50 years ago this month my Mother, eight months pregnant, was scrubbing floors for nuns at a catholic ‘Mother and Baby’ home in the depths of rural Kent. For 6 months, this teenage girl, had undergone an emotionally disfiguring baptism of shame.
The young girls in this Catholic facility were persuaded that for their acts of fornication and subsequent pregnancies they should be punished before God and their unborn, bastard children maligned.
This penance would not edify my Mother. She would not repent. She had already glimpsed the burgeoning freedoms of post-war Britain. She had met a rich, well-dressed, exotic, Persian boy who drove a sports car and had given herself to him. She was aspirational, a teenage girl with an appetite for the modern world. She wanted what he had, the freedom he had but he wanted less from her than she from him and after moments of unbridled passion she was pregnant and abandoned. One can only imagine how dreadful she felt telling her Edwardian parents that she was carrying me, knowing that her life would never be the same again.
My grandmother, disgusted by her willful daughter’s precocious ambition, spoke to a priest who organized seven long months of incarceration at the Mother and Baby home where she would be forced to abandon her dreams in exchange for shame, resentment and fear.
My grandparents abandoned her to her fate. During the 7 months she was sent away they did not visit her once. After I was born they accepted her home begrudgingly.
Most of the girls would give up their babies. Some of them willingly some, like my mother, unwillingly.
She could not breastfeed me. I refused to suckle. Perhaps I already knew that life was not worth living? The nuns insisted and forced me onto her nipple. My mother left me behind at the Mother and Baby home to be adopted but fate or circumstance or racism intervened. I could not be adopted. My skin was olive toned, my hair curly, my eyes jet black. It was obvious to all the prospective parents who viewed me during the time I was offered up for adoption that I would not fit invisibly into any nice, white family.
By July the 8th 1960 the day of my birth the door had well and truly shut on the promises of the age.
Remember, during the first few months of the 1960’s my mother was unaware that this decade in the United Kingdom would be described variously as ‘swinging’, ‘progressive’ and ‘free’.
What of these nuns now? These Brides of Christ? Where was Jesus when all of this was going on? Where was the love of God?
My Mother was neither free to keep me even though she begged to do so and the home I would eventually end up in, although loving, was certainly not progressive nor swinging.
My Grandmother, in a rare moment of charity, decided to go fetch me and I ended up, once again, with my teenage mother and her mother and her mother in a small, semi-detached house in a genteel seaside town. Besides these three women I lived with my two aunts and my sickly grandfather. Victorian Herne Bay was, was at that time, still enjoying the benefit of the second longest pier in England, a bandstand and the cavernous Kings Hall where polite tea dances were held.
There are photographs of me ensconced in the bosom of this dysfunctional family. I was the son my grandfather never let my grandmother have. She doted on me, walked me through the streets come rain or shine. Then, she let me go.
During the darkest days of my childhood I would try to get back to that house. A house I knew and loved but when I got there it was never the house I remembered. She sent me back again and again.
I lived there for two years until my mother married a local lad and we moved to Whitstable. My Grandmother was thrilled to have her sullied daughter married. It was, in fact, against all the odds. She was ‘taken off my hands’ my Grandmother later told me.
50 years ago. 50 years. I have lied about my age for so long that I am in shock when I type those words. The number has come too soon. I am not prepared to be this old nor was I ever expecting it. Shocking! Why did I never expect to live? On many occasions during my childhood I expected to die at the hands of my angry step-father.
When I finally escaped that man I sought out equally destructive situations.
I have been hankering after the long sleep since I was born.
As I sit at my desk in Los Angeles my greatest triumph, if at all my only triumph, has been to survive. To avoid the catastrophic blow that I expected every day. I may not have fulfilled my potential but I have certainly achieved more than I ever expected, more than I was told to expect. In spite of my temper, my addictions, my desire to take up where my murderous step-father left off I am alive!
It is only recently that I tentatively acknowledged that life must be lived.
