About my parents
This is a rather lengthy addendum to a page which explains my middle name. Since of course I was given this middle name by my parents, and this page originally started as an attempt to describe why they might have given me this middle name, and also why it was next to impossible to get an answer to the question of why from my parents. I kept on adding to it, and so I've split it into another page so that the main page doesn't become unreadable.
I've deliberately omitted most of the names of people from this account. Also, apologies that the material is a bit disorganised, I keep adding things to it and I am in the process of reorganising this material.
My family
I was born in 1966 in Bristol in the UK. My parents were married at the time of my birth but separated when I was around four years old, and divorced later at a date I was not informed of. I have one older sister.
My father, Douglas, was working at the Ashton Containers factory as a studio manager at the time I was born, and later opened a shop selling kitchenware in Waterloo Street in Clifton. Initially the house we were living in and the shop were both jointly owned by my parents, but as part of the divorce my father took the shop and my mother took the house ownership. The divorce seems to have been quite bitter, and also quite ridiculous, with my mother going as far as to insist on receiving a car door from my father, so my mother was driving around in a Renault 4 car with half of the logo from my father's shop on one door, and not the others. I'm not sure what my father did with the rest of the car after being deprived of the door, but it still seems to be a sore point with him.
My father remarried a few years after this, and my mother, Phoebe, a mentally-ill public mastubator, had a succession of relationships with various people, until forming a stable relationship with a man called Ray Davis, who was married but separated from his wife, and had formerly been a neighbour of ours. Ray had a business called "Brookline Delta" which manufactured and sold various items, including something called "Fridge Fresh Eggs", egg-shaped air fresheners to be placed in the egg tray of a refrigerator, and he had an office in London near to the Foyles bookshop on Charing Cross Road. My mother moved to London to live with Ray in December 1984, but she contracted breast cancer and died in August 1988. Ray passed on a few years later, of a stroke, around 1994. My father separated from his second wife, retired from shopkeeping around 1998, and is still living in Bristol.
I attended the Montessori school in Kingsdown, followed by Christchurch Primary School in Clifton, followed by Bristol Cathedral School. At the time I went to this secondary school, the reason I was sent there was almost as much of a mystery to me as why they gave me the middle name "Kasmin". I was very strongly hoping that I would be allowed to leave the school at some point. My father much later told me that when he was working near the local comprehensive school, Ashton, he got the impression it was not a very good place and thought it was better not to send me and my sister there, so they sent us to fee-paying schools. My parents had no religious beliefs, so I'm not sure why they chose the Cathedral school rather than Queen Elizabeth's Hospital or Bristol Grammar School, both of which were nearer to my house, but it may have been because our neighbour Ray Davis, who was an Anglican, sent both of his sons, Michael and John, there, and Ray was also friends with the then-headmaster David Jewell. Ray's son Michael left the school in 1977, and John in 1978.
My mother
Family background
My mother, Phoebe, a mentally-ill public masturbator, was born on 13 December 1935. She was the only child of a one-parent, unmarried family. Her mother, my maternal grandmother, whose last name was Whitehead but whose first name I do not know, was one of a large number of sisters, almost all of whom were childless. Apparently Phoebe's mother had suddenly decided to break ranks with her childless sisters, and have a baby at the age of forty, without marrying. The father, a Mr Russell, apparently offered to marry her but she refused. Mr Russell, whose first name I also do not know, had then emigrated to Canada, and my mother had never met him. Phoebe's mother apparently died in her fifties, before I was born. My mother later told me that she was glad to be rid of her own mother, but felt guilty about that.
Due to her late arrival, my mother's aunts were all in their seventies or eighties when I was a child. They all had names like Bonnie and Nonnie, and they all seemed to be batty, but my mother would tell me that they had been "quite something" in their youth. I have no idea what my mother thought of as being "quite something", and I suspect they were nearly as batty as young women as they were when they got older. All of these women seemed to be under some sort of compulsion to behave in "interesting" ways and to be "unusual" all the time. None of the batty aunts, except for a woman called Florence, had any children, and my mother ended up inheriting quite a lot of money and houses from these people.
Phoebe's mother seems to have often left her to stay at boarding schools or with friends. Apparently she had been moved from one school to another, and she had learnt about "the Tundra" several times because each different school would teach this. I don't think that she ever stayed with her batty aunts, but I'm not sure.
Every Christmas my mother's friends Hilary and Janis Hardiman would come and visit us, because my mother felt she had a debt to them, since she was allowed to stay with them as a child in their house, which was right next to Hampstead Heath. My mother would often tell us that she had had a deprived childhood, and that "she never went on any holidays" as a child. I'm not sure whether she really did, or whether she was really deprived compared to other children of her generation, such as war orphans or children who grew up in real poverty. Many people who knew her, including my father, had never heard anything about her "deprived childhood", despite her endlessly ranting on and on about it to me and my sister. Quite possibly someone told her to stop endlessly screaming, farting, and wanking in front of other people, and she considered herself to have been deprived on this basis.
Early experiences with my mother
Phoebe worked as a part-time art teacher at the Redmaids girls school in Bristol. I have some very early memories of her reading books to me, such as one about a jelly which was as big as the Albert Hall. But when I was around four or so years old, something went extremely wrong, perhaps because of the separation from my father, and after that all attempts at conversation or interaction with my mother would end on a sour note. This continued for the rest of her life.
The refusal to interact with us went far beyond chit-chat. She refused to do things like teaching me to tie my shoelaces, or teaching me left from right. As a child I would go around with my shoelaces undone, not knowing how to tie them. Eventually one of my sister's friends taught me. We were taught absolutely no manners whatsoever, even as far as not even being taught to say "please" or "thank you", and as a child I would wander off to other people's houses and even sit down at their family meals and so on. I found it extremely odd even at the time and I used to wonder if my mother was paying them some money for the food I was eating. Although we didn't have any normal, basic discipline, my mother would make us do things like writing "thank you" notes to people who'd given us a Christmas present.
As I was a child, I had no idea what was going on and thought that this was some sort of "new fashion" which we were doing, where normal manners and politeness were "old fashioned" and we were being brought up in some sort of modern way, and the other people were all behind the times. Of course this is ridiculous, but I was trying to justify my mother's very extreme neglectfulness to myself.
My mother often got extremely angry. I have a very distinct recollection from when I was around four years old, of walking along Clifton Down Road with her as we went shopping. She was wearing a headscarf, and she had an expression of utter, black rage on her face, for no reason which I could fathom. I spent most of my early childhood, until about the age of eleven, in a terror of angering my mother, who was "triggered" by any number of things, including not just bad behaviour, but various everyday words and actions. I wasn't allowed to play the "Colditz" game I got for Christmas because my mother thought "a lot of people died" under the Nazis, and I was recreating Nazi concentration camps, even I'd got the idea to buy the game from the children of our neighbour Charles Hannam, who was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. My mother also got very upset when I kept telling my sister to "go jump in a lake", because my mother considered that I was trying to make her commit suicide by drowning herself.
