3 Migraine

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

This was a bad one. Pain drilled into my right forehead. I couldn’t move because I knew that if I did I would be sick and, if there was one thing I hated more than anything, it was being sick. Paracetamol didn’t touch the pain but at least it sometimes put me to sleep, and sleep was the only respite. Or death.

The migraines had started in my mid-twenties – around the same time that Frog and I got together and I started taking the (contraceptive) pill and everything blew up with my parents. So it was hard to know which of those events had brought them on. And I firmly believed that there was a link between illness and what was happening in our lives. Or at least I did by then, after all my therapy.
    To start with the attacks coincided with my period so I didn’t recognise them for what they were. Frog and I went to the pub two or three evenings a week where I would happily down several glasses of wine so I thought it was simply a case of me being more sensitive to alcohol at that time of the month.
    I would spend a morning being sick and overdosing on paracetamol and by lunchtime, if I managed to keep down a banana, I would be feeling more or less OK.
    As time went on however and the attacks became more random in their timing, I began to recognise them for what they were. And because they were lasting longer and I was taking longer to recover from them, I decided I had to try and do something about them.

    I explored both conventional and complementary medicine and modified my behaviour according to what seemed to cause migraines. I went easy on alcohol, cheese and chocolate and tried to avoid extremes like too much or too little sleep or food, too much heat or cold, and strong smells. But nothing made any difference.
    My focus shifted and I started to compare myself to the knight in The Silver Chair, one of C S Lewis’s Narnia books. He had to be tied up at night because he went mad at that time. But it turned out that he didn’t go mad then. That was the time he went sane, when he realised that the Queen was keeping him prisoner. My migraines were the true reflection of what was happening in my life. The rest was pretence, a fool’s paradise.

The pain and the nausea began to recede and crying took over. It was a small step from saying that illness has its root in our behaviour and that we can do something about it, to saying that illness is our fault, and I of course took that step.
   I sat up in bed with my notebook, choking back sobs, and tried as usual to work out what I could do to redeem the situation. I felt as if I’d tried everything.
    On the few occasions when I did say anything, my father called me ‘touchy’ and my mother suggested I wrote a novel in order to ‘get it all out of my system’. Neither of those comments helped. In fact, they made me feel worse. Perhaps I needed something from them, some acknowledgement that they had mishandled the situation, that their letters were unfair, their reaction to Frog uncalled for. I couldn’t sort this on my own.

    How could I convey that to them?

To start with I asked them not to telephone me. It was bad enough visiting them and trying to pretend that everything was OK. It was even worse being caught unawares at home.
    Then I thought that perhaps I could direct them, show them in black and white how they could help me – and themselves. I drew up a contract in which we all apologised for our actions, signed it and sent it to them for their signature.
    There was zero response from them but my sister Amelia wrote, severely chastising me for expecting them to sign a contract that they hadn’t had a hand in drawing up. I was only trying to help, I thought.
    My father's 80th birthday approached and my mother arranged a party. But that was a step too far, even for me. How could I go to his party when he didn’t come to my wedding?
    I said as much to my parents but there was no response from them. Amelia wrote and chastised me again. My mother was crying, she said.
    I was crushed, torpedoed. In some ways I felt worse than I ever had. I couldn’t bear to hurt anybody. I felt as if I was losing my family and that was like losing part of me. I was nauseous with sorrow.

‘Belinda!’ said Brenda the bookshop owner when I arrived at work. ‘What on earth’s the matter? You look terrible.’
    ‘Oh . . . family troubles,’ I managed to say.
    The full truth was impossible. Impossible to tell anyone. It was such a long story and I was so ashamed of my part in it.
    Frog was the only person who knew the full truth, but he was part of it too. The two of us were tied together with a Gordian knot.
    Isolated.

To be continued

8.2 What about us?

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. For more information, see right.

Dear Belinda and John

 I felt that I had to write after seeing you both today.

    I want you to know that you are both truly an inspiration. There is no better reward for what I do that to see it manifest in people as it has so obviously in both of you.

    I want to acknowledge both of you for all of the hard work which you have done. To see you both so together, your love radiates and is infectious. It makes everything seem so exciting and leaves me with a renewed sense of purpose.

    So thank you, both of you, and keep up the good work. Keep growing and loving.

    With love, light and happiness

    Cheryl

    xx❤️

We had seen Cheryl on a good day, but I was touched, overwhelmed and puzzled by her card. I was sure we weren’t half of what she’d written, and most of what she said would be better applied to her than us.

