PART FIVE. 1 'Frog'

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. See right for a link to the full list of instalments.

1987

I rang my parents to tell them about Mollie’s death.
    I was still trying to do the right thing – or what I thought was the right thing, the thing that normal people would do – by keeping my parents up to date with my life. The visible things anyway.
    Unusually my father answered and, even more unusually, he didn’t immediately hand me over to my mother.
    I started crying as I told him what had happened.
    ‘Chin up,’ he said.
    It was one of the nicest things he’d ever said to me.
    And it helped. It was good advice.
    I felt better after the phone call.

Other than that, I can’t remember much at all about the immediate aftermath of Mollie’s death.
    I know that I went to London on my own to stay with my brother Jo and his wife Emmie. I was frustrated by John and the gulf that seemed to have opened between us.
    ‘He won’t talk to me about it at all,’ I complained to the two of them as we queued for pizza at an Italian restaurant.
    ‘Maybe,’ said Emmie, ‘but he would still want you there.’
    More wise words. It was a reprimand, but said with such kindness that I didn’t mind.
    John and Emmie got on so well together that sometimes I was afraid.
    I went straight back home.

Again, in spite of the struggle of our emotional lives, both John and I were progressing at work.

In his job at the university John was known as Freddie the Frog, Freddie for short. This was because on his first day there, because he found everyone so stiff and formal and in order to break the ice, he fallen to a squat and croaked ‘Ridip’.
    It was the sort of thing he did. He had a whole vocabulary of words he’d made up and used when he didn’t know what else to say. It was a brilliant idea and I wished I had the courage to do something similar.
    Then when he started doing his radio programmes, both on URE, the student radio station, and at DevonAir, the commercial one, he’d taken on the alias John the Frog. Soon this was shortened to Frog and his URE programme came to be called ‘The Frog Prog’. Which was a brilliant name, although people did get confused and think the ‘Prog’ bit meant that he only played ‘progressive music’, ie rock that had gone off-the-scale ridiculous, which wasn’t true at all.
    The programme was hotchpotch of rock, pop, folk, blues, classical, humour, TV themes – in fact anything that had caught his ear over his long listening life. He even included readings from books he loved.
    Sometimes he played around with the music too, ‘splicing’ tape on his gigantic tape-editing machine that he’d bought second-hand from the BBC in London and we’d manoeuvred together into the back of his Hustler, a gigantic Mini kit-car he’d made (another story), in order to drive it home.
    Anyway, soon DevonAir asked him to do a Frog Prog as well, an extraordinary honour as such freedom was unheard of on commercial radio.
    And everyone was calling him ‘Frog’, even me.

I meanwhile had become an editorial ‘consultant’ to an Exeter publisher. This meant being in charge of books from start to finish - liaising with authors, writing ‘blurbs’ (the bits on the book jackets that told you what was inside) and even introductions, and going into the office at least once a week for meetings. This was much more fun than simply copy-editing and proofreading, and was making me realise how much I liked writing myself. I began to wonder if I could do more of it.

But something was going very wrong with our personal life.
    Sometimes it seemed as if we couldn’t talk to each other without it descending into a ferocious argument.
    Sometimes in bed at night I thought we might kill each other. Broken glass loitered in a cobwebby corner where I’d thrown a glass. There was a hole in the wall behind the bed where Frog had punched it.
    Sometimes Frog would descend into what I called ‘victim mode’, in which he would moan for hours about how hard-done-by he was, how nothing I did for him was right. It infuriated me but there was nothing I could say to stop him, so I took to blocking my ears and hoping he couldn’t see in the dark. Because if he did see what I was doing he would erupt in fury and I would have to run from the bedroom and hide. He would then rampage about the house looking for me.
    I took to going away for weekends on my own – to see my parents, to stay with a beloved aunt in Staffordshire.
    Frog was hardly ever at home. Often I didn’t even know where he was, and he would come back with some excuse or other.
    I had the strangest sensation that when he looked at me there was someone standing next to me and I was being compared with them.

Then, on New Year’s Eve 1989, it all came to a head.

To be continued . . .

4.8 'You could come and live with us'

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. See right for a link to the full list of instalments.



‘You could come and live with us,’ I said.
    The suggestion had burst out of me without me thinking about it but, now I’d said it, I realised that I meant it. It solved everything – both Mollie’s problems and those of John and me.
    Mollie and I were out for a walk together while we stayed with John’s parents. It was autumn. Hedges overflowing with berries divided the flat countryside of Bedfordshire. The sticky grey mud round the edges of the fields where we walked clung to our boots like plates.