I didn't realise how very abnormal it was for her to be endlessly snapping at me, and to be completely unable to carry on a normal conversation with her, until much later, when I visited friends and saw them interacting much more normally with their parents. It's possible that I or my sister were doing something which upset Phoebe, but since she didn't tell us what it might have been, but would immediately start screaming and shouting when at all dissatisfied, interacting with her was rather nightmarish.
We were quite well off, and lived in a centrally-heated home in a nice area, with a small park in front of the house, and we had money, toys, and clothes, and she would cook all meals for us. She never resorted to tinned food or other convenience foods. She was very good at cooking, although she only had a few old cooking tools, such as a very old small kitchen knife which was a bit blunt, an old aluminium frying pan, and an old chipped enamel pot. Due to my father's business he had every single possible cooking tool in his kitchen, about twenty different knives and Le Creuset or whatever kind of expensive things everywhere, but my stepmother didn't enjoy cooking very much, and my father's cooking was a bit hit or miss, so I've never subscribed to the theory that expensive cookware or knives will make you a better cook.
Although my mother did not play the piano herself, she bought a piano, had it installed, had it tuned, and paid for my piano lessons with an elderly neighbour called Mrs Connolly. She even drove me to grade examinations. My sister did not go to the piano classes. Thinking about the expense and effort Phoebe had gone to, she must have wanted me to learn the piano, but I got terribly upset because, in line with my mother's policy of completely refusing to interact with me in any other fashion than screaming and shouting orders like a demented, sadistic prison guard, she would not listen to a single note that I played. After she'd quite brutally and completely ignored my piano-playing efforts for about two years I became demoralised and angry, and gave up. Incidentally, Mrs Connolly was astonished to find that I, at the age of ten, didn't know the difference between left and right.
I don't understand why, but the policy of ignoring me until she could no longer contain her rage seemed to be something my mother thought that she ought to do. For example, once, when we visited the Bristol City Museum for some kind of art thing she was doing there, to keep me quiet for a bit she gave me the job of drawing a picture of a sailing ship. When I showed it to her, almost as if she'd forgotten that she was obliged to be relentlessly nasty, she said "Oh that's nice". I went on to draw about twenty more pictures in the hope that she would react well to one of them, only to be ignored again.
When I was around eight or so, she got me to do some portraits of various people, which she'd put on the wall of the kitchen. Rather than ask me in a normal way to do the pictures, or simply enjoying them, what she would do would be this rather freakish "bribery" where she would promise to give me ONE aniseed ball if I drew the picture for her. Somehow or another, from her odd facial expression, it seemed as if she got some sort of pleasure from the idea of tricking me into making the pictures in exchange for a miserly quantity of aniseed balls. I don't remember but I think I would have been much more glad to have acknowledgement, rather than the ONE aniseed ball.
Art O-Level
As Phoebe was an art teacher, she asked me to take Art O-Level, the British secondary exam for sixteen year olds, now replaced by the GCSE. At my secondary school we had to choose one of either Latin or Art or Music in the third year, so I had to give up Latin. I was quite good at Latin, and I annoyed the Latin teacher Mr Fance, who complained that I was giving up after coming nearly top in Latin at the end of the third year. But although I'd done the exam at her request, my mother didn't take any interest at all in what I was doing for the whole two years until my exam.
Mr Black, the art teacher, had odd ideas about teaching. His teaching method mostly involved going into his room at the start of the class, leaving us to do whatever we chose to for two hours, and then emerging from his room at the very end of the class. Many of the people doing Art O-Level at my school were people who couldn't do Latin for one reason or another, such as people who'd joined the school in the third year and hadn't done Latin previously, or people who weren't very strong academically, and couldn't do Latin. But talented people emerged, so his "free-range" method of teaching worked for some.
Having not that much interest in art, and with no interest or encouragement from my mother, I would end up chatting about television programmes like "The Fall Guy" for two hours with the deadbeat students.
At that time, the Southern Universities Joint Board (SUJB) Art O-Level was graded based on a choice of two out of three components, one being drawing or painting, one being art history, and one being a craft of some kind. Our school had no craft section, so we had to do art history in addition to the drawing component. Mr Black's instructions on art history consisted of telling us to "write about a page" of text on some painting or another, and his method of correcting our work consisted of looking at the number of words we'd written and making sure it covered one page. One of my friends would write a page of absolute nonsense, which Mr Black would duly tick as satisfactory. Since I wasn't sure what to write about, I asked my mother. She had about 300 books on art history, because she taught O-Level art history to the girls at Redmaids, the same examination which I was going to do, but she would not give me any help whatsoever, but simply repeated about how Mr Black had had a hard life due to his daughters' fatal disease. One of Mr Black's daughters, Imogen, who died at the age of twelve, had been in my class at primary school, and of course it was sad, but that didn't help much with the art history component of my O Level. I suppose she might have had enough of teaching art history with her day job, but I can't figure out why on earth my mother would ask me to take the O-Level and then show so little interest in it, and I had absolutely no idea at all what I was supposed to write for the answers to the art history section.
The only reaction I got from her during the whole of my O-Level art was when I borrowed her coloured pencils to do the required coursework, and she started shouting at me about using them without her permission, even though she'd let my sister use them for the same task. The coloured pencils were barely used, and probably remained barely used when she died a few years later. Because my mother would overreact to everything, I ended up losing any respect for her and just thinking she was a horrible ogre or lunatic.
The really odd part of the story, though, was that, even after the astonishing lack of interest in my Art O-Level, which I'd only done because she asked me to, and after she had totally refused to help me or advise me or show any interest in it at all, when I was choosing A-Level courses, she said to me, in this bizarre, self-pitying voice, "Won't you do A Level art? For your mother?" I can't begin to understand it, especially since I saw her taking a perfectly normal interest in the work of other people's children.
Mother's rages and emotional outbursts
My mother was prone to bizarre, random rages, which would come out of nowhere. As a three-year-old, I had without thinking gone into the "sitting room", and my mother got into an absolute rage that I had gone into that room, even though I'm sure she'd never told me that I wasn't supposed to. For several years after that I had a phobia of the entire room, and couldn't go past the door of it for fear that something was going to come out and attack me.
