Mum could speak some English – but she could neither read nor write, so she took the letter to a neighbour. Imagine her horror when the neighbour read it, and she realised she’d been deceived once again. The affair was still going on. Horrified, she went to the officer in charge to tell him the marriage was over. I imagine she’d expected a sympathetic ear, along with some support but she got neither. She was made an outcast.
I missed my dad. I missed him terribly. I blamed him for leaving and I hated him for that. How could he abandon us – and it was an abandonment in every sense. The army life is simple. You move from house to house, but the basics for living were provided. You’d have furniture, pots and pans and bedclothes. And if the blankets were itchy, at least they kept you warm.
There’s a lot to be said for living within a closed camp. It gave us security, friends, and things to do; there were youth clubs, and activities, and all away from the civilian world outside the barriers, which was deemed unsafe.
When Dad left, we were provided with a house from the Northern Ireland Housing Executive, but it came unfurnished. All we had at the start were two wooden chairs that the painters had left behind.
It was a bleak time. Mum didn’t believe in loans, so we had no sofa until she could afford to pay for it. She didn’t realise, at first, that she was entitled to anything, because in Singapore, where she came from, there was no benefit system. If your family didn’t help you, you had to work. And when work was scarce, the family shared. When my uncle, who was a welder, got a contract on the ships for a year, he saved and supported the extended family. As jobs were shared his contract would be given to someone else. Then it was somebody else’s turn. That was the accepted way of things.
Life improved, a little, when Mum’s solicitor’s secretary, Betty, helped her to claim benefits. Throughout all this time, Mum looked amazing. She wore tight jeans with high heel shoes, and her red lipstick and sunglasses gave her an air of glamour and confidence. When we walked through the town, people turned their heads to watch her. I remember, one day, sitting on a bench with her, and this fellow came up and started chatting to her. She lit up at the attention, but it was years before she trusted a man again.
Nobody seeing her strutting around town would guess that she had any problems to contend with. But the truth was we had lost our mother to depression. She was in a very bad way. Returning from school one day, there was a strange woman in the house. ‘I’m from social services,’ she said.
‘Does you mum have any tablets’ She asked, and I said that yes, she had.
‘Can you show me where she keeps them?’
I did so, and now, wonder if they thought she was suicidal. And I wonder, was she? Had she been considering taking her life? I don’t know the answer to that. What I do know, is that her depression made her angry, and that I was the one to get the brunt of her anger. Whilst my sister and brother got away scot free, I was blamed for everything. One day I asked her why. ‘You’re your dad’s favourite,’ she said. That made me wonder if I reminded her of him.
I was eleven before I realised that I was ‘different.’ I’d started Antrim High School. It was a shock. The girls would shout, ‘chinky.’ It could have been a lonely time, but I had a friend!
On my first day, I walked into the classroom and noticed a beautiful girl with long blonde hair. There was a spare seat beside her. I sat there, and my friendship with Jacqueline began. We hadn’t any other friends, not really. At first, we played with Julie, who’d also moved here from Springfarm Primary school, but as time went on, she started smoking, and moving with a new crowd. We didn’t care. We didn’t need anyone else. We’d play chase in the playground, taking it in turns to be the bad guy.
Jacqueline and I shared the same interests. We sang in the choir, and we both learned musical instruments. I played the clarinet; she played the flute. We were innocents – in first year we were still playing with Barbie dolls, and later on, neither of us were interested in the cool crowd who went to the disco.
It didn’t seem to matter that we came from such different backgrounds, but we were, now I look back, chalk and cheese. She had the best pencil cases and pens, and I was the poor child, with no pencil case.
Jacqueline lived in a beautiful detached house. An only child, her mummy and daddy adored her. She had a pet cow! I had to queue for my free meal ticket; it felt as if I was begging all the time. It was as if the teacher, Mrs Adair, liked seeing my humiliation. I’d be nearing the front of the line, and she’d roar, ‘Sharon! Get to the back of the line.’ That kept happening, and went on, until Mum went to the headmaster to complain. She said, ‘The teachers here don’t like Chinese people.’ After that, it stopped.
