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

PART FOUR. 5 Hunky-dory

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


1980

At last we were settled in our new house in Silverton, or rather our new house two miles outside Silverton. Our new detached, three-bedroomed house with a quarter of an acre of garden. Our second house. It had cost us every penny we had, and now we had a mortgage too which meant that the house was in both our names as the building society needed the security of our combined incomes.
    I didn’t tell my parents this, not because I felt guilty but because it didn’t occur to me to do so. Like my emotional life that I’d kept secret until the issue of marriage arose, I’d never divulged my financial situation to my parents. Nor did it occur to me until later – several decades later – that because they had a stake in the house (having given us the money for our first house which we'd sold to part-finance the second) I should have told them and that it was dishonest not to.
    They didn’t say anything either – for once.

I’d of course gone the conventional route in looking for a new house, contacting local estate agents, trawling through page after page of information about properties for sale, and visiting a succession of unsuitable places – unsuitable because they were too small, too boring, too close to other houses – but suitable because they were what we could afford.
    John, on the other hand, had taken a road he’d never explored before just for the hell of it and halfway along had seen the house, seen it was for sale, and thought, yes, that was our house.
    As soon as I saw it I agreed with him.
    The views were fabulous. The neighbour, who showed us round and who had been cutting the grass to keep the place nice, was delightful. The house was modern, bright, immaculate and a blank canvas for us to put our stamp on.

We felt welcome straight away.
    We stayed with a friend in the village for a couple of months when we were between houses and with the neighbour C for the final weekend. She lived on a farm with her husband and young son and had let us leave all our belongings in one of their barns while the house purchase went through. On the Monday she helped us transport everything from their barn to our new house, on foot and in the Mini.
    Another neighbour brought us some swedes as a welcome present – from which I made a hearty soup.
    Another invited me to a Tupperware party. (I declined the invitation – feeling rather overwhelmed by something so grown-up – and I didn’t ask her in, which I realise now was very remiss of me. She was using the party as an excuse to drop in on us.)
    Another knocked on the door and asked if he could buy John’s motorbike. (He couldn’t.)
    People in cars would stop on the road and engage us in chat.
    Somehow, they all already knew all about us – where we came from, where we worked.

On our first night in the house, John spilt red wine on the beige carpet in the sitting-room. We took it as a good sign. Already we were making the place our own.
    In our two previous places – the flat and the bungalow - John had taken over one of the bedrooms for his hi-fi equipment and records, which had cut him off. In the new house he was able to park himself in one of the corners of the large sitting-room, which was much more companionable.

Music was everything to him. At around the age of eight he’d started to build his own electronic equipment on which to play music. He still had some of it, including a Perspex amplifier that he was very proud of. Music had saved him during his adolescence.
    When, at his grammar school, they’d asked him what he wanted to do when he left he’d said that he wanted to be a recording engineer. He wanted to help musicians create music. Right, said the school, not having the foggiest what he was talking about. A levels.
    And, of course, he failed them all. He wasn’t academic except about music. His knowledge of music was encyclopaedic. Ask him something about music – any sort of music – and he could answer. But ask him to study for something he wasn’t interested in and he stalled.
    His main criterion in choosing a house was for it to be somewhere he could play loud music - outside as well as inside - without worrying about disturbing anyone and now of course he could.
    And did.

I loved it. I was learning so much and luckily our tastes more or less coincided. The only genre neither of us liked was Jazz. He liked Folk music however which on the whole I didn’t, whereas I liked Country music which on the whole he didn’t. But we could deal with that.
    He turned his nose up at my handy portable record player with its lid made from its two speakers which I’d bought from a fellow student for £70 in 1976, and exclaimed in horror at its wires which – cleverly, I thought - I’d made longer by splicing in extra bits. He relegated it to the top of a cupboard. I didn’t mind – too much.
    And he disapproved of some of my records, such as Santana Abraxas which had blown me away when I first heard it in 1971, and kept them in a box separately from his racks. (At least he kept my records.) His records were arranged in the order in which he’d bought them and he remembered the position of every one. He could pull one out without even thinking about it.
    
His mission in life was to spread good music and to that end he’d joined the fledgling student radio station, University Radio Exeter (URE), helping them out technically and presenting a programme on which he could play whatever music he wanted.
    It saved him from the tedium of his job at the university, which nonetheless he worked at diligently. He didn’t want to be unreliable like his father. He wanted to be a good provider.

