6.3 Dreams and Whispers

This is part of an autobiographical series. See right for more about it and a link to the full list of instalments.



‘Close your eyes and relax every part of your body,’ said Pat.
    She then went through each part of my body in turn suggesting that it was now warm and soft, much as we did in yoga, except that Pat concentrated on unusual parts such as my stomach and I realised how much tension I carried there. She was speaking very softly and I could only just hear her.
    I wasn’t frightened as I knew now, after our practice session the previous week, that hypnosis didn’t involve loss of control. It was almost the opposite. I was more in control because I was steering from a different part of myself, a deeper part. And my initial trust of Pat had only deepened over the two years that Frog and I had been seeing her.
    In the practice session I’d sat in my usual armchair. Now I was on a futon on the floor of Pat’s room, on my back, covered in a light blanket.
    As before she asked me to count down in my head from one hundred and to tell her when the numbers disappeared, which they did very quickly as my usual brain took a back seat and I found myself in a world of shadows and fleeting glimpses as if I was halfway between sleep and being awake.
    This time she carried on.
    ‘You’re walking down some stairs,’ she said. ‘Tell me what you see.’

Frog and I had scuttled back to Devon after the visit to my parents, as ever relieved to be home. I had continued still seeing Pat on my own.
    Over the months that I'd been seeing her, we’d discussed my migraines, which were plaguing me more and more, and my eating disorders – which twisted and turned and changed their form but never quite went away, even though they were better than they’d been in my teens and early twenties.
    She knew about Brian in London and the terrifying black hole I’d fallen into after he’d taken my virginity and vanished, as well as the impression I’d had at the time of a black shutter crashing down on my life.
    I’d told her about my sexual encounters as a teenager, gropings in the dark which had disgusted me.
    We’d discussed my upbringing, how sex was strictly forbidden before marriage but not encouraged after it as women weren’t supposed to enjoy sex.
    She knew of course about my parents and their condemnation of Frog.
    But did all this explain my struggles, my inability to love him properly?
    She wondered if there was something much earlier going on, perhaps even some form of childhood sexual abuse.
    But I couldn’t remember anything, except for a strange recollection of being fetched from school by unfamiliar people and then left at the side of the road.
    Or was it a dream?
    She’d given me a book to read called When You and Your Mother Can’t Be Friends which took the reader back to their childhood at different ages and I found myself weeping uncontrollably from the age of four onwards over the whole week while I read the book.
    Had something happened at around that time?
    She’d suggested hypnotherapy as a way to uncover hidden memories – and deal with them.

I didn’t answer Pat immediately as I was concentrating on the stairs I was walking down. I knew them well. As I came to the familiar right-angled turn by a window Pat spoke again.
    ‘Where are you now?’ she asked.
    ‘I’m in our old house,’ I said, finding it hard to speak, not because I didn’t want to but because my muscles were so relaxed. ‘Coming down the stairs.’
    Our ‘old house’ was where we lived until I was six.
    ‘How old are you?’
   ‘I’m four,’ I said.
   I don’t know how I knew that. It simply arrived in my head.
    ‘What are you wearing?’
    ‘A red-checked tartan skirt with straps,’ I said.
    Again, I knew that instantly and had a vivid picture in my head of the skirt. I'd never seen it before.
    ‘What’s happening?’ she asked.
    ‘Someone’s coming out of the kitchen,’ I said. ‘A man.’
    I remembered every room in the old house, and often travelled through them in my mind. The kitchen door was almost opposite the bottom of the stairs.
    ‘And?’ said Pat.
    ‘He’s got a grey apron on,’ I said. ‘The whole of his middle is a grey blur.’
    ‘Do you know him?’ asked Pat.
    ‘I don’t think so,’ I said.
    Then I screamed.
    I was falling into the black hole again and this time it was even more frightening than it had been in London as I had no protection, nothing outside me to fall back on.
    My stomach was rising through my body.

    ‘Help! I’m going to be sick,’ I yelled.
    ‘Count back up to a hundred,’ Pat commanded. ‘Now.’
    It was like making my way up from the bottom of the ocean.

Even though we persevered with the hypnotherapy, we never went quite so deep again. It wasn’t deliberate on my part to avoid anything but I suppose that somewhere inside I was too afraid. And nor did Pat ever ask me about that incident again.
    I felt that it was a pity we hadn’t persevered but I guessed that Pat had had to stop the session as you couldn’t have someone vomiting when half paralysed and lying on their back. It would have been too dangerous.
    I desperately wanted to pull my weeds up by the root but perhaps some weeds were not yet ready to be removed.
    I had no idea what that whole session had been about.

Pat led me into hypnosis slightly differently each time. Usually we started with stairs. Sometimes I went through a mysterious door. Sometimes she asked me to imagine a beautiful safe space, such as sitting under a tree. Sometimes I found a helper – an angelic being who accompanied in my adventures and kept me safe.
    We explored different aspects of my life and worked out strategies for dealing with difficulties, reprogramming my mental and emotional processes.
    I went back into past lives, including past lives with Frog, to see what I could learn from them.
    I did a lot of crying, with the tears trickling into my ears and me unable to do anything about them.
    The sessions ended with light, with me with me imagining being filled and surrounded with it.

However vivid my experiences under hypnosis, most of them dissipated like dreams soon after I woke, and Frog who was also having hypnosis found the same happened with him, so we couldn’t really talk about what we were doing, although we tried.
    We did ask Pat about having hypnosis together, but somehow we never did.

It always took me several minutes to be able to move after I’d come back from a session and opened my eyes. 
    One day – nearly a year perhaps into the hypnotherapy – it took me more than a few minutes. I lay, scarcely able to breathe, for what felt like hours. It was frightening. I felt as if I'd never be able to move again.
    At last I was able to wiggle my fingers.
    ‘I feel like I’ve been on a very long journey,’ I whispered.
    ‘You have,’ said Pat.

To be continued . . . 

6.2 After the Speech

 This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. See right for more information.

As I came to the end of my speech, I was dizzy with relief. The ordeal I’d been dreading for weeks was over. My muscles relaxed and I felt as if I’d never be able to function again. My hands were still shaking.
    As well as the transcript of my speech, I was also holding a folder containing the letters and I now – as suggested by Pat - put it down on a nearby side table.
    ‘I’m leaving the letters behind,’ I said. ‘I don’t need them any more.’

I hardly dared look up. My parents hadn’t yet said a word. What was their reaction to my first ever attempt at standing up to them?
    Were they monsters or were they real human beings? Could the gulf between us ever be crossed?
    Their faces were inscrutable. They weren’t shocked or angry or even embarrassed. What were they?
    Then my mother shrugged.
    ‘Oh well,’ she said. ‘Things said in the heat of the moment, you know.’
    Coming from her, that was almost an apology, and I almost wanted to hug her.
    She’d never said sorry to me about anything and one of her precepts was ‘Qui s’excuse, s’accuse’. This I’d always taken to be a hangover from her aristocratic background and its associated arrogance (in my opinion).
    She’d made an admission of guilt, but was smoothing it over by making light of her words.
    That was OK. It was a start.
    ‘What I don’t understand’, said my father, squirming in his chair and looking like a small boy as he always did when emotions were in play, ‘is why you were in such a hurry to be married.’
    What hurry, I thought. It hadn’t seemed like a hurry to Frog and me. On the contrary, the months had seemed agonisingly long. Why wait when you knew what you wanted?
    Anyway, I knew how to deal with that observation.
    ‘We’d known each other for nearly a year,’ I said. ‘How long had you and Mum known each other when you got married?’
    I had the answer, of course, but I wondered if my parents remembered, or had made the connection.
    Strangely, Frog and I had married at almost exactly the same age as my parents. We had been 25 and 26 and they had been 24 and 27. Neither of them had had mothers around though. And their fathers didn’t appear to have been close. My mother’s father appeared in only one of the photographs from the occasion and my father’s father not at all.
    ‘A year,’ said my mother.
    Sometimes her outspokenness was a blessing.

