Interview: David O’rourke - In His Corner, Still Standing: John Metcalf at 70

Although my father was a Methodist minister, one of the defining things in my life was getting rid of religion. By twelve, I had come to see that my mother in particular was actively puritanical and had come from a terribly repressed background. I realized as soon as puberty commenced that it was going to be a close run between my sexuality and her religion. What I wanted was wine, women, and song. What she wanted was misery and prayer and guilt. So we drew the battle lines early on and the infighting was vicious.

As for my relationship to my brother, I was always cast as the black sheep of the family. My brother was always brilliant, but he is five years older than me, so in social terms we had very little to do with each other.When I was thirteen, he would have been in the army doing national service, so he was away from home for that, and then off to Cambridge, so I didn’t grow up with him except in our very earliest years. But he was always held up as an example. My mother would say, “If only you could be like your brother,” or “You were born for the gallows”—not encouraging talk to a young lad [laughter].

I guess I did cause vast amounts of embarrassment but I felt as if I was under perpetual attack. I’m afraid I was very badly behaved at school—at the elementary level and in the early years of high school—fighting and the like. I was once taken in possession of a Smith and Wesson .38 that I had swapped for with another kid [laughter]. I also did quite a lot of boxing and I was involved with some very tough boys who caused a great deal of social distress. There were also some incidents with the police. I’d become interested at one point in making bullets, and I had a bullet mold. The police got involved because I had been sawing lengths of lead pipe off people’s houses to melt down to make bullets [laughter].