Growing Up in the Madhouse

Dad always had a rather ruthless approach to life: take gardening, for example. His idea of pruning a bush was to round up the family like cattle and give us our orders with the air of a grizzled old drill sergeant:

"You, boy, wheelbarrow duty. And as for you, I want to see a rake in your hand in five minutes or there will be trouble!"

Then he would proceed to hack at bushes with a huge pair of shears or possibly a chainsaw, until nothing was left but a sorry looking three inches of stump: what he called "plenty of room for new growth", which the rest of the world would call "a mutilated carcass". The severed limbs of the unfortunate shrub would then be forcibly rammed down the poor garden shredder, which would grumble and rattle ominously, helped along by a hefty kick from one, or both of my brothers. The mangled remains, once spewed out the other end of the shredder, hopefully vaguely resembling some sort of mulch, would then be left to rot in a heap with lots of other ground-up plants.

Mum's approach to gardening couldn't be more different. My dad used to laugh at her as she used a miniature pair of clippers to snip, with the utmost precision and concentration, three inches off a couple of twigs, before getting distracted by the sight of a weed in the herbaceous border, and with all the single mindedness of a demented chicken, wandering off to fetch a trowel and a bucket to dig it up. My mother had some kind of unhealthy obsession with weeds. I grew up watching her stop whatever she was doing, no matter what she was in the middle of, be it barbequing sausages for the family or serving up champagne at some posh outdoor get-together, at the sight of a single dandelion in the flower bed. It would have her giving the hunting call of "Weed! Weed!", hitching up her skirts and searching almost desperately for a trowel. She would then proceed to work her way doggedly round the garden, painstakingly digging up each individual weed, often emitting a crow of triumph at wrestling out a particularly tough one, occasionally accompanied by a muttered, "Got you, naughty bindweed," or "Ah-ha! So you thought you could escape my clutches, eh?". Inevitably, everything else would be forgotten until she emerged, hours later, muddy and dishevelled from yet another bout with her arch-nemeses, the Dreaded Weeds, as she affectionately dubbed them.

It seemed to me that Mum spent most of her time in the kitchen or the garden, leaving them only to sleep and shop for food. When I was four, I didn't understand why she had to go to bed for weeks and weeks and have the doctor visit her. Dad explained that she had something wrong with a disc in her back. I hadn't known people had discs inside their backs. Did they look like the ones you got in computers? It was strange, not having her around, and for the first time in my life, Dad cooked all our meals and there was no Mum, pottering around humming, paperclips in her hair, off in her own little world.

Rectory Barn was, as you may have guessed from its name, near the church. It was not next door to it, more a couple of minutes' walk away, nor was the church strictly a church. There had been no services there for years, and now it was host only to large numbers of pigeons, who laid their eggs on the tower steps, and at one point a group of house martins in the porch, who only stayed for a year, yet made themselves quite at home, liberally redecorating the stone floor with their droppings. The tower made a half-hearted attempt to fall down every so often, but was easily put back in line with a few strategically placed supports.

The rest of the village consisted of no more than ten other houses, all ancient stone affairs with copious amounts of ivy scaling the walls, peeping in at the windows, and pulling slates off the roof. For a small village, the number of children of a similar age to me was surprising. There were my two brothers and I, next-door had a brood of four and there were a couple up on the hill. The rest of the houses, of course, were full of old people who would stop you on the road and either give you a sweetie or tell you off for something, or occasionally both.

My older brother and I often used to go and play with the boy on the farm up the road. We would spend all day trekking through the fields "exploring", returning at dusk with fingers numb from the cold and pocketfuls of treasures - feathers, interesting stones, half squashed berries and chunks of filthy sheep's wool purloined from barbed wire fences - things that could be precious only to a six year old adventurer.

As soon as I was tall enough to reach the top cupboard in the kitchen, I began to pose a serious threat to the safety of any and all chocolate related products kept there. I would launch carefully planned forays into the kitchen, using every bit of stealth and cunning I possessed to infiltrate the cupboard and retrieve the biscuit tin, which I would smuggle gleefully off to my room. I soon became known as the Biscuit Raider by my frustrated family, who would go to the biscuit tin for a snack, only to find an empty wrapper and a pitiful pile of crumbs where there had previously been a bumper pack of Bourbon Creams and three Kit Kats. Soon Mum would take to leaving frosty little notes in the tin, reading, "These biscuits have been COUNTED" or some other such friendly message. When this failed to deter me, hardened criminal that I was, she started hiding the packets of biscuits in various obscure places around the kitchen, some of them in such good hiding places she herself would fail to find them, and she would unearth them months later to her great surprise, like a baffled squirrel uncovering a stash of nuts it didn't even remember burying.

Winderton being such a tiny village, people tended to know each other's business almost as well, if not better, than they did their own. News travelled so fast you could start losing your hair in great chunks and next-door's cat would know about it before you did, which is saying something, because next door's cat just happened to be Jeremy. Jeremy, the locals claimed proudly, came as close to being insane as it was possible for a cat to be. He enjoyed spending any moment when he wasn't eating as though he'd been on starvation rations for a month, sitting stock still in the middle of the road, gazing at some unknown point in the middle distance, moving nothing but the very tip of his tail, which would twitch unceasingly, as though it were attached to some unlimited power source, like the Duracell Bunny. I sometimes wondered if it just kept on twitching, twitching, twitching, all night while Jeremy was asleep. If a car happened to arrive while Jeremy was there, he wasn't the slightest bit concerned. He would yawn pointedly, stretch himself at length, and positively saunter to the edge of the road, from where he could bestow upon the hapless driver a glare seething with pure animosity.

Late one summer, the air was laden with rumours, buzzing like electricity in a thunderstorm, after the Great Fruit-napping Fiasco (as my mother called it) took place. The village, previously untouched by crime, woke up one morning only to find that all the fruit was missing from people's gardens! Someone had come in the night and stripped every last bush, tree and plant. When Mum found out, she rushed straight to the greenhouse in a panic, returning with a deeply relieved smile. "Thank goodness my tomatoes are safe!" she sighed.

Many suspected the milkman, who was new and, as people muttered darkly to each other, "delivered in the middle of the ruddy night - like they do in towns!" The poor man was quite unaware of the ferment of suspicion of which he was the cause, although he must have wondered why for years afterwards old ladies kept giving him black looks and making obscure comments about strawberries.

The madhouse may have been funny-looking and falling to bits. It may have been in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by cottages full of strange old people. It may have been the slaughtering-ground of innocent mice and shrubs. But it was my home. And I loved it.