Also as a small child, with no clear idea even of the physical differences between men and women, let alone thoughts on women's role in society, she would, after reading books on feminism such as "The Feminine Mystique" by Betty Friedan, work herself into a frothing rage against me due to what she claimed were my sexist attitudes. Apparently I thought that women were just here to cook and clean for me, just like my father, even though I had then, and to this day still have, absolutely no idea what my father thinks about women, or anything much else, and I had absolutely no notions at all about women cooking and cleaning for me. I suppose my mother was angry with my father, and thought I'd make a convenient substitute when she felt like a rant or a rage, or something like that.
One night, we were sitting down eating supper, and my sister said something, I don't remember what, and my mother began screaming at her "You never complement my cooking" "Why don't you complement my cooking for a change?" over and over, and banging her palms on the table, until her face went bright red. Although it might be reasonable for her to expect children to be polite, or even say something nice about her cooking, my mother had never once taught us even the most basic manners, such as saying "please" or "thank you". She would usually fly into a rage whenever she wanted to request us to do anything, rather than ask in a normal way.
One evening, when I was about eight, my sister came up the stairs and informed me not to go downstairs whatever I did. Apparently my mother had started waving a kitchen knife at my sister. After that I have heard that she had to go into a mental hospital, but I don't know the details of it. I don't remember who might have looked after us when she was in the hospital, or she might have been an outpatient.
When I was about twelve or thirteen years old, and stayed in my father's house due to the relentless arguing with my sister, I was quite surprised when my stepmother Jackie would ask me to do things in a normal tone of voice, since up to then I was used to everything being all about the screaming and shouting.
When we were little, my parents had rented a television, but later my mother got the idea that televisions, along with pop music, were bad, and so although most of my friends had a television, we didn't have one until I was nine. Instead of having a television, she decided that we would read books out loud to one another. This sounds like a nice idea, but my mother would pick only books that she wanted to read, which were books for adults, with words in them which I, at the age of seven or eight, could not read. I don't remember whether my sister was able to read them. But I do remember the look of anger on my mother's face as I tried to read a book which was completely over my head. Surely she could have found a book which was suitable for eight year old children, and what on earth was the point of getting angry with a child for not knowing some words in a book?
One time she told me that I had to bring a lump of coal into the sitting room at New Year's, and then when I brought this coal into the room, she was cruel enough to pour scorn on me for doing it "the wrong way", although as I was about five or six years old I had no idea what way I was supposed to do it, or even why I was bringing the lump of coal into the room.
My sister and I were given the task of doing the washing up on alternate nights. My mother seemed to be incapable of remembering who had done the washing up most recently. My sister cottoned on to this, and falsely claimed that it was my turn to do it when it wasn't. As might be imagined this led to some arguments, so I would say things to my mother like, why not actually write down who'd done the washing up, or I would do it on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. But these kinds of practical suggestions were not welcome with my mother, the great and wonderous lady, who moved in illustrious circles, far beyond the mundane levels of problems which can be easily solved by applying a very small amount of common sense.
My mother went on and on about her "deprived childhood", and insisted on using all the family money on going on long, expensive foreign holidays by herself to compensate herself for this. She cancelled things like my sister's French tutor because she didn't want to pay for it, but would shell out lots of money on these holidays. Challenging her about it was a sure way to receive one of her sadistic screaming sessions. She would go off to Venice or on a bus journey around Yemen, leaving me and my sister to be looked after by various odd-bod people such as the tenants who rented the basement flat. I don't know what she did on the holidays, find small children to scream her head off at, go and wank herself in public places, or let off foul-smelling farts from her giant, flabby buttocks, I suppose. When I was fifteen, she simply left us in the house for several weeks without any adult supervision at all, during which time I accidentally started a cooking fire. Luckily I was able to put it out.
She would also claim to be some kind of great martyr or have greater capacity for sympathy than other people, sometimes to a ridiculous extent. She was all for donating to Africans, and she had sponsored a child in Africa. But her self-image as a great martyr and astonishingly virtuous woman had no bounds. When driving, she would screech the car to a halt to allow people to cross the road, even when she could have just continued on and let the people cross afterwards, since there weren't any cars behind us. When I asked her about it, she started absurdly ranting about how she "had been a pedestrian" and she "knew what it was like to be a pedestrian", as if all the other car drivers on the road had been born inside their cars and never once walked anywhere. My mother was the One True Friend of the Pedestrian, the virtuous woman who had suffered the indiginities of walking somewhere, and knew what it was like to be a pedestrian, and thus had to bring the car to a sudden halt so that people could cross the road. Since Ray Davis was keen on driving fast, she also decided that she was the One True Friend of the person who wanted to drive fast, and she would sometimes zigzag along roads in a bizarre fashion in order that these speedy people could overtake her. She was prone to "road rages", and would have fits of screaming fury if she gave way and the other driver failed to acknowledge her, so we children had to listen to the screaming fart hag ranting. One time a man in a passing car even went as far as to apologise to the screaming fart loon, even though the thing she was ranting about was unrelated to him.
Relief from the horrible old wanker's droning and screaming and raging and tales of martyrdom would come once a year, on Christmas day. My father would come over for a Christmas lunch, and suddenly the flabby fart beast's narcissistic rages and misery would pause. Naively, I thought this was the spirit of Christmas. Around 1980 my father remarried, and decided not to come over on Christmas any more, but spend the day with his wife's family. That Christmas day, for the first time, the stench wanker didn't cheer up for the day, but continued to be her endlessly miserable, spiteful, nasty self. I think the reason was that the insane wanking fart hag was getting child support money from my father, and to keep this money flowing, she would briefly put on a pretence of being normal on Christmas day in front of him.
Flabby old farts had very odd ideas about money, and when her batty aunts gradually died and left her some money or houses, she inherited various sums. At one point the stench onanist tried to open a joint account at the Bristol and West Building Society, but since she was single she needed a joint signatory. Instead of just telling me that she wanted me to sign it, she made up a ridiculous story to get my signature on a piece of paper. Oddly enough, she seemed to find this deception extraordinarily enjoyable and exciting. And then she was able to open the joint account with me. I can't believe the barking-insane flabby farts masturbator was crazy enough to think that I would withdraw all her money from the building society and splurge it, when I was only fourteen or something.
After she'd died, I talked to my mother's friends about her. It was almost as if they were talking about a different person. I had noticed that, similar to the Christmas day story, the stenching screamer's very unpleasant behaviour would disappear in front of most of her friends. For example we went on a holiday to a Greek island called Mykonos with another family, and I was spared the "nasties" for the whole two weeks. But I didn't put two and two together at the time. I attributed the smelly old wanker's rages and vileness to some kind of mental problem. But she disguised it from her friends in this way, so clearly it was deliberate rather than the result of some kind of mental illness which she didn't have any control over.