I now had a secretarial job at the National Trust Regional Office (long story) which was only a couple of miles away. This I found excruciatingly boring but I could bicycle there and walk in the park at lunchtime, and I was determined to stick at it as I’d never before had a job for more than a few years.

Kitten had had to go back to Rod while we were homeless but she was now safely restored to us.

So everything was in place, ready for our new married life together. All was hunky-dory.

    Or was it?

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Prologue

This is an instalment of the autobiographical series. I have published it before but not as a prologue, which is what I now intend it to be.

See right for links to the rest of the series.

 January 2022

Usually I walked our dog Ellie on my own every morning but that day, for some reason, Frog decided that he would accompany me.
    Perhaps he had a presentiment. He’d 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. He was hardly moving. Each footstep appeared to be an effort. He looked old.
    At last he reached the gateway and, as I shifted to one side to give him space, 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 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 asked, ‘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.

The helicopter took off, and the two ambulances set off in convoy for the hospital in Exeter, me in the second one and Frog in the first, 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. 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 sense 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.

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.

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PART FOUR. 4 The Proposition

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

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

Note

I'm slowing down with the series for the moment in order to catch up with the rest of my life but I certainly intend to finish it in due course.

Contact me on belindawhitworth[at]dialstart[dot]net to go on the mailing list and be kept informed of new instalments.

My father had a proposition for me. He would give me the money for the house if I registered it in my name only.
    I knew my father disapproved of mortgages, even if they were becoming more common. He considered them, like hire purchase, as something for the poor, and dangerous to enter into. But I didn’t think of that. All I saw was the insult to John. My father didn't trust him. He didn't trust me and my choices.

    I suspected that the announcement in the paper had been my mother’s work, but this proposition was definitely my father’s. Money was his currency, his purpose in life.
    My parents may have respected our marriage by putting us in the same room when we went to stay (which was strange, to say the least), but underneath they’d obviously not changed at all. Both, in their different ways, were persisting in thinking of John as belonging to a sub-species.
    I started to cry and everyone in the open-plan office looked up.
    I started to plead with my father, and I could hear myself sounding childish and unconvincing.
    ‘Think about it,’ said my father putting the phone down.

‘Family troubles,’ I said to the room at large, not wanting – like John T – to enter into long and shameful explanations. Which was perhaps another mistake. Perhaps I should have talked to people and asked their advice.
    I’m sure I told John about the proposition but I don’t remember him saying anything about it. Perhaps he didn’t want to influence me. Perhaps he was too hurt to say anything. Perhaps – and most likely – he didn’t know what he felt about it. He was used to being strong – for his mother. He wasn’t used to examining his emotions.
    In any case, I’d become the one who looked after our money and all things administrative as that was something I was reasonably good at. John’s forté was all things practical.
    So I was on my own and in the end I gave in. It was just a piece of paper, I said to myself, and in my heart I shared everything with John so did it really matter? Accepting the offer would keep my father happy since rejecting it would be a rejection of him, and I couldn’t face any more ructions. And finally, of course, the money would be more than useful as the mortgage would have stretched us to our limit.
    Wrong, wrong, wrong.
    But it took me many decades to realise that.

So we said goodbye to our lovely flat, with its views of countryside, its wooden steps where we sat out, and Esme the bottle-fed lamb who occasionally made her way up the steps and into our accommodation . . .

 

John with Esme

. . . and travelled backwards and forwards many times with a crammed Mini to our new semi-detached bungalow.
    We were transporting not only all our stuff from the flat but also all the stuff John had left at Rod’s and – finally – dear Kitten, who looked a little ragged by now. Poor thing.

Kitten in the new house

The garden was the best part of the property. It backed on to an ancient Devon hedge and a large oak tree and we spent much of the summer out there, either on a rug or using a packing crate as a garden table. John bashed a hole in our bedroom wall and put in a French window so that we had direct access.

Lunch in the garden

As time went on we began to realise that we didn’t fit in on the estate. Our immediate neighbours, a young couple like us, told us that the others called us ‘the hippies’ because we’d used the Mini to move in (and it was always rather muddy, but how could it be any other way when John insisted on using the ‘back roads’ – ie the Devon lanes – at every opportunity. Who has the time to wash a car anyway?). People complained about the weeds in our front garden.

