6.5 Work etc

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

In spite of Sam’s words, I felt that whatever strength I had arose from Sam’s kindness to me, from her holding her hand out to me on the night I first met her. She’d shown me that I’d not so much lost Frog as gained a friend.
    All through her relationship with Frog she’d only wanted to help. I knew that both from what I saw of her and from what Frog had said.
    ‘I didn’t have anyone else to talk to,’ he said. ‘I knew we needed help and I didn’t know where else to find it.’
    I supposed that was a problem for men. They didn’t have friends they could talk to about emotional problems. They turned to women for that.
    What’s more, Sam had an AIDS test before she and Frog started having sex together. That meant a lot to me because I knew how difficult and frightening it must have been.
    Nor had either of them told anybody about their relationship before Frog told me.
    And once he did tell me, he was kind to me – more so than he had been before.
    So my strength – such as it was - came from him too.

In some ways, Sam was uncertain of her sexual identity. She’d had a fling with another woman at some time in her past but hadn’t pursued it. As a child she’d shadowed her father rather than her mother, learning practical jobs from him. She and Frog, for instance, had worked on her car together. She didn’t model herself on the female role, such as the one I’d been brought up on – where your life was centred on being beautiful for men and being a ‘wife’.
    Sam’s way of being was a revelation to me and I saw how much of a doormat I’d been. I resolved never to be a doormat again.

As well as being academic, Sam was creative - she painted and she wrote – and this awoke creativity in me. The Bohemian life had always held such attraction for me – it was so romantic - and secretly, deep down, I’d always wanted to be an artist of some kind myself. That was another of the parts of me that I’d buried because I knew it was unacceptable to my conventional parents. I now started to un-bury it.
    I followed up my small book on the folklore of Dartmoor with a bigger book on macabre stories from Devon as a whole. I was to take the photographs for the book as well as writing the copy, and I had a wonderful time travelling all over the county in my little Mini, researching the stories with my camera and notebook.

I was learning to love Devon. The people were kind – kinder than they were in London and the Home Counties – and their lives didn’t revolve around careers and money. Barter was the order of the day, and communities were tight. I met many people when I was out walking with Brindle (our labrador/springer cross), both other walkers and people in cars. It was perfectly normal – indeed, expected - to stop your car and chat if you passed someone in the lanes whether they were walking or driving and whether you knew them or not, and you never passed a person on the footpaths with saying at least hello.
    Rural Devon at the time was a strange mixture of farmers and artists and I began to feel that I fitted right in, something I’d only ever done before in Australia.
    Lindeman Island in Australia had been my golden time and I still hankered after it.
    ‘It wasn’t real life,’ said Frog, ‘but it showed you what life could be like.’
    I thought that was a valid assessment.

Meanwhile, even bigger changes were happening in Frog’s life.
    He’d finally fallen out with the university. They’d always objected to his erratic timekeeping, his refusal to wear a technician's white coat and his general uncontrollability. He objected to the hierarchy – the old-fashioned distinction between academics and technicians - and the stuffy people.
    A new regulation that every piece of electrical equipment had to be tested every year was the final straw. The university decided – much against Frog’s wishes – that he was the person to carry out this task. It was mind-numbingly boring (I helped him with it once, but never again) and it took over from the parts of the job he loved such as coaxing aged equipment back to life and inventing new set-ups for experiments.
    Eventually, by more or less mutual agreement, he left.
    He was now self-employed, repairing instruments one day a week for a music shop in Exeter and combining this with other jobs both regular and one-off.
    To start with, he was completely lost, having been salaried almost without a break since leaving school twenty-five years earlier. Luckily, with my self-employed experience I was able to help him structure his days and list tasks and goals.
    That was to set a pattern. With his dyslexic brain he worked by instinct (or whim). He both appreciated my lists and sabotaged them by adding new items like ‘Smile’ or ‘Have fun’ - to my lists and well as the ones I'd drawn up for him.
    So it was good for me too!
    I never let him leave on errands without something written on a piece of paper even if he was only going out to do one thing as he was more than liable to forget it or be distracted. Sometimes he even forgot the piece of paper. Drat. Sometimes, I even sympathised with the uni. I called him ‘flibbertigibbet brain’. He called me ‘daft’.
    He did willingly consult me on spellings however, using me as a walking dictionary and often ringing me from work to find out how a word was spelt.
    The university tried to replace Frog but no one came close to his genius with ailing technology and his deep historical knowledge of the department’s equipment, and in the end they invited him back. He agreed to two days a week, freelance – an unheard-of concession at the university.

