The Halcyon Days

Chapter 1

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‘Mary had a little lamb, it kept on kicking and grunting. She took it up the garden path and kicked its fucking cunt in.’

My Dad, circa 1976

I’ve only once ever had a cop look up my arse. It’s not an experience I’d like to repeat.

I was fourteen and I’d been walking home from an Ice-T concert with my friends Tony and Rob. We’d bought some weed and were rolling a joint on a wall in the St Paul’s district of Bristol – our ‘hood’. Except it wasn’t, which is why the line of four unmarked CID cars that we’d decided to skin-up in front of watched us so closely. Three white kids on the ‘frontline’ were only there to do one thing. So we were busted and handcuffed and dragged off in the back of separate cars to Trinity Road Police Station, where I spilled the beans immediately on my friends, not knowing that Rob had had the sense to flick all the weed over the wall as the cops ran at us.

An hour later, utterly humiliated, I was released to find Rob waiting for me with a cheeky grin on his face. Tony was kept behind for safekeeping. The police had found a stolen cheque book in his pocket.

The following morning, while my classmates had their heads filled with nonsense, I was squatting silently in my hide, listening to the trickle of the river, waiting for a kingfisher to alight on the perch in front of me so that I could take another bad portrait of it with my ancient Nikon camera. It was a twenty-four hour period that, perhaps, encapsulates my childhood.

In Greek mythology, the Halcyon Days were 14 days over the winter solstice, when the sea was calm enough for kingfishers to lay their eggs.

Kingfishers had been my obsession from the age of seven, when I first copied a picture of one out of a bird book. My birds lived on a small, nondescript river just a few miles from central Bristol, where I grew up. It was perhaps more a brook – a stream in the summer months when it ran low, a raging, murky torrent in winter when it drained a valley section of the M4 between Bristol and Bath. It trickled and meandered across fields of dairy cows and wheat, slinking secretly through a couple of villages, under main roads and past a vast opencast quarry.

The river was dark for most of its course, tunnelled by elder, beech and ash trees, and deep pools formed in its meanders, home to fat brown trout, roach and shoals of chub. Between the pools, the river would concertina thin and fast over shillets as it was forced between mud banks, and then long and slow as it opened out to swamp beds of reeds and iris, its banks thick with ramsons and hemlock water-dropwort. As a boy I stalked the river’s edges, a canopy of cow parsley and giant hogweed above my head, catching minnows with my net or turning rocks over to reveal bullheads, which I learned to tease into milk bottles or jamjars with my hands. These fish were food for my kingfishers.

The nine miles of the river belonged to me, and me alone. I knew every inch of it and I occupied it like a squatter. I trespassed, set up hides, photographed my birds and fished, ghostlike, utterly absorbed but always with one nervous eye on the lookout for a landowner.

When I snuck into my hide, usually nothing more than an old tarpaulin or bedsheet propped up with sticks along the edge of the river, I found my peace. I could sit there for ten, twelve hours straight, even in the depths of winter, staring hopefully out of a small hole or slit, waiting for my halcyon bird to arrive on a branch next to me so I could admire it. And when one did grace me with its presence, my focus on it would become all-absorbing. A tiny bright jewel, set perfectly against the drab tangle and gloam of the river, its cerulean feathers streaked with deep blues, cobalts, vivid and electric, its white bib and orange breast cut and trimmed by precise, lined contrast all the way to the blues of the wings and back, its slight dagger beak, darkest black, with a flame of orange across its cheek, setting the eye, which would twitch like a cat’s as it watched the fishes below. Nothing compared to the fascination I felt for kingfishers, and they were my escape from the world.

I was bullied mercilessly and constantly at school, and I hated the place as a result. I was weak, scrawny and short of attention, so I annoyed my peers and generally failed to form good friendships. I was beaten up, robbed and humiliated regularly. I dreaded the walk to school in case I was surrounded and set upon, and in the playground I kept a low profile, always tense, always nervous in case I caught the wrong eye. My early experiences of humans was hostile, and that scar remains.

Me and my dad, William Roger Hamilton, in the 70’s. Dad wrote ‘The Guide To Minerals Rocks and Fossils’, which sold hundreds of thousands of copies and can often be found on friend’s bookshelves.

I’d love to say I had a normal childhood, but I didn’t. I tell myself that I did and try to diminish all my torment by remembering the privilege that surrounded me. But no child deserves to lose a parent. I spent my sixth birthday in the Brompton Hospital in London. My father, Roger, gave me a Dunlop tennis racket, which he presented to me from his bed, announcing the gift through his electric voice box. He breathed through a tracheotomy tube, which always looked crusted up. He coughed up phlegm and spat into a metal kidney dish, and he showed me the huge X-shaped scar across his chest, where one of his lungs had been removed. We played Abba on his tape recorder. That’s all I remember. He died ten days later, aged 34, from a form of cancer, now curable.

My mother had no idea he was going to die. I remember her breaking the news to me on the landing outside my bedroom the following morning. The house was dark with all its curtains drawn, and she was a wreck. I cried once, apparently, saw that it upset her and so never cried again. Three weeks later my uncle treated us to a trip to Singapore, where he lived, to convalesce. Our plane crashed in Bombay after refuelling, when a flock of geese flew into the engines just after take-off. Although nobody died that day, my exhausted mother had to cope with me, my eighteen-month-old brother Steven and my older sister Lucy, alone in the world and now abandoned in Bombay airport. My nose bled for most of the trip. It was hell.

