12
Geronimo
Claire got pregnant in a castle on our honeymoon, which was the best thing yet. The worst thing about the early stages of pregnancy is that it’s practically all you can think about, but you’re not supposed to tell anybody. I thought it was obvious anyway. We had to go to Marks & Spencer every week to get bigger bras, and pants. It’s best not to tell anyone the news in the first twelve weeks, because a quarter of pregnancies miscarry in the early stages. If all looks good at the twelve-week scan, you’re in with a good shot. At that stage you get graphs and comparative statistics on the likelihood of various aspects of the foetus being ‘normal’. Normality was a condition I had been shirking all my adult life. I suddenly found myself longing and wishing for something absolutely typical. I wanted everything about the baby and the pregnancy to be as ordinary as possible. The more in the middle of a line something was, the better I felt about it.
I think it is impossible for anybody with a vivid sense of reason to know how they would feel about continuing a pregnancy with complications until confronted with the situation.
Claire’s older brother Robert was physically disabled and he only lived until he was four. She sometimes says she can remember stealing his toys and then she goes quiet. Our consultant wanted to know exactly what was wrong with Robert, but we couldn’t trace his medical history and we only had one photograph of him. From what we could piece together, he had a genetic condition. When we spotted an unmistakable little willy on the scan, and it was clear we were having a boy, things went into overdrive. A Harley Street genetic specialist explained there was a fifty-fifty chance that Claire would be able to have healthy male offspring. It took him about an hour and lots of new words to explain why. Claire had to have her DNA flown to Switzerland for testing. At the time when we should have been breaking the happy news, we had even more to think about, but the little racing heartbeat had become the most precious thing in the world.
I liked the doctor. I like experts. I never met a true expert I didn’t like. Knowledge is an irresistible, benign enchantment. Genetics wasn’t as well understood when Robert was alive, so it was difficult to know what the exact cause of his troubles might have been. It might not have had a name, back then. In Switzerland, they were looking for translocated XX anomalies. That was the main worry.
We went back to see the doctor and he said Claire’s XX department was all located fine and dandy. I stood outside of myself for a moment. We’d both become preoccupied with the possibility of having to face a difficult decision. I suddenly found I had a lot to say, more than ever before. I couldn’t stop talking. I felt weightless. Claire was cracking a huge smile. The doctor was enjoying the moment and we blethered for ages. He reckoned it was all going to be fine but we still shouldn’t tell anyone until all the results were back, but that was really just a formality.
Then there was a phone call saying he wanted to see us again. I went into a bit of a panic. Why did he want to see us again? He said it was all Jim Dandy. There was nothing left to say on the matter, just loose ends to tie up. We didn’t have to go and see him about million-to-one-shot loose ends unless there was bad news. I couldn’t keep my cool. We got the first appointment we could and sat on the edge of our seats staring at him wide-eyed, the two of us.
‘Everything OK?’ he said. We both pointed out he was the best one to tell us that. ‘Oh, yes. No worries there, nothing to worry about. Just, you know, wanted to see how you were getting on, all part of the service, ahem.’
I felt my bodyweight disappear again, but as I floated down this rendezvous suddenly all seemed a bit pointless. The guy was a gene specialist, not a midwife. Midwives are the people you talk to about sore bosoms, milkshake cravings and all that stuff. My genetic make-up was doing fine thanks, no problems there as far as I could tell at the moment, doctor, cheers. Claire’s DNA was evidently scrubbing up OK, too, so really, all fine. All fine in the gene department, thanks very much.
As we were leaving he asked if he could have a couple of tickets for the Blur gig at Brixton Academy!
The Hospital of St John & St Elizabeth in St John’s Wood, ‘John and Lizzie’s’ to its guests, often has more paparazzi in attendance outside than patients on the wards within. Among the photographed it’s the most fashionable private hospital to launch your latest progeny. The Portland Hospital is still the hip place to get your ears tested, and I wouldn’t go anywhere else, but for celebrity childbirth it’s got to be John & Lizzie’s. They have very big baths on the birthing unit, almost as big as the ones in the Mercer Hotel. They sell the candlelit New Age homoeopathic, yogaromatherapy delivery package. These things are all popular among famous women.