At DevonAir, the local independent radio station, he was now doing two programmes a week: a rock programme, and a ‘Frog Prog’ where he played whatever he wanted - pop, rock, classical, folk, country, jazz, words. I kept encouraging him to try and take the ‘Frog Prog’ further and apply to national radio, but he was afraid of being curtailed and he didn’t have the necessary killer instinct. He was ambitious about his life – he wanted to make the most of it – but he wasn’t ambitious in a conventional sense, in the sense of status, money and so on.
    DevonAir was taken over by London’s Capital Radio and one Saturday night the head of DevonAir was entertaining the head of Capital.
    ‘You must listen to this,’ he said, turning on a ‘Frog Prog’. ‘No one else is doing anything like it.’
    Frog was playing some particularly obscure and gruesome track – jazz, I think.
    ‘I’m not surprised,’ said the head of Capital.
    So Frog lost his jobs at DevonAir too.

He carried on doing the ‘Frog Prog’ on the university radio however, and also managed to persuade the  'Guild' (the student union) to pay him for all the technical work he did for the student station. Previously, when he was working full time in the science department, this had been done in the university’s time and was another of their bones of contention with him.
   It was ironic that he now had life his way in both areas.
   He was lucky like that.

With two of us working from home, we needed more space. I needed a study and Frog needed a music room, somewhere to store his enormous and ever-growing collections of vintage hi-fi and records, not to mention his tools and machines.
    We began to think about expanding – in more ways than one.

To be continued . . . 

6.4 'Your Newness'

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



I raced through the kitchen, Frog thundering down the stairs behind me.
    ‘Come back,’ he shouted. ‘Come back. Don’t you dare run away from me.’
    It was the middle of the night and Frog was on the rampage again.
    I was heading for the downstairs bathroom where I hoped to slam the door behind me, lock it and collapse to the floor.
    Unfortunately I didn’t make it. Frog caught up with me and stood in the bathroom doorway blocking my exit.
    ‘Why do you shut me out?’ he boomed, his voice echoing round the tiled room ‘What do I do wrong? Why can’t I do anything right?’

It was the same old stuff, the same old pattern. Frog had wanted sex, I’d frozen. He’d gone into what I called his ‘victim mode’, droning on for hours and hours and hours about how hard-done-by he was. I’d lain beside him in bed, blocking my ears because I knew that by now that there was absolutely nothing I could do to stop him, that anything I said simply made him worse. And then, in the darkness, he’d caught sight of me with hands over my ears and switched to angry mode and I’d fled, knowing it wasn’t safe for us to be together any more as I might get angry too and then we might kill each other.
    

‘Don’t block your ears,’ he shouted as I cringed backwards trying to edge the bathroom door between him and me. ‘Listen to me. React.’
    All at once, something new filled my being. I thought I'd exhausted every option for dealing with these situations, but suddenly I saw a way out. I stood tall, facing Frog. I looked him in the eyes.
    ‘Just stop,’ I said.
    I wasn’t shouting. I wasn’t even raising my voice. But I was speaking firmly, with every ounce of my determination. For that moment, I had total faith in myself and what I was doing.
    Frog stopped instantly and looked at me, astonished.

We weren’t conscious of being different after our years with Pat, but we knew that we now had some strategies for dealing with our emotions and with each other - even though we still needed lots of practice. Equally importantly, we now had hope.

My fortieth birthday arrived and Frog gave me a card with a magical picture on the front of a woman in a cloak bending over a crystal ball with a solar eclipse behind her. Inside he wrote ‘Tiz said life begins at 40. Happy new life’.

On my forty-first birthday he gave me a card of a castle perched on the edge of a torrential waterfall. Inside he’d written ‘Happy birthday, Your Newness’ (‘Your Newness’ being a quotation from the Beatles’ film Yellow Submarine, one of his favourites).

