SUNDAY IN MEMORY LANE (Episode 25)

Bouncing from one disaster to the next....

When the first week of September kicked in we were miles from our home and I asked Dan if he wanted to stay on the Convoy or go to school back in Clacton. This would mean attending a school with a very poor reputation, so he considered his options carefully. He decided that going to school was the priority and so we prepared to leave the Convoy during the next move. We arrived back in Clacton with one day to spare in which to cobble together some sort of school uniform.

Dan did not like the school from the first day.
Mr Sutherland, his form teacher at his previous school, had asked me to let the next school know that he would very much like to hear from them, so that he could pass on his experience of Dan and his recommendations. He never heard a word from the school and I had to give him the address and phone number so that he could follow up on his intentions.

It did not make a difference to the way that Dan was treated. They were fodder at that school. There was never any homework and I do not recall Dan ever bringing even one book home. In short, he was wasting 7 hours a day being dis-educated, bullied and bored. Bullying Dan was a red flag to a bull. He hated bullies and began two years of being an anti-bully. In this way he gathered a half a dozen good friends. That was the only positive thing that he got from that school.

By the time he turned thirteen I was getting reports from an electronics teacher that "Daniel is not interested in electronics" - another case of the teacher teaching at such a low level of expertise that he was gazing out of the window, designing his next CB radio project or mentally writing a program for his Spectrum 48k.
The report was littered with similar comments from other teachers. Dan was considered disruptive, but when I questioned the teachers in respect of this claim all I heard was, "Daniel asks too many questions and argues with the staff". When I asked Dan what this meant he simply said, "The teachers at that school know nothing Mum!"

I offered a solution to Dan. I said, "Let's do home schooling for a while and see how we get along?" He gave it a few days thought and finally he agreed that this might be less stressful all around. I never needed to actually teach Dan anything by then, anyway. He already knew far more than me about electronics, cars, computers and physics which were his favourite subjects.

He settled into a natural rhythm of studying as he required to learn. He was heavily focused on programming his computer and was usually sprawled out on the floor in front of the TV which was the screen for those early home computers.

On one occasion, he had been there all night and was just putting the finishing touches to something he had been working on for days. I had offered him breakfast but he had waved me away while he concentrated. I sat quietly at the dining table drinking my first coffee of the day when there was a sharp rap at the door.
It was precisely 9am.

I opened the door to a square bodied and square faced man who announced that he was from the Department of Education and wanted to check that Dan was indeed studying at home. I put my finger up to my mouth and said, "Shhh", gestured him to come in and directed him to a dining room chair from where he could see Dan working on the floor. Dan was oblivious, totally absorbed in the program.

I silently offered the School inspector a coffee and he declined. He scribbled a few notes and asked me very quietly if this was a normal day for Dan. I said "and night, he never stops!" I gestured to the piles of books and magazines lying higgledy piggledy all around the room. I pointed at the spaghetti junction of electronic experiments winking and blinking with little LEDs (light emitting diodes). I gazed at the man with the sad long suffering look of a mum who can never vacuum properly, because disturbing this stuff was a heinous crime.

Finally, Dan punched the air with a "whoop" and rose to his knees.
He had created a rudimentary game which had involved 2,000 lines of computer code writing. Accuracy had been paramount, hence the intense concentration.

Dan got up and excitedly told the inspector all about it when he finally sat at the table for his breakfast. They chatted about all sorts of technical stuff while I got myself washed and dressed in the bathroom. By the time I got back to them, the inspector was preparing to leave and thanking Dan for a very interesting chat. I showed him out and a few days later received a charming letter from him saying that he was very satisfied that Dan was indeed working hard on his studies and to let them know if I needed any help in the future. I was delighted.

Dan's friends would call for him after school or he would stroll up to the school to meet them for after school jinks, which I preferred to know nothing about. He had a couple of bikes. Six in all. Our yard was easy to break into and unfortunately he had most of them stolen over the time we lived in that flat. We were over the top of a paint and wallpaper shop and our access was via a gate at the back of the store.

