PART FOUR. 4 The Proposition

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

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Note

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

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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.
    But, even so, we began to wonder if it was time to move.

To be continued . . .

PART FOUR. 3 The Announcement

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

Click here for the first instalment.

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

Fast Forward (not currently available)

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

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.

Click here for the first instalment.

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.

Click here for the first instalment.

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.

Click here for the first instalment.

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.

Click here for the first instalment.

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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PART THREE. 7 July and August

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

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

It all went so well at first.

We visited Richard, the pub landlord and someone John deeply respected and liked, and he agreed to be our best man.
    ‘I hope you’ll both be very happy,’ he said, putting his hand on my shoulder.
    Being some ten years older than most of his clientele, Richard took a fatherly interest in them, and he seemed to have a particularly soft spot for John. I was honoured that he considered me the right person for John.

We wanted a church wedding. We needed the spiritual depth that would give us. It was a sign to each other of how important our marriage was.
    We decided on the church in Silverton, the village where John had lived and where The Three Tuns, Richard’s pub, was situated, and went to see the vicar.
    With its walls of books and the patterned dark-red Turkish rugs on the floor, his room reminded me of that of one of my university tutors.
    There were some practicalities to discuss in that you had to have lived a certain amount of time in the parish, but luckily John’s time in the cottage could be adjusted to fit them.
    We spent a good hour with the vicar, touching on the problems with my parents, and arranging for a wedding at the beginning of September – which would give time for the banns to be read.
    ‘Look after each other,’ he said as he stood on his doorstep waving us goodbye.
    Of course, I thought. That’s what it’s all about. How simple.
    Because of his position, I thought of him as a grown-up – unlike John and me – and it was a joy to have a grown-up respecting us and taking seriously our wish to be married.

Liz and Rod said they’d come to the wedding and gave us a collection of practical kitchen items for when we set up home together (many of which I still have). I was touched.

Mollie was excited when John telephoned her and said that she and John T would definitely be there, probably bringing with them Simon, John’s younger brother, and Betty, Mollie’s sister. They would book a B & B for a couple of nights and could they take us out for supper at The Three Tuns the night before the wedding?
    I couldn’t wait to see them.

Now I had to decide what to do about my parents.

I took a train up to London for the day and went to Laura Ashley where I bought my wedding outfit, a long-sleeved, high-necked, frilled, pink-and-white-striped dress with a white lace-trimmed petticoat which purposely drooped below the hem of the dress.
    And then, not sure at all if I was doing the right thing, but wanting to be friendly now I was in the vicinity, went to see my father in his office.
    I told him about the wedding and found myself pleading again. I so wanted his approval but it wasn’t forthcoming. He was cold and distant and I went away with bowed shoulders.

My parents wanted to come to Devon to talk to me.

    I’d read of parents kidnapping their children who’d been caught up in ‘cults’, and ‘reverse brainwashing’ them, and I was terrified my parents might try something similar. So I arranged that we should meet on Exeter’s Cathedral Green – a neutral spot I thought and a public one where I might be safer – and brought John with me.
    The four of us sat on a bench together, with seagulls clustering around our feet waiting for food, my father at one end, John at the other and my mother and me squashed next to each other in the middle. I edged as close to John as I could and as far away as possible from my mother. I held tight to John’s hand.
    I’d decided recently that good people made you feel better about yourself and bad people made you feel worse, but what did that make my parents? Criticising parents was not something you did. How could I be descended from bad people and not be bad myself?
    Most of the arguing was done by John and my mother. I was proud of him. No one stood up to my mother except occasionally my sister Cass, child number three, who’d always been stroppy. Much of my childhood was spent keeping the peace between my younger siblings and, if ever there was an argument, Cass was in the centre of it.
    Certainly my father didn’t stand up to her.
    ‘You’re thinking of yourselves,’ said John.
    ‘No,’ said my mother, giving him a hard stare. ‘You’re thinking of yourselves.’
    Yes, I thought. But we’re the ones getting married, not you. Isn’t it our choice?
    John told me later that when my mother said that, he knew the gloves were off and that he couldn’t afford to give her any quarter.
    How fortunate it was that he’d had all that practice arguing with his father.

A few days after my parents' visit another missive arrived.

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PART THREE. 6 June

 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.

