By Eugene's Mum - Janet Sully.
The earliest days
Eugene was born in Crawley hospital at 21.00 on 30 November 1977 just short of his brother's 2 nd birthday. For the first few days of his little life he was as quiet as a lamb but then he found voice with a vengeance and has never looked back. He could scream so loudly to attract attention that I resorted to earplugs to avoid jumping out of the window in sheer desperation.
Brother Greg was an early riser who enjoyed a 6.00 am start and a 7.00 pm finish. Not so for Eugene , however. Even before he took to his permanent tannin fix he was a light sleeper. He was never in the land of nod before 12.00 at night and had a lie in until 9.00 am. As you can imagine, for me that meant a permanent lack of sleep which continues to this day. Maybe this is why I am always ratty.
Eugene was quick to speak. And boy did he chatter. It was nonstop. It is hard nowadays to know whether he inherited this from me or whether I ended up copying him to get a word in edgeways. It was a continuous tirade of questions. What? Why? When? How? By Whom? There was no question of his being fobbed off. He could spot rubbishy answers a mile off and anyway I do not like lies even white ones. 'I am afraid I don't know' was greeted with frustrated anger and a tireless repetition of the same questions until my head was raging with pain. Thank goodness I did not keep spirits in the house!
Eugene , known as Gene to the family, loved the sound of words. He liked long vowels and was delighted to call his bear, which I am sure was a sheep, Noony Noon. This bear had regal bat ears and the gormless smile of a hippy high on dope. Poor Noony, if only he had known what adventures were in store for him with our Eugene . How he survived the multiple washing machine runs, rocket launches into space, the parachute jumps, the tug of wars and the microwave I do not know. And yet he is with us today a little greyer and a little more spaced out but in our home as a well worn friend.
Gene loved music. Very early on he was singing nursery rhymes with his tuneful little voice and accompanying the sounds with a variety of home made instruments such as saucepans, ladles and pots of lentils. And a cracking good noise it made too. His favourite tune was 'I'm a little teapot' which is not surprising as he followed his grand parents' tradition of drinking tea all day long.
This love of the wicked brew led to his first collection which was that of teapots. We had to look far and wide to find comic ones for his amusement. I should have known that it would lead to other larger collections. I would then have insisted he only had teabags from day one.
My father would look after our little Eugene when I was out at work selling houses. Now dad had been on the North West Frontier in the 30s and was a communications expert. He had graduated on to radar in World War II and he had no fear whatsoever of electricity.
Naturally dad imparted his knowledge and fearlessness to the dear little boy who then started to disassemble and assemble old valve radio sets. One false move and he would, prior to becoming a crisp, have resembled Einstein on a bad hair day.
All my nagging both to dad and to Eugene was ignored. To my chagrin dad kept reminding me that when I was young I too was always fiddling with radios too but that was with tuning knobs not with screwdrivers.
With all this time spent with radios it was inevitable that Eug would become pop mad. He liked any sort of music and would listen for hours with his little head disappearing under earphones almost as big as he was. Even worse, he would compose his own little songs and bore us stiff with them, singing them over and over again.
Inevitably Gene was soon four and began play school. He enjoyed this experience and was unbelievably well behaved. He was quite quiet, joined in play with others and was very neat and tidy writing with beautify rounded letters and painting stacks of Noony characters in a variety of colours.
School soon fixed him. He was a bit too serious for the group so rather than be teased he transformed himself. Gone was the neat look, he put great effort into writing messily and entertained the troops with funny tales. He still managed to dress neatly but his room deteriorated rapidly into a den of chaos.
Next came the radio collection. He started with large old valve sets and graduated to smaller ones. He then started taking an interest in light bulbs and valves and set up a large collection in our garden shed. He even rang up the local paper and forced some poor journalist keen for an evening off to come all the way round to our house and photograph this bizarre treasure trove.
It was only several years later that this collection came to a sad end when the police called at my house to inform me that Eugene, at the instigation of his older brother, had picked up 7 lanterns put down by the council to indicate a hole in the pavement. To say I was angry was a mild exaggeration. It is fitting nowadays that he is a great road safety buff. Perhaps there is salvation for us all.
I have always loved musical instruments. I have tried to play the violin, the accordion, the piano, the mini organ, the Spanish guitar, the electric guitar and the synthesiser to no effect. All I ever succeeded in doing was driving the cat to run up the curtains and to vent my considerable frustrations at the difficulty of exam papers on a poor old piano totally unsuitable for tuneless renderings of the Eighteen Twelve Overture. How the neighbours did not call the noise abatement people I shall never know.
Anyway, Eugene had a little more talent. He would creep up to my little old mini organ and pick out a pretty ditty. He had a fair amount of talent which I am sure would have developed into something quite creative had I not made him take music lessons.
From light bulbs Gene started his alarm clock collection. This seemed harmless enough to me at the time and anyway alarm clocks are nice and small. I did become rather fed up with six alarms going off together all at once but still it showed creativity. What Gene really liked to see was the occasional old alarm clock which exploded when the spring broke sending bits and pieces flying round the room.
Again this collection came to a sudden end when I just avoided dying of a cardiac arrest when two giant teleprinter ticker tape machines set on a time switch started up in the spare room next to our bedroom at 6.00 in the morning. I had had enough and out they all went, ticker tape machines, alarm clocks, springs and all.
My husband and I have always been ardent travellers. Both he and I spent holidays abroad with foreign families from aged 12 through out teenage years and we had travelled widely by the time the boys came along. This meant that the boys had to travel too. Gene did his first trip abroad at 5 months when we spent a holiday in the USA and he looked mighty cute on my back in a baby carrier or in his little portable cot pram. The Americans just loved him.
A dream came true for him when he was 8 and we took him to Japan and Hong Kong. He just loved Japanese slippers and slipper rituals. He thought it was so cool that different slippers had to be worn for different occasions. I had to make sure when we visited temples that he did not start a slipper collection and World War III. The Tea Ceremony was another huge attraction for him and he was really in his element there.
The one thing Eugene did not like about Japan was the food. From early on in his life Eugene had refused point blank to eat fruit and vegetables. He would go red in the face and scream at the mere sight of a carrot or an apple and could go without food for days if necessary to avoid a healthy diet. However, he loved sausages and sausage rolls. He was thrilled to find a juicy looking one in Japan and took a huge bite. I have never seen a child look so apoplexic as Eug when his taste buds were activated. This was no sausage roll; this was a seaweed wrap.
Hong Kong was just a paradise for Eugene. Everywhere he looked were electronic shops. He would have gladly taken political asylum had he been older in order to stay in this paradise on earth. He shopped till we dropped day and night.
The whole atmosphere of lights, people and electronic goods was just too much for him. It has been imprinted on his mind for ever more.
Copyright © Janet Sully 2005