I had bought a 112ft long ex navy minelayer ship within the first year of our return to Clacton and we sometimes spent time on it. It was moored in an isolated spot at the end of a creek in Thorrington. The mooring was entirely free of costs because the boat was a war hero and had been granted by the Crown, a large chunk of the seawall as it's permanent home after it was decommissioned from the navy.

It had belonged to a good friend, Pete, but it had no engines and during the decommissioning had been stripped of all it's seagoing equipment. It was now a houseboat and Pete wanted to purchase a fully functioning seaworthy vessel that he had seen for sale in Norfolk. I agreed a deal to buy the minelayer for £5,000 which meant that Pete would have the cash to buy his dream. He intended to bring the new vessel around the coast to moor it alongside the minelayer. This was a splendid idea we thought.

However, the amount of work that he had to do to get the new boat seaworthy turned out to be very time consuming and Pete worked for months to repair it. Sadly, he worked himself to death. Literally. He was only 32, but he died suddenly of a heart attack and his poor family was absolutely devastated.

This left me in a terrible pickle. I had no knowledge of boats and struggled to cope with such a huge vessel by myself. I asked others for help, but all I attracted was people who simply wanted to use the space for partying. I lived on the boat during the summer months and worked myself silly trying to clean out the bilges.
I developed an ear infection without noticing it and collapsed at a friend's wedding because of it. At the local hospital I was given anti-biotics and told to rest up, preferably not on the boat. So, resignedly, I returned to the flat in Clacton.

During a high tide and stormy night a few weeks later, someone untied all the mooring ropes to permit the minelayer to drift out into the middle of the creek and eventually smash into the seawall on the other side.
As the tide withdrew the vessel tilted with it until it lay on it's side in the mud. Everything that had been inside was dislodged and soaked. It was a total disaster.
I persuaded Sid and my biker mates to come and see if they could help me right the boat, but all they seemed to want to do was get drunk and then ride their motorbikes through the neighbouring farmer's fields.

A few days later I arrived at the creek to discover that the boat was missing. Tony and his friend, Rob had stolen it. They had boarded at a high tide and towed it around the creek to St. Osyth where they had placed it in a locked marina. I don’t know if they were responsible for the untying of the mooring ropes, but it certainly seemed odd that they were so quick to react to the disaster - and to their own benefit!

I felt more than betrayed. I felt that karma would repay this dirty trick because I certainly could not. I felt friendless. I felt ill.

As soon as I got my head around the theft of the boat I discovered that Tony and his friend Rob were telling the town that they had not stolen it. They were saying that because it was unmoored and on its side they had ‘salvaged’ it. This was so deceptive and untenable in law that I was advised to report the theft to the police by my solicitor.
Once again, I hesitated to incriminate Dan's dad for fear of upsetting or worse, alienating him. I decided that maybe the thing to do was to let them spend their money keeping the boat. I still had all the paperwork after all. The marina charged them a weekly rent and I could see that the boat was safe when I passed by on the nearby road. In a way, they had done me a favour - they now had all the expense, maintenance and the worry!

Friends that I thought I had were either disinterested or turning to enemies all around me. One accused me of fancying her husband and I was told in no uncertain terms that I was no longer welcome at her house. I found out later that the husband had remarked that I was a very attractive woman and this had been enough to drive a wedge between me and that so-called friend.

Another so-called friend justified the theft of my boat and I discovered that this was because she was shagging Rob the Robber and therefore considered that the sun shone out of his tight cheeked arsehole. She was out of her head on cocaine, so her friendship was not important to me.

After the house in Newmachar was sold, Tony had returned to Clacton. Other friends were socialising with him at various venues around the town. I was not going out very much at all. Tony took up his relationship with Lorraine again and the day soon arrived when, drunk and stinking of alcohol, Tony appeared at my doorstep asking me to divorce him, so that he could marry her.
"What grounds would you prefer?" I asked stiffly.
"Whatever." was the response.
So I went to the solicitor and asked what would be the quickest way to divorce this nightmare out of my life. I was advised to go for irretrievable breakdown of marriage and the whole sorry process was initiated.