Once on the BBC there was a documentary about an eccentric, fat, old woman, who, having inherited a lot of money, then decided to spend the rest of her life pointlessly traipsing around Arabia on camels. She was greatly overweight, and would have several workers help her onto the camel, then she would go and meet someone or another, without any productive results, which was clearly nothing but a leisure activity. Flabby farts, watching this pointless, purposeless, aimless, worthless, ludicrous woman, living off other people's money, being pushed onto camels, said that she was a woman whom she admired very much, which seems to sum up how mad Phoebe was. I don't think her batty aunts, whom she thought were "quite something", had ever done anything much noteworthy.
The oddest of all the experiences I had with the mentally-ill wanker was to see what she was like when she was in a relationship with a man. Despite the endless feminist and other rantings she had subjected me to, when she was actually in a relationship with Ray Davis, she became utterly slavish and submissive. She would quite literally follow him around the room, and endlessly tried to please him.
Examples of mother's mad behaviour
I think because she was getting money from my father, she worked only two and a half days a week. I suppose the other time was supposed to be family time or something, but she would indulge in what she called her "work", which consisted of various dabblings in artistic projects. She had attended art school in the 1950s, and she had some ability in art, not to mention her abilities in fart, making her truly arty-farty. She had illustrated two books for our next-door-neighbour, a mountaineering doctor called Peter Steele, in the early 1970s. However, after that most of her art projects seemed to flounder. At one point she wrote an entire children's book consisting of copperplate lettering and illustrations she had done herself, or she had planned a book of photography of interesting doors from around the world. She got the photographs developed to publication quality, but unfortunately she would usually chicken out of actually submitting the projects to a publisher, and the children's book and the door photos ended up discarded. It seemed almost pitiful that she gave up on the children's book without even showing it to anyone, and she would say "what was I thinking?" or something, although the illustrations and lettering looked quite interesting, as if she had no self confidence to carry it through. One of the few projects which came to fruition was where she sewed together fabrics into graphics, which she displayed, and she sold some of these works. She also tried to start a carpet trading business, which was a complete failure. I was assigned to look after the display of carpets in the King Street Gallery in Bristol for a week, and there was not a single visitor to the gallery in the entire time that I was there.
My mother seemed to imagine that she was on a higher aesthetic plane than other people, often in quite a funny way. Opposite our house (number 3) there was another house where the owner had painted the drainpipes for the guttering a different colour, including a diagonal pipe which now seems to be gone, and my mother would moan on and on about how terrible it was that she had to look at these multicoloured pipes out of her bedroom window. After we moved to London, in Cassland Road in Hackney, the view out of the windows was very much worse than it had been in Canynge Square, but somehow her sensibilities weren't shattered by the dustbins and garages of Hackney. Any number of other things offended her sensibilities, such as the name of the car, the Hillman Avenger.
In the 1970s, we often went on long car journeys to see her elderly relatives, who lived in various parts of England. I don't remember where my sister was at the time, but she usually didn't come with us, and it would be just me and my mother travelling to these relatives.
On one journey, on the way home in pouring rain, the windscreen wipers on the car broke, and we stopped in a small town to get the wipers repaired. My mother got out of the car to find a garage, and then came back a few minutes later, in a state of great agitation, and declared that we could not stay in that town because "It's just like the fifties". I was unable to dissuade her from driving home in the dark and pouring rain with no windscreen wipers because of the repeated claim that the small town was "just like the fifties". I'm not sure what happened to my mother in the 1950s.
During one of the above-mentioned trips, she'd left me in the lounge of a hotel, where I watched a film called "Ice Station Zebra". Very near the end of the film, she insisted that I had to go to bed at once. I don't think there was any reason at all why I wouldn't be allowed to watch the final few minutes of the film.
Once we went to see one of my mother's friends from art school who lived in the countryside. The friend had married a wealthy man and they had two sons and an adopted daughter called Tamsin, who was Indian. I was playing monopoly with the two boys and they cheated, telling me that Bond Street was not for sale and then selling it to the other one when he landed on it. I told them I didn't want to play if they were going to cheat. My mother would always urge me to being more and more masochistic and submissive to other people, but in this case she didn't do that and said "You don't have to play if you don't want to". I wondered why she was being kind for a change, and then when I refused to take a stick insect from the boy she also didn't get in a bad mood about it but said it was OK not to take that. Then she burst into tears on the road away from their house and said she was never going to go back to that house because of something the woman had said about the adopted Indian daughter Tamsin. She wouldn't tell me what the mother had said but it seemed terribly odd when, having to put up with my mother's screaming and rages and other abuse, that she would claim to care about other people not being kind enough to their children.
When I was about seven or eight, the mad wanker had a "birthday party" for me which consisted of her inviting a group of exclusively little girls, the daughters of her friends, none of whom were my friends, to our house. Fortunately she didn't start wanking herself or letting off horror-farts, but the mad stench wanker then spent the entirety of "my" birthday party engaging with these little girls, and the stench hag completely and utterly rejected me at my own birthday party. I cannot understand how even a degenerate, stenching, foul, loathsome public masturbator like the stench hag wank beast, Phoebe Bullock, could do such an awful act of cruelty to her own child, but fortunately the evil gas wanking fart stencher croaked from cancer.
She would overdramatise things in a very ridiculous way. For example a cupboard in my room was stuffed with paintings stacked together, and I suggested to my mother, not knowing that they were her paintings, that she might as well throw away the old paintings. In a very melodramatic, self-pitying tone she said "When I am dead and gone you can throw them all away, I suppose". I thought they were some clutter she'd collected, but they were her old paintings from her art school days. Around the age of twelve or so, ten years before she died, she asked me what things of hers I wanted when she died. She used to tell me tall tales about how various of her possessions were worth thousands of pounds, and as I was a child I believed these stories, and so I asked for some of the items she'd claimed were valuable. Although I thought it was some sort of joke, when she died she had actually put all of these things in her will, so I was left having to deal with piles of ridiculous old furniture and carpets, which I ended up mostly giving away. In her will she'd also left all her artworks and her collection of textiles to Ray. I'm not sure what he did with those artworks and textiles, but I have the suspicion that they ended up being thrown away. My sister sold all Phoebe's art and other books to a bookshop of some kind without asking me, apparently in an effort to please Ray. For some reason I cannot fathom, my sister had been living in the house with Ray after my mother died, sleeping in her bed, until he threw her out.
