When I see washed-out photographs of English life in the 60s and 70s – cardiganed grandmothers eating roadside picnics beside Morris Minors, pale men sunbathing in shoes and socks on stripy deckchairs, Raleigh Choppers and caged budgerigars and faux leather pouffes – I feel a wave of what can’t properly be called nostalgia, because the last thing I’d want is to return to that age and those places where I was often profoundly unhappy and from which I’d have been desperate to escape if escape had been a possibility. Why then this longing, this echo of some remembered comfort?
Is it that, as children, we live inside a bubble of focused attention that gives everything inside a memorable fierceness? The way one could lie, for example, on a lawn and look down into the jungle of the grass to see earwigs and woodlice lumbering between the pale green trunks like brontosauri lumbering between the ferns and gingkos of the Late Jurassic. The way a rucked bedspread could become a mountain range stretched below the wings of a badly painted Airfix Spitfire. Or do objects, in their constancy, provide consolation in a world where adults are unpredictable and distant and unloving?
I lived, for the first 15 years of my life, with my parents and Fiona, my younger sister, at 288a Main Road, New Duston, on the outskirts of Northampton. Dad didn’t design it but it was an architect’s house nevertheless, a hint of Scandinavian modernism in the external wood panelling, the semi-open-plan ground floor and the boxy glass lobby. Hinged, teak double doors separated the dining room and a living room dominated by an uncarpeted staircase with open risers. The chimney breast was a broad, floor-to-ceiling stack of chunky sandstone blocks straight out of The Flintstones.
Under the stairs stood a Philips radiogram. If I listen carefully I can still hear King Size! by André Previn’s jazz trio, Paul Simon, and Play Bach No 2 by the Jacques Loussier Trio. What I can’t hear, beyond the occasional outburst – “Jesus wept!”, “Wait till your father gets home” – are conversations. It wasn’t so much that no one spoke, it was that no one talked. I never heard an adult tell or ask another adult something that really mattered. Maybe I wasn’t listening very hard but I don’t think anything was being said that was worth listening to, certainly nothing as interesting as the story of the Apollo space programme or the lyrics of “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard”. The most important things happened inside my head and these were not things that one shared with other people. Did similar things go on in other people’s heads? How was it possible to know?
***
I have a vivid childhood memory of being woken up by the sound of screaming on the other side of the wall. My sister was having a nightmare. I got out of bed and walked into her room. Mum was standing there at a loss for what to do. Fiona had stopped screaming by now. She opened her eyes, sat and shuffled herself up the bed so that she could lean against the padded, plastic headboard. I assumed she was awake. We heard footsteps outside. Mum said, “That’s Daddy coming to see how you are.” My sister screamed at the top of her voice, “No! He’s got the knife!” Fiona would carry on having this dream – Dad chasing her with a knife – for the next 45 years, and it would only stop when his Alzheimer’s became unmanageable and he went into a care home.
Like Fiona, I had recurrent nightmares as a child. In one I was standing at a crossroads on a ruined, post-apocalyptic plain in falling light while giant insects walked relentlessly towards me from all four points of the compass. In another I had been flushed down a toilet wearing an antique diving suit – waxed canvas, lead boots, a spherical brass helmet with hinged, circular portholes – and was drowning after becoming jammed in a narrow bend of piping.
There is a photo of Mum on a beach in either Devon or Cornwall, taken by Dad. They were either just married or about to be married. She looks stunning: fuchsia lipstick, freckles, simple white earrings like peppermint Mentos rhyming with a simple white shoulderless dress or swimming costume. She radiates something I never saw her radiate in real life, nor in any later photos, even those in which she is smiling and appears happy. It’s partly those freckles, which she came to hate, which she covered in foundation and which rarely came out in summer because she avoided the sun for fear it would trigger a migraine. But the real difference is internal. The woman on the beach seems confident about her own beauty and at ease in the world.
Maybe the picture’s deceptive, but I think that soon after it was taken some kind of light died in her. She had a bawdy side. She enjoyed salacious gossip and a Benny Hill double entendre. She sometimes wore a fun wig to go to dinner dances and could kick back in the right company with a Cinzano Rosso in one hand and a Consulate in the other. But these felt like distractions. Was it postnatal depression? Was it some pre-existing sadness temporarily held in abeyance by romance? Was there, from early on, some uncrossable gulf between them?
