My Mother My Mirror

by Andrea Kitt

  The following day I saw him during the day, then the day after he came to the bungalow for the night. We weren’t able to be together all the time because of his commitments to gigs, practices and so forth, but we saw each other much more often than usual. If only I’d had the health to make the most of it, we could have gone shopping and for long walks. As it was, the best I could do was to see him at home.

  That night at the bungalow I remember making him a meal, which he loved, then laughing a lot in the kitchen – I’m not sure what about, probably our crazy situation. All I know was that it gave me that lovely free, joyful feeling that I felt so much when I was with him.

  We made up a bed on the sitting-room floor and I slipped in beside him. This time he was more passionate, yet also severely restrained. It was obvious he wanted me, and I was surprised at how my supposedly-dormant body was responding to his. We had bizarre conversations, trying to figure out what ‘daddy’ would say: whether Tim actually meant us to go all the way, whether we should do so, just so we could know for sure it wasn’t what we wanted... After all, I’d given up all that side of life: I would be a big disappointment. Sex was obviously not what our relationship was about. Once or twice I let my hands stray towards naughty places, but he grabbed me firmly by the wrist and pulled my arms away. I asked if he did French kisses, and he mumbled a muddled response. Mick had great respect for Tim, and was fighting an intense inner battle.

  A few days later I went to see Therese again, and received some healing. I was not well: sleeping two to four hours a night, unable to walk up slopes without my heart beating like crazy. I knew I shouldn’t see Mick again for a few weeks, if there was any chance of recovery. But his flat was on the way home from Therese’s house. Just a quick visit; what harm could it do? So I saw him, and it was great; then that night as I lay awake I felt something snap in my chest. I had reached breaking point, and broken.

  I looked it up later and discovered it is a well documented phenomenon: the adrenal crash, that happens when stress becomes unbearable for the body. Of course there are diets and supplements and all sorts of things you can do to make yourself better, but none of these would make any difference unless I was able to sleep, and I couldn’t sleep until I had tackled the source of the stress, and I didn’t understand what was wrong with me.

  I thought I’d go to Leela: catharsis often made things clearer, and it was a great place to go to shake off troubles and start again. I got as far as packing and setting out, but had to turn back: I didn’t have the strength to get there, let alone rant and rave at the other end.

  I tried so hard to figure it out. Mick told me early on in our friendship that his birthday was on 7th June – one day after Sam’s! - and this set me thinking about Gemini men and the part they had played in my life. One thing was for sure: I found them irresistibly charming. The obvious theory was that I was attempting to heal my broken marriage by trying again with someone with a similar energy, and although Mick was far more humble, kind and approachable, I did recognize something in his free spirit and excitement about life that was definitely similar to Sam.

  Also, writing was an important part of my relationship with Sam, a passion we shared and something I did a fair amount of when I was with him, before the children were born. And now with all these e-mails we were exchanging, Mick was enthusing again and again about my writing, telling me what a natural I was, how much he loved reading what I wrote, how I must share my gift with the world. Until I really did take it to heart and began to write this book, which I would never have done without his overwhelming encouragement.

  Then I began to look back and think about the first Gemini man that I knew: my grandfather, Hugh. I felt his influence in my life a lot – particularly when it came to writing – yet I couldn’t remember much before a few visits with my parents when I was six or seven, and he died when I was ten. Was my whole relationship with him before we moved house, and did that move away from my dear grandfather cause an enormous feeling of loss and distrust? I talked about it with Tim, and we began to wonder if something deeply disturbing happened in those very early years: perhaps he had frightened me, or something else gave me a shock so terrifying that I buried it deep in my unconscious.

  I rang my cousin, Shelley’s sister’s daughter, and although she didn’t know much about my relationship with Hugh as a little girl, she did have one interesting bit of information. Apparently they had promised in the family not to say anything to me in case it was upsetting. Her mother told her that when she first met me as a four year old I had been a delightfully bright, cheerful and outgoing child, rushing into their bedroom in the morning to show them my toys and generally being a little ray of sunshine. Then a couple of years later I changed dramatically and became very quiet and withdrawn. When they asked what had happened, Carmen told them that the change in me took place when she had shown me one of the dead babies she had miscarried. My aunt was deeply shocked.

  When I asked my mother about this she absolutely denied it, and I certainly have no memory of it myself, but I could well imagine her doing something like that, perhaps because of some misguided idea that honesty was always the best policy, or that if I saw the reality of the dead child then it would make it less scary and I would understand better what the grown-ups were going through (although that’s the last thing I needed to know)... Carmen loved to shock people, and I know from experience she was not always sensitive enough to know who could handle her sudden dramatic displays and who couldn’t. But this line of enquiry reached a dead end: what was done was done, and what I needed to know was what was holding me back now in my life.

