When Skies Have Fallen
Page 47
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Epilogue: Saturday, 29th July, 1967
Dear Mum and Dad,
It’s been quite some time since I last put pen to paper and wrote you a letter. How strange to think that not so long ago all we possessed was the written word. How impoverished our communication used to be, and yet there is a permanence to this mode of correspondence that a telephone conversation lacks. Imagine if I were calling you now: you would listen, respond, the call would end, and you would promptly forget most of what was said.
I doubt you will ever forget what I am about to tell you, and it might at first seem as if I am a coward to inform you by this means, but how easy it would be for you to simply pass it off as a figment of your combined imagination. Better that, no doubt, than to believe it is the truth, for you have made your thoughts on this matter quite clear.
Today is a very special day for me. I’ll bet you’re looking at each other right now, utterly perplexed. After all, my birthday is still two months away, and it’s not my wedding anniversary—May 25th, 1946, in case you’re wondering, and yes, I married in secret. Not officially, you understand. Well, you don’t understand, not yet.
You see, Mum, Dad, today is the first day of my life that I am not a criminal. You may already have heard the news. After all, you’ve always kept up with current affairs, but in your sleepy hamlet, where the worst that ever happens is apple scrumping, and even then only if the season is right for it, perhaps the passing yesterday of a bill concerning prostitution and homosexuality is of no consequence.
Lest there be any confusion, I am not a prostitute. Indeed, I have lived virtuously, for there has only ever been “The One” for me. We met, we courted, we fell in love, and we committed to each other in common law, till death us do part.
You know Jim as my friend, my flatmate, the man who, after my accident, had “nothing better to do” than sit at my bedside, day after day, and has taken care of me ever since, though you never could quite understand why. This, Mum and Dad, is why.
Jim and I have been together for twenty-three years. We first set eyes on each other at the Palais Dance Hall in Minton, began courting, and soon after, we fell in love. We are some of the more fortunate ones, inasmuch as we have each other. Our love is not a sickness, nor is it a crime we “choose” to commit. If that were so, then the eighteen months Jim spent in prison would have deterred us. The barbaric “treatment” Uncle Bill was forced to endure would have cured rather than killed him.
We have lived in constant fear and, for the past twelve years, in reclusivity. Now that the state has decreed us innocent, we can finally come out into the open, but there is still so much more to be done. We are not sick. We are not predators. We were not “turned this way” by inadequate mothers, or perverts who took our innocence. We were born this way, and the love Jim and I share is as sacred and real as your love for each other.
There is still so much more to be done. For now, we celebrate our victory. After the way things were left with Uncle Bill, I don’t expect that you will consider it a victory, nor would I dare to ask that you try and be pleased for us. I just felt that it was time you knew the truth about the kind of man your son is: happy, healthy, and loved.
Love,
Robert