Dad, Roger, on a fossil hunting expedition in the Sahara, in the 70’s. He broke down in Dover on his way home. When he took the Land Rover for repair, the mechanic lifted the lid and joked “What have you done, driven across the Sahara?”

Aged six I became the man of the house and assumed the weight of responsibility that came with it. From that experience, I was born. A walking contradiction, always burdened with responsibility for others, particularly my mother, but deeply rebellious, as a result of repressing my childhood for responsibility. Kingfishers became my escape and my all-consuming obsession, most likely a diversion from grief.

Mum remarried a year or so after my father died. I called John ‘Dad’ the moment he and mum moved in together. He was a GP and moved us from Dulwich to Bristol. Unlike my father, who was tall, quiet and handsome, John was small. He had a red nose from drinking too much, and seemed to be permanently in action, like a human Border collie, a consequence of his ADHD. He was great fun, full of energy and enthusiasm, but was completely chaotic, and that set the tone for our family life. Dad had an almost complete disregard for rules, and that ethos soon filtered out through us all. There were few boundaries to worry about, and certainly not the rigid cultural constraints of middle-class England.

From the outside our life looked perfectly respectable – the decent-sized house, the Volvo and the Land Rover, the holidays in the Dordogne. But on the inside, life was unconventional. When Dad was at home he did pretty much everything in his underpants. He’d mow the lawn in them, greet the neighbours in them, serve up lunch to guests in them. He was fanatical about barbecues and spent most weekends trying to poison us with sausages and chicken he’d cook on flames as quickly as he could, until they were black on the outside and raw in the middle. I’d always have to recook everything he touched. When he took us on outdoor adventures, forcing us to climb mountains in Scotland or Wales in the pissing rain, he’d load up the Land Rover with all our bikes, and I’d have to sneak out and retie everything so we didn’t cause a pile-up on the M5.

Dad was essentially just a big, hairy child, and we all had to manage him. At work he was loved by his patients, because like many doctors he was a showman. He worked at Montpelier Health Centre, in the poorest area of Bristol, which had the highest mental health budget in the south of England. He didn’t have time to deal with the bureaucracy of the NHS, though, so he just ignored the rules. On one occasion he burst into the house with a three-week-old baby he’d wrapped in his windsurfing sail and thrown in the back of the Land Rover. He handed the baby to Mum, who immediately asked if she could keep it, because it was a very cute little black baby.

‘No, you can’t!’ he replied, then vanished back to the mother, who was outside in the car, to drive her off the psychiatric hospital to be sectioned, rather than having to wait for social services to attend her house and, as he saw it, waste everyone’s time. When he discovered a major problem with rickets in the Rastafarian community in Bristol, he took the kids off to hospital for X-rays himself, rather than writing referrals and having to wait weeks or months to be seen. He then implemented a nutrition campaign in the community to tackle the problem. He was a brilliant doctor as a result of being a maverick, and his erratic yet inspired behaviour coloured us all.

We couldn’t afford a car so dad, John, took us everywhere in a wheel barrow…

Mum had two more kids with Dad, Johnny and Jeremy, and despite being an extraordinary mother, always showering us with praise and attention, her hands were entirely full. She was feared and revered by the mums on the school run, while being fancied by all the dads. Tall, elegant and beautiful, she was also opinionated, and often blunt and direct. She taught us decency, politeness and respect, so we weren’t obnoxious, and instilled confidence in us through constant encouragement and the example of her positive attitude.

She did, however, give us pudding-bowl haircuts and always insisted we wore sensible Clark’s shoes, which meant that none of us fitted in with the cool kids, who’d be decked out with Nike trainers and cool haircuts. But we were allowed to be free, and naughtiness was generally encouraged, so we didn’t suffer the constraints imposed on other kids. We could get muddy and wet, and swear as much as we liked. She let us run wild in the streets, playing out until dark, shooting each other with homemade bows and arrows. Sometimes I’d wrap rope, soaked in petrol, to the arrows, light them and fire them into nearby gardens, pissing off the neighbors.

Bomb-making was a favorite pastime of mine, until I blew myself up in the kitchen one day with a bomb made of sugar and potassium chlorate, which I’d stolen from school. I’d ground it all down and turned the mixture into a rudimentary bomb, then wired the device to my brother’s electric trainset. It was supposed to blow the train up when it passed over a level crossing, but actually blew me up, exploding in my hand and causing severe burns, while singeing off my eyelashes, eyebrows and a good amount of my hair. I was banned from bomb-making after that.

Mum saw this creativity and invention as hugely important to us as kids, though. Making weapons, taking bikes apart and rebuilding them, woodworking in the garage, building dens in the woods and climbing trees, were what I remember as the best bits of my childhood. That freedom to create and invent, the ability to work and think with confidence and take risks without fear of failure – all this played a hugely important part in my subsequent career.

The next instalment looks at a growing fascination with photography, working for David Attenborough at 16 and the dream to become a National Geographic photographer.