Where Did It All Go Right? Read Online Free PDF

and damnation I would have tried a bit harder with Pete’s Embassy Number Ones. As it is, I know that Mum – an ex-smoker – would have disapproved loudly if I’d taken smoking up as a covert habit, but it was never cast as the original sin.
    Getting water inside our wellies carried a sterner punishment. And we risked that all the time.
    Let’s get this clear: Mum and Dad weren’t hippies. They were very much the rock’n’roll generation; married before peace and love, Mum was pregnant with me when President Johnson launched Operation Rolling Thunder in Vietnam. In fact the
laissez-faire
attitude they maintained while Simon and I grew up was quite an achievement for two straights. (Hippies make terrible parents anyway: liberals are just as oppressive as fascists. Mum and Dad were just grateful the world hadn’t ended during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.)
    My dad’s a laid-back sort of bloke. So am I. It must be in the genes then, because Pap Collins was not the worrying kind either. In fact, Pap took it to the extreme, and allowed old-fashioned stoicism to prevent him from ever seeing a doctor until it was too late. 5 He managed to turn ‘not worrying’ into a self-destructive act. At least my dad speaks up if he has an ache or pain. Whenever I talk myself out of visiting my doctor, I can hear the stubborn, scared voice of my Pap, who claimed he took his own teeth out by tying a piece of string to a doorknob and ended his days in hospital with one leg less than he’d started out with.
    My dad worries only out of loyalty to my mum, who worries as a form of catharsis. It’s a way of life for her. I think she enjoys a little fret. Yet she managed to hold back throughout my formative years, an act of long-sighted reason for which I am eternally indebted. She lost it completely when I was 17 and she decided I was gay, but then maybe the Cuban Missile Crisis consumed so much of her worry, it took her 20 years to get back into her stride. It’s a thought. Even my laid-back dad was a bit anxious when those Soviet merchant vessels approached the US blockade on 27 October 1962.
    * * *
    Were it not for Khrushchev, I could have been born in the London Borough of Sutton (which would have been poetic because that’s close to where Julie’s mum lives now). Rather adventurously, Dad had lived in a rented flat in London for almost a year when he married Mum. He shared with his best mate and later best man, Jim 6 and I’ll bet they had a swinging time. I know they sometimes drank in the same pub as the great British screen actor Jack Hawkins. They never spoke to him, but perhaps they should have. A couple of years after they’d quit London, he lost his voice following a throat cancer operation. 7
    He carried on making films, usually dubbed, until his death in 1973. Jack Hawkins meant something to me only in retrospect – it’s likely I never even saw
The Bridge on the River Kwai
or
Zulu
until after he’d departed – but my dad had gone to the pictures to see him in Charles Frend’s
The Cruel Sea
back in the Fifties and he’d left an indelible mark on the boy; just as Brigitte Bardot would later do for entirely different reasons. Legend has it that Dad and Jim went to see one Bardot film three times, because you glimpsed her bare back in it. A swinging time.
    By the time my mum decided that I was gay in the early Eighties, homosexuality was out in the open and on
Top of the Pops
. But in the early Sixties, when Dad’s landlords decided that he and Jim were gay, it was a truly underground lifestyle choice, the stuff of codes and slang and nods and winks. But Dad and Jim, innocent provincial boys who’d barely unpacked their suitcases, read nothing into the fact that their landlords were
two men
who
lived together
downstairs. Furthermore, he and Jim fancied Brigitte Bardot, which allowed them to share a tiny flat – and a double bed – with impunity. So when London’s gayest landlords invited them downstairs for