During my teenage years my mother developed some sort of sexual fixation on me and started a range of extraordinary behaviours including masturbating in front of me and various other very unpleasant things. The disgusting beast poked a spy hole in my bedroom door, and relentlessly and fruitlessly searched my room for material to excite herself with. The pretext for her wanking was that she needed to go to the toilet. Somehow or another she always needed to go to the toilet when I was in the bath. After endless nagging I had to let "old horror wanks" in. This continued even after we had moved to London, where we were in a house with two bathrooms adjacent to each other, and even when she could have used the bathroom next door, when I was in the bath she stood outside the bathroom door banging and banging on it, saying "I want to come in" over and over.
I was extremely unsettled by this masturbating psychotic horror wanker, and I did not feel safe sleeping in my bed for fear that the screaming wank hag would appear in the room.
This reached a crescendo when I returned after my trip to Israel as a Kibbutz volunteer. On returning from the trip, the shit-stencher's friend called Sarah Steele, the wife of the man whose books the loathsome wanking fart hag had illustrated, made some sort of complimentary remark about me and then this sent the shitbeast into sexual overdrive, with all kinds of absolutely horrifying and disgusting depravity including foully licking her disgusting flabby lips at me.
The man she was living with, Ray Davis, noticed that I was extremely upset with my mother's sexual behaviour towards me, and for reasons only known to himself, decided to take me to the pub and keep repeating that "incest is perfectly natural". When my mother died a few years later, I was quite glad that her horror wanks were at an end, and I've never missed her. The only time that I have thought that there might be something pleasant was that I thought she might have been able to get on with my daughter, since she would take an interest in the little girls and their drawings and so on. I have no pleasant memories of my mother at all, she seems just a deceased wanking stench loon.
Relationship to Kasmin and name dropping
She told me once that John Kasmin was Polish, and the name was Polish in origin. The newspaper articles given on the main page say that Kasmin was born in London, with the name Kaye, and that he had changed the name himself when he was living in New Zealand, perhaps because he didn't like his father. Poles I've asked have told me that it is not a Polish surname. Since my mother didn't even know the origin of the name, or whether or not he was Polish, I wonder how well she knew John Kasmin.
My mother was a terrible name-dropper who claimed to "know" people she'd only really met once or twice. For example she would claim to be a friend of Thelma Barlow, the actress who played Mavis on Coronation Street, or David McCallum. I think she'd only met them briefly. When staying in a hospital, she would tell the women at the hospital watching Coronation Street that the woman who played Mavis was her friend. I'm sure she never once met this actress after their initial acquaintance. I'm fairly sure she only met David McCallum once or twice, when he briefly dated a friend of hers, an actress called Hilary Hardiman, in the 1950s. But because my mother "knew" David McCallum, we had to watch every single television appearance of him, including such turkeys as "The Invisible Man" and "Sapphire and Steel" with Joanna Lumley. We didn't watch Coronation Street though. As far as I can work out, the "friendship" with John Kasmin was the same sort of thing as the friendship with David McCallum or Thelma Barlow.
Around 1988, when she wrote to me telling me she had cancer, I wrote back to her telling her I would be glad to be rid of her. She replied to me saying that my letter had hurt her a lot. That surprised me, since I had never considered my mother capable of normal human emotions up to that point. She seemed to be nothing more than a screaming, wanking, farting, evil sadistic lunatic.
At that time I was receiving help from the university I was attending, and the student counsellor at the university arranged to meet my mother. We had a conversation about some of these issues, including the masturbation. A few weeks later I got a call telling me that her condition had worsened, so I travelled to see her, but, as usual, she completely refused to talk to me, even at that point, and even after I had travelled specially to see her, and she started talking to Ray Davis's son John, who was living in the house with her, and whom she could have talked to at any time. Not really knowing what to say after that, having travelled all the way to see her, I said something about trying to get better. Then a couple of weeks after that she was hospitalised with cancer. Her condition was then extremely bad, she was suffering organ failure, and she could barely move, and yet for some reason at that point I had what I would consider about the only normal conversation I've ever had with her. She died a few hours later.
My father
My father, Douglas Bullock, a retired shopkeeper, is still alive, now in his eighties, but my parents separated when I was about four or five, and later divorced, and I and my sister remained with my mother, seeing him only on Sunday. Like my mother, he was difficult to talk to. Douglas was fairly incoherent and extraordinarily tetchy, a person who was so easily offended that he probably thought the speaking clock was saying something offensive about him.
Extreme uncommunicativeness
In the 1970s there was a shop on Whiteladies Road called "PETS AND BASKETS", here, with an oddly hand-painted sign where the K in "BASKETS" resembled an H. We would often walk past it, and Douglas, instead of just telling me that it said "basket" rather than "bashet", completely refused to answer when I asked him what a "bashet" was. Another time, we were sitting in a cafe and he started talking about the "Unimog", which he claimed was a vehicle which could go either on roads or train tracks, and he got upset and stopped talking to me when I asked him whether it had rubber tyres or steel train wheels.
A friend of my father was working as an architect in an African country, the name of which I've forgotten. He was having some kind of problem, and my father explained it by saying that he was being paid in "Mickey Mouse money". We couldn't understand what "Mickey Mouse money" meant so we tried to ask him what the problem was, and he repeated "It's Mickey Mouse money! It's Mickey Mouse money!", becoming more and more agitated and even angry that we'd asked him. In fact the problem was that it was difficult to exchange the currency of the African country for pounds or other currencies, but as children we couldn't understand the words "Mickey Mouse money", and my father for whatever reason thought that if he just repeated over and over that it was "Mickey Mouse money" and then got angry the meaning would become clear.
As a small boy I'd been fascinated with submarines and declared that when I grew up I wanted to be a "submarine technician". Douglas took me to a Royal Navy exhibit and got me a lot of posters about the Royal Navy, but as I was only six years old, I didn't realise that the Royal Navy was the organisation which had the submarines, and Douglas didn't think that piece of information was worth providing to me, so I ended up rather baffled.
Trying to talk to Douglas often seemed like a minefield of weird, argumentative behaviour, where he would try to pick fights and start arguments about silly things like a choice of words, rather than listen to what the other person was saying. Every time he heard me say the word "funny", he would repeat "Was it funny peculiar or funny ha-ha?", no matter how obvious it was which one was meant.
After reading a book on science experiments for children, I told him that I wanted to buy some iron filings. He got very excited, started saying that I didn't need to pay money for iron filings, and then he dragged me to a machine shop which used to be on Whiteladies Road and got some swarf from the floor of the shop, which of course I couldn't use.
