I thought I was an intelligent child because people were always saying so. Though my first words were standard enough, I soon decided my mouth was made for grander expressions, and made plans to learn them quick – mainly through pestering adults. Asking about the world got me attention and helped others confirm their suspicions about my intelligence, so I asked everything I could think of, whenever I could think of it, to whoever was around. Mum was pleased when she noticed me doing unusual things, and often said in later years, usually over dinner, how early she realised what a marvel she had given birth to. I was sent to nursery a full six months sooner than most, though barely able to stand up straight yet, and was half the size of many of the other children. I don’t remember it now, but Grandpa Harry used to tell how I noticed I was being treated differently to others, and that it gave me a thrill. “Three years old!” he said. “And dizzy with power!”
My earliest memory is my first day at nursery school. In the morning session, while sitting in the corner facing the wall inspecting the lines on my palms, a teacher came over, crouched down and asked, gently enough, why I wouldn’t play with the other children.
“Why are circles?” I replied, looking sadly upwards. “Is it so the sun can have a house to live in?”
That day I was collected early from nursery and the following morning I found myself in a new room with slightly bigger children and a different teacher, who received me with barely contained excitement. The previous session had taught me to offer theories along with questions. Even if the answers were wrong, it would make me seem more extraordinary.
“What are girls for?” I asked the teacher, Mum still by my side, grinning widely with pride. “Is it to make the boys happy?”
Other adults within earshot stopped what they were doing to look round at the teacher, who was tripping over her words.
“Oh! What a child you have there, Mrs. Passman,” she said to Mum, “We’ll take good care of him here, don’t you worry about that.”
The teacher clamped an arm round my shoulder as if to protect me from other poaching nurseries, and Mum walked away proud, though she had to come back for me early again, for a different reason. When I arrived home that night, she smuggled me through the back door and stood me in the kitchen on a towel while, damp and cold, the smell of pee rose from my trousers. I stared up at Churchill, looking down on us all from one of his many places in our home, waving a hat and fat brown cigar. “Who’s my clever little boy?” Mum whispered, rushing me out of moist clothes and into dry ones. “Who is it? Who is it, eh?” “Me!” I shouted, forgetting my wetness, not caring who heard. “I’m your clever little boy!”
Searching for that kind of attention was addictive. “How tall will I be?” I asked. “Who decides what colours are allowed in a rainbow?” “How many eggs can you put in one basket?” As well as a source of affection, this seemed a good method of ascertaining facts that would later be useful, finding out how the universe worked, and, eventually, how I could come to be in charge of it. But not everyone was dazzled by me. I annoyed my two brothers with questions more than most, and when I was younger they had little patience with it, but as we grew up they became friendlier about my grand ambitions. The workings of my mind became an endlessly funny joke they could share with others. “Did you hear that?” they’d say, calling down the stairs to our parents: “He wants to know why the stars don’t fall out of the sky!” So they were not in the way, but they weren’t much help either.
There were other methods of getting information – Dad’s shop had a small portable radio in it in those days, and we had a television in my parents’ bedroom – but these machines were frustrating because they often contradicted each other, and never quite said enough. One evening, after silently watching a news bulletin on Mum’s knee, I turned to her and said:
“Why is the news so quick? Is that all that’s going on?”
She became totally rigid, put me roughly back on the floor, threw her teacup and saucer at the wall and cried out wildly:
“Shut up, shut up, shut up! For the love of God – WHY ME?”
That kind of melodrama didn’t last long. She spent much of the rest of the night apologising, kissing my forehead and force-feeding me.
“Everybody likes sweets,” she said, under her breath, as she lined up an intimidating collection of chocolates, mints and jellies on the tray in front of me. “Sweet sweet sweeties for my sweet sweet boy.”
I was sick that night, but had forgotten the incident by the following afternoon.
I continued to ask questions for as long as people were prepared to give me answers – many adults were impressed or surprised at the bony little ball with the clear diction and wide vocabulary, and most indulged me. This intoxication, especially at home, was a feeling close to being above the law. Which I almost was, mostly. But on some topics, like British history, inconvenient questions were not rewarded with love and sweets, but with mild violence and harsh words, often shouted, about how some things were just the way they were, and kindly be quiet please Lewis, I’m trying to do the ironing. I deduced this only happened when I asked questions my parents didn’t know the answer to, and I felt very sorry for them, then. To be so old, and still have things you didn’t know. I couldn’t imagine it. When Mum smacked me, I understood she was really smacking herself.
Even when punishing us, our parents were always saying how privileged we were, and enjoyed describing the history of our home to us, right from when we were almost too young even to know what a country was. Britain was once one of the leading nations in the world, they said. It was the head of a glorious Empire, which contained many countries as far apart as Canada and Australia, who still had to bow to the Queen – even now, we were one of the richest countries in the world, and she was the richest woman. The whole planet communicated in our national language. English landowners had been at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution, which transformed the way people worked and lived. We were the inventors of Penicillin, the light bulb, the tin can, the computer. And we had not been selfish with civilisation either: we had given it to countries we borrowed like India and Pakistan, who couldn’t have dreamed of such things without help; and God only knows what state Africa would be in today without us.
