Finding Fathers; Dangerous world
- Thread starter KateF
- Start date
KateF
Silver Member
Sorry to have kept the cliffhanging! Still doing school projects and brain-knackered when I get in. Also maybe finding the next bit harder to write. Onwards though...
**********
"Hello"
"Hello"
Father and daughter speaking for the first time. I am sitting on the edge of the settee. Looking at the phone handset as if he is somehow in there.
I wish I could remember the exact words. I wish I had a recording of that conversation.
Instead just fragments remain.
"This is strange isn't it?" I say at some point. "It is", he agrees matter of factly.
Down to earth, gruff, typical Yorkshireman I'm thinking. But something sharp as well. Somehow I know I can say what I'm thinking and he'll get it.
"I've waited seventeen years for you" he says. I am surprised but I believe him. Relief is spreading through me. He wanted me to get in touch. I can talk to him.
"You've got an older brother" he says. "Born exactly eleven years before you". There's a smile in his voice as he says this. Teasing almost. "What, exactly?" I say, thinking I'm misunderstanding in my love of coincidences. "Yes, May 31st is his birthday too", he says, "as if I could ever forget". It is strange. My birthday, the day that has had significance to me for seventeen years, now being spoken by him. He talks more about his son with obvious pride. Andrew, is a salesman for a paper company, travels all over the country, is married to a Policewoman.
Did I wonder in this first conversation what our birth had meant for his eleven year old son? Was it too much to take in just then?
At some point, in response to me saying something about how we were speaking as if we knew each other but we didn't know each other at all he said;
"Blood's thicker than custom". I hadn't heard the phrase before. Typical Yorkshireism it sounded like. But I knew he was cutting through the fact that we'd never met before, through seventeen years of other families and separate lives, to say that we were tied by the blood we shared. It was in those words more than any others, that I knew he thought it was right that I'd suddenly come back into his world.
"Blood's thicker than custom". Those words are in a poem that I've performed hundreds of times now on stage. The phrase is like an incantation as I remind myself over and over "You were part of him, he was part of you".
He's talking about his wife, saying that he's told her and it's brought a difficult time back up again but "there will be no more secrets".
He describes the solicitor who told him my letter didn't sound like the result of a teenage tantrum a" white witch". And he doesn't sound like a man who usually uses the words "white witch" in conversation.
"Me and my wife will come and take you out for Sunday lunch" he says, "Would that be alright?" and as if anticipating a question I probably couldn't have asked he adds "and you can call me Norman and her, Rosemary".
I say that the story of my leaving home is a long story and I'll tell him in person; "Just say what you're comfortable with" he says. "Let's get to know each other".
He says he'll ring Jean's again before the weekend to confirm times. How did we end the conversation? "Goodbye" is a fair bet. But I can imagine me choking back sentences. Opening my mouth, intaking breath, knowing "Goodbye" was hardly enough.
I do remember swallowing tears as I came off the phone. A wave of choking emotion coming up my throat, which, out of habit, I quelled straight away. Sent it back down. I still couldn't let go. "He sounds so nice" I said to Jean as she brought another coffee, and kept saying throughout the evening, shaking my head in disbelief.
"Will he like me?" the unspoken question I worried over as the countdown to meeting him began.
**********
"Hello"
"Hello"
Father and daughter speaking for the first time. I am sitting on the edge of the settee. Looking at the phone handset as if he is somehow in there.
I wish I could remember the exact words. I wish I had a recording of that conversation.
Instead just fragments remain.
"This is strange isn't it?" I say at some point. "It is", he agrees matter of factly.
Down to earth, gruff, typical Yorkshireman I'm thinking. But something sharp as well. Somehow I know I can say what I'm thinking and he'll get it.
"I've waited seventeen years for you" he says. I am surprised but I believe him. Relief is spreading through me. He wanted me to get in touch. I can talk to him.
"You've got an older brother" he says. "Born exactly eleven years before you". There's a smile in his voice as he says this. Teasing almost. "What, exactly?" I say, thinking I'm misunderstanding in my love of coincidences. "Yes, May 31st is his birthday too", he says, "as if I could ever forget". It is strange. My birthday, the day that has had significance to me for seventeen years, now being spoken by him. He talks more about his son with obvious pride. Andrew, is a salesman for a paper company, travels all over the country, is married to a Policewoman.
Did I wonder in this first conversation what our birth had meant for his eleven year old son? Was it too much to take in just then?
At some point, in response to me saying something about how we were speaking as if we knew each other but we didn't know each other at all he said;
"Blood's thicker than custom". I hadn't heard the phrase before. Typical Yorkshireism it sounded like. But I knew he was cutting through the fact that we'd never met before, through seventeen years of other families and separate lives, to say that we were tied by the blood we shared. It was in those words more than any others, that I knew he thought it was right that I'd suddenly come back into his world.
"Blood's thicker than custom". Those words are in a poem that I've performed hundreds of times now on stage. The phrase is like an incantation as I remind myself over and over "You were part of him, he was part of you".
He's talking about his wife, saying that he's told her and it's brought a difficult time back up again but "there will be no more secrets".
He describes the solicitor who told him my letter didn't sound like the result of a teenage tantrum a" white witch". And he doesn't sound like a man who usually uses the words "white witch" in conversation.
"Me and my wife will come and take you out for Sunday lunch" he says, "Would that be alright?" and as if anticipating a question I probably couldn't have asked he adds "and you can call me Norman and her, Rosemary".
I say that the story of my leaving home is a long story and I'll tell him in person; "Just say what you're comfortable with" he says. "Let's get to know each other".
He says he'll ring Jean's again before the weekend to confirm times. How did we end the conversation? "Goodbye" is a fair bet. But I can imagine me choking back sentences. Opening my mouth, intaking breath, knowing "Goodbye" was hardly enough.
I do remember swallowing tears as I came off the phone. A wave of choking emotion coming up my throat, which, out of habit, I quelled straight away. Sent it back down. I still couldn't let go. "He sounds so nice" I said to Jean as she brought another coffee, and kept saying throughout the evening, shaking my head in disbelief.
"Will he like me?" the unspoken question I worried over as the countdown to meeting him began.
Isobel1965
Gold Member
Sweetie - that has taken me back to my first telephone conversation with my father after 20 years....only your's was a lot nicer.
How lovely of your dad to emphasise your blood ties and to tell you outright that he'd been waiting for you.
Bless you, darling!
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
How lovely of your dad to emphasise your blood ties and to tell you outright that he'd been waiting for you.
Bless you, darling!
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
KateF
Silver Member
Thanks Isobel- so sorry things weren't better with your father.
And hi Gen- I've known plenty of houses like the Boswells, and lived in some- but Jean's was more like a house on Brookside Close, if that helps the picture!
***********
I only had a one word description of Norman's wife. My Mum's ex-fiancee had met her briefly at a party and described her as "officious". I pictured a woman with severely swept back hair and twinset and pearls. A frosty businessman's wife. I wasn't looking forward to meeting her. The part of me that still somehow identified with my Mother saw her as someone on the outside of the triangle that had let to me and my brother beign born. At the same time I was glad that my father was insisting on "no more secrets". That felt right.
I wasn't expecting to speak to Rosemary before I met my father and she wasn't expecting to speak to me. But a couple of days before we were due to have our Sunday lunch, Norman rang while I was at Jean's to arrange what time to come and pick me up.
"I'm looking forward to meeting you” he’d said. Then, in a surprised tone, “Oh, Rosemary would like a word. I’m going to put her on”.
Rosemary has told me hundreds of times in the fifteen years since then, what happened. She’d been walking past his office while he was speaking to me, then, just on impulse come in and motioned to him to pass her the receiver. I didn’t know it then, but she was definitely not usually a woman of impulse. “You’re so spontaneous” she’ll say to me, “I’m too cautious”. She’d just had a sudden urge to speak to me before we met, she said.
I think in that first conversation I said something about being sorry to have brought everything back. It had been a difficult time she said. Her Yorkshire voice gentle and quavery. She didn’t sound officious at all. “I could write a book”, she said emphatically. I realised that there was still lots I didn’t know about the circumstances of my birth. All these stories which had been carrying on weaving themselves untold for years. I felt like I also knew about stories that twisted and turned and that it was difficult to tell, but needed to be heard. I still didn’t know how much of the story of my leaving home I would be able to tell in return. “It sounds unbelievable” Jean had cautioned my father when he first rang that week, “but it’s all true”.
Then there I was with Jean and her daughter Linzi in Topshop in the centre of Bradford. Saturday afternoon jostling and bustle. Teenage girls with crop tops and gelled back hair looking for sparkly outfits to go clubbing at “Maestros” or “Cloud Nine” that night. Me, in cover up denim shirt and leggings wondering what on earth you wore to meet your real Dad for the first time. “I wish I could lose two stone overnight” I said mournfully as we flicked through the rails; “too tarty”, “too small”, “too expensive”. Eventually I tried on a plain dark purple blouse and a long black skirt. Jean and Linzi nodded approvingly as I came out of the changing rooms, standing awkwardly, only half glancing at myself in the full length mirror outside the changing rooms. “That suits you” they said. I didn’t really have any smart clothes, very few clothes at all after having left home with hardly anything, kept saying “they’ll do for parties as well won’t they?” to convince myself that spending my entire weekly budget on an outfit was okay. I tugged at the buttoned up to the neck collar and cuffs feeling constrained and uncomfortable.
