PART FOUR. 6 Parents

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. See right for a link to the full list of instalments.

Mollie, John’s lovely mother, wasn’t well. She’d had a stroke in her thirties, a victim of the early contraceptive pill which contained high doses of hormones. (These were reduced to a fifth of the original levels once the link with strokes was discovered.) She recovered from the stroke but was left with permanently high blood pressure. The only time this dropped was when she came to stay with us, and her doctor prescribed frequent visits.
    We weren't complaining. She was such an easy guest. In the mornings while we were out at work she would bicycle to the village and buy herself a little treat – a bun, a packet of sweets – and in the afternoon would busy herself tidying our neglected garden.
    Thankfully, she wasn’t the sort of mother-in-law to criticise my housekeeping. Far from it. She was on my side and we’d chuckle together about John’s foibles - until he got cross and asked us to stop. We'd acquired an infestation of mice and one of them would hide under Kitten’s food bowl and in the evenings run across the sitting-room floor. Mollie laughed.
    She’d welcomed me from the start. She’d never judged me. Her visits were the only time I could look at myself in the mirror and like what I saw. It seemed as if my face was transformed.

She also transformed our fractious love life.
    This had never picked up. What we’d called ‘teething troubles’ had persisted.
    I became either like stone or I wanted to bite and scratch. I understood two things at this stage. I couldn’t trust that John’s feelings were love not lust, however much he protested, and lust disgusted me. I’d been on the receiving end of too much of it. On the other hand, I couldn’t risk losing him. He was everything to me. What if I gave everything to him and he let me down? I would be destroyed. This, I presumed, was an echo of Brian in London.
    I called Mollie my safety net as I knew that, whatever happened, she would be there. With her nearby, I could relax.

I was still ‘flipping’ – my view of John alternating between that of my parents and my own.

    My own was the one that hit me when John and I first spoke, when I had the revelation that I already knew everything about him and that we’d been together in many previous lives. Our relationship was sanctified by what I called ‘the blue-sky voice’, the one that had told me John would interest me for the rest of my life and I would marry him.
    My parents’ view was the one they expressed in their letters – that he was useless, rude, uncharming etc etc.
    I couldn’t understand how people could see things so differently. Who was right? For me it was impossible dilemma. I couldn’t solve it. My head spun with the conflict and I started to acquire regular right-sided headaches.
    But with Mollie staying, the flipping stopped. John blossomed in her presence, becoming grown-up and confident, his true self, instead of hurt and angry as he so often was when he and I were alone. I too could be myself with her and, what's more, she was like a double dose of John. 

My relationship with my own parents however was a different matter.
    Through friends, who’d heard via their mothers, I discovered that my mother had come to the conclusion that she and my father had been ‘too hard’ on John and me. She’d found our wedding ‘one of the nicest she’d been to’ and liked Mollie. After the wedding she’d decided that there was hope for our marriage after all.
    Well, bully for her. Nothing was said directly to me, so all I could do was carry on thinking that my parents still had the same devastatingly low opinions of John and me as the ones they’d expressed in their letters. The pain of those letters had imprinted itself too deeply inside me to be dislodged by third-hand news.
    I was too terrified of my parents to bring the subject up with them but continued to visit them both out of duty and because I couldn’t bear to lose touch with my family as a whole. My family and my upbringing were a huge part of me, and my childhood had been a happy one on the surface - stability, fun, lots of muddy time outside with my siblings, cousins and friends.
    I never went to see them without John however and when there I couldn’t meet their eyes. Our conversations were stilted and I tried not to be alone with either of them.

To be continued . . .

For Beth - Spring comes to Devon

As ever, spring is arriving in fits and starts. Wednesday was warm and sunny, more like summer, but today it’s cold and grey again. Nevertheless there was much to see on my walk this morning.

Blackthorn was in full bloom in the hedgerows

This ewe and her lamb caught my eye . . .

.

. . . as did this green-eyed cat

The flowers of Jack-by-the-hedge, also known as Garlic Mustard, have arrived in the last couple of days. The orange-tip butterfly likes to lay her eggs on this plant

Ivy berries are an important food for birds at this hungry time of year

The weeping willow on the lane below my house, always the first of the trees to burst into leaf

Around my pond: the giant water buttercups known as Kingcups

Wild garlic at the bottom of my garden. I planted a few bulbs many years ago and now I have a profusion

PART FOUR. 5 Hunky-dory

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. See right for a link to the full list of instalments.


