Christopher Green

Hughie and Paula

Robson Books, 2003.

There were few tender moments between father and son back then, although one spring day when I was about ten, he truly amazed me. I had taken a tiny duckling, which had followed me through Regent's Park, back to the lake, only to see a female duck kill it. Hughie listened sympathetically to my heartbroken story and talked to me gently, kindly, and reassured me that there was nothing we could do when Mother Nature decided to take her course. He acted towards me as I always hoped he would one day - with loving attention

Father was the hugely popular TV star Hughie Green (his talent show Opportunity Knocks ran for 22 years), but his son depicts a miserable childhood dominated by an 'explosive and unpredictable' man whose rages were often frightening. In later life his daughter publicly denounced him as a monster, but she wasn't much comfort either.

Linda and her best pal took me to the children's animal enclosure of London Zoo, bought me petting food to give the goats and chickens, and then disappeared when a thunderstorm broke overhead, leaving me panicked, surrounded by a pack of jostling, smelly llamas, drenched through, and facing the journey home on my own

The family lived close to the park and there were 'many happy, childhood visits', but the occasions recorded here are all unhappy ones.

Papa had bought a magnificent, clock-work submarine and taken me into Regent's Park to try it out. After one abortive voyage, Hughie accidentally kicked the motor key into the water, to the amusement of some onlookers. He strode off towards Chiltern Court seething with rage, and on entering 169, told Claire, "Your fucking cretin of a son lost the key of my submarine and humiliated me."

On another fateful day, 'damp and overcast...I sat with Mama beside the Regent's Park tennis courts while she filled out the [divorce] papers...In my favourite park that day, I was a naive thirteen-year-old, wounded and confused. Parents are not supposed to behave like this'.