by Louise Allen
I developed a daily routine. In the morning, while Tim would be studying or at a university lecture, I would listen to BBC Radio 4 and hear Brian Redhead explain the news (current affairs still interested me). Then, when the school bell went, I would settle down to teach myself to read and write. I got the dictionary and literally worked my way through it, trying to learn words. I’d read very few books, and I began to work my way slowly through a novel, looking up words, which Tim had suggested. The Catcher in the Rye was a great place to start. I got work in a pub in the evenings, pulling pints. This was good for my maths, as I had to add up in my head (like in the greengrocer’s). Meanwhile, Tim and I had a wonderful time together.
I soon decided that I should try to sign on to help us financially, as things were tight. I also applied for housing benefit. At first, Tim hadn’t told his parents that we were together. But it became clear after a while, as he didn’t like hiding things from them (unlike me, who found it easy), and they sent him some extra money. They were kind, supportive and thoughtful: like proper parents should be. They didn’t judge either. However, I didn’t want to be dependent on Tim or them; I wanted to make my own way. Tim was helping me plan my way to art school. He found the pubs where the art school students hung out and we went there a lot and chatted to them and found out what we needed to do. He really encouraged me, so I started to apply. My portfolio was growing daily, and I really hoped I could somehow get in.
One morning, I was jumping up and down on the bed, listening to Jimmy Hendrix’s ‘All Along the Watchtower’, which I thought was fantastic. I was just in Tim’s white shirt, with nothing underneath. The doorbell rang, and I thought it was the postman, who usually called at that time of day. Although I was in the shirt I was fairly decent, as it was big – at least to open the door a crack and take a letter in. However, when I opened the door, there was a middle-aged man in a plaid jacket and matching hat, with a clipboard.
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I’m Mr Jones and I’ve come about your recent housing benefit application.’
He showed me his lapel that had a badge saying he was from the council. I was standing on the doorstep in Tim’s shirt and nothing else, looking flushed from jumping on the bed. Hendrix was still blasting in the background.
‘Can I come in?’ I didn’t know what to say. He looked at me seriously and said, ‘I need to check some things before you can get any money.’
I felt put on the spot. I didn’t know he was coming but he was a council official, so I let him in. I thought, well, I really need the money, so we’d better sort it out. I showed him into our bedsit and turned off the music. I gestured for him to sit on the bed, which he did. I sat on a little upright chair opposite him, with our clothes all over it.
‘Well,’ the man began, looking at his clipboard and flipping through papers, ‘I’ve spoken to your mother, and she’s still entitled to claim child benefit as you are still under sixteen.’ He looked me up and down when he said that, and I suddenly felt very uncomfortable and aware I was just in a shirt with nothing underneath.
I pulled the shirt down to cover my knees, crossed my legs tight, and turned sideways on from him. I didn’t like hearing mention of my ‘mother’ – I was trying to forget her now. He cleared his throat and looked down at his clipboard again.
‘Ahem, well, yes, she says she doesn’t want anything to do with you, and because of that you are only entitled to £2.97 a week to live off. You are not officially here, as you are supposed to be there – she is getting your allowance. You can only get yours if she gives hers up.’
Oh God, I thought. Typical! I’m still being ruled by Barbara. She’s still trying to run my life and punish me, from Oxford to Portsmouth. I realised I’d been foolish to put down her address as mine on the housing benefit application. I hadn’t thought it through properly, and had done so automatically. I said nothing.
‘You can get a proportion of your rent, however’, said the man, looking round the tiny bedsit, ‘as housing benefit.’
I relaxed a bit then; well, at least we would get something. We sat looking at each other for a moment as I took this in.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Do I have to do anything else?’ The man looked at me for a moment and then rested his clipboard on the bed beside him.
‘Well,’ he said, looking a bit strange. ‘There are other ways of making money…’ And with that he patted the bed on the side with no clipboard. For a second I didn’t understand. What was he saying? What did he mean? He was looking a bit flushed now.