1980

At last we were settled in our new house in Silverton, or rather our new house two miles outside Silverton. Our new detached, three-bedroomed house with a quarter of an acre of garden. Our second house. It had cost us every penny we had, and now we had a mortgage too which meant that the house was in both our names as the building society needed the security of our combined incomes.
    I didn’t tell my parents this, not because I felt guilty but because it didn’t occur to me to do so. Like my emotional life that I’d kept secret until the issue of marriage arose, I’d never divulged my financial situation to my parents. Nor did it occur to me until later – several decades later – that because they had a stake in the house (having given us the money for our first house which we'd sold to part-finance the second) I should have told them and that it was dishonest not to.
    They didn’t say anything either – for once.

I’d of course gone the conventional route in looking for a new house, contacting local estate agents, trawling through page after page of information about properties for sale, and visiting a succession of unsuitable places – unsuitable because they were too small, too boring, too close to other houses – but suitable because they were what we could afford.
    John, on the other hand, had taken a road he’d never explored before just for the hell of it and halfway along had seen the house, seen it was for sale, and thought, yes, that was our house.
    As soon as I saw it I agreed with him.
    The views were fabulous. The neighbour, who showed us round and who had been cutting the grass to keep the place nice, was delightful. The house was modern, bright, immaculate and a blank canvas for us to put our stamp on.

We felt welcome straight away.
    We stayed with a friend in the village for a couple of months when we were between houses and with the neighbour C for the final weekend. She lived on a farm with her husband and young son and had let us leave all our belongings in one of their barns while the house purchase went through. On the Monday she helped us transport everything from their barn to our new house, on foot and in the Mini.
    Another neighbour brought us some swedes as a welcome present – from which I made a hearty soup.
    Another invited me to a Tupperware party. (I declined the invitation – feeling rather overwhelmed by something so grown-up – and I didn’t ask her in, which I realise now was very remiss of me. She was using the party as an excuse to drop in on us.)
    Another knocked on the door and asked if he could buy John’s motorbike. (He couldn’t.)
    People in cars would stop on the road and engage us in chat.
    Somehow, they all already knew all about us – where we came from, where we worked.

On our first night in the house, John spilt red wine on the beige carpet in the sitting-room. We took it as a good sign. Already we were making the place our own.
    In our two previous places – the flat and the bungalow - John had taken over one of the bedrooms for his hi-fi equipment and records, which had cut him off. In the new house he was able to park himself in one of the corners of the large sitting-room, which was much more companionable.

Music was everything to him. At around the age of eight he’d started to build his own electronic equipment on which to play music. He still had some of it, including a Perspex amplifier that he was very proud of. Music had saved him during his adolescence.
    When, at his grammar school, they’d asked him what he wanted to do when he left he’d said that he wanted to be a recording engineer. He wanted to help musicians create music. Right, said the school, not having the foggiest what he was talking about. A levels.
    And, of course, he failed them all. He wasn’t academic except about music. His knowledge of music was encyclopaedic. Ask him something about music – any sort of music – and he could answer. But ask him to study for something he wasn’t interested in and he stalled.
    His main criterion in choosing a house was for it to be somewhere he could play loud music - outside as well as inside - without worrying about disturbing anyone and now of course he could.
    And did.

I loved it. I was learning so much and luckily our tastes more or less coincided. The only genre neither of us liked was Jazz. He liked Folk music however which on the whole I didn’t, whereas I liked Country music which on the whole he didn’t. But we could deal with that.
    He turned his nose up at my handy portable record player with its lid made from its two speakers which I’d bought from a fellow student for £70 in 1976, and exclaimed in horror at its wires which – cleverly, I thought - I’d spliced together in order to make them longer. He relegated it to the top of a cupboard. I didn’t mind – too much.
    And he disapproved of some of my records, such as Santana Abraxas which had blown me away when I first heard it in 1971, and kept them in a box separately from his racks. (At least he kept my records.) His records were arranged in the order in which he’d bought them and he remembered the position of every one. He could pull one out without even thinking about it.
    
His mission in life was to spread good music and to that end he’d joined the fledgling student radio station, University Radio Exeter (URE), helping them out technically and presenting a programme on which he could play whatever music he wanted.
    It saved him from the tedium of his job at the university, which nonetheless he worked at diligently. He didn’t want to be unreliable like his father. He wanted to be a good provider.

I now had a secretarial job at the National Trust Regional Office (long story) which was only a couple of miles away. This I found excruciatingly boring but I could bicycle there and walk in the park at lunchtime, and I was determined to stick at it as I’d never before had a job for more than a few years.

Kitten had had to go back to Rod while we were homeless but she was now safely restored to us.

So everything was in place, ready for our new married life together. All was hunky-dory.

    Or was it?

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Prologue

This is an instalment of the autobiographical series. I have published it before but not as a prologue, which is what I now intend it to be.

