01
From chapter: ‘A Weekend in November’
Written in a ‘novelistic’ style.
Everyone’s facing the camera. It looks like a bright day, and they all seem to be having fun; hands resting on shoulders, barely-suppressed smiles, twinkling eyes. It must be someone’s back garden, after the wedding. All the faces are there. There’s my mum, Violet Took (a bride at seventeen, if you can believe it). There’s my dad, James Roper (although everyone called him Fred, for some reason). And there’s a woman standing near the fence, in a posh dress, with a blooming great hat on her head. She’s important; I’ll come back to her.
The year was 1949. I think the wedding was a hasty affair, as my sister Linda was born in the early spring of 1950. My brother Terry came next, in the September of 1951, and then I was born, on the 21st September 1953. But while Violet was my mother, and Fred was my father, they weren’t Mum and Dad. Let me explain.
Fred was caught nicking something when I was still in nappies—hub caps, I think I was told, or car wheels—so he went inside for a year and a half. Violet was left on her own, with three little ones to look after, and she couldn’t pay the rent on her council flat. When she was kicked out, the only bed she could find was a friend’s sofa. As for us kids, she took us to the nursery in Leytonstone one November Friday, and didn’t pick us up. And that weekend changed my life.
The year was 1949. I think the wedding was a hasty affair, as my sister Linda was born in the early spring of 1950. My brother Terry came next, in the September of 1951, and then I was born, on the 21st September 1953. But while Violet was my mother, and Fred was my father, they weren’t Mum and Dad. Let me explain.
Fred was caught nicking something when I was still in nappies—hub caps, I think I was told, or car wheels—so he went inside for a year and a half. Violet was left on her own, with three little ones to look after, and she couldn’t pay the rent on her council flat. When she was kicked out, the only bed she could find was a friend’s sofa. As for us kids, she took us to the nursery in Leytonstone one November Friday, and didn’t pick us up. And that weekend changed my life.