I was still tugging at them the next day. Pacing up and down in Jean’s kitchen. Watching the clock tick down the minutes both unbearably slowly, and too fast at the same time, until my father and Rosemary were due to come and pick me up.
And hi Gen- I've known plenty of houses like the Boswells, and lived in some- but Jean's was more like a house on Brookside Close, if that helps the picture!
***********
I only had a one word description of Norman's wife. My Mum's ex-fiancee had met her briefly at a party and described her as "officious". I pictured a woman with severely swept back hair and twinset and pearls. A frosty businessman's wife. I wasn't looking forward to meeting her. The part of me that still somehow identified with my Mother saw her as someone on the outside of the triangle that had let to me and my brother beign born. At the same time I was glad that my father was insisting on "no more secrets". That felt right.
I wasn't expecting to speak to Rosemary before I met my father and she wasn't expecting to speak to me. But a couple of days before we were due to have our Sunday lunch, Norman rang while I was at Jean's to arrange what time to come and pick me up.
"I'm looking forward to meeting you” he’d said. Then, in a surprised tone, “Oh, Rosemary would like a word. I’m going to put her on”.
Rosemary has told me hundreds of times in the fifteen years since then, what happened. She’d been walking past his office while he was speaking to me, then, just on impulse come in and motioned to him to pass her the receiver. I didn’t know it then, but she was definitely not usually a woman of impulse. “You’re so spontaneous” she’ll say to me, “I’m too cautious”. She’d just had a sudden urge to speak to me before we met, she said.
I think in that first conversation I said something about being sorry to have brought everything back. It had been a difficult time she said. Her Yorkshire voice gentle and quavery. She didn’t sound officious at all. “I could write a book”, she said emphatically. I realised that there was still lots I didn’t know about the circumstances of my birth. All these stories which had been carrying on weaving themselves untold for years. I felt like I also knew about stories that twisted and turned and that it was difficult to tell, but needed to be heard. I still didn’t know how much of the story of my leaving home I would be able to tell in return. “It sounds unbelievable” Jean had cautioned my father when he first rang that week, “but it’s all true”.
Then there I was with Jean and her daughter Linzi in Topshop in the centre of Bradford. Saturday afternoon jostling and bustle. Teenage girls with crop tops and gelled back hair looking for sparkly outfits to go clubbing at “Maestros” or “Cloud Nine” that night. Me, in cover up denim shirt and leggings wondering what on earth you wore to meet your real Dad for the first time. “I wish I could lose two stone overnight” I said mournfully as we flicked through the rails; “too tarty”, “too small”, “too expensive”. Eventually I tried on a plain dark purple blouse and a long black skirt. Jean and Linzi nodded approvingly as I came out of the changing rooms, standing awkwardly, only half glancing at myself in the full length mirror outside the changing rooms. “That suits you” they said. I didn’t really have any smart clothes, very few clothes at all after having left home with hardly anything, kept saying “they’ll do for parties as well won’t they?” to convince myself that spending my entire weekly budget on an outfit was okay. I tugged at the buttoned up to the neck collar and cuffs feeling constrained and uncomfortable.
I was still tugging at them the next day. Pacing up and down in Jean’s kitchen. Watching the clock tick down the minutes both unbearably slowly, and too fast at the same time, until my father and Rosemary were due to come and pick me up.
KateF
Silver Member
I'm in the living room, turning round every few seconds to look behind me out of the window. I see a pale blue Rover pull up across the street. A middle aged man and a woman in it, looking through the windscreen as if they're searching for something.
"It's them!" I shout to Jean and sit back down in the armchair.
Rosemary remembers this; "the first thing I saw" she says "was you jumping up at the window, then straight back down again".
I have agonised with Jean over the etiquette of greeting them. Should I answer the door? Wouldn't it be better if she answers it? What if they think she's me, even though she's a woman in her late forties? Do I stand up when they come in, or stay sitting? Will there be a hug or not a hug? I even practiced standing to say hello or sitting to say hello.
I'm not very socially adept as it is, not comfortable enough with my own body to negotiate the spaces between people, to read the gaps and the subtle leanings that signal how far to move in or stay back. Focusing on the mechanics of the greeting also gave me something to occupy my brain. Where will our bodies go? is an easier question to try and answer than Who are we to each other?
The doorbell rings.
My heart is hammering.
Jean crosses the hall, a smile ready on her face.
They have gone to the side door. They will be coming into the kitchen. I follow.
A blur of voices in the white tiled room; "I'm Jean" "I'm Norman, this is Rosemary" and someone, me? Jean? Norman or Rosemary? "-Kate".
And amid the "nice to meet you" and "it's foggy" and "do you want a coffee before you set off?" in those first few seconds we are all looking for the same thing. Actually, correction, nearly the same thing.
I am studying Norman's face, looking for myself.
And I can see me, in the long nose, the grey-blue eyes and something else too. An expression or a shadow across the brow line. At the same time, I'm thinking that he looks like how he sounded on the phone; down to earth, kind, Yorkshire business man in his sixties. Balding right over the crown with dark hair left at the sides, casual grey jacket, flannels, maybe pale blue shirt unbuttoned at the neck, brown loafers. His chest is heaving, he's out of breath, Rosemary saying something about "it's the change from outside to inside-catch his breath- emphysema". He and I catch each others eyes, smile.
If this was a film, brass band music might be playing now. Norman's theme it'd say in the score, "The Old Rugged Cross" maybe. One of the tunes on the cassette of brass band music in his car. Queensbury, this village, has a famous mill band that recently went over to New York to play at the Carnegie Hall, amid speculation about whether they'd have to change their name for the trip (they're called the Black Dyke Mills band...which it was thought might not quite translate culturally...).
Actually, we would save that music for later. It's a perfect accompaniment to the car journey from Jean's to the pub.
Some other director might put swelling strings on the soundtrack now as we stand in the kitchen, forming a ragged circle, assessing each other out of the corners of our eyes. But this is Bradford. It didn't feel like swelling strings were waiting to burst through. Outside it is windy, leaves are scuttling across the path. That's the sound, that'll do.
Rosemary is smiling, speaking easily across the gaps. Loose brown and pepper perm, unexpected snub nose and twinkling eyes in a lightly lined face. Red wool coat, a scarf maybe. She's wrapped up. Looks warm in both senses. "You're the spitting image of your mother" she says to me and Jean. "It's like Jennifer's in the room". I know I look like my mother facially, and I can tell Rosemary is saying it because she's honest and because it's too obvious to ignore. At the same time I want her and Norman to see my resemblance to him, not have it overshadowed by the ghosts of the past.
As soon as my mother is conjured into the room, so is her affair with Norman and the fact that I haven't seen her for over a year. She is an absent presence. In the film version, maybe we'd cut to an old photograph of her in the seventies. In a brown and orange room probably. Hair cut in the Purdy from the Avengers bob. Then fade into my face. A seamless edit.
"We haven't told Andrew" Rosemary is saying to Jean. "He drives alot for his job, he's a sales rep, so we didn't want him getting upset, thinking about it on motorways. We're going to tell him at the weekend".
This couple seem so solid and so considerate. So different from the parents I grew up with.
As we drive over the moors in thick, white fog, Rosemary still talks the most, while Norman steers carefully. The car smells of real leather, reminding me of the car Jim drove us to Germany in when I left home. I'm glad of the tangible memory. Of the split second return to that time over a year ago. Anything that helps me feel that everything really did happen is a relief rather than painful.
Both Norman and Rosemary laugh and look astonished when I tell them the story of the father quest. From the coincidence of my Mum's fiancee, to the company microfiches and their obstructive ex-neighbour ("Typical Jack that" says Norman). I feel very at ease with both of them. "I didn't know if I was going to tell you the whole story, but I've decided I'm going to tell you everything" I suddenly announce.
"It's them!" I shout to Jean and sit back down in the armchair.
Rosemary remembers this; "the first thing I saw" she says "was you jumping up at the window, then straight back down again".
I have agonised with Jean over the etiquette of greeting them. Should I answer the door? Wouldn't it be better if she answers it? What if they think she's me, even though she's a woman in her late forties? Do I stand up when they come in, or stay sitting? Will there be a hug or not a hug? I even practiced standing to say hello or sitting to say hello.
I'm not very socially adept as it is, not comfortable enough with my own body to negotiate the spaces between people, to read the gaps and the subtle leanings that signal how far to move in or stay back. Focusing on the mechanics of the greeting also gave me something to occupy my brain. Where will our bodies go? is an easier question to try and answer than Who are we to each other?
The doorbell rings.
My heart is hammering.
Jean crosses the hall, a smile ready on her face.
They have gone to the side door. They will be coming into the kitchen. I follow.
A blur of voices in the white tiled room; "I'm Jean" "I'm Norman, this is Rosemary" and someone, me? Jean? Norman or Rosemary? "-Kate".
