PART THREE. 5 Another Letter continued

 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.

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 Another Letter

 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.

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.

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.

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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PART THREE. 1 Bedfordshire

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

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

Easter 1978

We drove into a small village, similar to the villages in Kent – a church, a shop, a mixture of old and new houses, countryside all around - and slowed down outside a detached modern bungalow. Its gate was open and we zoomed into the driveway, coming to a stop in front of a garage.

    John leapt out of the car and made for a side door, while I did my best to keep up, my heart beating. Mollie and John T, John’s parents. What would they be like? What would they think of me?

    We entered a bright blue and white kitchen where a woman in an apron and slippers stood at the sink. She had fluffy blond hair and when she turned towards us I could see that she had the same green eyes as John and the same generous mouth. She was soft and lovely.

    John raced over to her, dragging me by the hand.

    ‘Dear boy,’ his mother said, touching him on the cheek.

    ‘This is Belinda, Ma,’ he said. ‘We love each other.’

    ‘I can see that,’ said Mollie.

    ‘And we want to get married,’ said John.

    ‘Dear girl,’ she said, touching me on the cheek.

 

John showed me to a chair by the window, at a table already laid for lunch.

    ‘There’s wine in the fridge,’ said Mollie, ‘if you’d like some.’

    ‘Wine!’ said John. ‘Since when have you and Pa drunk wine?’

    ‘Since he got his new job,’ said Mollie.

    From what John had told me I knew his parents had run an outfitting shop in a nearby town for nearly twenty years, before selling it. Since then his father had had a succession of different jobs, his latest a managerial post at a local aeronautics firm.

    John T had wanted to go to art school but his father, a tough shopkeeper originally from Australia (Australia again), hadn’t allowed it – ‘No son of mine goes to art school.’ He’d presented John T and Mollie with the shop on their marriage.

    Mollie now worked part time as a secretary. She came from a desperately poor family. She and her brothers and sisters weren’t allowed to eat fresh bread because they ate too much of it; they could only eat it stale. If they were ever lucky enough to go out somewhere her mother would order a pot of tea for one and six cups. The fecklessness of John T terrified her.

     Mollie was the first ever person in her family to go to grammar school. She’d looked after the shop’s accounts and done most of the work, according to John. She was the brains of the marriage.

    ‘Where’s Pa?’ John asked in a slightly aggressive tone.

    ‘Oh,’ said Mollie vaguely. ‘Probably watching television.’

    John pulled me up and through a hall into a dim room with half-closed curtains and a red carpet. Sprawled in an armchair was another version of John, albeit one with no hair and a large stomach. He grinned awkwardly and started to make polite conversation. Strangely, he seemed to want to impress me rather than the other way round.

    ‘Ma’s dishing up,’ said John brusquely. ‘You’re wanted in the kitchen.’

   

After lunch – a roast with all the trimmings – Mollie and I stayed in the kitchen clearing up while the Johns junior and senior went back into the television room. I could hear raised voices and then an argument, growing in ferocity. I presumed that was normal as Mollie seemed oblivious to it.

    ‘We’re so pleased he’s found you,’ said Mollie. ‘We’ve been worried about him.’

 

After lunch John took me out in the Mini for a tour round the locality.

    ‘That’s where I came off my bicycle,’ he said pointing to a ditch.

    ‘That’s where I came off my motorbike,’ he said, pointing to another ditch.

    ‘That’s where some – bugger – crashed into the Mini,’ he said at a junction. ‘Completely trashed it.’

    He’d had a succession of Minis, I knew. When he worked at his first job at Pye Telecom in Cambridge he lived at home and paid his parents for his keep. Unbeknownst to him his mother saved the money and soon there was enough for him to buy his first car, a Mini. He could remember all the registrations of his different Minis, and talked about them as if they were living beings, with feelings and their own separate characters.

After supper I sat in the bath, surveying my rolls of stomach fat as I usually did, my weight being a constant source of criticism and comment from both my parents, but instead of hating myself as I usually did, I had a small revelation. The problem wasn’t eating or not eating, being thinner or fatter. That simply gave the problem power. The only way out was to love yourself. That was where you started.

    I was placed in a small bedroom between John’s parents’ room at one end of the house and what had been John's bedroom at the other end. When I was sure the house was quiet I crept into John’s bedroom and, for the first time ever, we almost made love.

And I almost forgot that the following day we were off to Kent to see my parents.

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THE STORY CONTINUES. 8 March

 This is part of an autobiographical series that starts in Australia.

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

I was beginning to panic.

    My final exams were due to start in May, only two months away, and usually by now I would have a revision timetable drawn up. I would have acquired old exam papers so that I could work on the different questions I might be asked, and have a stack of index cards so that I could write down salient details for each possible topic. I had done none of that this time.