  Carmen continued to stick to the story that I was always a withdrawn, troubled little girl, yet as well as this report from my aunt, several other sources suggested that even I had a few years of innocent joy. My mother obviously believed what she said... Was it true, or did she have a need to make it true? Certainly this consistently negative opinion explained my feeling that there was ‘something wrong with me’. Was she doing to me what I have witnessed her do to so many others: subtly undermining me in order to boost her own confidence? I’m sure it was unconscious, but to be drip-fed a feeling of flawedness and inadequacy could definitely have crippled my sense of worth. She readily admitted that she was an extremely fearful, inadequate mother, but was that enough to make me so chronically withdrawn?

  For a couple of days Tim and I explored the outrageous possibility that Hugh could have been my father. We knew he and Carmen had been very close, and it would have explained my parents’ sudden departure from Essex far better than this strange idea that my grandparents were loving me too much. But we asked Carmen about it, and on this occasion I believed her. She described the closest she had ever got to Hugh, in their flat in London when he had grasped her hand and told her how important she was to him; and it all had a ring of truth to it.

  Next I spoke to my youngest sister, Martha, who is passionate about family history, and she told me she had seen a bunch of letters from Hugh that described me as a young child. I was immediately interested. She said they were tied in a bundle in a suitcase under a bed in Granny Ann’s spare room in Hertfordshire. Having failed to get away to Leela, I now wondered if I might be able to make it up there. If I could just find enough energy, I knew it would do me good, particularly to go back to the place where I lived as a child; and the contents of these letters may give me some of the clues I had been looking for. So I made plans to drive towards London to visit Granny Ann and William, Andrew Strange and Sally; and in the end I managed it without any problem.

  In Ann’s big old house, surrounded by Shelley’s sculptures, books and furniture, I began to relax. I went for long walks up and down chalky hills, thinking about my situation, and began to see things a little more clearly. I had two men in my life, one of whom wanted me to join him as a teenager, the other of whom was dragging me into old age... What about ME?? I played with the idea of finding a job and somewhere to live up there, and leaving the
whole mess behind. I knew I could do it; it gave me a feeling of relief just to think about it.

  Then I thought: before I moved in with Tim I was lively, dynamic, getting on with my life. Since living with him, I had become the needy one, always having a problem, becoming more and more unwell. I had presumed this was my fault, but was there a part of Tim that encouraged this, fostered it: in fact found it far easier to relate to me as his problem child than as an equal adult? Since I moved into his retirement bungalow on the retirement bungalow estate, I’d aged by about twenty years! He didn’t want to move: this was his last home. Everything was geared towards decline and death. I suddenly saw that it may not entirely be me making this happen; I was part of a dynamic, and it was far from healthy.

  49

  Letters & Poems

  On my second day at Ann’s house I rooted around in the spare room, finding boxes and trunks full of fascinating old photos and boring old documents, until finally I came across the letters from Hugh that Martha had been talking about. I took them down into the conservatory and looked through each one.

  He had written them to a lady friend of his in Scotland between the years 1954 and 1965, and they immediately made it clear that our relationship did carry on after the move away from Pillar Cottage; in fact it seems that until the age of five I was very close to him. In 1960 he suffered a lot of illness, and by the next entry in 1961 we had lost some of our closeness because of me growing up fast and him not seeing me for several months; but we were obviously still fond of each other.

  Letters from when I was two years old describe my familiarity with Forge Cottage and mention several times how much they were going to miss me when we moved. He says, “She’s so much at home here now, and almost everything in the place, including the large bath and the bed she sleeps in is ‘Andrea’s’”.

  But I still stayed there after we moved to Weston, sometimes for several nights at a time, and he obviously adored me, even if he sometimes felt a little overwhelmed by my demands. There were long descriptions of me ‘helping’ him in the house and garden, and having dolls’ tea-parties and pottering about in my own little world.

  He describes me in different places as “A very busy, quite self-sufficient, little person... A charming, happy little being, and so sensible... Intensely observant... A merry little soul, though she can be very solemn, and has the most bubbling, chuckling laugh you can imagine...”

  Being a man of words, he obviously delighted in my learning in this area, and when I was two years old he enthused: “Her word capacity is really alarmingly great. She picks words off one’s lips and repeats them – 3-syllabled words at times, phonetically perfect, though of course she doesn’t understand the meaning of many of them. But she seems to love the sound of words.” My favourite book at the time was Kate Greenaway’s ‘A Apple Pie’, which I would rush to get from the bookshelf and ask him to read again and again.

  He even talks about my early singing, and being a chorister himself in Kings College chapel, he knew what he was talking about: “She lets herself go completely with a full chest-voice and only head-voice notes coming at random intervals. And her whole small body joins in and kicks and vibrates with released energy so that I have quite a job holding her on my knee.” This is when I was three. Does it sound like a chronically inhibited child? Or is it just that, inevitably, Carmen only saw me when she was with me?

  I typed out seven pages of quotes from these letters, and the more I read them the more I felt, “Thank you Hugh. I really love you. Thank you so much for leaving concrete evidence that I was a normal, lovable child. Thank you for what we shared. I treasure it. It may even be true to say that you saved me from what could have been a childhood so unbearable that it damaged me in a way it was impossible to recover from.” And perhaps to some extent it also explained why on two very significant occasions in my life I have been drawn to men like him: charming, sensitive Gemini writers who have encouraged me in my own writing, who have been creative and romantic, and who have suffered a lot themselves.

