Youngs Mild

Bristol was a fantastic place to grow up. I cant complain about my childhood given the stress my mother was under. She gave me and my brother everything that she could despite the fact she couldn't work.

I have scant recollection about the first couple of years although I do remember some of the time we spent at my grandfathers. He had a very long garden, rectangular in shape with a patio area at the top which I recall had two concrete rabbits on and at the end of the garden was a large apple tree with a large compost heap. I cant be sure if these are actual memories or ones constructed from pictures or from events when I was a little older that I attribute to that earlier time.

I suspect aspects of this blog will be like that, created memories perhaps taken from a mosaic of events that I have attributed to a particular time.

My mother suffered profound depression in the time we moved back to Bristol. We stayed at my grandfathers for a total of 6 months, I'm told before we moved to the house she still lives into today on a road called Cheriton Place in Henleaze about a mile from my grandfathers.

She bought the house with absolutely no support from my dad at all. He was too busy being 30 going on 18, trying to catch on the youth that perhaps he felt he never had. He did visit a couple of times however these were infrequent and caused me so much trauma my mother asked him to either keep regular contact or consider not seeing us at all. He chose the easy option for him and merely stopped seeing us altogether. I will never forget the last time I saw him. I was 5 and he has visited one Sunday afternoon and as he left I ran along the road to his car only to find a woman in the passenger seat. I would later, in 1995 find out that this woman was called Linda.

My mum has never recovered from the effects the divorce had on her even to this day. All my memories from about 5 till 10 have a very dark and slightly upsetting sepia type tint to them. She was clearly clinically depressed and was on a variety of therapeutics included barbiturate's for quite a significant period. At about the age of 7 I think the whole situation of general impoverishment, the stress of having two young kids and the lack of a social support network got to a breaking point and my brother and I were nearly put into care. Thank god this didn't happen.