PART THREE. 2 En Route

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

Click here for the first instalment.

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The next morning John’s younger brother came over. He was tall and spindly with a cheeky grin, similar to John T when he was younger as far as I could judge from the photographs Mollie had shown me. He was working as a trainee journalist at a local newspaper.

    I didn’t meet his elder sister. She was yet another who’d ‘had’ to marry in their teens because she was pregnant. She was now a single mother with three daughters, her husband having left her on the birth of girl number three.

    I hinted to Mollie how scared I was about visiting my parents and she gave John a 1950s’ book called ‘Lady Behave: a guide to modern manners’ – what sort of invitations to use for different sorts of parties, where to seat people around a table, how to address a lord or a bishop, what to wear when – and he’d hooted with laughter.

    ‘Does anybody actually live like this?’ he spluttered.

    Mollie and I looked at each other.

 

After lunch, as we set off down the A1 for Kent, which was the same distance south of London as Bedfordshire was north, I ruminated on the encounter to come.

    I’d written to my parents saying, ‘I’ve met someone and he wants to marry me. I told him he was unsuitable!’

    The exclamation mark was important. I thought it might introduce a note of levity to the proceedings. I hoped it would suggest that it was stupid to be concerned about things like that.

    My parents were young once. They must remember what it was like. They must be human somewhere. I wanted to give them a chance. But, at the same time, I wanted to warn them.

  

My mother came from an aristocratic family which had lost its money several times over the centuries, the most recent being in my mother’s early twenties. Her mother had died of cancer around the same time and the family had broken up. She’d returned from the Sorbonne in Paris where she was studying and found a job.

    She never talked about that time. I’d had to glean what I could from her sister who was only six when their mother died and who’d lived with us.

    My mother’s golden years were the three she spent studying at Oxford University, where women were in the minority and the men older, back from the war. There, it seemed, her emotional life had stopped.

She made a good choice in my father. He may not have been quite her class or have her education but – unlike her family – he was solid.

    He’d built his business on trust and honesty, he said.  He was traditional. He believed in politicians and the police. Marriage and children was the correct order of things. ‘Capital’ - money saved - was the key to happiness.

    His mother had died of pneumonia when he was six and he went to an all-boys school, but he did have two sisters so women weren’t a complete enigma to him. But he considered them an inferior species. Frivolous, inclined to spend money unnecessarily, and without proper judgement.

Nine months after they married I was born and then four more children in the next seven years. On my sixth birthday we moved from a moderate dwelling to a farm with a seven-bedroomed Regency house as well as thirty acres of fields, stables with a flat above them, an orchard and a walled 'kitchen' garden.

    This was where John and I were now headed.

I’d been lying to my parents from an early age. Well, not lying, but certainly hiding my real self. I wanted, of course, to be loved and with each new brother or sister it seemed that I was loved less. Or at least I got less attention. There must be something wrong with me, I concluded, so I tried to be perfect.

    My parents believed that children should be docile and compliant. So that’s what I became.

    They knew nothing about my real life.

    I had no practice whatsoever in standing up to them.

    I was the first of the children to do so.

By my parents’ standards, John failed on every count. He wasn’t upper class. He wasn’t rich. He didn’t have the sort of job that either of my parents would understand. He didn’t actually have anything in common with them at all.

    I loved my family and I couldn’t bear the thought of losing them. And that's what I risked, I thought, if I told my parents about John. But I didn’t want to carry on lying to them for the rest of my life.

    There were two of them and only one of me. They both in their different ways had the weight of the establishment behind them. I was young, alone and a woman to boot. Who was going to respect me? What were my opinions and needs worth anyway?

    But, if I didn’t believe that blue-sky voice that spoke in my head on the night of the supper party, what was there left?

    It was an impossible dilemma. A nightmare come true.

We reached the village, lumbered up the half-mile drive and came to a stop in front of the house. As we scrunched across the gravel towards the primrose-yellow front door, I felt as if I was walking to the guillotine.

    I saw John’s long hair, green trousers and dusty Mini through my parents’ eyes and wondered if I was making a huge mistake.

    I had no idea how I was going to handle the imminent situation.

To be continued

PART THREE. 1 Bedfordshire

 A big welcome to my new followers

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

Click here for the first instalment.

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

Easter 1978

We drove into a small village, similar to the villages in Kent – a church, a shop, a mixture of old and new houses, countryside all around - and slowed down outside a detached modern bungalow. Its gate was open and we zoomed into the driveway, coming to a stop in front of a garage.

    John leapt out of the car and made for a side door, while I did my best to keep up, my heart beating. Mollie and John T, John’s parents. What would they be like? What would they think of me?

