PART NINE. 1 I am Now Willing to Begin the Healing Process

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. For more information and a list of instalments so far, see right.

2018


Of course, it wasn’t only my relationship with my parents that had come between me and Frog. It was also my experiences in London, in particular losing my virginity to Brian, the black shutter that had rammed down immediately afterwards and the black hole I fell into.
    The two traumas – that caused by my parents and that caused by Brian – had happened within a few years of each other when I was in my early twenties and utterly incapable of dealing with them. I hadn’t been brought up to have emotions or process them. I’d been brought up never to complain, to act as if everything was perfect, and to bury problems. The effects of those events had fed into each other, made each other worse and kept each other fixed.

I didn’t often think about Brian. He wasn’t constantly in my mind like my parents were. After all, he didn’t have to be. He was long gone. I’d fled to Australia to escape him (among other things). But whenever I did, I realised that somewhere deep inside I’d come to the conclusion, because of how he’d behaved, that men vanished after you’d had sex with them. It wasn’t safe to give yourself.
    So whenever sex threatened, I froze.

The block had gone very deep and even Pat’s ministrations – the counselling, the sex therapy, the hypnotherapy - had failed to shift it. She'd kept Frog and me together but I was still a mess. Cheryl had continued my education and introduced me to a whole new world, but that wasn't enough to unstick me either.
    Now, forty years later, even though I’d learnt so much emotionally and spiritually, the damage was still entrenched, stuck like the First World War bullet that had lodged itself in my late grandfather’s arm. He would flex his biceps and it would pop up, the size of a golf-ball, under the skin of a forearm, and we children would squeal with terrified delight. (Or was it really a bullet? Perhaps he just said that to tease us.)

Because of those long-ago events, I hung on to Frog as if he was a lifebelt. He was more of a parent to me than a husband.
    He was resigned by now, rather than angry, but he did often look very sad. It broke my heart.



Pat had introduced me to a book called You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay.

 

This describes how to use affirmations to cure disease and then at the end lists each disease, with the reasons why it’s there and the affirmations to deal with it.
    I’d skimmed the book at the time, thinking that it was just another New Agey publication, a quick fix, one person’s view, too idealistic for words, American.
    And impossible to use. It required a transformation that I didn’t feel capable of making.
    But I kept it by the bed and consulted it whenever I fell ill.

About migraines for instance, the book said that, among other things, they were caused by sexual fears. OK. Louise had got that spot on. ‘Can usually be relieved by masturbation’ she’d added in brackets. Well, I knew that wasn’t true. Anyway, who can do that with a splitting head and vomiting?
    From my Mind, Body, Spirit editing work and my research for MBS writing, I knew that the two sides of the brain deal with different aspects. Put simply one side is logical, the other imaginative. So, personally, I saw the migraines as also caused by me sitting on the fence, not knowing who to side with, Frog or my parents, me or my parents. How can people have such different points of view? Who was right? I simply couldn’t sort that out.
    In yoga, the indigo chakra, the one second from the top that sits over the forehead, deals among other things with reconciling opposites. One of its counter-effects, the result of that level being undeveloped, is of course headaches. I thought that was interesting too.

My migraines had worsened. I now felt ill most of the time. They dominated my life. It was impossible to plan anything because I couldn’t be sure I’d be well enough for it.
    One night, in desperation, feeling utterly dreadful, I grabbed You Can Heal Your Life from my bedside table, and opened it at random.
    It fell open at one of the early chapters, called something like ‘How To Change’.
    An affirmation jumped out at me. It went something like: ‘I am now willing to begin the healing process.’
    ‘Yes!’ I thought. I am.

To be continued

8.8 Free at last?

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. For more information and a list of instalments so far, see right.

I arrived mid-afternoon.
    ‘Why don’t you have a turn sitting with Mum?’ said Amelia.
    I tensed. Any love for my mother was either gone or buried deep. I was horrified by her decline and what she'd been through over the last three years. I was bruised by all the criticisms of my previous attempts to help. Nevertheless, I followed Amelia into my mother's bedroom.

    The room was on the ground floor with big windows overlooking the garden and the river, with trees beyond. A sofa stretched in front of the windows looking out. The shelves contained either books or pictures of the family. It was a lovely spot.

    It was February but already, on my previous visit, I'd watched crows collecting twigs for their nests. 

   'What are those big black shapes?' my mother had asked.

