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.

Contact me on belindawhitworth[at]dialstart[dot]net to go on the mailing list and be kept informed of new instalments.

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.

To be continued . . .

PART FOUR. 3 The Announcement

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 is in the sidebar to the right.

We may have been married but the battle wasn’t over. The next stage and my biggest mistake so far were still to come.

The honeymoon was a pleasant interlude, if wet. We spent several days on Bodmin Moor, with John glued to John Fowles’s The Magus and me sitting at the mouth of the tent, eating chocolate digestives and watching the rain. We were both still in shock, I think.

When we returned, I rang about a flat a few miles further west from Exeter than Liz’s cottage. Ironically, this time the landlady didn’t ask about our marital status.
    We went to see the accommodation. It was light and modern, on the upper floor of a barn, and we liked it immediately. Unfortunately, it was just outside our budget. We’d decided we could afford £20 (a month? a week? I can’t remember) but the flat was £22. When I explained this to the farmer, she said we could have for £20.
    Some good news at last.

In October, we moved in, with some more of John’s belongings, but not Kitten sadly as she wasn’t allowed. She, like the rest of John’s spare stuff, had to stay with Rod.
    At the same time, my job waitressing at the National Trust house was finishing, as the house closed at the end of the month. I volunteered to spend the first two weeks of November helping with a deep clean of kitchen and restaurant (gruesome, cleaning not being my favourite activity) and I then spent the next few weeks alone in the flat writing off for jobs, proper ones this time.
    I wrote to companies on spec, twice to a local publisher of non-fiction books, and after the second letter (and, I presume an interview, but I don’t remember it) they offered me a job as an editorial trainee, starting in January.
    Perfect.
    They said it was my typing experience that tipped the scales in my favour, even though they’d been suspicious of the green ink in which I’d written to them. (I was copying someone on my course at uni who wrote in turquoise ink.) So my time in London hadn’t been completely wasted.

One weekend we went to stay with Mollie and John T. As we sat at the table in their sun-filled kitchen, they pushed over to me a folded newspaper. One of the small ads was ringed.
    I read it in growing confusion. It seemed to be an announcement of our marriage but it said that John came from Luton in Bedfordshire whereas Mollie and John T lived nowhere near Luton.
    ‘I don’t understand,’ I said, shaking my head.
    Who would have done such a thing and why?
    ‘Do you think it was your parents?’ they asked.
    Things began to make sense. My parents knew John came from Bedfordshire but they didn’t know which part. They’d put the announcement in without consulting any of us named in it – Mollie, John T, John and me. They'd picked on Luton because it was the only town they knew in Bedfordshire.
    John T explained that someone at work had shown him the announcement and asked him if it was his son. After reading it, and beginning to suspect what had happened, John T had denied that it was anything to do with him. He couldn't account for the error without entering into a long unhappy story. What's more, Luton at that time did not have a good reputation. He was forced to lie.

    I was appalled that John T should have been put in that situation, at the disrespect shown to Mollie and John T, at the hurt they must have felt.
    My parents had obviously not softened in the slightest. And a few months later that was to be confirmed.

At the end of June we were going to have to move out of our lovely flat so that it could be let to holiday visitors – in the same way as most property in the county since visitors could be charged more than long-term tenants.
    We’d had enough of shunting from place to place, of the insecurity, of not being able to settle anywhere, and as winter drew on began to wonder if we should look into buying a house.
    Somehow we’d saved enough for a deposit, and with our combined incomes could apply for a mortgage for the rest of the cost. We found a semi-detached bungalow we could afford on an estate on the outskirts of a village a few miles from our flat. I wrote and told my parents of our plans.

By now we had a polite but meaningless relationship with my parents. We’d visited them and they’d said nothing about anything. I was seething with emotions and couldn't meet their eyes but I didn't how to even begin to explain what I was feeling. I couldn't pretend like they did - or as I presumed they did - and I found the situation intensely stressful. Nothing was resolved.

    Nevertheless I tried to carry on doing the ‘right thing’ by visiting and writing. I didn’t want to give them any more grounds for attacking me and John.

We didn’t have a phone in the flat so I’d given them my work number for use in an emergency.
    One day my phone rang at work.

    It was my father.

