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 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 for use in an emergency.
    One day my phone rang at work.

    It was my father.

To be continued . . . 

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SERIES. List of Instalments so far

PROLOGUE

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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

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.

Click here for the first instalment.

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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PART THREE. 5 Another Letter continued

 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.

That evening, after John had spent a day at work and I’d spent a day in the university library staring at my books, unable to take anything in, we picked up my father’s letter again, sitting side by side on the edge of our mattress.

 . . . Neither your mother nor I wish for riches for our children but we do hope they may avoid financial worries which can be a most dreadful and disruptive matter. It is also a fact that life is so much more enjoyable with the ability to live at a reasonable standard rather than in squalor, to be able to educate one’s children, cover medical and dental expenses, have an occasional holiday, a nice home with modern machines to take the drudgery out of housework, the ability to have some outside interests and to entertain one’s friends and one’s children’s friends etc etc.

    You have a little money of your own. This was intended to be your personal security but it will hardly buy half a modest house, let alone furnish it. I should certainly be upset if it were frivelled away. It represents hard-earned sweat on my part to do what I have been able for you.

    You will appreciate that education outgoings have been extremely high for some years. So despite a high income, taxation has forced me to live off capital. Although I have some years’ work to go, my first duty is to your mother and her security for the future. Therefore it would be foolish to anticipate much significant help from me and even less so for a cause in which I did not believe.

 

Well, at least I didn’t go to private boarding school like my brothers. And neither did my sisters for that matter. Through the Eleven Plus exam we’d all received scholarships to our local Direct Grant girls’ school, a half private, half government-funded institution, and we’d attended as day pupils.

    So, except for my primary school years, my father couldn’t blame me for educational outgoings, although it felt as if he did. 

I hated the thought of his 'hard-earned sweat'. Sometimes it broke my heart seeing him trudging up to the train station every day and travelling in and out of London. I'd mentioned that to Roger the poet (the one with the bushy hair who'd seemed to take a fancy to me) and he'd said that my father probably enjoyed it. I still felt guilty though.

And I hadn’t anticipated any financial help from him. That wasn’t the reason for our visit. How could he have thought it was? It made me feel sick to think that he did.

    I hadn’t thought about money at all with respect to John and me marrying, but that was probably another sign of my irresponsibility.

On the other hand, why did he always call my expenditure 'frivelling' (one of his words)?

    Didn't I save enough money in Australia to pay him back for the airfare and contribute to my expenses now at university?

    What about his expenditure? He had hand-made suits, membership of exclusive clubs, antique rifles, a yacht.

    What exactly was 'frivelling'? What could I spend money on? Or should I not spend it at all? It was so hard to know.

    It was all so confusing, and so distressing.

    Why did I keep having these ungrateful thoughts?

     

So much for the money side which one does not particularly enjoy talking about but which needs to be said and it has to be considered. It is high time you became sensible and more mature.

 

John had gone quiet but now he cleared his throat so I looked at him.

    ‘What’s more mature than finishing your degree and getting married?’ he asked.

    ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

 

As far as this young man is concerned it is probably invidious to say too much as he didn’t volunteer much information or conversation in the few days with us. Even if one realises he was nervous (so was I!), it was far from an encouraging occasion. From what little one gathered he is not settled into a reasonable career and has little indication that he could be a responsible provider which in the normal course of events he is more likely to have to be.

 

I clenched my stomach muscles. John had a good job and a car. He’d worked almost without a break over the last seven years since he left school. How dare my father criticise him.

 

You wrote to us with the words that he was unsuitable and so you must bear considerable responsibility for the encouragement given. However, in my bachelor days, I know that I had one or two unsuitable girlfriends but I can so truly be thankful that my own family and circle of friends and their reactions, help and advice played a real part and quite surely helped my behaviour and actions.

 

What ‘encouragement’? Did he mean ‘discouragement’ but couldn’t bring himself to write the word?

    I longed to hear about his ‘unsuitable girlfriends’. It was the only part of the letter that made me smile.

 

  So please very seriously consider what we say. I know your mother has also written to you. But take help and advice from others in your family and from your tried and true friends.

    I do realise that this is a severe letter but I think that on rare occasions it is one’s duty as a father even if it is distressing to us both. However, please be quite sure that your mother and I are absolutely concerned for your long-term happiness which we would be devastated to see thrown away on an impulse. We are always here to support and encourage you in times of stress.

    With very great love

   Daddy

 

‘Impulse!’ exclaimed John. He stood up and began pacing the room.

   

I was exhausted. Even though I’d known the encounter would be difficult, this was so much worse than I’d expected.

    I was devastated that my father thought so little of me, understood so little of my hopes and fears, of what I’d been through.

    My mother’s letter had hurt but I knew she was shooting from the hip, as she always did. She’d written the first things that came to mind. You could tell that from her large untidy scrawl.

    My father’s letter on the other hand was the product of thought. Even though almost every word gave me pain, he sounded so reasonable. The letter looked so imposing.

    How could I possibly counteract it?

    

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PART THREE. 4 Another 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 pay my father back for the plane ticket and 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.) Little did she know that Exeter was teeming with them.

    

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.

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PART THREE. 3 Kent

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.

 

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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