    Mollie loved the countryside and many of her reading choices reflected that – BB, Alison Uttley, Flora Thompson, Richard Jefferies, Tolkien. She read Lord of the Rings once a year. There was always a book in her corner of the kitchen, left open on its front in order to mark where she’d got to.

    I’d spent my childhood outside, playing in the garden, fields and river of my parents’ house with my brothers and sisters, exploring the North Downs on foot and by bicycle. It was where I felt most myself. It was somewhere to get away from grown-ups and their rules.
    Since leaving school however at seventeen, living in London and then Exeter, I’d largely forgotten about that connection, but now that I was working at home I was rediscovering it. I’d started to punctuate my working days with exploration of the fields, streams, copses and lanes around our house.
    Walking in the countryside was a pleasure that Mollie and I loved to share with each other.
    We crossed a rickety wooden bridge over a tiny stream.

    ‘Of course, not,’ said Mollie. ‘I couldn’t possibly do that. I wouldn’t want to be a burden. How would I earn money?’
    ‘You wouldn’t be burden,’ I said. ‘Far from it. We’d love it. And I’m sure you could find work.’
    Mollie hurrumphed.
    She’d been telling me how worried she was about money and how stressful she found it living with John T.

    She was haunted by her poor childhood. As well as the story of her mother ordering a pot of tea for one and six cups (for herself and her five children), she would mention how they’d never been allowed to eat fresh bread because they ate too much of it. Her mother always waited until it was stale before giving it to the children.
    John T, according to my John (who was I think quoting Peter Ustinov), was that scary thing – a poor man who lived like a rich one. He took trouble over his appearance, always carefully dressed in smart clothes, and every time we visited seemed to be wearing a new pair of shoes.
    He’d always wanted to be an artist but hadn’t been allowed to by his Australian father: ‘No son of mine goes to art school.’ He’d sold the shop that he and Mollie had run together and now got by with a succession of jobs, while Mollie worked part time at as a secretary at a local building company.
    Nor had John T been faithful to Mollie, and my John recounted terrifying evenings as a child listening to his parents shouting at each other.
    Mollie stuck by her husband however.
    ‘I made my vows,’ she would say, ‘and I’ll keep them.’
    John had been his mother’s champion, sticking up for her against his father as soon as he was old enough to understand what was going on. Once he got his driving licence he drove her around and helped her with the shopping.
    ‘Pa’s an idiot,’ he would say to me. ‘Ma’s so much more intelligent.’
    He was ashamed to be male, the same sex as his father.
    Things between Mollie and John T seemed to be coming to a head and I longed to help Mollie, but didn’t seem able to.

Later that day we went shopping together. I’d offered to make Mollie a shirt and we were buying material and a pattern for it.
    I could remember learning how to sew from my mother at a very young age. She made many of the family's clothes as it was cheaper at that time than buying them and she had five rapidly growing children.
    I hadn’t been interested in playing with dolls but I loved making clothes for them with scraps of left-over material. In my teens, when I shot up to five foot ten inches, I had to make my own clothes because nothing in the shops fitted me.
    I was far from an expert at sewing but it was something I did. I still used the machine my parents had given me for my twenty-first birthday.
    We found a soft brushed cotton in small sage-green checks – perfect for the season and Mollie’s green eyes. But as we walked back to the car, Mollie stopped and put her hand over her heart. She was breathing fast.

    I was a bit clueless about illnesses but she was fifty-nine, so pretty old, and all sorts of things happened to people at that age. Perhaps breathlessness was one of them.
    I waited, trying to be sympathetic without making a drama out of whatever was going on, and eventually Mollie shook herself and gave me a rueful smile.
    ‘OK now,’ she said.

Back in Devon I busied myself making the shirt, adapting the pattern to fit Mollie's measurements and taking as much care as I could.

    As soon as I finished it, I put it in the post, and a few days later Mollie rang me.
    ‘It’s perfect,’ she said. ‘It’s the best-made piece of clothing I’ve ever had.’
    I glowed. Like John, she spoke the truth. She never made false compliments.

    'Tell the truth and shame the devil' was one of her sayings. John had taken it on and often quoted it to me when I was doubtful about how to behave in some situation or other. I loved it. It made everything so simple. It was so unlike the way my family behaved.

