PART THREE. 4 A Second Letter

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

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The day after the arrival of my mother’s letter came another. This one was in a long brown envelope like an official communication, with my address written in neat forward-sloping script. Inside were four foolscap pages of small tightly-packed words.

    I showed the letter to John who was sitting at the kitchen table in the Exeter house, spooning up his breakfast muesli.

    ‘From my father,’ I said with a grimace.

    He got up and came over to stand next to me.

 

Tuesday 4 April

 

My dear Belinda

No doubt you were well aware of our feelings during your time at home. I did not want to say more at the time partly because words said in the heat of the moment are never the best ones and partly not to upset someone who was after all a guest in our house. However, it is obviously right that you should be fully aware of my views.

 

    ‘Obviously right?’ queried John.

    I was glad he said something as those words had not sat right with me either, but of course I’d quickly suppressed the doubts, telling myself that they were due to something wrong in me – me not understanding protocol or being discourteous or disrespectful or simply rippling waters that should have been left calm.

    I gave him a rueful smile and he put his arm round me. It made me want to cry.

    We carried on reading.

     Firstly, you should allow nothing to distract you from completing your course at university and obtaining as good a degree as you are capable. It was obviously a mistake for to have given up after the first year and for this I must partly blame myself as an indulgent father doing his best to please you. Australia, although a delightful interlude, has obviously not helped you to realise that life is not an irresponsible drifting from whim to whim.

 

That was all wrong on so many counts.

    I made the decision to leave university after my first year. How could he have stopped me?

    My life wasn’t an ‘irresponsible drifting from whim to whim’. Each step had taken weeks if not months of agonising indecision. Each had had its deeper purpose.

    Australia wasn’t a ‘delightful interlude’. I’d travelled to the other side of the world on my own, made friends, found jobs, saved enough money to help see me through my studies now, and above all been happy. I was proud of myself. Why couldn’t he be proud of me too? Why did he think so little of me?

    Why did he not understand anything about me? It broke my heart – for him as well as me.

    I put a hand over my face and John squeezed my shoulder.

      

Please also appreciate that university is a cosmopolitan picture of all sorts of people from different environments, classes, needs, outlooks etc and to quite an extent a carefree period before people start their careers. A university always has its extremes of politics, prejudices, moral behaviour and so on and while we hope you will absorb all the good things it has to offer, we also hope that you will retain the standards to which your mother and I have tried to encourage you.

 

How did he know? He’d never been to university. And, anyway, didn’t that contradict what my mother had said about my ‘narrow world of Exeter’, although I suspected that by ‘narrow world’ she meant a world without upper-class people in it. (I wanted to think upper-class ‘twits’ but censored myself.)

    

The next essential is for you to try to find the best possible job that offers you interesting work and a potential career. Where this job is geographically should not be influenced in the slightest by amorous inclinations. In fact a resolution on your part to deliberately separate for a considerable while to test your real feelings is to be advised and would certainly commend itself to me as to the seriousness of your intentions.

 

    John snorted. ‘ “Amorous inclinations”! It sounds like something out of a Victorian novel.’

    I wanted to laugh but it came out as half-laugh, half-sob.

    

You say you wish to marry but that you do not intend to have children for a few years. If this is so, then there can be no urgency to get married. It also seems to be an acknowledgement that marriage would not be financially possible without the backing of your own earning power. And if you do change your mind – which is more than likely – and decide to have children, who is going to support the family while they grow up?

 

My father had caught me unawares, asking me about children, and I’d made up that answer on the spot. Now I thought about it, I realised that I didn’t want them at all. I’d had too many younger brothers and sisters to look after. I’d done my stuff.

     All John and I wanted was to be together and we already knew – could already see from what was happening with my parents - that that was going to be more than enough for us to deal with.

    We hadn’t touched on the subject of children in our talking, which made me think John didn’t want them either, perhaps for the same reason as me. I knew that when younger he’d had to watch out for his little brother and found him a complete pain.

    I suspected however that there was no right answer to the question of children. I was damned either way.

    Why? Why was everything about me so wrong?

    Did my parents hate me?

 

I could hardly bear to go on reading. We’d only reached the top of page two.

    I sat down and put the papers on the table. John pulled up a chair next to me.

    ‘Enough for the moment?’ he said.

    I nodded, thankfully.

    At least he understood.

To be continued . . .

PART THREE. 3 Kent

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

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Monday 3 April

My dear Belinda

It is difficult to say that it was lovely to see you at the weekend. I think it was almost the saddest time of my life.  

