SUNDAY IN MEMORY LANE (Episode 24)

Down to zero, when they were leaving, for another one.....

Words may fail me now…. so forgive me if I falter. It is very hard to tell the truth from this point onwards, but I don’t want to let my readers down and so I will continue with my story, even though it hurts like hell and this part of the story has never passed my lips until now.

Tony fell out of the pub one night and staggered around the village in the early hours of the morning, falling into front gardens and trampling newly seeded lawns. I got a frantic phone call from one of Beekies Neuk’s new barmaids who had been woken by Tony breaking into her house and attempting to rape her, in front of her two small screaming daughters. She tearfully begged me to come and get him out of her bed.

Numbly, I dressed and drove the few hundred yards to her house. I got Tony out to the car and I apologised to the woman, but I could see that she was so distraught that apologies from me were not going to be adequate.

Over Christmas and the New Year of 1981, Tony worked offshore and returned home grumpy and mean spirited. He began to order Dan to go to his room every time Dan made the slightest noise. I would go with him and we would chat in Dan’s bedroom, leaving Tony to himself.

I remember that Tony came home after drinking all of one Sunday afternoon. Dan and I had been waiting for him to have a traditional Sunday roast together. Tony was in such a bad temper that he suddenly lifted his full plate of food and launched it at the wall above my head. I was physically sick with fright. Dan was stunned.

One night, Tony was out and I had gone to bed. It was a bitterly freezing winter night when the phone rang and George was asking me to drive to the pub and pick Tony up because he was almost comatose. I did as asked and Tony got into the car clutching the huge ‘pennies jar’ we usually kept on the bar. It was full and intended for a local charity. I took it back into the pub and apologetically gave it to George.

I was sick of the sympathy that I saw perpetually on the faces of everyone who looked at me during that period. George wore that sympathetic expression too.

When I pulled the car up onto the snow bound drive and switched off the engine, I turned to Tony and he was asleep. I said, “Tony, we are home, get out of the car.” and he didn’t move. I repeated myself and he snarled at me saying, “Fuck off.”

So I did.

I left him to freeze to death in a frozen car during a howling snowy gale. I got into my warm bed and went to sleep without a glimmer of conscience. Around 5am, he crawled into bed like a block of ice. I was disappointed that he had not died and that is the bare unvarnished truth.

On Burns Night, which usually falls around the 25th of January every year, I was grateful that Tony was offshore and I did not have to deal with him during the upcoming Cèilidh. George, Lyndia and I dressed up in traditional style and attended a large event at the Skean Dhu Hotel. It amazed me how everyone managed to eat so much and then dance throughout the night, even though they were absolutely puddled with alcohol!

It was all a bit too much for me and I slipped away from the main dance floor to the swimming pool. I stripped to my underwear and dived into the empty pool. I found myself crying like a baby. I could not stop, but it was the best place to do it…. nobody could see my tears.

When George and Lyndia came looking for me - once again, there were the sympathetic expressions on their faces. I got drunk myself that night, a very, very rare thing indeed. I have no memory of how I got home.

The final straw which fell on this camel’s back came about one Saturday morning during the following spring. One of the neighbours knocked at the door asking to borrow my vacuum cleaner because hers had broken. I sent Dan to fetch ours from the cupboard under the stairs and he stopped, staring into the cupboard. He called me to come and look, which I did. What greeted me was beyond my comprehension. The handle of my vacuum cleaner was thickly covered in dried faeces. I apologised to the neighbour, making an excuse about the cleaner being buried beneath some ‘stuff’. I promised to dig it out and deliver it to her house shortly. She looked suspicious….. or was it simply because Dan and I were looking so shocked? Or because it was obvious that I was lying? Probably both.

Anyway, I dealt with the thing and, as I cleaned the vacuum cleaner, a whole heap of unresolved mysteries lurched out of the shadows of my memory like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and slowly assembled themselves into a very ugly picture that I really did not want to see.

The unexplained day that Tony had returned from the oil rig, unable to stop crying, back in 1978.
The occasion when I had found him half undressed, ‘fighting’ with a young guy in a bathroom at a party, in 1979.
The distress he had expressed over Roger losing his job and his unreasonable total drunkenness ever since.
And now this….

It all added up to one thing. Not only was Tony irredeemably unfaithful and an habitual rapist, but now I had to face that he was also bi-sexual, if not fully homosexual.

