Family Life

Chapter II

I was born in London to rather bohemian and heathen parent's still clinging to the dope smoke of the hippy dream. My first years were spent in squats and at around aged three I was moved to the midlands. My father took work on the coal trains which used to run through our town until the mines and pits closed and suddenly there were people, who had only known of work in their lives, that were now suffering the indignity of the benefits system. It seemed overnight that it became a town with once productive members of society who were now resorting to forms of criminality to make up for the deficit and difference that time without work and time on the dole had left them with. Many had family's to look after and benefits weren't nearly as adequate then as it now attempts, or rather appears, to be. As a result home life would suffer because the quality of life and the quantity of its opportunities were now vastly reduced. Just imagine a society of men in their prime without consistent work in the only realm they'd ever known and the result is a race of very angry and embittered men. All with a pair of hands, a spine and a brain that could barely provide for their offspring.
My fathers background was in the british army..he grew up on army bases in malaysia and germany and his father was an army cook, something my father was proud of as he recounted my grandfather being "this little welsh man" who could make fried eggs by cracking into the pans 5 eggs at a time, in each hand. Not sure those army boy's cared a whole jot about shell in their eggs..but then again a soldier isn't required to.
My father prided himself on his own hawk-like sniping abilities and was due to be sent to the falklands. Until he got news of a close friend who had just lost his life explosively in another engagement elsewhere which deeply affected my father. So much so that he became a conscientious objector to all wars and the very idea of war itself now repulsed him. Discharged dishonourably for his objections my father replaced weapons with words and weed-smoke as he sought poetry for his escape. An incident involving a copywrite issue over lyrics of his, that were claimed officially as having been written by someone else, which were used in a song on the radio further aggravated my father..who was clearly struggling for some sort of recognition over the things he'd put his soul into.
My mother at 17 was a ballet-dancer..at 18 she was pregnant with me. She was from old Irish stock thanks to her own mother's long ancestry and my mother had a tough time with her growing up. Her mother drank like a whale and my mother would suffer various abuses at her hands.
When your being chased out the house by a knife held by your own drunk mother then this is bound to affect you deeply for many years after. Her father, also a londoner, was a shining light to my mother..but still she always felt that he could've intervened more, that he was visibly in fear of his own wife and therefore he was little protection from a tyrant.
I guess that my own father and mothers relationship started with all the verve and vitality that a mutual partnership invariably does; the running in the rain together, the staying up till dawn because of the desire to never miss a moment, the talking of a billion things, that simple appreciation for the body and the soul of one another.
But my earliest memories, from around aged four, were tainted with the sensation that I were not entirely wanted.
I don't recall being kissed goodnight or remember their arms ever around me. In fact they seemed more preoccupied with the struggle to raise me to full strength than the need to show me love.
From my room below I could hear arguing above at night..my mother crying that he wasn't listening..my father complaining that she didn't understand.
Sitting at the bottom of the stair's one night at around aged six I heard my father talking about his nightmares..that he'd suffered with them almost from the onset of the pregnancy.
He spoke of concepts I couldn't fathom at the time, that he'd dreamed of killing various people whom he could describe in detail but had never met in reality. His outpouring of thought's over this seemed to petrify my mother to the point where my father had to assure her that she was perfectly safe with him..that he would never hurt her. This proved to be quite untrue as years later he dislocated her arm, cracked two of her ribs with a punch and broke her perfect nose which left her with two shining black eyes for a while. Her close family were never convinced by her reasons for continuous injury's, but if someone won't admit their suffering then what can anyone else do to help?
But this talk of nightmares by my father was curious to me..he mentioned a mysterious "He"..a "Him"..and it was never made directly clear as to just who this "Him" was. But this person seemed to have instilled a great fear in my father as he talked of "His" future. My father spoke of suffering with premonitions and that this unnamed person was destined to become man, machine and monster.
What had me more curious was the sense, spine-chillingly at the time, that the person he was so in fear of was none other than my own future self.
The monster he described was me.