One evening a few weeks later the phone rang and John answered it.
    ‘It’s Jenny,’ he mouthed at me.
    I nodded. Jenny was his sister, and phone calls with her were never short. She still lived in Bedfordshire, near their parents.

    I pottered around, trying not to disturb the conversation.
    But John wasn’t saying anything. I glanced over at him and could see that he was listening intently, but his face had caved in.
    I went and sat next to him on the sofa.
    He was starting to look grey.
    I took his hand and he grasped mine tightly.
    He put the phone down.
    ‘It’s Ma,’ he said. ‘She’s had a heart attack. She didn’t make it. She’s gone.’

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4.7 Work and Home

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. See right for a link to the full list of instalments.



We’d been married now for eight years, living in our second house for six.
    Sometimes I wondered whether the original intensity of our feelings had been lost in the miasma of my parents’ reaction to John and me and the pressure of my finals. I remembered the inkling I’d had in the university library when revising for my exams that I was heading in the wrong direction. Was it correct? Had I been given the chance of a new life and not taken it? Was I sitting on the fence, unable to decide between John and my parents, the past and the future?
    These were depressing thoughts. No. Worse than depressing. Sometimes, in the aftermath of yet another of our fruitless attempts to be intimate, I just wanted to plunge a knife into my breast and end it all. I blamed myself for everything. I felt helpless. I didn't know how to change.
    My headaches were getting worse and now they were starting to make me vomit. Because they almost always occurred in my pill-free week, I mentioned them at the Family Planning Clinic.
    ‘Ah yes,’ they said. ‘Migraines. They are a possible side-effect of the contraceptive pill.’
    Hell’s bells, I thought. Why on earth didn’t you warn me?
    They put me on a progesterone-only pill (rather than one containing both progesterone and oestrogen) but it made no difference.

By contrast, our working lives were going well.
    I was back in the book-publishing world but freelance rather than salaried, working mostly from home which I much preferred. Ever since marrying, I'd struggled to integrate work and home. I didn’t like having to spend more of my time in the place I wanted to be less and I found it hard to divide my loyalties. My loyalties were to John exclusively (however confused those loyalties were).
    I’d moved to a second publisher when my traineeship finished at the first (something else I’m not proud of) but that job had come to an end because I didn’t get on with my manager. I hadn’t trusted her and when, five years into my National Trust job, she abandoned the company owing them money, I felt vindicated.
    Five years was more than enough at the Trust so I gave in my notice and applied for freelance editing at both the two publishers I’d been employed at, as well as publishers in London through my sisters who worked in that area too, and a ‘mind, body, spirit’ publisher in Dorset because they were fairly local and I was interested in the subject.
    The work consisted mostly of copy-editing and proofreading, both of which meant paying close attention to grammar, spelling and the precise meaning of words. All of this had been part of my degree, which included studying the language as well as the literature of France and Spain, and I was (I think) good at it. Plenty of work arrived, anyway.
    I quite enjoyed it too, even though I again had the sense that I was using only a fraction of myself. And I certainly enjoyed being able to get up from my desk every hour or so and walk round the garden.

As well as his music programme on University Radio Exeter, John had acquired a job presenting ‘Devon Rocks’, a rock-music programme on the local independent radio station DevonAir. This he did live every Saturday evening. In addition, he helped out on the overnight programmes (doing what, I wasn't sure - paperwork, finding records, making coffee, keeping the presenter awake?) and filled in on weekday evenings when presenters were not available for one reason or another.
    All of which meant I didn’t see much of him, and my eating problems, which had begun to calm down, returned when I was at home at night without him.

There were several reasons why my eating habits were improving.

    It helped me to have proper meals regularly with someone else, rather than starving and bingeing and having no routine as I had done when I was living on my own. In any case, bingeing was a secret, shameful activity and I tended not to do it when John was around.

    As I did most of the cooking, I'd been reading up about nutrition and concentrating on the quality of food rather than the quantity. This felt kinder. Instead of berating myself for my weight, I was nourishing myself.
    It was the eating problems as well as my migraines that had started my interest in the ‘mind, body, spirit’ movement. I suspected that conventional medicine could do nothing for either of these illnesses. In any case, I preferred to go my own way. I didn’t want to be labelled. I didn’t want to be a victim.

In spite of these small steps forward however, I spent many of my solitary evenings stuffing myself with whatever food I could find, trying to assuage some hunger that I couldn’t put a name to.

