 |
‘Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is
the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable
Irish Catholic childhood.’ That’s page one
of Frank McCourt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir
Angela’s Ashes. He’s effectively saying to
other memoir-writers, ‘Come and have a go if you
think you’re deprived enough!’ Well, neither
Irish nor Catholic, I had a happy childhood. There, I’ve
said it, it’s out in the open. And it feels good.
My parents never split up; in fact Mum and Dad rarely
exchanged a cross word. While growing up in Northampton
I was abused neither sexually, nor mentally. Nobody in
my immediate orbit died, unless you count James Beck,
the actor who played Private Walker on Dad’s Army
(I never knew him, but I certainly missed him when he
was gone). To this day I have never had cause to stay
overnight in a hospital, and the nearest I came to debilitating
illness in my youth was having a single stitch in my cheek
after horseplay with a paper party hat saw me fall onto
the corner of what was called in those days the music
centre. Kids mistook the tiny scar for a smudge of chocolate
on my face.
I attended the School of No Knocks, I got on well with
my brother and sister, and although we weren’t rich
(our Action Men drove around in a second-hand armoured
car, and we went on self-catering holidays in North Wales),
neither were we exotically poor. The only thing we were
truly deprived of was misery.
Thank you for letting me share that with the group. A
happy childhood is something of a social stigma at dinner
parties these days. As McCourt concludes, ‘the happy
childhood is hardly worth your while.’ True enough,
it’s hard to glamorise the ‘hardship’
of sitting in the family Viva on the seafront at Pwllheli
in inclement weather, eating fudge and doing quizzes until
the rain stopped. It wasn’t so bad. And it certainly
pales into insignificance next to Dave Pelzer, author
of the best-selling memoir A Child Called ‘It’.
Among a litany of other cruel indignities, he was forced
as a boy to drink washing up liquid by his monstrous,
alcoholic mother. We were forced to take Joy Ride travel
sickness tablets before the six-hour drive to Wales, but
that was for our own good.
You can’t help but recall Monty Python’s famous
Four Yorkshiremen sketch, in which a quartet of well-off,
dinner-suited Northerners indulge in a game of childhood-poverty
one-upmanship. Let’s re-stage that sketch with four
merchants of literary autobiographical misery, Frank McCourt,
Dave Pelzer, Dave Eggers (author of A Heartbreaking Work
of Staggering Genius), and perhaps Paul Morley (author
of Nothing). It would play something like this …
McCourt: “We lived upstairs in a rented house
in 1930s Limerick that was so cold we had to tear down
a partition wall for firewood, and we had to pick discarded
coal up off the road, even though Mam was ashamed of us
for doing it.”
Eggers: “At least you had a Mam. My parents
died of cancer within five weeks of one another, and I
had to effectively bring up my seven year-old brother
on my own.”
Morley: “Cancer? Luxury. My father committed
suicide in 1977 near Stroud – threaded a hosepipe
from the exhaust of a Ford van and asphyxiated himself.”
Pelzer: “You were lucky. I had to sleep in the
garage with no bed sheets, get up in the morning an hour
before my monstrous alcoholic mother woke up, clean the
house, subsist on scraps from the bin, and lie for years
to cover up the appalling systemic abuse which began the
day my mother – who called me ‘It’ –
pulled my arm out of its socket. She also made me swallow
a spoonful of ammonia.”
McCourt: “Ammonia? We used to dream of swallowing
ammonia …”
It may seem flippant or disrespectful to turn the very
real hardship of these authors into comedy, but all have
chosen to make their stories public, in doing so achieving
redemption by ‘externalisation’. Their misery
has been spread about for all of us to wallow in, and
what’s more, it has brought the sufferers acclaim,
fame and money in varying measures. McCourt won the Pulitzer;
Eggers’ agonisingly stylised book was named as one
of the best of the year by just about every critic in
2000, and Pelzer’s A Child Called ‘It’
was such a phenomenon it led to three lucrative sequels,
the most recent of which, Help Yourself, earned him his
second Pulitzer nomination.
At which you might ask the question: haven’t we
suffered enough? It seems not. Suffering – that
is, someone else’s – is big business. Pelzer
has turned his into a cottage industry. The miserable
memoir remains a safe bet in publishing, even a goldmine,
with Pelzer’s books each topping the international
bestseller lists, McCourt’s shifting in the miserable
millions and Angela’s Ashes being turned into an
all-star film by Alan Parker. It’s not over yet.
The UK’s biggest-selling book of last year was Pamela’s
Stephenson’s biography of hubby Billy Connolly,
which sold many of its half a million copies off the back
of revelations about systematic sexual abuse in Connolly’s
deprived childhood (‘Billy shared a sofa-bed with
his father. Late one night, when Billy was 10, he woke
to find his father “interfering” with him’).
If you can’t come up with juicy stories of divorce,
depravation and death, who’d want to read about
your life? We live in a post-Oprah world, where –
like the tree falling in the forest – a problem
isn’t a problem until it’s been aired in public,
preferably on television, and even Osama bin Laden’s
apparent evil has been explained away by an ‘unhappy
childhood’. America’s on-the-couch culture
is here to stay, and although anything that unblocks our
rather unhelpful British reserve can only be a good thing,
this 21st century mania for a problem shared is getting
out of hand. Sex And The City has made its own peculiar
brand of New York neurosis so chic that singletons previously
empowered by Bridget Jones are now feigning wacky hang-ups
to stay in the conversation. Never mind living in a high
state of alert over international terrorism, we’ve
got more important worries than that.
