Traces

by Patricia Wiltshire

  The ethos of that school was excellence in all things, and we all had to be obedient and work hard, or take humiliating punishments. One nasty penalty was having to learn poetry by rote overnight and then recite it in front of a whole class of peers. I still cannot learn anything off by heart, and I have no love of poetry – it is still a punishment to me even though I accept the depth of beauty and meaning in some of it. Needless to say, I never chose to recite poems at the Eisteddfod. Everyone had to perform, whether it was recitation, singing, dancing, painting pictures, or writing. To be fair, every conceivable activity was included so that each girl had the chance to excel at something, even if it were growing daffodil bulbs in a bowl. But life was definitely competitive at every stage, very full, and hurtling forward to the big exams, just weeks away.

  It was a Wednesday night in April 1958, just before my O-level exams, and I was enjoying myself at a social event in the Baptist chapel. I loved chapel and attended twice on Sunday and sometimes on a Wednesday too. We had great fun and the best-looking boys went there, so there were other incentives besides worship.

  That Wednesday night, my world came up against a brick wall – it was punctured and the air hissed out of it. A friend of my mother’s had come to the chapel hall and wanted to see me outside. I was puzzled.

  ‘Look, Pat, don’t go home tonight. You’re to go to Auntie May’s. Your mother’s left your father, and that’s all there is to it.’

  I stood stock-still. ‘What?’

  ‘I’ll take you up to your auntie’s. She is expecting you.’

  Wrenching a child unsuspectingly from her home in such a brutal way is less likely to happen today; society has been educated to care about the emotional well-being of their children. But, I had gone to chapel in my green dress while, unbeknown to me, my navy-blue-and-white school uniform, and my school books, were being delivered to my great aunt and uncle’s home a few miles up the valley. Ever since I could remember, I had never liked living with my mother or my father. They were volatile, they were too passionate; and they constantly argued and fought over the most trivial things.

  Theirs was a war of personalities rather than intellect, and I was invariably caught in the crossfire. But my mother leaving my father? That was unthinkable and in that day and age, families just did not break up. They stuck it out, and the bonds of marriage were bonds for life. All I could think about was the shame that would follow the announcement. My cheeks were on fire and I felt sick, and insecure, and frightened. Why couldn’t my mother come to fetch me? Why was it so sudden? Why did I have to be farmed out to elderly relatives who never struck me as being particularly sympathetic towards us? They were childless; their house was spick and span, highly polished, and cold.

  I did not speak again, not even when I was delivered to my new, and hopefully, temporary home. I did not ask about my mother; I did not ask about my father. The truth was that I was ashamed, humiliated, and disgusted at the behaviour of so-called adults. I always felt more grown-up than either of my parents, and I was used to viewing them through critical eyes. As ever, they were putting themselves first – their feelings were the most important, and had to be considered at all costs, even at the expense of their children. And yet part of me was glad that my parents had parted. Love is not always enough, and the combination of the two had been toxic for too many years.

  To be relieved of being caught in the middle of their war was, in many ways, a blessing – but it came with its curses as well. At 16 years old, I felt the stigma of their separation like a brand. And I will never forget or forgive my mother insisting that I accompany her to the court and being told that, from this moment on, I was to live with her. Looking back on this time, my parents did everything that is now considered to be bad for a child’s psyche and well-being. These days, it would be classified as child abuse. Then, such a concept would be unimaginable for a girl from such a ‘good’ home. The worst thing was that my grandmother was absent and I had no sanctuary. It was the turn of her youngest son and his family to have her, and she was in Yorkshire.

  I confided, in a whisper, to a special friend about my parents’ separation and, as her parents had been engaged in a cold war ever since she could remember, she was sympathetic. I have always considered parents and teachers to be the most influential, and the most dangerous, people on the planet, and I felt that I was a victim of both. Parents and teachers can destroy, they can enhance, they have the power to create a victim or a protégé, and the children within their sphere of influence have no power at all. Well, not in those days anyway.