We started going to visualisation classes. The idea of the ‘Visualisation for Childbirth’ course is to form a clear picture of what the birth is going to be like, so that you know what to expect and you’re not wildly dreading a big painful unknown. It definitely helped take some of Claire’s fears away. We lay on big cushions in a fug of ylang-ylang and sandalwood, imaginizing calm taxi rides to familiar surroundings, soft music playing at the birth centre, a nice big lovely bath, and then a most wonderful natural, extraordinary thing happening. We went into great detail. I often happily dozed off in the sessions. It harked back to childhood bedtimes. There’s a part of the brain that just can’t resist stories, the same part that likes experts. We seem to need them and there’s something about visualisation that’s better than television, or films. It’s like a very intimate, tailor-made radio play and it casts the listener in the lead role. I thought the acupuncture business Claire was having was probably bunk and people who talk about ‘energy’ are, frankly, silly, but there was something fair and simple about this kind of hocus-pocus. Of course it all went out of the window when the contractions kicked in.
I distinctly remember hearing Claire say, ‘I don’t WANT to go in the bath. I want some DRUGS. I want some drugs right NOW. GIVE ME SOME DRUGS!’ She’d been in the ‘birthing pool’ for hours and hours and nothing was budging. More and more people arrived and the lights got brighter. It was definitely all moving away from the calm candlelit herbal scenario we’d been working on. It was four o’clock in the morning when the obstetrician arrived, big, black, smiling and wearing an Arsenal top.
There is a part of everyone that recoils at the thought of seeing their loved one up on the jacks being poked around by a rubber-gloved gooner. Some fathers choose not to be at the birth of their children; it’s quite a trend. Some mothers prefer to have their super best friend as a ‘birthing partner’. I couldn’t have missed it. I was down at the business end gawping and crying. The baby was stuck in the birth canal, and a medieval-looking contraption called a ventouse, a kind of plunger like you’d use for sorting out a blocked sink, was squidged on to the little head somewhere on the other side of Claire. She was huffing and puffing, and the gooner was working up quite a sweat, too, as he pulled and heaved on the end of the plunger in the bright lights. It was hard, physical toil, like a strange tug of war. Some of the people were cheering on Claire’s team. ‘PUSH, CLAIRE, GO ON, GOOD GIRL!’ I was with the doctor. ‘PULL, PULL, NOW! NOW! COME ON THE ARSENAL!’ By the time they’d separated, the baby had a cone-shaped head. He was covered in goo and was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. No one’s ever ready for that feeling.
Building
The new house didn’t look in too bad shape. We thought we’d strip the wallpaper, redecorate, live in it for a while and modernise when the right time came. A lot of plaster seemed to be coming off with the wallpaper, so we took off some of the plaster. The walls were damp. With the walls exposed, you could see that some of the beams were rotten. The beams were rotten because the roof was leaking. So the roof had to come off. By this time it was obvious that the plumbing could do with an immediate overhaul and the electrics needed a good looking at. Old houses are like that. I’d dealt with builders and architects before, in London. Architects are a discrete genus of the species of Homo sapiens. To be a successful architect requires a similar mesmeric charm that is the bread and butter of the film director, the television evangelist, the hypnotist and the Pied Piper of Hamelin. They arrive with their little satchels and their propelling pencils. Everything about them says calm; from the crisp white sheets of paper they use to cast their spells, to their supernatural patience. They retreat, taking your dreams with them in that little satchel, and return with goblins, pixies and demigods who turn your house into dust. If all goes well you live happily ever after, but the plot thickens and takes unexpected twists along the way. People who’ve had babies bang on and on about what hard work it is. Having had a baby and builders at the same time, I’d say that builders are harder work, but I wouldn’t bang on and on about it. Other people’s builders are even less interesting than other people’s babies.
Building wasn’t something I’d ever viewed as a particularly creative process, not like art or music. Art and music happen in your mind and live there. Building, when you’re able to build anything you like, starts in your mind and then you live there. Artists and musicians enjoy a cachet that eludes the builder, but I’m starting to think that building is the most primal and satisfying of all the creative urges. As a steel beam was being craned into place, I turned to the structural engineer and said, ‘I guess it’s sculpture really, isn’t it?’
‘That’s not what we facking call it, mate! Hur, hur, hur.’
It’s easy for your dreams to run away with you, but, when all is said and done, a house is just a house. A home is something else and I gradually realised I had one. Even when it was mainly a building site it was where I wanted to be. We lived in the chaos with an ancient cooker and an open fire, doing nothing at all whenever we could. I didn’t want to go anywhere else. I’d landed.