‘Come and sit next to me,’ he said, patting the bed again. I froze. Oh no, not again. I eyed up the door, sneakily, under my lashes, wondering if I had a chance to run at it and escape. I didn’t want to look at the door in case it gave away what I was thinking.
‘Oh… yes?’ I said in a vague way, playing for time.
‘There are ways girls like you can earn money,’ he said, as he leant over the small space between us.
I then leapt up as if electrocuted and flew at the door like a mad bat. He thought I was just standing up, but I was out the door, down the landing, out the front door and into the alleyway. I got behind the big wheelie bins, shaking, and hid in broad daylight with just Tim’s shirt on.
I held my breath and hoped to hell the man didn’t figure out where I was. A few minutes later I heard the front door slam and saw his back disappearing down the path and into a parked car. Once the engine started up and the car left I crept out from behind the bins. I was barefoot and freezing. I had to hover in the chilly alleyway for three hours until the woman who lived upstairs came home, and she had a spare key for our flat. I felt absolutely furious that my safe and sacred space with my beloved Tim had been defiled by this horrible man. However, to my neighbour I explained I had locked myself out, and she seemed to believe my story. She even made me a nice hot cup of tea, as I was a human icicle by then. I never told Tim about the man because, deep down, I wasn’t sure if everything bad that happened to me wasn’t my fault. After all, I’d been told all my life that I was a ‘slut’, a ‘whore’ and a ‘tart’, so maybe it was true. Tim didn’t think that, thank goodness, and I didn’t want him to doubt me so, as usual, I decided to keep quiet.
22
The Long and Winding Road
Tim and I lived very happily together for two years while he was at uni. We decorated our bedsit, cooked vegan meals on a small Baby Belling stove, went on demos and to gigs and parties. He was very studious and worked hard but also made good friends. He was generous, kind and encouraging of me and my art. I held down loads of cleaning jobs while teaching myself all sorts of things (with Tim’s help as my mentor) and filling my portfolio. I spent lots of time with people from the art school and started going to the local library and dipping into their wonderful illustrated art books. I was fascinated by women artists, particularly Georgia O’Keeffe and Frida Kahlo, and I loved sculpture by Elisabeth Frink and Barbara Hepworth. As I worked towards getting a place at Portsmouth Art School, I broadened my knowledge by looking at Andy Warhol and German Expressionism, and I discovered Dada.
My portfolio was comprised of portraits and collages – huge charcoal faces of Tim and myself and friends – and I used Boots Extra Hold hairspray to stick things down. I managed to get an interview on the strength of my work.
At the interview the teachers thought I was two years older than I was, and said at sixteen I was too young to apply. I was told to come back later. I wasn’t too disheartened, as at least they liked my work, and Tim encouraged me not to give up. I felt it was a big step just to get that far, given my appalling school record. It made me even more determined to try, as I loved the look of the art school and the students, and I absolutely wanted to be there. I knew it was my gateway to heaven on earth.
Then something awful happened, which shattered my world. I didn’t see it coming at all. One morning we woke up in our little flat and Tim said, out of the blue, ‘How would you feel about an open relationship?’
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p; I didn’t really know what that meant. He explained it meant we could have sex with other people, not just each other. I knew instantly it would mean the end of our relationship. I loved and trusted Tim entirely, he was my world, and he was asking me to share him with someone else. I said I didn’t know and left it at that. However, soon after we went to a nightclub in Portsmouth, in quite a rough area, and during the evening Tim turned to me and said, ‘I’m going to walk Emma home.’
She was a pretty blonde girl in his class and they’d been chatting most of the evening. I wasn’t invited. He was going with her and leaving me behind. He’d never done anything like that before, so I couldn’t understand it. It seemed so out of character. But I could see they were flirting and that I was no longer the centre of his world. I realised the boy who had saved me, who had made me, who had given me comfort and security and love, with whom I’d built a new, safe life, was now focusing on someone else. How had that happened? Why hadn’t I seen it coming? What would I do? I wanted to fold up and die on the spot, but I left quickly and walked home crying the whole way. It couldn’t be. I couldn’t take sharing him. I was more distraught than I could deal with and I didn’t sleep all night, waiting for him to come back.
