The Greatest Thing

The Greatest Thing

I’m sitting at the table in my garden with my parents and my children, having just enjoyed a traditional Sunday roast complete with parsnips, bread sauce, stuffing, the full works. Nat King Cole’s Nature Boy serenades us from within the house, accompanied by crickets from without, and I watch the shadows cast by the leaves of the magnolia tree playing lazily on the lawn. I’m only half-listening as Dad spins some ridiculous yarn about an invisible chicken and everyone is smiling in anticipation. It’s one of those moments of intimacy that happen miraculously; thoughts and feelings suddenly cluster together like a crowd of clamouring children, waking the mind’s eye to a silvery chain of association that stretches back into the darkening past.

We settled in a small provincial town while my father chased his ambitions in the Police Service. We lived in a little house in a cul-de-sac, at the back of this derelict pile known, appropriately enough, as Folly House. It had been some alderman’s seat of power during halcyon days, then long since passed; it was our haunted house, our ruined castle, our thieves den. All the kids for miles around now grown to adulthood would feel a thrill when they recalled the green roof tiles, the riotous gardens, the mouldering summerhouses and broken sundials, the submerged cellars, the stagnant pond where we stoned frogs to death with cruel glee, the susurrus of yesterday’s corrupted opulence. I was about eight when my best friend Ian persuaded me to investigate with him a white box van which had been parked in the long drive for a week or so. All we found inside were bags of white sugar, and a frenzied sugar-fight ensued, leaving us breathless, savage, uncomfortably hot and sticky, with gritty sugar crystals prickling our backs. As we made our getaway, I noticed a shiny padlock, brand new, hanging on the door – I slipped it into my pocket. I hid this trophy in the well of an airbrick in the wall of our house and covered it with dry leaves. The next day was windy and autumnal, and when I got home from school I found myself transfixed by my father’s steel-grey policeman’s stare, weighing me as he toyed with the signature of my crime. The confession wasn’t long in coming: ‘It was Ian, Dad…he made me!’ Honesty is the best policy, I’d always been taught. Dad was very angry; I can’t remember exactly what happened but I do remember those pale eyes searching for the flaw in me.

My memory tells me this childhood was one long sandy path bathed in summer sunshine… I remember winding exultant bike rides down to the saltmarshes at the very beginnings of the world. The gorse was bright yellow and skylarks sang their plainsong just for me. I had everything I could have possibly wanted, and more, including the future. Then Dad got a job down south and things seemed to turn a corner. It was a prestigious position and important for him to go, so that decisions needed to be taken, for better or for worse. Dad went away, leaving us bobbing around in his wake; I think this might have been a mistake. I remember I didn’t want him to go, but you can’t tell how things will turn out at the time, can you?

The years flew past; Dad had thoroughly enjoyed himself down south but then one day he was back again, having to deal with all the dreadful monotony of a provincial police station. Being a career policeman is hard for the officer, but hard on his family too; everyone must always be ‘whiter than white’. There was an unmentionable pressure humming in the background. I was fifteen when I started to suffocate; my best mate Colin and I broke into the Church Rooms and stole a union jack flag in a fit of adolescent pique. Dad was on duty when I was brought in to the station; I don’t remember what exactly happened afterwards. I think Dad had his hands full at this point. His meteoric police career had stalled, and his colours were fading sadly as he drank to ameliorate his disappointment. I was a big boy by now; there was no telling either of us, and punches were thrown. I remember my flailing fist burst a blood vessel in his eye, so that the white turned red; the shame still smarts, honestly.

Things deteriorated as we careered into the Eighties. I was driving this girl’s father’s Mini when I shouldn’t have been and someone pulled across me and the Mini disintegrated. It was sod’s law. You might say I was beginning to run up something of a bill. I was becoming a ‘black sheep’, a ne’er-do-well, getting a bad name in the village. I discovered sex, drugs and alcohol; I discovered that I could be anything I wanted to be...but not how to be honest with myself. I left home to go to London, to study Law at some grisly unheard-of Polytechnic, located in a converted shirt factory. I didn’t care; I was just desperate to get away. When I invested my first grant cheque in a big lump of soap, the intent was clear and by the end of the first term, I was pumping out ounces and quarter kilos to anyone who had the money. I narrowly avoided having my skull stoved in on a number of occasions, and getting busted on a number of others. By this time I was in full flow, ignoring negligence, reasonableness and vicarious liability in favour of being knowingly concerned in all sorts of things in which I should not have been concerned. It was getting really serious.