I bought a digger. There was a huge area of concrete behind the house, about an acre, I think. I’m not sure if anybody actually knows how big an acre is. I’ve never been able to find out for sure. The area it covered was bigger than a football pitch and smaller than a cricket pitch. It was for making silage on. Silage is what cattle eat in the winter, fermented grass. I couldn’t see us needing quite that much silage ever, so I bulldozed the whole lot and a machine as big as a ship came and crunched it all into little pieces. Bulldozing concrete is about the closest feeling you can get to playing the bass in a rock and roll band. They are connected.
Now I was a builder again, like I had been when I failed my ‘A’ levels. When I worked on building sites, I dreamed about being in a band and the band was playing to huge crowds. I always knew it would happen, I just didn’t realise when it did that I’d be onstage dreaming I was on a building site.
There is always someone banging something somewhere on a farm. It’s a kind of heartbeat, and it’s as natural as the sound of a cock crowing.
There was a point when I realised that ‘farm’ is just another word for ‘building site’. A farm is a process, a continuous cycle. There is no conclusion. There were piles of manure, piles of rubble, a mountain of crunched concrete, heaps of wood, all kinds of stuff in mounds. My first inclination was to get rid of the piles and clear the place up, but piles are a farm’s vital organs. Some of the piles grew and some shrunk, but they were all being fed and milked, it seemed. I soon started to collect piles and talk about them and, indeed, to them.
We bought a couple of thousand sheep. Sheep are a good place to start. They are easy to look after and they don’t need any expensive equipment, not like babies.
Singing
My granny didn’t believe that we’d called our baby Geronimo. She kept asking what his name really was. I said that sometimes we called him Big Ears, and sometimes we called him Skippy, but his name was definitely Geronimo, and he wore it well. His first word was ‘digger’ which rang nicely with my new sense of purpose.
I saw the advert for the singing group in the doctor’s surgery. While being weighed, Geronimo had scored a direct hit on the health visitor’s slacks with a vigorous spray of baby wee. They really hate that, health visitors. They say, ‘It’s all right, happens all the time’, but it sours the atmosphere. Then he’d had his latest injections and he’d screamed and screamed at the nurse. Until then, I’d thought trumpets were the loudest thing in the world. It’s got something to do with their range. Trumpets play in the same register as shouts and screams. The Red Arrows taking off, or standing onstage at Glastonbury, sandwiched between towers of amplifiers and a hollering multitude, doesn’t give you quite the same impression of loudness as being in the same room as one other person who is playing a trumpet. And trumpets don’t get near to babies on the perceived loudness scale. It’s got nothing to do with decibels. There is something very subjective about the ear’s response to babies screaming.
We’d suffered a punctured dummy at Tesco a couple of weeks earlier and he’d gone into paroxysms of anguish. I figured that being deprived of his binky for an hour or two would do him good, toughen him up a bit. If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be really, really famous, try pushing a screaming baby around a supermarket for a few minutes. You look up and all eyes are on you. People stop what they’re doing and stare at you; they ask you if you’re all right, they nudge and point, they interfere. ‘No, he’s fine, he’s absolutely fine,’ I’d said. But they weren’t buying it. My nonchalance made them more concerned. Some had started to follow us and by the time we’d got to the beans aisle we had to abort the mission.
The surgery was full of screams here and wee there, and I was evacuating as swiftly as possible. I was halfway out of the door when I saw a little card pinned to the wall advertising a singing group for mums and babies. I paused to take down the number, avoiding the collective gaze of the waiting room.
I assumed they meant dads as well as mums. I arrived slightly late at the village hall, but I stood outside suddenly finding the need to pluck up courage. I was never nervous about going onstage or talking to rocket scientists on live television. I wasn’t fazed by Hollywood starlets or foozled by bullying billionaires. But I felt nervous now. Even when I picked up my guitar and sang Joe Strummer a melody I’d written for him it hadn’t been this bad. I was terrified. I was about to tiptoe into the delicate skein of the real world and I hadn’t been there for years.
When I got through the door the mums were singing a song about shaking a parachute, and shaking a parachute. Some babies were crawling around. Some were under the parachute laughing and some were trying to break things and fight each other. It’s invigorating to observe babies en masse.
The unaccompanied sound of mothers gently singing to their little children is the sweetest music I’ve ever heard. I was the only dad there. It was like being back in the French department at college, another matriarchal super-civilisation.