    We entered a bright blue and white kitchen where a woman in an apron and slippers stood at the sink. She had fluffy blond hair and when she turned towards us I could see that she had the same green eyes as John and the same generous mouth. She was soft and lovely.

    John raced over to her, dragging me by the hand.

    ‘Dear boy,’ his mother said, touching him on the cheek.

    ‘This is Belinda, Ma,’ he said. ‘We love each other.’

    ‘I can see that,’ said Mollie.

    ‘And we want to get married,’ said John.

    ‘Dear girl,’ she said, touching me on the cheek.

 

John showed me to a chair by the window, at a table already laid for lunch.

    ‘There’s wine in the fridge,’ said Mollie, ‘if you’d like some.’

    ‘Wine!’ said John. ‘Since when have you and Pa drunk wine?’

    ‘Since he got his new job,’ said Mollie.

    From what John had told me I knew his parents had run an outfitting shop in a nearby town for nearly twenty years, before selling it. Since then his father had had a succession of different jobs, his latest a managerial post at a local aeronautics firm.

    John T had wanted to go to art school but his father, a tough shopkeeper originally from Australia (Australia again), hadn’t allowed it – ‘No son of mine goes to art school.’ He’d presented John T and Mollie with the shop on their marriage.

    Mollie now worked part time as a secretary. She came from a desperately poor family. She and her brothers and sisters weren’t allowed to eat fresh bread because they ate too much of it; they could only eat it stale. If they were ever lucky enough to go out somewhere her mother would order a pot of tea for one and six cups. The fecklessness of John T terrified her.

     Mollie was the first ever person in her family to go to grammar school. She’d looked after the shop’s accounts and done most of the work, according to John. She was the brains of the marriage.

    ‘Where’s Pa?’ John asked in a slightly aggressive tone.

    ‘Oh,’ said Mollie vaguely. ‘Probably watching television.’

    John pulled me up and through a hall into a dim room with half-closed curtains and a red carpet. Sprawled in an armchair was another version of John, albeit one with no hair and a large stomach. He grinned awkwardly and started to make polite conversation. Strangely, he seemed to want to impress me rather than the other way round.

    ‘Ma’s dishing up,’ said John brusquely. ‘You’re wanted in the kitchen.’

   

After lunch – a roast with all the trimmings – Mollie and I stayed in the kitchen clearing up while the Johns junior and senior went back into the television room. I could hear raised voices and then an argument, growing in ferocity. I presumed that was normal as Mollie seemed oblivious to it.

    ‘We’re so pleased he’s found you,’ said Mollie. ‘We’ve been worried about him.’

 

After lunch John took me out in the Mini for a tour round the locality.

    ‘That’s where I came off my bicycle,’ he said pointing to a ditch.

    ‘That’s where I came off my motorbike,’ he said, pointing to another ditch.

    ‘That’s where some – bugger – crashed into the Mini,’ he said at a junction. ‘Completely trashed it.’

    He’d had a succession of Minis, I knew. When he worked at his first job at Pye Telecom in Cambridge he lived at home and paid his parents for his keep. Unbeknownst to him his mother saved the money and soon there was enough for him to buy his first car, a Mini. He could remember all the registrations of his different Minis, and talked about them as if they were living beings, with feelings and their own separate characters.

After supper I sat in the bath, surveying my rolls of stomach fat as I usually did, my weight being a constant source of criticism and comment from both my parents, but instead of hating myself as I usually did, I had a small revelation. The problem wasn’t eating or not eating, being thinner or fatter. That simply gave the problem power. The only way out was to love yourself. That was where you started.

    I was placed in a small bedroom between John’s parents’ room at one end of the house and what had been John's bedroom at the other end. When I was sure the house was quiet I crept into John’s bedroom and, for the first time ever, we almost made love.

And I almost forgot that the following day we were off to Kent to see my parents.

To be continued . . .

THE STORY CONTINUES. 8 March

 This is part of an autobiographical series that starts in Australia.

Click here for the first instalment.

The full list of instalments is in the sidebar to the right.

I was beginning to panic.

    My final exams were due to start in May, only two months away, and usually by now I would have a revision timetable drawn up. I would have acquired old exam papers so that I could work on the different questions I might be asked, and have a stack of index cards so that I could write down salient details for each possible topic. I had done none of that this time.

    Everything depended on the results of my final exams. There was no continuous assessment and my exams at the end of the previous year had been simply to test that I could continue to this year.

    At school I’d loved exams. I’d enjoyed the challenge. This time they were giving me nightmares.

    It was so hard to concentrate, sitting at my table in my room while John lay on the mattress and laughed over some book he was reading. It was horrible sitting on my own in the library staring at a blank wall.