Frog then had his say which, being unprepared, was short and slightly repetitive, but I was glad he said something. It was important that he showed support for me by joining in and vital for him to reveal that he was a real person with feelings as I didn’t think that was something my parents had ever credited him as being. Because he wasn’t like them they didn’t see him as fully human or worthy of respect.
    I’d found it difficult to understand how they could have written such awful things about him in the letters, without thinking that he might be reading them. They didn’t know that Frog and I were already living together but even so what sort of a relationship did they think we had, for me not to share the letters with him? And for both Frog and me to share some of what was going on with Frog’s parents?
    The letters had hurt both Frog and his parents and that was an outcome my parents had not considered. Even if my parents had changed to a degree in the way they behaved towards him, I couldn’t forget what they’d said. I was angry for all of us – me, Frog and Frog’s parents.
    Again, I realised that Frog had a lot more going on emotionally than I had credited him with. I wished I’d spent some time helping him prepare a speech. 

My parents listened to him without comment.
    I wondered if this whole situation was as alien to them as it was to me. Perhaps they simply didn’t know how to react or what to say.

My ‘alternative arrangements’ were my old schoolfriend, Trish’s daughter, who’d offered Frog and me a bed for the night if we needed it. Her support touched me as I’d always found her family harmonious and perfect. I rang her and said I thought we could manage to stay with my parents.
    Not that I wanted to, but I felt that to leave now would be cowardly – even more cowardly than I normally was. It was also unkind and might lead to a permanent rift, and I didn’t want that.
    I’d tried to get away from the problem by living in Devon but it had followed me down and I knew now that physical distance did not mean emotional distance.
    I still flipped between my parents’ view of Frog and mine. My (non) relationship with my parents still drove a wedge between Frog and me. I wanted it sorted.

The next day was fine, so my mother took her pre-lunch glass of wine out into the garden. My father sat inside with his pre-lunch whisky. He didn’t trust the sun. He’d suffered heat rash all over his body when in Calcutta with the navy during the war. My mother, being half Scandinavian, was fanatical about light. Whatever the temperature, if the weather was fine you had to be outside.

    I sat inside with my father.
    I’d always found him less scary than my mother. He tended not to hit below the belt and his letters, while equally devastating to me, had perhaps come from a better place than my mother’s. Or perhaps I was simply more willing to excuse him.
    ‘I didn’t need to marry someone like you,’ I said. ‘I had you as a father.’
    He looked so pleased that I stood up and gave him a hug, as prescribed by Pat.
    It didn’t feel too bad.
    Then I went outside to join my mother.
    ‘You’ll never change him, you know,’ she said, smiling ruefully.
    Did that mean she’d changed, or thought she had? Had I been working on outdated information all this time?
    If that was the case, why on earth hadn’t she said something? I wasn’t a mind-reader. Words could only be cancelled out by words.

As we all made our way to the kitchen for lunch, my father leant against a wall with a silly smile on his face.
    Both my parents drank huge amounts and I could remember them arriving back from parties and my mother racing to the bathroom looking green without even stopping to say hello to us children. I’d only occasionally seen my father wobbly, however.
   This was perhaps one of those times, but he looked happier than I remembered ever seeing him.

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PART 6. 1 My Speech

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. For more information, see right.



1992

‘What I’m talking about is what happened before I got married and the letters you wrote to me. Because of the pain it is not a subject I have been able even to think about let alone speak about for fourteen years. But I think it’s vital that we now clear the air. I feel that we are drifting further and further apart and I’m finding it more and more of a farce to come home. It has not been easy coming to see you all these years knowing what you think of me and what you think of John. Please believe that I’ve done it out of love, not duty and if I didn’t love you I wouldn’t be here today.’

My hands were shaking as I read from my sheaf of papers.
    Love wasn’t a word we ever used in my family except at the end of letters. I wondered if this was already the end of my attempt to make a speech and whether my parents were about to hoot in derision since that was what usually happened when I expressed things close to my heart. How did I ever get to be a daughter of theirs?
    Frog and I were on a high upright sofa against the wall with my parents opposite us, lower down in squishy armchairs.
    We were in the ‘blue room’, the small sitting-room in which my parents usually spent their evenings when they were on their own. It was cosy and a little dark with a wall of shelves crammed with books. I was glad we were there as it was more informal than the big ‘yellow room’ with its two large sofas at right angles to each other, its three sides of windows and its doors leading on to a terrace.
    It was after supper on the first evening of our visit to my parents and I’d plunged straight in to my talk. My parents had looked surprised when I’d asked them to sit down but had done so without complaint.
    The room was still silent so I carried on.

‘I can’t brush all those events under the carpet and pretend that nothing happened when I’m boiling over with anger and unhappiness – still, even though it was fourteen years ago. You had your say, but I never have. And I’d like to have it now. I must have it now if we are to repair things between us.’

My words had started to sound melodramatic and clichéd, and my throat was locking, but I couldn’t stop now. That would make me look even more of an idiot, and I’d never have the courage to reach this stage again.

‘First I’ll read out a few of the accusations you levelled against me – and I’m quoting from the letters.

    Irresponsible
    Drifting from whim to whim
    Inclined to ‘frivvle’ money
    Anticipating money
    Immature and not sensible
    Impulsive
    Acting with unseemly haste
    Inconsiderate
    Acting in an unsavoury manner
    Acting unfairly
    Likely to let people down
    Acting abruptly
    Not respecting other people’s point of view
    Discourteous
    Unkind
    Thoughtless
    Bigoted
    Dishonest

‘And now some of the judgements you passed on John – again from the letters.

    No brains or charm
    Unable to provide properly
    Not settled in a reasonable career
    Irresponsible
    Unlikeable
    Difficult to talk to
    Naïve
    Prejudiced
    Cliché-ridden
    Uneducated
    Ill-mannered

‘It was devastating to hear this from you. I can’t express how sad it made me to feel you misunderstood me so much and had such a low opinion of me and everything I’d been doing while growing up.
    ‘It also made me very angry that you felt you had a right to inflict your opinions on me. You’ve never asked me what my views on life are. You’ve always tried to mould me in your image. You’ve implied that it was my duty to behave like you. And that if I didn’t I was being ungrateful or naughty or stupid or something.
    ‘I have to follow my own conscience, wherever it takes me. It’s not right that anyone should be dominated by someone else. I’m different from you. I’m a different generation, a different person. You’ve never realised this and never given me the freedom to be myself.
    ‘Of course I want you to be happy, but I can’t betray myself to make you happy. You’d no right to use emotional blackmail on me and I think this is what angers me more than anything else.
    ‘Not so much you Dad as I realise a lot of what you said was said from genuine concern but perhaps over-protectiveness. It is statements like the following (and I’m quoting here from two of Mum’s letters).

 
    “It was difficult to say that it was lovely to see you last weekend. I think it was almost the saddest few days of my life,”
   and
    “I’m not sending you conventional phrases of good wishes. They would stick in my throat.”

 
‘Those are terrible things to say.
    ‘I blame myself for never having stood up to you properly before. In fact I’ve always tried to please you. Everything I did was to please you. But nothing has ever been good enough. And I realise now that I was a fool and very wrong to let it go on for so long. If you really find me so objectionable and such a disappointment to you there’s no earthly reason why we should ever see each other again.’