  The flat my mother moved me into was not home. It never would be. Home was the house where I had a room with my books and privacy. Home was the house where my grandmother would come to stay, and read alongside me, and nurse me when I was unwell. This new life did not look promising and, if I ever thought that my mother would soften when she was no longer fighting with my father, I was mistaken. Perhaps volatility had become a habit to her; she was as domineering and explosive as ever. Everything had to be done her way – and what this meant, most of all, was that I was never to see my father. His life continued, forever skirting the edges of our own, but my mother forbade me to have any contact; she forbade me to ask questions about him, or even to speak of him in her presence. This was not because he was a bad person but because he had committed the unforgivable – he had been unfaithful.

  These days, this would certainly not be grounds to keep a child from its father, and I knew he was desperate to see me, that he kept on trying but, from that moment on, my mother behaved as though he had never existed. I still know nothing about the catalyst that caused their final separation but then I have never wanted to be enlightened. Now, I look back on all this with disbelief that it was allowed to happen. Poor Dad with his wonderful hair and good looks. He had charisma too, but I could only cope with one of these volatile people, and as it had to be my mother, he became a remote, rather ghostly figure in my life. Parents beware: if you try to denigrate the other one to a child, you will forever be a traitor and less loved for it.

  When my mother had succumbed to old age and was living alone in the huge Georgian house on the top of Bedwellty Mountain, surrounded by stunning views and sheep, the doctors told me that she simply needed care and not hospital.

  ‘I am not going into any care home and be stuck in a corner like an old granny.’

  I knew that if any carer moved in with her, they would not last five minutes, and I would forever be trying to find responsible people.

  There was only one thing for it. She came to live with me in my big house in Surrey, where I lived alone with Mickey, my beloved cat. So began three hellish months. She had always had someone around to do her bidding and, in the beginning, I was her handmaiden. Not for long – I was working very hard earning my living, and I now had her to care for, do her laundry, and make sure she had her meals on time. I became very tired:

  ‘Where are you going?’ ‘How long are you going to be?’ ‘Who was that on the phone?’

  It was déjà vu. I was being treated like a teenager all over again. But, gradually, she came to realise that I was quite a sympathetic person, and that I had a breadth of knowledge that she lacked. She witnessed some of my discussions with police and accompanied me when I lectured to the police training college at Hendon. She met some of my friends, was invited to parties along with me, and she began to realise that there was life outside the Sirhowy Valley, that tiny pond where she had been such a big fish.

  After about three months of purgatorial existence, she slowly began to realise that I was kind and that she was comfortable; I realised that she was clever and very, very funny. So this is why she had so many friends and acquaintances! She often made me laugh out loud with her impersonations of people we knew and the things she said. She was still maddening and could be hurtful, but there was some depth there too. She could play the piano by ear, did exquisite embroidery, was brilliant at craft, she was pretty, could be very engaging, and
people were drawn to her. I was, perhaps for the first time, getting to know and understand my mother a little. We had three months getting on quite well and the quarrelling no longer characterised the relationship. Then, after she had been with me for six months, I had to go to New Zealand to a conference so I took my mother to Wales to a nursing home for the duration of my absence. We had arranged that she would come back to me when I got back from New Zealand but she broke her pelvis the day I got back and she rapidly went downhill from there on.

  After nearly six months, on the day after Boxing Day, she died in my arms and her dying words were, ‘I never realised I had such a wonderful daughter.’ I wept, not because she was gone, but for all the lost years when we could have been friends. I do not think she could forgive me for being my grandmother’s favourite, and being bestowed with all the love and attention she felt was hers. Her poor mother had always been too busy making sure her family would survive, and making time for open expressions of affection was probably a step too far. But I could never forgive my mother for her carelessness in causing my injury, the apparent disregard for my feelings throughout my life, and her constant invasion of my mental privacy. I could never relax in her presence. How sad it all was.