    The village and surrounding footpaths had an unpleasant atmosphere and I didn’t like walking on my own. The pub was not a patch on the Tuns, and we found ourselves taking the half-hour drive back to Silverton several times each week to visit our friends there.

    Then we started to get strange calls. It was always when I was alone in the house. I would pick up the phone and no one would answer even though I was pretty sure someone was there.
    ‘Ignore it’ said the woman opposite whose husband was a policeman.
    She’d given us a fold-up bed they no longer had any use for which was kind of her, but she always looked disapproving and never smiled. She boiled dishcloths, which was something my mother used to do, but not something I would ever dream of doing. They smelt horrible.
    ‘Get a whistle’, said the local police station, ‘and blow it hard down the mouthpiece.’
    That was good advice. I followed it and the calls stopped.
    Even so, we began to wonder if it was time to move.

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PART FOUR. 3 The Announcement

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

A link to the full list of instalments is in the sidebar to the right.

We may have been married but the battle wasn’t over. The next stage and my biggest mistake so far were still to come.

The honeymoon was a pleasant interlude, if wet. We spent several days on Bodmin Moor, with John glued to John Fowles’s The Magus and me sitting at the mouth of the tent, eating chocolate digestives and watching the rain. We were both still in shock, I think.

When we returned, I rang about a flat a few miles further west from Exeter than Liz’s cottage. Ironically, this time the landlady didn’t ask about our marital status.
    We went to see the accommodation. It was light and modern, on the upper floor of a barn, and we liked it immediately. Unfortunately, it was just outside our budget. We’d decided we could afford £20 (a month? a week? I can’t remember) but the flat was £22. When I explained this to the farmer, she said we could have for £20.
    Some good news at last.

In October, we moved in, with some more of John’s belongings, but not Kitten sadly as she wasn’t allowed. She, like the rest of John’s spare stuff, had to stay with Rod.
    At the same time, my job waitressing at the National Trust house was finishing, as the house closed at the end of the month. I volunteered to spend the first two weeks of November helping with a deep clean of kitchen and restaurant (gruesome, cleaning not being my favourite activity) and I then spent the next few weeks alone in the flat writing off for jobs, proper ones this time.
    I wrote to companies on spec, twice to a local publisher of non-fiction books, and after the second letter (and, I presume an interview, but I don’t remember it) they offered me a job as an editorial trainee, starting in January.
    Perfect.
    They said it was my typing experience that tipped the scales in my favour, even though they’d been suspicious of the green ink in which I’d written to them. (I was copying someone on my course at uni who wrote in turquoise ink.) So my time in London hadn’t been completely wasted.

One weekend we went to stay with Mollie and John T. As we sat at the table in their sun-filled kitchen, they pushed over to me a folded newspaper. One of the small ads was ringed.
    I read it in growing confusion. It seemed to be an announcement of our marriage but it said that John came from Luton in Bedfordshire whereas Mollie and John T lived nowhere near Luton.
    ‘I don’t understand,’ I said, shaking my head.
    Who would have done such a thing and why?
    ‘Do you think it was your parents?’ they asked.
    Things began to make sense. My parents knew John came from Bedfordshire but they didn’t know which part. They’d put the announcement in without consulting any of us named in it – Mollie, John T, John and me. They'd picked on Luton because it was the only town they knew in Bedfordshire.
    John T explained that someone at work had shown him the announcement and asked him if it was his son. After reading it, and beginning to suspect what had happened, John T had denied that it was anything to do with him. He couldn't account for the error without entering into a long unhappy story. What's more, Luton at that time did not have a good reputation. He was forced to lie.

    I was appalled that John T should have been put in that situation, at the disrespect shown to Mollie and John T, at the hurt they must have felt.
    My parents had obviously not softened in the slightest. And a few months later that was to be confirmed.

At the end of June we were going to have to move out of our lovely flat so that it could be let to holiday visitors – in the same way as most property in the county since visitors could be charged more than long-term tenants.
    We’d had enough of shunting from place to place, of the insecurity, of not being able to settle anywhere, and as winter drew on began to wonder if we should look into buying a house.
    Somehow we’d saved enough for a deposit, and with our combined incomes could apply for a mortgage for the rest of the cost. We found a semi-detached bungalow we could afford on an estate on the outskirts of a village a few miles from our flat. I wrote and told my parents of our plans.