A lot of the well-known nursery rhymes are folk tunes as old as the hills. They’re a part of the human condition, and they lift the spirits like love in the morning. We sang ‘Giddy-up horsey’, did more parachute shaking, then there was one I’d never heard involving lions and rivers. The hits kept coming, though. I think it’s the best band I’ve ever been in.
I became more and more engrossed, messing around in the parish. The more things I did, the more other things suggested themselves. It felt like I was in the right place. My usual response to being told ‘There is a TV crew at the door’ is to panic. The news media only normally hound you because some heinous escapade has come to light or something nasty is brewing. It’s never normally a good sign, even if it does make the cleaner feel glamorous. There were actually two TV crews and a Sunday Times journalist in attendance by the time I got to the front door. They were all smiling, though. They took it in turns to explain that our tiny, local rural community had been voted ‘England’s Finest Village’ by Country Life magazine.
Not since arriving in Japan for the first time, poor and practically destitute, to be overwhelmed by fanatical fans at the airport, had I felt quite so ridiculous as I did now in this Cotswolds village. Being big in Japan wasn’t something I’d ever bargained for. It was just a huge slice of luck that Japan existed at all and that its people wanted to buy our records and give us presents. I had the same feeling of outrageous good fortune now as it became clear that somehow we’d landed on our feet.
Of course the notion of the best village in the country is just a bit of harmless nonsense. In fact, it made our neighbourhood the scourge of the shire. The surrounding villages, some of which have a nicer duck pond and better preserved stocks, a higher-ranking celebrity resident or less low-cost housing, were unified in their disapproval. But I felt vindicated. When we were in the process of buying the farm, almost everybody I knew had sought a quiet word with me. They all expressed their concerns about my buying a random tumbledown ruin in the middle of nowhere. It had bewildered people and now it suddenly looked like a pretty neat trick.
Gardens
I don’t know how much sense it would make to live in the country if I wasn’t married. Cities are distracting, erotic places, but love flows uninterrupted in the countryside. I suppose that’s why we moved here, because we wanted to be together. That’s the best thing about living in the country, being in a world of your own with the person you love. I was never happier than when sailing on the random breeze of fortune, but now I was settled. I still wanted to travel, but in order to travel, rather than drift, I need a home. Some people have lots of houses, but you can only really have one home, somewhere that you long to be when you’re not there, somewhere in which you can happily do nothing at all, where all your things are.
I had been nocturnal for many years. Cities only really come alive at night; that’s when all the good stuff happens. The great outdoors flourishes in the sunshine and the pleasures of the countryside are subtle and lasting, rather than short and sweet. All happy endings imply gardens. That’s just the way it is.
I had been a vegetarian for twenty years. I’d fought my way around the restaurants of the world, sending things back that had bacon sprinkled on them or chicken stock in them, enduring many a plate of overboiled vegetables, and the disdain of proud chefs everywhere. Japan was the most difficult place to fulfil the vegetarian dream. I had taken special training to make sure I could order vegetarian food in Japan, but it’s complicated. Vegetarianism is just not a notion to the Japanese. You have to explain the whole concept, every time you order a bowl of noodles. Still, more often than not it would be a disaster. ‘I’m sure this is fish,’ I said to the girl from the record label, holding up a morsel with my chopsticks. ‘No, not fish,’ she said. ‘What is it then?’ ‘Is made from fish. Is not fish.’ It was hopeless.
I think my vegetarianism stemmed from a wish to take a benevolent but passive role in nature. That role changed when we moved to the farm. You can’t be a passive farmer. I had no idea what was going on. It was two hundred acres of unknowns. I don’t know what would have happened if we hadn’t found Paddy. Paddy is a kind of farming adviser called a land agent. It’s the equivalent of a manager in showbusiness, or, probably more accurately, someone who you pay to be your dad. Paddy walked all over the land with us, inspecting fences, hedges, ditches, weed infestation levels. He appraised the state of the roofs and gutters around the farmyard, he applied for grants, he told me to see so and so about such and such. He took care of the business, and I learned a lot from him very quickly. He said we had to do something about the rooks. They were taking over. Rooks eat all the other birds’ eggs, so unless you keep them under control you end up with just rooks. The West End is teeming with rodents. There were heart-stopping rats bigger than cats in Endell Street. Mercer Street was more mouse and pigeon territory. Rentokil would come and put their traps down and that would take care of it, but there’s no easy way to deal with rooks. The only way to control them is to shoot them. It was a difficult situation for a vegetarian. In the end I resigned myself to the fact that you’re being a lot more benevolent with a twelve-bore than you are when you order the nut roast. It was a short step from whacking rooks to munching on a bacon sandwich.
