PART THREE. 6 Fast Forward

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.

January 2022

Usually I walked Ellie on my own every morning but that day, for some reason, John – or rather Frog as he’d become known to all and sundry (for reasons that will probably be explained at some stage) – decided that he would accompany me.
    I don’t know why.
    Perhaps he had a presentiment. He had given me a very strange look earlier as we sat in bed having breakfast. It wasn’t a look I’d ever seen on his face before and I hadn’t known what it meant.
    Or perhaps he simply didn’t know what else to do.
    He’d been lost since retiring a few years earlier from his two jobs, one at the Exeter University student radio station and one in the university science department where he’d been working on and off for nearly half a century.
    He spent hours in his semi-underground music room playing patience on his computer and listening to records. Whenever I went down to see him he would look up guiltily and I had the sensation that he was hiding something from me. When I challenged him however he would deny it vehemently.
    Ellie and I used to spend time sitting in the conservatory together, me reading or sewing and Ellie sitting on my feet, and whenever Ellie heard Frog’s footsteps coming up the stairs from his room she would flinch. The day before, I’d flinched too for the first time. He brought with him an aura of – something.

It was a few days after New Year. The Christmas tree was still up in the sitting-room with its ropes of white and coloured lights, and Christmas cards hung around the house on loops of red string.

As we set off, the sun was shining but a cold wind was blowing and I was well wrapped up in a quilted coat, hat, gloves and scarf. Sometimes I wore lace-up walking boots and sometimes I wore wellies. Today was a welly day, but I can’t remember why.

The start of the walk was a steep climb up the lane behind the house and I soon left Frog behind. I felt a bit impatient. Why was he walking so slowly?
    I stopped at a gate halfway up the hill to wait for him. There was a view eastward over fields and hills and I breathed in the space and the silence and the fresh air. Through trees I spotted cars speeding along the motorway a few miles away but because the wind was south-westerly I couldn’t hear them. They were the only things moving.
    I looked back. Where was Frog? He’d been ages. Then he appeared around a corner, and I was shocked. Each footstep appeared to be an effort. He looked old.
    At last he reached the gateway and as I shifted to one side to let him in he gave a cry of surprise and fell to the ground. His eyes closed and his breathing became laboured and I knew something was seriously wrong. I rang 999 on my ancient mobile phone, my hands shaking.

After I’d explained in detail exactly where I was – luckily I’d been walking the area for over forty years and I knew the name of every farm, lane and crossroads - they tried to get me to resuscitate him. They wanted me to put my phone on ‘speaker’ so that they could give me instructions, but my phone was too old to have that capability. I dropped it on the ground and tried to resuscitate him anyway but I didn’t know what I was doing. I had had training in first aid but that was a long time ago and I couldn’t remember anything. In any case Frog was sprawled awkwardly against a bank, difficult to get at and far too heavy for me to move.
    Very soon two ambulances and a car arrived, and a helicopter landed in the field the other side of the gate. The farmer sped up from his yard below and unlocked the gate. Paramedics and doctors leapt out of their vehicles with packs on their backs and cases in their hands. They lifted Frog into the field and started attaching equipment to him.

I stood out of the way in the road, numb, and put Ellie on her lead. She was wildly excited and barking loudly. What was going on? Why were all these people here? Why weren’t they taking any notice of her? She should be centre of attention, not Frog.
    A neighbour wandered down, wondering what all the commotion was.
    ‘Can I help?’ he asked.
    ‘Could you take Ellie,’ I said, proffering the lead.
    Everyone in the area knew her. She was so striking with her long black and white coat and so gregarious, a bit of a femme fatale. She had to make everyone to fall in love with her. Frog and I called her a ‘minx’ and her admirers ‘victims’.
    ‘Of course,’ the neighbour answered, taking the lead and walking back up the lane with her.

    Ellie trotted after him without a backward glance.

A doctor with a clipboard came up to me and took some details.
    ‘Would John want to be resuscitated,’ she said, ‘if there was a chance he would be a vegetable?’
    ‘Absolutely not,’ I said.
    I tried not to look as they injected him with adrenaline and gave him electric shocks. His body shook like a jelly, but there was no sign of life. He was long gone.

The helicopter took off, and the two ambulances set off in convoy for the hospital in Exeter, me in one and Frog in the other attached to life-support machinery. I got my ambulance to stop at my house as we went past so that I could grab my purse.
    At the hospital I sat alone in a small room, still dressed in my dog-walking clothes, while they continued trying to bring Frog back to life. Eventually someone came out and told me they'd stopped trying and he'd been pronounced dead. Did I want to see him?
    I nodded.
    It took them some time to find the key for the room but at last they let me in and shut the door behind me.
    It wasn’t Frog lying there. The body didn’t look anything like him; it felt cold. I wondered whether his spirit was still around but I didn’t feel it.
    Even so, I couldn’t stop saying thank you to him – thank you for our life together, thank you for everything he’d done for me, thank you for putting up with me. I repeated the words over and over again.
    He was sixty-nine. We’d been married forty-four years.

