53 years ago, in my parents' bedroom on the first floor of a ramshackle Victorian house in Hertfordshire, I was born a blue baby. Almost strangled by the umbilical cord. my mother told me that my finger nails went black before the midwife saved me. I was a lacklustre child with spindly legs and whitewashed skin.
The experience must have left me defiant and stupid. I remember being four and bravely chucking the last of a thousand dummies that had dangled slantways from my mouth like a drooly pipe, into the coal-fired oven. And rushing down the cellar stairs to stand directly under the shute as the coalman tipped a black landslide of stinking, dusty rocks into the gloom.
When I was 7, I announced I was leaving home. I tied one of my dad's large white handkerchiefs to the end of a stick, filled its billowy insides with an orange and other life-saving necessities and set off down Church Road. I got to the Snow's house and turned back exhausted and frightened.
Once, possibly aged 6, I found a toddler wandering in Elton Road. She was plump, with golden hair and squashy legs like a cherub. I carried her home, which took a great deal of effort as she was heavy, and sat her on my bedroom floor. I showed her my dollies and set out a china tea set as she beamed and waved her fists. My mother appeared, was horrified and went mad. She gathered up my new baby sister and together we marched back to the spot where I had found her. There were some adults chatting lazily in the sunshine and mum asked breezily if the child was theirs. 'Oh Yes!' they said. And that was the end of it.
Boris was a young man probably in his twenties with Down's Syndrome, who lived further along Church Road with his father. I forget his father's first name now but rumour had it he was highly educated. Boris would drop his trousers and piss in the old red phone box opposite our house, or wander naked along the road carrying a handbag. Sometimes he would be smiling gaily, others in a fearful rage, shaking his fists and spitting into his beard. His dad wore a shredded, brown tartan dressing gown and would often hurry along the road searching for Boris with despair on his face. The father died one night and my brother and I watched his lifeless body, a bag of bones, being brought out in a green blanket and bundled into an ambulance while Boris cried uncontrollably on the pavement. I don't know what happened to Boris after that.
Those first ten years of my life in Hertford, when the summers were endless, the winters cruel and the rows between my parents interminable, gave me a slew of memories that seem medieval in comparison to my own son's current childhood. I and my brothers and sisters roamed the streets looking for action: hiding between potato sacks on the farmer's tractor trailer, (he delivered fresh from the fields back then,) throwing vegetables off the back and scattering when he chased us. Helping dad carry out rusty wheelbarrows and old spades for the rag and bone man who called out for business as he clattered along in his horse and cart.
Once, I ventured as far as Farquhar Street and went inside the house of a young woman who had a baby called Charlotte. She called the baby Lottie which I thought was very exotic and it did liquid green poos in a cloth nappy. Her house had barely any furniture and no carpets. Our voices echoed in the hall as she changed Lottie's nappy on a wooden telephone table.
53 years isn't really so long ago. But when you consider, for example, that the contemporary child support system only came into existence in 1993 - by which time I was 29 - it was a very different world. That single mother I stumbled across as a child was quite probably lucky to have a bare house and a telephone table to change her hungry baby on; there must have been thousands without even those benefits. I don't get child support from my son's father, as the law still hasn't evolved enough after 24 years to take to task fathers who choose to relocate to a country with which there is no 'reciprocal agreement' for the collection of maintenance (he did his research!) but perhaps in another twenty years this will have changed.
Thank God then, for Tax Credits, state childcare, partial parity between the sexes which means I have a job, and the wonders of twenty-first century healthcare which a) helped me have my son at the ripe old age of 43 and b) cured him of a cancer which would have killed him 53 years ago.
Wednesday 30 August 2017
Thursday 24 August 2017
Being worried
Anxiety medicines are a modern wonder. Like strong fishing wire, they seem to expand and contract according to the weight on the end of them as the waters of one's mental health ebb and flow. I have one of those plastic flip-top boxes you find littering musty bottom shelves in charity shops, which can hold scores of tablets for each day of the week. Mine, rather usefully, has AM and PM compartments. This means that you can have five pints and a kebab at lunchtime and know that if you fall asleep until the next day, one simple glance at the box will tell you how many pills you need to top up with to make up for the blackout.
Wine boxes should have the same advantage: a teeny tap for first light, a small tap for the morning, a large tap for between lunch and 4pm, a decent-sized tap for tea-time, a fuck-off jet tap for when the children are in bed and maybe a snifter tap for in-between.
