8.4 My Father

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. For more information and a full list of instalments, see right.

My father was now 82 and he wasn’t well. His kidneys were failing. I was surprised about that. Given the number of cigarettes he’d once smoked and the amount of whisky he’d drunk all his adult life, I’d have expected his lungs and liver to go first.

    Because of his kidneys, he ended up in the critical care unit of a London hospital and, after a panicked phone call from my mother, I took a train. I got lost on the way from the tube station to the hospital and was wearing new (pink) sandals which rubbed my feet. I was carrying my overnight bag in case I needed to stay and it was heavy. It was a hot day. Once in the hospital, I got lost again, until a harassed doctor stumbled over me crying in a deserted corridor and directed me to the right place.

    I found my father alone and asleep in the unit. Bodies lay around in beds, attached to a plethora of machines. as was my father. Nurses swathed in plastic protective gear attended to them. No one spoke.

    I didn’t know what to do so I sat and waited, watching the hands on the wall clock above the nurses’ station. They didn’t move. I’d never known time pass so slowly.

    Eventually my mother arrived, looking as glamorous as ever in white trousers and a navy-blue and white t-shirt. The anger towards my parents, which was always there inside me, now fought with a mixture of other emotions, mostly pity. I kissed her hello.

    A meal arrived and my father woke. He looked at his watch which he was wearing upside-down. He must have liked what he saw there however as he asked my mother to pour him a whisky, alcohol intake in my family being regulated not by quantity but by time - by pub opening hours as they were then. My mother reached for a bottle and glass on the windowsill. I was shocked.

    ‘You’re in hospital,’ I said. You can’t have alcohol.’

    My father looked puzzled. Whyever not, I could see him thinking. Whisky was as essential to his life as sleep and food.

    My mother poured him a tot and then cut up his food for him. Her hands were shaking.

    After an hour or so of polite conversation with the two of them, I couldn’t bear it any longer. My stomach was knotted with the stress of pretending to be normal.

    ‘I think I’ll go home,’ I said, grabbing my monstrous overnight bag.

    My mother looked surprised and maybe hurt.

    ‘I’ll be back,’ I said, kissing them both goodbye and fleeing.

 A few days later my brother Jo rang.

    ‘Dad’s decided he wants to come home. He doesn’t want to stay hooked up to a machine in London for the rest of his life,’ he explained.

    ‘So that means . . .’ I said.

    ‘Yes,’ said Jo. ‘They’re transferring him to a small cottage hospital near Mum and Dad’s where they can keep him comfortable.’

    I was impressed by my father’s courage. He’d always had a spiritual streak, helping with services in the village church, and spending hours staring into the bonfires he sometimes built at the weekend. His elder sister Susan, my godmother and beloved aunt, was deeply religious and told me how she’d once had a profound experience of God’s presence which had saved her after their mother died (of pneumonia when Aunt Susan was eight and my father six). She’d still suffered from bouts of depression all her life however.

    A day or two later, my mother rang. 

    ‘You have to come now,’ she said.

    Frog, Penny and I leapt into the car.

We were all there, all my brothers and sisters, staying at my parents’ house, and my mother was still organising meals for all of us, putting on a bright cheerful face. I wished she’d stop and be herself for a change.

    Frog and I drove to the hospital. My father was conscious but only just and he kept talking about the Mini Metro that he’d passed on to us after my mother acquired a new car.

    We nodded, enthusiastically, not quite sure where he was going with this.

    Like our animals, our cars came and went, and at one stage Frog had built a six-wheeled Mini kit car which looked like a giant greenhouse on wheels and had no seats in the back. Even though its top speed was only 40mph, it was perfect for carrying DIY materials as well as nieces, nephews and dogs who could all sprawl together. One day the roof had blown off in a storm on Salisbury Plain as we drove back to Devon from Kent, and we travelled the rest of the way (another two hours) with me clutching a wire to hold it back on again till we got home and Frog could do a proper repair. The Metro therefore had been something of a godsend.

    ‘It’s still going,’ we said. ‘We use it all the time. We’ve got it with us now.’

    That didn’t seem to be the right answer.

    I wondered if he was reassuring himself that he'd been a good father, that he'd always attended to our material needs. I wished he'd said that, instead of talking in code. (I wished later that I'd said something.)

It turned out that Frog and I were the last people to talk to my father. Later that evening the hospital rang.

    ‘You need to come now,’ they said.

    We all piled into cars and then sat round my father’s bed, talking desultorily and holding glasses of sherry, while the nurses fed him morphine. He was unconscious.

    Eventually the nurses ushered us children out.

