PART FIVE. 1 'Frog'

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. See right for a link to the full list of instalments.

1987

I rang my parents to tell them about Mollie’s death.
    I was still trying to do the right thing – or what I thought was the right thing, the thing that normal people would do – by keeping my parents up to date with my life. The visible things anyway.
    Unusually my father answered and, even more unusually, he didn’t immediately hand me over to my mother.
    I started crying as I told him what had happened.
    ‘Chin up,’ he said.
    It was one of the nicest things he’d ever said to me.
    And it helped. It was good advice.
    I felt better after the phone call.

Other than that, I can’t remember much at all about the immediate aftermath of Mollie’s death.
    I know that I went to London on my own to stay with my brother Jo and his wife Emmie. I was frustrated by John and the gulf that seemed to have opened between us.
    ‘He won’t talk to me about his mother at all,’ I complained to the two of them as we queued for pizza at an Italian restaurant.
    ‘Maybe,’ said Emmie, ‘but he would still want you there.’
    More wise words. It was a reprimand, but said with such kindness that I didn’t mind.
    John and Emmie got on so well together that sometimes I was afraid.
    I went straight back home.

Again, in spite of the struggle of our emotional lives, both John and I were progressing at work.

In his job at the university John was known as Freddie the Frog, Freddie for short. This was because on his first day there, because he found everyone so stiff and formal and in order to break the ice, he fallen to a squat and croaked ‘Ridip’.
    It was the sort of thing he did. He had a whole vocabulary of words he’d made up and used when he didn’t know what else to say. It was an inspired idea and I wished I had the courage to do something similar.
    Then when he started doing his radio programmes, both on URE, the student radio station, and at DevonAir, the commercial one, he’d taken on the alias John the Frog. Soon this was shortened to Frog and his URE programme came to be called ‘The Frog Prog’. Which was a brilliant name, although people did get confused and think the ‘Prog’ bit meant that he only played ‘progressive music’, ie rock that had gone off-the-scale ridiculous, which wasn’t true at all.
    The programme was hotchpotch of rock, pop, folk, blues, classical, humour, TV themes – in fact anything that had caught his ear over his long listening life. He even read from books he loved.
    Sometimes he played around with the music too, ‘splicing’ tape on his gigantic tape-editing machine that he’d bought second-hand from the BBC in London and we’d manoeuvred together into the back of his Hustler, a gigantic Mini kit-car he’d made (another story), in order to drive it home.
    Anyway, soon DevonAir asked him to do a Frog Prog as well, an extraordinary honour as such freedom was unheard of on commercial radio.
    And everyone was calling him ‘Frog’, even me.

I meanwhile had become an editorial ‘consultant’ to an Exeter publisher. This meant being in charge of books from start to finish - liaising with authors, writing ‘blurbs’ (the bits on the book jackets that told you what was inside) and even introductions, and going into the office at least once a week for meetings. This was much more fun than simply copy-editing and proofreading, and was making me realise how much I liked writing myself. I began to wonder if I could do more of it.

But something was going very wrong with our personal life. 
    Sometimes it seemed as if we couldn’t talk to each other without it descending into a ferocious argument.
    Sometimes in bed at night I thought we might kill each other. Broken glass loitered in a cobwebby corner where I’d thrown a glass. There was a hole in the wall behind the bed where Frog had punched it.
    Sometimes Frog would descend into what I called ‘victim mode’, in which he would moan for hours about how hard-done-by he was, how nothing I did for him was right. It infuriated me but there was nothing I could say to stop him, so I took to blocking my ears and hoping he couldn’t see in the dark. Because if he did see what I was doing he would erupt in fury and I would have to run from the bedroom and hide. He would then rampage about the house looking for me.
    I took to going away for weekends on my own – to see my parents, to stay with a beloved aunt in Staffordshire.
    Frog was hardly ever at home. Often I didn’t even know where he was, and he would come back with some excuse or other.
    I had the strangest sensation that when he looked at me there was someone standing next to me and I was being compared with them.

Then, on New Year’s Day 1990, it all came to a head.

To be continued . . . (but see Note)