For as long as I can remember I have imagined and reimagined my death. For long as I have flown in aeroplanes I have reveled in turbulence. As often as I have picked up strange, beautiful and dangerous men I have wished death come to me.
Shame has cast such a deep shadow over me that all I ever managed to do is struggle blindly down life’s treacherous path. Stumbling into people along the way who could see. Many of those people realizing that I was blind did not help without benefit to themselves. Many of those people, when I understood what monsters they were, were shocked when I ferociously bit their hand off up to the elbow.
Perhaps this is why I stayed close to my family home, a family that did not want me. Even to this day I hanker after Whitstable. There are still elderly parents of friends my age who remember the small boy who escaped his home whenever he could and seek refuge in theirs.
During the next month I am going to write an abridged memoir. We know the beginning and most of you know where I am right now. So, as I make my way East through New York and Paris back to my old hometown of Whitstable I will let you know what I remember, what I care to remember from the last 50 years.
Today, the little dog is on my bed waiting to walk through the Californian sun to our local coffee shop. There are people there who know me from the television. People who might wave a tentative hello. Tonight I may hear from the man I love and tell him so without shame or expectation. It’s not much to ask is it? To be loved, to love. To be loved..to love?
10 replies on “Bastard”
No it is not too much to ask. I love that you not only survived but that you are the person you have become/are becoming. I truly look forward to reading your biography and hope that if you do book signings I will be able to get to one, to smile into your eyes even if for only one moment.
My inner critic is cringing. Ah well.
Love is all there is. It’s the only thing that matters.
I want you to know that through your honest writing, and through your appearance on Sex Rehab, you have helped me. By being yourself, you have changed another person’s life. Thank you.
As long as you LIVE there is hope. I never expected to live past 30. Two suicide attempts later (I actually died the last time for over 2 minutes), I’m 46 and I love every grey hair, every wrinkle. I look like a Sharpei and I am blessed for it. You are loved. Right now, in your life right now, there is someone who is missing you and will light up when you walk in the room. It could be a friend or Little Dog, it doesn’t matter. You just have to be open enough to see it when it happens.
You’ve done so much in your life that the majority of people will never get to do. How many people can say they’re famous for being a director and your movies will be there for future generations too. Then you have helped many people through sharing your life on TV and here. You were meant to be here. You survived what many people couldn’t and you have many more years to come to live and be happy. You deserve to love and be loved and you are loved.
Brilliant Duncan. It’s tough to feel alive when all the while you were in utero people kept making your mother feel as if you were a horrible consequence. Infants and embryos experience the stess that a mother feels. A tough thing about it is that it is preverbal. It is all feeling and one has a difficult time making sense out of these instinctual feelings that can’t be identified with words. It is amazing how people think they are so important that they can judge another with such cruelty. Your spirituality is strong and your suffering and experiences seem to be lighting you up. You are really plumbing the depths now. A courageous soul. You are doing a great service by sharing your experience. You are touching many people who strive to feel connected and alive.
Thank you for this post Duncan. Thank you for sharing your life and your feelings with us. Thank you for the trust.Thank you for helping so many of us and letting us know you.
Know you have finished crashing through life, that’s over now. You are going to have a wonderful life with lots to look forward to.Age is just a number, you do not look 50, do not feel 50. The best is yet to come believe me.There is a calm and an ability to smile inside if you accept things. I just read somewhere that living in the past is like driving a car with only the reverse gear working.
I look forward to your book,I hope you put photos in it. I love books with Photos scattered inside.Please invite us to the launch, meet your friends.
Duncan,
The beginning of your post reminded me of the movie, “The Magdalene Sisters”. For what was done to young women (and young men, elsewhere) in the name of religion and charity, there should be a special ring in hell. For anyone who betrays and abuses the vulnerable and powerless. You ask “Where was the love of God” and I am reminded, strangely, of “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” because a friend of mine with whom I watched the movie said that God had betrayed the brave knight that Vlad had been when the love of his life was refused a Christian burial and he in his rage became cursed. My response was that man had betrayed him. Not God. Darkness can never defeat the Light for long.
