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playing guitar. I would really thrash it for hours on end, and I became completely obsessed with it. I must have driven everybody mad with the noise, but my father never said a word. I think he was glad I’d found something I could focus on, and I doubt I would have had that sort of freedom had my mother been around.
    IT was inevitable that my parents would divorce, which was something people just didn’t do in the early seventies. We grew up watching
Coronation Street,
a cozy English TV soap opera and people in the fictitious Northern town where it was set just didn’t do things like that, it was a complete taboo. Cullercoats was like
Coronation Street
with fish.
    It was difficult at school because I didn’t know whom to confide in, but when I did I soon found out that plenty of my mates came from families with similar problems.
    But the truth is that by the time my mother contacted us again, I wasn’t exactly missing her. Life had improved because there was no more tension. When she finally got in touch, it came in the form of a handwritten letter, which my father showed me one morning out of the blue. I remember being struck by how matter-of-fact the tone of her note was. She simply told us where she was living and said it was our choice if we wished to get in touch. There was no explanation of why she had abandoned us, but what really shocked me was the fact she’d been staying just a few hundred yards away from my grammar school. I wondered whether or not she’d watched me getting off the bus on all those winter mornings, and I questioned how it was that I’d never spotted her myself. She must have seen me coming and going; it would have been impossible not to. I was angry with her, too, for trying to put the responsibility about whether or not to see her again onto my shoulders.
    “So I’ve got a choice now, have I? I don’t remember having any choice in the matter last September,” I said to myself.
    I guess it must have taken a lot for her to have written that note after such a long time, and I understand that for any parent it can be difficult when you make a mess of things. But it was too late. I didn’t want to see her.
    LATER on, when I got to about thirteen or fourteen, sometimes I used to think that maybe I should do something about the fact my mother was no longer part of my life, but then I’d think,
Actually, you know what? As it stands there isn’t much wrong with the way things are
. To go back and try to integrate everything again would have been almost impossible without causing everyone a whole lot of new pain. To this day I still don’t know the full facts, and there are questions that I will never get an answer to, but as far as I know she moved in with another man. And I now know I have a half brother who was born later on, so I guess she had to make some difficult decisions of her own.
    My father and I were going to church during the time that he was having troubles with my mum. He used the church as a means to help him through it all, but he knew he would be eventually excommunicated if he were to divorce, and so he faced a horrible dilemma. At one point he sat me down and asked me if I felt he should try and give things another chance with my mum. I had to be honest and I simply asked him how many more chances he would have to take before he knew it would never work. The fact that we were forced to discuss a lot of adult issues together meant I learned to communicate with him on an adult level at a very early age, and I guess it brought us a lot closer together. We used to sit together for hours on end at night talking, and he explained politics and all his views about the world to me.
    Church certainly played an important part in our lives. Our vicar, the Reverend Eric Zachau, helped me a lot when it was time to study for my confirmation exams. My dad used to do little carpentry jobs for him, and at one point when I was an altar boy I would carry a wooden cross that my dad had made.