    'They're looking after you,' I said. 'Like angels'.

    My mother had nodded as if that was a perfectly normal thing to say.

    Perhaps that time I'd helped a teeny tiny bit. My way.
    

‘Hold her hand and talk to her,’ Amelia said before she left the room and closed the door behind her.
    It sounded like a command but I couldn't obey. My mother was semi-conscious, moaning and thrashing around as if in the grip of a nightmare and I didn't feel strong enough to touch her. It might have been a lie and I dreaded what I might convey to her, as well as what she might convey to me. I fished out my book and tried to read it.
    Some time later the door opened and Amelia reappeared.
    ‘Why are you reading?’ she said, looking shocked.
    I didn’t know how much my siblings knew about my parents’ reaction to Frog and my ongoing difficulties in dealing with it. I’d never talked to any of them about it as I was too afraid they would take my parents’ side and so the whole subject had erected a barrier between us. That hadn't mattered too much when my mother was healthy and independent but over the last three years it had.

    I couldn't possibly reply to Amelia's question. What did I say? Where did I start? How long did she have?

    I knew it was my fault for keeping quiet all those years, but I still resented Amelia telling me what to do. We weren't all like her. My experience of our parents was very different from hers.

    So I squashed my feelings back down again and said nothing.

       
In the early evening we five children sat round my mother’s bed, chatting quietly. The two carers hovered in the kitchen next door.
    We were all staying the night. The carers had the spare bedrooms, while I was camping upstairs in the gallery sitting-room with my sister Cass, she on the sofa and me on a mattress on the floor. Where my brothers were to sleep, I don't know.

    My mother was unconscious and calm.
    For some reason the talk turned to money. Jo was a mathematician at the Bank of England and I often asked his advice about things financial.
    Amelia looked at us as if we were worms.
    ‘How can you talk about things like that at time like this?’ she said through her teeth, trying to keep her voice quiet.
    My barriers gave way. Every resentment I'd ever had begged to be expressed. Words rose to my mouth and I had a unfamiliar sense of power as if I was channelling the real me at last.
    ‘Who put you in charge?’ I barked.

Appalled at what I'd said, I rushed into my mother’s garden, followed by my two brothers. I hugged Jo. Danny put his arm round me.
    ‘I think I’ll ring Frog,’ I said, fishing out my mobile phone with shaking hands.
    

Later I crept back inside and upstairs to my mattress. Cass didn’t appear so I presumed she was so disgusted with me that she’d taken herself off to Amelia’s house.
    I couldn’t sleep and in the middle of the night, I texted Frog.
    ‘Are you awake?’ I asked.
    ‘Yes,’ came the answer
    ‘I’m coming home,’ I texted back.
    As soon as it was light, I walked to the train station.
    Back home I retired to bed. At lunchtime the phone rang. Frog took the call. It was Jo.

    My mother had died.

    

I spent the next day sitting under an oak tree in a nearby park, in an agony of shame and sorrow, finally resolving to send Amelia a card, apologising for my outburst.
    Which I did, but I never had a reply. That didn’t surprise me however as she was even worse than me at dealing with conflict.

A few weeks later Frog and I drove up to Kent for my mother’s memorial service. My siblings were perfectly polite as if nothing had happened.
    In my mother’s garden I caught up with Caroline, my old schoolfriend, the daughter of Trish whom my mother had consulted all those years ago about me wanting to marry so unsuitably. I’d always been a little in awe of Caroline as she did everything correctly (according to the codes of both my parents and hers), but when I told her about my mother apologising to me for the first time ever she was sympathetic.
    ‘My parents weren’t very nice to me, you know.’ I said.
    ‘No they weren’t,’ she agreed.
    That meant a lot.

I was staying with Danny in Sussex and after the memorial we went for a walk.
    ‘Well, we’re orphans now,’ he said.
    ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘Free at last.’
    He looked me aghast.

    I'd spoken without thinking, not realising that it wasn't the sort of thing you said when your parents died. But there was no way I could backtrack and, anyway, I meant it.   

Freedom was what I craved. It was what I hoped for from now on. The departure of both my parents was like the moment when Frog first told me about Sam. Something supposedly awful had happened but I saw it instead as a chance to make things better.

    My parents had come between me and Frog, and now with them gone could the love I felt for Frog find expression at last?

    Could I finally break free of them?

    Could I finally be real? 

