Being the youngest of three by several years, thanks to our mother’s uncharacteristic love affair with the family GP, I was considered to be something of a golden child. “Darling James,” as one relative put it. I was teasingly reminded of this awful tag at family gatherings and Christmases ever-since.
Even our mother conceded that I never gave her any trouble. This was nonsense, of course, but next to a brother like mine, who wouldn’t take on an almost saintly glow?
All that was required of me to earn these accolades, was to avoid burgling local off-licences, desist from drink and drugged driving and generally keep myself to myself.
I did all the usual things that teenagers did in the 80’s but never touched drugs, having been put-off by observing their effects on Jeremy; Jum, as he was affectionately known to immediate family.
After mum, he had perhaps the greatest influence on my life. It was quite natural then, that I should later rebel and join the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary.
We approached the law of the land from different sides and the law always won.
Jum was always around in the early years; living first in Benfleet, where I was born, then rural Essex, where he was my playmate. One of my earliest recollections is being chased by my brother, who was making vicious snapping and growling noises, whilst holding aloft a stuffed baby crocodile.
I learned to ride on his bike, which was far too big for me.
Aged five or six, I recall walking with him along a country lane when I picked up a stone to lob it over the hedge. He warned me to stop but I threw it anyway. The sound of smashing glass told me that I’d scored a direct hit on a greenhouse. It’s all a blur after that but he probably took the blame.
We often had big family gatherings, especially at my uncle’s farm in Saffron Walden. They were the highlight of my younger years.
We played on the farm with uncle Den’s sons: Robin was Jeremy’s age and Simon was mine. A gap of nine years or so.
In late summer, we walked through the fields of cut straw where stubble fights ensued. If you pulled up a handful of straw stalks from the base, a great clod of earth came with it. These were launched like mortars at the enemy.
It was always young versus old and we always lost.
I lost most of the mud in my hair and down the back of my sweaty neck before I could get close enough to score a hit.
Being a pig farm, there were scattered piles of seeded potatoes about the place, behind fragrant and steaming heaps of bedding straw and dung. This set the scene for the dreaded ‘spud-fights’.
I was drawn to the danger of these one-sided battles, and they always ended abruptly when the superior artillery of Jum or Robin found its mark and I took a painful one on the schnozz.
My reaction was not to cry but to get mad as hell, going over-the-trenches to wreak revenge on the enemy lines with flying kicks and punches. Mum was appalled at my muddy and blooded appearance when we came in for tea.
They were glorious and happy days!
Television, or “the idiots lantern” as our father, Jack, called it only had three channels back then and was in black and white. Jum and I occasionally watched it together. War films or cowboy films were the only choices, plus Laurel and Hardy skits and Tom and Jerry cartoons.
Jeremy roared with laughter at the cartoons. I think it was the faces Tom, (the cartoon cat for younger readers) made when smashed in the face by a hot iron or swallowing a garden rake. It was then that we grew our love of Laurel and Hardy together. I still watch them on YouTube to this day when I’m feeling nostalgic or I need a good belly laugh.
I hear his laughter next to mine.
Jeremy’s humour was expressed verbally, whereas mine was more visual and slapstick. I enjoyed making people laugh.
Moving around with dad’s different jobs and attending a whopping six different primary schools, it came in handy when making new friends. There was a bit of the performing clown in both of us, I think.
We moved to Middle Assendon- a pretty little village outside Henley-On-Thames and life was, for a time, blissful. I played British bulldog in the field behind our house with Johnny and Danny Batty, the sons of Gurkha officer, Tim.
Dad would call me in for tea by standing in the back garden making a T sign with his hands until someone noticed and told me it was time to go in.
It was the Gurkha, Tim Batty who taught me to play cricket and rugby, and our tight little cul-de-sac was a long and narrow sports field.
I hit many a six through the neighbours open windows in summer and ironically, the then producer of the BBC TV sports programme, Grandstand (Tim Goddard) lived at square-leg.
I was once presented with a trophy at Henley mini-rugby club, by the main presenter of that show, Frank Bough. Of course, he turned out to be a paedophile like most of our childhood icons, including Stuart Hall, Rolph Harris and Gary Glitter: the sort of people I later made a living locking-up.
My sister has better recollections of Jeremy during this time as he was then living in some sort of commune.
We moved to Devon at the end of the long, hot summer of ‘76
Secondary school afforded much more stability for me. Dad took a job as a salesman of kitchen worktops, working for lifelong and close family friends, the Smiths. We three siblings each had good friends of our own age from that family and the Smith-Clarke relationship was cemented. We holidayed with them in Devon and Cornwall. Particularly Dittisham where the Smiths had a little holiday cottage on the quay.
John Smith had asked Dad to relocate to serve one of his best customers in Swindon. Dad hated the place and mercifully decided that the interests of the company were best served by relocating the family to Malborough in Devon, next to the beautiful seaside town of Salcombe. He said he could easily travel up the motorway – but soon lost interest. Dad then got a job selling wine but took the tasting duties too seriously for his own good.
It was in the garage of the house at Marlborough that Jeremy was introduced to the old the old terrier man, John Allen when he arrived to mate his rough coated Jack Russell with my smooth coated bitch, Bo. Jeremy’s interest in the South West Terrier, Lurcher and ferret club began there and featured much in his early writing.
And in Devon we remained. For me home, for Jeremy, base camp to Everest.
He’s written about most things that happened in between so I won’t rake over old ground. Besides, I couldn’t tell his story as well as he did.
Three days after my brother died, I sat before our oncologist. My PSA was 50 again; precisely what my brother’s was when he was first diagnosed. There is a poignant symmetry in it I suppose.
I took pleasure in his achievements as he did mine. We shared our commiserations in a cancer diagnosis too, though both of us exceeded all expectations. I’m still hanging on with indecent vigour.
It’s been a tough time since our mother died in 2019. One of our last actions together was to share communion in the little snug in mum’s house at Strete, overlooking the broad, winking, Start Bay and the Lighthouse at Start Point. The local vicar came around with all the accoutrements. I knocked on Jum’s door as he wrote another column and he jumped at the chance to join us. I have never seen him treat anything with such reverence and seriousness; it took me by surprise.
“Thanks for that, Jim,” he said afterwards with a big, sympathetic smile. We both knew it would be the last time to share such an intimate moment with our mother.
We shared a faith in God. For the record, neither faith was worth more or less than the other.
I’ve seen others write about my brother’s faith without properly understanding it. Faith is not the absence of doubt. The mark of a true Christian faith is a simultaneous peace with God and an ongoing battle with the self. Peace without and war within, as it were.
I’ve heard it said that the most dangerous place to be is to be at peace with yourself. That’s what the world teaches. Better that your sins should be forgiven but not forgotten, rather than forgotten but not forgiven. Jeremy knew the difference, for sure.
After mum died we had our one and only falling out in all those years. We wouldn’t be the first to do so under such circumstances, but it hurt like hell.
I accused him of cowardice and he accused me of being unloving.
In metaphorical terms- I caught him in the gut with a heavy sod of stubble and completely winded him- and he caught me right on the schnozzer again with a heavy spud.
Mercifully we made it up in the end. I sent a salvo of pleading messages and he swallowed his pride. I respect him most for that.
He lived and died in the that little cave house in Provence in the arms of his one true love, Catriona; a fitting and triumphant end to his low-life story.
I’m bursting with pride to have been part of it.