Kicking the Pricks by Derek Jarman

Author:Derek Jarman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2018-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

Her life was as open as my father’s was closed. All our childhood friends came to our house, everyone was welcome. One afternoon I came down to the kitchen to find her entertaining a black preacher nearly seven feet tall with dreadlocks; he was hell-bent on baptising her with a bottle of cooking oil. She persuaded him not to pour it over her hairstyle and had me baptised on my knees on the kitchen floor instead. She made him a meal, and while she was doing this, my father came back from work in his bowler and monocle, and retreated into his workshop without a word. She was game for anything to liven up the suburban monotony.

It seemed strange that my sister and I never put two and two together, until the week of my mother’s death. The disappearances were quite dramatic. My mother unwisely said one afternoon: ‘I’m leaving you your grandmother’s pearls’ (her most valuable possession); they disappeared without trace. After her death the situation degenerated into a tragi-comedy, as my father switched his attention to his grandchildren. The saddest development was his treatment of his eldest grandson which reproduced our relationship. Sam was the first to accuse my father. At the age of four, blamed by my sister for something that had been lost, he said quite innocently: ‘Grandad took it.’ My father flew into a rage and demanded a grown-up apology, and from that moment pointedly bullied or avoided the child. Sam never got a birthday or Christmas present, and this was always cruelly emphasised by my father. ‘There’s something for Kate, but there’s nothing for you Sam, and you know why.’ If our society condoned patricide, I think both my sister and I would have attempted it. We discussed it half-jokingly over the telephone often enough.

In the summer of 1986 my father had a stroke which left him with no speech and little movement. By a miracle his character changed. When I arrived at his bedside in Southampton General Hospital he broke into a radiant smile. These silent and public encounters were hardly an ordeal. It had never been possible to talk to him. Now both of us talked at him. If there was any meeting of our minds, it was marked by formal silence. He seemed happier than I ever remembered. Perhaps he was always a child who wished to be looked after. He had changed one cell for another: the location seemed of little importance. He sat at the window staring blankly into the road. Back at his home my sister and I sorted through the maddest inheritance. 90 bottles of whisky (he never drank), enough baked beans to fill a kitchen cupboard, 100 stolen cartons of lavatory paper, on and on, drawer after drawer, pens by the gross, envelopes by the thousands. Nothing in the place we expected. I suggested, half-joking, we could make use of a metal detector. In a cupboard I found two presentation photo mounts in leather embossed with the Royal Coat of Arms.

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