By now we had a polite but meaningless relationship with my parents. We’d visited them and they’d said nothing about anything. I was seething with emotions and couldn't meet their eyes but I didn't how to even begin to explain what I was feeling. I couldn't pretend like they did - or as I presumed they did - and I found the situation intensely stressful. Nothing was resolved.

    Nevertheless I tried to carry on doing the ‘right thing’ by visiting and writing. I didn’t want to give them any more grounds for attacking me and John.

We didn’t have a phone in the flat so I’d given them my work number for use in an emergency.
    One day my phone rang at work.

    It was my father.

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AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SERIES. List of Instalments so far

PROLOGUE

PART ONE (AUSTRALIA 1975)

1  Sydney

2  The Murray River, Streaky Bay and Adelaide
3  Wilpena Pound
4  Melbourne, Brisbane and Mackay
5  Before
6  A Whitsunday Island
7  Lindeman Island
8  The Great Barrier Reef
9  The Letter
10 I’ll be back’


PART TWO (THE STORY CONTINUES)
1 Cloak-man
2 The Disco
3 The Party
4 The Supper
5 The Cottage
6 The Confession
7 February
8 March

PART THREE
1 Bedfordshire
2 En Route
3 Kent
4 Another Letter
5 Another Letter continued
6 June
7 July and August
8 Missives
9 Results

PART FOUR
1 A Late Arrival
2 The Pub and the Church

3 The Announcement

4 The Proposition

5 Hunky-dory

6 Parents

7 Work and Home

8 'You could come and live with us'

PART FIVE

1 'Frog'

PART FOUR. 2 The Pub and the Church

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

A link to the full list of instalments is in the sidebar to the right.

I can’t remember much about my wedding day. I think I was numb. John and I had fought so hard for it and now it was actually happening it seemed unreal. Parts of it stand out, like sunbeams, and other parts are lost in the dusty corners of my mind.

Once in the village, my family and John headed for the church, while Jo and I hung back. I pulled him into the Tuns and downed two vodkas. I’ve no idea why. I think I thought they were part of the ritual. Jo didn’t join me in a drink but he stood by, offering his usual uncritical support.
    

All I remember of the service is John, me and the vicar going into some back room and signing the register, with Liz and Rod as witnesses. I suppose I went through the rest automatically, and it didn't imprint itself on my brain cells.
    Outside, we must have posed for photographs as I have a collection: some of me and John; some of me, John and Richard; and some group photographs.
    In these, John’s parents are one end, Mollie sweet and smart in a brown velvet jacket. John and I are in the middle, holding tight to each other’s hand. My mother is next to me with Jo behind her, bushy-haired and tall.
    I don’t like to look at those group photographs now. Perhaps because they’re a lie. We weren’t a happy group, at least I wasn’t happy to be next to my mother. I’m looking away from her, holding myself tight on the side next to her. She looks grown-up and confident. I look like an overweight child.
    My favourite photograph shows John and me with our back to the camera, walking away with our arms around each other. Safe at last.
    We didn’t have an official photographer but two friends with cameras were standing outside, waiting for us all to come out of the church. How did they know to be there? Such thoughtfulness. Such kindness.

I remember our rings, of course. John had designed them, and a silversmith he’d met at a craft fair on Exeter’s Cathedral Green had made them. His was a wide band with my name engraved on it in runes. Mine was three rings twisted together. It was heavy and clunky on my finger and I wondered if I’d ever get used to it.

Looking at my new wedding ring

Back at the The Three Tuns, Richard had chilled champagne ready. We sat at two tables, the young on one and the old (older) on the other.

    The older table was the noisy one. The vicar had joined us for lunch and he was regaling them with scurrilous stories (I heard something about him having to blow the smoke from his cigarette up a chimney) and they were all laughing loudly. In the pictures they are all smiling except for Betty who’s looking askance at my mother.

 

John T and Betty, looking askance

I sat mute in the centre of the other table.
    Friends of John’s from the pub joined the party and bought John and me brandies.
    Everyone was celebrating, except for John and me.