We still saw Sam occasionally, but always together. She gave me a card too, in which she’d written:

I just wanted to write a note to you. . . . I dunno . . . just to say that I have been thinking of you a great deal and to say that I admire your strength. You are a very rare person.
    Also that I think we can learn much from each other and it would be good if we didn’t lose contact. I hope to get to know you better.
    I love you both.

I didn’t know what Sam could learn from me but I did know that I’d learnt a great deal from her.

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6.3 Dreams and Whispers

This is part of an autobiographical series. See right for more about it and a link to the full list of instalments.



‘Close your eyes and relax every part of your body,’ said Pat.
    She then went through each part of my body in turn suggesting that it was now warm and soft, much as we did in yoga, except that Pat concentrated on unusual parts such as my stomach and I realised how much tension I carried there. She was speaking very softly and I could only just hear her.
    I wasn’t frightened as I knew now, after our practice session the previous week, that hypnosis didn’t involve loss of control. It was almost the opposite. I was more in control because I was steering from a different part of myself, a deeper part. And my initial trust of Pat had only deepened over the two years that Frog and I had been seeing her.
    In the practice session I’d sat in my usual armchair. Now I was on a futon on the floor of Pat’s room, on my back, covered in a light blanket.
    As before, she asked me to count down in my head from one hundred and to tell her when the numbers disappeared. This they did very quickly as my usual brain took a back seat and I found myself in a world of shadows and fleeting glimpses as if I was halfway between sleep and being awake.
    That was as far as we'd gone in the first session, but this time she carried on.
    ‘You’re walking down some stairs,’ she said. ‘Tell me what you see.’

Frog and I had scuttled back to Devon after the visit to my parents, as ever relieved to be home. We had continued seeing Pat separately.
    Over the months that I'd been seeing her, we’d discussed my migraines, which were plaguing me more and more, and my eating disorders – which twisted and turned and changed their form but never quite went away, even though they were better than they’d been in my teens and early twenties.
    She knew about Brian in London and the terrifying black hole I’d fallen into after he’d taken my virginity and vanished, as well as the impression I’d had at the time of a black shutter crashing down on my life.
    I’d told her about my sexual encounters as a teenager, gropings in the dark which had disgusted me.
    We’d discussed my upbringing, how sex was strictly forbidden before marriage but not encouraged after it as women weren’t supposed to enjoy sex.
    She knew of course about my parents and their condemnation of Frog.
    But did all this explain my struggles, my inability to love him properly?
    She wondered if there was something much earlier going on, perhaps even some form of childhood sexual abuse.
    But I couldn’t remember anything, except for a strange recollection of being fetched from school by unfamiliar people and then left at the side of the road.
    Or was it a dream?
    She’d given me a book to read called When You and Your Mother Can’t Be Friends which took the reader back to their childhood at different ages. From the age of four onwards, for the whole of the rest of the book, I found myself weeping uncontrollably.
    Had something happened at around that time?
    She’d suggested hypnotherapy as a way to uncover hidden memories – and deal with them.

I didn’t answer Pat immediately as I was concentrating on the stairs I was walking down. I knew them well. As I came to the familiar right-angled turn by a window Pat spoke again.
    ‘Where are you now?’ she asked.
    ‘I’m in our old house,’ I said, finding it hard to speak, not because I didn’t want to but because my muscles were so relaxed. ‘Coming down the stairs.’
    Our ‘old house’ was where we lived until I was six.
    ‘How old are you?’
   ‘I’m four,’ I said.
   I don’t know how I knew that. It simply arrived in my head.
    ‘What are you wearing?’
    ‘A red-checked tartan skirt with straps,’ I said.
    Again, I knew that instantly and had a vivid picture in my head of the skirt. I'd never come across the skirt before in my memory.
    ‘What’s happening?’ she asked.
    ‘Someone’s coming out of the kitchen,’ I said. ‘A man.’
    I remembered every room in the old house, and often travelled through them in my mind. The kitchen door was almost opposite the bottom of the stairs.
    ‘And?’ said Pat.
    ‘He’s got a grey apron on,’ I said. ‘The whole of his middle is a grey blur.’
    ‘Do you know him?’ asked Pat.
    ‘I don’t think so,’ I said.
    Then I screamed.
    I was falling into the black hole again and this time it was even more frightening than it had been in London as I had no protection, nothing outside me to fall back on.
    My stomach was rising through my body.

