How I Got Into Games, Part IV: Death

I’ve talked about birth, and now I’m going to talk about death. Years after I made Fallen London, someone I’m close to asked me ‘AK, is all your work about death?’ and I had to answer, shame-facedly, sort of, yes. So me take a chapter now to talk about why.

My mother Pennie and my father Hugh met at her twenty-first birthday party, and they fell in love at a holiday cottage on Anglesey, a peacefully melancholy island off the coast of North Wales. The cottage was called ‘Innisfree’, after the lake isle in the Yeats poem. Years later I went back there with my mother and saw the name wind-faded on the garden gate.

My mother and father were both RAF officers. My mother, Penelope, was twenty-two when they fell in love; my father Hugh was twenty-three. I have no memory at all of my father, and I passionately wish I did, but very occasionally it occurs to me to be relieved that I don’t remember him, because it sounds like I would have had a hell of a job living up to him. Here are some things I know about him.

He was determined to be a pilot from a very early age.

He earned his driver’s license and his private pilot’s license on the same day.

He was a lean, open-faced, easy-smiling man with an energetic quiff of dark hair. Like me, he had an absurdly oversized head and his eyes were too close together.

My mother has a picture of him, the year he graduated from RAF College Cranwell, with all the other cadets who had won prizes in that year. There are eight of them, very clean uniforms on very very young men. All the rest of them have just won a single prize, or perhaps two. My father has just won six.

He died when he was twenty-nine years old, eight years after he and my mother fell in love, a little over a year after I was born.

Here are the circumstances under which he died:

He was flying a Phantom fighter jet out of RAF Brüggen in Germany, where my parents then lived. He and his navigator were one of four crews carrying out a low level navigation exercise and a practice bombing run.

It was a very dark night. “There was no moon,” said the Air Accident Report on the incident, “and the conditions were described by the 2 preceding pilots as ‘goldfish bowl’ with no horizon, requiring the final descent and initial run-in to the target to be carried out completely on instruments…The aircraft was intact until impact, and had entered the sea with wings level in a shallow descent and all primary systems functioning. The RSO [Range Safety Officer] looking along the expected line of attack saw a fireball and then heard the sound of the explosion [ …] Both the crew were killed and the aircraft was destroyed.”

The reason the aircraft entered the sea at all — which aircraft are not designed to do — will never be known. My father — flying very low, very fast, on a moonless night — had used his afterburner to reach final approach speed, and the use of afterburners can create the illusion that an aircraft is ascending, as the pilot is pressed back into their seat. The accident report suggested tentatively that perhaps this, along with instrumentation complexities caused by an anti-ice warning, may have confused and distracted him for those few deadly seconds before he ploughed into the sea.

Or not. It might have been something completely different. The plane my father flew that night had previously been a ‘hangar queen’, a non-flying aircraft cannibalised for spare parts. It had been put back together, it had gone on to clock 27 hours in the air, and it had crashed two weeks later. So it’s possible something else was wrong with it. The accident report concluded that, theories or not, the root cause would always be unknown. My mother and I didn’t see the accident report for forty years, and by that point, if there had been any truth to be learnt, it was long lost at sea.

“I had always felt,” my mother told me in an email years later, “that had it not been Hugh and Dave [the navigator] that the a/c [aircraft] would have killed someone else; but this may perhaps not have been the case since other crews did not use the afterburner.”

My mother was at home when she heard the news. She tells me that she heard the doorbell and saw the silhouette of a man in a peaked cap through the glass of the front door. She thought my father had somehow returned early, and then when she opened the door and there were two uniformed men she instantly had a very good idea that something had happened, and what it was.

The RAF never found my father’s body. They did find the navigator’s. The way my mother heard about that was as follows:

She was told ‘They’ve found someone!’ There was, you see, until they found the aircraft, always the possibility that someone had ejected. So for a cruel minute there she thought it might be my father’s living body and not the navigator’s dead one.