Once, Mum showed me pictures of the Houses of Parliament, and it looked like such a grand, exciting palace that I was sure that we lived in the best country in the world. Where else could have Houses of Parliament? I told them I wanted to live there one day, and they smiled like their work was done. Both my parents prided themselves on giving us the beginnings of a good British education as well as the official ones we were getting – “an on the knee education” they called it – and they were sure we would have a head start on other children. Before I was seven I could recite the dates of all the Kings of England from Elisabeth I right through to Elisabeth II. It was a party piece I was expected to perform in the shop, when called upon, and I was not shy about it. While Philip and Chuck heckled, I stood on one of the barbers chairs and listed my Kings for the pleasure of customers. Loud and bold, from my little throat to the world, it felt like my natural domain.
In those days both my parents paid extra attention to me, but sometimes tired of my enthusiasm. One night at the dinner table I said:
“What would happen if there was no such thing as broccoli?”
“Well Lewis,” said Mum, banging a few limp, pale-green stalks onto my plate, “I suppose you’d have to have PEAS with your Shepherd’s Pie!”
While Mum attended to the dessert, my brothers secretly sneaked a couple of bunches of broccoli into my pockets, then burst out laughing. I let them sit there, so as not to upset Mum further. They were too young to turn on each other yet, but old enough to know they could gang up against me, and to know I would put up with nearly anything to avoid raised voices.
My early home life, I thought, was good training for a Prime Minister. At that time, Grandpa Harry said a grocer’s daughter had just been voted back into Britain’s top job, and explained this was evidence that yet again we were leading the world – America had to settle for an ex-pretend-cowboy to lead them, whereas our 20th Century Boadicea was the real deal. I was about nine years old then. Four years later, I was ignoring that kind of talk, and Grandpa Harry’s opinions had changed by then anyway – he no longer thought we were a nation of heroes, but a nation of vampires. I had just been accepted at Hall Farm New School, and thought I knew it all. It was around that time that I stole an apple from the fruit bowl.
When Mum found out I had taken it, half an hour after I’d left my dinner, cold and untouched, it wasn’t just a teacup she threw against the wall. This time, half the kitchen went.
“What difference does it make?” I asked, shrugging my shoulders. “We’ve got lots of apples left.”
First the chopping board where she was already preparing the following night’s meal went flying, along with the bits of baby sweet corn and carrot she had been cutting up. Little yellow and orange chunks flew everywhere. Then she started reaching for anything nearby:
“Nobody loves me in this house!” she screamed. “Not even my favourite little boy respects me!”
I sat still in my seat, hoping Chuck and Philip had not heard that, as a vase, several plates and a couple of glasses went hurling past. Once there were no more obvious things to hand, she became more methodical, going into the fridge and taking the items out one by one and sending them to the wall:
“I’ve had enough! You hear me? I made you Lasagne! Hard bloody work!”
Two pints of milk, some orange juice and even a homemade Minestrone soup got emptied out onto the floor. Dad came through to find out what was going on, raced over, picked Mum up and put her down on a seat opposite, restraining her. Mum stared, hissing, eyes red and bulging, as if they were about to pop from their sockets:
“Do you know what happens when you die, Lewis?” she said. “If you’ve been a bad boy who steals apples you go to HELL, and the Devil makes you sit on a seat of FIRE and he makes you watch a screen where he has filmed everything you’ve ever done wrong. And for every apple you steal, he sends a THOUSAND BOLTS OF FIRE through you. A THOUSAND.”
“Come on Marion, have we had enough now?” said Dad. “Don’t scare the boy. I’ll clean up this mess. Go and have a lie down.”
“A THOUSAND BOLTS!” she cried.
Dad finally got his hand over her mouth, holding it there hard while Mum tried to bite at his wedding ring. Through the pain he turned to me and said, low as he could:
“Lewis, your mother puts a lot of effort into housework – that’s proper work too, you know, though most people pretend it isn’t – and she likes to be appreciated.”
“She looks like a crazy dog,” I said. “What’s happening?”
“She just likes to be appreciated,” he said again.
They grappled with each other for a few moments until Dad overpowered his wife, then forced her back into a seat. She looked exhausted now, emptied out. When he was sure she was no longer dangerous, he turned around:
“Remember what I’ve said, Lewis,” he told me, “but don’t worry too much. You’re not going to Hell. That is just a word people use to get others to do what they want.”
Then Mum picked up a frying pan and clapped him once, clean and hard, round the head. He collapsed to the floor. She left the room.
I sat at the kitchen table, apple in hand, long after she was gone, looking down at Dad, who had passed out from the blow. I knew which side of the story I believed, and promised myself I’d be more careful about what questions I asked in future, if indeed I asked any at all. I’d brought on Mum’s first breakdown – or at least the first I had witnessed – all on my own, which meant I could do damage without meaning it. And who knew if the Devil was going to be reasonable enough to discount unintentional damage? I didn’t know a lot about the Devil, we hadn’t talked about him much, but he didn’t sound reasonable at all. I tried to picture him, and me next to him, struggling to escape. He was so high, I was so low – he was big, his Hell was even bigger, and I was very, very small. I laid the apple back in the bowl, whispered “Sorry,” into the bunch, and went carefully from the room, checking all round for signs of ambush. When Dad came round he locked Mum in the spare room for two days, taking her meals, putting her to bed, but keeping her away from us boys until he decided the time was right. For safety, he said. Hers and ours. Though I didn’t feel safe any more, and it gave her an idea.