When we went outside after lunch we discovered that Simon had sprayed the Mini with ‘Just married’ in shaving foam and tied bells to its rear bumper. John was almost speechless with anger.
    ‘How could you,’ he shouted. ‘You’ve probably damaged the paintwork.’

He untied the bells immediately.

We went back to Liz’s cottage with Mollie where we found four congratulatory telegrams – from my father’s older sister who was also my godmother, my grandfather (my father’s father), my godfather (who was related in a complicated way to my mother) and his daughter who’d been to stay with John and me at Liz’s cottage over the summer. (She and her boyfriend had slept in our room and we’d slept in a tent in the garden.)

    There were presents too, from family and friends on both sides.

    I began to feel a little more conscious. The world came into focus again. I’d expected everyone to be on my parents’ side but perhaps I mattered to people as well.
    John wiped the Mini clean. The paintwork was intact, thank goodness. We changed out of our wedding clothes, shaking the confetti out of our hair and underwear, and packed the car. We were off to Cornwall for a week, staying for two nights in a B & B and then camping. John had all the gear.
    We kissed Mollie goodbye and set off, alone at last, married at last.

John cried all the way down to Cornwall. I wasn’t sure what to do as I’d never credited men with emotions, not subtle ones anyway, and I didn’t yet know what to do about my own.
    I kept my hand on his leg in what I hoped was a reassuring way, and passed him tissues when he needed them.

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PART FOUR. 1 A Late Arrival

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

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

September 1978

‘Where’s Pa gone now?’ said John in an irritated voice – the one he always used when speaking of his father.
    ‘I’ll go and look for him,’ said Simon, leaping to his feet.
    We were in The Three Tuns having a meal with John’s parents and brother. Betty, his aunt, had retired to her room at the Bed & Breakfast where they were all staying.
    Simon returned.
    ‘He’s in the Gents,’ he reported. ‘He says he can’t come out because he’s “flatulating”.’
    Mollie and I looked at each other and, as one, we broke out laughing, and once we started, we couldn’t stop. We kept setting each other off.
    John and I had visited his parents a couple of times over the summer and I’d got to know them better. I never quite knew how to behave with John T or what to call him, but he was funny. He spent hours agonising over words and social conventions - and nearly always got them wrong. Mollie, on the other hand, had natural grace and I’d felt relaxed with her from the start.
    The whole family was more open than mine and they’d never judged me. I was happy sitting with them here in the pub. I felt like myself.
    It was the night before the wedding.

The next morning I hopped around on our mattress in Liz’s cottage trying to get dressed. I couldn’t find the white tights I’d bought to go with my pink and white dress but eventually they surfaced and I lay down and tried to pull them on. It was all so awkward. I was fumbling everything.
    John meanwhile dressed in the dark blue pinstriped suit, pale blue shirt and dark blue tie his mother had insisted - in spite of his protests - on buying him at Christmas when she’d renovated his wardrobe. He didn’t look like himself but Mollie would be pleased to see him in the suit and he didn’t have anything else appropriate. In a way I was proud of him.
    John’s family were going straight to the church, but my family who didn’t know the way were coming via the cottage so that they could follow John and me.
    John and I stood outside the front door waiting for them. I jiggled from foot to foot, peering down the dirt track that led back to the main road. They were long overdue.
    Sun shone through mist in an early-autumn way.

My brother Jo, child number two and the wise owl of the family, had rung me two nights earlier.
    ‘I’ve been speaking to Mum,’ he said, ‘and she wants to come to your wedding.’

    Which I translated as meaning that Jo had persuaded her.

    ‘We could drive down early on Saturday.' he continued. 'Mum says could you arrange some sort of lunch for us all afterwards. She’ll pay. And would you like me to “give you away”?’
    By then, so close to the wedding, I was finding it difficult to deal with anything practical so I agreed to the plans without thinking. But as soon as I put the phone down I regretted doing so. The prospect of seeing my mother cast a shadow over everything. Did she really think I would welcome her after everything she’d said?
    But it was a bridge of sorts, I supposed.
    It was certainly reassuring to know that Jo would be with me up the aisle. And helpful, as although John and I had had a run-through of the service with the vicar during the week I’d got no further with the ‘giving away’ part. It was appropriate too, in the absence of my father, not to say preferable because Jo was an equal so I would feel less like a parcel and more like a person.
    I’d rung The Three Tuns in a panic and Richard’s wife and the pub’s cook had risen to the occasion and promised to reserve tables for the party and cook the stew and baked potatoes that had been my unimaginative suggestion for lunch.

