that all those questions in your head about heterosexual men—like, is there something going on here?—are all brushed aside and you can indulge in a glorious, uncomplicated friendship with the male of the species.

  He used to rescue me on occasion too. One night we were going to a party (thrown by the girl who had managed to insert a tampon during geography O-level, incidentally), and I had nothing interesting to wear. I had a lovely piece of Moroccan, green, fringed silk which, with the help of a few huge safety pins, was turned into a dress, pinned up on one shoulder. As everyone got drunker, I noticed our hostess looking at me with an evil look in her eye. She was quite pissed and obviously just could not resist her mischievous plan. She came over to me and, with one deft hand movement, pulled off my makeshift dress, leaving me standing in the middle of the party with just my pants on. Now, although I wasn’t really overweight, neither did I have the confidence of a supermodel. I was absolutely mortified. Andy, quicker than a fat bloke should be allowed to be, was at my side almost immediately and enveloped me in a bear hug, while simultaneously covering up all the rude bits and edging me backwards towards a big curtain in which he wrapped me until I could be made decent again.

  My tormentor, realising she had gone a bit far, came over to apologise, but I was so angry that before she could manage to get any words out, I punched her right in the gob. She keeled over backwards and was stunned, lying on the floor for a few seconds. I haven’t had to use my right hook very often, but it was very effective on that occasion.

  The married couple who ran the pub were called Dick and Monica. Dick was tall and thin with a sort of military moustache that made him look older than he was, for he had a charming, boyish face and a lovely smile. He was humorous, friendly and had endless patience with the punters. Monica was tall and slim with blond hair and an angular, pretty face. She perfectly complemented Dick. She was warm, very funny and a huge nurturer which was just what I needed, as I’d escaped from Hastings feeling bereft and had very little contact with my mum and dad. She used to bring us all a cup of tea in the morning before the pub opened and we would sit on bar stools, chatting, eating biscuits and slagging off the regulars. It was glorious. Their upstairs flat had a homey warmth about it that made me feel very secure and I was always up there watching telly and talking bollocks. The two of them made such a difference to my life and are a part of the happiest memories I have of this time.

  Andy and I managed to find a flat on the Pantiles, and therefore it was about twelve steps from home to work—my perfect job. We settled into a life of very little responsibility, sharing the flat with a friend of mine from school and her boyfriend and spending long days in the pub— from ten till two thirty and then six till ten thirty, or eleven at weekends. I loved that job to pieces, apart from the morning shift, when a little crew of middle-aged men would take up residence at the bar at about eleven and talk bollocks for a couple of hours before the lunchtime trade drifted in. And, God bless ‘em, were they dull. Some days I would take to inventing jobs just to get away from them, as they droned on about gardening, fishing, their sheds, their wives, their medical conditions, etc., etc. A few would appear in the early evenings as well and one night, as a little group sat at the bar, an irate wife appeared with a tray containing a cooked dinner, a pudding and a glass of water. She marched up to the bar, where her absent husband was positioned, banged the tray on to the bar and uttered the words, ‘If you’re not coming home, you can have your fucking dinner here.’

  God, the poor guy, I thought, how embarrassing. Not a bit of it. He looked really pleased that someone had brought him his dinner and got stuck into it with relish—not quite the humiliating effect his wife had hoped for.

  By this time, having put on quite a bit of weight due to the pill, I decided to take drastic steps to reduce it, so I embarked on one of those utterly ridiculous diets that as a seventeen-year-old are pretty easy to manage: three boiled eggs a day for a month. It had the desired effect and I knocked off three stone in that time, although I was grumpy as anything and a bit of a wind-creating machine. Having lost the weight and feeling really rather pleased with myself, I found one or two men who had previously ignored me giving me t
he eye. Unfortunately, these men were neither attractive to me nor in the least bit interesting. In fact, one of them was downright pervy and I suppose I subconsciously absorbed the message that being the focus of the male race’s attention was not to my taste. The weight went back on pretty swiftly.