To be continued

8.7 My Mother

This is an extract from an autobiographical series. For more information and a list of instalments so far, see right.

Meanwhile my mother was managing well without my father, as far as I could tell. She moved to a small modern house next to the river in the village where we’d all been brought up.
    ‘It’s the sort of house I’ve always dreamed of having,’ she said.
    It was certainly different from the large Victorian farmhouse of my childhood, which had meant a lot of work.
    She had a busy social life and plenty of interests, and my sister Amelia lived only a few minutes’ walk away.
    Then she had a small car accident which scared her. She decided her reactions were no longer good enough and made the brave decision to stop driving. She engaged Amelia and her partner to drive her around, do her shopping and generally take care of her.

A few years later, when my mother was in her mid-eighties, she contracted pneumonia and was not expected to live. But she did, although her strength had vanished and she needed full-time care. We tried to share this out between the five of us children but we were pretty bad at it and decided that my mother would much rather have a professional than us. As would we. So Jo and my sisters (the three who lived closest) arranged live-in carers.
    My mother said she’d had a dream in which she saw God and God had said to her ‘We nearly got you that time, didn’t we.’ It made me wonder why God had let her live as her quality of life had plummeted. Modern medicine, it seemed, kept people alive at the expense of their spiritual wellbeing. Death was inevitable and we needed to be prepared for that, not patched up and sent off to limp into the future unaided. Or perhaps I was thinking of what I would want. Perhaps my mother preferred it the way it was.
    I tried to do my bit, travelling up from Devon to stay a couple of nights every month or so but I struggled. The only way I could deal with my mother was to cut off completely from her, to divorce myself from all my own feelings and pretend she was a child. It was exhausting.
    My main feeling, I think, was fear. She knew just how to hurt and didn’t hold back from doing so. I wanted to protect myself from that.
    One morning, however, as I was on my knees cleaning out her wood-burning stove while she sat on a nearby chair keeping up a running commentary on everything I was doing wrong, I could bear it no longer and exploded.
    ‘For goodness sake,’ I shouted. ‘Just let me get on with things in my own way.’
    My mother crumpled.
    ‘Oh I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I know I’m terribly bossy.’
    It was the first time in my whole life that she’d ever apologised to me about anything. I leapt up and gave her a big hug.

Her health deteriorated and she was in and out of hospital. The brunt of the worry landed on Amelia, as well as my brother Jo and sister Cass both of whom lived in London but often stayed at my mother’s. I was desperate to help, so after my mother had been stuck in a large Kent hospital for weeks, I travelled up from Devon to visit her there.
    The place was manic and the staff so overworked they could hardly acknowledge me let alone answer any of my questions. My mother was surviving in her usual no-nonsense way, but to me she looked like a lonely child, and her brain was wandering for the first time.
    I’d gathered from my sisters – or thought I had - that they wanted to bring her home so, after a long mobile-phone conversation with Cass in a hospital corridor, I set about trying to make that happen. Perhaps I could do something helpful at last.
    During my earlier visits to Kent I’d struggled to do the right thing but either my mother or Amelia or the carer had wanted me to do things differently from what I was doing and from what the other two said. It was horribly confusing and I’d felt utterly useless.
    The staff at the hospital said that so long as my mother could sit unaided (or some such, I can’t remember exactly) and had appropriate care at home (which of course she did have) she could go. I explained this to my mother and with what I could see was a feat of unimaginable determination she managed to do whatever she had to. The hospital said they would send her home in an ambulance the next day. They gave my mother a 6-page form to fill out about her 'hospital experience'. As neither she nor I for different reasons was capable of filling it out, I left it behind.

    Amelia was not at all pleased with the turn of events and, even though I could see it was because the stress was too much for her, I took it personally and felt that yet again I’d got things wrong.
    I went back to Devon the next day, knowing that my siblings had arranged two live-in carers for my mother and thinking that everything was more or less under control.

    Less than a week later however I was called back. My mother was now very poorly indeed.

To be continued

8.6 Penny

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. For more information and a list of instalments so far, see right.

Penny, our rescue lurcher, had now been with us for nine years.

    She no longer ran off to look for us whenever we left her alone, but even so both Frog and I had acquired the habit of taking her with us in the car when we went out. She was quite happy to wait in carparks while we shopped, and Frog took her to work with him whenever he could. The students at the university radio adored her and had made her an Honorary Life Member of the station.