In the summer of 1979 and 1980 I worked at his shop as a summer job. I wasn't allowed to run a cash register due to being a child, so I would do various cleaning or other tasks such as carrying deliveries upstairs or crushing cardboard boxes. One day I was given the task of sweeping the floor in the basement part of the shop. Although I was doing it the way I'd been told to by the woman directing me, when my father came down he suddenly started insisting that I was sweeping the floor "in the wrong direction", and he told me to sweep the dirt back over the floor and underneath a display in the centre aisle of the shop. Then he got absolutely irate when I asked him whether the other staff were going to vacuum up the dirt later on, and insisted that it should just be left there. This made no sense at all, but his ever-increasing irateness when asked very simple questions seemed extremely strange. After several more incidents of this type, where he would come and start angrily telling me that I was doing something wrong, I refused to take any more jobs working in his shop.
At one point he proposed that I should start a business making plate racks for his shop. He had a plan for the racks, so all I needed to do was to implement the plan. We went to a nearby lumber yard and he bought all the wood, which I was supposed to pay him back for, and he provided the tools and space to make the plate racks. At that time, around the age of fourteen, I had no experience of woodworking beyond a few simple projects, so I really did not even know how to make them, but he left me to my own devices, without showing me how to make them correctly. I didn't have any experience nor knowledge of commercial standards, so the wood joints weren't square, and there were gaps between the parts, so he told me that he could not sell the plate racks I had made. Since he hadn't spent any time at all showing me how he expected me to make them, it seemed as if he didn't really want the project to succeed, but more as if he'd been setting me up purely to have a go at me and criticise whatever I did, and didn't really want me to make the plate racks at all. I was able to sell one of the "defective" plate racks to one of my mother's friends, but I don't know what happened to the rest of the material.
My mother mentioned to me that one of the reasons that she decided to divorce Douglas was that she could not carry on a conversation with him. For example, she told me that if they went to the cinema together and saw a film, then she asked him what he thought of the film, he would say "It's not worth talking about".
Douglas had harboured ambitions of being a writer, which seems an unlikely profession.
"Odd" relationship with my sister
He was also very much more interested in my sister than in me, to the extent that it seemed quite creepy. We only saw him on Sunday, and most of the activities we did then consisted of him doing something with her, cooking with her, teaching her how to swim while I had to stand in the shallow end of the pool, then being fobbed off with excuses when it was my turn, or teaching her to drive the car, then telling me I couldn't do it because I was too young, or hovering around her as she was trying to fly a kite, a thing she didn't actually seem very interested in, whereas he took the kite away from me after only a few seconds, claiming I wasn't able to fly it properly.
He taught my sister how to cycle quite early, but my mother had to nag at him to get him to teach me, and I only learned when I was about ten. On the occasions when I was left with my father, he would often do things like dump me somewhere and go off to do something else. At one point he received some complaints from staff at a bar where he'd repeatedly left me to go off and play snooker. When I went with him to London for some trip or another, he bought me a Radio Shack electronics kit and asked me to build a radio from the instructions, then he went out somewhere, then when he came back he didn't even listen to the radio which I'd made for him.
Perhaps because he ran a kitchen shop, we used to go to restaurants for lunch every Sunday. A lot of the restaurants were his customers. Sundays mealtimes usually consisted of him jabbering excitedly and rather incoherently about films or books or something like that. I found it quite difficult to listen to him, since as I mentioned above he couldn't seem to cope with simple questions or interruptions. But my sister would listen to him and smile and nod, even though I'm not sure he was talking intelligibly. My sister later became a counsellor, which seems quite a good profession for someone who is able to listen to my father's blithering nonsense. He would jabber on very excitedly about books, which I later found out he'd only read a few pages of. In fact he only collected books but didn't really bother reading them, and he used to read reviews of the books, and his babbling often consisted of phrases from the reviews.
My sister, for whatever reason, had some issues, and she'd frequently do cruel things like leaving drawing pins on the staircase for me to step on, or suddenly punching me in the arm when our parents weren't looking. Douglas, for whatever reason, seemed to find this exciting, and decided to make all kinds of barking-mad excuses for my sister. With my birthday in March, and hers in October, she didn't give me a birthday card on my birthday, and so I didn't give her one, and Douglas said to me "You are a pig, Ben", for not giving her a birthday card. When my sister decided to endlessly make nasty remarks about me, again Douglas came up with bizarre confabulations about how this was due to me being "sullen and morose", as if I was supposed to jump for joy or something. I don't know if he went off and wanked his willy about her or what on earth was going on, but his behaviour towards her was at the extremes of sycophancy.
Douglas, for whatever reason, had decided that my sister was among the world's greatest living talents, and nothing could persuade him otherwise. Initially I thought it was some kind of ridiculous joke, but he'd become very hurt if I pointed it out. He bought her something called a John Bull printing set, a kind of rubber lettering, and then remarked repeatedly on how adept she was using it. I'd been sitting next to her and it was absolutely obvious to me that she had very little interest, and his overexcitement about my sister's amazing abilities seemed completely ludicrous. She only made the words "Rachel Bullock" with the set then got bored with the thing, but she seemed to have joined the ranks of the World's Greatest Living Exponents of Rubber Lettering according to my father.
He went on to buy her a printing press costing 500 pounds, for which a whole room in the basement of our house, previously rented to a university student, was then dedicated. The printing press sat idle for about two years, while my sister, the World's Greatest Living Exponent of Printing, so incredibly talented that she didn't have to do any mundane things like putting ink or pieces of paper in the printing press, or setting up the type, sat chatting with her friend. I'm not sure the number of pieces of paper which went through that printing press ever got into double figures.
Similar to the printing escapades, my sister miraculously joined the ranks of the World's Greatest Living Artists without actually creating any works of art. Living with my sister from childhood, I never noticed her to be at all interested in creating works of art, but for some reason my father was convinced that we had a major artistic talent on our hands. My sister didn't have to do anything beyond writing a few letters on a page for it to be seized on by my father as evidence that we were among the greatest of them all, a latter-day Van Gogh or Rembrandt in the making. For whatever reason, my sister went along with the notion that she was one of the World's Greatest Living Artists, and even attended Camberwell Art School in London, although her artworks seemed to consist of a few moments of dabbling with a paintbrush, and her interest in art seemed fairly casual.
I don't know why my sister went along with it all, but somehow she seemed to only offer passive resistance to my father's schemes. A few years later I stayed with my sister in her flat at Peckham while she was attending Camberwell Art School, and I was truly astonished at how much influence he seemed to have had over her. Talking to her friends, she would say exactly the same things that I had heard him say about not wearing pyjamas or something, with an identical tone of voice, and even the same facial expression, the most uncannily perfect impersonation of my father imaginable. When she was dabbling with the paintbrush, the look on her face was an absolute carbon copy of my father's expression when he would open one of his books to glance at a few pages.
