Luke Goss - I Owe You Nothing

Life in a single-parent family was not easy, even though my grandmother received a maintenance payment from my grandfather every week. It was twelve shillings (6op), which was not a bad amount immediately after the war but one which never increased, despite inflation. So my grandmother worked as a typist to support herself and my dad. They lived in a one-bedroom flat in a house without electricity, only gas lights. There was no bath, so my father was taken to Manor Street baths for a weekly wallow, and the rest of the week his mother stood him on the kitchen table and scrubbed him down.

He was introduced to music at an early age. His mother took him with her to her favourite ballets and to a concert by Edmundo Ross at the Albert Hall. She didn’t trust babysitters, so she always took him along. He remembers buying his first pop record – a Little Richard EP, when he was twelve – and having to go round to his cousin’s house to play it, because without electricity he couldn’t plug in a record player. He had a good singing voice, singing in the South London Schools Choir, until his voice broke.

When Dad was thirteen his mother remarried. His new stepfather was Denis Weston, who worked with his mother at the local electricity board. They all moved into a council flat in East Dulwich, where my father could play his records! Dad left school at sixteen with only one O level, GCE Art: he admits that, like his sons, he wasted his time at school and didn’t enjoy studying. He was good at art, but nobody encouraged him to take that any further. His only other interest was cars, so he became a trainee motor mechanic at a local garage. After a year he was transferred to the reception desk because he was good at handling customers. Three years later, dissatisfied because he wasn’t progressing fast enough, he left and joined the London Electricity Board for a short spell. Ten years after leaving school he had been through ten different jobs, including two jobs as a sales rep, one selling tyres and the other selling hosiery.

‘I wanted to go into car sales but there were no openings. I was young and naïve – I expected everything to happen quickly, I wasn’t prepared to wait. I was seriously planning to emigrate to Australia, but I met a girlfriend who changed my mind about that.’

Whilst he was in his teens Dad taught himself to play the harmonica and the guitar. By the time he was twenty the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were dominating the charts, and Dad was singing with a band, or a group as they were called in those days. It was a group which never had a name, and they only played one gig – disastrously. They used to practise at the Heal’s furniture store canteen, because the lead guitarist worked there. They were booked to fill in when the main group took a break during a dance at the Heal’s social club, in Kent. After watching the main group fail to get anybody up on their feet to dance, Dad knew they were on to a loser.

By then he was going out with Mum, and she and the girlfriend of one of the other members of the group gamely danced the whole time they were playing, although they were the only ones on the dance floor. Dad now admits this might have had something to do with the fact that they were dreadful.

It was in 1967 that my mum and my dad met; she was just twenty-one and he was twenty-three. Regardless of all that was to happen later between them, they were very much in love at the beginning – in fact, it was almost love at first sight. My mum was visiting her gran in hospital. As she walked down the corridor with her sister she saw Dad coming the other way, and they fancied each other instantly.

‘He was very attractive, and we gave each other the eye,’ says Mum. ‘When I came out after visiting-time he was waiting, and we started chatting. I’d just finished with another boyfriend who I knew was watching, so I played up to Alan like mad.’

They went out together for quite a few months, and by Christmas 1967 Dad proposed. They decided to get married the following September, but Matt and I changed their minds about that. When Mum found out she was pregnant they brought the wedding forward to April.

‘We didn’t get married because Carol was pregnant: we simply brought it forward. We’d already agreed we wanted to be married and I suppose after that we threw caution to the wind a bit,’ says Dad. ‘It was a surprise when Carol became pregnant, but not a nasty shock. We were both pleased: it was just sooner than we’d planned.’

Their main problem was finding somewhere to live. Then, only a week or two before their wedding day, they found a one-bedroom flat at the top of a house in Brockley. They didn’t let the landlady know that Mum was pregnant and managed to get away with it as Mum stayed slim for quite a few months – remarkable when you consider that she was carrying twins. Eventually the landlady found out there was a baby on the way and though she wasn’t heartless enough to throw them out, she certainly didn’t make life easy for a young mother. Although there was a big wide hall in the house, she would not let Mum leave a pram downstairs.

For the first three months of their married life Mum was able to carry on working, first as a hairdresser and later as a telephonist. But it hadn’t been an easy pregnancy: Mum had anaemia, low blood pressure, renal colic and, when she was three months pregnant, a threatened miscarriage that meant she had to spend two weeks in hospital.

She admits now that she knew nothing about babies and how they were born. ‘We went to a film about childbirth at the hospital,’ she says. ‘I assumed that by the wonders of nature the stomach opened up, the doctor lifted the baby out, and the stomach closed up again, an everyday miracle. When I saw what really happens I passed out. Alan had to get me outside. He drove to the nearest pub, dashed in and brought a double brandy out to the car for me. It seems incredible now that I could ever have been so naïve.

‘It was supposed to be the swinging sixties with everyone being permissive. But nobody had ever bothered to explain the fundamental facts of life to me.’

Soon after learning about it, Mum had to go through it. After we were born she spent ten days in hospital, and then went home to the flat in Brockley without her babies. We stayed in hospital for another month. She says:

‘It was a very strange experience, walking out of the hospital without them. I felt dreadful. I spent hours travelling back there to see them, and I was always pestering the life out of the staff on the phone. I remember one day being told that Luke was out of his incubator and holding his own. Matthew had also been taken out but then had to go back in.

‘I spent the weeks when they were in hospital getting ready for them at home. The pram had to be changed for a twin one, and I had to get lots of extra clothes, nappies and everything else.

‘Then, when they came home, it was a matter of survival. They were being fed every three hours, day and night. I was so, so tired, and there was no help. Alan was scarcely there – he was working very long hours. It was very hard work and I was very lonely. I had a boiler for the nappies, and the kitchen seemed to be permanently full of steam.

‘If I took them out I had to first carry the base of the pram down three floors to the hallway, go back for the body of the pram, go back again for the first baby and then make a fourth trip up and down for the second one. Coming back in I had to repeat the same procedure. I was dying of tiredness.

‘But despite that, I adored having them. I sat for hours by their cot – they shared one at first – just watching them.’

At this time Dad had a job working for a firm that supplied and stocked kiosks selling souvenirs all over the tourist areas of London. It paid well and gave him a car, but the hours were appalling. He worked for thirteen weeks with only one day off, and that was the day we were born.