    She was a skinny little thing when she first came to live with us and hardly ate, but she’d put on a couple of kilos since then and usually managed to finish her meals. But she certainly wasn’t a gutso (as Frog would say) like dear Brindle. She did however have two vices. (All dogs have at least one in my opinion, but each has their own particular brand.)

Firstly, she loved rolling in anything smelly, which necessitated frequent baths and showers. Luckily this was something Frog was good at giving her.

 

 Frog bathing Penny

Secondly she was a chaser, which was not surprising given her greyhound ancestry. If she spotted a deer – of which there were many around – she would be off, leaping over hedges, across roads, through fields and rivers.

    If I managed to call her before she fixed into chase mode, she was obedient, but if not she became blind and deaf to everything but her quarry and I had to resign myself to two or three frantic hours at home, waiting for her to return of her own accord. Which she always did thank goodness, footsore, dusty and breathless. And deer-less.

     I didn’t worry too much about what could happen to her when she vanished as she could look after herself. It was the damage she might cause while out that concerned me.

But perhaps I should have been stricter. Perhaps I should have thought ahead more, and not given her the chance to go off on her own. Perhaps she couldn’t look after herself quite as well as I thought.

    One day as she and I walked the lane that went up the hill behind the house she vanished to the far corner of an adjacent field and returned dragging the filthy remains of some long-dead animal. This was so unlike her that I began to feel slightly alarmed.

    Frog was full of stories of how farmers laced meat with poison and left it out to kill foxes and badgers. Many of the dead animals by the side of the road, he said, had been killed and thrown there by said farmers.

    How barbaric, I thought, trying not to believe him. And what about the buzzards and crows that then fed on the poisoned animals?

    Soon Penny was bored by the carcass and left it lying in the road, but a few hours after we arrived home she became restless, which again was unusual.

    Brenda had sold the bookshop and I was back at home editing, having written two (awful) novels and an autobiography on the strength of several inspiring weekends away, a monthly course in Exeter and an online course, all with an extraordinary creative-writing teacher called Roselle. Roselle reached deep inside you by giving deeply of herself, and this – for me at least – had led to writing pouring out of me.

    I’d paused writing for the moment however and gone back to the work I knew so well and felt safe with. I needed a rest from intensity, and to earn some money.

    Even from my eyrie, carved out of the loft when we built the extension sixteen years earlier, I could hear Penny in the bedroom crashing around. So I abandoned my proofreading and went down to check on her.

    By now she looked terrible – panting and almost foaming at the mouth. Something was obviously very wrong. It was time for the vet again.

    I heaved Penny into the car and drove as fast as I could through the twisty lanes, while she fidgeted in the back.

     As we pushed through the door of the waiting-room, she opened her mouth and delivered on to the floor a vast pile of vomit sprinkled with small blue bits, which looked suspiciously like slug pellets. Where had she picked those up? I never ever used them myself as I thought they were disgusting. There were many humane ways to reduce slug damage. And if they'd been in that carcass, why?

    ‘It’s poison,’ said the vet. ‘I’ve seen several cases recently.’

    Penny spent two days and nights at the vet's, while they emptied her stomach (I think) and fed her charcoal, before we could fetch her.

    But she was never the same again.

She never ran for joy any more. She never went chasing. She never wanted to leap into the car with us. She never slid into view with a shy grin on her face when Frog arrived home.

    Then one evening six months later, she started having fits. It was another dash to the vet’s, Frog driving this time and us rendezvousing at the clinic with the out-of-hours medic.

    ‘There’s nothing I can do, I’m afraid,’ she said.

    As we settled Penny on her bed, she fell still and calm, as if she knew what was going to happen.

Frog carried Penny’s limp body to the car, and back home began digging again, using his sleeve to mop from his face a mixture of sweat and tears. We’d chosen a spot one paving slab away from Brindle.

    I stood by, offering silent moral support and watching the clear night sky. Suddenly over the western horizon a shooting star flared into life and vanished.

    It felt like a sign of hope. Penny was all right. She would manage without us.

The next morning I went out to look at the grave. Penny’s sweetness filled the air.

Frog and Penny on Glastonbury Tor

To be continued

8.5.Money

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. For more information and a full list of instalments so far, see right.