My father’s death diverted the course of my mother’s life like a river. I don’t remember him at all. But absence is a shadow. So when, as I mentioned above, I was asked: “AK, is all your work about death?” I had to admit, a little sheepishly, that it was sort of a theme, and that’s why. Or half the why. I’ll come to the other half in a moment.

On the day that my mother heard about my father’s death, she was two months pregnant with my brother. She had no idea this was the case. She spent the ensuing few months, until she realised she was pregnant, living just as she would have otherwise as a newly widowed woman in the mid-1970s: smoking, drinking alcohol, and carrying heavy suitcases when she moved out of RAF married quarters.

But my brother was born just fine — happy, healthy, perhaps a little on the small side. My mother named him Hugh, after our father, and raised us both, in an unremarkable patch of suburban Oxfordshire, on a charity administrator’s salary and a war widow’s pension. She has never remarried.

Hugh was a wildly creative kid who played guitar, won miniature-painting prizes, and had the wild social life I didn’t. He and I were best friends most of the time we were growing up, except when we were fighting, which was the rest of the time. He was the last other human being I ever punched, although I punched him very ineffectually. I would complain about the volume when he listened to music. He would play D&D with me under sufferance. Hugh was always much much cooler than me. He was a slight, elfin-faced boy with steady hazel eyes and a tremendous well of sly charisma.

All the way through school, he was also a popular high-achiever who maxed out his exam results… up until the age of sixteen. Then he fell in with an odd crowd and started experimenting with odd chemicals. He stole money and pawned my mother’s jewellery to buy drugs. He wasn’t addicted to anything. He was just weirdly contemptuous of consequences. My mother discovered this when she was woken by a noise late at night and found Hugh on a bad trip in the kitchen, smearing Swarfega on the table and moaning ‘help me’. He flubbed his university entry exams and left home to live an adventurous sort of life that we still don’t know much about.

We do know that he was deeply involved in occult and psychedelic practices, and considered himself a shaman; that he made and sold didgeridoos; that he spent some time in a commune on the west coast of Ireland that was trying to restore a boat to cross the Atlantic; that he was an urban explorer of sorts, and enjoyed breaking into buildings to sleep there; that he had experiences that caused him to approach the vicar of my mother’s church and request an exorcism of the house he shared.

We also know that over three years of adventure and experimentation he lost his mind. There was never really a clear diagnosis, but by the age of twenty-one he had become convinced that he was being forced to write things in his diary by inimical astral presences; that he was going to build a solar-powered saucer craft and use it to travel to space; that the IRA had shot him, but he’d removed the bullet using a blanket; that he was a magician, possibly a reincarnation of King Arthur; and, at least once, that he was Batman.

Even after Hugh began to lose his mind, his sociability, buccaneering enthusiasm and basic good nature kept him well-liked. Twenty years after all this, I spent an evening with a couple of friends of his from that time. They reminisced fondly about the time Hugh had explored an underground tunnel-stream in Oxford where, legend had it, a skeleton lay in a punt in mouldering evening dress. Or how, as you were walking along the street with Hugh, he might say ‘Let’s go in here,’ duck into a construction site, and grab a hard hat. And the game was to wander round looking like you belonged for as long as you could until you got caught.

Eventually Hugh’s habit of breaking into buildings got him locked up, after a retired couple found him curled up asleep under their piano, and after he held a ‘one-man protest against virginity’ on the roof of Wychwood School in Oxford. But he never hurt anyone. ‘How do you think [person] felt when you jumped out of their wardrobe?’ a panel of mental health professionals (I’m told) once asked him. ‘A bit surprised at first,’ Hugh responded, ‘but then happy and excited.’

Hugh was locked up in Littlemore Hospital in East Oxford. He promptly escaped. They brought him back and gave him stronger drugs. He escaped again. Eventually he was released to my mother’s care, on a regime of powerful antipsychotics that troubled him with unpleasant muscle spasms and left him subdued and wry and sometimes more lucid than other times. That Christmas, I asked him how he’d escaped, and he said very reasonably ‘Well, I am a ninja, Alexis.’