    ‘Help! I’m going to be sick,’ I yelled.
    ‘Count back up to a hundred,’ Pat commanded. ‘Now.’
    It was like making my way up from the bottom of the ocean.

Even though we persevered with the hypnotherapy, we never went quite so deep again. It wasn’t deliberate on my part to avoid anything but I suppose that somewhere inside I was too afraid. And nor did Pat ever ask me about that incident again.
    I felt that it was a pity we hadn’t persevered but I guessed that Pat had had to stop the session as you couldn’t have someone vomiting when half paralysed and lying on their back. It would have been too dangerous.
    I desperately wanted to pull my weeds up by the root but perhaps some weeds were not yet ready to be removed.
    I had no idea what that whole session had been about.

Pat led me into hypnosis slightly differently each time. Usually we started with stairs. Sometimes I went through a mysterious door. Sometimes she asked me to imagine a beautiful safe space, such as sitting under a tree. Sometimes I found a helper – an angelic being who accompanied in my adventures and kept me safe.

    We explored different aspects of my life and worked out strategies for dealing with difficulties, reprogramming my mental and emotional processes.

    I went back into past lives, including past lives with Frog, to see what I could learn from them.
    I did a lot of crying, with the tears trickling into my ears and me unable to do anything about them.
    The sessions ended with light, with Pat suggesting I imagined being filled and surrounded with it.

However vivid my experiences under hypnosis, most of them dissipated like dreams soon after I woke, and Frog who was also having hypnosis found the same happened with him, so we couldn’t really talk about what we were doing, although we tried.
    We did ask Pat about having hypnosis together, but somehow we never did.

It always took me several minutes to be able to move after I’d come back from a session and opened my eyes. 
    One day – nearly a year perhaps into the hypnotherapy – it took me more than a few minutes. I lay, scarcely able to breathe, for what felt like hours. It was frightening. I felt as if I'd never be able to move again.
    At last I was able to wiggle my fingers.
    ‘I feel like I’ve been on a very long journey,’ I whispered.
    ‘You have,’ said Pat.

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6.2 After the Speech

 This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. See right for more information.

As I came to the end of my speech, I was dizzy with relief. The ordeal I’d been dreading for weeks was over. My muscles relaxed and I felt as if I’d never be able to function again. My hands were still shaking.
    As well as the transcript of my speech, I was also holding a folder containing the letters and I now – as suggested by Pat - put it down on a nearby side table.
    ‘I’m leaving the letters behind,’ I said. ‘I don’t need them any more.’

I hardly dared look up. My parents hadn’t yet said a word. What was their reaction to my first ever attempt at standing up to them?
    Were they monsters or were they real human beings? Could the gulf between us ever be crossed?
    Their faces were inscrutable. They weren’t shocked or angry or even embarrassed. What were they?
    Then my mother shrugged.
    ‘Oh well,’ she said. ‘Things said in the heat of the moment, you know.’
    Coming from her, that was almost an apology, and I almost wanted to hug her.
    She’d never said sorry to me about anything and one of her precepts was ‘Qui s’excuse, s’accuse’. This I’d always taken to be a hangover from her aristocratic background and its associated arrogance (in my opinion).
    She’d made an admission of guilt, but was smoothing it over by making light of her words.
    That was OK. It was a start.
    ‘What I don’t understand’, said my father, squirming in his chair and looking like a small boy as he always did when emotions were in play, ‘is why you were in such a hurry to be married.’
    What hurry, I thought. It hadn’t seemed like a hurry to Frog and me. On the contrary, the months had seemed agonisingly long. Why wait when you knew what you wanted?
    Anyway, I knew how to deal with that observation.
    ‘We’d known each other for nearly a year,’ I said. ‘How long had you and Mum known each other when you got married?’
    I had the answer, of course, but I wondered if my parents remembered, or had made the connection.
    Strangely, Frog and I had married at almost exactly the same age as my parents. We had been 25 and 26 and they had been 24 and 27. Neither of them had had mothers around though. And their fathers didn’t appear to have been close. My mother’s father appeared in only one of the photographs from the occasion and my father’s father not at all.
    ‘A year,’ said my mother.
    Sometimes her outspokenness was a blessing.