It was May of 1981 and the worst news was all over the television and newspapers. AIDS was everywhere. They were telling us in blaring detail that this killer disease was sexually transmitted and it was mainly gay men who were falling ill.

That was the end of my marriage.
I moved out of the master bedroom and into the spare room. I consulted a solicitor and arranged to sell our house. I contacted friends in Clacton and asked about accommodation. I gave my partners at the interior design company notice that I would be leaving. I was completely emotionless, behaving like a robot.

I had paid for Dan to attend Robert Gordon’s College until the end of the school year which was not until the end of June. I had six weeks to go before I could feasibly escape my ghastly excuse of a marriage.

A good friend, John, who had been a roadie for several years had returned to the UK and was settling down in Clacton. He phoned to say that he wanted to rent a nice flat in town but needed someone to share the costs. It was all agreed. At least, this time I had somewhere to go.

On the 4th of July 1981 I packed everything I could into the body of the trailer tent and we left the loveless house in Newmachar. Tony would return home a few days later and I didn’t even furnish him with a note. I had absolutely nothing to say. I left my wedding ring and engagement ring on the dressing table to serve as a clue.

Driving my red Lancia with the loaded trailer south for so many miles was good therapy. I had all my house plants carefully arranged on the back seat and my two cats Gemima and Herbie in cat boxes in the foot wells of the rear seats.
I had Dan, my co-conspirator, at 10 years of age reassuring me that we were doing the right thing. We had left our home the day after he had finished his final day at his lovely Aberdeen school. There would be no chance that I could ever pay for his education again and so, when he had agreed to leave Scotland, I had been really surprised.
He had long since lost his relationship with his father and had been embarrassed by some of the more outrageous things that Tony had done in and around our tiny Aberdeenshire village. Unfortunately the jungle drums beat hard and fast in a very small village in Scotland. Everything is exaggerated way out of proportion due to the absolute lack of anything real to talk about, most of the time. It was a relief to escape the attention of the sympathetic and unsympathetic gossips.

We arrived back in Clacton very late at night and went immediately to the address John had provided. It was a two bedroomed flat over a paint and wallpaper shop in the main street. Dan and I shared the smaller of the bedrooms and it was adequate for the little we had brought with us.

I was so completely depressed that my memory of this period is sketchy with vague impressions more than full memories. I did not care about much. I was horribly lonely.

I remember enrolling at a local gym and working out every day from 10am to 12 and spending a lot of my afternoons visiting old friends but something fundamental had happened to Clacton during my two and a half year absence. It took me a while to work out what was different. I noticed that I was not being invited out to parties or events and assumed that it was because nobody wanted a depressed person in their company.
But I was very wrong about that.
The reason I was treated like a pariah was more to do with the fact that I do not like to drink a great deal and I do not indulge in unnatural drugs. Everyone I knew was doing a lot of cocaine, speed, Amyl Nitrate, LSD and magic mushrooms. The drug scene in the summer of 1981 was exploding with all sorts of stuff and I went to see one dealer with whom I had been very close in the past.
"Why are you selling all this shit?" I asked, seeing all sorts of tell-tale signs in his kitchen.
"Money, Fran." he responded matter-of-factly.
"It is a bit sick to make money out of creating addictions, don't you think?" I said without flinching. His eyes narrowed as he surveyed my indignant body language.
"You smoke dope!" He defended.
"Yeah, but it is not addictive and you know it! Why didn't you stick with that?" I countered his argumentative stance.
From then on he gave me a run down of the profit margins on various drugs and I was disgusted that here before me was no friend. This was a guy who was profiting enormously from the addictions that he was creating among his customers. He did not see anyone as a real friend. He saw only customers who could bring him more customers if he kept them well serviced.

I did not buy anything from him ever again.

I decided to buy only homegrown weed from friends who were growing their own and in bulk so that I did not have to worry about it. Money for me, at this time was no object. I had plenty; my half of the sale of the house in Newmachar had provided me with a nice nest egg, but it meant very little to me.

Dan and I packed up the trailer tent and we went to a festival and joined the Peace Convoy somewhere in East Anglia. We went from festival to festival that summer, living in our two bedroomed trailer tent. Dan loved festivals and we would always park up a fair distance from the rest of the Convoy so that he would get to sleep at night.

Stonehenge Festival 1981

I liked to keep myself to myself at the time. I was still healing. I felt burned out. Unsurprisingly, I was not viewing men with a receptive attitude and they were ignoring me. I guess it would be fair to say that I was exuding a very hostile vibe…..