And amid the "nice to meet you" and "it's foggy" and "do you want a coffee before you set off?" in those first few seconds we are all looking for the same thing. Actually, correction, nearly the same thing.
I am studying Norman's face, looking for myself.
And I can see me, in the long nose, the grey-blue eyes and something else too. An expression or a shadow across the brow line. At the same time, I'm thinking that he looks like how he sounded on the phone; down to earth, kind, Yorkshire business man in his sixties. Balding right over the crown with dark hair left at the sides, casual grey jacket, flannels, maybe pale blue shirt unbuttoned at the neck, brown loafers. His chest is heaving, he's out of breath, Rosemary saying something about "it's the change from outside to inside-catch his breath- emphysema". He and I catch each others eyes, smile.
If this was a film, brass band music might be playing now. Norman's theme it'd say in the score, "The Old Rugged Cross" maybe. One of the tunes on the cassette of brass band music in his car. Queensbury, this village, has a famous mill band that recently went over to New York to play at the Carnegie Hall, amid speculation about whether they'd have to change their name for the trip (they're called the Black Dyke Mills band...which it was thought might not quite translate culturally...).
Actually, we would save that music for later. It's a perfect accompaniment to the car journey from Jean's to the pub.
Some other director might put swelling strings on the soundtrack now as we stand in the kitchen, forming a ragged circle, assessing each other out of the corners of our eyes. But this is Bradford. It didn't feel like swelling strings were waiting to burst through. Outside it is windy, leaves are scuttling across the path. That's the sound, that'll do.
Rosemary is smiling, speaking easily across the gaps. Loose brown and pepper perm, unexpected snub nose and twinkling eyes in a lightly lined face. Red wool coat, a scarf maybe. She's wrapped up. Looks warm in both senses. "You're the spitting image of your mother" she says to me and Jean. "It's like Jennifer's in the room". I know I look like my mother facially, and I can tell Rosemary is saying it because she's honest and because it's too obvious to ignore. At the same time I want her and Norman to see my resemblance to him, not have it overshadowed by the ghosts of the past.
As soon as my mother is conjured into the room, so is her affair with Norman and the fact that I haven't seen her for over a year. She is an absent presence. In the film version, maybe we'd cut to an old photograph of her in the seventies. In a brown and orange room probably. Hair cut in the Purdy from the Avengers bob. Then fade into my face. A seamless edit.
"We haven't told Andrew" Rosemary is saying to Jean. "He drives alot for his job, he's a sales rep, so we didn't want him getting upset, thinking about it on motorways. We're going to tell him at the weekend".
This couple seem so solid and so considerate. So different from the parents I grew up with.
As we drive over the moors in thick, white fog, Rosemary still talks the most, while Norman steers carefully. The car smells of real leather, reminding me of the car Jim drove us to Germany in when I left home. I'm glad of the tangible memory. Of the split second return to that time over a year ago. Anything that helps me feel that everything really did happen is a relief rather than painful.
Both Norman and Rosemary laugh and look astonished when I tell them the story of the father quest. From the coincidence of my Mum's fiancee, to the company microfiches and their obstructive ex-neighbour ("Typical Jack that" says Norman). I feel very at ease with both of them. "I didn't know if I was going to tell you the whole story, but I've decided I'm going to tell you everything" I suddenly announce.
Last edited:
KateF
Silver Member
Thanks Gen for being with me, though I nearly disappeared! Felt odd to write this while my twin brother was suddenly having a crisis about it sixteen years on. All gone completely quiet there now as if it never happened, which is very typical of my family. Will carry on where I left off.
*************
As we turn into the car park of The Smiths Arms, Norman points to a small grey village church across the road;
"This is a good pub for us to come to because your great grandparents got married there" he says.
I feel the disorientating sense of being part of a tradition I didn't know existed. And the grounding sense of him connecting me to it.
He leans on the pub counter, his shoulders heaving again, as the warm air hits his lungs. "We'll sit down" says Rosemary, "It'll take him a couple of minutes". I look back at him from the rectangular oak table. I have felt his strength of character already but now I can see his vulnerability.
He is sat next to Rosemary, I am opposite them across the table. Him with his pint of bitter, she with her sherry and me with a diet coke. Observers would probably take us for grandparents and grandaughter, a normal family out for a Sunday carvery.
If they passed the table, snatches of conversation would sound like that too; "What universities have you put down on your form?", "You could do a business course?", "I want to be a journalist I think".
Other snippets of conversation would be harder to place. There are lots of exchanges of information, looking for connections, coincidences. Norman says he was nicknamed "Hap" by his friends when he was at school, short for "Happy", because he always seemed to be in a good mood and often hummed and whistled to himself. "I do that as well!" I said, almost triumphantly. "He was really good at school like you" says Rosemary, "He passed for grammar school three times with a red tick but his mother couldn't afford to send him". "Being good at school" was never something that anyone in the family I'd grown up with had praised me for, in fact it had always been resented in a strange way. Now, here was Rosemary sounding proud of Norman, and connecting my academic success with his.
She said she'd carried the piece from the "Telegraph and Argus" about my running away, in her purse. "I didn't tell Norman but I kept it in my purse ever since. I only took it out the other day after I'd spoken to you". I was touched that Rosemary, who after all had no direct connection with me had done that and also amazed that at the time I'd left home and thought I was completely on my own, my real father was reading about me;
"When it said you'd got 6 As in your GCSEs, I said to Norman 'She's got your brains', but when the next day there was another article and it said you'd been found and may go home I said to Norman 'may go home? there's something funny there, what does 'may go home' mean?' but we thought it must just be a teenage tantrum and all over and done with".
We all paused, knowing that statement was evidently very wrong. I knew it was time to tell the story of my leaving home. Jean's words echoing in my head "It sounds unbelievable because it is unbelievable, but it's true". I hesitate, stumble over my words, take deep breaths. From my relationship with Jim that summer, to finding the wedding certificate, to discovering my parents were swingers who might have blackmailed sex partners.
I skip over lots of the detail of that. I don't want to tell Norman that at all really, but it's so crucial to explain why I left. I flash forward in my mind. What if in years, when I'm not around to do anything about it, someone shatters the last illusions someone has about me? Someone I have loved and lost and kept preserved in my memory. who has kept their memories of me intact, preserved under the dusts sheets of no new information. In a Yorkshire pub on a November day I feel like I am about to press eject on the video of Norman and Mum's relationship, which is playing on a loop somewhere in their heads with increasingly grainy images and a seventies soundtrack.
All projection. It's me who can't really bear to have the present superimposed over my memories, or to think it will happen to Jim. The me in his head will be disappearing and if I don't exist there then where am I? I'm going to make my mother in Norman's head disappear and if she isn't there then where is she?
My sense of self is still too much made up of what happened over a year ago. Because I have hardly any possessions and no photographs, I haven't got artefacts, just memories. What happened was like a bomb, with a bright, white glare illuminating everything for a second after the explosion, then darkness. Everyone was thrown away from it and we're still moving in slow motion from that point now, hands up in front of us, faces blank with shock. I imagine our birth as being that point in the parallel story of Norman and my mother, or maybe the uncovering of their affair...or it's ending.
I tell them about leaving home with Jim, meeting him at the airport and travelling to Germany. Then about Jim sending me back to England to draw money on one of my stepDad's cheques, and about being arrested in a branch of the Halifax Building Society in Blackpool. I don't try and justify what I did, except to say that I was completely stupid and had still been in shock and angry about the things I'd found out. Norman must sense that I am worried about his and Rosemary's reaction. Unexpectedly he reaches across the dark wood of the pub table and takes my hand in his. My hand relaxes into the warmth of his. Acceptance. The feeling I didn't know I'd been looking for but so desperately wanted.
*************
As we turn into the car park of The Smiths Arms, Norman points to a small grey village church across the road;
"This is a good pub for us to come to because your great grandparents got married there" he says.
I feel the disorientating sense of being part of a tradition I didn't know existed. And the grounding sense of him connecting me to it.
He leans on the pub counter, his shoulders heaving again, as the warm air hits his lungs. "We'll sit down" says Rosemary, "It'll take him a couple of minutes". I look back at him from the rectangular oak table. I have felt his strength of character already but now I can see his vulnerability.
He is sat next to Rosemary, I am opposite them across the table. Him with his pint of bitter, she with her sherry and me with a diet coke. Observers would probably take us for grandparents and grandaughter, a normal family out for a Sunday carvery.
If they passed the table, snatches of conversation would sound like that too; "What universities have you put down on your form?", "You could do a business course?", "I want to be a journalist I think".
Other snippets of conversation would be harder to place. There are lots of exchanges of information, looking for connections, coincidences. Norman says he was nicknamed "Hap" by his friends when he was at school, short for "Happy", because he always seemed to be in a good mood and often hummed and whistled to himself. "I do that as well!" I said, almost triumphantly. "He was really good at school like you" says Rosemary, "He passed for grammar school three times with a red tick but his mother couldn't afford to send him". "Being good at school" was never something that anyone in the family I'd grown up with had praised me for, in fact it had always been resented in a strange way. Now, here was Rosemary sounding proud of Norman, and connecting my academic success with his.
