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don’t know how I became Bumpkin with a ‘b’ because it started with a nursery rhyme.

      Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater

      Had a wife but couldn’t keep her.

      So he put her in a pumpkin shell

      And there he kept her very well.

      Teachers were always singling out my pictures and telling me they had never seen anything like it for a child of my age. It was nice to be good at something, but I couldn’t really take credit for it because it was a natural talent. I didn’t have to work at it or anything; I could just do it. The pictures were clear in my head and my hands were able to reproduce them on paper. I remember a green painting, all covered in tadpoles, which I did when I was about five, which everyone thought was brilliant. I always feel calm when I’m drawing, as if everything is right in my universe.

      Pushed into a corner by her breakdown, Mum decided she had to choose between rock and roll and bringing me up properly as a full-time mother. So rock and roll got the push for a few years and Mum joined a folk group at the local church so she could keep up with her music and be with me. During her breakdown she had been seeing a series of numbers flashing in her head all the time, popping up everywhere she went. She couldn’t understand what they meant but when she walked into the church for the first time she saw the same numbers on the hymn board, like a sign telling her that she was on the right path and had arrived at the right destination. We’ve both had a lot of those sorts of experiences, lots of visions, premonitions and signs, some of them spooky, some of them shocking, some of them really comforting.

      Mum seemed to just want to disappear during that period, as if she didn’t want anyone to look at her or be attracted to her. She would deliberately wear boring clothes, which was a radical move for a woman who used to change the colour of her hair as often as most people change their knickers. I quite liked the God Squadders she was hanging out with now, even though they were incredibly straight compared to us and the sort of people we had hung out with before. They all seemed to be dead keen to save our souls from eternal damnation, which was kind of them.

      We went on a pilgrimage with them one year, walking in the rain all the way from Epping to Walsingham in Norfolk where there is a famous shrine to the Virgin Mary. They call it ‘England’s Nazareth’, apparently. The shrine had been there since 1061, even before William the Conqueror. (See how educational the trip was?) Anyway, we had to take turns carrying this great big cross, and I got to have my go as well, walking barefoot on the wet roads like some dramatic biblical figure. I loved it, even though the walking made my knees swell. It took four days and we had to carry our rucksacks and sleeping bags on our backs. I loved the whole travelling experience, out on the open road with its constantly changing scenery, part of a friendly group of people.

      The only thing I didn’t like was all the dead animals we passed. Every dead bird or squashed hedgehog would have me crying for miles, and when we came across the skeleton of a deer I was beside myself, thinking of Bambi’s mother being killed by the hunters in the forest. It was the first time I had been faced with mortality and it made me uneasy.

      When we finally got to Walsingham the shrine was lit by thousands of candles and looked magical and otherworldly. I just stood and stared at all the little flames flickering in the shadows, basking in the quietness and coolness inside the ancient walls.

      The first Christmas after Mum had joined the church, when she was still feeling too fragile emotionally even to go busking, she warned me that we weren’t going to be able to afford any presents, or even a proper Christmas lunch that year. I think I was a bit disappointed, but not mortified. Then the day before Christmas Eve a couple of elderly ladies from the church came knocking on the door with a hamper. They told us they had a list of the needy living in the area who they distributed these gifts to and they had decided we would be worthy recipients. I think Mum was a bit shocked to think that we looked that desperate, but she was still too grateful for the hamper to protest. The moment they’d gone we were excitedly tearing it open and Mum was weeping with joy at the sight of so much food. It had everything we could need for the celebration, from the turkey to mince pies and Christmas pudding.

      Although I liked the people at the church, I wasn’t quite sure about the whole believing-in-God thing. I was quite willing to believe in angels, since I had actually met one, and happy to keep an open mind, but I can’t say I exactly had ‘faith’ in a way any priest would have approved of. The question I decided I wanted to ask God, if I ever got to meet him, was how did he make himself. A variation of the old chicken-and-egg and which-came-first puzzle, I guess. When I did finally get to meet him, many years later, I forgot to ask the question in all the excitement. I wasn’t quite sure, either, why we had to stare at statues dripping with blood when we were at school. That part of it all seemed a bit spooky to me.

      Most of the Christian meetings we went to happened in a nearby fourth-floor council flat, where the leader of the group lived. When he moved to a house closer to the church Mum and I went round to clean the flat up for the next tenants. When they arrived they were really scary, the complete opposite to the clean, sober Christians before them. I couldn’t stop myself from staring, open-mouthed, every time we went round there. The mother of the family was huge and smelly and had no teeth because, she told us, her husband had knocked them out with a baseball bat. The family had a couple of evil-looking Dobermans, called Satan and Lucifer, which they never took out of the flat, allowing them to crap and piss wherever they wanted indoors. The dogs suited their names perfectly, true hounds of hell, always growling under their breath and watching me out of the corners of their eyes as if waiting for their chance to pounce. The flat got to such a state that the dog pee was seeping through the ceilings on to the neighbours below, dripping down their walls. The family had a son, who wanted to be my friend. He had a big dent in his head.

      ‘What happened to your head?’ I asked.

      ‘The telly fell on it,’ he informed me.

      Another neighbour’s husband died and everyone clubbed together to buy a big wreath of flowers to display in his memory on the landing outside the flats. My new-found, dent-headed friend was caught nicking it and trying to squeeze it in through his mother’s front door.

      My real best friend at the time was Leon from upstairs and we used to play with our He-Man dolls together, or dress up as Spiderman (or Darth Vader once I was hooked on Star Wars). Leon’s mum was really nice too, and had a successful job of some sort, which made other people on the estate so jealous of her they eventually torched her car. We went to CenterParcs together for a holiday, just like two normal families.

      Things were seldom normal back at the flats. One morning, at about six o’clock when it was just getting light, Mum and I heard screams and gunshots outside. Mum phoned the police and we crouched together on the balcony, watching through the railings as police cars screeched into the courtyard below. The place was deserted apart from one lone black man who looked like he was peacefully making his way to work. The police all leapt on him, pummelling him to the ground.

      ‘That’s not fair,’ I whispered to Mum. ‘He’s not doing anything wrong.’

      ‘I’m going to say something,’ Mum said, standing up to shout some sort of abuse at the police (she’d had a few run-ins with them herself while out busking and wasn’t a huge fan). Just at that moment, however, they pulled a sawn-off shotgun out from under the man’s coat and Mum sank quietly back down next to me. Apparently he’d shot some woman in the block over a drugs deal that had gone wrong.

      The local papers that week said that the arrest had been made due to ‘a vigilant neighbour’. Mum decided we should keep a bit of a low profile for a while.

       CHAPTER FIVE

       ANIMALS AND GRAVEYARDS

      Lots of this stuff I don’t remember any more, at

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