PART THREE. 4 A Second Letter

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

Click here for the first instalment.

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

The day after the arrival of my mother’s letter came another. This one was in a long brown envelope like an official communication, with my address written in neat forward-sloping script. Inside were four foolscap pages of small tightly-packed words.

    I showed the letter to John who was sitting at the kitchen table in the Exeter house, spooning up his breakfast muesli.

    ‘From my father,’ I said with a grimace.

    He got up and came over to stand next to me.

 

Tuesday 4 April

 

My dear Belinda

No doubt you were well aware of our feelings during your time at home. I did not want to say more at the time partly because words said in the heat of the moment are never the best ones and partly not to upset someone who was after all a guest in our house. However, it is obviously right that you should be fully aware of my views.

 

    ‘Obviously right?’ queried John.

    I was glad he said something as those words had not sat right with me either, but of course I’d quickly suppressed the doubts, telling myself that they were due to something wrong in me – me not understanding protocol or being discourteous or disrespectful or simply rippling waters that should have been left calm.

    I gave him a rueful smile and he put his arm round me. It made me want to cry.

    We carried on reading.

     Firstly, you should allow nothing to distract you from completing your course at university and obtaining as good a degree as you are capable. It was obviously a mistake for to have given up after the first year and for this I must partly blame myself as an indulgent father doing his best to please you. Australia, although a delightful interlude, has obviously not helped you to realise that life is not an irresponsible drifting from whim to whim.

 

That was all wrong on so many counts.

    I made the decision to leave university after my first year. How could he have stopped me?

    My life wasn’t an ‘irresponsible drifting from whim to whim’. Each step had taken weeks if not months of agonising indecision. Each had had its deeper purpose.

    Australia wasn’t a ‘delightful interlude’. I’d travelled to the other side of the world on my own, made friends, found jobs, saved enough money to 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.)

    

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.

To be continued . . .