    Everything depended on the results of my final exams. There was no continuous assessment and my exams at the end of the previous year had been simply to test that I could continue to this year.

    At school I’d loved exams. I’d enjoyed the challenge. This time they were giving me nightmares.

    It was so hard to concentrate, sitting at my table in my room while John lay on the mattress and laughed over some book he was reading. It was horrible sitting on my own in the library staring at a blank wall.

    In some of deep part of me I wondered if this was really the direction I should be taking. Might not all this brainwork be damaging? Studying was part of my old life, the old me. Should I not be throwing myself wholeheartedly into my new life with John?

    While we had our deep connection, in every way on the surface we were opposites.  Could I not be learning from that and enjoying it, instead of trying to stuff my poor brain with the words of other people?

    But I had to get my degree. I couldn’t bear the thought of failing twice.

 

Then there was our marriage to think of.

    Did we run away and get married in secret on our own? That tempted me, but my experience so far had shown me that running away was a bad option.

    I’d run away from university first time round, and look how badly that had turned out. I’d run away from all the disasters of London and, while Australia had been the best thing that had ever happened to me, I’d come back. And I’d come back determined to fit in this time, to engage with ‘real life’, whatever that was, to live like a normal person.

    But John wasn’t normal. Or at least not by the standards with which I'd been brought up.

‘I’d like to tell Ma,’ said John. ‘I’d like her to come to our wedding.’

    I knew, from what he’d said, that he was close to his mother. His father wasn’t kind to her, and John had supported her in many ways. I wanted to meet her.

    ‘OK,’ I said. ‘I suppose that means I ought to tell my parents too.’

Easter was early that year, at the end of the month. We decided to head east then, staying with John’s parents first – the easy bit – and then going on to mine.

    The prospect of telling my parents about John was even worse than the prospect of my finals. 

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THE STORY CONTINUES. 7 February

 This is part of an autobiographical series that starts in Australia.

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

January morphed into February. We divided our time between John’s cottage out in the wilds and my house in Exeter. Our sex life had at last begun but it wasn’t what I had been led to believe sex would be like when you met the right person. We explained that away as ‘teething problems’ and tried not to worry.
    One Saturday as John and I sat in my kitchen it started to snow. Fat fluffy flakes piled up at the bottom of the window. It was beautiful, as was the dark-red rosebud that appeared above John’s head.
    Unusually, we’d had a small smoke of cannabis.
    John had been smoking a lot of cannabis when I first met him – and that too explained much – but as soon as I told him that I didn’t like it, he started to cut down. It wasn’t that I disapproved of the drug – far from it – but I didn’t like the fuzzy idiot he turned into under its influence.  I preferred his straight self. Or perhaps I should say that I felt safer with his straight self. The fuzzy idiot frightened me.
    Cannabis frightened me too, took me to some scary places, which was why I’d never smoked it much.
    ‘I ought to go home,’ he said, ‘while I still can. I’ll be back this evening.’
 
It was his birthday the next day so I made him a fruit cake. Or, rather, two fruit cakes. It was another recipe of my mother’s and she catered in bulk. Not only did I have four siblings, but a nanny had lived with us when we were younger, as well as a sister of my mother’s, so it had been a big household.
    The snow continued and John didn’t reappear. At last, at about eight o’clock he rang.
    ‘I can’t get to you,’ he wailed. ‘I’m in the pub. Richard’s letting me use the pub’s phone. I’m behind the bar. I had to walk here. I’ve abandoned the Mini in a hedge somewhere. I’ll have to try and get to you tomorrow.’
    We hadn’t spent a night apart since the day after the supper party over a month earlier. I tried to be brave.
   
The next morning I looked out of the window and the city had turned white. A deep layer of soft snow covered everything. Nothing moved.
    I had no way of contacting John or finding out how he was. Had he made it home, walking through the snow in the dark? Or was he lying in a hedge somewhere dying of cold?
    I felt trapped in the house, unable to help him. I couldn’t even study - which was not like me at all.
     I had no one to talk to.
    Alison had cut me off because I hadn’t told her what was going on with John. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to, I just couldn’t. I didn’t know myself what was happening. Sometimes I wondered if I was going mad.
    Graham kept his distance, pursuing his studies in the department and only coming back to the house to sleep.
    I sliced into one of the cakes and treated myself to a piece of it.
    And every time I passed the cake, I had another piece.
    By the early afternoon the first cake was finished. I was shocked. How had I done that? I wrapped the other cake up tightly and put it away in the back of a cupboard.
 
