SUNDAY IN MEMORY LANE (Episode 40)

More losses than any soul should bear......

Not for the first time in my life, I was floundering. Danny Hemstock did his very best to show me around Boscombe and Bournemouth; to put a smile on my face, but nothing could reach me. I was behind a silent wailing wall of regrets and distress. I was often dreaming of my finca and Madrigal de la Vera, but waking to reality in tears of realisation. Danny was very worried, phoned my son Dan and begged him to come to Boscombe to help me to find suitable accommodation.
He warned that I was “not right in the head”.

I was very surprised when Dan arrived and took over immediately. He trawled through the local estate agencies and found a converted coach house, tucked neatly at the back of a large Victorian house that had been converted into flats. He persuaded the landlord to accept pets, so I paid the deposit and rent in advance. We moved in with very little and bought the furniture we needed from charity shops and second hand dealers. I volunteered to work a few shifts at the best of them so that I could spot useful deals as soon as they came in. I had lost so much weight during my last few months in Spain that I needed all new clothes.

Within weeks, Dan was working with one of the tenants and developing a relationship with another. Kim was very young. I think she was only 16 or 17 when she got together with Dan who was twenty years her senior. I have to admit that I couldn’t warm to her and, when she announced that she was pregnant, I suspected that Dan had fallen into a trap. I didn’t say anything about my misgivings. I just hoped that the fascination would fizzle out.

Under persuasion from the two Dans, I registered with a local doctor and was given SSRIs. I barely noticed any effects from them at first, but within a fortnight I was doing some very uncharacteristic things. Suddenly I wanted false nails and a fake tan! I was buying make up and hair dyes! I was looking up recipes for unusual meals.

I had enough functioning braincells to realise that, far from helping me to recover from depression, these little pills were changing my personality completely! They were turning me into a Stepford wife! I stopped taking them, but their effects were surprisingly long lasting. It was more than a year before I felt ‘normal’ again.

During August of 2008, the settlement from the sale of Finca Avalon arrived in my bank account and I bought another Leyland Daf van - almost identical to the one I had owned previously. I fitted it with a new gas cooker, a fridge and a portaloo. Rasta, Ben and Pearlie cheered up enormously when they saw it. There would be more adventures to come, rather than stuck in one place restricted.
That was my hope too but it didn’t really go that way.

Danny Hemstock wanted me to meet his oldest son, Bryan, who lived in Formby, on the affluent outskirts of Liverpool. We went to visit and Bryan showed us around a promising modern shop that he was intending to develop into a men’s grooming salon. He persuaded me to invest in his business and it seemed like a very good idea at the time. Bryan already owned one ladies’ hairdressing salon where he worked with his girlfriend - or rather, that is what he told me….

No sooner were we back in Boscombe than Bryan phoned and asked me to send, by bank transfer, £18,000 to his solicitor. This money would serve to prove that Bryan had financial security and collateral when applying for the new shop lease. I agreed, convinced that I was about to become a partner in a new potentially profitable business.

Within days, I received a written request for £18,000 from the agents who were leasing the property. Confused, I phoned them and they denied any dealings with a Mr. Bryan Hemstock or his solicitor. As far as they were concerned, I was to become the sole proprietor of the vacant shop located in Formby!

I could not understand what had happened, so I quickly drove the hundreds of miles back to Bryan’s home, but there was no sign of life there. The following morning I was on the Solicitor’s doorstep at 9am, asking to speak to the person handling Bryan Hemstock’s business affairs. After keeping me waiting for hours, a very uncomfortable man explained that he had passed the £18,000 on to Bryan but was now, despite effort, unable to contact him. He had been told that the money was a gift.

I found the ladies’ hairdressing salon but that was closed. I asked around, at several neighbouring businesses but nobody seemed to know where Bryan and his girlfriend had gone. I left endless text messages and unanswered calls on his mobile phone until it was switched off. Finally, with no other choices left to me, I parked my van within sight of Bryan’s home and waited, watching.

Four days and nights later at about 9pm, I saw a light was switched on and the entrance door was lying wide open. I was there in a flash, but Bryan was not. The girlfriend adopted a very hostile attitude towards me. I was even more confused. She said that this was HER flat and the hairdressing salon was HER business. Bryan was not the business owner, as he had claimed. He was, in fact, bankrupt and she did not know where he was!

I realised that I had been tricked and went to the local police station to make a statement. I was devastated. Worst of all, when I spoke to Danny Hemstock about Bryan’s deception he became hostile too! I just couldn’t believe what was happening.