    ‘You need to leave your mother alone with your father,’ they said.

    Cass and Danny elected to stay at the hospital, sleeping on the padded bench outside my father’s room, while Jo, Amelia, Frog and I went back to the house.

    In the morning it was all over. We four returned to the hospital and I was allowed into my father’s room to take a last look at him. I’d never seen a dead human before. I was uncomfortable seeing him so vulnerable. It felt voyeuristic. But then it wasn’t really him. It was like a waxwork.

    Back home, we all went upstairs for a lie down. My mother and I stood on the landing together and suddenly she reached out and kissed me. She’d never ever done anything like that before. Affection was always shown at specific times, like bedtime or hellos and goodbyes. It was never spontaneous. I had no idea what she meant by it.

To be continued

8.3 Migraine

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. For more information and a list of instalments so far, see right. 

This was a bad one. Pain drilled into my right forehead. I couldn’t move because I knew that if I did I would be sick and, if there was one thing I hated more than anything, it was being sick. Paracetamol didn’t touch the pain but at least it sometimes put me to sleep, and sleep was the only respite. Or death.

The migraines had started in my mid-twenties – around the same time that Frog and I got together and I started taking the (contraceptive) pill and everything blew up with my parents. So it was hard to know which of those events had brought them on. And I firmly believed that there was a link between illness and what was happening in our lives. Or at least I did by then, after all my therapy.
    To start with the attacks coincided with my period so I didn’t recognise them for what they were. Frog and I went to the pub two or three evenings a week where I would happily down several glasses of wine so I thought it was simply a case of me being more sensitive to alcohol at that time of the month.
    I would spend a morning being sick and overdosing on paracetamol and by lunchtime, if I managed to keep down a banana, I would be feeling more or less OK.
    As time went on however and the attacks became more random in their timing, I began to recognise them for what they were. And because they were lasting longer and I was taking longer to recover from them, I decided I had to try and do something about them.

    I explored both conventional and complementary medicine and modified my behaviour according to what seemed to cause migraines. I went easy on alcohol, cheese and chocolate and tried to avoid extremes like too much or too little sleep or food, too much heat or cold, and strong smells. But nothing made any difference.
    My focus shifted and I started to compare myself to the knight in The Silver Chair, one of C S Lewis’s Narnia books. He had to be tied up at night because he went mad at that time. But it turned out that he didn’t go mad then. That was the time he went sane, when he realised that the Queen was keeping him prisoner. My migraines were the true reflection of what was happening in my life. The rest was pretence, a fool’s paradise.

The pain and the nausea began to recede and crying took over. It was a small step from saying that illness has its root in our behaviour and that we can do something about it, to saying that illness is our fault, and I of course took that step.
   I sat up in bed with my notebook, choking back sobs, and tried as usual to work out what I could do to redeem the situation. I felt as if I’d tried everything.
    On the few occasions when I did say anything, my father called me ‘touchy’ and my mother suggested I wrote a novel in order to ‘get it all out of my system’. Neither of those comments helped. In fact, they made me feel worse. Perhaps I needed something from them, some acknowledgement that they had mishandled the situation, that their letters were unfair, their reaction to Frog uncalled for. I couldn’t sort this on my own.

    How could I convey that to them?

To start with I asked them not to telephone me. It was bad enough visiting them and trying to pretend that everything was OK. It was even worse being caught unawares at home.
    Then I thought that perhaps I could direct them, show them in black and white how they could help me – and themselves. I drew up a contract in which we all apologised for our actions, signed it and sent it to them for their signature.
    There was zero response from them but my sister Amelia wrote, severely chastising me for expecting them to sign a contract that they hadn’t had a hand in drawing up. I was only trying to help them, I thought.
    My father's 80th birthday approached and my mother arranged a party. But that was a step too far, even for me. How could I go to his party when he didn’t come to my wedding?
    I said as much to my parents but there was no response from them. Amelia wrote and chastised me again. My mother was crying, she said.
    I was crushed, torpedoed. In some ways I felt worse than I ever had. I couldn’t bear to hurt anybody. I felt as if I was losing my family and that was like losing part of me. I was nauseous with sorrow.

‘Belinda!’ said Brenda the bookshop owner when I arrived at work. ‘What on earth’s the matter? You look terrible.’
    ‘Oh . . . family troubles,’ I managed to say.
    The full truth was impossible. Impossible to tell anyone. It was such a long story and I was so ashamed of my part in it.
    Frog was the only person who knew the full truth, but he was part of it too. The two of us were tied together with a Gordian knot.
    Isolated.

To be continued

8.2 What about us?

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

Dear Belinda and John

 I felt that I had to write after seeing you both today.