A couple of weeks ago my stress levels reached so far beyond known galaxies I felt my heart contracting, pulling my chest cavity inwards, neurons fizzing and popping, a tingling in my arms and wrists. Concerned that I was going to die I rang my cheerful Doctor and asked him for advice.
He was very accommodating. He knows the shitstorm I have suffered over the last few years and has held my hand throughout - as far as a Doctor can. He diagnosed Hunter's leukaemia also, on Thursday May 17th 2012 at about 10am. So I am insanely grateful to him or else Hunter might have died.
He listened quietly as I burbled on barely drawing breath about maxing out on KP peanuts at 2am, the crackling sensations in my arms as though they were going to snap off, the arrhythmia, body sweats the like of which would have made Fatima Whitbread going for gold blush.
I admire clever people who can come up with an intelligent war plan swiftly; a way of tackling an immediate threat while conniving other options to defeat the enemy even more convincingly later on; taking the high road holding Harry Potter omnioculars whilst the ill-prepared adversary takes the low road only to find it blocked by fifteen police cars.
Up with such a plan the good doctor came. He proffered three different weapons from his considerable arsenal: polyporpnolopolypop, fizzeloctenone, and hedgestrimmeronilol,. The first was apparently going to halt the heart attacks, the second would give me the sort of high one gets on a ferris wheel after snorting coke, and the third was to knock me out cold thus saving me the nightly expense of KP Nuts - currently on offer in Asda but usually a brass-neck £3.39 per big bag.
I said thankyouIloveyou, accepted the lot without prevarication and rushed round to the pharmacy to collect them.
A few days later:
So, like I say, anxiety medicines are a modern wonder. I am wearing my pink, tasseled prom dress and fluffy swan-down slippers and my island is crowned with palm trees spilling bananas and lapped by gorgeous cyanic seas and I am eating buttered samphire roasted on an open bamboo beach fire with Justin Timberlake.
I
Wine boxes should have the same advantage: a teeny tap for first light, a small tap for the morning, a large tap for between lunch and 4pm, a decent-sized tap for tea-time, a fuck-off jet tap for when the children are in bed and maybe a snifter tap for in-between.
A couple of weeks ago my stress levels reached so far beyond known galaxies I felt my heart contracting, pulling my chest cavity inwards, neurons fizzing and popping, a tingling in my arms and wrists. Concerned that I was going to die I rang my cheerful Doctor and asked him for advice.
He was very accommodating. He knows the shitstorm I have suffered over the last few years and has held my hand throughout - as far as a Doctor can. He diagnosed Hunter's leukaemia also, on Thursday May 17th 2012 at about 10am. So I am insanely grateful to him or else Hunter might have died.
He listened quietly as I burbled on barely drawing breath about maxing out on KP peanuts at 2am, the crackling sensations in my arms as though they were going to snap off, the arrhythmia, body sweats the like of which would have made Fatima Whitbread going for gold blush.
I admire clever people who can come up with an intelligent war plan swiftly; a way of tackling an immediate threat while conniving other options to defeat the enemy even more convincingly later on; taking the high road holding Harry Potter omnioculars whilst the ill-prepared adversary takes the low road only to find it blocked by fifteen police cars.
Up with such a plan the good doctor came. He proffered three different weapons from his considerable arsenal: polyporpnolopolypop, fizzeloctenone, and hedgestrimmeronilol,. The first was apparently going to halt the heart attacks, the second would give me the sort of high one gets on a ferris wheel after snorting coke, and the third was to knock me out cold thus saving me the nightly expense of KP Nuts - currently on offer in Asda but usually a brass-neck £3.39 per big bag.
I said thankyouIloveyou, accepted the lot without prevarication and rushed round to the pharmacy to collect them.
A few days later:
So, like I say, anxiety medicines are a modern wonder. I am wearing my pink, tasseled prom dress and fluffy swan-down slippers and my island is crowned with palm trees spilling bananas and lapped by gorgeous cyanic seas and I am eating buttered samphire roasted on an open bamboo beach fire with Justin Timberlake.
I
Tuesday 8 August 2017
The Lane
I live in a row of terraces. I have lived here for just over eleven years. Through my kitchen window, as I sit here now, there is a cool breeze bringing with it the sound of doves cooing as they ready for bed, seagulls scrapping and the odd shout of children playing in the lane. The lane is a single track that runs behind the terraces - where we all park our cars in an untidy tangle of garages off to the sides, where snow and ice lies thick in a bad winter and which is a dust-bowl in summer.