It was the final step in a complete volte-face. I didn’t recognise myself any more. It only seemed like a minute ago that I was the number one slag in the Groucho Club, a boozy lascivious metropolitan vampire pacifist with too many friends. Here I was early in the morning, fresh from kippers with my wife, standing in a field alone with a shotgun. I let ’em ’ave it.
Beagle II
It was our first Christmas on the farm, 2003. Beagle was due to land on Isidis Planitia, a flat and relatively friendly part of Mars, early on Christmas morning. There was a media centre in London that had satellite links with mission control in Darmstadt. I drove up to London with my dad in the dead of night. We got there in an hour. Naturally, Colin Pillinger and his wife and the whole Beagle team were there. There were journalists, TV crews and one or two interested public figures. Everett Gibson, from NASA, was there, still showing everyone his meteorite. There were mince pies and crackers and the atmosphere was more than festive. It was tense, very exciting - the story of Beagle had become a media phenomenon. There was massive popular support for the sideburned swashbuckler and his spaceship.
We knew the lander had separated successfully from Mars Express, the mother ship, and was spinning its way towards the Martian surface. It was hard to believe it was happening. ‘Parachutes should have opened,’ said Colin. The whole room was silent. The whole city was silent. It was Christmas morning after all. I formed a mental picture of the chutes opening in the thin Martian atmosphere and the tiny machine that was taking us further into the space age. There was a lot riding on it as it hurtled, red-hot, supersonic, towards the virgin landscape. What might happen? What might we know this time tomorrow? Money, reputations, years of hard work were suspended from those remote gossamer parachutes.
Ten seconds to impact. Colin was talking to mission control on a headset. He’d been addressing the room, but now his attention was with them. We were holding our breath, waiting to hear the musical call sign that indicated Beagle had landed and was functioning. But there was no signal. It never came.
I still think Beagle was a success, in many ways. It was a triumph of aspiration, if not a victory for science. The world doesn’t leap forward by committee. It needs leaders. It needs leaders with big sideburns.
Queen
I jumped in a taxi on Oxford Street. ‘Buckingham Palace!’ I said, became aware of what I’d said and laughed out loud. I was often saying, ‘Follow that car’, and even, ‘Lose the car behind us’ wasn’t unusual, but I’d never said ‘Buckingham Palace’ to a taxi driver before. I thought he might have had more to say about it. He merely declared solemnly that Marble Arch was completely solid. For a moment I thought he was attempting some spontaneous architectural criticism, but he was referring to the traffic and not to the monolithic, eternal qualities of the structure itself. We picked our way swiftly and silently through the magic maze of Mayfair, eluding the petrified chaos of the main roads.
My experience of taxi drivers, and in fact more or less everybody, is that people naturally tend to underestimate each other. Very successful people are often refreshing because, being used to success, it’s what they identify with and what they tend to expect and see more of in people.
I once got in a taxi at Sloane Square. The driver and I were talking and he inevitably asked me what I did all day. I told him I was a musician – I was in a chatty mood. Not as chatty as him, though. He naturally assumed that I was a struggling musician. People usually do. He treated me to a well-prepared ‘Don’t you give up on it, my son’ soliloquy. ‘You’ll get there in the end,’ he said. I wondered where the hell he was talking about. I’d asked him to take me to Claridge’s.
I went to a drum shop, once, with Ben Hillier. He was the hot record producer of the moment. He was in between finishing Think Tank for Blur and starting a record with Depeche Mode. Ben has a thorough academic grounding in rhythmic principles and occult knowledge of metric pulse systems. He’d played timpani in orchestras when he was twelve; he’d engineered drum sounds on U2 albums; he’d programmed beats for Paul Oakenfold; he’d found the man with the cannons that we used on ‘Jerusalem’. I’ve never met anyone who knew more about drums than Ben. If ever there was a bona fide drum expert, it was him, and he’d just walked into the drum shop. He was looking at a vintage Gretsch kit. It was a beauty, very expensive. He was asking questions about it that I didn’t understand. The man said, ‘It’s a bit unnecessary for a home studio, if that’s what you’re looking for.’ He was quite dismissive. It wasn’t what Ben was looking for. He was looking for something that could grace Abbey Road. He was definitely being underestimated.
We were arriving at Buckingham Palace, now.
‘Where do you want, mate?’