Poor Cheryl however was becoming overwhelmed. Everyone wanted her to sort their life out. She was working all hours and earning more money than she had time to deal with. Her own personal life was faltering.

Cheryl and I, together with friends, had organised a Day of Healing in the village where Frog and I lived. Therapists and healers offered taster sessions of their talents, including Cheryl her aura portraits and me tarot-reading, even though I felt hugely unqualified to advise people on their lives. I didn’t have Cheryl’s confidence and unless I caught my insights immediately and hung on to them they vanished like early morning mist in a din of mind-chatter – usually critical of me and what I was doing.

    Nevertheless the day was a success with queues at lunchtime stretching out of the Village Hall and round the carpark.

That was one of the last times I saw Cheryl. One day she simply vanished and word came later through a friend of a friend of a friend that she’d moved to another part of the country, halted all her psychic work and taken an ordinary job with the Post Office.

    What a waste. What a loss.

Frog and I, now in our late forties and with our Silver Wedding approaching, muddled on. Our sex life was nothing like I’d once hoped and dreamed of (for which I blamed myself), but the fearsome fights were more or less a thing of the past and we enjoyed being with each other, or at least I enjoyed being with Frog. I don’t know what he felt but he did write me loving messages and send me loving cards, and he was still there. 

My favourite times were the mornings we spent in bed together, our ‘breakfast meetings’ as we called them jokingly.

    Frog didn’t properly get going till lunchtime whereas I was a lark (another of the many many ways in which we were complete opposites) so I would leap out of bed early, let Penny into the garden, flap around in my dressing-gown doing whatever I needed to do, then rejoin Frog in bed.

    I would lie dozing with my hand on his thigh while he propped himself up on lots of pillows, read his Chambers Dictionary and tried to wake up.

    Felicity would lie purring on Frog’s chest. Penny would be hiding downstairs.

    

Why can’t it always be like this? I would think. Everything feels right when Frog and I are together. Why do I have to have all those doubts? Why did I make such a complete hash of our early days together, our wedding and our encounters with my parents? Will I ever get things straight?

    Every day I went through my parents’ letters and the lead-up to our wedding in my mind, wondering how I could have done things differently, trying out different scenarios. None of them worked. My migraines continued.

One morning I spoke, the words appearing from nowhere and tumbling out of me.

    ‘What I’d really like’, I said, ‘is a part-time job somewhere locally – Tiverton for instance – in something interesting like a bookshop.’

    ‘Mmm,’ said Frog, head in dictionary. ‘Good idea.’

    In spite of everything, I’d enjoyed working on the New Age Encyclopaedia, and I wanted to do more writing. Maybe even some ‘creative writing’ such as fiction. But freelance editing didn’t make that easy. It put me in an intellectual rather than a dreamy state of mind. It was unpredictable and last minute so I couldn’t plan my life. I couldn’t leave space for creative writing because it would more than likely be filled up.

    A regular job, two or three days a week, might make things easier, and we could afford it. I didn’t have to work full time any more because my parents had sold the farm and moved somewhere smaller, dividing some of the proceeds among us children. So I had some savings, and could perhaps put them to good use. What I considered good use, at least. My father certainly wouldn’t. So I wouldn’t tell him (as per usual).

    But I wasn’t desperate to make the change, so I put the thought out of my head.

The next day a neighbour rang.

    ‘You know I work at the Tiverton Bookshop,’ she began. ‘Well, my boss is looking for some extra help - say two or three days a week. Would you be interested?’

Within a week, I had the job and had booked myself in for a creative writing weekend on the River Tamar near Plymouth in South Devon. How lucky I was, and how extraordinary was the universe. Of course there was an intelligent consciousness behind everything. How could it be otherwise?

     I just hoped Frog could manage Penny while I was out. It was still early days between her and us and he wasn’t the most patient of people, not even with his beloved canine friend.

To be continued . . . 

PART 8. 1 . . . Other Animals

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



2001


Frog removed a paving slab in our garden and dug a hole for Brindle’s body, sweat pouring off him. It was penance for all the times he’d shouted at her. We placed her body in the hole and covered it with earth.
    Brindle had joined us two years 'before Sam' and I felt as if I’d undergone several lifetimes since then. She’d kept me company for thirteen and a half years, an unwavering source of pragmatism, common-sense and love. Now she was gone.
    The next day my sister Cass came to stay with her children aged 10, 7 and 4. The children were devastated to discover that Brindle was no longer with us and decorated her grave with flowers, petals and pine cones from the garden. Then we sat round the grave and sang and said some prayers.