Dan had a friend who visited frequently and I often would share our food with the extra mouth. One day he asked me to give him the recipe for my lasagne for his single parent father to learn how to cook. Somehow this wound up with me inviting them to dinner one evening and from there a friendship grew between me and his father, Alan.
That man behaved as if butter would not melt for at least 6 months and eventually persuaded me and Dan to move into his house with him. Within less than 2 hours of getting all my stuff moved, he launched into his first physical assault of me. I had given notice at the flat and the new tenant was moving in. There was nowhere to run.

On the day of Live Aid, 13th of July 1985, I was running out of Alan's house, leaving everything I possessed behind. I wore a torn shirt and a dislocated jaw. I went to the hospital and from there, knocked tentatively at a friend's house for shelter.

I could feel the buzz of Live Aid in the air. The streets were virtually deserted as everyone was glued to their television sets watching the event. My friend was out cold on some cocktail of drugs. She was in bed and her two kids were half dressed playing in the lounge. They let me in and, failing to arouse Lynn, their mother, I prepared them some food, found items of clothing to put on them and settled down to recover from the unexpected ordeal of being a domestic violence victim.

To make matters much worse, Dan went to stay with his father because he was assaulted by Alan's two sons. I was unable to argue with the arrangements, those two sons of the devil had pinned him to his bed and stabbed the pillow all around his head to terrorise him!

I was sitting in Lynn's house, uninvited and devoid of possessions. I picked up the local paper from the floor and began reading it. An advertisement for trainee bus drivers caught my eye. I applied for the job.

A few weeks later I was on a training course and loving it. Bus driving was easy.
All the rules made perfect sense to me and I was determined to become the first female bus driver at our depot. I passed the exam with great marks. I was one of ten new employees at Eastern National Clacton Depot. I found a dreadful bedsit with kitchen close to the bus station and I went to tell Dan of the changes I had made. He was delighted and came back to live with me immediately.

Within days of starting work I went to see the local council and arranged to be considered for a new house purchasing scheme that they were running. It meant that I could buy half of a property and they would cover the other half for which I would pay a nominal rent. With my new salary, equal to a man doing the same work, I acquired sufficient mortgage qualification to begin looking for a suitable home for Dan and I.

It did not take us very long to find our next home. It was directly opposite to one of Dan's closest friends and it was neat beyond belief for the price. It had only two bedrooms but the loft space had been converted into an extra room accessible via a permanently fixed ladder. It was an adorable little terraced house with a good sized garden. The day we moved in was very exciting!

I had been keeping some furniture from my home in Scotland in a local lock up. So it was brilliant to be able to house it all finally. That house was, from day one, a very happy place to live. We discovered that we had a ley line running through it from north to south a few feet away from the party wall with our neighbours. As long as we did not put electrical equipment in that area we had no problems.
We acknowledged that we had ghosts, we didn't have a lot of choice in the matter.
Our ghosts seemed to love us very much and performed some astonishing tricks in the nick of time on very many occasions.

There was a brief time when Alan, the domestic abuser, tried to regain my confidence but the house locked him out of the building and I could not undo the locks at all.
Another time he gained entry and attempted to strangle me at the top of the stairs.
Somehow I shattered one of my finger joints pulling his fingers off my throat, but just as I thought I would pass out, he fell down the stairs so hard it looked as if he had been forcefully thrown. I ran over him to get out of the house and ran to a neighbour who immediately called the police. Strangely enough, Alan did not attempt to invade my life again, which was a great relief.

As 1986 New Year's Day came in I was determined that I no longer needed a man in my life and decided to become celibate at 34 years of age. That might well have been one of my better decisions in life, if only I had kept it!

I was loving driving buses, making a lot of new friends at work and was still studying Chinese philosophy in my spare time. Dan was happy to have a proper house for a home again at last. We felt secure. For a while.