When watching television with my father, a regular feature was this pathetic jealousy of any good-looking man. Every single attractive-looking man was "awful", said with a shake of the head. Years later, watching "Top of the Pops Christmas Special" with my sister in Peckham, every single pretty woman, like Keren from Bananarama or Enya, was greeted with the same ludicrous jealous response "She's so awful!", just exactly like Douglas's jealous bitching.
After leaving the art school, my sister did various jobs, and at one point she opened a shop, which promptly failed due to mismanagement. According to my father, she was convinced that she was among the World's Leading Exponents of Shopkeeping since she "came from a retailing family", although apparently she didn't know basic things about accounting. Even after this, my father would still keep on and on about how incredibly talented she was. In fact immediately after telling me this story about her record shop, my father then started claiming that my sister would be good at running an internet-based record shop. It seemed to be a kind of wilful self-delusion, and nearly impossible to discuss since my father would become more and more irate when contradicted. His sister, my aunt, was quite similar in that regard, although my grandmother wasn't, so perhaps it was something they both got from their father.
Even worse than my sister's bizarre narcissism was that my father would let her get away with almost any kind of bad behaviour. For example she would steal things from his shop, such as marzipan cake decorations, and although I'm sure he noticed, he would say nothing to her. Later on in life, there were extremely serious problems with actual theft of large sums of money and fraud. I think it would have been much more useful and beneficial for my sister if my father had told her to stop stealing things as a child, rather than encourage her into being a raging narcissistic loonie.
Relations with extremely odd women
He'd been involved with a series of women all of whom, like my mother, seemed to be at best extremely eccentric. Before I was born he'd had a relationship with a Jewish woman who, from what I've heard about her, was completely barmy, resulting in a half-brother I've never met who was adopted, and he left my mother for a woman who had a large collection of snakes. At one point the upper floors of the Kitchens shop building were filled with aquarium-like glass cases containing snakes. I can't comment on the woman's personality since I don't think I ever spoke to her, but her facial expression gave life to the phrase "mad staring eyes". After that, he remarried a woman who was prescribed to take large quantities of tranquilizers, and he was trying to persuade her to cut down on them with the help of books like "Anti-Psychiatry" by R.D. Laing. So it seems that my father was attracted to women with mental problems, and even seemed to be deliberately trying to make my sister behave as badly as possible. It's been alleged to me that my father has bipolar disorder, although I cannot comment nor diagnose such a condition.
Even more than my sister, the topic which really got my father's knickers in a twist was my mother. A few years ago, I did try to bring the topic of my barmy mother up with my father, with the result that he got very angry. He was complaining on and on about how he had been mistreated by everyone, and how he wanted to help my mother and he was upset because nobody had told him when she was ill. In fact he'd driven my mother nearly round the bend by first of all stirring up arguments between me and my sister, and then completely refusing to help her. Not only did he not want to help my mother, but he spent so much effort evading doing things to help my mother that it would have been much easier to do the things she'd asked him. Astonishingly, he seemed to barely know my mother, with little to no idea of her personality, or of her personal history, and he'd treated her with utter contempt, but in his own mad mind he had "adored" her. At this point I realised that his mental health problems were quite likely almost as severe as my mother's.
As I mentioned above, he never seemed greatly interested in me, but I was surprised to see him put on a suit and turn up to the parents' evenings at my school. Apparently his interest was in going somewhere with my mother rather than finding out about the school. As I mentioned above my parents separated at age four and my mother got a television for the first time when I was nine. During a conversation with someone when I mentioned that my mother had got a television when I was nine, my father interrupted me to start talking as if he had been living with us at the time, so for some reason he wanted this person he didn't know very well not to find out he'd separated from my mother when I was nine. When my father remarried I came home to my mother crying her eyes out, so I suppose these two nutters had some kind of feelings towards each other.
My aunt told me that my father had left his national service in the Royal Air Force due to having a nervous breakdown. My father had told me a story about his national service period when he claimed that someone who was a nuclear scientist from Harwell had been forced to a nervous breakdown by being forced to clean the floors with a toothbrush. It seemed like an odd story since scientists from Harwell wouldn't normally have done national service, and my father got incredibly irate about the sadism inflicted on this man, where he didn't normally care that much about other people.
A lot of my father was prone to making accusations, which seemed to consist of projecting his own feelings onto other people. He'd accuse me of having sexual feelings for my sister, or having a sexual relationship with my aunt, which of course I didn't, or of various kinds of sadism towards him. He would often complain about other people and then go on to do most of the things he'd complained about them doing.
The oddest experience of all, and the one which finally convinced me that my father was actually seeking out mentally unwell women, was with an ex-girlfriend of mine who he developed a fixation on. He had met this girlfriend, a Japanese woman, when visiting Japan around 1995 or so. He then started trying to make grabs at her, and also behaving in an extraordinary, rude way to me while staying in my house. He then went on later to start remarking about how she seemed to be crazy. I accidentally stumbled on a collection of photographs of her which he'd taken on his visit to Japan, which he was keeping in his office room. My father doesn't have any photographs of either me, or my children, and showed absolutely zero interest in his grandchildren, yet the foul old turd was obsessed with this woman that he regarded as being crazy, and the lunatic even asked me to introduce him to her when visiting Japan again later on.
Staying at my fathers' house
Due to arguments with my sister, my mother insisted that I had to stay at my father's house when I was around 13. I should point out that my father was largely responsible for these arguments becoming so bitter, by endlessly taking sides with my sister. Anyway I had to stay there. I was put in a room opposite Douglas and Jackie's bedroom. Douglas had been making various claims about Jackie saying various things, so I assumed that the problems with the situation were down to Jackie.
For the first few weeks of my stay, I was not given any information about what to do about laundry or anything. My mother had chucked me out of the house due to arguments I hadn't even started, and I was stuck in this room with no idea what to do about the dirty clothes. My socks got to the point where they were so dirty that they were quite rigid, and the room was covered in rubbish. I wasn't given bus fare so I had to walk to the school, in these rigid socks. Douglas, as usual, did absolutely nothing to help, but Jackie in the end decided that she would help and so she gave me a place to put the laundry. As I mentioned elsewhere she also was fairly normal about asking me to do things, although she sometimes would get angry about trivial things.
The Jeromes
One example I found quite funny was when he started complaining about another man, since deceased, called Mike Jerome, a retired architect from South Africa, and the father of my sister's friend mentioned above who taught me to tie my shoelaces. Mike Jerome was a very short, very dark-tanned, chain-smoking man with a huge, bushy beard in the style of Karl Marx. Douglas said that he couldn't stand Mike Jerome's style of conversation. Mike Jerome's style of conversation certainly was quite odd. He would start a sentence, then mumble something, and then finish with the end of another sentence, so it seemed to sort of make sense, but if the audible parts were to be written down on a piece of paper it wouldn't make any sense at all, in quite a similar way to some of the statements of Donald Trump. The funny thing about this though was that Douglas did exactly the same thing, mumbling mid-sentence and finishing with another statement.