The decorations on Brindle's grave

Frog had sweated over Kitten’s grave too when she’d died twelve years earlier, only that time he was exorcising sorrow not guilt. Kitten had been with him through most of his twenties and thirties, including the worst time of his life when Wendy, his girlfriend of five years, suddenly upped and left (before I met him). We’d laid some sprigs of catmint in the hole with Kitten, as she had loved the plant so much, rolling in it with a silly smile on her face.
    Strangely, it wasn’t long after her death that Frog had taken up with Sam. Was there a connection, I wondered.

While Kitten was alive we’d given a home to another cat, a tabby whom we named Catherine after one of Frog’s nieces. As a change from all our other animals, we found Catherine the conventional way through an advertisement in the local paper about a litter of kittens. She developed into a healthy individual with thick fur and a tail like a fox's brush, unlike poor Kitten who was starting to look ragged. She’d had a hard life.
    Kitten and Catherine had got on well, having play fights in the evening and curling up together in the cat-bed, with Kitten often putting a protective paw over her young friend.

 

Kitten and Catherine sharing the cat-bed

Sadly, six years after Kitten’s death, Catherine was run over and we were cat-less.
    The next year, shortly after we lost our baby Thomas, a bedraggled and starving kitten appeared in the garden hedge. We adopted her and named her Felicity as she’d turned up unexpectedly when we needed her, like happiness does.
    She developed into a ball of fluff, but never forgot her feral origins. Frog and I were the only humans she would tolerate.

Felicity, a ball of fluff, taking charge of the sofa

How strange animals were. We thought we were looking after them, but perhaps it was the other way round.
    

And then there was Penny.

After Brindle's death there was a big dog-shaped hole in our lives that didn't go away, so six months later we went to a small rescue centre that had advertised at the vet’s.
    The moment we arrived, I started to cry. So many dogs, so much barking, concrete runs, a stink of excrement. I had to sit on a wall and recover.
    We wandered round, looking for a Staffy – a Staffordshire bull terrier - as I’d met several on my rambles and loved them. But one dog caught both our eyes.
    She had her paws on the wall round her yard and stared at us with huge liquid-brown eyes, barking urgently. She was a lurcher, pretty and slender, the complete opposite of dear Brindle.
    ‘I think she’s chosen us,’ said Frog.
    ‘Definitely,’ I agreed.
    We took her for a walk and she seemed already to be trained and respond to commands. She was about three years old, said the Rescue Centre, but they couldn’t tell us anything about her past.
    We went home and I couldn’t stop thinking about her. My heart went out to her. She needed us. I couldn’t wait to take her away from that prison.
    The Rescue Centre wanted to inspect our premises (and us, I suspect) so I scoured the house and put out Brindle’s bed with a clean cover.
    We passed the test and next day went to fetch our new companion animal.

The rescue centre had called her Shandy, but when Frog was in his teens his family had a Shetland Sheepdog with the same name. He’d loved that Shandy and didn’t want to feel he was replacing her, so we called our new dog Penny instead.
    Phew. She turned out to be an escape artist, chewing her way out of the cat flap the first time we left her alone. Luckily a neighbour saw her charging down the road and rescued her. Another time she got out (I can’t remember how) and walked all over Frog’s car leaving scratch marks. He was furious.
    ‘The little sod,’ he said.
    But he loved her really. And in my pictures of that time the two of them are always together and a paw or a hand is always resting on the other.

Frog and Penny resting together after a steep climb up a cliff

Penny with her paw on Frog's arm

It took about a year for Penny to settle down but for once I didn’t mind anything. She didn’t drain me like our other animals had. She was vulnerable, not demanding, and I couldn’t do enough for her. Perhaps it helped that she wasn't a puppy.
    She loved to run, looking like a cheetah with her strong back legs doubled underneath her, and once she learnt how to would shudder to a halt a millimetre from my knees. I suspected she'd never been able to run before she came to us and not seen grass either, as to start with would always seek out concrete for her ablutions.
    At home she spent her day hiding in the gap between the wall and Frog’s side of the bed, only coming out on Frog's return, when she would greet him from the top of the stairs with a shy smile. I didn't know dogs could smile, but Penny certainly did.

