PART THREE. 8 Missives

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

Click here for the first instalment.

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

We found the letter on the doormat when we returned from work. We both recognised it instantly from the blue envelope and the scrawled address. It was from my mother.

    It was beautiful summer’s day so we took the letter, a blanket and a cup of tea each out into the garden and sat in the shade of the old apple tree in the far corner.

    I leant into John. I was so tired of all this. 

 16 August 

My dear Belinda

 

So be it. I think you are putting us all in rather an invidious position. Why this unseemly haste? Either you should have got married quietly without telling anyone beforehand or you should give everyone due warning. Don’t forget that we are all very fond of you and it is a big day. Have you considered Grandpa, H & Minda, Dennis & Peta etc? I think this hole and corner business is most unsavoury. Unless you are pregnant, why do you have to rush it so?

 What unseemly haste? It was now six months since we’d been to see my parents and eight months since John and I had first realised we wanted to marry.

    Yes, we should have got married without telling them.

     No I hadn’t considered the wider family. I hadn’t been married before. I didn’t know how one was supposed to behave. And anyway, I didn’t think our marriage concerned anyone except John and me.

    The word ‘pregnant’ hit me like a punch to the gut. My mother never normally used it. It was too crude. She always said that someone was ‘expecting a baby’. I knew she was using it to hurt.

    Apart from anything else it is a little unfair to Daddy who has already made all his travelling arrangements for the business trip which you have known about for a long time.

That was puzzling. I didn’t know anything about a trip. Had I missed it in one of the letters of the ‘usual mundane gossip’ or had my mother forgotten to tell me? She did sometimes forget to whom she’d told what, telling one child something twice and another nothing at all.

    I felt bad about the clash as I didn’t want my father to think I’d deliberately excluded him but I couldn’t change the date of the wedding now. It was only just over two weeks away.

 

    You are our oldest and first born and of course we want to be at your wedding, whoever you marry. We may not like John, but you have rather taken it for granted that we wouldn't ‒  you said so before we even met him ‒ and we’ve never had a chance to get to know him better and change our minds.

 

I never said they wouldn’t like him. I said that he was ‘unsuitable (exclamation mark)’, by which I meant that he was unsuitable by my parents’ standards, not by mine. I wondered if that had been a misunderstanding all along.

    Somehow, though, I couldn’t be bothered to correct anything. What would be the point? They wouldn’t listen.

    And no, they hadn’t had a chance to get to know him better. That was my fault. I was a coward. I couldn’t risk any more criticism of him. I was afraid of what that would do to me.

    Anyway this is my immediate reaction and I won’t write any more at the moment. If you feel like it, ring up and reverse the charges.

    Love

    Mummy

 We put the letter down and looked at each other.

    ‘We’re not that poor,’ said John indignantly. ‘Why’s she put in that bit about “reversing the charges”?’

    ‘God knows,’ I said.

 

The next day when we returned from work we found a letter from my father waiting for us. Usually we left the sitting-room to Liz as it was her house, but she was upstairs, so we huddled together on the sofa. I felt slightly sick.

My dear Belinda

There is of course nothing we can do if you decide to go against our wishes except to convey our real sorrow at such estrangement. But if you are looking for our approval then I feel bound to say that, at this stage, I am unable to give you away.

I hadn’t asked him to give me away. I was hardly aware of that part of the wedding service as I hadn’t been to any weddings as an adult. Our friends didn’t get married, or at least weren’t married yet. John and I were an exception.

    What was this ‘giving away’ bit, anyway? It struck me as rather quaint.

    But I was sorry to have upset my father, if that was what I’d done.    

We hardly know John although we are aware that you come from different backgrounds. I do find him very difficult to talk to and while that is partly my fault he does not seem to be forthcoming in general conversation. Of course he is nervous but we cannot make a real judgement if he will not talk. About his home and family, interests, sport, holidays he’s had, school, training – in fact anything. He doesn’t necessarily have to talk to me but some initiative is essential if we are to get to know him.

       ‘I ballsed it up, didn’t I,’ said John.

       ‘You didn’t play their game,’ I said. ‘And why should you?’

       ‘I didn’t know there was a game to be played,’ he said. ‘I was out of my depth.’ 

    I don’t want to repeat all I’ve said in my previous letter but I do think that you yourself will not know your own mind if you stay at Exeter where obviously you will see John all the time and think of little else. If you get a job well away from Exeter, you and he would be welcome to see each other at weekends and hopefully here at home as often as you like. If you do this, and if your mind remains unchanged and we know more about John, we shall feel properly placed to be fair and reasonable. You must know our only concern is your long-term happiness. I also trust that John will appreciate all this, that he will be fair to you and not wish for hasty and irreversible action.