    I want you to know that you are both truly an inspiration. There is no better reward for what I do that to see it manifest in people as it has so obviously in both of you.

    I want to acknowledge both of you for all of the hard work which you have done. To see you both so together, your love radiates and is infectious. It makes everything seem so exciting and leaves me with a renewed sense of purpose.

    So thank you, both of you, and keep up the good work. Keep growing and loving.

    With love, light and happiness

    Cheryl

    xx❤️

We had seen Cheryl on a good day, but I was touched, overwhelmed and puzzled by her card. I was sure we weren’t half of what she’d written, and most of what she said would be better applied to her than us.

Poor Cheryl however was frazzled. Everyone wanted her to sort their life out. She was working all hours and earning more money than she had time to deal with. Her personal life was faltering.

Cheryl and I, together with friends, had organised a Day of Healing in the village where Frog and I lived. Therapists and healers offered taster sessions of their talents, including Cheryl her aura portraits and me tarot-reading, even though I felt hugely unqualified to advise people on their lives. I didn’t have Cheryl’s confidence and, unless I caught my insights immediately and hung on to them, they vanished in a din of mind-chatter – usually critical of me and what I was doing.

    Nevertheless the day was a success with queues at lunchtime stretching out of the Village Hall and round the carpark.

That was one of the last times I saw Cheryl. One day she simply vanished and word came later through a friend of a friend of a friend that she’d moved to another part of the country, halted all her psychic work and taken an ordinary job with the Post Office.

    What a waste. What a loss.

Frog and I, now in our late forties and with our Silver Wedding approaching, muddled on. Our sex life was nothing like I’d once hoped and dreamed of (for which I blamed myself), but the fearsome fights were more or less a thing of the past and we enjoyed being with each other, or at least I enjoyed being with Frog. I don’t know what he felt but he did write me loving messages and send me loving cards, and he was still there. 

My favourite times were the mornings we spent in bed together, our ‘breakfast meetings’ as we called them jokingly.

    Frog didn’t properly get going till lunchtime whereas I was a lark (another of the many many ways in which we were complete opposites) so I would leap out of bed early, let Penny into the garden, flap around in my dressing-gown doing whatever I needed to do, then rejoin Frog in bed.

    I would lie dozing with my hand on his thigh while he propped himself up on lots of pillows, read his Chambers Dictionary and tried to wake up.

    Felicity would lie purring on Frog’s chest. Penny would be hiding downstairs.

    

Why can’t it always be like this? I would think. Everything feels right when Frog and I are together. Why do I have to have all those doubts? Why did I make such a complete hash of our early days together, our wedding and our encounters with my parents? Will I ever get things straight?

    Every day I went through my parents’ letters and the lead-up to our wedding in my mind, wondering how I could have done things differently, trying out different scenarios. None of them worked. My migraines continued.

One morning I spoke, the words appearing from nowhere and tumbling out of me.

    ‘What I’d really like’, I said, ‘is a part-time job somewhere locally – Tiverton for instance – in something interesting like a bookshop.’

    ‘Mmm,’ said Frog, head in dictionary. ‘Good idea.’

    In spite of everything, I’d enjoyed working on the New Age Encyclopaedia, and I wanted to do more writing. Maybe even some ‘creative writing’ such as fiction. But freelance editing didn’t make that easy. It put me in an intellectual rather than a dreamy state of mind. It was unpredictable and last minute so I couldn’t plan my life. I couldn’t leave space for creative writing because it would more than likely be filled up.

    A regular job, two or three days a week, might make things easier, and we could afford it. I didn’t have to work full time any more because my parents had sold the farm and moved somewhere smaller, dividing some of the proceeds among us children. So I had some savings, and could perhaps put them to good use. What I considered good use, at least. My father certainly wouldn’t. So I wouldn’t tell him (as per usual).

    But I wasn’t desperate to make the change, so I put the thought out of my head.

The next day a neighbour rang.

    ‘You know I work at the Tiverton Bookshop,’ she began. ‘Well, my boss is looking for some extra help - say two or three days a week. Would you be interested?’

Within a week, I had the job and had booked myself in for a creative writing weekend on the River Tamar near Plymouth in South Devon. How lucky I was, and how extraordinary was the universe. Of course there was an intelligent consciousness behind everything. How could it be otherwise?

     I just hoped Frog could manage Penny while I was out. It was still early days between her and us and he wasn’t the most patient of people, not even with his beloved canine friend.

To be continued . . . 

PART 8. 1 . . . Other Animals

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. For more information and a list of instalments so far, see right.



