worse. He kept clashing with his bosses and felt everyone was out to get him. After he joined the union and became heavily involved with it, he felt his bosses were out to get him for being an activist.
‘They’re destroying me,’ I’d hear him rant at Mum.
‘Just keep your head down and stop causing trouble, Dave,’ she would tell him. ‘We need the money.’
But that would just drive Dad into a fury. ‘You don’t understand what it’s like working there,’ he’d rage.
For 18 months he was involved in disciplinary action and subject to reports. It sent him – and all of us – crazy.
Because Dad was convinced he was about to be sacked, he started working part-time at a stamp shop he set up in part of his dad’s jewellery shop off the Edgware Road. So, on top of all the stress at work, he was also working really long hours in his second job, desperate to keep paying the mortgage so we could stay in our perfect home.
He was angry all the time. Looking back, he was probably suffering from depression or stress, perhaps both, but at seven all I could see was that the dad I adored had turned overnight into some kind of raging monster.
In many ways I feel sorry for my dad because he’d had a really tough childhood. He was born in America but at six his father moved to London with a new wife while his mother, Magda, stayed in New York with her new husband. Magda had custody of Dad but, according to the family story, his dad went over there and brought him back to Britain. Having got him back, though, his dad and his new wife realised they didn’t really want him. They didn’t take care of him and he ended up stuck in a children’s home.
Magda still lives in Manhattan in some plush apartment but my dad doesn’t have much contact with her and he doesn’t speak to his father at all. So Dad has had it hard himself in life – he says that’s why he can’t show emotion in front of his kids. But I tell you, he could certainly show anger back then.
And although I can see the reasons for his behaviour now, at that time I was just a little girl who desperately wanted her daddy. And Dad had changed so much – he didn’t want me following him to the betting shop any more and there were no more runs around the streets.
One day I entered a gymnastics competition and won second place. I was so proud of myself and sprinted straight from the gym to Dad’s stamp shop, my silver medal bouncing around my neck as I ran down the road.
I walked into the shop and said, ‘Hi,’ waiting for Dad to notice the shining medal on my chest and to throw his arms around me and tell me how proud he was of his favourite daughter. I waited as he looked up and gave me half a smile over a book of stamps. Then I waited some more. And some more. He didn’t notice, and it was soon obvious he was never going to notice. He hadn’t seen my medal and, worse still, he hadn’t registered the sheer joy on my face. In the end I said, ‘Look, Dad, I came second.’ I can’t even remember how he reacted. Whatever he did or said, that isn’t the bit I remember about that day.
Dad began missing my and Natalie’s birthday parties. And if we had friends round after school and were being noisy he’d go mad. One evening I had my friend Vicky Fiddler round to play. We were busily brushing each other’s hair at the kitchen table when Dad burst into the room in a fury. ‘Who’s this?’ he yelled, glaring at us both. I was devastated he could act so mad in front of one of my friends.
He was always so angry. For as long as I can remember he had called me ‘Fatso’ and ‘Lump’ but it had always seemed like a joke. Now the things he was saying seemed more cruel. He said to Natalie that at night sawdust would fall out of her head on to the pillow because she was so stupid.
At that time Dad was working a lot of night shifts too, which meant Natalie and I had to creep around the house all day, terrified we would wake him up. And when he was on normal day shifts we would skulk around when he was due home, waiting for the sound of his key in the lock, at which point we would run upstairs and hide.
One afternoon we accidentally scratched his backgammon board with my shoe buckle and were so terrified of how he’d react that we spent the entire afternoon hiding in Mum’s wardrobe.
Dad wasn’t violent towards us – although I can remember the odd whack if we were playing up – but just really, really angry. Most of his anger he was taking out on Mum and they were rowing all the time. A lot of their fights happened first thing in the morning when Dad came in tired and grumpy from a night shift and got into bed with Mum. Natalie and I didn’t need to eavesdrop at their door to hear what was going on. We’d wake up and look at each other as we heard every word being hurled across their bedroom. Often it was about stuff I just didn’t understand, other times it was Dad’s problems at work or how we’d keep our house if he didn’t have a job.
As the months went by it felt like they were rowing about everything, right down to what dress Mum was wearing. One time I remember her coming downstairs all dressed up for an evening out. ‘Why are you wearing that?’ Dad said. Mum’s face crumpled and she looked totally lost. ‘You’ve never had any class,’ he sneered at her as she turned around and slowly went back upstairs to change.
I understand now how complicated marriages can be and that there are two sides to every story. And there were probably times when Mum was nasty to Dad or wound him up, but I don’t remember them. I just remember Mum becoming less and less sparkly, less and less pretty and more and more ground down. She stopped having friends round to the house and looked exhausted all the time.
One day I heard Dad tell her she was hopeless and had no vision.
‘You and your family have never thought I was good enough,’ Mum shouted back at him. Mum had been brought up a Catholic and Dad’s family hadn’t liked it, although by this point the two of them couldn’t even agree what channel to watch on the telly, let alone on big things like religion. They never went out the way they had once done and there was no more cuddling up in front of a video.
I was seven and all I wanted was for my daddy to play with me and Natalie and to talk to us, but all we saw of him was him arguing on the telephone with this massive firm, being horrible to our Mum and shouting at us.
Things took a turn for the worse around about the time I turned eight, in the spring of 1990. Mum sat me and Nat down one day and told us Grandad was ill – really ill. People kept talking about the ‘C-word’ and although I didn’t really have a clue what it really meant, it was clearly bad.
Mum took me out of school to visit Grandad one afternoon at the Central Middlesex Hospital, where he was being treated. She’d popped into the baker’s on the way to collect me and she gave me a gingerbread man to eat on the train on the way there. It all started out feeling like a real treat.
But as soon as I saw Grandad in the hospital I knew something was badly wrong. I think it was the first time I’d ever seen him without his woolly cardigan on and that was enough of a shock. Instead, he was wearing a white hospital smock which seemed to smother him, he was so thin and pale. There was no pipe sticking out of his mouth any more and any Popeye strength had clearly been sapped away.
I sat on Grandad’s bed and chattered about gymnastics and Brownies and the latest dramas at Hillside Infant School while Mum squeezed into an adjoining toilet with a doctor ‘for a word in private’. It was the only place they could find to tell her that her father was dying.
When Mum walked back into the room her whole body was shaking except for her face, which was totally rigid.
The doctor had just told her the results of surgery on a blockage in Grandad’s bowel. ‘We opened him up but saw immediately there was no point in operating – it was too far gone, so we just sewed him up again. Mrs Grahame, I’m terribly sorry, but there is nothing further we can do for your father.’
Mum nearly passed out from shock but pulled herself together to come back into the room, where I was still talking Grandad through my flip routines.
We chatted for a bit longer, then Mum and I walked back to the station. When we got home she