SUNDAY IN MEMORY LANE (Episode 20)

Objectives reached.... now what?

I was so embarrassed about the fight I had with Lorraine that I shut myself up in the house as much as I could and got stuck into studying Science 101 with the Open University. It was a great distraction from the unpleasant realisation that I was, essentially, still the unruly street urchin from London who could fight like an insane cat if necessary.
I had thought that my splendid education and hippy lifestyle had overlaid my childhood with a higher moral grounding. I could not have been more wrong.

When Tony returned from his shift offshore I was ready and prepared for him to be furious with me. Oddly, he was far from angry. He seemed amused!
I had the feeling that two stupid women fighting over him appealed to his vast and ever expanding ego, so I was careful to drive home to him that it would never have happened if Lorraine had stuck to her usual distain rather than attempt to glass me in the face. I had heard that she had tried this with others before and so I considered that my reaction might have given her some pause to change her tactics.
I was wrong about that too.

Tony said he would visit her in hospital to check out whether she intended to press charges of assault. This seemed to be his greatest concern. I was well aware that he was simply making a good excuse for hearing her version of the story and presumably checking that his drinking and sexual deviancy partner was fit to return to duties.

He came back looking surprisingly angry. He said that I had broken both her cheekbones. He said that, rather than getting the authorities involved, Lorraine had "put a contract out on me" via her London gangster connections. Knowing that Lorraine had fantasies about being a Gangster's Moll, I burst out laughing.
"No Fran!" scowled Tony, "She is seriously going to try to get you beaten up or maybe worse!" he said. I continued to be totally unimpressed by this threat and he seemed a little frustrated with me.
"I told her that if one hair of your head was even moved out of place by any of her heavy mob mates, the first thing I intend to do is kill her." He said this without emotion of any kind and his expression was tight lipped and very serious.

I was not even remotely afraid. That woman had ideas above herself at all times and I did not think that any London gangsters would even dare to come anywhere near me.
There was something that Tony and I both knew about my family that was like the fattest insurance policy ever underwritten by Lloyds 100.

I was my father's first born. We lived, during my infancy, in abject poverty in a bomb shaken house in Islington. Our family ranged all over North and East London and we knew people. Lots of useful and innovative people. Although I never told a soul about my family connections, the family name was well known. I had been cared for by my grandmother during my early years and she had a lot of clients for palm reading and tarot cards. I used to love hiding under the table, earwigging.

One lovely, very smart, bleached blonde lady was a regular visitor and she would always be shown into the front parlour with much affection and the greatest respect.
That lady was my grandmother's closest friend and ally.
That lady was the much loved and highly respected, Mrs. Kray.

I overheard all the readings as I sat screwed up in a ball under the heavy flock floor sweeping table cloth. I used to nick swigs of my grandmother's extremely strong coffee, which I loved but was never allowed to drink. I would not always understand the conversations, but I soon came to know the names of Mrs Kray's adored sons.

I had no idea then, in the 1950s, that this family would become the most infamous family to ever grace the East End, but I knew we were closely tied to them and that there were many secrets I was hearing that could never be told to anyone ever.

My confidence, purely based on the fact that I was not going to be dragged into court for assault, was entirely restored. My hand began to resume it's correct, more feminine shape and I ventured out and about despite my severe embarrassment.

Something very strange began happening.
Women I had never met before were stopping me in the streets or at gigs and asking me if I was the woman who had battered Lorraine! I would always confess and squirm but they would hug me and praise me! I was totally amazed by this.
It transpired that Lorraine had delved into several marriages locally and had caused a lot of trouble ever since she was at school. Apparently she had always been a scheming and very nasty piece of work. Some of the stories that were told to me during that period were most revealing. One woman explained to me, what she considered was the root cause of Lorraine's errant behaviour towards other women.
She told me that Lorraine's mother had stolen a well known handsome man from his wife and that the heartbroken wife had committed suicide in terrible distress.
The theory that was put to me by this new friend explained a great deal. Was it possible that Lorraine was trying to become even more of a successful bitch than her mother?
We could only speculate, but the thought that this was her objective has never left my consciousness. There was no way that I would be bumping myself off over the likes of the local bike. She would never be achieving that ambition.
That was a fact.