We had a small cremation service for my father attended by close family only, and afterwards lunch in the garden under two awnings as it was a sweltering July day. My mother had bought in quiches, French bread and mounds of strawberries which I had carelessly prepared simply by pulling the green bits out. I didn’t dehull them properly and for once my mother made no comment.

    After the aunts and uncles departed we stayed chatting in the garden. Frog and I planned to drive home overnight as travelling up we’d been caught in a jam on the M25 in Mediterranean heat and it had been almost unbearable.

    A small rainbow appeared in the sky near the sun and we all looked at it in awe.

    ‘It’s called a sundog,’ said Frog, the expert on all things celestial.

    ‘How extraordinary,’ said Amelia. ‘It seems significant, somehow.’

    It did.

A few weeks later, there was a memorial service in the village church for which Frog and I drove up again. My parents had been very sociable and the church was packed with their friends, as well as relatives from far and wide. It was an emotional occasion with music and speeches, laughter and tears. I sat stony faced.

    Afterwards I said to Frog, ‘That was confusing, wasn’t it. I didn’t recognise the person they were all talking about. How come I see him so differently?’

    ‘I know exactly what you mean,’ said Frog. ‘I felt the same.’

I didn’t shed a tear for my father then, but I had shed lots fourteen years earlier when we were seeing Pat. I’d mourned the father I’d loved and admired so much when I was a child.

    The father who read Jo and me extracts from a book called The Witches’ Kitchen. I think it was one from his childhood as it had a drab hard cover like many of the other old books – some dating to Victorian times - that lived on the shelves at home. He read it with relish, and Jo and I would squeal with delighted terror.

    The father who would come up and see us children in bed when he got back from work, and when we asked him excitedly how much he’d earned today, would pull the change from his pocket and count it. That was what fathers did, we knew that. They earned money.

    The father who protected me from crocodiles under the bed.

    The father who loved practical jokes, who had a mustard pot that wasn't a mustard pot, that a green snake would jump out of when you took the lid off.

    The father who taught us what he called the Siamese War Cry:

    'Oh wah, tah nah, Siam.'

    [Try saying that.]

    The father who wore a pale green v-necked jumper for years and years, even when it was full of holes. It made him look so handsome.

    The father who helped me with my maths homework, who was so patient and explained it so simply and clearly.

    The father who’d found me in the dining-room one evening in my early teens crying over my school books because I had so much revision to do before my exams and who’d been both sympathetic and encouraging, probably bringing out the family motto he’d created: ‘All the Fishers are tough’. He would ask us to repeat it and we would chant it back to him. We thought it was a huge joke.

    The father with whom I’d had a special relationship because I was his oldest child, and a girl.

Now my father was the bogeyman, the one who scared me. The one who hadn’t wanted me to go to Australia. The one who’d tried to come between me and Frog, who’d written such long intricate letters which had appeared so reasonable but had cut me to the core. The one who was always so critical. The one I no longer trusted. He still meant money to me, but the love was gone.

    Money had been a problem, I could see that now. Not only had I been terrified of losing my family if I stood my ground, but I hadn’t wanted to be cast adrift in a ruthless world with only the money that Frog and I could earn between us. I needed and wanted his financial help. And my father had perhaps tried to keep it that way.

At one time, probably when I was in my thirties, I’d asked him if I needed to be paying into a pension.

    ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘You’ll be fine.’

    What I took that to mean was that I would be provided for when he and my mother died, but when I discussed the subject with my sister Cass she had a different take.

    ‘What he meant’, she said in her usual confident way, ‘was that women didn’t need to concern themselves with money.’

    Little did he know, I thought, that I was the financial brains of my marriage. Frog was such a spendthrift that he had to run all purchases by me. We had joint accounts and I checked the statements. I gave him the cash he needed. I paid the bills (as he simply tucked them down the back of the sofa). I filled out the tax forms. I did all the financial planning.

    Even though my father wouldn’t have dreamt of inducting me – or any of his daughters - in the ways of handling money, of acquiring capital, of providing for old age, I’d imbibed financial acumen from him. I was proud of that, and proud that I was doing it without him knowing. It was a small victory.

But I hadn’t stood up to him when he gave me the money to buy a house on condition that it was in my name only, that Frog was left out of it. And I hadn’t taken out a private pension. I was still relying on an inheritance.

    Money had come between me and the truth, me and independence, me and an adult relationship with my father.

    I wasn’t proud of that.

    And now it was too late to do anything about it.

    

To be continued