I Read the News Today, Oh Boy by Paul Howard

Author:Paul Howard [Howard, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509800056
Publisher: Picador

10: FULL SWING

Nicki thought her second pregnancy was going to go on forever. The baby was more than a month overdue. Tara took her across London in his Lotus Elan to Cable Street in the East End – the scene of a famous battle between Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts and anti-Fascist protesters back in 1936 – and they drove up and down the cobbled road. ‘Someone told us that you could induce labour that way,’ she remembered, ‘driving over cobbles in a low suspension car. Of course, it didn’t work.’

In the end, the baby was delivered by caesarean section on 1 March 1965, three days before Tara’s twentieth birthday. It was a boy. They named him Julian Dominick: Julian after Tara’s friend, Julian Ormsby-Gore, and Dominick after Dom, the baby’s grandfather.

They went to Ireland to allow Nicki to recuperate at Luggala. Tara had some business to attend to in London and he arrived a day or two later. Nicki was waiting for him in the arrivals hall of the then tiny Dublin Airport when she fell into conversation with an American teenager, who was waiting for his French girlfriend to arrive on a flight from Barcelona. He told her that his name was Rock Brynner.

‘Nothing to do with Yul Brynner?’ Nicki wondered.

Rock laughed in an embarrassed way. ‘Actually, yeah,’ he said, ‘he’s my dad.’

Growing up, Rock had become fixated with Ireland. He loved the plays of Samuel Beckett and, at the age of sixteen, knew his way around James Joyce’s Ulysses. So he enrolled in Trinity College in Dublin and moved into a flat in Rathgar, south of the city, just a couple of miles from the nursing home where Tara first entered the world.

‘I had this wonderful French girlfriend,’ he remembered, ‘who was extraordinarily beautiful, who lived with her parents on the Costa Brava and who used to commute backwards and forwards to Dublin to see me. And this particular evening, I was waiting at Dublin Airport for her to arrive when I got chatting to this girl, Nicki, who was waiting for her husband, Tara.

‘Nicki was from – I think – an Irish farming background, but she didn’t sound like a girl from an Irish farming background. She sounded like she was English upper class – like a young, crazy aristocrat. And I suppose that’s part of what made London so exciting in the 1960s. You could reinvent yourself like that. You know, men could wear furs and doormen didn’t blink an eye!’

Tara eventually arrived. Nicki made the introductions and Tara invited Rock and his girlfriend to come with them to Luggala. Over the course of the weekend, Tara introduced him to hashish, and, as they bonded over a joint, they discovered how much they had in common. ‘We came from different social backgrounds,’ Rock remembered, ‘but our place in those societies was much the same. Tara, like myself, was often the only child in a room full of remarkable adults – adults who didn’t usually tolerate the presence of a child.

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