I sounded screechy and childish and I was beginning to see that I was forgetting everything Pat had taught us about speaking from the heart and not accusing, but it was too late now to change my words.
    I’d written the speech almost automatically and not edited it, knowing that, if I did try to do so, it would fall apart.
    I’d never spoken to my parents like this before and I knew I still had a lot to learn.

‘But if we do continue to see each other it is essential that you respect and listen to me and my views. You have to let me be free. Anything else is very destructive. I can’t see you on any other terms.
    ‘We must be able to disagree with each other without you taking it personally. If I disagree with you I’m not criticising you or dismissing your way of life. It’s just a sign that I’m alive. I’m not just a copy of you. I’m a person in my own right.
    ‘You may say that all these events I’m talking about happened fourteen years ago and what on earth’s the point of bringing them up now. They’re over and done with. But they’re not and I can’t forget them.
    ‘If I’ve upset you I’m sorry. I’m trying to repair things between us and help things develop. They have been stuck at a very bad patch for a long time. However if you can’t put up with me any more I don’t have to stay a moment longer. I’ve made alternative arrangements for tonight should it be necessary.
    ‘But if we can clear the air and move forward together with honesty and tolerance I shall be overjoyed.’

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5.8 Sex etc

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series (unnamed as yet). For more about it, see right.

So then we tackled the thorny subject of sex.

Pat gave us a book to read. It was a collection of people’s sexual fantasies, possibly only those of women, but I can’t remember. I can’t remember the title either.
    It helped up to a point, but I didn’t like using fantasy – whether my own or other people’s. My fantasies were unpleasant, about being degraded and coerced, and I didn’t want to encourage them.
    Fantasy didn’t solve my fundamental blockages; it simply bypassed them. It wasn’t a long-term solution.
    Nor did using fantasy seem fair to Frog. It took me away from him.
    And I don’t think Frog ever used fantasy, not that we talked about it. It wasn’t in his nature. He was far too pragmatic.

Classic sexual therapy was next on the agenda. This involved taking things slowly – going to a certain point, as directed by Pat in her session with us that week, and then stopping. And then, all being well, going a little bit further the following week. Again, as directed by Pat.
    This didn’t work for me either as I switched off before we even started. In other words, I would do what I always did at the prospect of sex. I would stop breathing, my stomach would clench, my whole body would lock and my brain would fuse.
    We had a holiday booked during this part of our time with Pat and while on holiday we fell straight back into our old patterns.

We started to see her separately.

In Frog’s case, I suspected this meant him being able to give full rein to his grievances, his complaints about me. We didn’t talk about his sessions though. I think we felt that we’d already done enough talking – and shouting - with each other. We were so tired of it.
    In my case, seeing Pat alone meant talking about my parents, and in particular what I called The Letters – the letters my parents had written to me when Frog and I wanted to marry.
    I’d kept the letters in a file in the bottom of a drawer hoping to forget about them but not wanting to destroy them because I had an inkling that they might one day be important. They were evidence. I hadn’t forgotten about them however. In fact I thought about them every day.
    ‘During Sam’, as Frog and I now called the year when he was seeing her and I knew about it, I’d shown them to two people. To Di, the friend I met every week for lunch. She’d laughed and I’d wished I could too. And to Sam. As she finished reading them, she’d nodded.
    ‘I see,’ she said. ‘These make a lot of things much clearer.’
    I was grateful for her understanding.
    I brought them in to show Pat and she read through the file in silence while I waited.
    Up until then Pat had not expressed an opinion about anything, which was another of my surprises about counselling. I’d expected – from the name of the therapy – that being told what to do was its primary function. On the contrary. Its primary function, as far as I could see, was for us to find solutions for ourselves, through Pat’s questioning.
    I didn’t therefore expect her to pass any comment on the letters. I was simply showing them to her to give her the background.
    When she’d finished reading however, she looked up at me, her eyes shiny behind her serious black glasses.
    ‘Oh dear, Belinda,’ she said. ‘These are terrible.’

I would visit my parents, Pat and I decided, and talk to them about the effect of the letters on me. I wrote out what I was going to say, knowing that I would be incapable of saying anything otherwise. I read my speech out to Pat and she nodded her approval.
    ‘Why don’t you give your parents some spontaneous gestures of affection when you’re there,’ she said.
    I looked at her in horror. I’d never done such a thing. We didn’t do things like that in our family.
    ‘And when you’ve finished speaking,’ she said, ‘give them the letters back.’
    Frog was going to say something too but, in true Frog fashion, he didn’t prepare anything. He preferred speaking off the cuff. He did it all the time on the radio and he loved the adrenalin rush it gave him. I hated adrenalin. It gave me migraines.
    I made a date with my parents for Frog and me to visit, without telling them why. I wanted it to be a normal visit, as far they were concerned. I didn’t want to put any pressure on the situation. As far as I was concerned, it had more than enough already.
    The visit loomed over me like the entrance to a dark tunnel. It was the most frightening thing I’d ever done.

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5.7 Conflict

This is part of an autobiographical series. For more information, see right.

It took me a few weeks to relax. I thought Pat was going to diagnose me, stick a label on me, pack me up and send me off home with a treatment plan, like doctors did. It was the label I dreaded most. My ailments were mine. They were particular to me. No one else suffered in the way I did. I wanted to be treated like an individual.
    And that was exactly what Pat did. She asked question after question, probing ever deeper. She listened without comment. To both of us, both Frog and me, and to each of us in turn. And when one of us was speaking, the other wasn’t allowed to interrupt.
    It was the first time in my life I’d ever been able to speak about myself freely. Indeed, it was the first time in my life I’d ever been allowed to have thoughts and feelings. And I think it was the same for Frog.

I learnt a lot about him. I knew the facts but he’d never properly talked to me about the attached feelings. Perhaps he thought I’d understand automatically.
    I learnt that when he was a young child (six years old?) and fell off the desk and broke his nose and was sent to hospital for plastic surgery – which I already knew about - he only saw his parents once a week. The rest of the time they waved at him through a glass door. This was terrifying and devastating for him.
    I learnt that when Fran left it was a complete shock. They’d been together for nearly five years – since she was sixteen and he was twenty-one – and she was his first serious girlfriend. They’d met at a folk club and he’d followed her down to Exeter when she started at the university. He’d had no idea she was carrying on with one of their housemates.
    I began to understand that he feared abandonment. He feared rejection. He didn’t trust his own instincts. He couldn't trust that I really loved him, that I wouldn't suddenly go. He needed from me more reassurance than I could give him, because of course I had my own troubles.
    As a child he’d been traumatised by listening to his parents argue. Then, when he was a teenager and started to help his mother, he had to be strong. He couldn’t burden her with his own problems because she had enough of her own. He had to try and sort his problems out by himself. He still thought this was how he had to behave.
    Not only was it a revelation to me that he had these feelings, but it was a revelation to me that he had feelings at all. I’d always thought of men as creatures from another planet. They didn’t understand very much at all. They didn’t speak the same language as women. In fact, they hated women and did their best to imprison them. I didn’t trust them and I’m not sure I even particularly liked them, except for my two brothers.
    This conclusion was partly as a result of my experience and partly due to the way my mother treated my father – with disdain but from a position of servitude, servitude being the default position for women of her generation (but that's another story).

I was surprised about myself too. I was surprised by how much I cried and what I cried about. The tears arrived without warning. They rose from somewhere deep inside and shook my whole body.
    I was surprised by the fact that Pat let me cry. She didn’t offer comfort. She didn’t say anything. She just handed me tissues and waited while the spasm passed.

The sessions exhausted us both and we went home raw, wondering if we could survive another week, just the two of us together. Pat must have known this as she always sent us off with a hug and something positive to take away, some new way to behave, some new idea, and she always rang halfway through the week to check on us.