Penny emerging from the bedroom in order to greet Frog

So now we lived with one dog, Penny, and one cat, Felicity.
    You might note that they were both female. That was because Frog preferred females to males in all species. He had more than enough trouble tolerating his own maleness and didn't want another male living in the house, not even a non-human one. 

But what about us? What about Frog and me? How were we getting on?

To be continued . . .

7.7 Brindle and . . .

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

The Foot and Mouth epidemic started in February, not the most exciting month for walks at the best of times, let alone ones where you couldn’t tread on anything green. Nevertheless we were lucky enough in Devon to have a vast network of tiny tarmacked lanes, largely free of traffic and fringed with banks, hedges and trees. These I trudged, with dog in tow.

Brindle in later years

I had to keep Brindle on a lead as she was now deaf as well as disobedient so if she’d strayed into a field I would have had no way of bringing her back. If I’d climbed into the field I faced a large fine, not to mention alienating my farming neighbours. If Brindle had strayed she risked being shot.
    Having Brindle on a lead made me feel as if I was on a lead too and, while she was obviously missing all the interesting smells and carcasses, I was missing all the usual details of winter turning to spring. As my mother so eloquently put it later, ‘We never saw the bluebells that year.’ It was like a bereavement.
    From time to time, Brindle would sit down in the middle of the road and refuse to get up.
    ‘Look,’ her eyes would say, ‘I’m an old lady now. This is boring and I’m beyond tired. I want to be back at home, snoozing on my bed.’
    ‘I know, I know,’ I would say. ‘I’m bored too but we have to get our exercise. In any case it’s as quick now to carry on as it is to turn round.’
     She would haul herself to her feet, and we would struggle on be-leaded.  
 
In May Frog and I went on holiday to a Greek island, leaving Brindle with neighbour Claire and her husband Ben. Unfortunately there was a storm at the end of our two weeks and the ferry was cancelled. We were stuck.
    The travel company doled out phone cards so that we could phone home and I stood in the rickety open booth on the village’s seafront, buffeted by winds, and dialled the UK, marvelling at technology. Here I was on a minuscule, barely inhabited, island. How extraordinary that a rusty contraption could put me in touch with someone thousands of miles away.
    Ben answered and he didn’t sound too pleased when I explained the situation and asked if they could possibly look after Brindle for another few days.
    ‘I just hope she’ll last that long,’ he grunted.
 
Luckily, the Greeks are used to the weather disrupting travel and three days later - by an ingenious route involving another bigger ferry and a cardboard hotel on a tourist trap island where disco beats kept us awake all night - we arrived home.
 
The next day Frog and I took Brindle out for a walk.
    I was surprised that Frog had volunteered to come too. He didn’t normally. Perhaps it was the holiday, I thought, as we'd done a lot of walking on the island.
    About five minutes from home, Brindle collapsed. She lay on the ground, panting, her tongue hanging out. Frog lifted her off the road into a gateway and laid her on the grass. I crouched over her, stroking her and talking to her, feeling pretty shaky myself.
    After a few minutes, as Brindle showed no sign of improving, Frog spoke.
    ‘I think we ought to go home and ring the vet. I’ll carry her.’
    I thanked god that Frog was with me. What would I have done without him? I couldn’t lift Brindle myself. She was far too heavy. I couldn’t have left her alone. I would have had to wait for a passing car but that might have taken hours.
 
Back home Frog laid Brindle on her bed. Because she was panting so much, we thought she might be hot, so we put a fan on her.
 
‘It’s a pulmonary embolism – a clot on the lung,’ said the vet when he arrived. ‘There’s no hope, I’m afraid. She’s slowly suffocating. We have to put an end to it.’
    As if she understood, Brindle struggled to her feet and staggered outside, only to crumple again on the grass.
    All three of us – the vet, Frog and me – followed her out and knelt around her.
    The vet took out a needle and as he depressed the plunger I saw Brindle’s spirit burst from her body like a puff of smoke and streak northwards over the shed.
    It was in a hurry. It couldn’t wait to leave.
 
Brindle had waited for me to finish my book. Over the last three months she’d trudged the lanes with me even though she hadn’t wanted to. She’d waited for Frog and me to return from holiday. She’d made sure both Frog and I were there when she finally collapsed.
    Perhaps, in the end, she did what she came here to do.

To be continued . . .

