There's a saying that goes something along the lines of having children doesn't come with a rule book. Come to think of it, why would it need to? With every parent having begun life as children themselves, they've had first hand experience of what it feels like to be one. Yet, in reality this experience may count for little and be quickly forgotten by parents forging a child-rearing path which may well be influenced by how they themselves were parented.

 

So, if there is such a thing as an ideal childhood, I wonder what would it look like. Would it be a wholesome experience free from strife and hardship or perhaps one consisting of elements of both grief and harmony? Regardless of which is better, perfection in parenting seems to me to be an altogether unrealistic expectation. As for the child, the likelihood of enjoying a happy childhood depends upon many things, central to which is the character and past experiences of their parents.

 

Many people may pay the ultimate compliment to their own parents by emulating the way in which they were raised. Meanwhile, others may vow never to raise their children the way their parents raised them. Either way, at the heart of good parenting lies an understanding of the basic needs of children and a commitment from the parents to put such needs before their own.

 

Among the most fundamental needs of any child, or any person for that matter, is the need to know they're loved and know where they belong. Indeed, the lack of a sense of either in childhood can have dire consequences in later life and lead many an unfulfilled person to look for love and acceptance in the most undesirable places with similarly undesirable results. There are those who are fortunate enough to find family among their relatives while others are forced to look elsewhere. Furthermore, some will continue to look for love from those whose need to be loved is greater than any capacity to give love.

 

It is not my intention in the retelling of this story to paint a biased picture by emphasising the bad over the good. Indeed, in the interests of fairness to all concerned, I intend to present as best I can a balanced version of events in order for the reader to judge the character of those featured herein. Suffice to say this is not a hard luck story, but a success story. A story told from the perspective of a boy who struggled, fought and survived the very people who should have loved him and ensured he knew where he belonged. Instead, he ventured through life as if he were alone, a wayfarer, a joker, a protector, a truth seeker and a problem solver.

 

What I know of my parents' lives is based largely on what they and their respective family members chose to reveal. Born in London in 1934 to Jack and May Hills, my dad, John Robin, was thirty-eight years old by the time of my birth. The British Hospital for Mothers and Babies in Woolwich, South-East London, was the place where I entered the world as the third of John Robin's four children. His first child, a daughter named Leigh, was born in April, 1960, to him and his first wife, Jackie. John Robin and Jackie were married no more than seven years before she left him following an affair with his brother-in-law, Jim, who'd married John Robin's younger sister, also named Jackie.

 

Following the breakdown of his first marriage, John Robin left the family home in Lewisham and apparently went to sea intent on discovering the manhood his first wife had mocked him for lacking. Upon his return to London in 1968, he rented a flat in Bennett Park, Blackheath, and rejoined the Prudential Insurance Company with whom he'd been an insurance agent since leaving the RAF in 1956. Tragically, in 1936, Jack Hills died of tuberculosis when John Robin was but two years old. Exposed to the deadly infection through his profession as a glass-blower, Jack's son would have no memory of his father.

 

Considering Jack's kind and gentle nature, it's little wonder that May was said to have been inconsolable when he died. With no other means by which to raise their son, May's older sister Liz and younger sister Grace looked after John Robin while May went out to work. Come the late 1930s, May married a man named Harry. May and Harry eventually settled in a large semi-detached council house in Campshill Road in Lewisham along with John Robin and his half-sisters, Val and Jackie, born of Harry and May. Feared by his wife and children as a mercurial man with a cruel temper, Harry never warmed to Dad and bullied him in a way he would spare both his daughters. While the reason for the bullying remained unknown, there's also no way of knowing whether Harry's cruelty actually created or merely reinforced his stepson's altogether meek and unassuming character.

 

Compounding his misery, May's apparent lack of affection towards her children did little to mitigate the effects on John Robin of Harry's bullying. Being six years older than his sister Val and almost eight years older than Jackie, John Robin often spent rueful time having to babysit his younger siblings. He would lament as much on numerous occasions in the future to his offspring how he felt he'd done his time looking after children. Following his perceived penance, in the early 1950s, John Robin joined the RAF as the force typist. With his travels taking him to Egypt and Cyprus, he tasted freedom for the first time until his discharge in 1956.

 

Following his failed marriage to Jackie and subsequent trip to sea, while living in Bennett Park in 1968, John Robin met the girl who would become his second wife and my mother. At the time of their meeting, at age seventeen, Mum was roughly half Dad's age. Dad never spoke of where they met or what initially attracted him to Mum. Nonetheless, if a mature relationship was what he wanted, it's doubtful he would have found it in the arms of a seventeen-year-old girl. Furthermore, Dad was a man of simple needs who, like many men of his generation, were accustomed to having a woman do everything for him. Therefore, as long as his dinner was on the table when he came home from work and he could get his leg over whenever the opportunity arose, he'd be a happy man.