Then the sessions moved on and we began to talk about our feelings for each other – our grievances – and again we weren’t allowed to interrupt each other. These too were a revelation. Why had Frog never told me all this before? Why had he flown into a rage instead and punched the wall? Why had I never taken my own grievances seriously? Why had I always dismissed them and blamed myself?
    Pat was the referee we so desperately needed, but sometimes she lost control too and Frog and I began hurling complaints at each other as we had at home, without the violence but worse in other ways as we didn’t hold back.
    Slowly, slowly though, we began to understand the fundamental principle of conflict. It was OK. In fact it was inevitable. Grievances mattered but you had to be constructive otherwise you made the situation worse. And to be constructive you restricted yourself to talking about your own feelings rather than blaming the other person. You had to confess. You had to be vulnerable. ‘I’ not ‘you’.
    For instance, when Frog began laying into me about refusing his sexual advances, saying ‘We’re married. I’m allowed to touch you whenever I want,’ Pat would stop him and say, ‘But how did you feel when Belinda refused you?’
    And Frog would start crying and it would all come out all over again about being separated from his parents, about Fran leaving without warning. He couldn’t read me – or at least he didn’t trust what he read. He was afraid of losing me.
    And then she would turn to me and say, ‘And how did you feel when Frog reacted to you like this?’
    ‘I felt angry.’ I said. ‘But I didn’t feel I had a right to be angry. I felt upset that Frog didn’t understand my point of view. I didn’t know how to express my point of view. It was so outlandish, so unlike what other people said that I wondered if there was something wrong with me. I felt like I didn’t matter. I was just a piece of meat. A possession. I was disgusted.’
    And then I would start crying too.

What a quagmire. No wonder we’d struggled. And loving each other as much as we did made it worse. We loved each other with our souls as well as every other part of ourselves. To lose each other, we would lose everything.

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5.6 Pat

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. See right for more information.

The room, on the top floor of a three-storey terraced house, was cosy – more like a bedroom than a consulting room. A blue carpet and colourful rugs covered the floor. Books and knick-knacks filled shelves either side of a small grated fireplace. Out of the window I could see the roofs of Exeter. We sat in armchairs.
    Pat herself was of indeterminate age – older than us perhaps but only by ten years or so. She had fluffy brown hair and wore a light-pink cardigan, both offset by strong black-framed glasses.
    ‘So tell me why you’re here to see me,’ she said.
    Frog and I looked at each other.
    ‘Come on, come on,’ she said gently.

The previous year was a blur. Frog had been in mourning for Sam and, while I’d occasionally tried to comfort him, I hadn’t felt that that was really my role. It stuck in my throat (as my mother would say) to have to do it. It was a step too far.
    Whether we’d argued and fought as we had before Sam and what had eventually brought us to see Pat - a counsellor trained by the marriage-guidance charity Relate, now working independently in a complementary health centre - I can’t remember.
    It was my idea, I know, and me who’d done the research, but Frog hadn’t demurred. He’d come along with me in everything without saying a word.
    I’d spoken to Pat on the phone and she’d offered us a free fifteen-minute try-out session.
    As we climbed the second flight of steep wooden stairs however, I wondered whether we really needed this. Surely we could manage on our own. I felt OK now. Completely calm.

I told Pat this and she laughed.
    ‘Let’s see, shall we,’ she said.
    So I began trying to explain – about Brian in London, my parents, Sam – and the more I spoke, the more spilled out.
    Pat held up her hand. ‘Stop, stop. You don’t need to say any more. I can see now that this is going to take some time. Are you all right with that?’
    I nodded vehemently.

    I already trusted her. I already liked her. I knew she could help us.

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5.5 Waiting

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. See right for more information.

Wait. That was all I could do. Wait.
    I had an idea that a year was all it would take, that at the end of the year Sam would move on. After all, what was in it for her?
    But as the year wore on, I started to lose hope. The situation was almost more than I could bear. Not only did I have to share Frog with Sam one night a week, but the three of us went out together – to concerts, parties, pubs, on day trips - and Sam came on holiday with us for a week.

I found Sam difficult to get on with, not because she was a difficult person but because we were so different. We had no crossover points except for Frog. And I was wary of her too because of what I saw as my frivolity and lack of intelligence compared with her. I was always trying not to say something stupid.
    She was thoughtful though.

    I knew she'd had an AIDS test before taking up with Frog, which was not an easy thing to do, and I greatly appreciated it.  
    One Thursday night as Frog made ready to leave, wind began to shake the house. Sam rang and told Frog that because of the weather he ought to stay with me and make sure I was OK. So he did.
    Another time the three of us went to a concert and I was in the bar talking to a friend when Frog came out of the concert hall and dragged me off by the arm saying that the music was about to begin. Sam restrained him.
    ‘Oy,’ she said. ‘She was talking.’
    Frog looked slightly shamefaced.
    Sometimes I went over to Sam’s house on my own but that was uncomfortable because I presumed her housemates knew about Frog and her and me and I didn’t want their pity.

Frog and I smoked cannabis in the evenings – with Sam and her connections we had plenty of access to the stuff. We thought it would calm us down, lift some of my inhibitions. Which it did up to a point.
    But one night, when Frog was with Sam and I was in bed on my own, I woke to a vision of two men in the corner of the bedroom. They were plotting something very evil.

    I imagined it was some sort of crossed line (like you used to get with landlines and found you were listening in to a conversation that was nothing to do with you) and knew I had to stay very still and not be afraid because if they sensed my presence I would be in grave danger.

    So that’s what I did and they went away.

I was proud of myself.

Often I couldn’t eat, and weight fell off me.
    Even the postman noticed. He stopped as he passed me in his van one day when I was out walking in the lane and asked me if I was all right.
    ‘You look ghastly,’ said my mother. ‘You really ought to wear more makeup.’
    Frog brought me regular packets of Cadbury’s chocolate eggs to keep my strength up.

I fell in love with someone else and had feverish daydreams about our possible relationship - which of course came to nothing as I didn’t actually want it to.

Frog didn’t tell anyone what was going on, as far as I was aware, and the only people I told were my two sisters and a friend whom I used to meet for lunch once a week in Exeter. She listened to my outpourings with sympathy and kept them to herself. I don’t think she even told her husband.
    The story was complicated and people were so quick to lay blame. They thought in stereotypes, in tabloid headlines: one was the guilty party and one was the victim. But it wasn’t like that at all. I didn’t want people to think badly of Frog and I was ashamed of my failings which, in my opinion, had led to the situation. That was why I kept quiet.

I thought about leaving Frog, but again it was only a dream. Where would I go? What would I do? This was my life. I couldn’t envisage any other. And what about the blue-sky voice – the one that said Frog would interest me for the rest of my life?

One evening after Christmas, Frog arrived home in a whirl. Sam had taken up with one of her housemates and wanted to end her relationship with Frog. Without saying much to me he raced over to her house to persuade her differently.
    I knew I was in trouble. Was Sam laying down a challenge? Could I end up losing Frog completely?
    I abandoned all my scruples and rang Sam’s house at frequent intervals throughout the evening. Sometimes I managed to speak to Frog, sometimes I didn’t.
    I needed to make my feelings absolutely clear. I mattered. I didn’t want to lose him.
    He crawled back in the early hours of the morning.

    He’d lost. Sam was gone.

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5.4 Vengeance

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. See right for more information about it.

