1967
Longleat.
Greater World Foundation. Harry Edwards. Spiritual healing. Ouija board. Seances.
1968
1969
It is July 20, 1969, just before 4am in the morning.
My mother and I are watching crackling images of Neil Armstrong stepping out of the lunar module, beginning his historic walk down Apollo 11’s ladder.
I am 12 years, 7 months and 5 days old …
Crackle … “That’s one small step for Man” … crackle ….
At that exact moment, hearing my father’s steps across the bedroom floor above us, she interrupts and talks over what would become the most famous sentence ever uttered throughout all of human history
“One giant leap for Mankind”
“Do you know what, Christopher?” My mother pauses and looks up at the ceiling. Refering to my father still making a noise upstairs, she continues.
“It’s legalized rape, that’s what it is”, briefly pausing before adding …
“He pulls my legs apart like a chicken”.
This is my mother wilfully, purposefully sowing seeds directly into my mind with a single goal of encouraging me to hate my father.
I was 12 years old. I didn’t really comprehend the mechanics of the physical act she was referring to but I, obviously, understood the deliver and tone of the words.
Exactly 2 and a half years later, during the pitch black of the power cuts of an Edward Heath UK government, with Greg the Beagle’s lead tied to a heavy suitcase, my mother and I crept out of our house at Buckler’s Mead Rd, walked down Birchfield Rd and eventually made it to town where, from her friend Mabel’s Dress Agency address, my mother, with my own naive and brainwashed blessing, left home for the Isle of Wight where her lover, an Anglo – Indian man named Frank Keywood was waiting with a brand new bungalow he had bought her in Anderri way, Shanklin.
Frank Keywood worked in telecommunications in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
The bungalow at Shanklin was bought outright with just a few months of his contracted pay and, back in Yeovil, though being just a child of 15 years and one month, I was being primed by my errant mother and her new partner to consider not just changing my name to Keywood (to hurt my father) but also to be signed over as legal owner of my mother’s half of the house she currently still owned with my father. (I know. I know. I understand how crazy this seems but imagine how I had to cope living in ‘a broken home’ with my previously good school work going down the pan a father having a history of attacking me and
I didn’t appreciate it at the time but the wicked act my mother had finally accomplished, (in poisoning my mind against my father who I still had to obviously live with), set about a devastating series of events that would peak and culminate in destabilising my own life exactly as I was going through puberty before becoming a proper young man. (At that time of my life, an added distraction I needed like a hole in the head!)
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