Mummy had become mum and daddy was now dad.

I remember the last day of term
Just before Christmas, probably in 1988,
My cigar-breathed teacher, Mr. Barnes,
Set the class a holiday assignment
– “Write a poem about Christmas.”
(It might have been 1986, but I think it was ’88.
He was the best teacher a child could hope for,
In second-year and fourth-year juniors,
At a fifties built prefab school in east Herts,
It even had a small and hellishly cold outdoor swimming pool!)

So either at the age of eight or ten,
I took my holiday homework very seriously;
And I waited patiently for inspiration.
Minutes after a luxurious dinner on Christmas day
In a warm house in a street called Ashdale:
A quite heated debate was brewing at the dinner table
Between my father and my granddad.
I don’t remember much about it at all.
It had something to do with hand grenades:
Ones used during the second world war,
How many seconds did it take for them to detonate?
I was on the side of my granddad,
He was more knowledgeable on this matter, in my view.
(Granddad had gone on a lot of long walks
Over unforgiving terrain
As an Army Officer in Burma
In the early nineteen-forties).
I didn’t dismiss my father’s arguments though.
When not working hard,
He mainly sat in his armchair reading
His Daily or Sunday newspaper,
Slaved over crosswords.
There were plenty of digestible hardbacks on the shelves too,
Daddy was no fool.
I started writing down some words
As their war of words settled into peacetime quarrels
And I roughly wrote down my thoughts.
Later on, I got hold of my trusted penguin thesaurus
And discovered grown-up words to replace my childish ones.

A short poem with no intentional rhymes,
Describing the family Christmas argument
In the form of a tennis match with no umpire,
It was entitled ‘Christmas Noise’
I think the poem is lost forever,
but I remember the last line now
It was, and still is:
‘I love Christmas noise!’

Things changed.

Late on a Tuesday or Wednesday evening in October 1989; a twelve-
year-old version of myself got out from the back of the horseless
carriage of his teammate’s father, having been chauffeured from a
football team training session in Stansted Mountfitchet. My next
memory is noticing that daddy’s car was missing from the Pynchbek
drive, I proceeded down the driveway that led to a carport, that
contained a workbench, bicycles and various valuables that never
got stolen. If you don’t know what a carport is, it is a roofed garage
without a garage door. The main entrance to the house was situated
on the side of the detached house rather than at the front. Unusually,
the door was wide open, I entered the strange detached house and
the living room was empty. The television was off, and the lights
were faded. The kitchen was also empty and devoid of life. Before I
was able to go up the winding stairs to assess the situation, the lady
from next-door entered the house with a very concerned look on her
face. She explained to me that mummy and daddy were at my
granddad’s house. Something bad was happening in the first of
two standalone houses next to the flats at the end of Piggots Way.
The next thing I remember was being in bed, after checking my
two younger brothers were fast asleep in the bedroom next door
to mine. The duvet was covering my face as I lay horizontally still,
virtually paralysed, unable to imagine what was happening. The
upstairs and downstairs telephones had started to ring in tandem
with each other. I rushed into mummy and daddy’s bedroom,
answered the phone apprehensively, daddy was at the other end.
I cannot remember the words uttered, but dad told me that
granddad had been found dead.

It sounded as he was laughing, and I convinced myself that he
was joking around. I either asked him why he was laughing or for
him to stop being silly. I rushed back to the refuge of my bed to
stare at the dark October air. It wasn’t long before dad opened my
bedroom door and let in some much-needed light. Once again, I
cannot remember what dad said, but he was not joking or laughing.
It was the very first time that I saw tears stream from dad’s eyes.

I cried a lot, and thought about death at length for the very first time.
Eventually, I slept.

In the morning,

I could have stayed at home, but I got ready for school anyway,
full of determination to be strong. At the beginning of morning tutorial,
realization of my grandfather’s death hit me harder than it had the
previous night. I started sobbing. A kind classmate asked me what was
wrong. I tried to get words out, but my attempts to stifle the sobs and
sniffles made talking coherently difficult, and it was almost impossible
to breathe. A mental and emotional pain, comparable to a thousand
broken wrists. The sobs and murmurs turned into full-blown wails…
I wasn’t strong enough for school on that day.

Mummy had become mum and daddy was now dad.