‘I think we need to go in where those policemen are standing, by the photographers, see?’
‘In?! Yaw goin’ in? Idunbelieveit! Twenny-farve years I been waitin’! Twenny-farve years!’
‘Jesus, I didn’t think you were very impressed. How long do you think I’ve been waiting to say it?’ He wanted to know everything then, but there wasn’t time.
I noticed Beth Orton going in, giggling, and I relaxed a little bit. It was a reception for the music industry, but I hadn’t known exactly what to expect.
It was the best party I’ve ever been to. I’ve tried to work out why. There was no sex or drugs or rock and roll. It was purely about music, in all its shapes and forms. I was talking to a tin-whistle player for a while. Then I spotted my manager. He was hosting a little huddle that included Status Quo, Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins. He was doing his Basil Brush laugh and telling stories. I had no idea that he knew all these people. I went to say hello, but got talking to a lady from the Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy Foundation. She introduced me to an academic from the Guildhall School of Music. Like myself, most people had arrived without their wives, partners or friends. There were no plus ones, which meant that everyone had to talk to each other, rather than huddling around in their customary cliques. Everybody who turned up was quite excited about being at the palace, apart from Brian May, who was leaning unceremoniously against a fireplace, with his mad Louis Quatorze hair and aristocratic features, giving the impression that he was often there.
I caught up with my manager and he said, ‘Come on, you’ve got to meet the Queen.’ ‘Where is she?’ I spotted her; she was with Beth Orton and they were both giggling. The Queen seemed to be really enjoying herself, and why not? It was a great party. Mastering the two-minute encounter is part and parcel of being in a famous band. Music has a supernatural effect on people; I know, because I feel it myself. Meeting the people we have stirred is a delicate business. It’s not big-headed to suggest that sometimes members of the band spent the merest of moments with people who would really cherish the encounter and take the memory to the grave. The Queen, who does that kind of thing more than anybody, is really, really good at it, the uncontested world champion of the brief encounter. She made her way around the whole room and made everyone feel special. It’s tiring being anti-royal. I’ve felt much better about everything since I had a chat with the boss.
I think all rock stars start by wanting to destroy the world. Then their dreams come true and they end up trying to keep it like it was before they started.
It’s Twins!
It was Boxing Day 2005. We’d had dinner with the Duke and Duchess of Somerset. We kind of gatecrashed. We’d just confirmed that Claire was pregnant, days pregnant. It was really icy on the roads and really late. I’d done most rock star things, but I’d never driven a car into a tree until that night. We were almost home. I put the brakes on to slow down for the hairpin bend at the top of our valley. Nothing happened. We just kept going. We were heading for a Cotswold stone wall at deadly speed. I mounted the verge to lose some pace but lost control and we glanced off a mature oak, Quercus robur. It was a hell of a wallop. Six inches further to the left and we’d have hit it smack on. Claire might have lost her legs. As it was, she lost the baby a few days afterwards and I just don’t know how closely linked the two events were.
We were on holiday in the Maldives six months later and Claire just couldn’t get out of bed. She wanted taramasalata for breakfast, but it wasn’t that kind of hotel. I think men can tell when their wives are pregnant. I always knew before we did the test. It’s the rising shape of the breast that gives it away, more than the à la carte thing. I said we weren’t having ice cream this time. No way. It’s hard to watch your wife eat ice cream, especially when you’re really happy. I put on four stone when Geronimo was born, slightly more than Claire did. I’d worn out a pair of running shoes getting that stuff off. We both thought it might be twins. Claire was just so tired and hungry. We told the doctor and the doctor said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, you don’t want twins. It’s complicated.’ And sent us for a scan.
As soon as the ultrasound image came up on the computer screen, it was blindingly obvious what was happening. For the untrained eye, it’s hard to tell exactly what’s what on an early scan. It’s all a bit abstract. I was definitely looking at a diptych, though, two of everything. Yep, there were two tadpoles, two doughnuts, two wiggly bits, two croissant things; twoness abounded and multiplied and filled the screen. It was doubled up. It was dual-aspect. It was a completely two-nique situation. The mirror symmetry spoke a primitive language that a monkey would have understood. I looked up at the consultant and raised my eyebrows. He just nodded.
‘Yep,’ he said. ‘Not much doubt about that.’