I wasn’t interested in boys as a teenager, but for some reason they were interested in me. When I was fourteen, this boy, Aaron, asked me out. Being an innocent, I naturally said, ‘no,’ and that infuriated him. He wasn’t used to being turned down and retaliated by calling me names. One day, he spat at me. His friends all laughed, as if it was great sport. I’ve never forgotten the humiliation.
There were two especially good-looking boys at school, Spud and Gibby. Everyone loved them! One day, the girls in my class asked Spud, ‘who is the nicest girl in the class?’ I’m pretty sure they expected him to choose Sonia, because she worked her way between them. If she wasn’t going out with one of them, she’d be going out with the other. So, when he said, ‘Sharon Truesdale,’ they weren’t too pleased. And that’s when my real problems started.
These girls had never noticed me before, since I was far from cool, but now they decided they disliked me. They started calling me names and calling my mum names. They’d wait for me after school, and shout out, ‘There goes Chinky.’ I see now that they were jealous, but their bitchiness really affected me. It made me more determined than ever to avoid boys.
Of course, that didn’t last! At fifteen, when Geoff, a boy a few years older than me took an interest, and asked me out, I agreed, and was happy to. We were together for four years – we even got engaged! But when I set off to study law, he couldn’t cope with the long-distance relationship. He stopped contacting me, and I heard he had found someone else.
That hit me hard. Was my mum, right? Were all men bastards who just used you for sex? I got over my bitterness because my mantra for life has always been to forgive, forget, and get on with my life. Geoff and I have remained friends to this day.
It had taken me a while to realise that whilst my childhood had been difficult, James’s was even more troubled. Yes, it was more prosperous than mine – and his dad was in his life - but it takes love to nurture a child, and whilst there was not a lot of love in my family, there was rather less in his.
But by the time James and I moved in with his mother, it was, essentially, a happy house. Joyce had married again, and her two sons with Davy were fun to have around the place. But damage, once done, doesn’t easily lift. And if Joyce had learned that women should be subservient, and that accepting a black eye here and there was par for the course, James had witnessed all that too.
Strength and dominance were part of being a man. That’s what he’d learned. And if James had charm too – and he had – bucket loads of it – I was starting to realise that there was another side to him. And that was altogether darker.
After three, long, months of living with his family we found a house. I was thrilled! This was the new start I had longed for. And when the line on a pregnancy test went blue, and I told James the news, we were both over the moon! He was so proud. This was proof of his manhood. Away from his family home, his mood calmed too, and I was filled with hope.
2
Young Matthew
‘I wish I was dead.’
‘What did you say?’ Catching seven-year-old Matthew by the shoulders, I turned him to face me, looking into the eyes that were so like my own.
He pulled away, and muttered under his breath, so that I had to strain to hear him.
‘I’m going to kil
l myself with a knife.’
My heart nearly stopped with the shock of it. Yet his pronouncement didn’t come completely out of the blue. Matthew’s problems started early. You could say they began before he’d even been born. In early pregnancy, I had started to bleed. Fearing the worst, I went to my doctor, and he sent me on to hospital. The technician, scanning me, couldn’t find any sign of a baby. ‘I don’t think you’re pregnant,’ she said. ‘Could you have made a mistake?’
She called in a doctor who took some blood, and, having tested it, said, ‘You are pregnant. You weren’t wrong about that; but it’s an ectopic pregnancy.’
I’d never heard of that. ‘What does it mean?’
‘The baby is growing in your fallopian tube.’
I frowned, trying to take it in.
‘I’m really sorry.’
‘But what does that mean?’
‘We’ll have to remove it.’
I cried then, and I cried again when I came around after the operation. James visited, and he was nice. He said not to worry, that we could just try again. Joyce wasn’t so sympathetic. ‘Poor James,’ she said, ignoring the tears I was now trying hard to hide.