With enormous difficulty and pain, like trying to drive a car with the handbrake on while panicking about some speedy monster on my tail, I finished my finals and came to the end of my university career. If I passed the exams, that is, and I wouldn’t know that till August.

    In some ways, the finals had been but a blip on the radar screen of my life. In other ways, they were like the interference that masked radio transmissions. They didn’t matter – John was all that mattered to me now – but they stopped me engaging with him and the new life he promised. He was so imaginative, musical, funny, individual, romantic and I longed to be like that myself, instead of the diligent scholar I was.

    Now they were over, a weight lifted.

    One of the weights, anyway. 

I found a job waitressing at a National Trust house a few miles outside Exeter, near John’s cottage. It wasn’t Australia but it was fine – and after my finals it was a relief to work nine to five at something I could easily do. Our boss was young and beautiful and she left us mostly alone. The restaurant was in the main house in a light-filled room – an orangery perhaps - and the guests older, polite and generous with their tips. We wore frilly floor-length aprons in a leafy green and white cotton.

John let me use the Mini to drive to work while he travelled to the university every day, in the opposite direction, by motorbike. I don’t think I realised how much of honour it was that he trusted me with his car.

 
Rod, who was looking after Kitten, moved out of the cottage and agreed to take her with him for the moment. She had after all been the cottage cat, not John’s exclusively, even though she’d become that when everyone else deserted the place.

John was already in debt because of having to pay everyone else’s rent on the cottage so we decided that he should cancel the lease and move out in his turn. What a performance! We stuffed the Mini with as much as it would hold and put to one side other important bits and pieces of John’s that Rod would take with him and store safely.
    John and I tussled over what he did actually need and what he didn’t, what was junk and what was something that 'might come in useful’. The house looked just as cluttered when we left, however, as it had before and I pitied the landlord – a local farmer with whom the tenants had waged a non-stop battle. He’d let down the Mini’s tyres at one stage in protest at the parties and drug-dealing that were going on.
    In one of the farm’s barns John had found an old clock in pieces and he’d repaired it. He wanted to take it with him, thinking that it had been abandoned, but the message arrived (I can’t remember how) that they wanted it back.
    John refused to have any more to do with the family so I went up to the farmhouse on my own with the clock and the money still owing and knocked on the door. The farmer’s mother answered - small, bony (not to say hatchet-faced) and sharp-eyed. She looked surprised when I handed it all over.
    Now we had to find somewhere to live.

The tenure of the Exeter house was shortly to expire, and most spare property was let to tourists over the summer. And that was without the fact that John and I weren’t married. I scoured the local paper every Thursday, property day, and rang likely places from the payphone in the house. They always asked about our marital status and, as soon as I hesitated and before I could explain anything, put the phone down on me. To be together but unmarried was to be ‘living in sin’. I didn’t see it that way.
    At last Liz, a friend of John’s – she’d briefly consoled him after his girlfriend left – and who was now with Rod, offered us a room in the house she was renting.
    The room was tiny, the size of our mattress, so all our other possessions had to live on the landing outside it. But the house, up a country lane on the outskirts of Exeter, had a big overgrown garden and we started to enjoy the summer.

 

John (left) and Rod enjoying the summer in the garden of Liz's house*

Meanwhile my mother had kept her promise and wrote to me with nothing but the ‘usual mundane gossip’. (How on earth she thought that she could brush under the carpet something as important as me wanting to marry and how on earth she thought I would just forget about it, I couldn’t imagine.) From my father there was nothing, thank goodness. 
    I hadn’t replied to the letters from my parents, partly because I didn’t have time and partly because I hadn’t a clue how to handle the situation. Conflict wasn’t anything our family dealt with. Tears were allowed but anger wasn’t. Parents were always right.
    Anyway, I didn’t want to think about my parents as whenever I did I fell apart. The glue holding me together as a person came unstuck and I turned into a random collection of meaningless bits. It was horrible. It was frightening. It was like a drawn-out version of the black hole I’d fallen into in London.

    John was looking after the letters and he'd put them somewhere safe where I wouldn't find them. I didn't ever want to read them again.

    
We started to plan our wedding. If my parents didn’t want to be involved, we would do it ourselves.

* Apologies as usual for the state of the photograph

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