She said she'd carried the piece from the "Telegraph and Argus" about my running away, in her purse. "I didn't tell Norman but I kept it in my purse ever since. I only took it out the other day after I'd spoken to you". I was touched that Rosemary, who after all had no direct connection with me had done that and also amazed that at the time I'd left home and thought I was completely on my own, my real father was reading about me;
"When it said you'd got 6 As in your GCSEs, I said to Norman 'She's got your brains', but when the next day there was another article and it said you'd been found and may go home I said to Norman 'may go home? there's something funny there, what does 'may go home' mean?' but we thought it must just be a teenage tantrum and all over and done with".
We all paused, knowing that statement was evidently very wrong. I knew it was time to tell the story of my leaving home. Jean's words echoing in my head "It sounds unbelievable because it is unbelievable, but it's true". I hesitate, stumble over my words, take deep breaths. From my relationship with Jim that summer, to finding the wedding certificate, to discovering my parents were swingers who might have blackmailed sex partners.
I skip over lots of the detail of that. I don't want to tell Norman that at all really, but it's so crucial to explain why I left. I flash forward in my mind. What if in years, when I'm not around to do anything about it, someone shatters the last illusions someone has about me? Someone I have loved and lost and kept preserved in my memory. who has kept their memories of me intact, preserved under the dusts sheets of no new information. In a Yorkshire pub on a November day I feel like I am about to press eject on the video of Norman and Mum's relationship, which is playing on a loop somewhere in their heads with increasingly grainy images and a seventies soundtrack.
All projection. It's me who can't really bear to have the present superimposed over my memories, or to think it will happen to Jim. The me in his head will be disappearing and if I don't exist there then where am I? I'm going to make my mother in Norman's head disappear and if she isn't there then where is she?
My sense of self is still too much made up of what happened over a year ago. Because I have hardly any possessions and no photographs, I haven't got artefacts, just memories. What happened was like a bomb, with a bright, white glare illuminating everything for a second after the explosion, then darkness. Everyone was thrown away from it and we're still moving in slow motion from that point now, hands up in front of us, faces blank with shock. I imagine our birth as being that point in the parallel story of Norman and my mother, or maybe the uncovering of their affair...or it's ending.
I tell them about leaving home with Jim, meeting him at the airport and travelling to Germany. Then about Jim sending me back to England to draw money on one of my stepDad's cheques, and about being arrested in a branch of the Halifax Building Society in Blackpool. I don't try and justify what I did, except to say that I was completely stupid and had still been in shock and angry about the things I'd found out. Norman must sense that I am worried about his and Rosemary's reaction. Unexpectedly he reaches across the dark wood of the pub table and takes my hand in his. My hand relaxes into the warmth of his. Acceptance. The feeling I didn't know I'd been looking for but so desperately wanted.
KateF
Silver Member
So my father is holding my hand for the first time and I am seventeen.
"You're pleased she's got in touch aren't you?" Rosemary had said when he sat in his office holding my letter. "I am" he had said. I can feel that he is pleased as we sit here in the pub.
There is more talk and more laughter. "You have dimples!" he exclaims, happily. I don't think anyone has particularly pointed them out before. He has them too. Another connection.
I feel like I need to say that I don't want a "family thing", that one failed family is enough. That I just got in touch because "I wanted to get to know you", I say, trying to encompass Rosemary in my gaze, but ending up looking at Norman. "It's hard to avoid a family when you are in one" he replies. He is stating a fact, without rancour. But I picture my bedsit, my one room where I decide when I come in, or leave, when to eat, when to sleep. It's my safe space and I know that as long as I have that I will be okay. I know that I need to have that. A feeling like fear rises at the thought of giving away the independence that has been so hard won.
Later when he and Rosemary have dropped me back off at Jean's and Norman has said he will ring later in the week, and I have waved them goodbye from the lounge window as their Rover drives into the darkness, I know that he was pleased and I know that all three of us got on, but still I don't know for sure that he will ring. My heart pounds at the thought that he might not.
I tell Jean about our conversations, I tell her how he held my hand across the table and how I said I didn't want to be part of another family. "Just take it slowly" she says "Take it as it comes".
Later that week I write in my diary;
3rd December
He rung on Tuesday and spoke to Jean. He said to her that he thought I bottled things up (not demonstratively emotional) which of course corresponds to what my Stepdad, Jim, June etc have said. Jean said to him I would be when I was more secure. He said he and Rosemary had been happy about Sunday. They have to tell their son now. I'm so glad he rung. I like him already, in fact I could love him. His wife is so brave to meet me. She's said she's wept buckets and could write a book. She says we were never forgotten. Although all this has raised more issues than I considered, I'm glad I did it.
"You're pleased she's got in touch aren't you?" Rosemary had said when he sat in his office holding my letter. "I am" he had said. I can feel that he is pleased as we sit here in the pub.
There is more talk and more laughter. "You have dimples!" he exclaims, happily. I don't think anyone has particularly pointed them out before. He has them too. Another connection.
I feel like I need to say that I don't want a "family thing", that one failed family is enough. That I just got in touch because "I wanted to get to know you", I say, trying to encompass Rosemary in my gaze, but ending up looking at Norman. "It's hard to avoid a family when you are in one" he replies. He is stating a fact, without rancour. But I picture my bedsit, my one room where I decide when I come in, or leave, when to eat, when to sleep. It's my safe space and I know that as long as I have that I will be okay. I know that I need to have that. A feeling like fear rises at the thought of giving away the independence that has been so hard won.
Later when he and Rosemary have dropped me back off at Jean's and Norman has said he will ring later in the week, and I have waved them goodbye from the lounge window as their Rover drives into the darkness, I know that he was pleased and I know that all three of us got on, but still I don't know for sure that he will ring. My heart pounds at the thought that he might not.
I tell Jean about our conversations, I tell her how he held my hand across the table and how I said I didn't want to be part of another family. "Just take it slowly" she says "Take it as it comes".
Later that week I write in my diary;
3rd December
He rung on Tuesday and spoke to Jean. He said to her that he thought I bottled things up (not demonstratively emotional) which of course corresponds to what my Stepdad, Jim, June etc have said. Jean said to him I would be when I was more secure. He said he and Rosemary had been happy about Sunday. They have to tell their son now. I'm so glad he rung. I like him already, in fact I could love him. His wife is so brave to meet me. She's said she's wept buckets and could write a book. She says we were never forgotten. Although all this has raised more issues than I considered, I'm glad I did it.
KateF
Silver Member
Thanks Kerry. Good to have a fellow Bradfordian on board!
I think there'll probably be about eight-ten more installments ish.
And Gen, it's not too painful in the actual writing- in a weird way, it's more the thought of stopping. I think though I'm going to try get a move on with it over the next few days.
I think there'll probably be about eight-ten more installments ish.
And Gen, it's not too painful in the actual writing- in a weird way, it's more the thought of stopping. I think though I'm going to try get a move on with it over the next few days.
KateF
Silver Member
And now it is Sunday again and Norman is picking me up. Just him this time. It feels right this way round. That it was him and Rosemary together first “no more secrets” he had said, but that now we got to have some time together, just the two of us. I remember wearing a bright green v necked sweater. My cheerful top I always thought of it as. Sat in the front of the car, feeling comfortable. He’s less chatty than Rosemary but we talk easily. I don’t feel like I have to censor my thoughts with him, or my sometimes convoluted way of putting things. He just gets it. I am almost teasing with metaphors. Knowing they’re ridiculous. But he joins me in them. This is still new for me. “Imagine if there was a butterfly” I say “and it had been in a cage before, if it got the chance to be around a new butterfly…er…family, it wouldn’t want to be in a cage anymore, but it could fly around, swoop in and visit”.
”But if the butterfly is part of the family, it can’t really not be in the family. If it’s around, then it is in the family. It’s not possible any other way” Norman replied. I heard the certainty in his voice and I believed him. But even if I wanted to be caught and brought fully into his life, I couldn’t allow myself to say it. I was going to have to be coaxed in. Somehow I knew he could be patient enough.
The pub, The Royal is on the main road from Huddersfield to Halifax. Old fashioned. Brasses on the walls, red wallpaper, swirly red carpets. I’m still getting used to the distinctive pub smell. Smoke and beer and the Sunday roast. We both order beef. It comes with roast potatoes, peas as green as my jumper, a huge, billowing Yorkshire pudding.
He talks about my Mum. How she’d just lost her father, he dropped dead suddenly on a golf course. They went out for drinks at first he says. Then her fiancé broke off their engagement. He was a shoulder to cry on. It turned into something else. Business trips away. I picture hotel corridors at night, notes in briefcases. Two or three years it went on. Then she was pregnant. It was a shock. They’d rented a flat to meet in, near Lister Park in Bradford. He and Rosemary had been just drifting along. He thought she’d be alright when he left. He remembers her, just sat on the settee, in tears. His sisters coming round to the flat, refusing to talk to him while my mother was there. His mother, shocked, just shocked. “This isn’t you Norman…you’ve always been so responsible, this isn’t you”. Norman who sent all his money home from the army home to his Mum when she was on her own still bringing up Eric the youngest. Norman who everyone else in the family went to for advice.