7.6 Prayer

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

Brindle was now thirteen and beginning to show her age. She was grey around the muzzle and stiff in the back half. She didn’t need quite as much exercise as before.
    I’d hated the puppy stage. It had drained me. I had nothing to give a young creature. I wondered if we’d made a terrible mistake, taking her on. But then, when she was a year and a quarter, she turned a corner. She became grown up and almost began to look after me instead.
    She wasn’t allowed on the furniture but she was allowed to have two feet off the ground. In the mornings as Frog and had our breakfast in bed, she would place her front two feet on top of the duvet my side, with her two back feet still on the ground. I would put my hand on her head. In the evenings as Frog and I sat on the sofa together watching television, she would rest her front feet on my knees. It was wonderfully comforting.
    She was an independent creature, like Frog, and we’d had trouble training her. Or perhaps we were just hopeless at it. It was more a case of her training us to let her do what she wanted.
    She was also horrendously greedy, stealing the cat food at home and diving into next-door’s dustbin whenever she had the chance. She would strew its contents all over the road so that she could have a good look at them and snack on anything tasty. I would then have to go down with a black bin bag wearing rubber gloves and pick it all up.

Brindle as a puppy, trying to get at the cat food

    When she and I were out walking together she would suddenly scent a dead creature or remember a spot where she had once many moons ago buried the remains of some animal. Nose to the ground, she would head off at speed and no amount of calling could bring her back. When she did eventually return, of her own volition, she would often be carrying some foul bone in her mouth, or dragging a rotten carcass behind her.
    Nevertheless, with her stripey orange-brown coat the exact colour of Devon mud, her liquid yellow eyes and her inclination to plumpness, I loved the half springer spaniel, half labrador accident, and my walks with her were the highlight of my days.

    Then, one evening her legs went. She staggered round the house, unable to climb the stairs, leaving behind her piles of vomit. She looked as if she was drunk. We raced her to the vet and he pronounced a stroke.
 
I was by now deep into the encyclopaedia, realising that a year was not going to be nearly enough to complete it. I’d had a three-month extension of my deadline but was beginning to think that wasn’t enough either.
    The subject was vast and the word ‘encyclopaedia’ was more than demanding. It implied that I was passing on everything that was worth knowing about each subject, something I was far from qualified to do. What’s more, the book couldn’t be personal like a ‘devil’s dictionary’. It had to be authoritative.
    My migraines were striking more often, sending me to bed, unable even to think, which delayed the work even further.
    ‘Please God,’ I prayed. ‘Don’t let Brindle die just yet. I haven’t got space to deal with her death at the moment.’
 
I picked up my influences from everywhere, which was perhaps another reason I felt so at home in the New Age. I was brought up in the Church of England. Yoga philosophy had ingrained itself in me from my twenties. Psychotherapy over three years and a year of hypnotherapy had added to the mix. Wide experience of complementary medicine had imbued me with a belief in forces that we can’t yet explain scientifically and shown me that we are not victims of fate – we are in charge of our own health and well-being.
 
So, yes, even before I met Cheryl I believed in prayer, but I did it my way. I knew that if you put enough passion into your prayers they would be answered. But I also knew that what you wanted wasn’t necessarily what you needed and nor was it necessarily the best thing for the world at large.
    I had prayed and prayed for Frog to have a job in local radio but when he did I hardly saw him. And then Sam came into his life.
    Two years earlier we had been down to one car which was inconvenient as Frog took it to work with him, leaving me trapped at home, and I had prayed for another one. Soon after that, Frog’s father died and we were able to take over his.
    As a result, I was very careful what I prayed for and I didn’t pray for things very often. The best prayers, I had found, just fell out of me.
    And this prayer about Brindle was one of those.
 
And Brindle rallied, dragging herself up the stairs and wobbling after me on short walks, and over the course of a week or so returning to more or less normal.
 
At last I finished the encylopaedia and sent the manuscript to the publisher who was delighted with it and sent me my second cheque, the first having arrived when I signed the contract and the third due when the book was published in about a year’s time.
    All I had to do now was write ‘blurbs’ for the jacket (the write-ups that appear on the front flap and on the back) and check proofs. A piece of piss, as Frog would say.
    My migraines receded.
    I looked forward to returning to simple editing – working on other people’s books. To seeing friends and family. To having a life again.
    And most of all I looked forward to unrestricted walks with Brindle.
 
Then the Foot and Mouth epidemic struck, affecting farm animals and causing over six million of them to be slaughtered and burnt all over the country. The countryside was placed out of bounds.

To be continued . . .