In my old bedroom, again. This is, at least, a matter of choice. Monday evenings and Tuesday mornings are now spent in the family home so that I can keep my father company and give my mother a chance to go to her choir practice, on Mondays, and her art class, on Tuesdays. (I suddenly asked myself today: what if my mother were rubbish at these things? She’s not, though – especially not at the singing, as anyone who saw her on Broadway or NBC back in the day can attest. As for her art, I couldn’t paint to her standard even if I applied myself to nothing else for years.)
Anyway: I find myself, after a 12-year hiatus, once again intimately concerned about a close family member’s capacity to eat, sleep, and move without injury, only this time the concern is directed towards the previous generation rather than the next one. That’s the way it goes, and from the way events are moving, it looks as though I will have only the briefest of respites from such cares until the close family member whom I worry about falling over, or worse, will be me.
And as if this temporal confusion were not enough, I now find myself once again in the room where I spent the years 1972-85, from childhood to young adulthood, learning how to leave the room. I didn’t have an unhappy childhood, apart from the unhappiness I brought to it. Which was considerable, and not so much from a gloomy nature as from the early realisation that anyone who thought things in the outside world were just dandy really wasn’t paying attention. The chafing, constantly under-entitled condition of childhood itself didn’t make things any better.
The old room has been repurposed now as a kind of art studio: but the thick blue curtains are still there, there is a sofa-bed in place of my own old bed (on which my youngest son now sleeps, perhaps absorbing its melancholy, like radon seeping from the rocks, while he sleeps), but it is in the same place; the little sink in the corner, into which I would piss and occasionally puke, is still there, but the taps have jammed solid. The mirror is still there, though, into which I would, as Nigel Molesworth put it, gaze at my strange unatural (sic) beauty, and ask what purpose it served.
For the main thing that bothered me in that room, from 1975 on, was of achieving, in the Freudian phrase, full genitality – or getting laid. Once this question arose, it became impossible to dislodge, and when I say I spent every hour of every day worried that I would somehow die before I lost my cherry, I do not mean I thought about it once an hour. No: I thought about it through all of every hour, of every day. And night. Even my dreams had only one subject.
Of course, it wasn’t just the brute urges of the body. The heart, or the soul, if you wish, yearned, too; and the idea of finding someone who could satisfy both carnal and spiritual selves seemed so perfect that it also seemed unattainable. So, to distract myself, I would read; and once I was tall enough to peer over a bar without standing on tiptoe, I would go to the local pub and have a couple of pints of Guinness, which would be enough to get my 14-year-old body sozzled. (How on earth did I manage that? I was small for my age and shaving was as remote a prospect as sex, but somehow I had the kind of bearing which convinced barmen that it was OK to serve me. I wonder if it is somehow my fault that there are now signs everywhere saying you’re going to be asked for proof of age if you look under 25. Twenty-five!)
So, in 2015, as I retrace the familiar steps and retire to bed, I look for reading matter. Most of my books are dispersed (quite a few of them in boxes in the loft above, creating ominous cracks in the ceiling beneath), but there are a few survivors; a P G Wodehouse or two, a set of Wisdens, much loved, from 1974-85. I pull out the 1974 edition and read of the promising young Somerset players Ian Botham and I V A Richards and their proud captain, Brian Close. I had forgotten he’d captained Somerset. (This was a week before his death.)
I turn the light off. The curtains in my old room shut out the light; in the Hovel it never gets dark, the street never wholly quiet. East Finchley, at night, is as silent as the grave. And the lines from Marvell pop into my head before I fall asleep. You know the ones? “The grave’s a fine and private place,/But none, I think, do there embrace.”
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This article appears in the 30 Sep 2015 issue of the New Statesman, The Tory tide