    In some of deep part of me I wondered if this was really the direction I should be taking. Might not all this brainwork be damaging? Studying was part of my old life, the old me. Should I not be throwing myself wholeheartedly into my new life with John?

    While we had our deep connection, in every way on the surface we were opposites.  Could I not be learning from that and enjoying it, instead of trying to stuff my poor brain with the words of other people?

    But I had to get my degree. I couldn’t bear the thought of failing twice.

 

Then there was our marriage to think of.

    Did we run away and get married in secret on our own? That tempted me, but my experience so far had shown me that running away was a bad option.

    I’d run away from university first time round, and look how badly that had turned out. I’d run away from all the disasters of London and, while Australia had been the best thing that had ever happened to me, I’d come back. And I’d come back determined to fit in this time, to engage with ‘real life’, whatever that was, to live like a normal person.

    But John wasn’t normal. Or at least not by the standards with which I'd been brought up.

‘I’d like to tell Ma,’ said John. ‘I’d like her to come to our wedding.’

    I knew, from what he’d said, that he was close to his mother. His father wasn’t kind to her, and John had supported her in many ways. I wanted to meet her.

    ‘OK,’ I said. ‘I suppose that means I ought to tell my parents too.’

Easter was early that year, at the end of the month. We decided to head east then, staying with John’s parents first – the easy bit – and then going on to mine.

    The prospect of telling my parents about John was even worse than the prospect of my finals. 

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THE STORY CONTINUES. 7 February

 This is part of an autobiographical series that starts in Australia.

Click here for the first instalment.

The full list of instalments is in the sidebar to the right.

January morphed into February. We divided our time between John’s cottage out in the wilds and my house in Exeter. Our sex life had at last begun but it wasn’t what I had been led to believe sex would be like when you met the right person. We explained that away as ‘teething problems’ and tried not to worry.
    One Saturday as John and I sat in my kitchen it started to snow. Fat fluffy flakes piled up at the bottom of the window. It was beautiful, as was the dark-red rosebud that appeared above John’s head.
    Unusually, we’d had a small smoke of cannabis.
    John had been smoking a lot of cannabis when I first met him – and that too explained much – but as soon as I told him that I didn’t like it, he started to cut down. It wasn’t that I disapproved of the drug – far from it – but I didn’t like the fuzzy idiot he turned into under its influence.  I preferred his straight self. Or perhaps I should say that I felt safer with his straight self. The fuzzy idiot frightened me.
    Cannabis frightened me too, took me to some scary places, which was why I’d never smoked it much.
    ‘I ought to go home,’ he said, ‘while I still can. I’ll be back this evening.’
 
It was his birthday the next day so I made him a fruit cake. Or, rather, two fruit cakes. It was another recipe of my mother’s and she catered in bulk. Not only did I have four siblings, but a nanny had lived with us when we were younger, as well as a sister of my mother’s, so it had been a big household.
    The snow continued and John didn’t reappear. At last, at about eight o’clock he rang.
    ‘I can’t get to you,’ he wailed. ‘I’m in the pub. Richard’s letting me use the pub’s phone. I’m behind the bar. I had to walk here. I’ve abandoned the Mini in a hedge somewhere. I’ll have to try and get to you tomorrow.’
    We hadn’t spent a night apart since the day after the supper party over a month earlier. I tried to be brave.
   
The next morning I looked out of the window and the city had turned white. A deep layer of soft snow covered everything. Nothing moved.
    I had no way of contacting John or finding out how he was. Had he made it home, walking through the snow in the dark? Or was he lying in a hedge somewhere dying of cold?
    I felt trapped in the house, unable to help him. I couldn’t even study - which was not like me at all.
     I had no one to talk to.
    Alison had cut me off because I hadn’t told her what was going on with John. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to, I just couldn’t. I didn’t know myself what was happening. Sometimes I wondered if I was going mad.
    Graham kept his distance, pursuing his studies in the department and only coming back to the house to sleep.
    I sliced into one of the cakes and treated myself to a piece of it.
    And every time I passed the cake, I had another piece.
    By the early afternoon the first cake was finished. I was shocked. How had I done that? I wrapped the other cake up tightly and put it away in the back of a cupboard.
 
Late in the afternoon, there was a hammering on the door. A tramp-like figure stood on the step. He wore a tweed coat that reached to his ankles, a baggy knitted hat that fell over his eyes and a grubby pale-pink scarf that wound round and round his neck and trailed to the ground alongside the coat.
    This wasn’t the hero I’d been imagining and pining for.
    ‘What on earth are you wearing?’ I exclaimed. I sounded like my mother.
    ‘Oh these,’ John said looking down. ‘I found them on the floor. I wanted to make sure I was warm enough.’
    ‘I walked in,’ he continued, excitedly. ‘I walked all the way here on the tops of the hedges. Well, a bloke at Stoke Canon stopped and gave me a lift. He had snow chains on his tyres. But otherwise I walked.’
   