2001


Frog removed a paving slab in our garden and dug a hole for Brindle’s body, sweat pouring off him. It was penance for all the times he’d shouted at her. We placed her body in the hole and covered it with earth.
    Brindle had joined us two years 'before Sam' and I felt as if I’d undergone several lifetimes since then. She’d kept me company for thirteen and a half years, an unwavering source of pragmatism, common-sense and love. Now she was gone.
    The next day my sister Cass came to stay with her children aged 10, 7 and 4. The children were devastated to discover that Brindle was no longer with us and decorated her grave with flowers, petals and pine cones from the garden. Then we sat round the grave and sang and said some prayers.

The decorations on Brindle's grave

Frog had sweated over Kitten’s grave too when she’d died twelve years earlier, only that time he was exorcising sorrow not guilt. Kitten had been with him through most of his twenties and thirties, including the worst time of his life when Wendy, his girlfriend of five years, suddenly upped and left (before I met him). We’d laid some sprigs of catmint in the hole with Kitten, as she had loved the plant so much, rolling in it with a silly smile on her face.
    Strangely, it wasn’t long after her death that Frog had taken up with Sam. Was there a connection, I wondered.

While Kitten was alive we’d given a home to another cat, a tabby whom we named Catherine after one of Frog’s nieces. As a change from all our other animals, we found Catherine the conventional way through an advertisement in the local paper about a litter of kittens. She developed into a healthy individual with thick fur and a tail like a fox's brush, unlike poor Kitten who was starting to look ragged. She’d had a hard life.
    Kitten and Catherine had got on well, having play fights in the evening and curling up together in the cat-bed, with Kitten often putting a protective paw over her young friend.

 

Kitten and Catherine sharing the cat-bed

Sadly, six years after Kitten’s death, Catherine was run over and we were cat-less.
    The next year, shortly after we lost our baby Thomas, a bedraggled and starving kitten appeared in the garden hedge. We adopted her and named her Felicity as she’d turned up unexpectedly when we needed her, like happiness does.
    She developed into a ball of fluff, but never forgot her feral origins. Frog and I were the only humans she would tolerate.

Felicity, a ball of fluff, taking charge of the sofa

How strange animals were. We thought we were looking after them, but perhaps it was the other way round.
    

And then there was Penny.

After Brindle's death there was a big dog-shaped hole in our lives that didn't go away, so six months later we went to a small rescue centre that had advertised at the vet’s.
    The moment we arrived, I started to cry. So many dogs, so much barking, concrete runs, a stink of excrement. I had to sit on a wall and recover.
    We wandered round, looking for a Staffy – a Staffordshire bull terrier - as I’d met several on my rambles and loved them. But one dog caught both our eyes.
    She had her paws on the wall round her yard and stared at us with huge liquid-brown eyes, barking urgently. She was a lurcher, pretty and slender, the complete opposite of dear Brindle.
    ‘I think she’s chosen us,’ said Frog.
    ‘Definitely,’ I agreed.
    We took her for a walk and she seemed already to be trained and respond to commands. She was about three years old, said the Rescue Centre, but they couldn’t tell us anything about her past.
    We went home and I couldn’t stop thinking about her. My heart went out to her. She needed us. I couldn’t wait to take her away from that prison.
    The Rescue Centre wanted to inspect our premises (and us, I suspect) so I scoured the house and put out Brindle’s bed with a clean cover.
    We passed the test and next day went to fetch our new companion animal.

The rescue centre had called her Shandy, but when Frog was in his teens his family had a Shetland Sheepdog with the same name. He’d loved that Shandy and didn’t want to feel he was replacing her, so we called our new dog Penny instead.
    Phew. She turned out to be an escape artist, chewing her way out of the cat flap the first time we left her alone. Luckily a neighbour saw her charging down the road and rescued her. Another time she got out (I can’t remember how) and walked all over Frog’s car leaving scratch marks. He was furious.
    ‘The little sod,’ he said.
    But he loved her really. And in my photographs the two of them are always together, with a paw or a hand always resting on the other.

Frog and Penny resting together after a steep climb up a cliff

Penny with her paw on Frog's arm

It took about a year for Penny to settle down but for once I didn’t mind anything. She didn’t drain me like our other animals had. She was vulnerable, not demanding, and I couldn’t do enough for her. Perhaps it helped that she wasn't a puppy.
    She loved to run, looking like a cheetah with her strong back legs doubled underneath her, and once she learnt how to would shudder to a halt a millimetre from my knees. I suspected she'd never been able to run before she came to us and not seen grass either, as to start with would always seek out concrete for her ablutions.
    At home she spent her day hiding in the gap between the wall and Frog’s side of the bed, only coming out on Frog's return, when she would greet him from the top of the stairs with a shy smile. I didn't know dogs could smile, but Penny certainly did.

