All I knew was that I didn’t want to be like my father
LOOKING back, Steve christmas is all too aware of the poignancy of his essay.
Writing about his grown-up life, he predicted he would be a ‘sargant’
( sic) in the police with a wife named Jane, a new surname (Stephensone), a house in Wales and four children.
The new surname and life in Wales were, he suspects, because he wanted to get as far away as possible from Harwich, essex, where his parents ran a café and sweet shop.
Steve’s father was an alcoholic who could put away a bottle of whisky a day and was verbally abusive to his wife and two sons.
‘i didn’t want to be me,’ says Steve, who now lives in eastbourne with wife Sue, 57, a Pa for the NHS, whom he met on holiday aged 21. ‘i wanted to be this other person.’
School was also miserable for Steve. ‘i wasn’t very clever,’ he says. ‘There was too much else going on in my life. i think today someone would have noticed.’
He left school with no qualifications aged 15, and moved with his family to Rye, east Sussex, where he worked as a farm labourer, until his father went bankrupt and
uprooted them all again to nearby Hastings. ‘I remember making a conscious decision that I wasn’t going to be like my father,’ he says.
Steve didn’t become a policeman — he realised before leaving school that at 5ft 9in he wasn’t tall enough and that he would struggle to pass the exams he needed.
Instead, several years later, he started working for an insurance company, and studied at night to pass his vocational exams, discovering he was actually quite bright after all.
Fatherhood came late for Steve. After leaving home at 31 to marry Sue, they eventually had daughter Emma, now 23, through IVF, thanks to Professor Robert Winston. ‘All I wanted when I was 11 was structure, to be happy, have children and for them to be happy, and that’s what has happened,’ smiles Steve, who took early retirement before setting up his own business writing wills. As for his father, he died in 2003, a year after Steve’s mother. ‘That last year I learned a lot about him,’ says Steve. ‘I stopped him drinking so much, stopped him smoking. Before he died he gave me a big cuddle, which he had never done, he apologised and said: “I’m really sorry for what I’ve done.” Life’s too short to stay bitter. What happens in your childhood doesn’t have to hold you back.’