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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