Next morning, when he wasn’t there, I just packed my bags and left. I had nowhere to go but I couldn’t stay and see Tim with someone else. It would kill me. It was so sudden. I guess he sort of lost his head, felt trapped and wanted to try being with someone else. He was also at the end of his course, so maybe he felt he needed to be free.
I guess he must have fallen out of love with me, or got bored, or wanted new experiences – but he hadn’t said a word before dropping the bombshell. I guess we had fallen into a young married couple routine too soon and, perhaps very naively, I thought we would just go on for ever. I was two years younger than him, and I also guess he felt the world was his oyster. He was very handsome, intelligent, charming – and maybe we’d been together too long. He was coming up to twenty when I was still only seventeen.
Maybe she was cleverer than me and he felt tired of training me up. I would never know. His parents had totally accepted us as a couple, although Barbara disapproved, and of course had never visited. We’d done everything together – gone to films, gigs, meals with friends. He was at the end of his studies and we hadn’t talked about what would happen next; we hadn’t dared. I was still trying to get into art school, while he was talking about doing an MA. But all of a sudden he was into someone else and I couldn’t stand it. Open relationships were quite common at the time, as people experimented sexually and emotionally, but we’d been so close. I wasn’t going to fight over him though; it was too humiliating and I was too proud. I was also sensitive to rejection, so all I could do was pack up and melt away into Portsmouth. But how would I survive?
On the bus into town I felt like I’d swallowed a concrete block. What was I going to do? Where would I live? I bought a local newspaper, got a load of ten pence pieces and stood in a phone box, dialling up landlords from the small ads section. I had to find somewhere for the night at least, and I didn’t have much cash. After a day of phoning I eventually got a tiny room in a grotty shared house with a very dodgy, rough-looking landlord. I didn’t understand what I was getting myself into, but I was desperate. I made up a bed and cried and cried and cried.
I didn’t phone Tim; I didn’t let him know where I was – I’d sort that out later. I felt lonelier and more desolate than I had in the whole of my life, but I had to survive. Luckily, I still had my jobs, but I’d relied on Tim’s family money and grant to make life work. So I had to get more jobs, and I worked and worked. I took anything I could get, in different cafés and bars. Plus I still did ironing, gardening, washing people’s cars; anything to earn a fiver. It was incredibly tough. I lived on lentils, beans and pasta and little else. It was hard to eat well after the rent was paid. I got so poor and thin that I would scavenge vegetables from shops and supermarkets at the end of the day and boil them into a curry and live on it for days. I tried to nourish myself but it was hard.
When I met friends in pubs and cafes, I said I’d just eaten or drunk, so I didn’t spend, and I didn’t let on how tough things were. I never wanted to be a sob story – I was too proud. If I visited someone’s house to eat, that was fantastic, but on the whole without Tim I was very alone. The friends we’d had from the time we lived together were now mostly drifting away from Portsmouth. Their degrees over, there was no longer any reason for them to stay.
As time went on I began to see that I had landed in a pretty hairy household. There were heroin addicts and drunks and the place was really a bug-ridden flophouse. No wonder it was so cheap. The landlord turned out to be a local gangster, driving a flash fast car and dealing drugs. At certain low points I even found myself accepting some of his drugs, which he made out was a freebie and then, in the months when I was low on cash, he made it clear I could pay in another way – with sexual favours. Just like the horrible men on the Cowley Road had demanded from my friend Sandy.
I was habituated to this kind of abuse from my years with Kevin and Mark and the various social workers, so sometimes, to my disgust, I complied, as there was no other way to pay the rent. Being stoned or drunk helped me get through it. I didn’t care. I had learnt to disconnect from my body through years of abuse. I occupied my mind. It was ghastly but I did it and tried not to think about it afterwards. It was a means to an end, although it made me feel totally sick.