‘I can’t give her up,’ Frog said.
    He was very firm about that. Somehow, he’d taken the upper hand. Did it not occur to him that he might lose me?
    Well, actually, he wouldn’t. Like Mollie, I’d made my vows and wouldn’t go back on them. In any case, I was used to putting up with things. And now that everything was out in the open, the situation didn’t feel as bad as it had before.
    Except for the possibility of losing Frog.
    I was back on the precipice where I’d found myself when I first met him – albeit for a different reason.
    So I took control.
    ‘How about you spend one night a week with Sam?’
    To ask him to give Sam up would mean losing him as, even if he did so, he would never forgive me. And didn’t they say that if you loved someone you set them free?
    Well, I was setting Frog free. I deliberately stepped off the edge of the precipice.
    He looked surprised.
    ‘OK.’

So it began.
    Every Thursday morning I waved him off to work, knowing I wouldn’t see him again till Friday. Sometimes I wasn’t even sure if I would see him again at all. Every Thursday morning, I had to give him up. It took every ounce of my determination, but I knew it was the right thing to do.
    I busied myself during the day with work and walking – we had a dog now – and on the nights when I was alone I wrote in a notebook I’d started. It was my best friend.
    I started a new yoga class in Exeter on Friday mornings so that I had something to look forward to, something to help me stay strong. And after the class, if things were OK between us, I would drop in to see Frog in his workshop at the university, and hug him as if we’d been parted for weeks. He would hug me too as if relieved himself to be back.
    ‘I don’t fancy her half as much as I do you,’ he admitted to me slightly shamefully one night in bed. ‘Sometimes it’s difficult, you know.’
    I hugged that knowledge to myself.

‘ “Vengeance is mine,” sayeth the Lord’ was a phrase I remembered from my religious education at school.
    It echoed round my head as I tramped the woods and fields with our beloved Brindle, the accidental offspring of one neighbour’s Springer spaniel and another’s black Labrador. She was striped brown, strong-willed and inclined to plumpness. When we went to see the litter, she sprawled on her back with her pink stomach sticking up, obviously the boss but looking like a piglet compared to the other puppies who were sleek and black. We’d had no choice however as all the others were spoken for.
    I’d hated being in charge of a young creature – which confirmed my decision not to have children - and bitterly regretted taking her on for a good year and a half, until she suddenly grew up and became bearable.
    Now, I enjoyed her company.
    I knew the phrase came from the Old Testament and that Jesus had come to free us from all that – as our teachers were, thankfully, at pains to point out. But I didn’t see it as meaning that God was cruel. I saw it as meaning that we didn’t have to take our own vengeance, that God would deal with it.
    Like Karma, part of yoga philosophy.
    So I didn’t have worry about getting my own back on either Sam or Frog. The universe would take care of it. In any case, wasn’t it my reward for my adultery with Brian?
    Sometimes, though, my anger did break out. Like one night when the three of us were in the sitting-room of Sam’s shared house.
    ‘I can’t understand how someone as intelligent as you, could do something so stupid,’ I blurted out (meaning something as stupid as stealing someone else’s husband).
    Goodness knows why I said that. It surprised me.
    Sam was intelligent. She’d done her degree at Oxford and was now working towards a doctorate. She lived with serious, political people, and I felt superficial and frivolous compared to her. Maybe that was why I said what I did.
    Sam shot off in her car and disappeared into the night. Frog was angrier that I’d ever seen him before and lay on the sofa without speaking to me. I sat uncomfortably on the edge of an armchair. We waited for several hours until Sam returned safely.
    That, I think, was when I came closest to losing him, so I never said anything like that again even though it didn’t seem quite fair that I couldn’t.
    I apologised to Sam but I couldn’t escape the thought that it was a valid question, even though I’d put it badly.

I got my own back in small ways. I stopped doing Frog’s washing. I stopped cleaning and tidying the house. I didn’t always cook supper.
    I realised that I’d been a bit of a doormat and in some ways it wasn’t surprising that Frog had taken up with Sam – so independent and interesting. I vowed never to be a doormat again.
    I joined the local Friends of the Earth Group and helped them out with stalls in Exeter City Centre. I even drove with them to an anti-road protest (which seemed ironic). We then drove home again having not seen any action except for an encounter with an angry local who wanted the road. I realised that protesting wasn’t for me but I continued to attend FoE meetings.
    I decided to expand my work into writing and through friends who’d started a publishing company wrote a small book about the folklore of Dartmoor.

I went to a party with Sam and a friend of hers, leaving Frog at home with a stomach bug – vomiting and diarrhoea.
    When I returned in the middle of the night Frog looked at me pathetically.
    ‘I passed out on the bathroom floor,’ he said.
    I didn’t feel in the least sympathetic.

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5.3 The Truth at Last

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. See right for more information. 

Silently, in slow motion, Frog nodded.

    I stopped breathing.
    ‘Have you . . . ?’ I asked, my voice echoing in this strange new place we’d found ourselves.
    Frog nodded again.
    ‘Everything?’
    He nodded again, still with that mixture of pity, guilt and determination.
    Then I started to understand.
    ‘Was it . . . was it . . . Sam?’ I asked.

    He’d been talking about a woman called Sam ever since the summer, when she’d joined the student radio station wanting to present her own blues programme. A woman was a rarity at the station and none of those there were did any music presentation. Frog had trained her in the use of the ‘deck’ – a table-sized array of switches, buttons and levers.
    ‘Yes,’ he said.
    I’d been a fool. I hadn’t suspected anything. But now the whole of the last six months – the way our conversations had so often descended into arguments, Frog’s disappearances, my visions of someone standing beside me - was falling into place.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
    And I knew he was. He wasn’t trying to excuse himself or justify his actions. He was telling me the truth at last.
    A light switched on in my head. Everything was going to be all right. This was our chance – finally – to get things straight.

I quizzed Frog all through the night as we lay in bed. I had to know it all. I had to cancel out the lies. They were worse than the infidelity.
    ‘That time when . . . ?’ ‘When you said . . . ?’ ‘Where did you . . . ?’ ‘How did you . . . ?’
    He answered every question.
    ‘I want to meet her,’ I said.

The next day, after Frog went to work, I found I couldn’t get out of bed. My legs wouldn’t hold me up. I lay under the duvet, trying to adjust to this new reality. Nothing similar had ever happened to me before.

    Frog rang halfway through the morning.
    ‘How are you?’ he asked.
    ‘I’m a bit weak, I said.
    ‘You’re allowed to be weak,’ he said.
    There was a pause and then he spoke again.
    ‘She’ll come over this evening’,’ he said, ‘but she’s very frightened.’
    It was new to me to have someone frightened of me. It was usually me frightened of other people. It gave me a sense of power, but I knew I couldn’t misuse it. I risked losing everything if I did.

She wasn’t particularly pretty, which was a relief. And she was obviously just as shaken, even less sure how to proceed, than I was, which was another relief.
    I can’t remember what we talked about but I do remember that she was kind. She’d been learning about reflexology and gave me a foot massage. I found some vegetable pies in the freezer and made us all a supper of sorts.
    As she and Frog said a loving goodbye to each other out on the drive, I stood to one side feeling utterly desolate. No one cared about me any more. I was all alone in the world.
    Sam got into her car and started driving but as she passed me she wound down her window, reached out and took my hand.
    Instantly, everything changed. I wasn’t on my own after all. I was included. Sam was now my friend too.

‘I just needed someone to talk to,’ said Frog when we were back inside. ‘And then – well – one thing led to another. And I thought, I was telling her all our secrets anyway . . . And maybe she can help us.’
    I’d almost wished for this. Sometimes when we’d had yet another of our fights over my inability to enjoy sex, I’d almost wished for another woman to take over that part of the relationship between Frog and me. We loved each other too much. It was all too intense and we couldn’t help each other. Maybe we did need somebody else.
    ‘You come first,’ he said.
    That was all I needed. How would I survive otherwise?
    But I wasn’t safe yet. One false step and he would be gone.