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AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SERIES. List of Instalments so far

PROLOGUE

PART ONE (AUSTRALIA 1975)

1  Sydney

2  The Murray River, Streaky Bay and Adelaide
3  Wilpena Pound
4  Melbourne, Brisbane and Mackay
5  Before
6  A Whitsunday Island
7  Lindeman Island
8  The Great Barrier Reef
9  The Letter
10 I’ll be back’

PART TWO (THE STORY CONTINUES)
1 Cloak-man
2 The Disco
3 The Party
4 The Supper
5 The Cottage
6 The Confession
7 February
8 March

PART THREE
1 Bedfordshire
2 En Route
3 Kent
4 Another Letter
5 Another Letter continued
6 June
7 July and August
8 Missives
9 Results

PART FOUR
1 A Late Arrival
2 The Pub and the Church

3 The Announcement

4 The Proposition

PART FOUR. 2 The Pub and the Church

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 is in the sidebar to the right.

I can’t remember much about my wedding day. I think I was numb. John and I had fought so hard for it and now it was actually happening it seemed unreal. Parts of it stand out, like sunbeams, and other parts are lost in the dusty corners of my mind.

Once in the village, my family and John headed for the church, while Jo and I hung back. I pulled him into the Tuns and downed two vodkas. I’ve no idea why. I think I thought they were part of the ritual. Jo didn’t join me in a drink but he stood by, offering his usual uncritical support.
    

All I remember of the service is John, me and the vicar going into some back room and signing the register, with Liz and Rod as witnesses. I suppose I went through the rest automatically, and it didn't imprint itself on my brain cells.
    Outside, we must have posed for photographs as I have a collection: some of me and John; some of me, John and Richard; and some group photographs.
    In these, John’s parents are one end, Mollie sweet and smart in a brown velvet jacket. John and I are in the middle, holding tight to each other’s hand. My mother is next to me with Jo behind her, bushy-haired and tall.
    I don’t like to look at those group photographs now. Perhaps because they’re a lie. We weren’t a happy group, at least I wasn’t happy to be next to my mother. I’m looking away from her, holding myself tight on the side next to her. She looks grown-up and confident. I look like an overweight child.
    My favourite photograph shows John and me with our back to the camera, walking away with our arms around each other. Safe at last.
    We didn’t have an official photographer but two friends with cameras were standing outside, waiting for us all to come out of the church. How did they know to be there? Such thoughtfulness. Such kindness.

I remember our rings, of course. John had designed them, and a silversmith he’d met at a craft fair on Exeter’s Cathedral Green had made them. His was a wide band with my name engraved on it in runes. Mine was three rings twisted together. It was heavy and clunky on my finger and I wondered if I’d ever get used to it.

Looking at my new wedding ring

Back at the The Three Tuns, Richard had chilled champagne ready. We sat at two tables, the young on one and the old (older) on the other.

    The older table was the noisy one. The vicar had joined us for lunch and he was regaling them with scurrilous stories (I heard something about him having to blow the smoke from his cigarette up a chimney) and they were all laughing loudly. In the pictures they are all smiling except for Betty who’s looking askance at my mother.

 

John T and Betty, looking askance

I sat mute in the centre of the other table.
    Friends of John’s from the pub joined the party and bought John and me brandies.
    Everyone was celebrating, except for John and me.

When we went outside after lunch we discovered that Simon had sprayed the Mini with ‘Just married’ in shaving foam and tied bells to its rear bumper. John was almost speechless with anger.
    ‘How could you,’ he shouted. ‘You’ve probably damaged the paintwork.’

He untied the bells immediately.

We went back to Liz’s cottage with Mollie where we found four congratulatory telegrams – from my father’s older sister who was also my godmother, my grandfather (my father’s father), my godfather (who was related in a complicated way to my mother) and his daughter who’d been to stay with John and me at Liz’s cottage over the summer. (She and her boyfriend had slept in our room and we’d slept in a tent in the garden.)

    There were presents too, from family and friends on both sides.

    I began to feel a little more conscious. The world came into focus again. I’d expected everyone to be on my parents’ side but perhaps I mattered to people as well.
    John wiped the Mini clean. The paintwork was intact, thank goodness. We changed out of our wedding clothes, shaking the confetti out of our hair and underwear, and packed the car. We were off to Cornwall for a week, staying for two nights in a B & B and then camping. John had all the gear.
    We kissed Mollie goodbye and set off, alone at last, married at last.

John cried all the way down to Cornwall. I wasn’t sure what to do as I’d never credited men with emotions, not subtle ones anyway, and I didn’t yet know what to do about my own.
    I kept my hand on his leg in what I hoped was a reassuring way, and passed him tissues when he needed them.

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