Frog then had his say which, being unprepared, was short and slightly repetitive, but I was glad he said something. It was important that he showed support for me by joining in and vital for him to reveal that he was a real person with feelings as I didn’t think that was something my parents had ever credited him as being. Because he wasn’t like them they didn’t see him as fully human or worthy of respect.
    I’d found it difficult to understand how they could have written such awful things about him in the letters, without thinking that he might be reading them. They didn’t know that Frog and I were already living together but even so what sort of a relationship did they think we had, for me not to share the letters with him? And for both Frog and me to share some of what was going on with Frog’s parents?
    The letters had hurt both Frog and his parents and that was an outcome my parents had not considered. Even if my parents had changed to a degree in the way they behaved towards him, I couldn’t forget what they’d said. I was angry for all of us – me, Frog and Frog’s parents.
    Again, I realised that Frog had a lot more going on emotionally than I had credited him with. I wished I’d spent some time helping him prepare a speech. 

My parents listened to him without comment.
    I wondered if this whole situation was as alien to them as it was to me. Perhaps they simply didn’t know how to react or what to say.

My ‘alternative arrangements’ were my old schoolfriend, Trish’s daughter, who’d offered Frog and me a bed for the night if we needed it. Her support touched me as I’d always found her family harmonious and perfect. I rang her and said I thought we could manage to stay with my parents.
    Not that I wanted to, but I felt that to leave now would be cowardly – even more cowardly than I normally was. It was also unkind and might lead to a permanent rift, and I didn’t want that.
    I’d tried to get away from the problem by living in Devon but it had followed me down and I knew now that physical distance did not mean emotional distance.
    I still flipped between my parents’ view of Frog and mine. My (non) relationship with my parents still drove a wedge between Frog and me. I wanted it sorted.

The next day was fine, so my mother took her pre-lunch glass of wine out into the garden. My father sat inside with his pre-lunch whisky. He didn’t trust the sun. He’d suffered heat rash all over his body when in Calcutta with the navy during the war. My mother, being half Scandinavian, was fanatical about light. Whatever the temperature, if the weather was fine you had to be outside.

    I sat inside with my father.
    I’d always found him less scary than my mother. He tended not to hit below the belt and his letters, while equally devastating to me, had perhaps come from a better place than my mother’s. Or perhaps I was simply more willing to excuse him.
    ‘I didn’t need to marry someone like you,’ I said. ‘I had you as a father.’
    He looked so pleased that I stood up and gave him a hug, as prescribed by Pat.
    It didn’t feel too bad.
    Then I went outside to join my mother.
    ‘You’ll never change him, you know,’ she said, smiling ruefully.
    Did that mean she’d changed, or thought she had? Had I been working on outdated information all this time?
    If that was the case, why on earth hadn’t she said something? I wasn’t a mind-reader. Words could only be cancelled out by words.

As we all made our way to the kitchen for lunch, my father leant against a wall with a silly smile on his face.
    Both my parents drank huge amounts and I could remember them arriving back from parties and my mother racing to the bathroom looking green without even stopping to say hello to us children. I’d only occasionally seen my father wobbly, however.
   This was perhaps one of those times, but he looked happier than I remembered ever seeing him.

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PART 6. 1 My Speech

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



1992

‘What I’m talking about is what happened before I got married and the letters you wrote to me. Because of the pain it is not a subject I have been able even to think about let alone speak about for fourteen years. But I think it’s vital that we now clear the air. I feel that we are drifting further and further apart and I’m finding it more and more of a farce to come home. It has not been easy coming to see you all these years knowing what you think of me and what you think of John. Please believe that I’ve done it out of love, not duty and if I didn’t love you I wouldn’t be here today.’

My hands were shaking as I read from my sheaf of papers.
    Love wasn’t a word we ever used in my family except at the end of letters. I wondered if this was already the end of my attempt to make a speech and whether my parents were about to hoot in derision since that was what usually happened when I expressed things close to my heart. How did I ever get to be a daughter of theirs?
    Frog and I were on a high upright sofa against the wall with my parents opposite us, lower down in squishy armchairs.
    We were in the ‘blue room’, the small sitting-room in which my parents usually spent their evenings when they were on their own. It was cosy and a little dark with a wall of shelves crammed with books. I was glad we were there as it was more informal than the big ‘yellow room’ with its two large sofas at right angles to each other, its three sides of windows and its doors leading on to a terrace.
    It was after supper on the first evening of our visit to my parents and I’d plunged straight in to my talk. My parents had looked surprised when I’d asked them to sit down but had done so without complaint.
    The room was still silent so I carried on.