It’s funny that I’ve blanked out how I felt while he was telling me the story. I have more detail now, filled in over the years by Rosemary. I don’t think he could have said this to me, though somehow it feels like he implied it. “He always said Jennifer would have killed him within five years” Rosemary has said. Not literally. Just- younger man, older woman. “She offered it on a plate, what man wouldn’t take it?” Rosemary said. They used to meet at Yeadon Tarn. Walk round the lake. Watching the ducks and the swans. Once Rosemary’s brother saw them in the Otley Chevin Pub. Thought it was just a business meeting. “What’s up with Jennifer? I remember saying to Norman, she’s a funny one, she’ll see me coming into the office and just duck away. But I still didn’t guess, I was so complacent, I was stupid”. Rosemary will half-laugh, half-sigh.
He was only gone a week in the end. My Mum, left behind in the flat that was meant to be for both of them, longing for him back. I imagine that with no difficulty. Me and Jim were together a week after I left home. A dream, then chaos, structures toppled and nothing ever the same again. Except Norman went back to Rosemary and the life they had before. Although; “It took me five years to feel normal again” she would tell me eventually. But this time round, in the first telling in a pub with the man who left seventeen years earlier, my sympathies are with my Mum. On her own one January in 1975. A baby that she didn’t know yet was two babies due in four months. And I still don’t know where Jim is, but Norman is here. Seventeen years later it feels like I am getting something that should have been my mother’s. But also that this reunion is the inevitable picking up of a thread that couldn’t have stayed hanging forever. All secrets must come out in the end, I think.
He and Rosemary offered to bring us up Norman says and I raise my eyebrows. He nods. We both acknowledge in that moment what an amazing woman his wife is. My mother refused the offer and that’s when he bought a house for us in Pudsey and paid a weekly income which only stopped when she married three years later. “I never met your Stepdad” said Norman, shaking his head “but I knew of his family of course with his father having been Lord Mayor”. He looks pained when I tell him about my Stepfather’s phonecalls after I’d left home. I don’t feel angry, but somewhere deep inside I’m saying on behalf of the three year old me, sitting oblivious in a wood panelled courtroom as the adoption order is made, “This is the wrong decision and one day we’ll all regret it”.
Driving back he stops the car outside a newsagents, gives me a five pound note and asks if I’d mind going in and getting him a packet of Embassy cigarettes. I walk purposefully into the shop, glad of the errand. I am marvelling at this ordinary thing. I’m getting my father a packet of cigarettes. I almost want to tell the shopkeeper as I ask for them; “I’ve never done this before, even though it’s for my Dad”. As I hand them over it feels good to be able to do something for him. Though I’m also aware the cigarettes are a symbol of defiance for him. Carrying on doing something he wants to do, even as his chest heaves and his lungs are sticky with tar. Defiant self destructiveness. I recognise that from Jim. Or maybe from myself.
Stopping the car on the street opposite my bedsit, which I point out to him through the window. He’s already said he won’t come in, the stairs would be too much for his breathing.
He gets a white envelope from his inside pocket it and passes it across. “Oh!” I say surprised “Wha-?”. “It’s fifty pounds” he says “It’s what I give Andrew on his birthdays, I’m sure you’ve got some things you could spend it on”. This is completely unexpected. I try to refuse. Not a polite, no but really yes refusal, I really mean that I don’t want to have his money. I feel like I’m doing alright on my own, don’t want to compromise my independence. It’s partly pride, partly not feeling like I deserve it, partly not wanting to feel obligated in a way. But he is insistent. Says he wants me to be on an equal footing with Andrew. That I can use it to pay bills. I give in. The money will be useful and I don’t feel able to stand my ground. “I’ll ring you at Jeans on Tuesday” he says, and leans across to kiss my cheek. A flicker of him saying goodbye to my mother after some assignation.
I wave as I walk across to the terraced house where my bedsit is on the third floor at Number 2 Mount Pleasant Street.
The Crowded House song “Weather with you” was always playing on the radio then, and felt like it was directed at me because of how it mentioned Mount Pleasant Street, even if the number wasn’t right;
Walking round the room singing
Stormy Weather
at 57 Mount Pleasant Street,
Years later I read in the papers how the former cabinet minister Clare Short said when she met the son she had given up at birth that it’s like falling in love, and I knew what she meant. How you feel you know the other person magically well, even though you’ve only just met. You look for connections and ties that will explain or justify or allow you to have the depth of feelings that you’ve got after such a short time.
Now it’s the same room but everything’s different,
you can fight the sleep but not the dream”.
And everything did feel different as I opened the door after that afternoon with Norman. I still lived on my own in one room, but suddenly didn’t feel as alone any more. It was both wonderful and terrifying…
”But if the butterfly is part of the family, it can’t really not be in the family. If it’s around, then it is in the family. It’s not possible any other way” Norman replied. I heard the certainty in his voice and I believed him. But even if I wanted to be caught and brought fully into his life, I couldn’t allow myself to say it. I was going to have to be coaxed in. Somehow I knew he could be patient enough.
The pub, The Royal is on the main road from Huddersfield to Halifax. Old fashioned. Brasses on the walls, red wallpaper, swirly red carpets. I’m still getting used to the distinctive pub smell. Smoke and beer and the Sunday roast. We both order beef. It comes with roast potatoes, peas as green as my jumper, a huge, billowing Yorkshire pudding.
He talks about my Mum. How she’d just lost her father, he dropped dead suddenly on a golf course. They went out for drinks at first he says. Then her fiancé broke off their engagement. He was a shoulder to cry on. It turned into something else. Business trips away. I picture hotel corridors at night, notes in briefcases. Two or three years it went on. Then she was pregnant. It was a shock. They’d rented a flat to meet in, near Lister Park in Bradford. He and Rosemary had been just drifting along. He thought she’d be alright when he left. He remembers her, just sat on the settee, in tears. His sisters coming round to the flat, refusing to talk to him while my mother was there. His mother, shocked, just shocked. “This isn’t you Norman…you’ve always been so responsible, this isn’t you”. Norman who sent all his money home from the army home to his Mum when she was on her own still bringing up Eric the youngest. Norman who everyone else in the family went to for advice.
It’s funny that I’ve blanked out how I felt while he was telling me the story. I have more detail now, filled in over the years by Rosemary. I don’t think he could have said this to me, though somehow it feels like he implied it. “He always said Jennifer would have killed him within five years” Rosemary has said. Not literally. Just- younger man, older woman. “She offered it on a plate, what man wouldn’t take it?” Rosemary said. They used to meet at Yeadon Tarn. Walk round the lake. Watching the ducks and the swans. Once Rosemary’s brother saw them in the Otley Chevin Pub. Thought it was just a business meeting. “What’s up with Jennifer? I remember saying to Norman, she’s a funny one, she’ll see me coming into the office and just duck away. But I still didn’t guess, I was so complacent, I was stupid”. Rosemary will half-laugh, half-sigh.
He was only gone a week in the end. My Mum, left behind in the flat that was meant to be for both of them, longing for him back. I imagine that with no difficulty. Me and Jim were together a week after I left home. A dream, then chaos, structures toppled and nothing ever the same again. Except Norman went back to Rosemary and the life they had before. Although; “It took me five years to feel normal again” she would tell me eventually. But this time round, in the first telling in a pub with the man who left seventeen years earlier, my sympathies are with my Mum. On her own one January in 1975. A baby that she didn’t know yet was two babies due in four months. And I still don’t know where Jim is, but Norman is here. Seventeen years later it feels like I am getting something that should have been my mother’s. But also that this reunion is the inevitable picking up of a thread that couldn’t have stayed hanging forever. All secrets must come out in the end, I think.
He and Rosemary offered to bring us up Norman says and I raise my eyebrows. He nods. We both acknowledge in that moment what an amazing woman his wife is. My mother refused the offer and that’s when he bought a house for us in Pudsey and paid a weekly income which only stopped when she married three years later. “I never met your Stepdad” said Norman, shaking his head “but I knew of his family of course with his father having been Lord Mayor”. He looks pained when I tell him about my Stepfather’s phonecalls after I’d left home. I don’t feel angry, but somewhere deep inside I’m saying on behalf of the three year old me, sitting oblivious in a wood panelled courtroom as the adoption order is made, “This is the wrong decision and one day we’ll all regret it”.
Driving back he stops the car outside a newsagents, gives me a five pound note and asks if I’d mind going in and getting him a packet of Embassy cigarettes. I walk purposefully into the shop, glad of the errand. I am marvelling at this ordinary thing. I’m getting my father a packet of cigarettes. I almost want to tell the shopkeeper as I ask for them; “I’ve never done this before, even though it’s for my Dad”. As I hand them over it feels good to be able to do something for him. Though I’m also aware the cigarettes are a symbol of defiance for him. Carrying on doing something he wants to do, even as his chest heaves and his lungs are sticky with tar. Defiant self destructiveness. I recognise that from Jim. Or maybe from myself.
