by Paul Kelly
Title Page
SO FAR DIVIDED
By
Paul Kelly
Publisher Information
So Far Divided published in 2011 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
The characters and situations in this book are entirely imaginary and bear no relation to any real person or actual happening.
Copyright © Paul Kelly
The right of Paul Kelly to be identified as author of this book has been asserted in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyrights Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Chapter One
It was raining heavily outside; the sky was dark with not a cloud in sight as I gazed at my reflection on the window of my bedroom. Suddenly a flash of lightning lit up the room for a few seconds and then as the darkness overtook again, it was like looking again at my face in the window pane, as if in that few last seconds, I had grown at least twenty years older. I smiled as I thought about that . . . twenty years indeed . . . that’s a laugh, I thought as I was thirty-seven years of age and would be thirty-eight in four months’ time.
What had happened in my life? Did everyone have joy, happiness and sad times, I thought again and my thoughts went out to Aaron . . . he was my older brother and would be 42 this year. Aaron was most women’s dream of a man. He was tall, dark and handsome with a Jewish appearance. . . He loved himself to an extreme and I always knew that, but I still loved him despite that fault. He was married with two children and divorced after only four years of marriage. He didn’t give that much of a chance and those kids would have to grow up without a daddy. Well, at least Aaron and I did have a daddy and a mummy, even if it was only for a short time. They were both dead now and I sighed heavily as I reflected on the few years we had been with them. Those were years that I would rather forget, but sadly memories last for a very long time.
Mummy was a heavy drinker in her time and she and daddy had many rows. Daddy was a solicitor in the city of London and we had lived in Belgravia in a rather posh house with no financial worries that I could think of and perhaps that was one of the reasons why mummy was such a boozer. She could down a bottle of gin a day and if we had been poorer, she couldn’t have afforded such drink and I know she could drink nearly a bottle of gin every day, together with a fair ration of whisky Daddy liked a drink, as most men do, but he was liberal in what he had and that was for more reasons than I cared to think of. Daddy had an eye for the ladies and this was the cause of most of the rows at home. Mummy could strike out and give daddy quite a thrashing, but it is only now that I understand why he did not reciprocate. He wanted a peaceful life in order to pursue his own pleasures whilst mummy could find all the happiness and rest in her life, if you could call it that, with a bottle or so a day . . . and daddy could afford that. It was cheaper than having a divorce, where he felt sure she would demand more than he was prepared to give.
When I was very little, daddy used to drive me to school and pick me up again at four o’clock when the school lessons were over. He did this with Aaron too, but on one particular day when the school holidays were in session and it was daddy’s birthday, I bought him a book from Smith’s that I knew he wanted and took it to his offices as a surprise for him, but when I got to the offices, the secretary who was sitting at a desk outside daddy’s own little office in the building, asked me if I would just take a seat until she returned as she had to do some business in an office on the lower floor. She told me she would be about twenty minutes and I agreed to wait until she returned, but twenty minutes went by and there was no sign of the lady, so I glanced at the door of daddy’s office and decided I would pop in there and give him the surprise I had bought for him. I knocked quietly but there was no answer, so I slowly opened the door and went in. . . where I got the shock of my life. I could see daddy’s naked bum over a pair of ladies legs on his desk and there were grunts coming from both of them. I got out as quickly as I could . . .
When he came out of the office and knowing that I had seen him in there, partially clothed, to say the least, he told me not to mention anything of what I had seen to mother and added, ‘Nothing for you to worry about Dear. You will understand better when you get older. You see, that’s just what men do . . .’
I was very worried about what I had seen and more worriedly concerned about daddy’s explanation ‘that was just what men did’ as I would hate to think that I could marry a man when I grew up, who did things like that . . . regardless of what other men did. . . but daddy drove me home as we both sat in the car in silence and nothing more was said.
It was a very long drive and an even longer silence . . .
That same evening I could hear a great row going on between my parents and I hadn’t said a word to my mother about my father’s office nonsense, however it was two weeks after this that the same row went on when I WAS IN BED. It must have been about midnight and I could hear doors slamming and screeches as both my parents were at it in the upstairs hall and then only a few moments after that, I could hear a terrible crash which made me get up to see what had happened. Both of them had fallen down the stairs and were lying together on the floor near the lounge. I was worried and telephoned for an ambulance, where each of them was taken to the hospital. Mummy was dead when they arrived there and daddy died three days afterwards with a broken spine.
The thought of them both being dead when only such a short time before they were full of life and arguing like mad, was hard to comprehend. I was particularly upset and sad because Mummy had spanked Aaron earlier that day and he went to bed crying and complaining of a sore head where he had been hit several times, so that when the parents were taken to hospital and Aaron could see me sobbing uncontrollably, he took me to his bed and cuddled me to sleep.