The next day I went for a walk in a nearby wood. I climbed the footpath, thinking only of survival.
    If men’s sins were of commission, then women’s were of omission and I’d done plenty of that – not dealing with the legacy of Brian in London, not making up my mind as to whether I was on the side of my parents or the side of Frog.
    But I couldn’t afford to waste energy on guilt. What a useless emotion it was. I needed every ounce of my strength to make my way forward.
    I stopped to do some breathing exercises. I’d been going to yoga classes for several years and breathing was an important part of the practice. I closed my eyes and concentrated.
    Breathe in for a count of four, hold for four, breathe out for a count of four, hold for four. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
    When I opened my eyes again the air sparkled. I felt calm and almost happy.
    I could do this.

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PART FIVE. 2 The Accusation

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. (See the column to the right for more information.)
Click here for the previous instalment.
Click here for a complete list of instalments so far.

(NB I have published this instalment before and then removed it, so some of you may remember it.)

Please be kind. This series is me baring secrets, things I've never dared mention up until now. I stopped publishing the series in April after a couple of upsetting comments, but I’ve since discovered that I can’t write it properly without you.
Without you I write for publishers, agents and critics which results in stodge.
With you I write, I hope, for something that somebody real might want to read.

New Year's Day, 1990

As we’d arrived back late in the evening, and as we'd been eating well for days, I made a simple supper of baked beans on toast.
    I brought the plates into the sitting room on two trays which I placed on the coffee table, before sitting on the sofa and placing my tray (with the smaller helping) on my lap.
    Frog was already on the sofa but he hadn’t turned the television on and he didn’t reach for his tray. He didn’t look at me either, or say anything.

After spending Christmas together at home we’d done a tour of the parents, staying first with John T who was managing just fine. He’d joined a dating agency and, being that rare thing, an older single man, had received countless replies from women who wanted to get to know him. He was working his way through them and Frog was disgusted.
    ‘It’s an insult to Ma,’ he said.
    John T had cleared the house of all Mollie’s things and piled them into the garage. He wanted Frog to deal with them but he refused.
    ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘Not yet.’
    The house itself was now pristine and characterless, empty without Mollie’s presence.

Things were no better at my parents’ house, even if the house was bigger and easier to get lost in. No better for me anyway.  I carried on pretending to my parents that I was different from what I really was. It was an awful strain.

    In a strange way, however, my parents were warming to Frog, or at least they’d found a language in which they could communicate with him. What's more, he was still around, whereas the relationships of both my sisters had ended. Not that my parents said anything to me about their changing opinion, of course.

    The landmark was Christmas Eve a few years earlier when the dishwasher failed as sixteen people were expected for the Christmas meal and more on Boxing Day. Frog had spent all morning lying on the kitchen’s stone floor repairing it.

    Ever since then my mother had greeted Frog with a list of practical jobs she needed help with. My father wasn't practical. His speciality was numbers. I remembered my childhood as a catalogue of crises, with the car not starting, the television going 'on the blink', electricity failing or things leaking. I too loved having Frog around to deal with practicalities. 

     Frog was happy to help. It gave him a role in my family. He’d always done the same for his own mother and one of his missions in life, after spreading good music, was rescuing damsels in distress (not that my mother was a damsel).
    Another Christmas my father took Frog out to show him a chain-saw he’d bought for chopping logs but been too nervous to use. My father and Frog had spent a happy day working together, my father fetching and carrying and Frog chain-sawing. Ever since then, chain-sawing had been another of Frog’s jobs and whenever he didn’t know what else to do he would be outside adding to the log-pile.
  
During the visit Frog had done another of his disappearing acts saying he was going up to London. He loved shopping, unlike me, so I presumed he was off to some specialist music shop and didn't question him. In any case, I was afraid to say anything these days.

    He’d arrived back at 7pm, explaining that he’d waited for the (cheaper) off-peak train - which sounded a bit odd as he'd never done that before and, anyway, I hadn't asked for an explanation. I’d been watching out for him since 5pm and had raced out to the hall to hug him, just pleased to see him back. My mother, who was skulking in the kitchen doorway, gave us a funny look.

I paused with a spoonful of beans halfway to my mouth. My throat and stomach had locked. I felt as if I couldn’t carry on - with anything.
    ‘There’s someone else, isn’t there,’ I blurted out.
    It was one of those occasions when the words appeared before the thought. It had never occurred to me that something like that might be going on. I trusted Frog, and I was making the accusation as a challenge, expecting him to deny it vigorously.
    He looked at me with a strange expression on his face – a mixture of pity, guilt and determination.

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Note about the Autobiographical Series

I’m still writing this, but not publishing instalments for the moment.

This is because I’m into sensitive areas and I don’t want things to be taken out of context and misunderstood: the story needs to be read as a whole.

I may in due course publish chunks – ie several instalments in one go.

Or I may keep going till the end and then decide when/if/how I publish.

Whatever I decide, I’ll try and keep you informed.

Thank you for reading up to now. I appreciate every page view and comment.

And if you haven't read any of the series yet, click on the picture to the right and you'll find a full list of published instalments with links. 

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.

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4.8 'You could come and live with us'

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



‘You could come and live with us,’ I said.
    The suggestion had burst out of me without me thinking about it but, now I’d said it, I realised that I meant it. It solved everything – both Mollie’s problems and those of John and me.
    Mollie and I were out for a walk together while we stayed with John’s parents. It was autumn. Hedges overflowing with berries divided the flat countryside of Bedfordshire. The sticky grey mud round the edges of the fields where we walked clung to our boots like plates.

    Mollie loved the countryside and many of her reading choices reflected that – BB, Alison Uttley, Flora Thompson, Richard Jefferies, Tolkien. She read Lord of the Rings once a year. There was always a book in her corner of the kitchen, left open on its front in order to mark where she’d got to.

    I’d spent my childhood outside, playing in the garden, fields and river of my parents’ house with my brothers and sisters, exploring the North Downs on foot and by bicycle. It was where I felt most myself. It was somewhere to get away from grown-ups and their rules.
    Since leaving school however at seventeen, living in London and then Exeter, I’d largely forgotten about that connection, but now that I was working at home I was rediscovering it. I’d started to punctuate my working days with exploration of the fields, streams, copses and lanes around our house.
    Walking in the countryside was a pleasure that Mollie and I loved to share with each other.
    We crossed a rickety wooden bridge over a tiny stream.

    ‘Of course, not,’ said Mollie. ‘I couldn’t possibly do that. I wouldn’t want to be a burden. How would I earn money?’
    ‘You wouldn’t be burden,’ I said. ‘Far from it. We’d love it. And I’m sure you could find work.’
    Mollie hurrumphed.
    She’d been telling me how worried she was about money and how stressful she found it living with John T.

    She was haunted by her poor childhood. As well as the story of her mother ordering a pot of tea for one and six cups (for herself and her five children), she would mention how they’d never been allowed to eat fresh bread because they ate too much of it. Her mother always waited until it was stale before giving it to the children.
    John T, according to my John (who was I think quoting Peter Ustinov), was that scary thing – a poor man who lived like a rich one. He took trouble over his appearance, always carefully dressed in smart clothes, and every time we visited seemed to be wearing a new pair of shoes.
    He’d always wanted to be an artist but hadn’t been allowed to by his Australian father: ‘No son of mine goes to art school.’ He’d sold the shop that he and Mollie had run together and now got by with a succession of jobs, while Mollie worked part time at as a secretary at a local building company.
    Nor had John T been faithful to Mollie, and my John recounted terrifying evenings as a child listening to his parents shouting at each other.
    Mollie stuck by her husband however.
    ‘I made my vows,’ she would say, ‘and I’ll keep them.’
    John had been his mother’s champion, sticking up for her against his father as soon as he was old enough to understand what was going on. Once he got his driving licence he drove her around and helped her with the shopping.
    ‘Pa’s an idiot,’ he would say to me. ‘Ma’s so much more intelligent.’
    He was ashamed to be male, the same sex as his father.
    Things between Mollie and John T seemed to be coming to a head and I longed to help Mollie, but didn’t seem able to.