 

As aware of Dad's fundamental needs as I eventually became, I found myself in later life questioning why he thought a seventeen-year-old girl would be a good choice for meeting them. While she would meet his needs in the early days of their relationship, by the mid 1970s a sudden and inexplicably dramatic change occurred in her behaviour. For a man apparently lacking in emotional intelligence concerned primarily with the fulfilment of his needs, Dad would soon find himself as powerless as his young children to cope with the sudden and tempestuous change in his young wife, Pamela.

 

Born in Camberwell, south-east London in 1951 to Ron and Lucy Edmonds, Pamela would be the first of their six children together. However, Pamela was not the eldest sibling, as both Ron and Lucy both had a child each from a previous relationship. Ron enjoyed a career in banking while Lucy kept house for Ron and their burgeoning family. The Edmonds clan lived a comfortable existence in houses in the Lewisham, Lee and Catford areas of south-east London. Home life consisted of an inter-generational household of parents, maternal grandparents and an aunt named Joyce, with the seven Edmonds children all sharing beds.

 

A strict disciplinarian, if Ron hit one child he would hit them all. However, not without kindness or favour it could be said that Ron was a fool for his wife. The standing family joke within the family went that Ron would give Lucy the top brick off the chimney if she asked for it. According to Lucy, Ron had an obvious favourite among their children who she considered to be Pamela. Her belief in her daughter's special status rankled Lucy and roused within her a deep feeling of jealousy and spite. However, it was not the perceived favouritism of Pamela that persistently pitted her against her mother, as much as Pamela's contention that she was being sexually abused by her maternal grandfather.

 

My mother spoke very little about the alleged abuse perpetrated against her, regarding it as too horrific to relive. However, she alluded to having been paid by her grandfather to keep schtum and hid the money in a crack in the stairs of the family home. When confronted one day by her mother, who had observed her concealing money and demanded to know from where it came, Pamela's admission of the abuse she had suffered was roundly rejected by Lucy, who then proceeded to accuse her of stealing from her purse.

 

The final nail in Pamela's coffin came following her rejection of her parents' attempts to plan her future. By 1968, now aged seventeen and long possessed of an unapologetically wilful character, Pamela resisted her parents' wishes for her to marry a member of their extended family. Her rejection of Ron and Lucy's proposal occurred around the time that Pamela met John Robin. Crucially, after a series of assignations, one night, Pamela committed the unforgivable transgression of staying overnight at John Robin's flat in Bennett Park.

 

While the exact details of the doorstep showdown differed depending on who was telling the story. Lucy contended that Pamela left the house of her own free will while Pamela maintained that her belongings were waiting for her on the doorstep when she arrived home. Pamela's grandmother weighed in, along with her other daughter, Pamela's auntie Joyce, by slapping Pamela around the face. Regardless of whose version of events bore greater resemblance to the truth, nonetheless, Pamela's subsequent departure from the family home threw together two hapless individuals burdened by the wretchedness of their respective pasts. Time would reveal just how mismatched John Robin and Pamela were and how their peculiar coupling perhaps owed more to convenience than chemistry or common interests.

 

Although the present harmoniousness between John Robin and Pamela wouldn't last, by mid 1969, she had fallen pregnant. Suffering low birth weight and breathing difficulties upon his birth on 27th January, 1970, her first born child, named Matthew, died after only 12 hours of life. Following their move to a two-bedroom house in Southbourne Gardens in Lee, south-east London, Pamela learned she was pregnant again. In December of the same year, Pamela gave birth to a second child, a daughter, who I shall refer to by her nickname, Dee. Almost two years almost to the day following Dee's birth, in December 1972, I came along followed just under five years later by my younger sister, Saskia.

 

With Dad working as an insurance agent for The Prudential while Mum remained at home to take care of her children, their respective roles were typical of the time. While Dad, with his strong work ethic, was well suited to hard work, Mum was his polar opposite. Indeed, they were polar opposites in most respects and had little in common except the need for fulfilment of their respective emotional needs yet with virtually no capacity to meet the emotional needs of the other. In addition, they shared a joint propensity to place the fulfilment of their own emotional needs before those of their children.

 

So, with a hard working and productive father and a stay at home mother, my family ticked all the boxes of what was considered the nuclear family. However, this did not make the home environment a wholesome one because in many respects my family was far from normal. How could it be when at the centre of it all was a woman who, with her casual lies and cruelties, her deceit, her dark moods and her erratic behaviours, struggled to slay the demons of her past.

 

Drawn into the storm that had been building within her was a man hopelessly dependent on her yet powerless to resist her and equally powerless to control the most destructive elements of her character. Between the two ill-fated individuals lay three innocent children struggling to make sense of their world and find refuge amid the storm soon to rage around them which threatened to engulf them all.

 

This is the story told from the perspective of one of their children; a story of a boy's fight for survival, a fight to escape his parents, a fight for life and the right to just be a boy, a boy called Johnno.