With the death of both my mummy and my daddy, Aaron and I had to go and live with my uncle Martin and Aunt Sarah. They had only been married for about a year and lived in the south of London but the change was quite a relief to both Aaron and myself except for the fact that because it had been raining heavily when we travelled to Sarah and Martin’s house I contracted a dreadful cold which developed into pneumonia and then I had to go into hospital. I was there for nearly three months and I am told I kept going in and out of consciousness until my pneumonia cleared up, but it was when I was in hospital that I kept being sick and one of the nursing staff asked me one day if I was always being sick or was it something that happened occasionally but before I could reply to her question I was sick again.
“How old are you darling?” the nurse asked me and I told her I was eleven going on for twelve and she raised her eyebrows and made a funny noise with her mouth. I kept being sick every morning and often during the day and as I could feel my belly getting bigger by the day, to my utter horror and morning sicknesses I realized I was pregnant. I could never understand how this could happen to me as I had never ever slept with a man . . . and only Aaron had shared my bed and that was only for one night when mummy and daddy were taken to hospital. Could it have been Aaron? Could that be possible? I don’t remember anything and Aaron was only fifteen years of age. . . AND I WAS ELEVEN . . . I remembered at that point that I had been going in and out of consciousness when I was in hospital, but surely there could have been no connection to my state of ‘motherhood’ when I was lying there in that hospital not knowing where I was or
what I was doing. . .
Chapter Two
The years had past, but grief dose not leave you regardless of what people say that time heals all wounds . . . I sat thinking over my past again as I studied my old face in the window pane and the thunder continued to roar outside. I remembered the pregnancy lark and shook my head. How could a child of eleven give birth to a little baby and how could a little boy of fifteen be able to become a father? It all seemed impossible and yet that was the only way it could have been. I had never had sex with any man and little Aaron was the only male I had slept with and that was for one night only when we were both in fear.
Could I have conceived in that short time?
Aunt Sarah and Uncle Martin had doubts when they found out that I was pregnant and after all this I went through a load of questions as to how I could have become such a mystery, but there were no answers and Sarah and Martin couldn’t suggest any answer to the problem. Could I have been the ‘whore’ they each thought I might be, I wondered as I am sure I heard uncle Martin tell Sarah that I could well have been lying to them just to save my face. They suggested abortion at one stage, but when they took me to the doctor, he was very wary about doing anything like that as he said I was very young to be put through such an aggressive ordeal and it was then suggested that as I was nearly twelve years of age, I would never be able to look after a baby and I should seriously think of adoption. All this thought of so many different things I might be able to do gave me a headache and I know at one time I wished the baby inside me would just die. . . Failing that, I had hoped that Sarah and Martin might ‘adopt’ but neither wanted to have a baby around the house as it would cause such a tremendous ‘uproar’ in their already peaceful home and they had never thought of having a baby themselves until they had been married for much longer than the few years they had enjoyed together.
Little Jonathon, as we called him, was born on the 5th of April, just two months before my birthday in July of that year and Sarah made all the arrangements for adoption, but by this time I had grown to love the little boy. It was like having another little doll in the house, together with the many dolls that daddy had bought for me and this doll could move and cry as well as eat and drink. The nappy changing gave me no trouble and I immediately felt that I had done this all my life and that I was well and truly a ‘little mother’ however, the authorities at that time made all the arrangements with Sarah and in a trice, the little boy was wrenched from my arms and I was told to forget that I had ever been pregnant and to get on with my life as an ‘ordinary little girl’ I was warned NEVER to talk to Aaron about this matter as he was so busy playing football and rugby at school that he never ever noticed that my belly was growing bigger by the day. Aaron was never to be upset, regardless of anything else. .
The adoption was arranged for some family who did not live near us to take the baby and I was never allowed to know where they had taken him. It was several years later when a girl from my school who was seventeen and had given birth to a little girl, had to have her baby adopted as she was unmarried, that I learned that Sarah had been told of the adopting family for my little boy, but she would never tell me where this was and for many years I lived with doubts as to whether my Jonathon had survived the adopting ordeal or even if he was dead or alive. I didn’t even know if he would have had his name changed . .
