Someone I Once Knew

I did not have a particularly happy childhood, my father was a womanizing bastard who could not handle the responsibility of life in civvy street with a wife and twin boys and abandoned us after a few years. Mum brought us back to her family in Hull but found it very difficult coping with the stigma of being a single parent and had a nervous breakdown. My brother and I went to stay with aunt Sally (Newland Sailors Home) for a year or two until Mum "got on her feet again". Mum remarried her childhood sweetheart Joe (whom she had left heartbroken a few years earlier to follow her ambition to join the Royal Navy. Although at first they kept in touch, they were many miles apart and life inevitably moved on for both of them. Mum fell in love with John Nicholas (a dashing Navy Lieutenant) while serving in Singapore and my twin brother (Mike) and I were the result).

Much of this can be found in Mums book "Out of the Chrysalis". Anyway to cut a long story short, Joe Shepherd had a deep rooted resentment of my brother and I that stemmed back from this period. He was a control freak and an Alcoholic and although there are happy memories from that time, they are sadly sullied by his treatment of Mum and ourselves over time.

Mum fell pregnant with twins again but there were complications and sadly Gary John was still born although Caroline survived. A year or so later Gary was born and then Dianne and my younger brother David.
Dad used to work for Hull Corporation Telephones (as it was then known). Before that he was a fireman on the railways. He could not cope with change and was a very heavy "social drinker".

For my part I was quite clever and passed my 11 plus examinations and as time went on, as the oldest I was pushed to achieve academically (my brother Mike was a very sickly child). I felt under a great deal of pressure to achieve but I was hormonal and still a virgin at 15 yrs old and ran away from home and the situation (to loose my virginity in a workman's hut at the side of the road leading out of the town instead of sitting for my GCEs). For a time I did not look back as I was afraid to face the consequence of my behavior but later discovered that i did not really know the girl I had run away with and I was appalled to discover that she was stealing from people that were good enough to take us in. We had a massive argument about this and she climbed into a truck drivers cab and left me standing at the side of the road. I returned home.

Dad refused to allow me back into the house unless I "took the cure" for drugs and signed myself into De La Pole hospital (the local house on the hill) and proved to him that I was drug free (this was 1970 and he was paranoid that drugs were taking over the world and would through me, be the ruination of his family) but for my part I had only tried a joint or two as no-one would give us anything as we were so young.
My relationship with my Dad deteriorated massively from that point on as I felt that if I had to accept "the cure" for something I had very little experience of then I was damned sure that I was going to find out about it in my own way. Dad did everything he could to stop me of course, by plying my brother with alcohol to loosen his tongue to find out where I was and what I was up to and informing the local drug squad of any developments, but nothing would deter me. De La Pole became the soft option to prison and any publicity was better then no publicity as far as I was concerned.
This whole situation spiraled uncontrollably until at 19 yrs old I was a complete and utter mess after taking and mixing just about anything I could get my hands on, on a daily basis over the period. One day I did not take anything but felt myself tripping and I just did not come down. two days later I was rushed into De La Pole Hospital after being followed by alien spaceships to my girlfriends home, I though I was being abducted by aliens after spending much of the previous night talking to the ghosts of Adolf Hitler and Jimi Hendrix.
The doctors assessed that the only course of treatment was eight sessions of ECT which left me cabbaged for a considerable period of time, however I was determined to remember what had happened to me and I once again embarked on a drug fuelled mission of self obsession.

I was also of course caught up in the time of the British Woodstock, Bickershaw Festival, a plethora of our favorite West Coast Musicians that happened in 1972 and which was the total experience. A windswept thunderstorm in a sea of mud and in the presence of the legendary Dr John aka the Night Tripper and then later Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band at 4.00 in the morning was ,for me both phenomenal and unforgettable.

Later the next day as the psychotropic haze wore off we were treated to the Greatful Dead who proved that discomfort is mind over matter.