Читать книгу Under Pressure. Living Life and Avoiding Death on a Nuclear Submarine онлайн

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It was the hot summer of 1982 and the World Cup on the telly when the phone rang. Dad answered. It was a friend of my Uncle Brian, telling him that Stephen had been found dead in his car. In shock, we assumed he’d been in a car crash, but in fact he’d had a massive heart attack and a friend had discovered him slumped over the steering wheel with the horn blaring. Dead, and not yet out of his teens. The post-mortem revealed he had an enlarged heart muscle. I was devastated by his death, but of course I had to be as strong as I could for my aunt and uncle. I didn’t know how to process my feelings or communicate my grief, so I just bottled it up and allowed it to fester. It wasn’t really an era for discussing feelings – that wasn’t how things worked – and my whole family suffered in silence.

My parents would let me out of the house for hours at a time. I’d disappear up the local park, playing football, climbing trees, annoying the neighbours, staying out till dark; fish and chips every Saturday lunchtime, going to Woolworths to buy The Jam’s Sound Affects, my first LP – not ‘vinyl’, it was never called that, a modern term used by people who were never there in the first place; playing ‘knock and run’ … slowly I was tapping into a new sense of adventure as my body and confidence grew.