See right for links to the rest of the series.

 January 2022

Usually I walked our dog Ellie on my own every morning but that day, for some reason, Frog decided that he would accompany me.
    Perhaps he had a presentiment. He’d given me a very strange look earlier as we sat in bed having breakfast. It wasn’t a look I’d ever seen on his face before and I hadn’t known what it meant.
    Or perhaps he simply didn’t know what else to do.
    He’d been lost since retiring a few years earlier from his two jobs, one at the Exeter University student radio station and one in the university science department where he’d been working on and off for nearly half a century.
    He spent hours in his semi-underground music room playing patience on his computer and listening to records. Whenever I went down to see him he would look up guiltily and I had the sensation that he was hiding something from me. When I challenged him however he would deny it vehemently.
    Ellie and I used to spend time sitting in the conservatory together, me reading or sewing and Ellie sitting on my feet, and whenever Ellie heard Frog’s footsteps coming up the stairs from his room she would flinch. The day before, I’d flinched too for the first time. He brought with him an aura of – something.

It was a few days after New Year. The Christmas tree was still up in the sitting-room with its ropes of white and coloured lights, and Christmas cards hung around the house on loops of red string.
    As we set off, the sun was shining but a cold wind was blowing and I was well wrapped up in a quilted coat, hat, gloves and scarf. Sometimes I wore lace-up walking boots and sometimes I wore wellies. Today was a welly day, but I can’t remember why.
    The start of the walk was a steep climb up the lane behind the house and I soon left Frog behind. I felt a bit impatient. Why was he walking so slowly?
    I stopped at a gate halfway up the hill to wait for him. There was a view eastward over fields and hills and I breathed in the space and the silence and the fresh air. Through trees I spotted cars speeding along the motorway a few miles away but because the wind was south-westerly I couldn’t hear them. They were the only things moving.
    I looked back. Where was Frog? He’d been ages.

    Then he appeared around a corner, and I was shocked. He was hardly moving. Each footstep appeared to be an effort. He looked old.
    At last he reached the gateway and, as I shifted to one side to give him space, he gave a cry of surprise and fell to the ground. His eyes closed and his breathing became laboured and I knew something was seriously wrong. I rang 999 on my ancient mobile phone, my hands shaking.

After I’d explained in detail exactly where I was – luckily I’d been walking the area for over forty years and I knew the name of every farm, lane and crossroads - they tried to get me to resuscitate him. They wanted me to put my phone on ‘speaker’ so that they could give me instructions, but my phone was too old to have that capability.

    I dropped it on the ground and tried to resuscitate him anyway but I didn’t know what I was doing. I had had training in first aid but that was a long time ago and I couldn’t remember anything. In any case Frog was sprawled awkwardly against a bank, difficult to get at and far too heavy for me to move.
    Very soon two ambulances and a car arrived, and a helicopter landed in the field the other side of the gate. The farmer sped up from his yard below and unlocked the gate. Paramedics and doctors leapt out of their vehicles with packs on their backs and cases in their hands. They lifted Frog into the field and started attaching equipment to him.

I stood out of the way in the road and put Ellie on her lead. She was wildly excited and barking loudly. What was going on? Why were all these people here? Why weren’t they taking any notice of her? She should be centre of attention, not Frog.
    A neighbour wandered down, wondering what all the commotion was.
    ‘Can I help?’ he asked.
    ‘Could you take Ellie,’ I said, proffering the lead.
    Everyone in the area knew her. She was so striking with her long black and white coat and so gregarious, a bit of a femme fatale. She had to make everyone to fall in love with her. Frog and I called her a ‘minx’ and her admirers ‘victims’.
    ‘Of course,’ the neighbour answered, taking the lead and walking back up the lane with her.
    Ellie trotted after him without a backward glance.

A doctor with a clipboard came up to me and took some details.
    ‘Would John want to be resuscitated,’ she asked, ‘if there was a chance he would be a vegetable?’
    ‘Absolutely not,’ I said.
    I tried not to look as they injected him with adrenaline and gave him electric shocks. His body shook like a jelly, but there was no sign of life.

The helicopter took off, and the two ambulances set off in convoy for the hospital in Exeter, me in the second one and Frog in the first, attached to life-support machinery. I got my ambulance to stop at my house as we went past so that I could grab my purse.
    At the hospital I sat alone in a small room, still dressed in my dog-walking clothes, while they continued trying to bring Frog back to life. Eventually someone came out and told me they'd stopped trying. Did I want to see him?
    I nodded.
    It took them some time to find the key for the room but at last they let me in and shut the door behind me.
    It wasn’t Frog lying there. The body didn’t look anything like him; it felt cold. I wondered whether his spirit was still around but I didn’t sense it.
    Even so, I couldn’t stop saying thank you to him – thank you for our life together, thank you for everything he’d done for me, thank you for putting up with me. I repeated the words over and over again.