Through the haze of grief, through the confused days and the terrifying sleepless nights that followed, one thought kept me going.
    This was my chance. This was the first time in my life I’d lived alone. My parents were dead. Frog was dead. He’d taken himself out of the picture deliberately so as to give me space. I was no longer beholden to anyone. I had nothing left to lose.
    Now at last I could sort out the whole sorry mess.
    And then, maybe, just maybe, when Frog and I met again, in our next life together, I would be able to do everything so much better.



To be continued . . . 

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?

    

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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.

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PART THREE. 3 Kent

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.

 

Monday 3 April

My dear Belinda

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

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

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

 

    no trips abroad

    no extras of nice clothes etc.

    no private medicine

  

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

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

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

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

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

Love Mummy

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

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

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

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

What was I? Did I even exist?

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

The visit had not gone well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    ‘You can’t marry him,’ she said.

    I felt like a child.

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

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

    ‘What did you do?’ I asked.

    ‘I walked out,’ he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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PART THREE. 2 En Route

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

Click here for the first instalment.

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

The next morning John’s younger brother came over. He was tall and spindly with a cheeky grin, similar to John T when he was younger as far as I could judge from the photographs Mollie had shown me. He was working as a trainee journalist at a local newspaper.

    I didn’t meet his elder sister. She was yet another who’d ‘had’ to marry in their teens because she was pregnant. She was now a single mother with three daughters, her husband having left her on the birth of girl number three.

    I hinted to Mollie how scared I was about visiting my parents and she gave John a 1950s’ book called ‘Lady Behave: a guide to modern manners’ – what sort of invitations to use for different sorts of parties, where to seat people around a table, how to address a lord or a bishop, what to wear when – and he’d hooted with laughter.

    ‘Does anybody actually live like this?’ he spluttered.

    Mollie and I looked at each other.

 

After lunch, as we set off down the A1 for Kent, which was the same distance south of London as Bedfordshire was north, I ruminated on the encounter to come.

    I’d written to my parents saying, ‘I’ve met someone and he wants to marry me. I told him he was unsuitable!’

    The exclamation mark was important. I thought it might introduce a note of levity to the proceedings. I hoped it would suggest that it was stupid to be concerned about things like that.

    My parents were young once. They must remember what it was like. They must be human somewhere. I wanted to give them a chance. But, at the same time, I wanted to warn them.

  

My mother came from an aristocratic family which had lost its money several times over the centuries, the most recent being in my mother’s early twenties. Her mother had died of cancer around the same time and the family had broken up. She’d returned from the Sorbonne in Paris where she was studying and found a job.

    She never talked about that time. I’d had to glean what I could from her sister who was only six when their mother died and who’d lived with us when I was a child.

    My mother’s golden years were the three she spent studying at Oxford University, where women were in the minority and the men older, back from the war. There, it seemed, her emotional life had stopped.

She made a good choice in my father. He may not have been quite her class or have her education but – unlike her family – he was solid.

    He’d built his business on trust and honesty, he said.  He was traditional. He believed in politicians and the police. Marriage and children was the correct order of things. ‘Capital’ - money saved - was the key to happiness.

    His mother had died of pneumonia when he was six and he went to an all-boys school, but he did have two sisters so women weren’t a complete enigma to him. But he considered them an inferior species. Frivolous, inclined to spend money unnecessarily, and without proper judgement.

Nine months after they married I was born and then four more children in the next six and a half years. In a thunderstorm, on my sixth birthday, we moved from a moderate dwelling to a farm with a seven-bedroomed Regency house as well as thirty acres of fields, stables with a flat above, an orchard and a walled 'kitchen' garden.

    This was where John and I were now headed.

I’d been lying to my parents from an early age. Well, not lying, but certainly hiding my real self. I wanted, of course, to be loved and with each new brother or sister it seemed that I was loved less. Or at least I got less attention. There must be something wrong with me, I concluded, so I tried to be perfect.

    My parents believed that children should be docile and compliant. So that’s what I became.

    They knew nothing about my real life.

    I had no practice whatsoever in standing up to them.

    I was the first of the children to do so.

By my parents’ standards, John failed on every count. He wasn’t upper class. He wasn’t rich. He didn’t have the sort of job that either of my parents would understand. He didn’t actually have anything in common with them at all.

    I loved my family and I couldn’t bear the thought of losing them. And that's what I risked, I thought, if I told my parents about John. But I didn’t want to carry on lying to them for the rest of my life.

    There were two of them and only one of me. They both in their different ways had the weight of the establishment behind them. I was young, alone and a woman to boot. Who was going to respect me? What were my opinions and needs worth anyway?

    But, if I didn’t believe that blue-sky voice that spoke in my head on the night of the supper party, what was there left?

    It was an impossible dilemma. A nightmare come true.

We reached the village, lumbered up the half-mile drive and came to a stop in front of the house. As we scrunched across the gravel towards the primrose-yellow front door, I felt as if I was walking to the guillotine.

    I saw John’s long hair, green trousers and dusty Mini through my parents’ eyes and wondered if I was making a huge mistake.

    I had no idea how I was going to handle the imminent situation.

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