Shortly after my first adult novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, was published I said in an interview that I’d been an anxious and depressed child. It seemed an unremarkable comment. I knew many people who could say the same. Consequently I forgot having said it until I rang my parents a couple of weeks later and, to my surprise, it was Dad who answered the phone. He said that my mother was “crying herself to sleep and waking up crying in the morning” as a result of something I’d said in an interview. I pressed him for more details then told him to put Mum on the phone so we could talk about it. Dad disappeared for a few moments then said, “I’m afraid she’s weeping too much to come to the phone right now.”
Mum voted Tory all her life. She was an ardent Brexiter avant la lettre, detested the idea of being connected to France by the Channel tunnel and swore she would never use it. She believed that working women were the cause of unemployment and was happy to tell anyone this, including a female friend and neighbour who had a full-time job. People with strong Northampton accents, anyone overweight, people with tattoos all evoked either mocking laughter or a shudder of theatrical disgust. She couldn’t abide men with beards, or the Welsh. She had a “golliwog” fridge magnet and referred to gay men as “lovely boys”. When an old friend of theirs started to suffer from Alzheimer’s she bemoaned the fact that his sister wasn’t helping out because “she’s too busy having chemotherapy”.
She was frightened, of change and difference, of pain and discomfort, of decay and disease. One of the reasons her health was so poor in her final years was that she refused to listen to medical advice. She never did the exercises recommended by physios. She continued smoking and drinking. I was with her when she was being clerked in after one of her many ambulance rides to hospital. The young doctor asked if she took any exercise. She thought for a moment before saying, “It was a long walk to school”. She liked cleanness and tidiness and predictability. Until she was forced to move into the assisted living apartment she maintained a garden that was as clean and tidy as the interior of the house. When we had a cat she would put folded cloths in its favourite sitting spots to protect the furniture and would sometimes sneak up on it from behind and spray its back end with Marks & Spencer vaginal deodorant, something the cat did not enjoy. She didn’t read books. She didn’t listen to music.
Mum had no interest in my writing. With a couple of minor exceptions she never spoke about it and certainly never asked questions about it. The one book of mine she read was Curious Incident while on holiday with Dad shortly after it came out. Her review in its entirety: “I thought there was too much swearing in it. Then I had to drive around Menorca in a car with your father and it seemed quite realistic.”
In the years before Curious, and for quite a few years after, she made it clear that she would prefer me to have a “proper job”. I pressed her once to be specific and say what kind of job I could do that would make her happy. She thought for a while, trying hard to combine our two very different world views, then suggested that I could perhaps “design tools to help disabled people”.
Dad was an academic failure, proud of the fact that he earned one point for an English paper because he managed to write his name at least. 18 Cranbrook Road, where he grew up, was not a bookish household. There was a Bible, a prayer book and eight volumes of the Newnes’ Pictorial Knowledge presumably bought in instalments from a door-to-door salesman. Other than that it was the Sun and the Radio Times. He was, however, a prodigious sportsman. He learned to swim by watching Johnny Weissmuller in the Tarzan films. He played water polo, he sprinted, he hurdled, he swam, he boxed, he played rugby. He was also a fine draughtsman. After national service he went on to set up his own architectural partnership, designing buildings for the Open University, Carlsberg and Ikea, riding out the building slump of the 70s by designing abattoirs. In consequence we ate a lot of free pork pies as children and Dad took my subsequent vegetarianism, I suspect, as something of a personal insult.
He was a big man with a short fuse.
My sister once asked Mum, “Why does Dad hate me so much?”
“You have to remember,” said Mum, “that he only wanted one child.”
She would later say to Donna, one of her favourite care assistants, during one of the daily visits in which they shared gossip, Silk Cut and honey-roasted cashews from Waitrose, that she, too, only wanted one child. In truth, I don’t think she wanted children at all, but she had a lifelong fear of being different, of standing out, and while a woman who was unable to have children of her own would have been an object of sympathetic pity in their circles in Northampton in the early 60s, a woman who chose not to have children would have been eccentric at best and a pariah at worst.
We were, I think, too much hard work. “I don’t know how you cope with three children,” she once admitted to Fiona. “I couldn’t cope with two.” I walked my sister the mile to school every day from the ages of six (me) and five (her). Dad made us breakfast and Mum stayed in bed until we had left the house. Mum also had a weekly cleaner, something unheard of among our friends. Dad would take us both to church on Sundays and then to his parents afterwards, leaving Mum at home on her own. On Saturdays and during school holidays he would regularly take Fiona to the golf club and the rugby club while he trained or played and she was looked after by Snowy the groundsman so that Mum had only one child to look after at home. That didn’t mean she was parenting as such. I would usually be in the garden, alone in my room or at a friend’s house. Often she would have cluster headaches, take Solpadeine and spend long periods lying down in a darkened bedroom.
