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down. It’s the stairs that were purple, you see: hard, steep, and with a fraying carpet of purple. On the way down I’d had a pretty good look at them, as well as a pretty good feel of them as they made contact in rapid succession with my knees, elbows and head. They fanned round in segments at the bottom, dropping me neatly into the living room where Mum instantly materialised to scoop me up. Consoling, checking for cuts or breaks, she was making the kind of sympathetic noises I would make if my own two-year-old fell down a flight of stairs. I was soon aware of another noise, though, the noise Dad was making. He was laughing. ‘Poor old boy,’ he said, chortling through his moustache, ‘poor old boy, ha ha ha.’

      Seventeen years later, I put a suitcase down in the same room and notice the stairs have been re-carpeted: they’re now a kind of old-folks-home blue. Delia, the woman that Dad painfully refers to as his ‘lady-friend’, catches my look.

      ‘I suppose coming back here must bring back some memories,’ she says carefully. I don’t mind Delia. Dad had various ‘lady-friends’ while still married to my mum, but Delia wasn’t one of them. That didn’t stop my mother constantly referring to her as ‘Delilah’ and noting she was always getting lipstick on her teeth.

      ‘I remember falling down those stairs when I was two,’ I say.

      ‘Oh dear,’ says Delia, alarmed. And then, ‘How do you know you were two?’

      ‘I must have asked Mum about it.’

      The mention of my mother is unfair. It’s like reminding Gok Wan that I used to hang out with Prince. Delia inspects her shoes for a second, but then looks up with a kind smile.

      Dad bustles through and has been listening. ‘I don’t remember the stairs, boy,’ he says cheerfully.

      ‘No.’

      ‘I was probably pissed!’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Ha ha ha. Well, you’re ’ome again now, mate.’

      Delia isn’t sure if this last remark is the diplomatic success Dad seems to think it is. She smiles again. I try not to look at her teeth.

      ‘Yeah,’ I say.

      The house was called Slieve Moyne and was my first home as a staircase-bopping toddler, and then my third home as an oh-so-watchful young man in his late teens. What happened in between is a happy story with a sad ending, or, from where I’m typing, a sad middle with a happy present. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

      Lincolnshire is a large and largely ignored county on the east coast of England, sufficiently far north to be considered Northern, but somehow not Professionally Northern in the manner of, say, Yorkshire or Tyneside. From where I grew up, it takes about an hour to get to a major road, the A1 – also known as ‘the Lincolnshire bypass’ – and it’s this sense of isolation that gives the place some of its character and beauty, as well as some of its problems.

      Slieve Moyne was in the village of Woodhall Spa. Growing up, I was given the impression that Woodhall was one of the ‘nicer’ villages in the area. Certainly the Conservative Club, the Golf Club, the Tea House in the Woods and the Dower House Hotel – a stately procession of mock-Tudor buildings with horse-brassy fireplaces – lend the place an impregnable air of Tory respectability. In my first few years, I thought this was not just desirable but typical. England was the most normal part of Britain, Lincs the most normal part of England and Woodhall the most normal part of Lincs. In a few years, I would think of the place as Tatooine, the planet Luke Skywalker imagines to be furthest from the bright centre of the universe. But for now, it was the universe and one with which I was perfectly content. There was just one problem. When we first meet Luke on Tatooine, he has an issue with his mysteriously absent father. My father, on the other hand, was all too present. And his name might as well have been Darth Vader. Actually it was Paul. It’s a silly comparison of course. Dark Lords of the Sith aren’t constantly wasted.

      ‘You shouldn’ta come back, Obi-Man! [hic] When last we met, I wuz just an old boy [belch] Now I’m the master and you’re a fucky old bastard. Oh bollocks, I just cut me thumb off. Bloody light sabre needs a new fuse.’

      Here we go then. It’s the mid 1970s and I live with Mum, Darth and my two older brothers Mark and Andrew.

      Imagine a child’s drawing of a house. This one would show three bedrooms upstairs, the little one with Rupert the Bear wallpaper for me, the middle one for the grown-ups and the one at the other end containing Mark and Andrew wearing denim waistcoats and walloping each other with skateboards (because that’s what Big Brothers do). There is smoke coming out of the chimney, as it should in all drawings of this kind; in this case provided by Darth holding double pages of the Daily Mail against the fireplace to encourage the flames. Sometimes he gets distracted while doing this because he’s shouting at James Callaghan on TV, and the paper catches fire. He has to throw the lot into the fireplace, which of course sets fire to the chimney.

      He has laid the fire using the logs and sticks that he chopped up with the chainsaw left leaning against the back door, the one he uses for his job as a woodsman on the local estate (my Daddy is a woodcutter). The Mummy will be in the tiny kitchen, standing over an electric hob (because that’s what Mummies do) and stirring Burdall’s Gravy Salt into a saucepan of brown liquid.

      It’s a static picture, of course, so we can’t see that the Mummy’s hands are shaking because she knows that the Daddy has spent all afternoon in the pub and has come home in one of his ‘tempers’ (because that’s what Daddies do). If, during tea, one of the Big Brothers speaks with his mouth full or puts his elbows on the table, the Daddy has been known to knock him clean off his chair. The Mummy will start shouting at the Daddy about this, but of course she can’t shout as loud as the Daddy. No one can shout as loud as the Daddy or is as strong as the Daddy which is why the Daddy is in charge. The Little Brother will start crying at this point and will most likely be told to shut up by the Big Brothers who are themselves trying not to cry because that’s another thing that they’ve learned doesn’t go down well with the Daddy.

      On the rare occasions the subject of Dad’s behaviour came up over the following years, the fixed view was that ‘Robert got away with it’ and that Mark and Andrew (six and five years older than me respectively) were mainly the ones in harm’s way when Dad ran out of words. This in turn was held up to be some kind of hippy crèche compared to the treatment Dad received from his own father, Ron.

      So I was lucky. Still, I remember the summer’s day when I was watching the Six Million Dollar Man battling with Sasquatch and the following moment I was being lifted an impossible number of feet into the air and thrashed several times around the legs with a pair of my own shorts that had been found conveniently nearby. Dropped back on the settee, I looked at those navy-blue shorts with a baffled sense of betrayal. They were my shorts. My navy-blue shorts with the picture of Woody Woodpecker on the pocket. And he’s just hit me with them. Maybe in the seconds before I was watching Steve Austin, I’d spilt something or broken something. Maybe I’d got too close to the fire or the chainsaw. Who knows? Actually telling a child why he was being physically punished was somehow beneath the dignity of Paul’s parenting style.

      There are happy early memories from Slieve Moyne too, of course. Singing along with Mum whenever her beloved Berni Flint appeared on Opportunity Knocks; the thrilling day the household acquired its first Continental Quilt (a duvet), which my brothers and I immediately used as a fabric toboggan to slide down the purple stairs; playing in the snow, playing in the garden – all the sunlit childhood fun you’d expect from times when Dad was out.

      And, to be fair, there were moments when he was affectionate. For example, if he was in a good mood he might crouch down in front of me, put his massive fist under my nose and say in a joke-threatening way, ‘Smell that and tremble, boy!’ For years I wasn’t quite sure what this phrase meant – ‘smellthatandtremble’ – it was just a friendly noise that my dad made when he was trying to make me laugh. Oh, and I laughed all right. I mean, you would, wouldn’t you?

      But in general, I’m afraid my memories of those first five

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