The next morning we trudged together through the snow, across the city to the campus. Everyone else was on foot as well, in an assortment of colourful clothes that looked as if they too had been dragged from obscurity. It was like a scene from a Dickens novel.
    We didn't want to risk being separated again and so after the snow John moved in with me, gradually bringing different bits and pieces. First the hi-fi and some records which he installed in the sitting-room, and then a selection of clothes which he crammed into a small cupboard in my small room.

    Luckily one of the men who’d previously lived in the cottage had returned before the snow so Kitten had been and was being looked after.

Kitten

One Saturday John arrived with a large mattress strapped to the roof of the Mini.

    ‘I’m fed up with sleeping on your single mattress,’ he said. ‘So I’ve brought mine from the cottage.’

    We slid it off the car and struggled with it into the house. Then John tugged it up the stairs by its handles while I stood at the other end trying to stop it sliding back down again. Unfortunately Graham appeared at the top of the stairs. He gave a sickly smile.

    ‘Sorry, sorry,’ I said to Graham, while he waited for us.

    ‘Look,’ I said to John, ‘why don’t we take it back down again, and let Graham get through.’

    ‘No, no,’ said John. ‘Keep going.’

    My single mattress went in the sitting-room’s bay window as additional seating and every time I saw it I cringed.

    My heart and my soul were John’s, but my head was somewhere else.

To be continued . . . 

THE STORY CONTINUES. 6 The Confession

 This is part of an autobiographical series that starts in Australia.

Click here for the first instalment.

The full list of instalments is in the sidebar to the right.

Note

Please check that you’ve read the current version of  instalment 5 before you read this instalment.

(I say this because I have posted and reposted several different versions of instalment 5 and probably confused everybody. Many apologies. I'm hoping that the current version is the definitive one. )

  

So I did what I always did in such circumstances. I switched my feelings off and my brain on. The relief. The world was normal once again. And if it was a bit mundane, that was a small price to pay.
    John was sitting on the other side of the mattress, looking at me. He seemed at a loss, or waiting for me, or something. So I moved towards him. Sex was obviously the answer. That was what people normally did in these circumstances, wasn’t it?
    The trouble was, John and I seemed to have started at the wrong end. We’d started with our souls and left out all the rest of us. How did we catch up?
    And I didn’t even have a teenage romance in my past, a gentle love affair where I could have learnt about sex slowly. I’d been nabbed a few times at teenage parties but the results had disgusted me. I couldn’t even talk about them. And then, of course, there was B in London.
    I moved closer to John and touched him, but he reared back against the wall.
    ‘No, no,’ he cried out. ‘Something’s wrong.’
    I started to cry. It was the best thing he could have done. The only thing.
    Men had been pursuing me, grabbing me, following me since my teens. It was exhausting, frightening, destructive. I never had a chance to feel my own feelings. I was overwhelmed by other people’s lust. And here was someone, the first ever, refusing me for some reason.
    What a gentleman.
    And once I started to cry, I couldn’t stop. I found myself pouring out the whole story of B and London. I soaked a pillow with my tears.
    As before, at the party, John listened without comment. I knew that this was partly because he didn’t know what to say, but perhaps that again was the right way to be. I didn’t want advice or comfort. I just wanted truth.
    I must have fallen asleep as the next thing I remember is waking up, my head on a damp pillow, and the door opening.
 
Kitten sashayed in, followed by John wrapped in a torn green coat and carrying a bowl and a mug.
    ‘I didn’t know whether you took sugar in your tea,’ he said, ‘but I put some in anyway.’
    Kitten did a flying leap and landed dead centre on the mattress. She’d obviously done the manoeuvre before. I shuffled away from her to give her space. She struck me as the sort of cat you wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of.
    As I ate my bowl of muesli, John and I looked at each other and smiled. Again, we didn’t know what to say to each other. We’d gone beyond small talk. Or skipped it.
 
‘I’ve got to go to work soon,’ said John. ‘Shall I give you a lift to the campus or back to your house – wherever you want to go?’
    I retrieved my clothes from the piles on the floor, relieved to find them. Some time during the night I must have removed them but I didn’t remember doing so.
 
On the way in to Exeter, John played a cassette of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Rumours’, drumming along on the steering wheel.
 
    Did she make you cry
    Make you break down
    Shatter your illusions of love?
 
    Is it over now
    Do you know how
    To pick up the pieces and go home?
 
He was happy, and if he was happy so was I. That was enough for the moment.

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