  Hugh also took me to the sea, sometimes with my parents and sometimes just him and me, because Frinton was a day trip from Little Walden. On one occasion he says: “I’ve never seen an infant of 18 months welcome the sea so fearlessly. She just opened her arms to it, crying “Eee, eee, eee,” and the bigger the wave that bounced against her little chest, the more ecstatic she was. There is no doubt about her having six planets in water.” Then when I was four: “Andrea spent much of the time we were there in it ‘up to my neck’ as she proudly declared.”

  And if there was any doubt about my affection for him, he reported on an afternoon when I was four years old: “ I said at one point, ‘Well, Andrea, I’m going to lie down for a quarter of an hour.’ To which she replied, ‘Oh, I’ll come too,’ and needless to say sat and sprawled on top of me throughout.”

  William was particularly interested in what I had to tell him about the grandfather he had never known, and both he and Charlotte seemed to find my drama around Mick quite entertaining. I went to visit Andrew and strode across huge, stubbly cornfields discussing astrology, love and the meaning of life. It was springtime again and the land was hopeful, with green shoots and delicate flowers. Then I drove up to Weston and walked quietly round the village, visiting the shrines of my past, and to St Christopher School in Letchworth. I wanted to reconnect with my roots as much as I could.

  After five days with my family, I went to stay with Sally in Buckinghamshire. She had suffered from adrenal fatigue herself and was empathic and helpful. I was beginning to feel stronger; then I went with her to visit her therapist in London and had a couple of sessions. I’m sure she said all sorts of things to me, but the one that stuck in my mind was, “You should have sex with him.” This was hardly professional, but most of all it was not what I wanted to hear! Suddenly I felt all agitated again – in fact it more or less wiped out the benefit of the little holiday, and even before I got back to Devon I felt I was right back where I was before.

  In my desperation, I decided hypnotherapy was worth a try. There was obviously something going on so deep inside me that there was no way I could figure it out by myself: I needed someone to help me plumb the depths of my unconscious. A person called Jeremy Seabrook had been recommended, so I called and arranged for him to come to the house.

  I immediately sensed that this man was different from any of the therapists or even psychics I had seen before: he was deeply intuitive and was able to see me far more clearly than I could see myself. The way he spoke reminded me of books I had read about life after death: a realm in which there is only energy, unhampered by the complications of the material world. It seemed he was naturally aware of what was really going on on an energetic level, and was able to penetrate the layers of disguise I had developed over the years. Yet he was also completely present in his body, with a good sense of humour and a refreshingly direct and genuine way of communicating.

  Time and again he would walk into a session and ask me how I was, I would tell him how I thought I was and he would say, “Yes, but what’s really going on?” Often I had no idea what he was talking about, but with a little prompting I became aware of a deeper level of feeling; then he encouraged me to close my eyes and focus all my energy on that experience. In this way he helped me reach down through layers of pain and misunderstanding to the raw, vibrant emotion underneath, and once this had been thoroughly explored and expressed I would come out the other side with new insights, clearer and freer to carry on with my life.

  One of the first and most vital things he told me was that the dynamic between myself and Carmen was the same as it had ever been: in this essential way she had not changed. If she had, I would no longer be struggling with my side of it. This was an enormous relief, as I had convinced myself it was all my fault now, because she was so different and sorted; which of course put me right back in a painful childhood place of, “Mummy’s always right... so what’s wrong with me?”

  Catharsis
in these sessions wasn’t the jumping up and screaming variety, but it certainly went just as deep. I sat there with my eyes shut imagining mummy with her watertight ego, her superior rightness, her impenetrable ‘me’ness, and imagined myself screaming and tearing at her face, trying desperately to reduce her to something humble, something naked of pretence and show and normal, a person with whom there could be an equal flow of love backwards and forwards; because there can be no love without equality.

  Soon after this session it was Carmen’s 85th birthday and she was planning a party. The last big event had been her 80th, which she held on a ferryboat going down the river Dart. She had arranged tributes to herself, which I thought a little peculiar, and when they happened I found quite disturbing. I listened to three or four people praising her in different ways, then as the compliments continued I became more and more agitated. I felt so strongly that they were only expressing one side of the story: that I was the casualty of all this fame and wonderfulness, that I desperately wanted to tell people how it had been for me, but didn’t know how I could without spoiling the party. At the time, I just got more and more intensely involved with practicalities: tidying up the meal and sorting out things to be taken home.

  When I finally got back with Tim the full force of the evening hit me, and I sobbed my heart out. I had that awful feeling that I had got absolutely nowhere: here I was back in the same old situation, shy little Andrea shrivelling away in the corner whilst my mother sat on her throne and the world adored her. In the end I wrote a powerful poem about my pain, but I still didn’t feel the world had heard me, because it hadn’t.

  So here I was five years later, and in my therapy session I imagined myself back there, saying what I wanted to say and being heard, and suddenly I saw that it was a very important part of my own healing to tell other people what it was like for me, which is one of the reasons I am writing this book.