Penny emerging from the bedroom in order to greet Frog

So now we lived with one dog, Penny, and one cat, Felicity.
    You might note that they were both female. That was because Frog preferred females to males in all species. He had more than enough trouble tolerating his own maleness and didn't want another male living in the house, not even a non-human one. 

But what about us? What about Frog and me? How were we getting on?

To be continued . . .

7.7 Brindle and . . .

This is an instalment from an autobiographical series. For more information and a list of instalments so far, see right.

The Foot and Mouth epidemic started in February, not the most exciting month for walks at the best of times, let alone ones where you couldn’t tread on anything green. Nevertheless we were lucky enough in Devon to have a vast network of tiny tarmacked lanes, largely free of traffic and fringed with banks, hedges and trees. These I trudged, with dog in tow.

Brindle in later years

I had to keep Brindle on a lead as she was now deaf as well as disobedient so if she’d strayed into a field I would have had no way of bringing her back. If I’d climbed into the field I faced a large fine, not to mention alienating my farming neighbours. If Brindle had strayed she risked being shot.
    Having Brindle on a lead made me feel as if I was on a lead too and, while she was obviously missing all the interesting smells and carcasses, I was missing all the usual details of winter turning to spring. As my mother so eloquently put it later, ‘We never saw the bluebells that year.’ It was like a bereavement.
    From time to time, Brindle would sit down in the middle of the road and refuse to get up.
    ‘Look,’ her eyes would say, ‘I’m an old lady now. This is boring and I’m beyond tired. I want to be back at home, snoozing on my bed.’
    ‘I know, I know,’ I would say. ‘I’m bored too but we have to get our exercise. In any case it’s as quick now to carry on as it is to turn round.’
     She would haul herself to her feet, and we would struggle on be-leaded.  
 
In May Frog and I went on holiday to a Greek island, leaving Brindle with neighbour Claire and her husband Ben. Unfortunately there was a storm at the end of our two weeks and the ferry was cancelled. We were stuck.
    The travel company doled out phone cards so that we could phone home and I stood in the rickety open booth on the village’s seafront, buffeted by winds, and dialled the UK, marvelling at technology. Here I was on a minuscule, barely inhabited, island. How extraordinary that a rusty contraption could put me in touch with someone thousands of miles away.
    Ben answered and he didn’t sound too pleased when I explained the situation and asked if they could possibly look after Brindle for another few days.
    ‘I just hope she’ll last that long,’ he grunted.
 
Luckily, the Greeks are used to the weather disrupting travel and three days later - by an ingenious route involving another bigger ferry and a cardboard hotel on a tourist trap island where disco beats kept us awake all night - we arrived home.
 
The next day Frog and I took Brindle out for a walk.
    I was surprised that Frog had volunteered to come too. He didn’t normally. Perhaps it was the holiday, I thought, as we'd done a lot of walking on the island.
    About five minutes from home, Brindle collapsed. She lay on the ground, panting, her tongue hanging out. Frog lifted her off the road into a gateway and laid her on the grass. I crouched over her, stroking her and talking to her, feeling pretty shaky myself.
    After a few minutes, as Brindle showed no sign of improving, Frog spoke.
    ‘I think we ought to go home and ring the vet. I’ll carry her.’
    I thanked god that Frog was with me. What would I have done without him? I couldn’t lift Brindle myself. She was far too heavy. I couldn’t have left her alone. I would have had to wait for a passing car but that might have taken hours.
 
Back home Frog laid Brindle on her bed. Because she was panting so much, we thought she might be hot, so we put a fan on her.
 
‘It’s a pulmonary embolism – a clot on the lung,’ said the vet when he arrived. ‘There’s no hope, I’m afraid. She’s slowly suffocating. We have to put an end to it.’
    As if she understood, Brindle struggled to her feet and staggered outside, only to crumple again on the grass.
    All three of us – the vet, Frog and me – followed her out and knelt around her.
    The vet took out a needle and as he depressed the plunger I saw Brindle’s spirit burst from her body like a puff of smoke and streak northwards over the shed.
    It was in a hurry. It couldn’t wait to leave.
 
Brindle had waited for me to finish my book. Over the last three months she’d trudged the lanes with me even though she hadn’t wanted to. She’d waited for Frog and me to return from holiday. She’d made sure both Frog and I were there when she finally collapsed.
    Perhaps, in the end, she did what she came here to do.

To be continued . . .