At last, in a swirl of stones, my parents’ turquoise Volvo estate car pulled up. My two sisters, my mother and Jo piled out.
    I hadn’t expected my sisters and tears pricked my eyes.
    Being so close in age (five of us in six and half years), we siblings had been a tight gang as children and the thought of losing them over this débâcle was almost the worst part of it.
    I wondered what story they’d been told.
    They’d dressed up for the occasion, Amelia – child number five - in a long checked dress and Cass in a smart white shirt and pink poplin skirt.

    Jo was in a suit, like John.
    ‘Where’s Danny?’ I asked. He was child number four.
    ‘He was already booked to play in a cricket match,’ said Jo.
    I hoped he didn’t feel left out.
    ‘Sorry we’re late,’ chorused my sisters. ‘Jo insisted on stopping for a full breakfast.’
    That was typical of Jo – timekeeping was not one of his strengths - but he got away with everything.
    ‘And I miscalculated the time,’ said my mother.
    I kissed her dutifully on the cheek and avoided her eye.
    ‘We’d better get going,’ I said, climbing into the Mini with John.

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PART THREE. 9 Results

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

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

My results arrived in the post. I’d almost forgotten about them with everything that was going on, but my hands shook as I ripped open the envelope. All I wanted was to have passed. The mark didn’t matter.

    I was astonished to discover that I’d received a 2/1, the second-best mark. I didn’t think I deserved it.

    I wanted to tell my parents – perhaps at last I might have done something that pleased them – so I wrote them a letter.

    At the same time I told them the date of the wedding along with the time and where it was happening. I’m not sure why I did that, as I knew my father couldn’t come and I didn’t want my mother to. Perhaps I thought I was covering myself and giving them a last chance. Or perhaps I was trying to take charge of the situation.

 

On Saturday, a week before the wedding, John and I were down in the kitchen having breakfast when we heard the ominous thump of letters landing on the mat in the hall. I fetched them. They were from my parents, of course, and I gave my mother’s to John.

    ‘I don’t want to read this now,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I can. Can you put it away somewhere I won’t find it and perhaps I’ll read it another time.’

    I took my father’s letter back to bed with me. I wanted to read it on my own. This was my problem, not John’s.

 

It was only two pages long and the handwriting was almost unrecognisable. It was larger than usual and untidy and it sloped backwards instead of forwards as it usually did.

  

25 August

 

My dear daughter

 

You have told us your decision and I am, of course, very sad. It is so far from the happy family occasion it should be but the abruptness of your actions have obviously made that inevitable.

    What is a major worry is the thought that you may be turning your back or opting out of many of the standards to which we did our best to bring you up. I don’t think we are old-fashioned. That is an accusation that the younger generation always make to the older when they want to do something without approval.

    If friendships wither it is not always the friend’s fault. It is even odds that it is caused by oneself. It is not clever nor tolerant not to respect and consider other people’s point of view. It is even odds that they are more right than you.

    Nor is it hypocrisy to observe the usual courtesies and respect the social graces and behaviour of the company you are in at any time. It is kindness and thoughtfulness. Many of the most courteous and well-mannered people are some of the poorest and their company some of the most delightful.

    Bigotry is the belief that you are always right. Honesty is to say what you think even if you accept that you may be wrong.

    Selfishness and intolerance are the bane of the world. Kindness and good manners the blessings.

    Sorry to be a pompous bore.

    With love Daddy

I could barely read I was so tense but words jumped out and they seemed to be a criticism of John and me – as usual. The strange thing was that everything my father was saying could have applied to my parents - as far as I could see.
     He sounded broken and the letter broke me too. I couldn’t bear seeing my father so unhappy. What had I done to deserve all this? 

    My opinion of John wobbled, as it always did when my parents described him from their point of view, but I didn’t waver in my determination to marry him. He was, I now realised, the only thing I had left.

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PART THREE. 8 Missives

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

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 the flipping. 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.

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