Free Semi-Detached by Griff Rhys Jones

wasn’t quite so easy-going about it: ‘No, no, Dr Rhys Jones, it
was quite right of you to call me out … I was more than happy to drive out
here … that’s very kind of you, but I am on duty.’ The door banged shut. The
front door knocker rattled as usual. There was asignificant pause as my
father lingered by the door. It was The Winslow Boy in reverse. He was
thinking up a cruel and unusual punishment, and who could blame him?
    If the
family had stayed in Midhurst would we gradually have fitted in more? Would I
have felt less like an outsider, less willing all my life to be a voyeur,
looking in on the lighted window across the square, or the gravel drive, and
the Georgian house glowing in the sun, or the clink of glasses and the bray of
public-school certainties? After all, ‘in the local kindergarten one of my
classmates was Lucy Cowdray Her father, Lord Cowdray, came and stood with a red
face and flat cap at the sports days watching us do somersaults. Jimmy Summers,
my best friend, had a maid who wore a uniform. Their house was huge. When we
played at Jimmy Summers’ house he could reach into a toy chest and pull out a
set of lead toy boats which, astonishingly, included scale models of every ship
that took part in the battle of Jutland — Germans too. It took us hours to lay
them out across his vast playroom floor. It must have come from some family
connection. The sort we lacked. There were fancy dress competitions at the
local church fete where I was dressed as a Mexican with a burned cork
moustache, but they were always won by some damned people who had the same elaborate
costumes every year and fooled the visiting judges. I sang the treble opening
to ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ at the local carol service. ‘Jab’ and the
Benicky boys and the general Tory heartland benevolence of this pre-war English
Eden easily sucked my mother in. She loved the social whirl. Who knows, it
might have even broken down my father’s natural defences. I would have gone to
a public school, like my boyhood friends. We would have had chintzy furniture, and
my father would have had to learn to like cocktail parties. But when I was
seven, my father started looking for another job. In some shadow world, down at
the hospital, there was another, rather different father, the dedicated, stern
and diligent chest physician who had toiled, between woodwork projects, to get
more qualifications and who was now expecting promotion but not getting it, in
the cloistered and class-ridden atmosphere of what was after all an ex-RAF
hospital. It was time for him to move on. My mother’s friends could hardly
believe it. It was not just the idea of promotion, throwing up the world of
the sanatorium and the close-knit society to which they were all so firmly
attached. It was the location. ‘How will you cope, Gwyneth? It will be too
awful.’
    We were
moving to Essex.

 
     
     
    4. Swimming in Essex
     
     
    The M25/M11 intersection,
a colossal masterpiece of road engineering visible from Mars, lies slumped in
the bottom of the valley of Epping Green. Wendy Davies’ architect father had a
house there, where I first listened agog in the semidarkness to Leonard Cohen.
I’d be lucky to hear him now. The traffic whistles in all directions at once,
but the nearby hill is still topped by a castellated beacon: Epping’s water
tower.
    I see
this turret of my old home virtually every weekend, but I never ever venture
off to look at where I lived for fourteen years. When I did, I didn’t know how.
‘You presumably have to come off the M11 early,’ I explained to my wife, Jo,
who was driving. The map-book was under the dog, and the dog was asleep. ‘You’ll
have to come off where it says Loughton.’
    ‘If you
want to come off for Epping,’ chimed in my mother from the front seat, ‘you’ll
have to come off for Loughton.’
    My
mother is a little deaf. The noise of the car made it more difficult for her.
She obviously heard things, but