I suspect that for each individual - adult and child - who lives along its length, the lane holds a history. It delivered to me the sound of tyres crunching quietly away as my ex-husband pretended to drive to Barnstaple leaving me standing in the garden on a clear June day in 2008 holding our baby. I never saw him again.
The lane has contained and lost numerous balls and shuttlecocks down the years as my son and I played cricket, catch and badminton between its narrow confines. It benefits from the last of the sunshine on a hot day before the sun sinks over the sea in the West, and in the past I have sat in the open boot of my car with a glass of wine soaking it up. When he was two, my son and I built a thin, ragged snowman in an icy lane, with coal for eyes and a carrot nose and if I search my video camera there are moving pictures of him and I sliding unsteadily down the garden path and out through the back gate to inspect 'Mr Noman' and give him a kiss.
My immediate neighbour on one side of our terrace - an old seadog who served in the Navy and barbecued piri piri chicken every summer until illness kept him a prisoner on the second floor of the house, died a few years ago. He was a pigeon fancier and when we first moved here his feathery friends would take flight high over the lane in a dark, silent cloud, swooping over the rooftops. On the other side, my wonderful neighbour Pam is still suffering the agonies of losing her clever, kind, tall husband to an incurable cancer at the young age of 63. Before he died he would cut back his garden's trees that overhang the lane in summer providing refuge for all manner of large birds that like to deposit their dinner on top of my car.
Like a murder mystery there have been arguments, threats and deaths in the lane. Four or so years ago I had a stand-up row in the lane over parking with a thick-set neighbour whose wife and I were friends and ran a small business together. The friendship had come to an abrupt halt for reasons that remain a mystery to me. Fortunately, my even more thick-set lodger at the time threatened to knock his block off and he swiftly backed down. The parking issue was resolved on the spot by my lodger's intervention - for which I am thankful. But neither the neighbour nor his wife have spoken to me since. In fact she is a haunting absence, as I have seen her maybe twice in the lane over the last few years, whereas when we were friends and business partners we ran into each other almost every day.
Then there was Mustardgate. But that's a long story and involved police.
And the fat lady who hasn't spoken to me for eight years after I 'used her property.' The story is short and brutal: two days after his disappearance, I tried to do a u-turn in the lane in the large, unwieldy car my husband had left me with. Strapped into the back seat was the wailing baby and, in a rather desperate and tearful state myself, I backed two feet into the woman's open garage to aid the manoeuvre. She appeared from her gate at that very moment like a wretched crone and advanced on me in a billowing blouse with black curly hair swinging round her angry face and eyes narrowed. I appealed to her telling her of the calamitous departure of my husband and apologised for using her garage. She was utterly disinterested and like I say, hasn't spoken to me since. Perhaps I ought to feel sad for someone with such limited humanity. But I don't. I can't wait to get away.
Once, I stepped out into the lane to find a baby-faced policeman searching the garages, asking if I had seen a teenage thief who had boldly entered a property one street away, stolen a kettle and scarpered. I hadn't, but I admired the lad's derring-do.
I found my beloved cat lying paralysed in the lane, outside our garden gate. He must have dragged himself home. Or maybe he was deliberately run down. I held him while he was put to sleep. My special, adored cat who had travelled all the way home from Australia with me in 2000. The lane claimed him. I have his ashes in a carved wooden box.
The lane stops at my back gate so there is only one way out - back past the rear-ends of all the other terraces that lie along it. It has entrapped and cocooned me. Significant events have visited us here - have tramped up the stony length of it and entered the back gate by stealth: my marriage dissolved here; lone parenthood with all its complicated chemistry arrived to replace it; leukaemia crept in and left its dirty fingerprints in every corner. Loss, Fear and Isolation have chummed up and tried to barge in - a trio of thugs jostling to sit round the fire with me on dark nights.
But the brightest, loveliest of lights has always shone strongly into the darkest recesses of home and heart and seen off the worst shadows: my beautiful son was born here. We drove home from hospital with him - weighing nearly 9lbs, wrapped in a crocheted blanket - and he entered his new home from the lane, the gate swinging shut as we began our big adventure together. He learned to ride a bike in the lane, to bowl a cricket ball, to skip and to build snowmen. He has dug mud pies, chased escaping puppies, played endlessly on scooters at weekends with his two great buddies a few doors down who come to visit their granny. He has been bald from cancer, and thick-locked, brown and bonny in the lane as we have held running races and carried logs in from the garage together. We have shared secrets, listened to music and laughed, sitting in the car in the lane waiting for the rain to stop.