Stopping the car on the street opposite my bedsit, which I point out to him through the window. He’s already said he won’t come in, the stairs would be too much for his breathing.
He gets a white envelope from his inside pocket it and passes it across. “Oh!” I say surprised “Wha-?”. “It’s fifty pounds” he says “It’s what I give Andrew on his birthdays, I’m sure you’ve got some things you could spend it on”. This is completely unexpected. I try to refuse. Not a polite, no but really yes refusal, I really mean that I don’t want to have his money. I feel like I’m doing alright on my own, don’t want to compromise my independence. It’s partly pride, partly not feeling like I deserve it, partly not wanting to feel obligated in a way. But he is insistent. Says he wants me to be on an equal footing with Andrew. That I can use it to pay bills. I give in. The money will be useful and I don’t feel able to stand my ground. “I’ll ring you at Jeans on Tuesday” he says, and leans across to kiss my cheek. A flicker of him saying goodbye to my mother after some assignation.
I wave as I walk across to the terraced house where my bedsit is on the third floor at Number 2 Mount Pleasant Street.
The Crowded House song “Weather with you” was always playing on the radio then, and felt like it was directed at me because of how it mentioned Mount Pleasant Street, even if the number wasn’t right;
Walking round the room singing
Stormy Weather
at 57 Mount Pleasant Street,
Years later I read in the papers how the former cabinet minister Clare Short said when she met the son she had given up at birth that it’s like falling in love, and I knew what she meant. How you feel you know the other person magically well, even though you’ve only just met. You look for connections and ties that will explain or justify or allow you to have the depth of feelings that you’ve got after such a short time.
Now it’s the same room but everything’s different,
you can fight the sleep but not the dream”.
And everything did feel different as I opened the door after that afternoon with Norman. I still lived on my own in one room, but suddenly didn’t feel as alone any more. It was both wonderful and terrifying…
KateF
Silver Member
Another week passes.
I go to school, do essays about Othello and the Napoleonic wars, get a turkey sandwich everyday from the bakery on the way home and sometimes fear that Norman will just disappear.
But the next Sunday, we’re in another pub, this time with Rosemary again.
They both laugh ruefully as Rosemary tells me how she and Norman had been all ready to tell their son Andrew and his wife that I’d got in touch. They’d invited them round for tea and been nervous.
Andrew’s first words had been “We’ve got some news for you”.
A sitcom moment as Norman and Rosemary looked at each other, both thinking “well, so have we”.
Andrew and Jackie told them that Jackie was pregnant.
Rosemary laughed but winced at the memory as she related how Andrew had said “Oh. You don’t seem very excited. Jackie’s Mum and Dad were much more enthusiastic”.
They had toasted the new baby with wine over dinner. But Norman and Rosemary must have been thinking about an even more unexpected new addition.
“We couldn’t say anything then” said Rosemary, “we’ll leave it for a bit longer. Don’t want Andrew having everything on his mind when he’s driving up and down the motorway.
Did I feel guilt? I don’t remember. But I know I felt a warm glow when Rosemary said with genuine brightness “So, you’re going to be an Auntie”.
I imagined a baby growing up calling me Auntie Kate. Never knowing that I hadn’t always been part of the family.
I was beginning to feel even more comfortable with them now. Used to them. That time, Rosemary carefully wrapped two of the huge Barnsley lamb chops that she and I hadn’t been able to manage up in a white napkin. “Take them” she insisted, “You can have them for your tea later, you won’t need to heat them back up”. I’d told them about the kitchen in my block of bedsits. How mould and damp covered the walls. They’d both shaken their heads. “It’s a good job you get free school lunches” Norman had said. “You’ll be able to come round and have a proper meal and a bath at our house once we’ve been able to tell Andrew” said Rosemary.
It was nearly Christmas and the following Saturday I went into town and bought a little green plastic tree, some red bows, a couple of red and gold baubles and a jolly Santa decoration. I dressed it carefully and put it on the wooden table that, along with the single bed and a chair constituted the furniture in my bedsit. As I watched my black and white telly, I kept looking at it. It made the small room seem cosy. Adverts on the telly showing families shopping and unwrapping presents. Normality. A world away, somewhere else, but it felt like I was getting a glimpse into how some of it might be possible for me. But it also felt very far away at the same time.
Two families I was disconnected from. One that I’d left, and one that I still couldn’t join. Somewhere in between them, I was in limbo.
One day in the week before Christmas, I went up to Jean’s. I felt like she’d disconnected from me in a way. Before, there’d been a sense of “us”, both knowing what it was like to have had the structures of our lives ripped apart, still trying to make sense of what we’d lost. Now she didn’t talk as if “we both know what it’s like” any more. I got a subtle sense of her shifting away, whether in response to the way that Norman and Rosemary were taking on the surrogate family role she had had, or because what had happened to me somehow reinforced the fact that the sense of unity she so missed in her marriage wasn’t suddenly going to be restored with a miracle reunion. I felt like someone on a stormy lake, making a crossing from one rescue raft to another. Amid the spray and the confusion, the raft I’m stepping from is pulling away before I’ve reached the next. Before I even know if the next one is waiting.
But she held a brightly wrapped present out to me as I came into the kitchen. “Norman rang before to check I’d got this. He’d left it behind the dustbin, he must have come when we were out shopping”. She was smiling, and I took the parcel in my hands. It was something soft and squashy. I read the handwritten label; “His name’s Fred and he’s a Reynard” and thought it must be some sort of family heirloom, although it didn’t feel like a photograph. I ripped the wrapping open and exclaimed in surprise and pleasure. It was a toy fox. A soft, brown fur fox sitting on his hind legs, looking somehow wise and friendly at the same time. Like Norman. I felt very touched. And somehow I was suddenly a child again. It was the gift a Dad might give to his young daughter. It was unexpected, this softness, from a man who seemed so down to earth. I sat with Fred on my knee all night, stroking his ears. Thought of all the occasions that presents had been missed.
Christmas Day 1992.
I suppose I should have written before. Up until now I’ve been V depressed about Christmas. The mocks finished, the last week sped by and I realised my aloneness. This week I’ve been trying to get out and about to not be alone. Went to Helen’s, Amanda’s, Val’s and to town a lot. Fifteen of us went out on Christmas Eve and had an okay time. Went to Jean’s today and didn’t do much. Didn’t feel particularly at home or not at home. Opening my presents on my own this morning wasn’t as wrenching as I’d thought. I seem to have numbed a bit. Jean hasn’t helped lately, she’s been a bit off. I may be being a bit paranoid but, aside from her own justified depression, her attitude seems to be –well you’ve got a father now, you should be okay, what are you complaining about? To go anywhere Boxing Day I’ve invited myself to Margaret’s from the bakery. This week my Dad rung Jean’s to say a parcel had come for me. It is a fox! It’s lovely. I’m so glad at the thought and he rung today. I’m meeting Andrew on Sunday. Apparently he wasn’t mega surprised and has been making lots of jokes about twins. I think this meeting will be harder than N and R. Andrew sounds a right life and soul of the party type and I’m a thousand miles from that. To Norman I feel an amount of affection that I haven’t often felt. I hope it isn’t misplaced and yes, I know I shouldn’t, but I want to be a full member of his family (I know we’re talking ages here).
On the crisp, cold Boxing Day afternoon, I took the nearly empty 576 bus down the hill into Halifax, planning to get a present to take with me to Norman and Rosemary’s house. Getting off in the windswept bus station I realised that the shops weren’t open on Boxing Day, although a driver directed me to the B and Q in a retail park just off the flyover into the town. Ornaments? I thought, plants? I was hoping I could find something as meaningful as Fred the fox had been to me. Men with trolleys of planks and women carrying boxes of half price Christmas decorations walked round the quiet aisles. I wandered round the garden centre section, hoping something would leap out at me. I turned up the label of each of the green plants, let out an involuntary “aah”, when I came to one called “Flaming Katie”. A little green plant with red flowers. I wondered about the symbolism. Would they want something that reminded them of me specifically in the house? And, “flaming”…it sounded like the expression “flaming nora”, which you’d say if something was surprising and a bit much to take in. Not necessarily in a good way. But it seemed to fit. I did a couple more indecisive circuits of the greenery, then came back to the Flaming Katie. Back at the bus station, it turned out the buses stopped at 3 o clock, so I set off up the three miles of hill back to my bedsit. My nose cold, breathing out puffs of grey air, it was turning dark as I got back to my room. With my bedside lamp, my electric heater on and the Christmas tree, I felt that strange mixture again of warm and safe in the absence of the volcanic arguments of the home I’d left, but as if, as I looked out of the window into the quiet street on Boxing Day night, I didn’t quite exist to anyone else but myself. I put Flaming Katie on the table next to the Christmas tree. The next day we would be heading into another big first time meeting with my older half brother. The bloke who’d heard of our birth when he was eleven, and then seen his Dad leave for a week. For someone who shouldn’t have existed, I felt like I was causing an awful lot of upheaval. Flaming Katie indeed…
I go to school, do essays about Othello and the Napoleonic wars, get a turkey sandwich everyday from the bakery on the way home and sometimes fear that Norman will just disappear.
