Tony Parsons: One For My Baby

I was at teacher-training college by the time my dad’s book came out, so I watched its ascent of the bestseller lists from a distance. It felt like one moment my father was what he had been forever-a journalist hanging around training grounds hoping for a few exclusive grunts from twenty-year-old footballers on thirty grand a week, and the next he was a bestselling author, cocooned by six-figure royalty checks, regularly appearing on the artier kind of talk shows, getting recognized in restaurants.

I know it wasn’t that easy. Oranges for Christmas took years to write. But success always looks like it has come quickly, no matter how hard the rock it is carved from. And it felt like almost overnight my father went from being an unknown sports journalist to a respected writer, doing events in bookstores where he gave a reading, answered questions and signed copies of Oranges for Christmas. People actually place a value on his autograph these days, just like those fans at training camps who wait for the twenty-year-old footballers on thirty grand a week.

Oranges for Christmas: A Childhood Memoir was a good book. I liked it a lot. I wasn’t bitter that it cast a massive shadow over my own half-baked dreams of writing for a living. It deserved its success.

The book was about my father’s childhood in the East End, about how they were poor but happy, and how my dad and his army of brothers and sisters almost died of joy if they got an orange for Christmas.

Oranges for Christmas is full of dirty-faced urchins having a rare old time hunting for rats on bomb sites while their next-door neighbors are being blown up by the Luftwaffe. There is a lot of death, disease and rationing in Oranges for Christmas but the reason it sold so well is because it is ultimately as comforting as a cup of hot, sweet tea and a milk-chocolate cookie. For all the gritty anecdotes about polio, nits and the Nazis, my old man’s book is endlessly sentimental about a kind of family that no longer seems to exist.

And that’s ironic because Oranges for Christmas dropped like one of Hitler’s buzz bombs among my father’s family. His brothers and sisters were all happily settled into respectable middle age by the time Oranges for Christmas appeared. Suddenly their adventures of half a century ago were in the public domain.

My dad’s eldest sister, my Auntie Janet, did not appreciate my dad telling the world about the time their own father had caught Janet jacking off a GI during a blackout. In the book the story was told as lovable, where-are-my-trousers farce, but the revelation caused a sensation at Auntie Janet’s branch of the Women’s Institute, where to this day she remains chief jam-maker.

My dad’s brother Reg also hit the roof when he saw Oranges for Christmas. A bank manager in the Home Counties for many years, Uncle Reg felt my father had gone too far by revealing how one night during the Blitz, Reg, then four years old, had struggled into the Anderson air raid shelter in their back garden with his pants around his ankles and his tiny winkle quivering with fear. Uncle Reg felt that wasn’t the image a bank manager should project to his customers in the current market.

Then there was Uncle Pete, a teenager in the book, whose exploits in the black market made many a young housewife with no nylons and a husband at the front willing to-as Pete called it-“put the kettle on.” Uncle Pete-or Father Peter as he is known these days-had a lot of explaining to do to his congregation.

Auntie Janet giving executive relief to a young American soldier bound for the beaches of Normandy, Uncle Reg wetting his pants as the bombs dropped, Uncle Pete exchanging his virginity for a pair of nylons-the reading public loved this stuff. And thanks to Oranges for Christmas, everybody loves my old man. Apart from all his brothers and sisters and most of the people he grew up with in the old neighborhood.

They don’t talk to him any more.

When you come back home after living abroad, you see your country with the eyes of a time traveler.

I was gone for just over two years, from the spring of 1996 to the summer of 1998. That’s not very long at all, but now time seems somehow dislocated. A lot of that is to do with Rose, of course. When I left I didn’t know she existed, and now that I am back I don’t know how I can live without her.

But it’s not just about Rose, this sense of displaced time.

It’s there when I am driving my dad’s car, looking at a newspaper, eating a meal with my parents. Everything is just a little bit out of whack.

There are refugees on the Euston Road for a start. That’s new. I see them from my father’s Mercedes-Benz SLK. And the refugees see me, because my old man’s little red roadster is a car that is designed to attract attention, although probably not from people who have recently fled poverty and persecution.

There were no refugees on the Euston Road when I went away. You got the odd drunk with his hopeful bucket but nobody from the Balkans. Now these thin men and boys swarm around the stalled traffic in front of King’s Cross Station, squirting windscreens and scraping away the grime, even when you ask them not to. The refugees point at their mouths, a gesture that looks vaguely obscene. But they are just saying that they are hungry.

That’s all new.

And it’s not just the refugees on the Euston Road.

Terry Wogan is playing REM on Radio 2. Princess Diana is rarely mentioned. And perhaps most shocking of all, my father has started going to a gym.

All these things seem incredible to me. I thought Wogan only played middle of the road music-but then perhaps REM became MOR while my back was turned. I believed that Diana would be as visible in death as she was in life. And I thought that my dad was the last person in the world who would ever start fretting about his love handles.

The old place looks pretty much the same-frighteningly like its old self, in fact-but everywhere there are clues that things are secretly different.

Michael Stipe is suddenly whining among the easy listening. Diana is a part of history. And my old man has jacked in the takeout chicken tikka masala and is talking about the benefits of a full cardiovascular workout.

Sometimes it hardly feels like the same country.

I am currently living with my parents. Thirty-four and still at home-it’s not great. But it’s not the house where I grew up-that would be just too sad-so living with them doesn’t feel as though I’ve completely regressed to childhood. At least, not until my mum hands me my pajamas, all neatly washed and ironed.

It’s just a temporary thing. As soon as I get my life back together, as soon as I get a job, I’m going to find myself a flat. Somewhere close to work. I want it to look exactly like the apartment that Rose and I had in Hong Kong. We had a good place. I was happy there.

And I know I should be trying to move on. I know that I should be trying to put my time with Rose behind me. I know all of that.

But if you believe that you can recognize someone you have never met before, if you believe that there is just one person in the world for you, if you believe that there’s only one other human being out there who you can love, truly love, for a lifetime-and I believe all of these things-then it follows that there’s no point in pretending that tomorrow is another day and all that crap.

Because I’ve had my chance.

They’ve got this huge house now, my mum and dad. One of those tall white houses in Islington that looks big from the front and then goes on forever once you get inside. They’ve even got a swimming pool. It wasn’t always this way.

When I was growing up and my old man was still a sportswriter, we lived in a tatty Victorian row house in a part of town that gentrification never quite reached. After Oranges for Christmas became a bestseller, everything changed.