  The flat we lived in was a beautiful Georgian place that sat above a posh shop selling very expensive fabric and the like. It had always felt strangely atmospheric and this led us one drunken night to hold a séance, with the aid of some letters hastily scribbled on torn-up pieces of paper and an upturned glass. We waited, as we had decided not to ask questions and just see if anyone turned up. Eventually, after some time, the glass spelled out the words ‘Knowledge is not free’. Oh fuck, an old headmaster of Eton, I thought.

  Curious, we asked the question ‘What price is knowledge?’

  At this point the glass spelled out ‘Your life’ and dramatically shot off the edge of the table. As we were all suffering from heightened excitement already, this incident made us feel quite shaken and we decided to go to bed. I got into bed feeling a bit of a scaredy-cat, turned the light off and tried to sleep. I had no success and the more I tried, the worse it became. I also had an increasing awareness that someone was in the room. As my head was hidden under the covers, I decided, very bravely I thought, to have a look round. As I peered out from the top of my eiderdown, I spotted a person in the corner of the room. A tall woman, dressed from head to foot in a greyish colour, with some sort of hat on. My heart wobbled and I reached for the bedside light. As light flooded the room, the person faded from view. I stumbled down the stairs to find my flatmate, Betty, also awake, and she told me that coat hangers had flown out of her wardrobe.

  Now, I am quite prepared to believe that I was so drunk that I imagined the whole thing but it seems strange that something happened in two parts of the house at once. We moved not long after that.

  I had been in Tunbridge Wells for about nine months and, apart from contact with a few people in Hastings, I had all but forgotten my old life, although I had found it a struggle not to ring Dave, who I thought of often. But I knew it would go nowhere until he somehow sorted himself out and stopped leading the life of a relatively wealthy playboy.

  And then one day, completely without warning, he walked into the pub while I was working. My poor teenage heart jumped in my chest and I became a human jelly. As soon as I got off work, we left together and went off to the flat to try to sort things out. He said he had been looking for me since I had left, but would not reveal how he had found me. I suspected he hadn’t tramped round England like some wild-eyed Thomas Hardy character, suffering silently and sleeping out in all weathers, but that one of my friends had eventually caved in and grassed me up, but I never found out. I was so pleased to see him, although my friends weren’t because, of course, my stories of his profligacy and unfaithfulness had led them to give him the label ‘twat’. Had I been in my right mind, I probably would have agreed with them, but of course I wasn’t. I was somewhere in that psychotic nether region of the spirit known as ‘being in love’s, and I didn’t see sense and I didn’t listen to anyone’s advice. I’d written poems, for God’s sake, and that’s always a bad sign. So, despite a wealth of eminently sensible advice, I decided to reinstate cordial relations and go back to him. I decided I would not physically go back, though. Hastings is an interesting place which draws its sons and daughters inexorably back to a life they probably don’t want and subconsciously, I think, like a young Oliver Twist, I was trying to get to London. (Sorry you’ve had to put up with two literary references in one paragraph. I assure you it’s an aberration.)

  So I saw Dave when I could and we wrote to each other. I felt torn between the two worlds, but I knew that if he drew me back in, it would end badly, which I’m sure my parents were anxious about too.

  And now a grown-up job was required, as working full time in a pub was not really the career path I wanted to head down. With my friend Julia, I got a job working for Dr Barnardo’s, at a complex of small houses, all of which were children’s homes.

  Julia and I had been in the same class at school. She was, and still is, such a funny person: cynical, quick, very bright and really good fun to be with. She was the perfect person to work with, as she kept me and the kids entertained and was always coming up with great ideas to stave off the boredom. One day she suggested we have a blindfolded food-tasting competition, whereupon we made up the most revolting combinations of food you can imagine, like salad cream, corn flakes, jam and sausages, and the kids had to put a blindfold on and guess what was in each bowl. They loved it and, amazingly, none of them was sick.

  Each house had a married couple who lived there permanently plus two extra staff members, normally women, who were known as ‘housemothers’. Bloody hell, I was only eighteen or nineteen at this point and certainly not ready to look after a load of kids.

  I had no conscious reason for wanting to work with deprived and orphaned kids. I had worked in that field before because my mum was a social worker, and I found the pace and emotional involvement required for that sort of work very satisfying.