    

    With much love

    Daddy

 We hadn’t spent a night apart since the snow in February. It would be unbearable to do so. How could my father not realise that?

    Perhaps we were rushing things but I was so frightened – of being prevented from marrying John, of having my mind changed. 

 

Something horrible was starting to happen to me. I was flipping viewpoints. Sometimes I saw John as this extraordinary person I loved and sometimes I saw him as my parents did – useless, ‘common’ (as my mother would have put it) and boring.

    I didn’t know how to stop it. I didn’t know what it meant.

    Was I being worn down? Was this ‘reverse brainwashing’?

    Which was the real John? Which was the real me? How could people have such different views? Which viewpoint was right?

    How could I be so weak?

 

If anyone had ballsed things up, it was me. I’d done everything wrong.

To be continued

PART THREE. 7 July and August

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

Click here for the first instalment.

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

It all went so well at first.

We visited Richard, the pub landlord and someone John deeply respected and liked, and he agreed to be our best man.
    ‘I hope you’ll both be very happy,’ he said, putting his hand on my shoulder.
    Being some ten years older than most of his clientele, Richard took a fatherly interest in them, and he seemed to have a particularly soft spot for John. I was honoured that he considered me the right person for John.

We wanted a church wedding. We needed the spiritual depth that would give us. It was a sign to each other of how important our marriage was.
    We decided on the church in Silverton, the village where John had lived and where The Three Tuns, Richard’s pub, was situated, and went to see the vicar.
    With its walls of books and the patterned dark-red Turkish rugs on the floor, his room reminded me of that of one of my university tutors.
    There were some practicalities to discuss in that you had to have lived a certain amount of time in the parish, but luckily John’s time in the cottage could be adjusted to fit them.
    We spent a good hour with the vicar, touching on the problems with my parents, and arranging for a wedding at the beginning of September – which would give time for the banns to be read.
    ‘Look after each other,’ he said as he stood on his doorstep waving us goodbye.
    Of course, I thought. That’s what it’s all about. How simple.
    Because of his position, I thought of him as a grown-up – unlike John and me – and it was a joy to have a grown-up respecting us and taking seriously our wish to be married.

Liz and Rod said they’d come to the wedding and gave us a collection of practical kitchen items for when we set up home together (many of which I still have). I was touched.

Mollie was excited when John telephoned her and said that she and John T would definitely be there, probably bringing with them Simon, John’s younger brother, and Betty, Mollie’s sister. They would book a B & B for a couple of nights and could they take us out for supper at The Three Tuns the night before the wedding?
    I couldn’t wait to see them.

Now I had to decide what to do about my parents.

I took a train up to London for the day and went to Laura Ashley where I bought my wedding outfit, a long-sleeved, high-necked, frilled, pink-and-white-striped dress with a white lace-trimmed petticoat which purposely drooped below the hem of the dress.
    And then, not sure at all if I was doing the right thing, but wanting to be friendly now I was in the vicinity, went to see my father in his office.
    I told him about the wedding and found myself pleading again. I so wanted his approval but it wasn’t forthcoming. He was cold and distant and I went away with bowed shoulders.

My parents wanted to come to Devon to talk to me.

    I’d read of parents kidnapping their children who’d been caught up in ‘cults’, and ‘reverse brainwashing’ them, and I was terrified my parents might try something similar. So I arranged that we should meet on Exeter’s Cathedral Green – a neutral spot I thought and a public one where I might be safer – and brought John with me.
    The four of us sat on a bench together, with seagulls clustering around our feet waiting for food, my father at one end, John at the other and my mother and me squashed next to each other in the middle. I edged as close to John as I could and as far away as possible from my mother. I held tight to John’s hand.
    I’d decided recently that good people made you feel better about yourself and bad people made you feel worse, but what did that make my parents? Criticising parents was not something you did. How could I be descended from bad people and not be bad myself?
    Most of the arguing was done by John and my mother. I was proud of him. No one stood up to my mother except occasionally my sister Cass, child number three, who’d always been stroppy. Much of my childhood was spent keeping the peace between my younger siblings and, if ever there was an argument, Cass was in the centre of it.
    Certainly my father didn’t stand up to her.
    ‘You’re thinking of yourselves,’ said John.
    ‘No,’ said my mother, giving him a hard stare. ‘You’re thinking of yourselves.’
    Yes, I thought. But we’re the ones getting married, not you. Isn’t it our choice?
    John told me later that when my mother said that, he knew the gloves were off and that he couldn’t afford to give her any quarter.
    How fortunate it was that he’d had all that practice arguing with his father.

A few days after my parents' visit another missive arrived.