People can be cruel. People can be cold. Those people don't matter. I am leaving the lane and the worst memories behind, but taking many, many more precious moments with me.
I suspect that for each individual - adult and child - who lives along its length, the lane holds a history. It delivered to me the sound of tyres crunching quietly away as my ex-husband pretended to drive to Barnstaple leaving me standing in the garden on a clear June day in 2008 holding our baby. I never saw him again.
The lane has contained and lost numerous balls and shuttlecocks down the years as my son and I played cricket, catch and badminton between its narrow confines. It benefits from the last of the sunshine on a hot day before the sun sinks over the sea in the West, and in the past I have sat in the open boot of my car with a glass of wine soaking it up. When he was two, my son and I built a thin, ragged snowman in an icy lane, with coal for eyes and a carrot nose and if I search my video camera there are moving pictures of him and I sliding unsteadily down the garden path and out through the back gate to inspect 'Mr Noman' and give him a kiss.
My immediate neighbour on one side of our terrace - an old seadog who served in the Navy and barbecued piri piri chicken every summer until illness kept him a prisoner on the second floor of the house, died a few years ago. He was a pigeon fancier and when we first moved here his feathery friends would take flight high over the lane in a dark, silent cloud, swooping over the rooftops. On the other side, my wonderful neighbour Pam is still suffering the agonies of losing her clever, kind, tall husband to an incurable cancer at the young age of 63. Before he died he would cut back his garden's trees that overhang the lane in summer providing refuge for all manner of large birds that like to deposit their dinner on top of my car.
Like a murder mystery there have been arguments, threats and deaths in the lane. Four or so years ago I had a stand-up row in the lane over parking with a thick-set neighbour whose wife and I were friends and ran a small business together. The friendship had come to an abrupt halt for reasons that remain a mystery to me. Fortunately, my even more thick-set lodger at the time threatened to knock his block off and he swiftly backed down. The parking issue was resolved on the spot by my lodger's intervention - for which I am thankful. But neither the neighbour nor his wife have spoken to me since. In fact she is a haunting absence, as I have seen her maybe twice in the lane over the last few years, whereas when we were friends and business partners we ran into each other almost every day.
Then there was Mustardgate. But that's a long story and involved police.
And the fat lady who hasn't spoken to me for eight years after I 'used her property.' The story is short and brutal: two days after his disappearance, I tried to do a u-turn in the lane in the large, unwieldy car my husband had left me with. Strapped into the back seat was the wailing baby and, in a rather desperate and tearful state myself, I backed two feet into the woman's open garage to aid the manoeuvre. She appeared from her gate at that very moment like a wretched crone and advanced on me in a billowing blouse with black curly hair swinging round her angry face and eyes narrowed. I appealed to her telling her of the calamitous departure of my husband and apologised for using her garage. She was utterly disinterested and like I say, hasn't spoken to me since. Perhaps I ought to feel sad for someone with such limited humanity. But I don't. I can't wait to get away.
Once, I stepped out into the lane to find a baby-faced policeman searching the garages, asking if I had seen a teenage thief who had boldly entered a property one street away, stolen a kettle and scarpered. I hadn't, but I admired the lad's derring-do.
I found my beloved cat lying paralysed in the lane, outside our garden gate. He must have dragged himself home. Or maybe he was deliberately run down. I held him while he was put to sleep. My special, adored cat who had travelled all the way home from Australia with me in 2000. The lane claimed him. I have his ashes in a carved wooden box.
The lane stops at my back gate so there is only one way out - back past the rear-ends of all the other terraces that lie along it. It has entrapped and cocooned me. Significant events have visited us here - have tramped up the stony length of it and entered the back gate by stealth: my marriage dissolved here; lone parenthood with all its complicated chemistry arrived to replace it; leukaemia crept in and left its dirty fingerprints in every corner. Loss, Fear and Isolation have chummed up and tried to barge in - a trio of thugs jostling to sit round the fire with me on dark nights.
But the brightest, loveliest of lights has always shone strongly into the darkest recesses of home and heart and seen off the worst shadows: my beautiful son was born here. We drove home from hospital with him - weighing nearly 9lbs, wrapped in a crocheted blanket - and he entered his new home from the lane, the gate swinging shut as we began our big adventure together. He learned to ride a bike in the lane, to bowl a cricket ball, to skip and to build snowmen. He has dug mud pies, chased escaping puppies, played endlessly on scooters at weekends with his two great buddies a few doors down who come to visit their granny. He has been bald from cancer, and thick-locked, brown and bonny in the lane as we have held running races and carried logs in from the garage together. We have shared secrets, listened to music and laughed, sitting in the car in the lane waiting for the rain to stop.