Claire had her head in her hands and her mouth was open; she was speechless. I realised that was what I was doing too, holding my head and gaping. I don’t know if it’s a learnt or primal reflex that causes that reaction - hands on ears, eyes and mouth wide - but it seems to be the universal mechanism for expressing sudden, unexpected, uncontainable elation. We told the grannies on Christmas Day. I thought about it and decided that the exact point when Christmas peaks is halfway through lunch, after the goose and before the cheese. So that was when we told them. I filmed their reaction and they both do that exact same thing. They put their hands on their heads, curl forwards and open their mouths. It’s a super-smile, reserved for just a handful of occasions in a lifetime when it is suddenly clear out of the blue that something wonderful has happened and things are going to get immeasurably better from now on.
I was sidelined by the news. We were at the neighbours’ house on Boxing Day and I was talking to an eminent elderly lady. Old ladies are a vital part of life in the country. The Cotswolds does a very good line in golden grannies. They seem to know more about gardening and pianos and local history and who’s who and what’s what than anybody. I was telling her my plans to bulldoze all the building rubble into one large heap in the distance, making a satisfying megapile. I explained how I was going to put a shed on the top and apply for planning permission to be buried underneath it with my guitars. At the mention of guitars, she said, ‘Oh, are you the one who . . .’ I thought she was going to say, ‘is in that band?’ I prepared myself to be bashful, but she said, ‘. . . whose wife is having twins?’ And that was me all of a sudden, Claire’s husband, the twins’ dad. I had a new identity. Bands and families aren’t that dissimilar. I had a new band now, or rather Claire did.
Claire got really big. We had fat rapper tracksuits on standby. I thought they were the only things that would fit. One of her friends told her that she wasn’t going to be able to pull her own pants up when it got to the end. Another one said she’d need a wheelchair, for sure. I’m not sure how badly Claire needed to hear those kinds of things, or how badly the people who said them wished it was them having twins instead.
It didn’t get that far, though. I was in London when Claire phoned and said she thought her waters had broken. It was three months early. She was rushed to the regional maternity unit and told to lie very still. They said it would be great if she could just stay as still as she could for about the next three months or so. She’d been there for a week when I got the call, the call I had been getting every day, ‘Get down here, I think they’re coming’, followed by a mad dash and panic and then, nothing doing.
It was the morning of Easter Monday, about two-thirty, when the phone rang. This time it wasn’t Claire who called. It was a midwife. She said, ‘I think it’s worth your while coming down.’
It was a familiar run, by now, but it was an eerie sprint to the hospital that time. The roads were immaculate. It was dream-like. I didn’t see another person or vehicle as I gunned the big old Merc through the ghostly empty night the twenty-odd miles to Oxford.
Hospitals are buzzing the whole twenty-four hours, especially maternity wards. There were always a couple of people smoking outside the entrance to the women’s centre and there were people around the drinks machine, waiting and wondering.
Claire was crying when I got to the ward. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. It wasn’t her fault. I held her hand. We’d been briefed on what to expect if she gave birth this early when she was first admitted. It wasn’t exactly what you want to hear. Serious risk of brain damage, almost certain to be breathing difficulties, possibility of blindness, and that was just the ‘B’s.
The babies were definitely on their way and they were both breech and they were weak, especially the one whose waters had broken. The safest option, said the consultant, was an immediate emergency Caesarean. I didn’t have any better ideas.
The operating theatre was as white as an art gallery and as bright and busy as a TV studio. There was the surgeon and her assistant, the anaesthetist, a nurse for each baby, a specialist for each baby and doctors and people with clipboards. All you could see was eyes. Everyone had masks on.
I was sitting by Claire’s head behind a curtain that ran along the top of her chest. I’d been talking to my friend Robert about Caesareans. His wife had one. He said it was absolutely fine as long as you don’t look over the curtain. The only trouble is that all you want to do is look over the curtain.
It was true. I was leaning over. Claire wanted to know what was going on. I didn’t want to tell her. They’d painted her tummy with gloop, sliced it open and the surgeon was in there up to her elbow, rummaging.
When she pulled twin one out by his feet, like a rabbit coming out of a hat, he didn’t make a sound. I was sure he hadn’t made it. He was limp and silent. Claire was saying, ‘Is it OK? Is it OK?’ I said of course it was. It was a lie as far as I was concerned, but a good one. They were still fishing around for twin two. He was squeaking a bit when he got out, so that was all right.
I felt so confused. Claire was in a daze. The babies were whisked straight from the theatre into intensive care, where all the life-support apparatus was situated. No one can tell you what’s happening at this stage, no one can say, ‘It’s fine, don’t worry’, because no one knows. It’s best just to let them deal with it. It was my job to look after Claire. I couldn’t do anything else.