Through the haze of grief, through the confused days and the terrifying sleepless nights that followed, one thought kept me going.
    This was my chance. This was the first time in my life I’d lived alone. My parents were dead. Frog was dead. He’d taken himself out of the picture deliberately so as to give me space. I was no longer beholden to anyone. I had nothing left to lose.
    Now at last I could sort out the whole sorry mess.

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PART FOUR. 4 The Proposition

This is an instalment of  an as-yet unnamed autobiographical series that started in Australia in 1975.

A link to the full list of instalments so far is in the sidebar to the right.

Note

I'm slowing down with the series for the moment in order to catch up with the rest of my life but I certainly intend to finish it in due course.

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My father had a proposition for me. He would give me the money for the house if I registered it in my name only.
    I knew my father disapproved of mortgages, even if they were becoming more common. He considered them, like hire purchase, as something for the poor, and dangerous to enter into. But I didn’t think of that. All I saw was the insult to John. My father didn't trust him. He didn't trust me and my choices.

    I suspected that the announcement in the paper had been my mother’s work, but this proposition was definitely my father’s. Money was his currency, his purpose in life.
    My parents may have respected our marriage by putting us in the same room when we went to stay (which was strange, to say the least), but underneath they’d obviously not changed at all. Both, in their different ways, were persisting in thinking of John as belonging to a sub-species.
    I started to cry and everyone in the open-plan office looked up.
    I started to plead with my father, and I could hear myself sounding childish and unconvincing.
    ‘Think about it,’ said my father putting the phone down.

‘Family troubles,’ I said to the room at large, not wanting – like John T – to enter into long and shameful explanations. Which was perhaps another mistake. Perhaps I should have talked to people and asked their advice.
    I’m sure I told John about the proposition but I don’t remember him saying anything about it. Perhaps he didn’t want to influence me. Perhaps he was too hurt to say anything. Perhaps – and most likely – he didn’t know what he felt about it. He was used to being strong – for his mother. He wasn’t used to examining his emotions.
    In any case, I’d become the one who looked after our money and all things administrative as that was something I was reasonably good at. John’s forté was all things practical.
    So I was on my own and in the end I gave in. It was just a piece of paper, I said to myself, and in my heart I shared everything with John so did it really matter? Accepting the offer would keep my father happy since rejecting it would be a rejection of him, and I couldn’t face any more ructions. And finally, of course, the money would be more than useful as the mortgage would have stretched us to our limit.
    Wrong, wrong, wrong.
    But it took me many decades to realise that.

So we said goodbye to our lovely flat, with its views of countryside, its wooden steps where we sat out, and Esme the bottle-fed lamb who occasionally made her way up the steps and into our accommodation . . .

 

John with Esme

. . . and travelled backwards and forwards many times with a crammed Mini to our new semi-detached bungalow.
    We were transporting not only all our stuff from the flat but also all the stuff John had left at Rod’s and – finally – dear Kitten, who looked a little ragged by now. Poor thing.

Kitten in the new house

The garden was the best part of the property. It backed on to an ancient Devon hedge and a large oak tree and we spent much of the summer out there, either on a rug or using a packing crate as a garden table. John bashed a hole in our bedroom wall and put in a French window so that we had direct access.

Lunch in the garden

As time went on we began to realise that we didn’t fit in on the estate. Our immediate neighbours, a young couple like us, told us that the others called us ‘the hippies’ because we’d used the Mini to move in (and it was always rather muddy, but how could it be any other way when John insisted on using the ‘back roads’ – ie the Devon lanes – at every opportunity. Who has the time to wash a car anyway?). People complained about the weeds in our front garden.

    The village and surrounding footpaths had an unpleasant atmosphere and I didn’t like walking on my own. The pub was not a patch on the Tuns, and we found ourselves taking the half-hour drive back to Silverton several times each week to visit our friends there.

    Then we started to get strange calls. It was always when I was alone in the house. I would pick up the phone and no one would answer even though I was pretty sure someone was there.
    ‘Ignore it’ said the woman opposite whose husband was a policeman.
    She’d given us a fold-up bed they no longer had any use for which was kind of her, but she always looked disapproving and never smiled. She boiled dishcloths, which was something my mother used to do, but not something I would ever dream of doing. They smelt horrible.
    ‘Get a whistle’, said the local police station, ‘and blow it hard down the mouthpiece.’
    That was good advice. I followed it and the calls stopped.
    Even so, we began to wonder if it was time to move.

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