But the next Sunday, we’re in another pub, this time with Rosemary again.
They both laugh ruefully as Rosemary tells me how she and Norman had been all ready to tell their son Andrew and his wife that I’d got in touch. They’d invited them round for tea and been nervous.
Andrew’s first words had been “We’ve got some news for you”.
A sitcom moment as Norman and Rosemary looked at each other, both thinking “well, so have we”.
Andrew and Jackie told them that Jackie was pregnant.
Rosemary laughed but winced at the memory as she related how Andrew had said “Oh. You don’t seem very excited. Jackie’s Mum and Dad were much more enthusiastic”.
They had toasted the new baby with wine over dinner. But Norman and Rosemary must have been thinking about an even more unexpected new addition.
“We couldn’t say anything then” said Rosemary, “we’ll leave it for a bit longer. Don’t want Andrew having everything on his mind when he’s driving up and down the motorway.
Did I feel guilt? I don’t remember. But I know I felt a warm glow when Rosemary said with genuine brightness “So, you’re going to be an Auntie”.
I imagined a baby growing up calling me Auntie Kate. Never knowing that I hadn’t always been part of the family.
I was beginning to feel even more comfortable with them now. Used to them. That time, Rosemary carefully wrapped two of the huge Barnsley lamb chops that she and I hadn’t been able to manage up in a white napkin. “Take them” she insisted, “You can have them for your tea later, you won’t need to heat them back up”. I’d told them about the kitchen in my block of bedsits. How mould and damp covered the walls. They’d both shaken their heads. “It’s a good job you get free school lunches” Norman had said. “You’ll be able to come round and have a proper meal and a bath at our house once we’ve been able to tell Andrew” said Rosemary.
It was nearly Christmas and the following Saturday I went into town and bought a little green plastic tree, some red bows, a couple of red and gold baubles and a jolly Santa decoration. I dressed it carefully and put it on the wooden table that, along with the single bed and a chair constituted the furniture in my bedsit. As I watched my black and white telly, I kept looking at it. It made the small room seem cosy. Adverts on the telly showing families shopping and unwrapping presents. Normality. A world away, somewhere else, but it felt like I was getting a glimpse into how some of it might be possible for me. But it also felt very far away at the same time.
Two families I was disconnected from. One that I’d left, and one that I still couldn’t join. Somewhere in between them, I was in limbo.
One day in the week before Christmas, I went up to Jean’s. I felt like she’d disconnected from me in a way. Before, there’d been a sense of “us”, both knowing what it was like to have had the structures of our lives ripped apart, still trying to make sense of what we’d lost. Now she didn’t talk as if “we both know what it’s like” any more. I got a subtle sense of her shifting away, whether in response to the way that Norman and Rosemary were taking on the surrogate family role she had had, or because what had happened to me somehow reinforced the fact that the sense of unity she so missed in her marriage wasn’t suddenly going to be restored with a miracle reunion. I felt like someone on a stormy lake, making a crossing from one rescue raft to another. Amid the spray and the confusion, the raft I’m stepping from is pulling away before I’ve reached the next. Before I even know if the next one is waiting.
But she held a brightly wrapped present out to me as I came into the kitchen. “Norman rang before to check I’d got this. He’d left it behind the dustbin, he must have come when we were out shopping”. She was smiling, and I took the parcel in my hands. It was something soft and squashy. I read the handwritten label; “His name’s Fred and he’s a Reynard” and thought it must be some sort of family heirloom, although it didn’t feel like a photograph. I ripped the wrapping open and exclaimed in surprise and pleasure. It was a toy fox. A soft, brown fur fox sitting on his hind legs, looking somehow wise and friendly at the same time. Like Norman. I felt very touched. And somehow I was suddenly a child again. It was the gift a Dad might give to his young daughter. It was unexpected, this softness, from a man who seemed so down to earth. I sat with Fred on my knee all night, stroking his ears. Thought of all the occasions that presents had been missed.
Christmas Day 1992.
I suppose I should have written before. Up until now I’ve been V depressed about Christmas. The mocks finished, the last week sped by and I realised my aloneness. This week I’ve been trying to get out and about to not be alone. Went to Helen’s, Amanda’s, Val’s and to town a lot. Fifteen of us went out on Christmas Eve and had an okay time. Went to Jean’s today and didn’t do much. Didn’t feel particularly at home or not at home. Opening my presents on my own this morning wasn’t as wrenching as I’d thought. I seem to have numbed a bit. Jean hasn’t helped lately, she’s been a bit off. I may be being a bit paranoid but, aside from her own justified depression, her attitude seems to be –well you’ve got a father now, you should be okay, what are you complaining about? To go anywhere Boxing Day I’ve invited myself to Margaret’s from the bakery. This week my Dad rung Jean’s to say a parcel had come for me. It is a fox! It’s lovely. I’m so glad at the thought and he rung today. I’m meeting Andrew on Sunday. Apparently he wasn’t mega surprised and has been making lots of jokes about twins. I think this meeting will be harder than N and R. Andrew sounds a right life and soul of the party type and I’m a thousand miles from that. To Norman I feel an amount of affection that I haven’t often felt. I hope it isn’t misplaced and yes, I know I shouldn’t, but I want to be a full member of his family (I know we’re talking ages here).
On the crisp, cold Boxing Day afternoon, I took the nearly empty 576 bus down the hill into Halifax, planning to get a present to take with me to Norman and Rosemary’s house. Getting off in the windswept bus station I realised that the shops weren’t open on Boxing Day, although a driver directed me to the B and Q in a retail park just off the flyover into the town. Ornaments? I thought, plants? I was hoping I could find something as meaningful as Fred the fox had been to me. Men with trolleys of planks and women carrying boxes of half price Christmas decorations walked round the quiet aisles. I wandered round the garden centre section, hoping something would leap out at me. I turned up the label of each of the green plants, let out an involuntary “aah”, when I came to one called “Flaming Katie”. A little green plant with red flowers. I wondered about the symbolism. Would they want something that reminded them of me specifically in the house? And, “flaming”…it sounded like the expression “flaming nora”, which you’d say if something was surprising and a bit much to take in. Not necessarily in a good way. But it seemed to fit. I did a couple more indecisive circuits of the greenery, then came back to the Flaming Katie. Back at the bus station, it turned out the buses stopped at 3 o clock, so I set off up the three miles of hill back to my bedsit. My nose cold, breathing out puffs of grey air, it was turning dark as I got back to my room. With my bedside lamp, my electric heater on and the Christmas tree, I felt that strange mixture again of warm and safe in the absence of the volcanic arguments of the home I’d left, but as if, as I looked out of the window into the quiet street on Boxing Day night, I didn’t quite exist to anyone else but myself. I put Flaming Katie on the table next to the Christmas tree. The next day we would be heading into another big first time meeting with my older half brother. The bloke who’d heard of our birth when he was eleven, and then seen his Dad leave for a week. For someone who shouldn’t have existed, I felt like I was causing an awful lot of upheaval. Flaming Katie indeed…
(((((((( hugs ))))))))) to ya kate
I can only say that my heart is breaking a little bit reading this and I'm wishing you didn't have to ever experience what you did go through BUT look at the amazing lady you turned out to be
You continue to shock me with every installment of this thread with your strength and courage and just your amazingness (is that a word?? who cares lol)
love ya chick xxxxxxxxxxxx
I can only say that my heart is breaking a little bit reading this and I'm wishing you didn't have to ever experience what you did go through BUT look at the amazing lady you turned out to be
You continue to shock me with every installment of this thread with your strength and courage and just your amazingness (is that a word?? who cares lol)
love ya chick xxxxxxxxxxxx
KateF
Silver Member
I see Norman's Rover from my window on the second floor and run downstairs. Nerves again, another family reunion. Norman says we'll call in at the pub at the bottom of their road first while Rosemary makes the dinner. I have a Diet Coke as always. "Andrew's really looking forward to meeting you. His wife takes a bit longer to trust. A Police Constable looks at things differently really". I pick up that Norman is sounding a cautionary note about the reception I'll get from Jackie. Seventeen year old runaway who left home with a very dodgy man raising alarm bells for some people. I realise again how far away I am from the sixteen year old who stayed behind after school for Russian lessons and had never even had a detention. I know Norman sees me for who I am though. It's him and me in the pub, a sense of a companionable father and daughter Sunday, though we might look more like Granddad and Granddaughter to observers. He surprises me when he says he remembers my mother had some poetry published in an anthology. "I wonder why she never told me even when I wrote poems at school?" I said. "She never showed any interest". I imagined Norman encouraging my Mum when she got the poems published. Imagine what it might have been to get that encouragement from him. His blue eyes are the same colour as mine. Are kind and crinkle at the corners when he smiles. "Okay, ready?" he asks as we rise from the wooden pub stools in the Ring O Bells. I know he means am I ready for meeting Andrew and Jackie and I nod yes.