Later that day we went shopping together. I’d offered to make Mollie a shirt and we were buying material and a pattern for it.
    I could remember learning how to sew from my mother at a very young age. She made many of the family's clothes as it was cheaper at that time than buying them and she had five rapidly growing children.
    I hadn’t been interested in playing with dolls but I loved making clothes for them with scraps of left-over material. In my teens, when I shot up to five foot ten inches, I had to make my own clothes because nothing in the shops fitted me.
    I was far from an expert at sewing but it was something I did. I still used the machine my parents had given me for my twenty-first birthday.
    We found a soft brushed cotton in small sage-green checks – perfect for the season and Mollie’s green eyes. But as we walked back to the car, Mollie stopped and put her hand over her heart. She was breathing fast.

    I was a bit clueless about illnesses but she was fifty-nine, so pretty old, and all sorts of things happened to people at that age. Perhaps breathlessness was one of them.
    I waited, trying to be sympathetic without making a drama out of whatever was going on, and eventually Mollie shook herself and gave me a rueful smile.
    ‘OK now,’ she said.

Back in Devon I busied myself making the shirt, adapting the pattern to fit Mollie's measurements and taking as much care as I could.

    As soon as I finished it, I put it in the post, and a few days later Mollie rang me.
    ‘It’s perfect,’ she said. ‘It’s the best-made piece of clothing I’ve ever had.’
    I glowed. Like John, she spoke the truth. She never made false compliments.

    'Tell the truth and shame the devil' was one of her sayings. John had taken it on and often quoted it to me when I was doubtful about how to behave in some situation or other. I loved it. It made everything so simple. It was so unlike the way my family behaved.

One evening a few weeks later the phone rang and John answered it.
    ‘It’s Jenny,’ he mouthed at me.
    I nodded. Jenny was his sister, and phone calls with her were never short. She still lived in Bedfordshire, near their parents.

    I pottered around, trying not to disturb the conversation.
    But John wasn’t saying anything. I glanced over at him and could see that he was listening intently, but his face had caved in.
    I went and sat next to him on the sofa.
    He was starting to look grey.
    I took his hand and he grasped mine tightly.
    He put the phone down.
    ‘It’s Ma,’ he said. ‘She’s had a heart attack. She didn’t make it. She’s gone.’

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4.7 Work and Home

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



We’d been married now for eight years, living in our second house for six.
    Sometimes I wondered whether the original intensity of our feelings had been lost in the miasma of my parents’ reaction to John and me and the pressure of my finals. I remembered the inkling I’d had in the university library when revising for my exams that I was heading in the wrong direction. Was it correct? Had I been given the chance of a new life and not taken it? Was I sitting on the fence, unable to decide between John and my parents, the past and the future?
    These were depressing thoughts. No. Worse than depressing. Sometimes, in the aftermath of yet another of our fruitless attempts to be intimate, I just wanted to plunge a knife into my breast and end it all. I blamed myself for everything. I felt helpless. I didn't know how to change.
    My headaches were getting worse and now they were starting to make me vomit. Because they almost always occurred in my pill-free week, I mentioned them at the Family Planning Clinic.
    ‘Ah yes,’ they said. ‘Migraines. They are a possible side-effect of the contraceptive pill.’
    Hell’s bells, I thought. Why on earth didn’t you warn me?
    They put me on a progesterone-only pill (rather than one containing both progesterone and oestrogen) but it made no difference.

By contrast, our working lives were going well.
    I was back in the book-publishing world but freelance rather than salaried, working mostly from home which I much preferred. Ever since marrying, I'd struggled to integrate work and home. I didn’t like having to spend more of my time in the place I wanted to be less and I found it hard to divide my loyalties. My loyalties were to John exclusively (however confused those loyalties were).
    I’d moved to a second publisher when my traineeship finished at the first (something else I’m not proud of) but that job had come to an end because I didn’t get on with my manager. I hadn’t trusted her and when, five years into my National Trust job, she abandoned the company owing them money, I felt vindicated.
    Five years was more than enough at the Trust so I gave in my notice and applied for freelance editing at both the two publishers I’d been employed at, as well as publishers in London through my sisters who worked in that area too, and a ‘mind, body, spirit’ publisher in Dorset because they were fairly local and I was interested in the subject.
    The work consisted mostly of copy-editing and proofreading, both of which meant paying close attention to grammar, spelling and the precise meaning of words. All of this had been part of my degree, which included studying the language as well as the literature of France and Spain, and I was (I think) good at it. Plenty of work arrived, anyway.
    I quite enjoyed it too, even though I again had the sense that I was using only a fraction of myself. And I certainly enjoyed being able to get up from my desk every hour or so and walk round the garden.

As well as his music programme on University Radio Exeter, John had acquired a job presenting ‘Devon Rocks’, a rock-music programme on the local independent radio station DevonAir. This he did live every Saturday evening. In addition, he helped out on the overnight programmes (doing what, I wasn't sure - paperwork, finding records, making coffee, keeping the presenter awake?) and filled in on weekday evenings when presenters were not available for one reason or another.
    All of which meant I didn’t see much of him, and my eating problems, which had begun to calm down, returned when I was at home at night without him.

There were several reasons why my eating habits were improving.

    It helped me to have proper meals regularly with someone else, rather than starving and bingeing and having no routine as I had done when I was living on my own. In any case, bingeing was a secret, shameful activity and I tended not to do it when John was around.

    As I did most of the cooking, I'd been reading up about nutrition and concentrating on the quality of food rather than the quantity. This felt kinder. Instead of berating myself for my weight, I was nourishing myself.
    It was the eating problems as well as my migraines that had started my interest in the ‘mind, body, spirit’ movement. I suspected that conventional medicine could do nothing for either of these illnesses. In any case, I preferred to go my own way. I didn’t want to be labelled. I didn’t want to be a victim.

In spite of these small steps forward however, I spent many of my solitary evenings stuffing myself with whatever food I could find, trying to assuage some hunger that I couldn’t put a name to.

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PART FOUR. 6 Parents

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

Mollie, John’s lovely mother, wasn’t well. She’d had a stroke in her thirties, a victim of the early contraceptive pill which contained high doses of hormones. (These were reduced to a fifth of the original levels once the link with strokes was discovered.) She recovered from the stroke but was left with permanently high blood pressure. The only time this dropped was when she came to stay with us, and her doctor prescribed frequent visits.
    We weren't complaining. She was such an easy guest. In the mornings while we were out at work she would bicycle to the village and buy herself a little treat – a bun, a packet of sweets – and in the afternoon would busy herself tidying our neglected garden.
    Thankfully, she wasn’t the sort of mother-in-law to criticise my housekeeping. Far from it. She was on my side and we’d chuckle together about John’s foibles - until he got cross and asked us to stop. We'd acquired an infestation of mice and one of them would hide under Kitten’s food bowl and in the evenings run across the sitting-room floor. Mollie laughed.
    She’d welcomed me from the start. She’d never judged me. Her visits were the only time I could look at myself in the mirror and like what I saw. It seemed as if my face was transformed.

She also transformed our fractious love life.
    This had never picked up. What we’d called ‘teething troubles’ had persisted.
    I became either like stone or I wanted to bite and scratch. I understood two things at this stage. I couldn’t trust that John’s feelings were love not lust, however much he protested, and lust disgusted me. I’d been on the receiving end of too much of it. On the other hand, I couldn’t risk losing him. He was everything to me. What if I gave everything to him and he let me down? I would be destroyed. This, I presumed, was an echo of Brian in London.
    I called Mollie my safety net as I knew that, whatever happened, she would be there. With her nearby, I could relax.