Before Dad died and Mum had the stroke that would put her in a nursing home I would regularly drive to Northampton to visit both of them. Dad spent the greater part of his time sitting in the armchair in his room. On one occasion the only other male resident of the memory unit picked up a sewing box from a sideboard and, for reasons known only to himself, walked into Dad’s room and tried to brain him with it. Dad floored him with a single punch, telling his favourite care assistant Judith afterwards, “I’ve still got it”. It was Judith who told me that the digital picture frame I’d brought, far from entertaining him or aiding his memory, was confusing him. He found it difficult to distinguish between people who had really come into his room and people whose pictures appeared on the little screen. In particular he kept thinking that a younger version of Mum had been visiting. “That woman’s been in again, coming on to me,” he said to Judith on one occasion. “She doesn’t stand a fucking chance.”
The visits to Mum were harder work. She would often greet me by pointing out that I was losing more hair, and pay me barbed compliments about being unexpectedly smart if I was wearing a collared shirt. She asked what my children were up to and this would occupy us for a few minutes. Mostly we talked about her life. It was not a life she was enjoying. News and politics we avoided where possible. I was glad when there was some financial, practical or bureaucratic problem I could help her sort out. I think she found me boring mostly. Sometimes she would say, “Don’t look so glum”, or, “Entertain me”. She cried every time I left and clung on to me when I gave her a brief hug. I was embarrassed by how uncomfortable I found this and how difficult it was to respond in kind. I’m sure, deep down, it was because I had no memory of being hugged by her, no memory of Mum saying she loved us, no memory of her showing us real affection as children, and because there was a good deal of self-pity in her sadness. But this is just post-rationalisation. What I felt at the time was disgust, of a kind I’ve never felt about anyone else.
To say that I was the favourite would imply actual liking. I certainly got preferential treatment on account of the double blessing of being both the older child and a boy. Dad allowed Mum to hit Fiona, for example, but not me. She did so regularly, once taking down Fiona’s pants at a bus stop to smack her when she was seven years old.
I think Mum and Dad embraced the idea of me as a freakishly clever child because it lessened their need to understand me. I was off in my own world of encyclopaedias and star charts, a world whose language was alien to them and in which I would know best how to look after myself. In contrast they treated Fiona as an encumbrance, and because she wasn’t as academic as me she was unable, in those early years, to earn the affirmation at school that she was missing at home.
When, many years later, Fiona was taken into Kingston hospital with meningitis and was awaiting the results of a lumbar puncture to find out whether it was viral or bacterial (the latter can be rapidly fatal) she rang home, but Mum said they couldn’t visit because “Your father has golf in the morning”. They carried on finding reasons not to visit for the entire week she was in hospital.
Neither Mum nor Dad went to her degree show when Fiona got a distinction in her MA in production design for film and television, and when she later got a job at the BBC Mum’s reaction to the news was, “You’ve already got a job looking after three children.”
The last words Mum spoke to Fiona in person were, “I’ve never believed a word you’ve said.”
We assume it’s hard when a loved and loving parent dies, but it can be just as hard when you lose a parent whom you don’t love and who never loved you. When Mum and Dad died it was a relief for me. For my sister it was the moment when she knew for certain that she would never hear them say sorry.
What does it mean, the injunction not to speak ill of the dead? Which dead? For how long after their passing are we meant to hold our tongues? And does speaking ill mean telling lies or telling the truth?
Mum was obsessed with what other people might think of her. Someone in their village was knighted and I addressed my next letter home to “Lord and Lady Haddon”, not realising how upset she would be in case someone would think they were mocking their newly elevated neighbours. Fit in, don’t make a fuss, don’t complain or rebel or seem unnecessarily different. Propriety was everything. They bought a large antique 18th-century oil painting of an anonymous local gentleman in a heavy gold frame. To some people Mum joked that it was one of her ancestors. To others she said nothing and let them assume precisely that. Like Dad, she’d risen a long way and found herself in a place that never quite felt like solid ground. She assumed other people would judge her in the way that she judged them, by the way she spoke, the way she dressed, the cream carpets, the framed maps of the county.
I don’t think it ever occurred to her that people might look at her and ask, “Was she kind? Did she care about other people? Did she love her children?”
• This is an edited extract from Leaving Home: A Memoir in Full Colour by Mark Haddon (Chatto & Windus). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
