From isolation to desolation

I was a lonely child. Not from choice, but location.

My father, fresh from leaving the RAF, took a job as a groundsman at a country estate on the outskirts of Henley-on-Thames. The house was an imposing building with Greek pillars either side of grand entrance doors, approached by stone steps.

The bungalow, which came with the job, was not so grand and situated in the woods. Smoke from the living room fire billowed from a tall chimney and up into the trees. I remember watching the smoke.

For a child aged four, it was about the most exciting part of living there.

I imagine my mother was lonely too. She didn’t have a job, as she had me to raise. We were stuck in the middle of nowhere. In my memories, she’s wearing an apron and cooking or washing clothes in the sink – when she’s not telling me off for being a pest.

Being Italian, she could speak English, but her reading and writing skills were poor.

She told me many times how she was given an ultimatum by her father. Her parents were tenant farmers in the south of Italy with four children. When my mother reached the age of 18, her father told her she could either become a nun or work abroad.

She came to England and settled in Manchester, which has a significant Italian community. She worked for a Jewish family as a housekeeper, and later as an orderly in the local hospital.

Meeting and marrying my father meant a change of location, as I was born in Darlington in the north east. From here we moved to Norwich and then Henley.

The remote nature of our home meant isolation. Half a mile down the drive, in the gatehouse, lived the Gibbons family. They had a daughter who was a year or two older than me.

She had quite a temper when she couldn’t get her way.

Being older, she liked to bully and boss me around. When I refused to do what she wanted, she hit me with a cricket bat.

It was my first experience of Accident and Emergency and the start of a rift between my parents. My mother disliked the Gibbons, especially their daughter. My father was a more relaxed character, who enjoyed their company and a few bottles of beer.

It was a relief to leave the bungalow and go to school. While inviting other children to the bungalow was a non-starter, I enjoyed mixing them in the playground, even though I lacked a few social skills.

But evenings were spent in the middle of the woods. Without a TV and only a radio, I felt bored.

My father must have noticed because the following Sunday morning, as he sat at the breakfast table with a mug of tea, reading the newspaper, he hauled me up onto his lap. Thanks to roll up cigarettes, which he kept in a tin, or wedged behind his ear, he smelt of tobacco. It wasn’t an unpleasant odour, just how he smelt.

He had a cheeky glint in his eyes, and loved to joke. When he played with me, he liked pulling faces to make me laugh. During these moments, my mother was often inside, cooking or washing.

Whether she approved of me sitting on my father’s lap while he read the paper, I don’t know.

But I was fascinated by the words on the page, especially the headlines.

It wasn’t long before he began to teach me what the words meant. Soon, I could read many of them for myself. Sunday mornings became a great adventure as I learned more and more words.

I was too young to understand the significance of what I’d learned. And most of the words meant nothing to me. But they still gave me an advantage when one morning, the teacher handed out a book, filled with cartoon drawings and short sentences at the bottom of each page.

It was our first reading lesson.

At some point the teacher singled me out, ticking me off for flicking through the pages instead of concentrating on the lesson. She loomed over me, arms folded, annoyed to find me halfway through the book.

“What are you doing, Robert?” she asked.

“I’m reading,” I replied, unaware of the trouble this answer would bring.

From the grim look on her face, I could have said a rude word. “What do you mean you’re reading?”

She took my book, turned to another page and asked me to read what it said.

Having learned from the Sunday People newspaper, my range of words had a bias towards football and headlines. But I managed to read enough words. After repeating this over a few more pages, my teacher was well and truly agitated.

I was told to stop reading at home so I could learn to read properly in class.

For the rest of the morning, I tried to figure out what I’d done wrong. Reading was something good, wasn’t it? I loved looking at words, trying to work out how to pronounce them. Discovering new words was great fun.

Yet according to my teacher, it was wrong.

I was singled out as some clever clogs kid.

By lunchtime, I felt so angry, I couldn’t spend another minute in school. I would stay at home and let dad teach me.

I walked out of the school and carried on until I reached home.

My mother’s reaction when I entered the kitchen did not fill me with confidence. When asked what I was doing at home, my answer was simple.

“I’ve left school. They told me I wasn’t allowed to read.”

When dad returned for tea, she told him I’d not only walked out of school, but I’d walked the one and half miles home, crossing three major roads in the process.

My father looked impressed. He told me off, but once my mother was out of the room, he praised me for sticking to my principles and not being pushed around. He promised to have a word with my teacher in the morning.

He made me promise not to walk home again, as it frightened my mother.

When his efforts to get me a reprieve failed, he offered to teach me at home. It would be our secret. All I had to do was play dumb in class and copy what others were doing and saying.

When I was about six or seven - I can’t remember the exact age – I discovered Five on a Treasure Island by Enid Blyton. It didn’t take long for me to start the second book, followed by the next, until I’d completed the series.

Reading took me to new, imaginary worlds. I discovered characters who became heroes, people I wanted to emulate. They taught me valuable lessons about how good must always triumph over evil.

Reading increased my vocabulary. In turn my use of longer and more complex words simply expanded my isolation from home to school. It became a barrier between me and other children.

I wasn’t trying to show off. I simply couldn’t understand why no one else used the words they discovered while reading.

In the end, it didn’t matter. Books gave me all the exciting adventures I needed.

Before long, I was writing stories. I would have shown them to my father, but my mother had left him. I had a younger brother to look after as well.

We moved from Henley-on-Thames to a small village in Wiltshire called Bradford-upon-Avon. I attended a new school, where the teachers encouraged me to read. But it wasn’t the same without my dad, his roll up cigarettes and a look through the Sunday papers.

Then one day, he returned. I was delighted to see him, even though he didn’t seem the same. He looked thin and tired. But he spent time with my brother, getting to know him.

Then one evening, he wasn’t there.

I wondered if he’d gone again.

During the night I was roused from my sleep.

My father was dead.

The first heart attack put him in hospital. The second one ended his life at the age of 37.

At the age of eight, it became my second experience of unfairness – one which would have a far-reaching influence on my life, behaviour and writing in the years to come.

I sat on my bed, tears running down my cheeks, feeling so alone.

The following year, my school report said – ‘Robert still misses his father and writes about him as if he were still alive.’

They were my first tentative steps as a writer.