People can be cruel. People can be cold. Those people don't matter. I am leaving the lane and the worst memories behind, but taking many, many more precious moments with me.
Wednesday 2 August 2017
Divorced!
What a strange day. I got divorced! This is how it went:
At 7.30 the alarm chirruped and I sprang from my comfy bed, pulled on a warm top (it's pissed with rain here and been 15 degrees for five days now) and scuttled downstairs in a state of high excitement. I lit the fire in the sitting room by way of an incendiary-type celebration, and got hot Javan coffee on the go.
Consulting with my higher-self takes a lot of concentration - it's an art form I learned from a strikingly gorgeous native American Indian who wrestled alligators for a living, during a visit to America when I was 18. My higher-self gave good guidance and I cheerfully flung several more pictures and a mouldy Keffiyeh which my son bravely sported during a couple of school nativities, onto the impressive pile of dead-marriage debris in the dining room.
I banged shut the door and drank coffee spiked with palm sugar and puffed on a couple of Players while I waited for the doorbell.
It trilled. On the doorstep, two diminutive blokes. One was built like a brick shithouse no more than five feet tall, and his companion was roughly twelve. "He's stronger than he looks" said the shithouse. I know these types having moved house a zillion times. I have carted a piano around for most of these moves. Don't do it unless you CANNOT live without a piano: it adds pounds to a removal bill as it requires three beefcakes to shift it. Ridiculous that I have stubbornly kept hold of my standard dull upright as I can only play a few bits of Bach and the theme tune from Captain Pugwash when I've had a few. I CANNOT live without it though.
Anyway, in they came and surveyed what wares I had to flog. They were mightily unimpressed with most of it though shithouse did use velvet descriptions for the old dresser which he said was glazed with a mahogany veneer, and the linen press which he praised. Because it has a key. Which is good news apparently.
I offered them some of my Javan coffee before they set about straining to 'uplift' (to use a rather brilliant term used by my deceased brother-in-law when he threatened to come and seize the family 'heirlooms' post the sudden departure of my whoring ex husband) my objets...but they declined.
So here is what I have today divorced myself from:
17 pictures including a framed piece of silk or something that belonged to my former husband - possibly removed from the lithe thighs of an Asian Princess. No idea. It's gone anyway.
An antique linen press. One of the 'heirlooms.' Ah well. Tons of similar on Ebay.
An antique glazed mahogany dresser. Another 'heirloom.' Rather a shame as I kept all our batteries in the top drawer and batteries are a bloody nuisance to find if you don't have a set place for the buggers.
Two vintage deckchairs. A project interrupted by the small matter of my son's diagnosis of leukaemia.
A splendid dressing table - painted in Paris Grey and Annie-Sloan waxed, a project completed during my son's leukaemia and more interesting to tackle than the deckchairs.
A lush sideboard with claw and ball feet and all keys. Painted, waxed and just generally lovely. But I bought it from the local paper for 40 quid to practise all the painting and waxing on - so not too big a loss.
A lovely vintage desk, sanded, painted in teal, with brass knobs and original slide-tray. But I got it from the tip for 20 quid so though it was fabulous I haven't lost a fortune.
Two carver chairs with velvet covers. I had difficulty deciding whether or not to part with these, as they came from my dead father-in-law's flat in Bristol. But since my ex wasn't much interested in his own son, let alone a couple of chairs that his dad owned, I thought they ought to go. So go they did.
Three Indian bongo drums that I bought at an Eton school fair years ago. I have hung on to the African spears.
A door planer.
A big old steamer trunk.
A vintage fishing net.
A steam-punk era spirit optic which I used often in my London days.
Loads of other stuff. Lots of it. A dusty hinterland of dead-marriage items that have cluttered my home, my house and my heart for nearly ten years. My real divorce came through in November 2008 but gave me no sense of freedom as I was very busy with our baby and trying to sort out the awful debts he left behind.
Today's divorce was much better. It was fun and peaceful. I gave the boys a tip and thanked them for their hard work. It will have meant nothing to them - it must be like clearing the dishes after a messy farewell party.
I did a dance when they had gone. A happy dance.
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