Click here for the next instalment

PART THREE. 6 June

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

Click here for the first instalment.

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

With enormous difficulty and pain, like trying to drive a car with the handbrake on while panicking about some speedy monster on my tail, I finished my finals and came to the end of my university career. If I passed the exams, that is, and I wouldn’t know that till August.

    In some ways, the finals had been but a blip on the radar screen of my life. In other ways, they were like the interference that masked radio transmissions. They didn’t matter – John was all that mattered to me now – but they stopped me engaging with him and the new life he promised. He was so imaginative, musical, funny, individual, romantic and I longed to be like that myself, instead of the diligent scholar I was.

    Now they were over, a weight lifted.

    One of the weights, anyway. 

I found a job waitressing at a National Trust house a few miles outside Exeter, near John’s cottage. It wasn’t Australia but it was fine – and after my finals it was a relief to work nine to five at something I could easily do. Our boss was young and beautiful and she left us mostly alone. The restaurant was in the main house in a light-filled room – an orangery perhaps - and the guests older, polite and generous with their tips. We wore frilly floor-length aprons in a leafy green and white cotton.

John let me use the Mini to drive to work while he travelled to the university every day, in the opposite direction, by motorbike. I don’t think I realised how much of honour it was that he trusted me with his car.

 
Rod, who was looking after Kitten, moved out of the cottage and agreed to take her with him for the moment. She had after all been the cottage cat, not John’s exclusively, even though she’d become that when everyone else deserted the place.

John was already in debt because of having to pay everyone else’s rent on the cottage so we decided that he should cancel the lease and move out in his turn. What a performance! We stuffed the Mini with as much as it would hold and put to one side other important bits and pieces of John’s that Rod would take with him and store safely.
    John and I tussled over what he did actually need and what he didn’t, what was junk and what was something that 'might come in useful’. The house looked just as cluttered when we left as it had before and I pitied the landlord – a local farmer with whom the tenants had waged a non-stop battle. He’d let down the Mini’s tyres at one stage in protest at the parties and drug-dealing that were going on.
    In one of the farm’s barns John had found an old clock in pieces and he’d repaired it. He wanted to take it with him, thinking that it had been abandoned, but the message arrived (I can’t remember how) that they wanted it back.
    John refused to have any more to do with the family so I went up to the farmhouse on my own with the clock and the money still owing and knocked on the door. The farmer’s mother answered - small, bony (not to say hatchet-faced) and sharp-eyed. She looked surprised when I handed it all over.
    Now we had to find somewhere to live.

The tenure of the Exeter house was shortly to expire, and most spare property was let to tourists over the summer. And that was without the fact that John and I weren’t married. I scoured the local paper every Thursday, property day, and rang likely places from the payphone in the house. They always asked about our marital status and before I could explain anything put the phone down on me. To be together but unmarried was to be ‘living in sin’. I didn’t see it that way.
    At last Liz, a friend of John’s – she’d briefly consoled him after his girlfriend left – and who was now with Rod, offered us a room in the house she was renting.
    The room was tiny, the size of our mattress, so all our other possessions had to live on the landing outside it. But the house, up a country lane on the outskirts of Exeter, had a big overgrown garden and we started to enjoy the summer.

 

John (left) and Rod enjoying the summer in the garden of Liz's house*

Meanwhile my mother had kept her promise and wrote to me with nothing but the ‘usual mundane gossip’. (How on earth she thought that she could brush under the carpet something as important as me wanting to marry and how on earth she thought I would just forget about it, I couldn’t imagine.) From my father there was nothing, thank goodness. 
    I hadn’t replied to the letters from my parents, partly because I didn’t have time and partly because I hadn’t a clue how to handle the situation. Conflict wasn’t anything our family dealt with. Tears were allowed but anger wasn’t. Parents were always right.
    Anyway, I didn’t want to think about my parents as whenever I did I fell apart. The glue holding me together as a person came unstuck and I turned into a random collection of meaningless bits. It was horrible. It was frightening. It was like a drawn-out version of the black hole I’d fallen into in London.

    John was looking after the letters and he'd put them somewhere safe where I wouldn't find them. I didn't ever want to read them again.

    
We started to plan our wedding. If my parents didn’t want to be involved, we would do it ourselves.

* Apologies as usual for the state of the photograph

Click here for the next instalment

PART THREE. 5 A Second Letter continued

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

Click here for the first instalment.

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

That evening, after John had spent a day at work and I’d spent a day in the university library staring at my books, unable to take anything in, we picked up my father’s letter again, sitting side by side on the edge of our mattress.