To distract myself further I decorated my room as well as I could using paper, paint, drawings, collage, pictures, anything to give it some colour and life. I picked up a couple of stray animals, a pretty little cat and a pup, who kept me company, but this was a horrible, lonely, terrible time in my life and my health began to suffer badly. All this time I’d had no real contact with Barbara. She was always venomous and vindictive the minute I got in touch with her while I was with Tim, so I tended to steer a wide berth.
I had, from time to time, over the two years I was with Tim, tried to explore something more with Julie. Part of me still hoped she would turn out to be a real mum to me. However, she inevitably disappointed. She didn’t turn up, or whatever we planned somehow went wrong. She always put herself first, and I was always forgiving her and then trying again, hoping desperately that she would change. I did find out some of her story, however, which was important for me to know.
I discovered that my father had been a Jewish taxi driver in his thirties who had formed a relationship with Julie when she was only a teenager, around fourteen. They had sex in the back of his taxi and, bingo, that’s how I came about. Julie herself wasn’t Jewish, so I wasn’t technically Jewish, as it follows the matrilineal line. However, I had my father’s dark hair and olive skin, which is why Barbara was always taunting me. This put me in a difficult position: I’d always been told I was Jewish, in a nasty way, and rejected by Gentiles (like Barbara), and yet I was now not Jewish, so I couldn’t belong to that community either. I was in a difficult place socially and culturally. What was I exactly? Where did I belong? Who wanted me? I didn’t have a proper pedigree; I was a real outcast, a mongrel, like some of Barbara’s poor dogs.
I also found out that when Julie got pregnant her parents gave her an ultimatum: give up the baby for adoption or never come home again. They were very religious people, but not at all compassionate. She had no choice and was forced to give me up in the strict nursing home where she gave birth, aged fifteen. She was also banned from seeing my father again. It turned out he was a married man, already with children, and that he completely ditched Julie once she’d got pregnant, although he had broken the law due to her being under age. She never saw him again and he didn’t contribute to my upbringing.
Julie’s own father was a bigamist, she discovered later, which caused her all sorts of emotional problems. She was a confused and rejected woman who had never really grown up emotionally. Her childlike behaviour meant she had husband after husband, but was never really
able or willing to be a mother to her own children (including me, who was an embarrassment). I was an uncomfortable reminder to her of that time in the back of the taxi with my wayward abandoning father.
I eventually found out his name and where he lived, and even got his phone number. One day I got up the courage to phone him and explain who I was. He sounded very surprised and uncomfortable, but we agreed to meet on a bench in the University Parks, one of my favourite places, but he never turned up. I suppose it was one step too far for him to take. I was devastated, as I was never to meet him before he died. I was incredibly sad and hurt about this, which all happened while I was living with Tim, and continued once I had left and was surviving the best I could in my grotty bedsit.
I was hell-bent on trying to keep myself afloat and get into college. I was used to no one wanting me; it seemed like my default position. I was getting thinner and thinner, and got far too interested in drink and drugs for my health and sanity. I was in such pain. I was so lonely, desperate and rejected, and trying to create a successful persona for the world to see, that I was abusing myself and the stress began to wear me into the ground.
By this time Tim was long gone, taking a gap year before beginning his MA elsewhere. We were no longer in touch. One day I was feeling very desperate. I had a packet of seeds and I went out to the scrubby patch of yard at the back of the flats. It was unkempt and untended, with old furniture and bricks strewn about. There was one corner that got a bit of sun, though, and it had a bit of earth. I cleared a patch with a kitchen fork, opened the packet and scattered the seeds on the ground. I thought to myself, If these seeds come up, I’ll go on, but if they don’t, that’s it. Finito. I felt my life was hanging by a thin thread, and something as simple as seeds not flowering would be a sign that the struggle to survive was too great for me to continue bothering with.