Like Douglas, Mr Jerome had ambitions to be a writer, and he had actually written and illustrated a book, which he sent to Ray Davis, consisting of his thoughts about life in general. Ray showed it to me, but it was quite hard to make sense of, being written in a kind of dialectical English in the style of a long poem, covering more than a hundred pages. I remember that Mr Jerome regarded the members of the Houses of Parliament as "the greatest fools in the land", and I think the gist of the entire book was that the vast majority of the human race was deficient in wisdom and intelligence compared to himself. This book was never published, even privately, as far as I know, even though Mr Jerome had gone as far as to illustrate it with, as far as I can remember, various pictures of a harlequin. Ray said that it was his life's work. I'm not sure what buildings he had worked on as an architect, but hopefully that went better than his writing.
My mother was great friends with Mr Jerome's wife, a rather extraordinary woman called Bella Jerome, who would laugh like a hyena. As a child my bedroom was above the kitchen where my mother would have her "dinner parties" to which this frightful hag Bella was a regular guest, quite similar to Count Olaf's dinner parties in the books of Lemony Snicket, and I had to go upstairs to my mother's room to sleep in order to escape the awful sound of Bella's laughter. As I mentioned above, my mother would drastically moderate her unpleasant behaviour in front of her friends, with the one exception of this extraordinary harridan, old Bella Jerome. The last time I met the loathsome old hag Bella Jerome, after my mother's funeral, where she was reasonably pleasant for a brief moment, was at Douglas's house in the 1990s. She was visiting him for some reason, and I asked her if she'd like a cup of tea, and the awful beast began a stream of vile ranting and abuse. I mentioned it to my father, who only remarked that he liked "wild women". He also mentioned that Mike Jerome had died. Wanting to have anything to do with women like Bella Jerome or my mother seems to me to be something like an impulse to eat dogshit. Involving yourself with these vile hounds, and then complaining about an unhappy relationship seems something like eating a plate of dogshit, and then complaining that it didn't taste nice.
Deranged behaviour with my family
Kasmin
Anyway, because the choice of my name had something to do with my mother, I never got a shred of sense out of him about it. The only thing he ever mentioned, which as usual with my lunatic parents I overheard him saying to someone else, rather than directly to me, was that John Kasmin had been a friend of theirs at the time I was born, but apparently was no longer a friend after that.
Another problem unfortunately with my father was that he was terribly prone to lying and exaggerating and making up stories involving his being the centre of attention. He'd often tell stories about famous people like Allen Ginsburg or Elizabeth David, who, for no apparent reason, would come up to him and make declarations or something, as if he was some incredibly significant figure they greatly desired to confide in.
The most surprising thing about Douglas was that this man, who seemed to be some sort of deranged irresponsible monkey, was able to run a business employing nearly 100 people at its peak.
Other people
Regarding the above serious problems with my parents, I had some support from other people which I should mention. My grandmother and aunt had evidently noticed that there was something extremely seriously wrong with my mother, and to try to give me some relief, they used to invite me to visit them in London. I used to travel there more than once a month, usually going on the National Express coach from Bristol to Paddington, and stayed in the guest room of my grandmother's old people's home called the Harrison Homes which was in St James Gardens. My grandmother used to give me all sorts of books to read from the library in the home, such as a biography of the actor Peter Finch, or a book of reminiscences by a Norwegian soldier who'd stayed in the UK during WW2. After I got married my aunt told my wife that they had both been extremely upset by seeing the cruel way my mother was treating me and ended up in tears about it.
There were a couple of problems with my grandmother and aunt. My grandmother as she got older found it difficult to stop talking, and sometimes when I visited she would talk for three hours without stopping, usually about coincidences, between people who'd known other people who knew other people who knew some other people, generally something to do with India where she'd worked during the period of British rule. My aunt, an unmarried woman, although she was quite kind-hearted, was very keen to give me jobs to do, and she would seemingly want to fill my days with trivial tasks. For whatever reason she was fond of putting words in my mouth, and decided that I liked going to see musicals, and watching Jim'll Fix It, so we'd go and see Michael Crawford in Barnum or something like that, and we always had to watch Jimmy Savile, even though I actually hated him. Anyway I'm very grateful to my grandmother and aunt for trying to help.
My stepmother Jackie evidently noticed the problems with my mother but didn't say anything about it directly to me. I'm not sure what she said to my father. When I was staying at my father's house things got a lot better for me in terms of not suffering the attacks and abuse from my mother, but there were some quite bad problems in terms of neglect, in that Douglas wouldn't help with dirty laundry, school lunch, or give me the bus fare for school, and I stupidly ended up moving back into my mother's house. In fact it fell to Jackie to look after me in Douglas's house, again making a complete mockery of my father's claim that he wanted to help my mother. He was quite prone to making up stories about how Jackie was complaining about this, that and the other, or somehow or another was suffering from some bout of something or another, as a way of getting out of doing things to help my mother. I didn't realise how much of this was lies until he separated from Jackie, and all the "problems" which previously had been blamed on Jackie suddenly became the fault of someone or something else. Evidently these were all his problems.
I think I was starting to show signs of abuse during primary school. A friend from primary school said that I was walking around pretending to be a Dalek all the time when I was ten. I remember just crouching up in the playground. In the secondary school, I am sure I had a lot of behaviour problems, but nobody from the school was interested to help me, with the exception of the art teacher I've mentioned above, Mr Black, who tried to get me to make some plans. I still somewhat despise some of the teachers at Bristol Cathedral School, who often seemed to want to play favourites. Another boy I made friends with there had some very serious problems in his family too, and he ended up deliberately failing his examinations and leaving the school at sixteen, despite being quite bright. I think the school could have done better in terms of care for pupils like me or him.
When I got to university I had quite a lot of problems, to put it very mildly, so I did get some help from the student counsellor at my university. It was the first time I'd been able to talk about my mother to anyone, so it was a useful thing to do. One problem with the student counsellor was that she tended to "fill in the gaps" with her own thoughts and ideas rather than listening to me, so she ended up with a bit of a distorted picture. I could not get a word in edgeways about my father, for whatever reason. I was incredibly glad not to have to deal with my parents any more once I got to the university, and I wasn't greatly upset by my mother dying just after I finished my second year there, but she seemed to think that I'd been having a terrible time at the university, whereas actually the terrible time was before that, having to deal with my mother and father, and the university and my mother dying was a great escape for me.