23 JULY 2005, Page 42

A family affair

Jeremy Clarke

At Pamplona for the running of the bulls, my usual spiritual, mental and physical meltdown occurred, as usual, about the fourth day. As usual I visited that awful place lit by the shocking white light of alcoholic truth and as usual I’d been frightened. And as usual I’d come home feeling a little shriven, while yet marvelling at the new depths of despair and degradation that I’d plumbed during the week-long religious knees-up.

Back in England, no sooner had I slung my foetid bag down in the hallway than I was due to leave the house again. My boy’s half-brother was 14, and to celebrate it there was the usual birthday tea at my boy’s mother’s house. Sitting shoulder to shoulder around the table when I arrived, half an hour late, were my boy, my boy’s mother, his little sister, his birthday-boy brother, his grandma, his grandpa and his mother’s poacher boyfriend. A family affair. On the table was a feast of processed and reconstituted food, plus plates of fluorescent cakes and a bowl of crisps. Everyone budged up, some with good, others with bad, grace, so that I could sit down and become part of this happy, united gathering. For fortunately this petit-bourgeois Essex cuckoo that laid an egg in their working-class Devon nest was forgiven and accepted a long time ago.

None present except my boy has been abroad. The grandparents haven’t been out of Devon. But my having always just got back from abroad excites neither envy nor curiosity. Life is difficult enough here, where things are familiar, thank you very much, without the added palaver of having to run the gauntlet of different food, weather, languages, insects and bulls running through the streets.

My boy stood up to make room for me next to him. I hadn’t seen him for just under a fortnight and I swear he was an inch, if not two, taller. ‘Good holiday?’ he said, courteously presenting his father with a homecoming plate of ham baps. With shame I saw myself lying face down on the greasy cobbles beside a puddle of my own vomit. ‘Yes and no,’ I said, transferring one to my plate.

Last week, while his father was spewing on the cobbles, my boy was diligently waiting on tables in a pub as part of a schoolrun work-experience programme. It was a nationwide schools initiative for 15-yearolds. I asked my boy how he’d got on and whether the landlord had given him anything as a thank you. The table fell silent. They already knew the answer to that one and were disgusted by it — but not surprised. At the end of the week the landlord hadn’t thanked him or even said goodbye, let alone bunged him a couple of quid. So my boy’s experience of unskilled labour, his insight into his future lot, that it is to be slavery more or less, had been, in fact, about right. ‘F—ing bastard,’ said the grandpa, his mouth so crammed to bursting that crumbs flew out in different directions. My boy loyally defended his exemployer on the grounds that he wasn’t obligated to pay him anything.

We polished off the grub and the fizzy pop, then my boy’s half-brother, whose father has never shown the slightest interest in him, in spite of living on the same council estate, opened his birthday cards. Inside them was a grand total of £110 all told, and we all put out our hands, with varying degrees of seriousness, for a loan. Then the grown-ups sat back for a smoke and a good ‘yarn’, as is customary on Sunday afternoons, birthday party or no.

The grandma kicked off with one about old Bert Tripp and Ada Brooking kneeling together at the altar rail to get married, and the congregation tittering because they’d left the price tags on the soles of their new shoes. Then it was the day when Amy Parson’s wig blew off in Fore Street and Darky Bartripp halted its progress by stamping on it as if he’d killed it. Inconsequential tales these are mostly, tales of innocence, poverty, and of the absurdity of the human condition. I looked around the table. The kids were squeezed in between the adults, chins on the heels of their hands, listening gravely. The poacher, more inward-looking than the rest, and slightly apart, being less human-centric than the rest of us, if at all, was carefully licking the edge of a liquorice paper. ‘Those were the days,’ finished off the grandma, as she always does. ‘Look at it now!’ And the grandpa capped that by raising himself up on one buttock and passing wind and laughing uproariously as if it was the best possible joke, one we hadn’t heard before. But furthest apart from these good folk, owing to a sleazy, reprobate way of thinking, which I sometimes like to call ‘educated’, was myself. And I felt sick at heart.