With all the flaws that you’ve discussed, your mother has an indomitable will, courage and aspiration for freedom that I believe is a golden thread through your life as well. She may have, unguided, gone down a dangerous path and fallen but she had the strength to right herself and soldier on. I believe that she has passed that strength of character on to you. Along with aspirations for better things. For beauty and freedom. Why else would she tell you of the beautiful house where she worked, filled with beautiful things and the beautiful people who lived there? It must have seemed like they were demi-gods, who were untouchable by anything sad or dark. You aspired to live the fantasy and used all your inborn brilliance, tenacity — from both your parents — and every opportunity to learn and flourish when you got the chance. Your only mistake was that you thought that you had to be inauthentic in order to be accepted. But you learned better.
I believe that despite the insecurity, fear and shame that caused your mother to be unable to breast feed you in the beginning, her love for you and your feeling of it — feeling her heart — enabled you to feed and survive. There are infants who don’t. Even if they’re well fed, they fail to thrive for lack of human contact. For lack of love. I believe that her love and your grandmother’s are the foundation of your empathy and compassion. Your ability to love. That they could never be consistent is the foundation for your inability to believe that love, if found, will stay.
The ones who loved you were conflicted and were unable to protect you from a predator. That predator made your childhood an agony where death seemed the only out and where danger, pain and degradation were entwined with your sexual identity and needs. But you have not only survived, YOU HAVE THRIVED. You have walked through the fire and come through the other side so that you can be a beacon to those who are similarly lost, saying that it’s possible to come through and not hobble around broken but to heal and dance. To be a phoenix. To soar!
At 50, you have been reborn. Do you get that? YOU HAVE BEEN REBORN! You have decades of creativity and love ahead of you. Don’t voodoo yourself out of them. Don’t tell yourself that you’re old or that you might not make it past 53 because your dad died then. You don’t have an expiration date stamped on your foot. What we perceive we can be and do has an incredible effect on how our lives and our physical health turn out. We see examples all the time of our elders who are leading physically challenging, creatively productive lives. Don’t allow the darkness to cheat you out of the rest of your life, the way it sapped your first years like the terrible parasite it is. Cast it out and tell it to get behind you. Because IT IS BEHIND YOU. If you trust in Grace. I know that you’ve been so tired, and you’ve been hurt and this financial contretemps is frightening but YOU WILL WIN THROUGH. I cannot conceive of a God who would let you come this far only to let you be thrust back. Remember that we as humans have the power to make a hell out of heaven or a heaven out of hell. You’ve been through hell. It’s time you claimed your piece of heaven. Claim it!
It’s not ever too much to ask, to love and be loved. There’s this beautiful song “Nature Boy” that says the greatest thing that we’ll ever learn is to love and be loved in return. I know that you love and I know that you are and will be loved. Just allow the possibility. Don’t stop believing. Please.
I look forward to the memories that you will share with us on your journey home. I believe that Whitstable feels like home because you WERE loved there. Despite all the horror. And it was there that you said that you had a moment of perfect joy as a child. (You never told us what it was. Such a precious moment. I can understand why you’ve kept it to yourself.) Float on.
Blessings,
Amanda
your a beautiful bastard!!!!
Hello Duncan,
I messaged you on twitter some time ago to get your suggestions about writing. In short I wanted you to read a part of my blog especially my Poem in hopes that you can give me a word of advise etc. I would not consider myself an eloquent writer but I have a story that should be told, because of you I am able to muster the courage to write down what occured to me as a child and I thank you for exposing our stories and i’m sure there’s many more that only need to face their fears and their demons. I only hope to touch one persons life and have them understand someone else’s pain, and struggles, the reasoning behind some of our eccentricities. Thank you again and the site is http://www.twistedandintertwined.blogspot.com