‘Poor James?’
‘He was so looking forwards to be a dad.’
‘Well, yes. And I was pretty keen to be a mum, too.’ Did she blame me for losing the baby? For somehow being bad breeding material?
‘If you hadn’t told everyone you were pregnant so early on, this would never have happened.’
Back at home, I kept crying. I couldn’t stop. I vomited too. ‘It’s bizarre,’ I said. ‘I feel like I’ve got morning sickness, but I’m not even pregnant. I don’t understand it.’
I went back to my doctor.
‘It’ll be the anaesthetic,’ he said. ‘Give it a few days and I’m sure you’ll be fine.’
I did, and I wasn’t. I went back again, and another test showed that I was still pregnant. That made the doctor scratch his head. ‘It must’ve been twins,’ he said. ‘And you lost one.’
The sickness dogged me for a while. I didn’t feel like going out, but once it passed, we decided to go to Dublin for a weekend. James’s friends, Gary and Grainne came too. On the way, we stopped for petrol. James sat in the driver’s seat, whilst Gary filled the tank. Afterwards, he jumped back into the car, slammed the door, and James sped off. ‘What’s that about?’ I said. ‘You haven’t paid?’
The other three laughed and my heart sank. It was a terrible weekend, because I realised, as never before, that James was not the person I’d thought. I don’t drink, and the three of them were tanked up for most of the weekend. ‘You’re just a killjoy,’ James said when I complained. And, when, driving like a maniac, he scared the living daylights out of me, I muttered that I hated him, and wouldn’t want him around my baby.
Pushing down the accelerator, his knuckles turned white. And he said, ‘Take that back. If you ever think of leaving me, I’ll kill the two of us.’
I screamed at him to slow down, and thankfully he did. And after that, things calmed down a little.
The sickness cleared, and at six months pregnant I felt good. We were both looking forwards to the birth, anxious to be a real family. But one morning, jerking awake from a dream, I couldn’t breathe, and realised that James’s hands were round my neck.
I fought him off. That wasn’t easy. James is much stronger than I am, but perhaps all he wanted was a reaction. Well he got that all right. I sat up, gasping for air, and hoped he’d say sorry. But he was shouting at me. ‘Where are my jeans? Where did you put them? Tell me now, or I’ll be late for work.’
‘Aren’t they in the hot-press?’
He ran off to look and came back wearing them. ‘How was I to know,’ he said, instead of saying, ‘sorry.’
‘James, that’s where your clean work clothes go. You know that.’
Why didn’t I leave him then? Because I loved him. Because he came home contrite. Because he promised nothing like that would ever happen again. Did I believe him? I wanted to.
And it didn’t happen again. Not like that. And if he screamed at me each night, and threw his dinner across the room, or shouted and threatened me, that was just his temper. Maybe Joyce was right. Maybe he couldn’t help it. And he did, always, say sorry.
The baby was due on April 3rd, 1995. I hoped it wouldn’t arrive on April Fool’s Day, and as it turned out, that would have been the least of my problems. Towards the end of my pregnancy, the doctor became concerned. ‘Your blood pressure is up,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to watch that.’ When my urine tested positive for protein, and my ankles and face swelled up, I was admitted to hospital with pre-eclampsia.
I didn’t feel too bad; but I looked like Michelin woman from all the swelling. ‘Where are you Sharon,’ James joked, slumping in the chair beside the bed.
When the doctor announced that I was to be induced, I felt such joy. ‘I’ll be a mother tonight,’ I said. But no such luck. They tried to start me off with pessaries; they tried three times, and eventually contractions started to kick in.
I held Matthew when he was born. I held him close, hoping he would breastfeed, but he seemed too sleepy. I was unwell for a while. I had a haemorrhage and needed a blood transfusion. And the next day Matthew had jaundice and was sleepy and floppy.