Norman and Rosemary's house is a 1970s detached house with a built on garage and driveway, a couple of hanging baskets outside the front door and, in common with all the other similar houses and semis on the busy avenue, a well kept garden. It seems to embody normality. Rosemary hugs me as we come through the backdoor and says Andrew and Jackie aren't there yet and would I like a drink? She's remembered I had a Martini in the pub once and says I could have some of that with lemonade. I sit drinking it in their large, cosy living room, on a green settee similar to the one my parents had. Norman sits in the easy chair that looks like his customary seat, with the Independent on Sunday and a pair of reading glasses on the armrest. A couple of lit alcoves have white pottery figures arranged on the shelves and Norman points one out; a cheery looking statuette of a girl with red cheeks and a shepherdess skirt holding a basket. "I've called that one Rosie Pinching Apples" he says and laughs and I remember how he and Rosemary got married when she was seventeen and he was twenty five. I can tell that he can still see the cheeky seventeen year old that she used to be in her. All this stability and continuity is a world away from my experience of family. Yet here I am, sat in this room, evidence of a rupture that nearly ended everything for them.
The doorbell rings. I freeze. "That'll be them" Norman says and gets up. I stay on the settee, trapped in the same "Do I stand up or sit down" paralysis of a few weeks before. Chatter in the hallway, then a tall, blonde, smiling man strides in to the living room, filling the doorway, saying "So where's Cilla Black then, I'd have thought she'd be here!", "Exactly" I banter back in the same tone "It's compulsory that she's at all family reunions nowadays". "This is Jackie" he says cheerily, as a small, pretty, very dark woman with perfectly styled hair and make up stepped in and gave me a small, tight smile. We chatted for a while then as Rosemary got them drinks. Easy jokiness between me and Andrew which felt nice and natural, polite conversation between me and Jackie in which she asked me about A-levels and I asked her about her job as a Police Constable.
I remember after dinner round the dining room table (where I'd hovered waiting to be told where to sit) and Andrew joking about us sharing the same birthday "I said Dad must only have one fertile day a year, that right Dad?" and Norman had grinned, Jackie got up from the table when Rosemary did and as I offered to help said "Oh no, no need, you're a guest, I'm practically part of the furniture". I caught Norman's eye then and saw that I hadn't imagined her asserting of her territorial rights. "Andrew's not a bit like that" Rosemary said later. "As soon as we told him about you he said, well you must get her a car so she can drive over to you, and he's been an only child but he's not selfish in that way at all. She's jealous is all we can think, but she's no need to be."
We had played rummy after that and whist at the table as darkness fell and a soft orange light came from the standard lamp in the corner. This type of evening reminded me of being at my Nan's when we were very small. The cosiness, the safety. Norman was solicitous "Are you alright?" he'd ask every now and again. After Andrew and Jackie had gone, with more banter from Andrew and another tight smile from Jackie, I asked Norman "How much of what's on the surface with Andrew is what there is?". I suppose I was looking for reassurance that his friendliness was real. He, after all, had been an eleven year boy when his Dad had walked out for a week, and I had indirectly been the cause. I sensed the tension from Jackie, but couldn't pick up anything but lightness from Andrew. "Ooh, that's a deep question" said Norman as he sat in the easy chair and sucked in his breath, considering. "I think there's alot more to Andrew underneath that he doesn't let out". Rosemary had brought black and white photos of Andrew as a little boy and, alongside one of Norman aged about ten, sat with schoolboy cap and boney knees on a wall, there was definitely a resemblance to Richard, my twin. I told them so and they nodded.
Later when Rosemary was out of the room, I suddenly felt like I wanted to let Norman know how important he was to me. Perched on the arm of the settee, looking at him and glancing away, not being very good at talking about my feelings, it came out as a stumbling mixture of thanking him for being so nice to me, and telling him that I already had the feelings I'd have if I'd always known he was my father. He listened then said something along the lines of how I might feel like that about any adult who'd been kind to me, after what I'd been through. He said it in such a balanced, measured way, that rather than feeling he was throwing a compliment back at me, I felt I was almost being invited to make a case back to him, so I did. I said that there were lots of people who'd been helpful to me that I didn't feel like that about, that it was something to do with how we'd connected as well.
I can't remember if I actually did or not, but I hope I might also have quoted back his own words to him about blood being thicker than custom. That we might have smiled at each other in mutual recognition of the strangeness and the realness of the situation. It's easy to idealise now, and I know that he knew all too well that it was then. It's what lovers know when they look at the flattened ground in the aftermath of the blown out hurricane of their affairs. That Sunday in Pullan Avenue it felt like the storm had moved on and would never be back. I'm glad I didn't know then that I would only sit with Norman in this living room one more time.
Norman and Rosemary's house is a 1970s detached house with a built on garage and driveway, a couple of hanging baskets outside the front door and, in common with all the other similar houses and semis on the busy avenue, a well kept garden. It seems to embody normality. Rosemary hugs me as we come through the backdoor and says Andrew and Jackie aren't there yet and would I like a drink? She's remembered I had a Martini in the pub once and says I could have some of that with lemonade. I sit drinking it in their large, cosy living room, on a green settee similar to the one my parents had. Norman sits in the easy chair that looks like his customary seat, with the Independent on Sunday and a pair of reading glasses on the armrest. A couple of lit alcoves have white pottery figures arranged on the shelves and Norman points one out; a cheery looking statuette of a girl with red cheeks and a shepherdess skirt holding a basket. "I've called that one Rosie Pinching Apples" he says and laughs and I remember how he and Rosemary got married when she was seventeen and he was twenty five. I can tell that he can still see the cheeky seventeen year old that she used to be in her. All this stability and continuity is a world away from my experience of family. Yet here I am, sat in this room, evidence of a rupture that nearly ended everything for them.
The doorbell rings. I freeze. "That'll be them" Norman says and gets up. I stay on the settee, trapped in the same "Do I stand up or sit down" paralysis of a few weeks before. Chatter in the hallway, then a tall, blonde, smiling man strides in to the living room, filling the doorway, saying "So where's Cilla Black then, I'd have thought she'd be here!", "Exactly" I banter back in the same tone "It's compulsory that she's at all family reunions nowadays". "This is Jackie" he says cheerily, as a small, pretty, very dark woman with perfectly styled hair and make up stepped in and gave me a small, tight smile. We chatted for a while then as Rosemary got them drinks. Easy jokiness between me and Andrew which felt nice and natural, polite conversation between me and Jackie in which she asked me about A-levels and I asked her about her job as a Police Constable.
I remember after dinner round the dining room table (where I'd hovered waiting to be told where to sit) and Andrew joking about us sharing the same birthday "I said Dad must only have one fertile day a year, that right Dad?" and Norman had grinned, Jackie got up from the table when Rosemary did and as I offered to help said "Oh no, no need, you're a guest, I'm practically part of the furniture". I caught Norman's eye then and saw that I hadn't imagined her asserting of her territorial rights. "Andrew's not a bit like that" Rosemary said later. "As soon as we told him about you he said, well you must get her a car so she can drive over to you, and he's been an only child but he's not selfish in that way at all. She's jealous is all we can think, but she's no need to be."
We had played rummy after that and whist at the table as darkness fell and a soft orange light came from the standard lamp in the corner. This type of evening reminded me of being at my Nan's when we were very small. The cosiness, the safety. Norman was solicitous "Are you alright?" he'd ask every now and again. After Andrew and Jackie had gone, with more banter from Andrew and another tight smile from Jackie, I asked Norman "How much of what's on the surface with Andrew is what there is?". I suppose I was looking for reassurance that his friendliness was real. He, after all, had been an eleven year boy when his Dad had walked out for a week, and I had indirectly been the cause. I sensed the tension from Jackie, but couldn't pick up anything but lightness from Andrew. "Ooh, that's a deep question" said Norman as he sat in the easy chair and sucked in his breath, considering. "I think there's alot more to Andrew underneath that he doesn't let out". Rosemary had brought black and white photos of Andrew as a little boy and, alongside one of Norman aged about ten, sat with schoolboy cap and boney knees on a wall, there was definitely a resemblance to Richard, my twin. I told them so and they nodded.
Later when Rosemary was out of the room, I suddenly felt like I wanted to let Norman know how important he was to me. Perched on the arm of the settee, looking at him and glancing away, not being very good at talking about my feelings, it came out as a stumbling mixture of thanking him for being so nice to me, and telling him that I already had the feelings I'd have if I'd always known he was my father. He listened then said something along the lines of how I might feel like that about any adult who'd been kind to me, after what I'd been through. He said it in such a balanced, measured way, that rather than feeling he was throwing a compliment back at me, I felt I was almost being invited to make a case back to him, so I did. I said that there were lots of people who'd been helpful to me that I didn't feel like that about, that it was something to do with how we'd connected as well.
I can't remember if I actually did or not, but I hope I might also have quoted back his own words to him about blood being thicker than custom. That we might have smiled at each other in mutual recognition of the strangeness and the realness of the situation. It's easy to idealise now, and I know that he knew all too well that it was then. It's what lovers know when they look at the flattened ground in the aftermath of the blown out hurricane of their affairs. That Sunday in Pullan Avenue it felt like the storm had moved on and would never be back. I'm glad I didn't know then that I would only sit with Norman in this living room one more time.