    I wonder if you quite realise what you are doing. At the moment you are living in a somewhat unreal atmosphere at university. Everybody is equal and simply accepted for what they are there. When you get away things are not quite the same.

    If you marry John you are cutting yourself off from all the things you have been brought up to accept and expect. Firstly on the purely practical side:

 

    no trips abroad

    no extras of nice clothes etc.

    no private medicine

  

above all, none of the advantages for your children that you have had.    

    Secondly and far more important you will be committed to such a narrow limited world and circle of friends, with really not much hope of improvement. It may not matter to you now, but I think you will get very bored. It does still matter what your background is and the mere fact that you worry about this yourself proves it. You can ignore the background and upbringing if someone has great brains, or charm, or talent, but they must have some compensation.   

    I rang up Patricia after you left. I wanted to hear her reaction and see if I was being prejudiced, snobbish etc. She was terribly distressed to hear about you. I think she feels as upset and worried as we do. She said she could not bear to think of you wasting your very good brain – not to mention ability and looks. I think she feels for you as for a daughter and being a little further away she can think less emotionally. I would not call her cynical, but she put even more emphasis than I do on the importance of background, how you have been brought up and what you expect from life. It is this that gives you confidence and the ability to mix with anybody. 

    Anyway, don’t do anything in a hurry. If you are not dying to have babies what is the hurry? Get your degree and get away from your narrow world of Exeter. You have so many talents. Don’t bury them all and turn into a bored and boring housewife too soon.

    Enough of preaching. You know what I think and I shan’t mention it again. My next letters will be the usual mundane gossip   

Love Mummy

The words ‘the saddest time of my life’ lodged in my chest like a boiled sweet swallowed whole. What awful thing was I doing to my mother?

I felt betrayed by Patricia, the mother of a schoolfriend. She had indeed been like a mother to me, her home a haven of kindness and understanding. How could my mother have gone to her behind my back?

I didn’t care at the moment about anything my mother listed – travel, clothes, medicine. I didn’t even think about them, but might I change my mind when I was older? How could I know?

Who was right, my mother or me? I felt, destroyed, crushed. I’d tried to introduce her to the most precious part of my life to date and she’d stamped all over it.

What was I? Did I even exist?

I handed the letter to John who was standing beside me. He took it in silence.

The visit had not gone well.

    My mother had emerged from the front door, a smile of welcome on her face, taken one look at John and removed her smile.

    John must have sensed the atmosphere as he didn’t emerge from his room for drinks in the drawing-room before supper, an essential part of the ritual. I didn’t blame him and didn’t go upstairs to fetch him, but that was black mark number one – or perhaps black mark number two, his arrival the first.

    Supper was in the dining-room around the 12-seater mahogany table, surrounded by oil paintings and family portraits. The family usually ate in the kitchen so this could have been construed as a compliment but I thought it more likely to be an effort to intimidate and test John. It certainly put me on edge.

    ‘What job do you do?’ my father asked.

    ‘I repair things,’ John mumbled, the first words he’d spoken.

    The brilliant, energetic, crazy, funny, individual person I loved had vanished. I almost sided with my parents.

    I too seemed to have vanished. I couldn’t explain either that he did so much more than that. He built prototypes, he helped academics with their experiments. He was a genius with machines. He sensed them intuitively and mended them like a healer. He could mend anything, build anything.

    He worked with his hands, which was meaningless to my parents, not even a consideration.

    After supper my mother and I washed up, leaving the men together in the drawing-room.

    ‘You can’t marry him,’ she said.

    I felt like a child.

    I went out into the hall and John emerged, hair flying.

    ‘He wanted me to ask for your hand in marriage. I know he did,’ he exclaimed with fury.

    ‘What did you do?’ I asked.

    ‘I walked out,’ he said.

That night we clung to each other in John’s bed. We couldn’t move. We couldn’t speak.

The next morning, I found myself pleading for the right to marry John, which hadn’t been my intention at all. I’d come to tell my parents not ask them. I was doing everything wrong and I didn’t know how to stop.

    My parents were implacable. I couldn’t marry him. They stared at me with blank, hard faces.

We couldn't wait to get back to Devon. We left after lunch with ‘Rumours’, which had become our special album, blaring from the Mini’s speakers.

Been down one time
Been down two times
I'm never going back again.

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PART THREE. 2 En Route

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

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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 when I was a child.

    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 six and a half years. In a thunderstorm, 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, 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.

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PART THREE. 1 Bedfordshire

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

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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.

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THE STORY CONTINUES. 8 March

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

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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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