Dad was an alcoholic, and violent and destructive with it. But when I was nine, he painstakingly created a thing of beauty, which I have kept to this day
My father was an alcoholic; and when you grow up with an alcoholic, you get used to them pissing in places they shouldn’t. In the street, as the neighbours tut; in wardrobes; on my bed, while I was in it. He could never find his way to the bathroom in the dark.
When I was around nine, I awoke one night to him shouting from the landing: “Look at this!” I kicked off my duvet, with its peach Laura Ashley print, and crept round my door. At 5ft 4in, he was a stocky, small man – though not particularly small to me. He had a beard that every so often he savaged with nail scissors, giving it an uneven, mangy appearance, but when it was long a friend compared it to George Bernard Shaw’s. This was a name I knew, vaguely, because we had many books in the house; my father read extensively.