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PART FOUR. 6 Parents

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. See right for a link to the full list of instalments.

Mollie, John’s lovely mother, wasn’t well. She’d had a stroke in her thirties, a victim of the early contraceptive pill which contained high doses of hormones. (These were reduced to a fifth of the original levels once the link with strokes was discovered.) She recovered from the stroke but was left with permanently high blood pressure. The only time this dropped was when she came to stay with us, and her doctor prescribed frequent visits.
    We weren't complaining. She was such an easy guest. In the mornings while we were out at work she would bicycle to the village and buy herself a little treat – a bun, a packet of sweets – and in the afternoon would busy herself tidying our neglected garden.
    Thankfully, she wasn’t the sort of mother-in-law to criticise my housekeeping. Far from it. She was on my side and we’d chuckle together about John’s foibles - until he got cross and asked us to stop. We'd acquired an infestation of mice and one of them would hide under Kitten’s food bowl and in the evenings run across the sitting-room floor. Mollie laughed.
    She’d welcomed me from the start. She’d never judged me. Her visits were the only time I could look at myself in the mirror and like what I saw. It seemed as if my face was transformed.

She also transformed our fractious love life.
    This had never picked up. What we’d called ‘teething troubles’ had persisted.
    I became either like stone or I wanted to bite and scratch. I understood two things at this stage. I couldn’t trust that John’s feelings were love not lust, however much he protested, and lust disgusted me. I’d been on the receiving end of too much of it. On the other hand, I couldn’t risk losing him. He was everything to me. What if I gave everything to him and he let me down? I would be destroyed. This, I presumed, was an echo of Brian in London.
    I called Mollie my safety net as I knew that, whatever happened, she would be there. With her nearby, I could relax.

I was still ‘flipping’ – my view of John alternating between that of my parents and my own.

    My own was the one that hit me when John and I first spoke, when I had the revelation that I already knew everything about him and that we’d been together in many previous lives. Our relationship was sanctified by what I called ‘the blue-sky voice’, the one that had told me John would interest me for the rest of my life and I would marry him.
    My parents’ view was the one they expressed in their letters – that he was useless, rude, uncharming etc etc.
    I couldn’t understand how people could see things so differently. Who was right? For me it was impossible dilemma. I couldn’t solve it. My head spun with the conflict and I started to acquire regular right-sided headaches.
    But with Mollie staying, the flipping stopped. John blossomed in her presence, becoming grown-up and confident, his true self, instead of hurt and angry as he so often was when he and I were alone. I too could be myself with her and, what's more, she was like a double dose of John. 

My relationship with my own parents however was a different matter.
    Through friends, who’d heard via their mothers, I discovered that my mother had come to the conclusion that she and my father had been ‘too hard’ on John and me. She’d found our wedding ‘one of the nicest' she’d been to and liked Mollie. After the wedding she’d decided that there was 'hope' for our marriage after all.
    Well, bully for her. Nothing was said directly to me, so all I could do was carry on thinking that my parents still had the same devastatingly low opinions of John and me as the ones they’d expressed in their letters. The pain of those letters had imprinted itself too deeply inside me to be dislodged by third-hand news.
    I was too terrified of my parents to bring the subject up with them but continued to visit them both out of duty and because I couldn’t bear to lose touch with my family as a whole. My family and my upbringing were a huge part of me, and my childhood had been a happy one on the surface - stability, fun, lots of muddy time with my siblings, cousins and friends.
    I never went to see them without John however and when there I couldn’t meet their eyes. Our conversations were stilted and I tried not to be alone with either of them.

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For Beth - Spring comes to Devon

As ever, spring is arriving in fits and starts. Wednesday was warm and sunny, more like summer, but today it’s cold and grey again. Nevertheless there was much to see on my walk this morning.

Blackthorn was in full bloom in the hedgerows

This ewe and her lamb caught my eye . . .

.

. . . as did this green-eyed cat

The flowers of Jack-by-the-hedge, also known as Garlic Mustard, have arrived in the last couple of days. The Orange-tip butterfly likes to lay her eggs on this plant. (The butterfly is named after the male as the female does not have orange-tipped wings. Both however have dappled green and white underwings.)

Ivy berries are an important food for birds at this hungry time of year

The weeping willow on the lane below my house, always the first of the trees to burst into leaf

Around my pond: the giant water buttercups known as Kingcups

Wild garlic at the bottom of my garden. I planted a few bulbs many years ago and now I have a profusion