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. 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.
    It 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.
    John T explained that someone at work had shown him the announcement and asked him if it was his son. After reading it, and slowly realising what had happened, he denied that it was anything to do with him. He was forced to lie rather than explain a complicated and upsetting story.
    I was appalled that he 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 out 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 behaved in the usual superficial way. I was unable to say anything to them of my seething emotions – I never had, I had no experience of doing so – and found it almost impossible to be like that myself. I couldn’t meet their eyes.
    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 to use in an emergency.
    One day the phone rang at work.

    It was my father.

To be continued . . .