  After my parents’ divorce, life with my mother was utterly painful and, when my boyfriend said he was getting a job in England, it dawned on me that I could do the same. So, halfway through my A-levels, I applied for a laboratory job in the Civil Service in Surrey, got it, and found lodgings. Of course my mother tried to prevent it, but she just had to give in because I had made up my mind and was exhilarated at the prospect of my new-found freedom from her. I just ran away.

  Looking back on it, the people with whom I lived in Surrey were sweet and kind but, oh goodness, they were so foreign. I was fed wholesome casseroles and had a nice, warm room but I was homesick. Perhaps that is hard to believe after what I have said about my life at home, but I was homesick for the valley, my friends and all things familiar. I could not believe how flat it was in Surrey – I had not seen one proper hill. The water tasted salty and horrible; it was not the sweet, soft water coming from the hills. The buses failed to stop for you unless you put out your hand. In Wales, if you were standing at a bus stop, it was deemed obvious that you were waiting to be picked up. I was dumbfounded that bus after bus just drove past until I saw someone hail at the opposite bus stop and the thing came to a halt. This was another lesson in coping with this strange, flat land, where everything looked the same and there were rows of poplar trees everywhere.

  I was surprised to see bottles of pickles and jam with the price stuck on the side, and biscuits in packets. I had never seen anything pre-packaged and I could not help thinking it was really vulgar. At home, cheese was cut with a wire, biscuits were always loose in big tins, sweets in big jars, and bacon sliced on a machine with a lethal, rotating blade. Health and safety? It did not exist. Most amazing to me was that in England, coal was bought from a coal yard and came in small sacks. I had only ever witnessed coal being dumped by the ton in the road outside the house, some chunks being the size of armchairs. Fathers broke them up and laboured to carry the gleaming anthracite to the coal house, before sweeping, then washing the street with buckets of soapy water. Neighbour helped neighbour at such times, and there was always the gift of beer at the end of the job.

  I remember watching my father break up the coal with a sledgehammer, and both of us looking for fossil plants in the depths of the boulders. We found a lot too – mostly ferns but also some gigantic forms of stem which I now know to be the ancestors of our little horsetails. Thinking back to those days, we had fun on bonfire night with firework parties on the plot of land my father owned at the back of the house. Particularly memorable was the year when one jealous little boy threw a sparkler into the huge box of fireworks being boastfully held aloft by another. The pyrotechnics were spectacular – rockets shooshing along the ground in every direction, Jackie Jumpers, cracking and jumping up girls’ skirts, Catherine wheels whirling aimlessly and frantically round and round on the ground, and the loud cracking and banging accompanied by genuinely fearful shouts and screams – everyone running in different directions. Looking back on it, it was hilarious and proved what they said in chapel: you must not have jealousy or boastfulness – what a good demonstration of the rewards of both these sins. Others kept chickens on their plots, next door kept geese, and I still remember my father eating a goose-egg omelette. It was huge. Further down the street, the land might be used to keep a pig. I can still hear the screams when they were dragged off to slaughter, and the frantic clucking, flurrying, and screeching when one of the chickens next door was having its neck wrung for dinner. I hated all that but we did have fun on our plot. I think my father kept it just for us to play on it.

  The few years after running away from Wales were unhappy, miserable, and lonely, but I was determined that there was no going back. I never did. People made fun of my sing-song voice and vowel sounds, and felt free to denigrate Wales and the Welsh whenever they wished. This was not bias against the Welsh – demeaning jokes about the Irish, Scots, and northerners, and even those from the West Country were just as acceptable. I gradually came to learn that indigenous people of the Home Counties are a breed apart, although they now moderate their behaviour because of political correctness. The last half century has changed the whole country. Now that I have spent most of my life in Surrey, I have become fundamentally anglicised and, when I go back to Wales, I feel a bit of a foreigner – I am acutely aware of the strong accent that I once must have had, and the differences in attitude and culture. I have lived most of my life in limbo – Welsh to the English and English to the Welsh. That is the fate of an immigrant.