It didn’t dent anyone’s happiness. James had a permanent grin on his face. My mum was over the moon, and my sisters were cock-a-hoop. Joyce already had grandchildren, but on my side, he was the first grandson, the first nephew, the first everything! It was brilliant!
After 10 days we returned home to our estate house. I felt so proud bringing the beautiful Moses-basket into our house in the Newpark estate. I was 21; I was married; and I had my baby, my beautiful little boy.
James was working for a lorry company making trailers at the time, and I worked for three nights a week – leaving Matthew with Mum. She lived just across the road, so this arrangement worked out well. But, taking advantage of this, James started going out with his mates; basically, living the single life.
I didn’t mind at first. I had my baby, and reasoned that James needed an evening out with his friends, but then the nights out escalated. There were times when I’d wake in the morning and realise his side of the bed hadn’t been slept in. There were nights when I wished he’d stayed out, because he arrived in the small hours blocked, shouting and breaking things.
One evening, I decided to watch a movie. Maria, my sister, said that there was a film coming up on TV, Sleepers, that I would enjoy. ‘It will be just your kind of thing,’ she said.
I waited, impatiently, until the night it was on, and, expecting James home for dinner, I ordered takeaway beef curry, fried rice, chips and prawn crackers. He wasn’t home by 9.00pm, so leaving his share in the oven, I settled down in front of the television.
It was after 10pm when James appeared at the entrance of the living room. The smell of alcohol would have knocked you flat. He stood at the door looking at me, and said, ‘I’m going to kill you’
Ignoring him, I said, ‘I’m watching this film – the one I told you about.’ I hoped this would distract him. But it was if as he hadn’t heard me.
‘I’m going to kill you’ He’d raised his voice now. ‘I dreamt about it; I’ll do it with a knife.’
There was a dangerous glint in his eye. I thought, oh God, he means it! And from that moment I was wary. And the next time he threatened me he had baby Matthew in his arms – and I feared for him too. That was it! I left him the following day and went across the road to stay with Mum.
It wasn’t a difficult decision. I’d watched my mum and dad argue. Mum had stayed out of a sense of misplaced loyalty, only to be unceremoniously dumped when Dad met someone, he considered more appealing. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake! I was lucky, and managed to get a housing executive house, so leaving James in the matrimonial home.
I walked out with a nothing but a single bag of belongings, and my baby son. Ja
mes wasn’t pleased. He’d lost control of me, and he ended up damaging the house. My name was on the mortgage, meaning that I was still financially responsible for it. I ended up getting a court order to get him out, so that the house could be sold.
James’s response was to clear the whole house. When I went around to check, I couldn’t find any sign of baby Matthew’s things. His cot, clothes, everything was gone. I told the police, and they contacted his family, and told them that if the things were not returned, James would be arrested. Funny how everything reappeared the next day! James moved on, getting a flat in Newpark, just a road away from Caulside, where Matthew and I now lived.
I was still scared of James – terrified of his temper – but baby Matthew adored his father, and four months later, around the time of Matthew’s second birthday, we decided to give our marriage another chance. James asked me out to dinner. We had a lovely time. We really did. All the romance of the early days was back, and I invited James back to the house, where we had a night of passion.
Waking in his arms I felt so happy. It was like all the bad stuff had never happened. Later that day, I stood on the bed reaching into the top of the wardrobe for some clean sheets, and I was singing, feeling carefree for the first time in ages, when James appeared at the bedroom door, Matthew at his feet.
‘What are you so happy about,’ he said. Then he thumped the door so hard that it broke. Matthew ran from him in terror, holding out his arms to me, so I scooped him up, and said, ‘How dare you break up my house.’
He looked at me in astonishment, his mouth open, as if he didn’t know this new version of Sharon; this strong confident woman who was well capable of sticking up for herself. He left without saying a word, leaving Matthew screaming, inconsolable.
‘That’s it,’ I shouted to his back. ‘We’re finished.’ And we were. We were, except that, as fate would have it, that night had produced results. I was pregnant again.
Forever Young: A mother's story of life after suicide Page 2