 . . . Neither your mother nor I wish for riches for our children but we do hope they may avoid financial worries which can be a most dreadful and disruptive matter. It is also a fact that life is so much more enjoyable with the ability to live at a reasonable standard rather than in squalor, to be able to educate one’s children, cover medical and dental expenses, have an occasional holiday, a nice home with modern machines to take the drudgery out of housework, the ability to have some outside interests and to entertain one’s friends and one’s children’s friends etc etc.

    You have a little money of your own. This was intended to be your personal security but it will hardly buy half a modest house, let alone furnish it. I should certainly be upset if it were frivelled away. It represents hard-earned sweat on my part to do what I have been able for you.

    You will appreciate that education outgoings have been extremely high for some years. So despite a high income, taxation has forced me to live off capital. Although I have some years’ work to go, my first duty is to your mother and her security for the future. Therefore it would be foolish to anticipate much significant help from me and even less so for a cause in which I did not believe.

 

Well, at least I didn’t go to private boarding school like my brothers. And neither did my sisters for that matter. Through the Eleven Plus exam we’d all received scholarships to our local Direct Grant girls’ school, a half private, half government-funded institution, and we’d attended as day pupils.

    So, except for my primary school years, my father couldn’t blame me for educational outgoings, although it felt as if he did. 

I hated the thought of his 'hard-earned sweat'. Sometimes it broke my heart seeing him trudging up to the train station every day and travelling in and out of London. I'd mentioned that to Roger the poet (the one with the bushy hair who'd seemed to take a fancy to me) and he'd said that my father probably enjoyed it. I still felt guilty though.

And I hadn’t anticipated any financial help from him. That wasn’t the reason for our visit. How could he have thought it was? It made me feel sick to think that he did.

    I hadn’t thought about money at all with respect to John and me marrying, but that was probably another sign of my irresponsibility.

On the other hand, why did he always call my expenditure 'frivelling' (one of his words)?

    Didn't I save enough money in Australia to pay him back for the airfare and contribute to my expenses now at university?

    What about his expenditure? He had hand-made suits, membership of exclusive clubs, antique rifles, a yacht.

    What exactly was 'frivelling'? What could I spend money on? Or should I not spend it at all? It was so hard to know.

    It was all so confusing, and so distressing.

    Why did I keep having these ungrateful thoughts?

     

So much for the money side which one does not particularly enjoy talking about but which needs to be said and it has to be considered. It is high time you became sensible and more mature.

 

John had gone quiet but now he cleared his throat so I looked at him.

    ‘What’s more mature than finishing your degree and getting married?’ he asked.

    ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

 

As far as this young man is concerned it is probably invidious to say too much as he didn’t volunteer much information or conversation in the few days with us. Even if one realises he was nervous (so was I!), it was far from an encouraging occasion. From what little one gathered he is not settled into a reasonable career and has little indication that he could be a responsible provider which in the normal course of events he is more likely to have to be.

 

I clenched my stomach muscles. John had a good job and a car. He’d worked almost without a break over the last seven years since he left school. How dare my father criticise him.

 

You wrote to us with the words that he was unsuitable and so you must bear considerable responsibility for the encouragement given. However, in my bachelor days, I know that I had one or two unsuitable girlfriends but I can so truly be thankful that my own family and circle of friends and their reactions, help and advice played a real part and quite surely helped my behaviour and actions.

 

What ‘encouragement’? Did he mean ‘discouragement’ but couldn’t bring himself to write the word?

    I longed to hear about his ‘unsuitable girlfriends’. It was the only part of the letter that made me smile.

 

  So please very seriously consider what we say. I know your mother has also written to you. But take help and advice from others in your family and from your tried and true friends.

    I do realise that this is a severe letter but I think that on rare occasions it is one’s duty as a father even if it is distressing to us both. However, please be quite sure that your mother and I are absolutely concerned for your long-term happiness which we would be devastated to see thrown away on an impulse. We are always here to support and encourage you in times of stress.

    With very great love

   Daddy

 

‘Impulse!’ exclaimed John. He stood up and began pacing the room.

   

I was exhausted. Even though I’d known the encounter would be difficult, this was so much worse than I’d expected.

    I was devastated that my father thought so little of me, understood so little of my hopes and fears, of what I’d been through.

    My mother’s letter had hurt but I knew she was shooting from the hip, as she always did. She’d written the first things that came to mind. You could tell that from her large untidy scrawl.

    My father’s letter on the other hand was the product of thought. Even though almost every word gave me pain, he sounded so reasonable. The letter looked so imposing.

    How could I possibly counteract it?

    

Click here for the next instalment

PART THREE. 4 A Second Letter

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

Click here for the first instalment.

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

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 pay my father back for the plane ticket and 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.) Little did she know that Exeter was teeming with them.

    

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.

Click here for the next instalment