Journalist and writer Linda Grant chose to share the very
real trials and tribulations of living with a mother suffering
from Alzheimer’s in the recent, warmly-regarded
memoir Remind Me Who I Am, Again (using memory as its
theme, the author also delves into her own second-generation
Jewish immigrant past). But the real revelation comes
at the back of the book, where her sister explains why
she gave Grant her blessing to go public with these personal
matters: ‘I am seduced by the fact that the family
I had always thought of as shallow and inconsequential
is actually fascinating and significant.’
This is why I kept quiet for so long. I suspected that
my shallow and inconsequential early life was actually
just that. However, after reading Nothing, Paul Morley’s
moving book about his father’s suicide, I began
to feel oddly jealous. I searched in vain for emotional
scars and found only smudges of chocolate. There was nothing
in my early life to suggest a book as fascinating and
significant as Morley’s or Pelzer’s, and I
felt alone. I was a victim just as surely as the abused
Connolly or the deprived McCourt, yet they had access
to an effective source of closure – that is, stick
it in a best-selling book and suddenly feel a whole lot
better.
Perhaps, I began to reason, there were others out there
like me, living with the shame of a really nice upbringing.
Maybe by writing a book about it, I would encourage people
to ‘come out’, and admit that their past harboured
no dark secrets, no family strife, no interference on
the sofa-bed. This book, Where Did It All Go Right?, details
my life from cradle to leaving home, aged 19. It has a
happy ending and, counter to all publishing wisdom, a
happy beginning and a happy middle. What’s more,
to back up my outrageous claims of incident-free contentment,
I have included actual childhood diary entries, such as
24 February 1973, when I wrote, ‘I had a smashing
tea, it was the best tea I’ve ever had.’ Or
17 November 1977, which reads, ‘My teddy Arthur
came second in the teddy contest. Hooray!’ (This
was the teddy I’d made in needlework – it
was a very modern comprehensive, and don’t mention
punk rock, I was only 12.)
Far from the miserable Irish Catholic childhood, this
was a jolly, atheist Northampton childhood. When I was
at school in the Seventies, divorce was not yet commonplace
– certainly not in Northampton! – and most
kids had the requisite number of parents: one of each.
It was a hazardous decade, globally, with the rise of
terrorism, crippling industrial action and the Opec stranglehold,
but these trifles had little effect on the young life
of a provincial boy, bar the odd power cut. Though public
information films warning us not to take sweets off strangers
or fly a kite near electricity pylons raised the general
level of paranoia, we were still allowed to walk to school
and stay out till dark. Processed food was on the rise,
from Smash instant mashed potato to new-fangled individual
pots of mousse, but we were still relatively healthy,
encouraged to play in the mud, thus building our immune
systems as nature intended. We didn’t want for much
beyond a stick shaped like a gun and the occasional Funny
Face lolly; it was a good time to be alive.
So how do I feel now that Arthur the teddy and those happy
holidays in North Wales are about to join Dave Pelzer’s
ammonia and Linda Grant’s mum’s dementia in
the public domain? Any fears or regrets that my own idyllic
provincial upbringing will no longer be a secret? While
writing the book, I did wonder if perhaps the process
of telling my own story would unearth some deep, lingering
resentment or hang-up that I had buried under rose-tinted
memory. It didn’t. A girl called Anita Barker, who
lived round the corner in Bideford Close, once mocked
the stabilisers on my bike when I was about seven, but
the emotional aftershock was minor.
I fell out with my mum when I was 17 over the state of
my hair and some apparently undesirable new friends I
fell in with, but what teenager doesn’t?
Since finishing the book, having gaily boasted that Mum
and Dad never argued, I’ve remembered a couple of
times when they did: there was a row in the car while
we were parked near Highgrade the grocer’s once,
after which my brother Simon and I hypothetically arranged
which parent we would prefer to live with if they split
up. But I think it was more of a game for us, like choosing
which Action Man kit we most wanted from the Kay’s
catalogue.
I was also systematically spoilt by one set of grandparents
over a number of years – buying me Airfix soldiers,
letting me stay up late at their house when I stayed over,
taking me to Blackpool for the weekend – something
I confidently assumed hadn’t bothered my brother
at the time. However I asked him about it recently and
he admitted that it had. It had made him confused and
bitter. But hey, that’s for his memoir!
I even contacted Anita Barker through Friends Reunited
and she says she doesn’t recall the stabiliser incident.
Nor does she remember me putting me arm around her in
1978, even though she was going out with Paul Bush at
the time, which was a big deal for me, aged 13.
The good people of Limerick bayed for Frank McCourt’s
blood when Angela’s Ashes was first published, claiming
that even in the 1930s it wasn’t as grim as he made
out in the book. Gerry Hannan, a DJ on Limerick 95, compiled
a book of memories from locals that contradicted the author's
memory, daring McCourt to see him in court.
Anita Barker has promised me she won’t sue over
the stabilisers. Which is just as well – I don’t
want an unhappy ending now. |
|
|
|
Contact
Andrew at happy@wherediditallgoright.com