I was still ‘flipping’ – my view of John alternating between that of my parents and my own.

    My own was the one that hit me when John and I first spoke, when I had the revelation that I already knew everything about him and that we’d been together in many previous lives. Our relationship was sanctified by what I called ‘the blue-sky voice’, the one that had told me John would interest me for the rest of my life and I would marry him.
    My parents’ view was the one they expressed in their letters – that he was useless, rude, uncharming etc etc.
    I couldn’t understand how people could see things so differently. Who was right? For me it was impossible dilemma. I couldn’t solve it. My head spun with the conflict and I started to acquire regular right-sided headaches.
    But with Mollie staying, the flipping stopped. John blossomed in her presence, becoming grown-up and confident, his true self, instead of hurt and angry as he so often was when he and I were alone. I too could be myself with her and, what's more, she was like a double dose of John. 

My relationship with my own parents however was a different matter.
    Through friends, who’d heard via their mothers, I discovered that my mother had come to the conclusion that she and my father had been ‘too hard’ on John and me. She’d found our wedding ‘one of the nicest' she’d been to and liked Mollie. After the wedding she’d decided that there was 'hope' for our marriage after all.
    Well, bully for her. Nothing was said directly to me, so all I could do was carry on thinking that my parents still had the same devastatingly low opinions of John and me as the ones they’d expressed in their letters. The pain of those letters had imprinted itself too deeply inside me to be dislodged by third-hand news.
    I was too terrified of my parents to bring the subject up with them but continued to visit them both out of duty and because I couldn’t bear to lose touch with my family as a whole. My family and my upbringing were a huge part of me, and my childhood had been a happy one on the surface - stability, fun, lots of muddy time with my siblings, cousins and friends.
    I never went to see them without John however and when there I couldn’t meet their eyes. Our conversations were stilted and I tried not to be alone with either of them.

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For Beth - Spring comes to Devon

As ever, spring is arriving in fits and starts. Wednesday was warm and sunny, more like summer, but today it’s cold and grey again. Nevertheless there was much to see on my walk this morning.

Blackthorn was in full bloom in the hedgerows

This ewe and her lamb caught my eye . . .

.

. . . as did this green-eyed cat

The flowers of Jack-by-the-hedge, also known as Garlic Mustard, have arrived in the last couple of days. The Orange-tip butterfly likes to lay her eggs on this plant. (The butterfly is named after the male as the female does not have orange-tipped wings. Both however have dappled green and white underwings.)

Ivy berries are an important food for birds at this hungry time of year

The weeping willow on the lane below my house, always the first of the trees to burst into leaf

Around my pond: the giant water buttercups known as Kingcups

Wild garlic at the bottom of my garden. I planted a few bulbs many years ago and now I have a profusion

PART FOUR. 5 Hunky-dory

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


1980

At last we were settled in our new house in Silverton, or rather our new house two miles outside Silverton. Our new detached, three-bedroomed house with a quarter of an acre of garden. Our second house. It had cost us every penny we had, and now we had a mortgage too which meant that the house was in both our names as the building society needed the security of our combined incomes.
    I didn’t tell my parents this, not because I felt guilty but because it didn’t occur to me to do so. Like my emotional life that I’d kept secret until the issue of marriage arose, I’d never divulged my financial situation to my parents. Nor did it occur to me until later – several decades later – that because they had a stake in the house (having given us the money for our first house which we'd sold to part-finance the second) I should have told them and that it was dishonest not to.
    They didn’t say anything either – for once.

I’d of course gone the conventional route in looking for a new house, contacting local estate agents, trawling through page after page of information about properties for sale, and visiting a succession of unsuitable places – unsuitable because they were too small, too boring, too close to other houses – but suitable because they were what we could afford.
    John, on the other hand, had taken a road he’d never explored before just for the hell of it and halfway along had seen the house, seen it was for sale, and thought, yes, that was our house.
    As soon as I saw it I agreed with him.
    The views were fabulous. The neighbour, who showed us round and who had been cutting the grass to keep the place nice, was delightful. The house was modern, bright, immaculate and a blank canvas for us to put our stamp on.

We felt welcome straight away.
    We stayed with a friend in the village for a couple of months when we were between houses and with the neighbour C for the final weekend. She lived on a farm with her husband and young son and had let us leave all our belongings in one of their barns while the house purchase went through. On the Monday she helped us transport everything from their barn to our new house, on foot and in the Mini.
    Another neighbour brought us some swedes as a welcome present – from which I made a hearty soup.
    Another invited me to a Tupperware party. (I declined the invitation – feeling rather overwhelmed by something so grown-up – and I didn’t ask her in, which I realise now was very remiss of me. She was using the party as an excuse to drop in on us.)
    Another knocked on the door and asked if he could buy John’s motorbike. (He couldn’t.)
    People in cars would stop on the road and engage us in chat.
    Somehow, they all already knew all about us – where we came from, where we worked.

On our first night in the house, John spilt red wine on the beige carpet in the sitting-room. We took it as a good sign. Already we were making the place our own.
    In our two previous places – the flat and the bungalow - John had taken over one of the bedrooms for his hi-fi equipment and records, which had cut him off. In the new house he was able to park himself in one of the corners of the large sitting-room, which was much more companionable.

Music was everything to him. At around the age of eight he’d started to build his own electronic equipment on which to play music. He still had some of it, including a Perspex amplifier that he was very proud of. Music had saved him during his adolescence.
    When, at his grammar school, they’d asked him what he wanted to do when he left he’d said that he wanted to be a recording engineer. He wanted to help musicians create music. Right, said the school, not having the foggiest what he was talking about. A levels.
    And, of course, he failed them all. He wasn’t academic except about music. His knowledge of music was encyclopaedic. Ask him something about music – any sort of music – and he could answer. But ask him to study for something he wasn’t interested in and he stalled.
    His main criterion in choosing a house was for it to be somewhere he could play loud music - outside as well as inside - without worrying about disturbing anyone and now of course he could.
    And did.

I loved it. I was learning so much and luckily our tastes more or less coincided. The only genre neither of us liked was Jazz. He liked Folk music however which on the whole I didn’t, whereas I liked Country music which on the whole he didn’t. But we could deal with that.
    He turned his nose up at my handy portable record player with its lid made from its two speakers which I’d bought from a fellow student for £70 in 1976, and exclaimed in horror at its wires which – cleverly, I thought - I’d made longer by splicing in extra bits. He relegated it to the top of a cupboard. I didn’t mind – too much.
    And he disapproved of some of my records, such as Santana Abraxas which had blown me away when I first heard it in 1971, and kept them in a box separately from his racks. (At least he kept my records.) His records were arranged in the order in which he’d bought them and he remembered the position of every one. He could pull one out without even thinking about it.
    
His mission in life was to spread good music and to that end he’d joined the fledgling student radio station, University Radio Exeter (URE), helping them out technically and presenting a programme on which he could play whatever music he wanted.
    It saved him from the tedium of his job at the university, which nonetheless he worked at diligently. He didn’t want to be unreliable like his father. He wanted to be a good provider.

I now had a secretarial job at the National Trust Regional Office (long story) which was only a couple of miles away. This I found excruciatingly boring but I could bicycle there and walk in the park at lunchtime, and I was determined to stick at it as I’d never before had a job for more than a few years.

Kitten had had to go back to Rod while we were homeless but she was now safely restored to us.

So everything was in place, ready for our new married life together. All was hunky-dory.

    Or was it?

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