The doctor prescribed tranquilisers. I had gone into the surgery with a severe stomach ache, but I was stressed, not suicidal. He looked at me with contempt and resentment. He was wearing a dirty yellow shirt that made him look seedy and somewhat depraved, like he might have a job on the side as a porn actor.
“I don’t think it’s that serious a problem,” I said.
I thought it might have had something to do with having newly returned to London. I was living in a bed-sit the size and shape of a ship’s cabin, kitchen included, and was unemployed. I was twenty-six years old with a degree in history from Cambridge University.
Continue reading ‘How a Cambridge man makes an Egg McMuffin’
In November 1962 my father made my mother leave the marital home, 257 Cannon Hill Lane, a mock-Tudor semi in the south London suburb of Morden. I was eight, my brother, Sasha, six, and my father forty-eight.
Over the following months my father became highly irritable, very quarrelsome, and his sleep pattern went to pot. Now he wrote through the night, went to bed around seven in the morning, got up about four in the afternoon, and resumed work on his plays and novels at seven or eight in the evening.
One evening, he called us to the kitchen. He’d made one of his standard suppers, brown toast, mashed sardines and a sliced tomato. The plates were on the breakfast counter and there were three of them. He was eating with us, which usually he never did. He must be in a good mood, I decided.
Continue reading ‘The good and the bad brother’