He could have been called MARMADUKE or FINKLEBOHM for all I knew and names were never mentioned. It was I who gave the little one the name Jonathon. I am not what you might call a ‘religious man’ and by that I mean that I don’t think of God every day, but I do pray regularly for the son I would love to have had and when I think of Aaron who has since got married again for the THIRD time and has more children than I can count, I often wonder if he is the father of my little boy, who by now, if he is still alive would be a young and I am sure, handsome man but you cannot live your life with regrets and Aaron never ever visited me in later life. I knew he was there, SOMEWHERE and I hoped, living happily with the woman he was with at that time. I think he lived in Enfield . . . well that was the last district I was led to understand he was living. Maybe God will have mercy on me some day and let me see my little son again, but my faith is very shallow and perhaps I am asking too much from God when I only speak to him on occasions and even then, I use my own language which is not very holy or angelic. As for me, I had never married and if I did now, the chances of having children would be nil, I would imagine but when I was in hospital as a child with pneumonia I was cared for by an excellent nurse. It was a male nurse and he came from Glasgow in Scotland. I guessed he was from Scotland as I recognised the accent from several of my friends in my school days and I never knew there would be such a person . . . as nurses always seemed to me to be females, however, this nurse, Mr. Coleman was very attentive to anything I needed and he used to read to me in the evenings when I was recovering. The stories he read were definitely for children but I listened intently even if I had heard them before. He would joke with me in his Scottish brogue and say, “It’s a braw bright moonlicht nicht the nicht . . .” and I learned that expression off by heart to his great delight. He also brought me fruit and in a short time I began to realize that this man was someone special in my life and we arranged to meet when I was discharged from the hospital. Now I know that may sound as if Mr. Coleman, whose name was Jack had ‘ulterior motives’ in arranging to meet a little girl when she was free to walk about with him, but I was very soon to learn that his motives were very pure and I began to realize that not only did he love me, but I also loved him.
There were two other men who gave me some attention, but neither of them could compare to Jack. Jack would spend the day and evening with me and then when he took me home around ten o’clock, he would hug me on the doorstep and give me a warm kiss and THEN HE WOULD GO HOME. I was very deeply in love with Jack Coleman and I would have married him had he asked me, but every time I thought of marriage, I could see the little boy that I had lost and I felt he cast a peculiar spell over my life and it would not let me rest. I COULD NEVER HAVE REPLACED THAT LITTLE BOY JONATHAN . . . and I knew it with a thought that I was aware would be with me until I die. Jack Coleman went off to America to do similar nursing with invalid and sick children, not long after we had been going out together and I realized when he had gone that it was all in my imagination that Jack and I could ever have got together as a married couple. Yes, he loved me, but Jack loved everyone who needed his love as he was a brilliant nurse and children with any type of sickness or illness drew his attention to the exclusion of most everything else. This is one of the reasons why he went to America and to do the nursing that he chose to do there . . . again with sick and crippled children.
The most peculiar thing that happened to me at that time was the strange and unusual attention from Martin my uncle, who seemed to regard me in his ‘purity of life and living’ to be nothing more than a prostitute and I could see him looking at me as if I was something he had picked up on the pavement after he had taken his dog for a walk.
When Martin looked at me, I felt I had to go and have a good shower and yet I never ever felt that either he or Sarah were practising Christians . . .I never saw them going to church or to the synagogue, although they were both Jewish just as I was.
Chapter Three
I had applied for a job as a school teacher assistant at a local school where they looked after children who had difficulties of various kinds and I was delighted when a letter came one morning to let me know that I had got the job. I was particularly interested in getting this post as it was so familiar to what Jack Coleman had done in America and the news of his death by some incident concerning a child whom Jack had tried to save from a car accident. He died and the child lived. . . and I cried for weeks.
On my first day of work, I was greeted very warmly by the staff and was made to feel very much at home. The children were wonderful and it was a great delight to feel that I could
do something for them to enable them to enjoy what life they had as indeed some of the children were very sadly wanting in so many ways, but it was after my first working day when I returned home that I got quite a surprise as Martin was sitting in the lounge as if he had been waiting for me for some time. I thought at first that he wanted to find out something about the new job and even possible congratulate me on getting the post, but that was very far from what I found; very far from what he had in mind. . . “So you are working now,” he said and I smiled as I nodded, but his conversation changed at that moment and he surprised me even more when he went on. “Perhaps now you might consider a little contribution to the household chores and give Sarah and me a little help . . . do you think?”
I was more than surprised when he said that as I had always ‘contributed’ as best I could when I had part time jobs in the past and I also did all the house cleaning and ironing, which I felt was another way of ‘contributing’ as neither Martin or Sarah did any work around the house and I also made the beds up when they both had left the house to go to work. I did not know how to reply to Martin but I knew I would have to say something so I suggested I would ‘contribute’ immediately I got my first wage packet and he seemed satisfied with that as he was about to leave the lounge, but suddenly he returned and sat down again as he lit a cigarette. I moved the ash tray towards him and he grinned as he crossed his legs.
“I suppose now, we will be able to ask you what happened when you had that brat so unexpectedly so many years ago . . . Yes?” he asked as he flicked his cigarette into the ash tray and looked at me with a strange look on his face.