  I married a very tall and handsome Englishman whose childhood could not have been more different from mine. His parents, their house, and their lifestyle all reminded me of an Ovaltine advertisement: Mummy and Daddy around a cosy fire in a comfortable, pre-war villa, all in their checked dressing gowns drinking Ovaltine before bed. I can still hear the jingle of the advert. To me, his childhood seemed to have been like something out of an Enid Blyton novel, and his parents’ attitude to life, the world and the universe was classically conventional. Mummy really did stay at home baking in the kitchen while Daddy went up to town in his bowler and with his furled umbrella, completing The Times crossword by the time his train pulled into Waterloo station.

  This apparent idyll was marred by the war and evacuation to the country and, for five years, my father-in-law saw his wife and son rarely. He was a very senior civil servant with important war duties and had been sent to Manchester. Gradually, it emerged over many years of little snippets and revealing remarks that family life had not been all it seemed. My husband had little rapport with his father and spent most of his time with his mother, who adored him. I actually got on with his father rather well and was not afraid to prick his bubble of pomposity from time to time. I remember my mother inviting them both to her house on her hillside for a holiday, and my father-in-law expressing utter amazement at how clean everything was in the Valleys, how beautiful were the views, and generous and funny the people. From anyone else, his comments might have seemed patronising but I knew he was genuinely surprised that we were not all covered in coal dust. I remember my husband saying to me, ‘You are the daughter he always wanted,’ and, with a curl of the lip, ‘you being academic.’ Again, was there jealousy for affection innocently received?

  My husband’s father had smoked heavily for most of his life and, just after retirement, he sank into the inevitable blocked artery/diabetes syndrome which took both his legs. He died aged 72, which we now consider to be quite young; modern medicine seems to have given us hope eternal where 60 is now the new 40. I remember sitting next to him as he lay on his deathbed, immaculate as ever with neat pyjamas and perfectly trimmed hair and moustache. I held his hand and absent-mindedly put my finger on his pulse. I was interested by the irregularity of its rhythm and strength
. The last rapid quivers coincided with his giving a single gasp and staring me full in the face. With this last breath all animation left him.

  I was fascinated by the change. He was Dad – and then just a body; this happened within a blink. I had never witnessed death like this. It made me realise that the spirit had left, leaving an empty vessel.

  Years before, I had become a reductionist – convinced that the soul, the spirit, the being is only a complex set of physico-chemical reactions. We are all victims of our brain chemistry and our personal experiences. Whether your nature is saintly or that of a psychopath is largely out of your control. You can only ever hope to moderate your behaviour – your thoughts are your own and peculiar to you. Intimately witnessing the very end of a life was, for me, very comforting. I was convinced now that he would not suffer any more. There was nothing left to respond to anything that might cause pain.

  About 30 years later, in 2005, my mother died in my arms, just as my ex-father-in-law had done. The sudden switch from life into death was the same dramatic metamorphosis, but my almost detached interest in the demise of two old people was that of a curious scientist. I have only experienced the agony of real bereavement for two other humans, and for every cat I have had the good fortune to cherish.

  It is hard to believe that, at the time we divorced, I had been married for 42 years, and yet I knew my husband little better than after our very formal, gentle courtship of nearly five years. For decades, emotionally we had been a pair of satellites revolving around each other but rarely touching. He was a hobbies man and was an excellent photographer, then scuba diver, then pilot of fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters, as well as being a good horseman. He later became obsessed and highly competent with computers. He always had to have the very best equipment, and no one else was allowed to touch any of it. I thought we were very well off and, at one time, we owned a Porsche, then a Ferrari – and I loved driving both. We had a twin-engine, eight-seater Cessna light aircraft, two horses, goodness knows how many computers, and other various electronic wizardry. Ever-cautious, I learned to fly because I was terrified of being alone at 5,000 feet with a heart-attack victim slumped over the instruments. We flew all over Europe at whim, stayed in lovely hotels – Cannes was our favourite resort – and no wonder many of our friends shared my illusion that we were wealthy.