future heavyweight champion soon withered away as I fell victim to numerous childhood ailments. But, as most fathers do. Dad looked straight through my chubby pallid scrawn, convinced I had the makings of a professional footballer. He’d tried out for Swindon Town as a youngster, and wouldn’t accept I hadn’t inherited his own magic left foot. Most Saturday afternoons would find us at the local ground, me struggling to see above a sea of heads at the exotic green turf beyond.
They were the best of times, made better when my dad would lift me confidently on to his broad shoulders to catch key moments of the game. I’d sit there, elevated, giving my own childish commentary to the action, hands clinging to his ears and thinning hair, feeling him sway slightly if Town scored, bonded.
Often, he’d carry me aloft as we walked back home, weaving through thousands of jubilant or disgruntled fans, nodding at friends – feeling literally ‘on top of the world’.
My bedroom became a temple to the Town, covered in posters, programmes, scarves, away-ticket stubs and league tables. At the age of nine I knew no times-tables, but all of Swindon Town’s cup-winning teams by rote. Dad always put me to bed with tales of the ‘great’ games, vivid descriptions and I clung on to every word.
It was only in later life that my mother’s indifference to the Town began to make sense. I think she resented the hold it had on Dad, perhaps even saw me as a rival for his time and affection. But these are suppositions I can only make with hindsight. An attempt to understand why she appeared distant at times. Perhaps I was the son my father always wanted, which my mother dutifully supplied, who then took her place in his heart. Whatever – I’ll never know, they’re both long gone, and all I’m left with is a frustrating mix of unanswered speculation and distant memories.
I suppose my childhood split itself into two parts. The happy times up till the age of nine or so, then the confusing times after. Dad changed, became withdrawn, older, somehow more fragile. We didn’t go to matches any more, I went with friends, while he sat at home, listening to the radio. But it was no gradual slowing down, it simply happened one weekend, almost as if he’d been replaced by an apathetic, stooping doppelgänger during the night.
I continued following the often disastrous footballing antics of the Town for the rest of the season, returning home to give my indifferent dad an increasingly lacklustre match report, but to be honest, without his enthusiasm, my heart was in it even less than his. Down came the scarves, posters and wall-charts, up went Jane Fonda as Barbarella.
And I too, began to change. My weight ballooned, skin stretching under the constant ingestion of crisps and sweets. My eyes took on their now familiar stillness. I went from a slim young boy into a blob, cocooned from a terrible truth I hadn’t the will or maturity to deal with. The subconscious took over, remoulding me, distancing me from such things I hadn’t the developed intellect to face. And it’s only now, all these years later, as the terrible truth emerges blinking into the sunlight of my new reality, that the choices I have made, the things I’ve done, the hurt I’ve caused others all fit so hideously elegantly into place.
I didn’t eat three Mars Bars every day because I wanted to – it was because I needed to. The promised work, rest and play disguised a deeper, darker need – to forget. And the calories did their job, protecting me from the outside, wrapping me in comforting fat, giving me time to heal before I had the strength to go back and face what had so quickly and violently destroyed both my father’s and my own innocence.
But I digress. Back to the potted biography. Next it was eleven-plus, special tutoring and a place at the Boys’ Grammar. School caps, long lines of fragile little boys lugging briefcases designed for grown-ups, stuffed with battered text and exercise books. Eng. Lang., Eng. Lit., Geography, Art, French, German, Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Latin, detention, the cane, school reports, fear, and football. I remember my dad extolling my laughably nonexistent sporting virtues at my interview as a huge ape in a Loughborough tracksuit sneered in anticipation of towel-whipping me in the showers. Which he did, many times.
As expected, I was average at just about everything, with the exception of sport. Here, I seemed to excel as an uncoordinated dunderhead, but being one of the widest, if not tallest, boys in my year, I was made substitute goalkeeper in the St Barts third team. I remember Dad would occasionally make a reluctant trip out to the school touchline, joining other rain-sodden parents jeering my efforts as the ball skidded past me into the back of the net. And always after, during the journey home, few words would pass between us, yet I sensed his disappointment. It was a world away from the distant days when he’d lift me on those once broad shoulders, now stooped and rounded by time.
Moving on, past A levels towards 1976, my first job – tea-boy in a provincial advertising agency. The name’s irrelevant, so was the job. Amazingly, I lost three stone, my virginity, discovered pot, the music of The Doors, Yes and Genesis. I wore flares and discovered a gift for mimicry and joke-telling which won me many friends my age, but few amongst the management. I had a weekly wage and all the brash confidence of youth. I was impregnable, bolstered by hormones and arrogance.
Then fired for skinning up in the toilets.
London beckoned, and I Dick Wittingtoned to its heady call, winding up as a junior copywriter in a ‘mainstream’ ad agency on Dean Street.
Jemimah Eliott arrived, full of my imagined Eastern European promise, our brand-new hotshot account handler. I wrote the copy for the ads she presented to the clients. I went to one or two of these presentations, watching her wage a professional charm offensive on our clients in order to bolster the agency’s profits. She was good, very good, young, attractive. I fancied her like mad, but thought I had no chance. But we used to laugh a lot together, swapping gossip and tall stories about the guys with their own parking spaces who were for ever offering to take her away for a ‘formative think-tank regarding agency strategy for the forthcoming new business pitch’ – adspeak for a quickie in a hotel on expenses.
The senior rejected suits had, of course, discovered the source of their failure to bed her. Jemimah Eliott was, in their hugely embittered opinions, obviously a muff-muncher, rabid dyke, prick-teaser. I remember nodding sagely, laughing inside at their broken egos.
Then one day, just another unremarkable Wednesday, she came to brief me on some job or other. At the end she asked me out. As simple as that, just went staight ahead and asked. Unbelievable – but true.
We married in nineteen-eighty – me twenty-two; her twenty-three; two young kids standing at the altar, backs to the world of temptation and drudgery which lay waiting outside the church.
We agreed I would move to another agency, figuring working and living with one another wouldn’t necessarily make the ideal platform for a successful relationship. But perhaps we hadn’t fully thought it through. Trouble was, we still worked in the same business, only now we were professional rivals. Then disaster – in April 1987, my agency lost a major bit of business to hers. Jemimah was on the pitch team. Word soon got round. I was suspected of leaking details by a paranoid management reeling from the loss of a major blue-chip account. I was history shortly after, summoned by a phone call to a meeting with the smiling executive where a lukewarm pot of coffee, my P45 and a derisory payoff were the only things on the table.
I felt numb, made completely impotent by the decision. Not that the drop in money affected J and I in the slightest – in a bizarre irony, she’d been promoted to the board of her agency as a result of winning the business I’d been unfairly suspected of losing. We were richer than we’d ever been.
At first we were cool about it, spending the redundancy and planning a heavy freelance career from the ruins of my Filofax. One or two jobs rolled in, charity from old pals, giving Adrian the odd hundred quid here or there. But I grew to hate every minute of it. My heart wasn’t in it; I couldn’t bear to think of Jemimah leaving for work, while I sat upstairs in the heavy silence, de-roled, emasculated.
Like an idiot, I began to drink heavily, from the moment J left for the station until she returned, often finding me bombed on the sofa, useless. Days, time, dates, all became irrelevant as I woke each day with the sole aim to hit the whisky hard, dull the pain of failure. A never-ending supply of child-minders and nannies looked