Meanwhile Dougie, Jai, Alan and various other Glaswegian friends were conducting their many and regular post mortems in my lounge as usual. I would provide the space and stay upstairs in my bedroom either dressmaking or studying. I had no need to know what they were discussing and only if it directly concerned me would I go downstairs and get involved in the conversations.
Sometimes they would simply be drinking, smoking and listening to music. Things were often pretty raucous, but they respected my lovely newly decorated lounge and there was never any sign of fighting or even disagreement. Oh, except the one time I said something very cheeky to Jai and he jumped on me which caused my old rocking chair to die in a million pieces underneath me!
Otherwise it was quite a happy period.
I felt very safe with them.

The stash of alcohol was still languishing in the loft gathering dust. I asked Jai if he could arrange for it to be removed and he stated that there was no hurry. They were saving it for Christmas and the New Year, so out of sight and mind for the time being was agreed to be the best place for it. I promptly forgot about it's very existence and when the end of 1977 approached we had a terrific couple of weekends that turned into continuous parties from Friday until Sunday. The fact that I don’t remember anything about those parties would suggest that they were excellent!

I was amalgamating my various unconnected friends with these parties.
The bikers, the hippies, the musicians and the Jocks would mingle and they got on extremely well. We developed such a busy household that I simply left the front door key in the latch to save myself from having to keep running to the front door to let people in.

The neighbours complained about the noise to Tony, when he was home from the rigs and he would convey this to me regularly. Try as I might to keep some control, the volume knob on the record player was always creeping up to full behind my back, but by some miracle, Dan would usually sleep through the din, in his bedroom at the very back of the house. But not always; he complained about the noise too and even to this day, ruefully remembers trying to sleep at that time.

It was around this time that the owners of Elaine's flat decided to try to evict her but when the court heard about the length of time that she had been in occupancy and the improvements she had made they granted her a full tenancy and the owners were rebuffed. She was conducting a torrid affair with a married man at the time and we were seeing less and less of each other.

One day she came through the door flapping brochures and paraphernalia at me.
"I am going to join a Kibbutz in Israel!" she announced, very excitedly.
"But the flat?" I queried, thinking of all the bother we had gone to with the court case and keeping the place looking lovely. She seemed to dismiss the flat and I felt that something else was behind this sudden change of direction.
"Has Kevin sodded off or something?" I asked, referring to her married lover.
It turned out that he had left his wife and gone to London to stay with his sister.
Elaine's face spoke volumes. She had clearly hoped that he would move in with her, but this had not been on Kevin's agenda. The disappointment was very evident.
She insisted that she was going to Israel and that was all she wanted to talk about from that day until she actually packed up and left.

I missed her very much, but she sent me cassette tapes of music she was into and long letters explaining what she was doing and who she was screwing. She seemed to be loving the kibbutz life and, when her arranged time came to an end, she stayed on for more years. She learned Hebrew and was serious about a young Jewish guy, but he treated her really badly and dismissed any possibility of marriage - because she was not Jewish.
She was gutted and, on the rebound, headed straight into a splendidly romantic relationship with a young Argentinian. She never permitted her letters to convey unhappiness, but the tracks she was sharing with me, on the cassette tapes that she included, told a very different story. I got the distinct impression that she was deeply hurt by that Jewish guy.

By this time I was studying Psychology and hating it. I just could not get the theories to stick in my head. They were simply awful and I felt, instinctively, that they were completely wrong. I struggled on with it for a while, even submitting great essays and experiments which I conducted on my friends without cease. No, psychology was not convincing me, no matter how hard I tried. But I could thank Carl Jung for introducing me to the I Ching. That was the breakthrough which came to my rescue.

I swapped over to a course in eastern philosophy and found my niche. I had a real love for all things Chinese since early childhood and their Taoist philosophy captured my imagination, despite the difficulty I had with it at first. I was learning to distinguish between Yin and Yang, I was appreciating the natural forces, rhythms, all types of Chi and becoming curious about martial arts.

I had taken a better job for the summer, working on the beach selling ice-cream.

At the same time I was working on the house as finances permitted. The kitchen was filled with stolen goods, thanks to Tony and the boys. Even the new sliding glass, double glazed doors had arrived on a dark night by the back gate. Tony knocked the dining room bay window out completely and we lived with a plastic sheet over the huge hole left there for some time. Finally he created a squared small extension to accommodate the new doors and the old doorway at the end of the kitchen was bricked up.