The really funny thing was that Dad started to study law too! Hey, suddenly we might have had common ground; we might have swapped notes, mooted precedents, compared marks. It was a weird time: the GLC was in its death throes, funding all sorts of free gigs and parties; the Miners were getting their heads broken; there was a feeding frenzy going on in the corridors of power as Thatcher proclaimed the death of society, selling off all its assets to her minions. (She won’t remember it now, of course, poor thing.) But it was a great time to be a young; I was squatting, living on my wits, having a fine time, drunk on lawlessness. I got caught breaking a squat but the charges were dropped because someone hadn’t done their paperwork properly. Put it on the bill with all the rest. Then my best friend Stuart persuaded me to smuggle cannabis from the Netherlands. I just walked it through, grinning like an idiot, the typical student…I thought I was Baader Meinhof, living outside, a proper rebel…Honestly, what a dope! Sometimes when I was sitting around in my south London squat, profligate and stoned, I would muse on how my father had spent the Sixties arresting people like myself; I thought at the time that this was ironic.

And then of course, after six months, I got caught…it was time to pay up and be damned.

What a come-down! I was released by Harwich Magistrates Court on bail, into the custody of my father, because of his assurances, his good name. He said to me, (among other things), that ‘…a journey of a thousand miles begins by putting on your boots.’ He took me home and we wept together for the first time, for lost days of innocence, for responsibilities not taken, for dreams that would never be realized. It was serious this time. The local press ran the story and the small town shook its head and said I had it coming. Later I cried alone - poor little boy! The conditions of bail required me to write my name, each Sunday night, on a register at the police station where my father had served as commanding officer. The desk-sergeants who took the signature always asked how the old man was, with a smaning smile. When my judgment day finally crawled over the horizon, his Honour was adamantine: six months. As the court rose stoney-faced, I sank gasping into a cruel sea of cold unmediated fear. I was going down.

HMP Pentonville is a Dickensian hulk, a brutal panopticon of livid greenish light, like some lost city of the damned that one might find on the deepest ocean bed of Victorian science fiction. When the airlock had sealed me in, the reception procedure triggered a rush of dislocation. I could not hide my naked innocence from their rapacious, mocking eyes. I held my breath, said nothing, saw nothing, heard nothing, stared only at the floor.

I survived, of course. I survived the stanley blades slicing, the PP9 batteries swinging in a sock, ever ready, the bullying swaggarts with jangling keys on jingling chains, the acrid sweat of suspicion sticking to their shirts...I survived that grotesque heaving carnival of ground-glass repression, of slops and bromide, of violence and corrupted power.

Dad visited me in prison. He brought me tobacco and money, survival rations which I had to smuggle back inside; his complicity made him squirm. Looking into his eyes, I saw my sunny childhood there, reflected in his brimming tears. I touched his soft warm hands, I memorized his solidity. There I was, undone, adrift, honestly the architect of my own misfortune, and there he was, throwing me out a silver line, so that I might hold onto him. I thought of how deeply I must have hurt him; I realized then…he really did love me after all.

The breeze stirs the whispering canopy once again, the crickets sing, and Nat King Cole still serenades us over mellow swirling strings: ‘The greatest thing…you’ll ever learn…is just to love…and be loved in return…’ Dad breathlessly finishes his story, red-faced, barely able to contain his pot-bellied mirth, and everyone is laughing together. I look at my children, nearly adult now, soon to seek their own way through the pelting struggle of life. What is the greatest thing that anyone can ever teach, that anyone can ever learn? I’m blooming now, even as I think on how things since have not always been easy between my Dad and I. But he taught me something that many never learn…something about the meaning of love…and it really is the greatest thing.