‘I can’t brush all those events under the carpet and pretend that nothing happened when I’m boiling over with anger and unhappiness – still, even though it was fourteen years ago. You had your say, but I never have. And I’d like to have it now. I must have it now if we are to repair things between us.’

My words had started to sound melodramatic and clichéd, and my throat was locking, but I couldn’t stop now. That would make me look even more of an idiot, and I’d never have the courage to reach this stage again.

‘First I’ll read out a few of the accusations you levelled against me – and I’m quoting from the letters.

    Irresponsible
    Drifting from whim to whim
    Inclined to ‘frivvle’ money
    Anticipating money
    Immature and not sensible
    Impulsive
    Acting with unseemly haste
    Inconsiderate
    Acting in an unsavoury manner
    Acting unfairly
    Likely to let people down
    Acting abruptly
    Not respecting other people’s point of view
    Discourteous
    Unkind
    Thoughtless
    Bigoted
    Dishonest

‘And now some of the judgements you passed on John – again from the letters.

    No brains or charm
    Unable to provide properly
    Not settled in a reasonable career
    Irresponsible
    Unlikeable
    Difficult to talk to
    Naïve
    Prejudiced
    Cliché-ridden
    Uneducated
    Ill-mannered

‘It was devastating to hear this from you. I can’t express how sad it made me to feel you misunderstood me so much and had such a low opinion of me and everything I’d been doing while growing up.
    ‘It also made me very angry that you felt you had a right to inflict your opinions on me. You’ve never asked me what my views on life are. You’ve always tried to mould me in your image. You’ve implied that it was my duty to behave like you. And that if I didn’t I was being ungrateful or naughty or stupid or something.
    ‘I have to follow my own conscience, wherever it takes me. It’s not right that anyone should be dominated by someone else. I’m different from you. I’m a different generation, a different person. You’ve never realised this and never given me the freedom to be myself.
    ‘Of course I want you to be happy, but I can’t betray myself to make you happy. You’d no right to use emotional blackmail on me and I think this is what angers me more than anything else.
    ‘Not so much you Dad as I realise a lot of what you said was said from genuine concern but perhaps over-protectiveness. It is statements like the following (and I’m quoting here from two of Mum’s letters).

 
    “It was difficult to say that it was lovely to see you last weekend. I think it was almost the saddest few days of my life,”
   and
    “I’m not sending you conventional phrases of good wishes. They would stick in my throat.”

 
‘Those are terrible things to say.
    ‘I blame myself for never having stood up to you properly before. In fact I’ve always tried to please you. Everything I did was to please you. But nothing has ever been good enough. And I realise now that I was a fool and very wrong to let it go on for so long. If you really find me so objectionable and such a disappointment to you there’s no earthly reason why we should ever see each other again.’

I sounded screechy and childish and I was beginning to see that I was forgetting everything Pat had taught us about speaking from the heart and not accusing, but it was too late now to change my words.
    I’d written the speech almost automatically and not edited it, knowing that, if I did try to do so, it would fall apart.
    I’d never spoken to my parents like this before and I knew I still had a lot to learn.

‘But if we do continue to see each other it is essential that you respect and listen to me and my views. You have to let me be free. Anything else is very destructive. I can’t see you on any other terms.
    ‘We must be able to disagree with each other without you taking it personally. If I disagree with you I’m not criticising you or dismissing your way of life. It’s just a sign that I’m alive. I’m not just a copy of you. I’m a person in my own right.
    ‘You may say that all these events I’m talking about happened fourteen years ago and what on earth’s the point of bringing them up now. They’re over and done with. But they’re not and I can’t forget them.
    ‘If I’ve upset you I’m sorry. I’m trying to repair things between us and help things develop. They have been stuck at a very bad patch for a long time. However if you can’t put up with me any more I don’t have to stay a moment longer. I’ve made alternative arrangements for tonight should it be necessary.
    ‘But if we can clear the air and move forward together with honesty and tolerance I shall be overjoyed.’

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