Alan came to turn the battered kitchen walls into smooth plastered perfection again and I remember really well that it was a wet late October when he finished the job. The reason I am so certain is because I made him fresh magic mushrooms with cheese on toast for his lunch and he, being always prepared to experiment, had remained with me for the rest of the night, talking nonsense and crying laughing over everything! It was so funny to see him childlike for a change. He deserved it. He was always so annoyingly mature otherwise!

Tony fitted the new cabinets in the kitchen and built the long continuous work surfaces from chipboard, precisely to my design. While he went off to do a roofing job, I set about gluing the Formica onto the boards and wondered why I felt as stoned as if I had been smoking some heavy Tibetan Temple balls or something similarly laced with opium. When Tony walked back in, some hours later, I was giggling, completing the gluing of all twenty seven feet of pure white Formica into place. I was thrilled with the way it all looked, but he was diving at the sliding doors and dragging me out into the garden.
"You divvy!" he shook his head, as he positioned me on the garden bench.
"You are smashed out of your head on glue fumes! You should have had the door open!" I was incorrigibly dissolved in giggles and saying, "But it is November Tony! It's too cold!" I was fortunate that he had come home when he did, because I was barely making sense out of my vision at the time! The kitchen looked wonderful in a swimmy sort of way!

We threw another party to celebrate the completed kitchen and finally were able to use the whole ground floor, just as it was always intended to be used. The upstairs kitchen was returned to being a bedroom for various guests and overnight drunken friends.

As 1978 rolled in, Tony was promoted to the job that he really wanted.
He became a Derrickman and his salary went astronomical because of the extreme risks he was taking just to do the job. He described it to me and I was mortified.
He was the man responsible for the top end of each new piece of drilling pipe and was up high in the drilling rig, attached into place by a safety line. He loved it because he worked alone and so high up he could see for miles across the crazy weather and ocean. It inspired him somehow.
On his journeys back and forth from the rig he had met some guys who were working for BP and he liked the sound of their working conditions and the remuneration package that was temptingly high. He asked me to phone BP's Aberdeen HQ for an application form and we filled it in immediately.
After a brief interview Tony served his notice with Sedco and started to work for BP.
He had to take a short period of demotion, but he was earning a lot more and the rig, The Sea Conquest, was top of the range, relatively new and very well equipped.

Tony's self esteem was wall to wall without a kink or a wrinkle. He was still drinking far too much and I rarely saw him sober. It was saddening for me because he was no longer showing any signs of being the guy I had married. I felt as if I did not really know this man. I dare say that Lorraine knew him better than me because she was still his preferred drinking partner. I had remained disinterested in getting drunk because it would just make me very sick. Mind you, I don’t think Tony knew me very well either. We were both conducting extra-marital affairs. We were, in reality, living a lie.

I preferred to smoke and was growing a few cannabis plants of my own in the back garden. The resulting crop was very fresh tasting and gave a lovely creative edge to my thinking. It was also free, which was the best bonus of all.
It suited me, and so Tony and I lived more or less separate lives in the same space.
We did not have arguments, we just lived together like brother and sister, apart from a rare occasional and brief lovemaking session, but they were loveless and dry events.
I did not enjoy them at all, so I would avoid them if I could.

Dan, meanwhile, was a contented little chap totally absorbed with electrical experiments. He spent a lot of time in his room with the door closed. A sign saying KEEP OUT was usually stuck on it with Sellotape.
He would reluctantly come down for meals or to go out with the occasional friend, but his heart was in diodes and soldering bits and pieces together to create all sorts of strange looking items. He began to take an interest in CB radio around that time.
I still managed to get him to come down to the beach in the summer holidays and those were always great and happy days, but the weather never was as reliable as the summer of 1976.

Effectively, we all occupied the house, but lived separate lives and I was yearning for something more than an endless round of joints, parties, gigs and festivals. I was running out of projects, losing interest in studying, fed up of constantly cleaning up after everyone. I had overcome the backlog of debt and had no money worries.
But at that time I could not figure out what was missing from my life.
I just felt that there was a space that needed filling within me.
So I set out to discover what it was.