  We had about eleven kids in the house. Poor little buggers, the lot of them, with various emotional problems. There was no washing machine for a while, so all the washing had to be done by hand, and with one child regularly jumping from bed to bed and pissing on the other kids while they were asleep, there was quite a lot of it. The couple I worked for were nice enough but would sometimes go away for the weekend with their own kids and leave me or Julia in charge. As we were teenagers, they suspected the worst and obviously thought we would spend the weekend chatting on the phone, so they locked the office with the phone in it, cutting off our only method of communication. This meant that in order to contact the outside world, one had to catch a passer-by or go to one of the other houses with all the kids in tow. Shopping was the same. I had to get on the bus with about eleven kids, including a toddler and a baby, and try to shop while stopping them gobbing, throwing things or fighting.

  Just getting the little buggers out of the house was an achievement in itself. There were three sets of siblings: a brother and sister (sweet and lovely looking, they got adopted fairly quickly), two brothers with learning disabilities who were quite a management problem (they didn’t get adopted) and another set of brothers who were just plain naughty (they didn’t either). (Incidentally, I met the older of the last set of brothers in Camberwell about twenty years ago and he told me he was working as a pimp. I was so proud.) Then there was a baby in a pushchair and a toddler who needed to be strapped into a buggy of some sort too, or he would have dived headlong into the road, because that’s what toddlers do. I seem to remember I had some sort of makeshift strap which I tied to his arm to stop him legging it off into the crowd.

  It took a bloody age to get them all to the bus stop, with one child pushing the toddler’s buggy and me with the baby. Then both pushchairs had to be folded up when the bus came and the whole lot herded on board. Trying to marshal them all round the supermarket and stop the shoplifting and the eating of scraps was a task beyond human endurance, hence I think I only ever took them all out like this twice and if we didn’t have enough food in I just improvised with whatever was in the cupboard rather than face it again. I virtually needed counselling after these trips.

  I was really lonely there sometimes. Once I asked the milkman in for a cup of tea, I was so desperate for human contact. Rather wisely perhaps, he declined.

  One weekend, one of the kids, a strapping fifteen-year-old with slight learning disability, came downstairs at about eleven thirty while I was watching telly and announced, ‘I’ve hurt my penis, can you have a look at it for me?’

  Well, obviously, on my own with a boy nearly as big as me, a penis examination didn’t really grab me. I managed to break into the room with the phone and called Julia and asked for back up. She arrived twenty minutes later and we did the examination together. Nothing wrong at all and I’m afraid,
more due to anxiety I think than anything else, we were hysterical for about an hour afterwards.

  Dave, due to work commitments in London, didn’t really manage to see me very often. He was still working in the same residential home and had a rather gruelling shift pattern. You may think we had cosy chats about our very similar jobs, but we didn’t really. I don’t think either of us wanted to talk about it outside work. I supplemented his meagre presence with a couple of on-off relationships, one with a delightful ceiling suspender who was no-nonsense, good fun and a joy to be with.

  Do you want to know what a ceiling suspender is? Well OK then, they put ceilings in that are lower than the existing ceiling, I presume to save money on heating. This is normally done in old houses with very high ceilings, like your Georgians and Victorians.

  My time with the ceiling suspender didn’t particularly involve any exciting social events. We went to the pictures and pubs and had dinner quite a lot with friends. It was normal and lovely.

  By this time, I’d found myself a perfectly adequate bed-sit in a leafy road full of huge Victorian houses. It was on the ground floor and my bed was next to the big bay window. On summer nights I often forgot to draw the heavy curtains. One night I was rather foolishly watching Hitchcock’s Psycho on my own at one in the morning. I’m slightly pathetic on the horror film front. I’ve always wondered why it’s considered so entertaining to see (mainly) women butchered in a variety of ways. Still, Hitchcock was always at the epicentre of the genre and there was nothing else on. So I steeled myself for the shower scene, although I could feel my heart beating faster. Just as the killer struck and my fear increased, there was a loud banging on the window and I looked over to see a leering face. I screamed my head off until I realised it was the ceiling suspender, who had crept up to the window and watched the film through it, the bastard, until it got to the shower scene.