Self. Sufficient.

The summer of blackberries and fun-sized Boost bars

We were going to cope now he had gone. We were going to be “we” whether we wanted to be. There had been a discussion or two as to whether we might prefer to go with our father — in which case, we could fuck right off and never be spoken to again — or whether we would be staying the support the woman who had right on her side. Not to mention a very loud voice and the threat of the bread knife to slash her wrists if things went against her.

I hesitate to add that she very rarely drew blood. I hesitate to add that the kitchen drawer was very rarely opened. For anything.

We were going to be self-sufficient. There would be no breadwinner, but then there really hadn’t been for some time. Our father — who would, from this point on only be referred to by his Christian name (or a wide variety of expletives that got wider the further a certain person got down the vodka bottle) — had lost his job at the bakery at some indeterminate point a year or even two before his departure.

He had carried on going to work and posting the unpaid bills to the top of the kitchen cabinets for some time before finally admitting — being forced to admit — what had happened. He’d got himself a security job. I remember the clip-on tie — the better not to throttle him with (an invitation to his wife if ever there was one) — and I remember the comedy hat.

Seven Become Six

I remember what happened to our income as a result of him having to take whatever was on the cards at the Job Centre. I remember him borrowing my pocket money to buy cigarettes. And then the money stopping. And then the arguments and the realisation that Mrs. Thatcher’s magnificent Right to Buy initiative, and the idea of families like ours having mortgages, really only worked if there was enough to pay the bills. All of them.

That wasn’t why my father left with the two black bin liners barely full of his paltry possessions. A man who never owned — let alone read — a book, and whose one musical purchase was a cassette of Abba’s Super Trouper. Because he fancied Agnetha. Although he couldn’t pronounce Agnetha, perhaps on a point of principle. He didn’t go much for foreigners, did my father.

It wasn’t money, strictly speaking, that meant he left that night when it was just me up, because Herself had actually gone to bed (unusual for her when she spent most nights on the sofa, incapable of making her way up the stairs that remained uncarpeted from the point the woodworm treatment went down in 1986 to the point she finally moved out twenty years later). There were other things. I would be told that I didn’t want to know what those other things were.

The point was that he left that night in August. John Lennon Live in New York was on ITV. My father had precisely two bin liners containing his worldly possessions. And a portable television I’d never before seen. I suppose something to do with the security job. Something to keep him company during the lonely nights. Or the nights he told us were lonely, which was very much not the same thing. I suppose the television might actually have been his.

I’d see him twice more. Once at the law courts when the very swift decree nisi was granted. Once outside the house, when we were sheltering next door with the neighbours we ordinarily couldn’t stand, and he pulled up outside in a car, of all things. A man who had never previously driven, as far as I knew, and certainly didn’t own a car, was now turning up in a car. And all those things he had promised that night, with John Lennon on the telly, when he’d appealed to me everything could be different and perhaps we might go on holiday some time and perhaps there might be better days somewhen, started to make some kind of sense.

I never did get an explanation of the car.

Six Become Self-Sufficient

But we didn’t need him. We — whether we wanted to be included in the “we” or not — didn’t need him. We could be self-sufficient. Frankly, we had been for long enough, so this was just formalising the deal. Now he was gone to Wherever.

And I remember there was a certain excitement to this. The six of us — five children and remaining parent — taking on the world. Or the town. Or the estate agent and the benefits people and the social workers and anyone else who wanted to get in the way of the life she was now determined we were going to have.

And I remember practically the first things we did to prove that self-sufficiency.

It was August. There are blackberries in August. They are free and even plentiful, if you can pick enough of them. I remember the Tesco carrier bags and the hour or four spent on what I swear was August Bank Holiday Monday walking along the side of a busy road, trying not to be overpowered by heat or car fumes, picking blackberry mulch, most of it long past its best, and stuffing it into the carrier bags that would then drip blackberry juice all the way home.

I remember thinking that this was the beginning of us winning without our father. We didn’t need him. We’d been told we didn’t need him. We’d all of us sat there in her bedroom the night after the court appointment cutting him out of every single family photograph. It would start with the blackberries and the — oh yes — the free fun-sized Cadbury’s biscuit Boosts they were giving out at the Power FM Roadshow in the park.

The free fun-sized biscuit Boosts that we waited to pick up when the Roadshow had finished — scouring the park, again with the carrier bags, like crazed litter pickers, looking for the freebies that the other families hadn’t been bothered to take with them because they weren’t self-sufficient. They weren’t going to win on their own like we were. For precisely two days in August 1991.

Because I don’t remember us doing anything similar ever again.

The six of us out there, scouring and striving, and proving how very self-sufficient we were.

Working as a family unit, even though we’d already had our number reduced by one. And been told he would have no involvement of any kind in our lives ever again.

Which turned out to be very true, as the next I would ever hear of him was a year after he died. In 2015.

There would be no more dual carriageway blackberry picking. There would be no more picking over public parks for abandoned giveaway chocolate bars. And it wouldn’t just be because the blackberries had never been eaten or even so much as baked in a pie. Or because the chocolate had only made us all thoroughly sick to the point that if you put a Cadbury’s biscuit Boost in front of me right now I’d be gagging for a week.

It was because, I think, the point had been proved that he wasn’t needed.

To her.

The point had been proved to her that he wasn’t needed.

And, for our mother, that was sufficient.

For the rest of us, it was the beginning of several long years when so much that was nowhere near to being sufficient was going to have to be.

Thanks again to the Memoirist for the Memoirist Idol contest this month — good stuff to get the writing juices (as opposed to blackberry juices) flowing. In the spirit of the context, have a read of Terry Barr’s glorious piece on barbershops…