suicide. They both ate a Mars
bar in a beach shelter. “She
loved it,” Webb says.
If the tone is often wry, it’s
sometimes bald to the point of
savage. “She f***ed me up,”
Webb says, “just as Philip
Larkin said she would.” The
pain, the embarrassment, the
shame burst out of every
page, but it isn’t hard to see
why his mother preferred to
focus on the surface. After her
first marriage failed, one of
her lovers dropped dead
on a train. Another, the BBC
newsreader Peter Woods, got
her pregnant and dropped
her. “That’s your father,” she
told Justin casually one day
when “a lugubrious-looking
chap in a light-coloured suit”
popped up on the TV. Justin
never met him. Instead he
grew up with Charles, a
widower who at least paid the
bills. Unfortunately he was, in
the words of the family
doctor, “stark staring mad”.
Charles would play Bach in
the early hours at a volume
that made the house shake.
He believed someone wastampering with his Hillman
Minx and kept getting bigger,
stronger garage doors. Once
he tried to kill himself. He had
a debilitating mental illness in
the age of “anti-psychiatry”
and felt he had to “pretend to
be normal”. A tragedy for him,
and for his supposed family.
It’s a desperately sad story,
told with tenderness and
journalistic verve, of
dysfunction, loneliness and
panicked attempts to paper
over cracks. Webb seeks solace
in his train set and creates a
private world where trains are
“frequent and well run”. At 11he is sent to a Quaker boarding
school. The boys sleep 60 to
a dormitory. They have no
privacy, no hot water and
barely edible food. They are
bullied and brutalised. “It was
grim,” Webb says. “A place of
despair. A wrecker of already
damaged lives.”
All of this takes place against
the backdrop of the Seventies,
the decade of “coal dust and
decay”, political collapse and
existential national angst. “We
were all at sea,” he says. “Often
out of our depth, bobbing
around, going under.” His
mother was caught up in the
trends, making a surprising
transition to hippie and
peacenik. Webb fell for Led
Zeppelin, but it’s Fleetwood
Mac’s Rumours that he says
changed his life. It “suggested
a new and more complex
world in which the things you
do have consequences”. It led
him to a conversation with the
new headmaster that set him
on the path to where he is now.
This memoir, which ends
just before he sets out on that
path, is fascinating and hugely
entertaining. It’s extremely
thoughtful and shockingly
honest. Webb, 61, thinks his
traumatic childhood fostered
a need for attention and fame
that bordered on narcissism.
He was attracted to the
“callousness” and cynicism of
some journalism, he says,
because he “wanted to be
un-souled” and “to care less”.
He thinks he was “feminised”
by his mother’s “toxic
femininity”, set apart from
the rugby players whose
unselfconscious masculinity
he admired. Well, perhaps. But
maybe his mother’s “toxicity”
wasn’t related to her sex?
You’d expect such a
seasoned journalist to relate
the personal to the political,
but his vision of the 1970s
seems darker than most. “For
all the faults of the school,” he
says, “none of the teachers
was a psychopath,” and this,
he thinks, marks it out as
“vaguely special” at the time.
Those of us who survived
a Seventies education
unscathed by psychopaths
might feel this is going a bit
far. Some of us might even
remember some sunshine.
But we are all products of our
childhood and the miracle is
that Webb escaped the
darkness and managed to
create some sunshine of his
own. That’s the story I’d like
to read next. cher mission in life to remind
the world, even when she
could barely feed herself and
her child, that she was upper
middle class.
After a failed marriage and
a series of affairs, including
one with the father of her
child, she lived with her
second husband in a modest
end-of-terrace house “on the
wrong side of the Bath
tracks”. She spent her energy
ensuring that her son learnt
the words and mores that
would distinguish them from
their inferior neighbours.
Like a militant Mitford, she
would sneer at anyone who
said “pardon”, “sofa” (“It was
the ‘divan’ with an accent on
the ‘aan’ bit”) or “perfume”.
The television set had to be
hidden behind an armchair.
The coach trips they took
offered limitless fodder for
eyerolls with her son. “Accents
were reprehensible,” he says,
“observations banal.” It
cemented their already deep
bond. Just once she allowed
him to persuade her into a
taboo-breaking act of socialCHILDREN’S
BOOK OF THE WEEKNICOLETTE JONES
The Bird Singers
by Eve Wersocki Morris
Hodder £7.99, age 10+This assured debut is
likely to give readers the
creeps from the beginning.
When sisters Layah and
Izzie and their mother go
to stay in a Lake District
cottage owned by an old
friend sinister things start
to happen, beginning
with a strange presence
in the garden. The twisty
and suspenseful story
develops into a well-
handled action adventure,
born out of the myths
recounted by the girls’
much-missed Polish
grandmother. It’s
interwoven with a
mysterious subplot that
gradually ties in with the
main narrative. The sisters
discover that all is not as it
seems, come into their own
strengths, learn to value
each other and bring their
family together. Using
Lakeland landscape and
Polish culture, this unusual
fantasy introduces a
notable new talent.WATCH OUT FOR
Don’t Ask the Dragon
by Lemn Sissay, illustrated
by Greg Stobbs
Canongate £12.99, age 3+A boy who is not sure
where he belongs asks
animals for advice in this
picture book by Lemn
Sissay, the poet and
university chancellor.
Warm-hearted and
cheerful to look at, it is
simple but lyrical, and has
an unexpected twist.Then and now Justin Webb
today and, left centre,
at school in the Seventiesother f ***ed me up
The pain
and shame
burst out of
every page
6 February 2022 23