We got back to the ward and I asked the nurse as discreetly as I could when we’d know if there were any problems. I was really worried about the one who hadn’t made any noise or movements. She said brightly, ‘No news is good news, so try and get some rest.’ I called Mrs Swann, the piano teacher, to say we couldn’t make it today, because the babies had arrived. She said, ‘Congratulations!’, and I hadn’t realised until she said that magic word what had actually just happened. It was all so touch and go, I hadn’t even called the grandparents.
As the days in intensive care went by, I wondered when I’d be able to stop worrying. Blind panic had mellowed to acute anxiety, which in turn had settled right down into chronic mild apprehension with occasional spasms of intense anguish, all mixed with the chest-beating rapture of fatherhood. It was weird, like moose cheese: too much flavour to deal with.
The special care birth unit was as hot as hell, and the torment was as exquisite. This is where the sick babies from all points west were brought to fight for their tiny lives. It was always hard to walk through that door. Sometimes we’d visit and there’d be a new arrival, parents sobbing in the wake of some terrible complication. It was most heart-rending when the parents were young. We never knew if it was going to be us next up for some bad news.
But the little boys, who to start with would fit in the palm of my hand, fingers like matchsticks and faces like tiny old men, grew stronger. It’s the first twenty-four hours that are the toughest. Then if they can make the first week they’re in with a good chance. But it’s always day-by-day, hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute, in neonatal intensive care. After eight weeks in Oxford and a fortnight in Banbury, we brought them home. It was a close squeak. Twenty years ago they wouldn’t have made it.
Toys are better now, as well. They don’t know they’re born, kids today.
Today and Tomorrow
It’s half my life ago, nineteen years, since the first rehearsal when we wrote ‘She’s So High’ and it’s nearly four years since Think Tank. It was a mad steeplechase on a mad horse, but writing about it all at last has made me realise just how much I loved every single minute of it, while it was happening. No one can be wise until they have been properly foolish, or feel well at home until they’ve spent time wandering in the wilderness. Having spent so much time together, all four of us in the band have grown up in our own quite different ways since that last record, we’ve all learned to stand on our own two feet as individuals. Damon’s sold millions more records, Graham has found peace and filled it with his own noise, Dave’s gone into politics and I’m a Renaissance man. I think we all needed to do that before we could face each other again.
On my last birthday, Graham came out to the farm. I hadn’t seen him for a couple of years, but we were both wearing tweedy suits and thinking about the same new things. He wants to move out to the country, too. He brought his new guitar with him, a customised Martin acoustic, built especially for him. He played it while I cooked lunch. It was just like at college only it was a better lunch, and a nicer guitar. ‘I’m up for having a jam with the others,’ he said, rather surprisingly.
I was just happy to see him again. It’s companionship that makes any journey worthwhile. I’d taken a running jump at everything and somehow, instead of falling, I’d risen, weightlessly and effortlessly, lifted higher and higher by the arms of the people who surrounded me.
Flying Tony brought the Bonanza over today. I’d sold it to Dave for a generous price and he still lets me use it occasionally. I drove cross-country to Enstone aerodrome with Claire and Geronimo. The flying club usually only does Pot Noodles and crisps but there was a barbecue going on this morning and burger smoke wafted amid the avgas fumes. There were planes coming in from all directions and the usual murmur of covert excitement that is the happy atmosphere of all small airfields.
‘Where do you want to go?’ said Tony.
‘Shall we just go and look around?’
The earth fell away once more. My wife, my child, my friend and I were airborne, a racing bullet at the exact centre of a perfect three hundred and sixty degree horizon, the whole world below us, and God knows, the boundless open universe above. It was a late September day. The haze of high summer had dissolved and the air beneath our wings was a sea of perfect clarity, England in its green glory, below.
England is beyond all doubt the prettiest country from the air. It is more intricately fascinating than the yawning stitched quilts of continental Europe, more vivid than any other landscape. Those small meadows are impractical for farming but unrivalled in their brilliant perfection. And right in the middle of the prettiest part of England’s green and pleasant land was the farm. I hadn’t seen it from the air since I’d bulldozed the concrete or planted the vegetable garden, dug the lake or knocked down the asbestos carbuncles. It was a miraculously transformed ruin; it was a phoenix from the flames; it was a very big house . . .