But over the next couple of months after Christmas he started to improve. He was not the firework character he’d been, and he obviously felt some disjunction with his past, but he was putting his life back together. He lived quietly, he stayed in touch with friends, he planned to do a part-time degree course in the autumn.

It was looking like an uptick on the narrative of his life, and in my mother’s. My father Hugh had died tragically and meaninglessly with no warning at all, but two months before his death, he’d conceived my brother Hugh. My mother had raised my brother, and then he’d gone off the rails, and then she’d helped him get back on them. He was obviously a furious Roman candle of a person, and he was going to make a mark.

My brother Hugh killed himself on February 16th 1996, when he was twenty-one years old.

I always have to do the maths in my head to double-check exactly how old we both were, because it was a month after my twenty-fourth birthday and a few weeks before his twenty-second. My mother rang to give me the news and I remember the feel of the old-style Bakelite phone in my hand and the things that I said and the way the conversation went quiet next door in the kitchen.

I’m not going to talk about he died, because there is evidence that describing the means of suicide sometimes leads to imitative behaviour, but I will say that it was very gruesome, that my mother and I never saw the body — which was not in a good condition — and that there is no possible doubt that he intentionally took his own life.

We still don’t know why. That it was the week of Valentine’s Day might be significant. My suspicion has always been that the road back was just too steep a climb. I have the sense that he saw he had gone from star student to occult adventurer to mentally ill twenty-one-year-old living at home with his mother, and the contradictions were too great for him to survive intact.

Part of the reason that I have this sense is that when I saw him, that last Christmas in 1996, I wasn’t especially supportive. I’d just found my first, relatively exotic, real job, teaching English in Poland, and a new girlfriend I had been eager to talk about. I had been full of stories of my life in a far and wintry country, while he quietly sat in the armchair in the corner, riding out his muscle spasms.

I hadn’t been deliberately unkind, but I had been conscious of my desire to make the point that I was doing well. For the first three quarters of our lives he’d been the golden child and I’d been the screw-up. Then he’d been the screw-up, but he’d also been the prodigal son, and my mother had spent years going out of her way to take care of him.

I mean, of course she had. She’d lost her husband and she was terrified something would happen to her son. More: after she left the RAF, she’d made a life working in the charity sector. She knew something about mental health, and she was well aware that Hugh might be at risk of hurting himself. She said as much to me, and I hadn’t taken her seriously at all. If you’ve ever been close to someone who’s developed mental health issues, this point might sound familiar: when someone gets ill, for a long time it’s easy to think that they’re just being an asshole. Even once the penny drops, the sense of assholeness can linger unfairly. I knew my brother had been through a bad patch, but my attitude to him was still mostly the typical sibling one of mingled affection and rivalry.

So I don’t for a moment think I killed my brother, and I don’t think I even failed to save his life, but I have no choice but to accept that there might be things I could have done or said that would have made him safer, and that I didn’t do or say those things.

By the time I turned thirty, I had mostly stopped talking about the two Hughs. It didn’t usually upset me to do so. These were very old wounds. But I found that it was difficult to tell only part of the story. “Are you an only child?” someone would ask, and I might lie and say I was, or I might say no, one brother. If they asked what my brother did, I might say he was dead. They’d ask why. Christ, they’d say, that must have been rough on your parents. Did they cope OK? I could evade the question, or I could say, well, one of them did…

And once the whole story was out in the conversation, it usually meant an awkward minute where the other speaker would struggle to find the right thing to say, and I’d feel bad. So I got better at spotting when the conversation was heading towards awkward territory, and I’d steer it somewhere safer.

But absence — as I said — is a shadow, and for my mother, kind and brave and tough though she is, it was more than a shadow. I learnt very, very early that anything can be taken away at any time from anyone for no reason at all. I think that’s partly why I like games and stories, where everything happens for a reason.

(Please click this link if you need someone to talk to or have been thinking about suicide)

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This is a draft excerpt from my upcoming book, Sex, Lies, and Videogames.