For the following year, I tried to settle down in various places. I rented a flat in Formby for six months, until I realised that I was not going to be recovering my stolen money. It is a very affluent small town, known for its gorgeous sand dunes and resident famous footballers. Rasta, Ben and I enjoyed the wide and windswept beaches but the place represented a painful sting to my self esteem. I had been conned there and that soured it for me. I decided to go on the road again.

Then I was helped by my old friends in Aberdeenshire to move there. Winter was coming and they freaked out that I intended to spend it in my van. Lyndia would not hear of it and insisted I stay with her and even come to work with her to help me get back to some semblance of normal. But I remained locked in a profound depression. Then the van froze, due to lack of use, and became impossible to restart. Lyndia spoke to her mechanic friend and he persuaded me to swap my van for an Audi Estate car which was completely reliable and in very good condition. I instantly regretted doing that - but hey…. I was regretting everything I did, so what was one more straw on the camel’s back?

I guessed that I was a downer to be with, so I rented another fully furnished flat for a further six months, but was becoming even more unhappy. I just could not feel at home there, despite the lovely scenery and unspoiled beaches.

At a complete loss, I returned to Essex with my dwindling funds. I rented a house in Harwich and waited for the case against Bryan Hemstock to finally come to court. That turned out to be a nerve-wracking non event because Bryan did not even show up! He was given a guilty verdict in his absence and sentenced to fifteen weeks in prison. Hardly commensurate with the misery he had caused me. There was no chance of him repaying me either.

Meanwhile, my son Dan had stayed with his girlfriend, Kim who had delivered a sweet, blonde haired, blue eyed baby. They named her Sherona and, for a short while, they came to stay with me in Harwich but eventually, they chose to return to the Bournemouth area because work prospects for Dan were better there which was going to be important because, even though their relationship was very rocky, Kim was expecting another child.

Rasta had his thirteenth birthday party in June of 2010. He, Ben and Pearlie were all slowing down. Their old habit of play fighting was long since over and they tended to prefer lazing in front of the fire together between taking slow walks along the seafront and around the parks or woods. I worked in the Low Lighthouse Museum, assisting the curator during the summer months and the dogs would sit outside attracting plenty of attention from visitors.

It was during the cold months of early 2012 that I noticed Ben was especially slow and then, there came a day when he refused to come for a walk with us. He stopped eating and drinking. Despite offers of all his favourite foods like ham, cheese and scrambled eggs, Ben just wanted to cuddle up with me on the couch. Rasta and Pearlie would kiss him from time to time and he would waken long enough to acknowledge them but, after six days like that, he quietly died in his sleep and we all mourned his passing with copious tears. It was as if he committed suicide, in dignified resignation at the end of a long happy life, rather than linger in increasing discomfort.

A few months later, I received a phone call from the local vet informing me that Pearlie had been run over and killed by a car outside our house. Thoughtfully, the driver had immediately taken her to the vet, but she was already gone. The microchip that had been part of her EU passport had served its purpose, enabling the vet to contact me with the sorry news. I collected her, nestled in a cardboard box, curled up and looking as if she was simply sleeping. Rasta and I said our farewells as we buried her next to Ben, her fur wet from my tears.

When he passed his fifteenth birthday, Rasta was a little deaf, a little blind and very, very slow. I had to help him up and down stairs but he still insisted on following me everywhere. If I was more than a few paces away from him he would panic and try to run after the wrong people so I had to keep him on a lead and walk at a snail’s pace. I didn’t mind. He had waited for me for the previous 15 years, after all.

One day, an RSPCA officer knocked at the door and told me that somebody had reported that Rasta was neglected. I was shocked and informed the officer that Rasta was elderly, but certainly not neglected. This officious young woman decided that my word was not good enough and ordered me to take Rasta to the vet for examination and some medication. I did as I was asked and the vet prescribed Tramadol, supposedly for pain.

From the start of that pharmaceutical intervention Rasta seemed to be in a daze. Then, before he finished the prescription, he started to cough up intense white foam, retching hard and using up precious energy until he collapsed. He couldn’t eat or drink because he was constantly heaving up this horrid foam. I stayed up all night with him, cleaning him and the floors. When I took him to the vet, the only recommendation was euthanasia to end his suffering. I was bitterly angry. Their damned poison had tortured my precious Rasta when he was already weakened and now they wanted to finish him off?

I cannot find words to describe how I held him, looked into his eyes and tearfully told him to go, as the injection took his life.

It tore me apart to lay his tired old body next to his two best friends.

All gone within that one fateful year, 2012.