Late in the afternoon, there was a hammering on the door. A tramp-like figure stood on the step. He wore a tweed coat that reached to his ankles, a baggy knitted hat that fell over his eyes and a grubby pale-pink scarf that wound round and round his neck and trailed to the ground alongside the coat.
    This wasn’t the hero I’d been imagining and pining for.
    ‘What on earth are you wearing?’ I exclaimed. I sounded like my mother.
    ‘Oh these,’ John said looking down. ‘I found them on the floor. I wanted to make sure I was warm enough.’
    ‘I walked in,’ he continued, excitedly. ‘I walked all the way here on the tops of the hedges. Well, a bloke at Stoke Canon stopped and gave me a lift. He had snow chains on his tyres. But otherwise I walked.’
   
The next morning we trudged together through the snow, across the city to the campus. Everyone else was on foot as well, in an assortment of colourful clothes that looked as if they too had been dragged from obscurity. It was like a scene from a Dickens novel.
    We didn't want to risk being separated again and so after the snow John moved in with me, gradually bringing different bits and pieces. First the hi-fi and some records which he installed in the sitting-room, and then a selection of clothes which he crammed into a small cupboard in my small room.

    Luckily one of the men who’d previously lived in the cottage had returned before the snow so Kitten had been and was being looked after.

Kitten

One Saturday John arrived with a large mattress strapped to the roof of the Mini.

    ‘I’m fed up with sleeping on your single mattress,’ he said. ‘So I’ve brought mine from the cottage.’

    We slid it off the car and struggled with it into the house. Then John tugged it up the stairs by its handles while I stood at the other end trying to stop it sliding back down again. Unfortunately Graham appeared at the top of the stairs. He gave a sickly smile.

    ‘Sorry, sorry,’ I said to Graham, while he waited for us.

    ‘Look,’ I said to John, ‘why don’t we take it back down again, and let Graham get through.’

    ‘No, no,’ said John. ‘Keep going.’

    My single mattress went in the sitting-room’s bay window as additional seating and every time I saw it I cringed.

    My heart and my soul were John’s, but my head was somewhere else.

To be continued . . . 

THE STORY CONTINUES. 6 The Confession

 This is part of an autobiographical series that starts in Australia.

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

So I did what I always did in such circumstances. I switched my feelings off and my brain on. The relief. The world was normal once again. And if it was a bit mundane, that was a small price to pay.
    John was sitting on the other side of the mattress, looking at me. He seemed at a loss, or waiting for me, or something. So I moved towards him. Sex was obviously the answer. That was what people normally did in these circumstances, wasn’t it?
    The trouble was, John and I seemed to have started at the wrong end. We’d started with our souls and left out all the rest of us. How did we catch up?
    And I didn’t even have a teenage romance in my past, a gentle love affair where I could have learnt about sex slowly. I’d been nabbed a few times at teenage parties but the results had disgusted me. I couldn’t even talk about them. And then, of course, there was B in London.
    I moved closer to John and touched him, but he reared back against the wall.
    ‘No, no,’ he cried out. ‘Something’s wrong.’
    I started to cry. It was the best thing he could have done. The only thing.
    Men had been pursuing me, grabbing me, following me since my teens. It was exhausting, frightening, destructive. I never had a chance to feel my own feelings. I was overwhelmed by other people’s lust. And here was someone, the first ever, refusing me for some reason.
    What a gentleman.
    And once I started to cry, I couldn’t stop. I found myself pouring out the whole story of B and London. I soaked a pillow with my tears.
    As before, at the party, John listened without comment. I knew that this was partly because he didn’t know what to say, but perhaps that again was the right way to be. I didn’t want advice or comfort. I just wanted truth.
    I must have fallen asleep as the next thing I remember is waking up, my head on a damp pillow, and the door opening.
 
Kitten sashayed in, followed by John wrapped in a torn green coat and carrying a bowl and a mug.
    ‘I didn’t know whether you took sugar in your tea,’ he said, ‘but I put some in anyway.’
    Kitten did a flying leap and landed dead centre on the mattress. She’d obviously done the manoeuvre before. I shuffled away from her to give her space. She struck me as the sort of cat you wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of.
    As I ate my bowl of muesli, John and I looked at each other and smiled. Again, we didn’t know what to say to each other. We’d gone beyond small talk. Or skipped it.
 
‘I’ve got to go to work soon,’ said John. ‘Shall I give you a lift to the campus or back to your house – wherever you want to go?’
    I retrieved my clothes from the piles on the floor, relieved to find them. Some time during the night I must have removed them but I didn’t remember doing so.
 
On the way in to Exeter, John played a cassette of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Rumours’, drumming along on the steering wheel.
 
    Did she make you cry
    Make you break down
    Shatter your illusions of love?
 
    Is it over now
    Do you know how
    To pick up the pieces and go home?
 
He was happy, and if he was happy so was I. That was enough for the moment.

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