SUNDAY IN MEMORY LANE (Episode 9)

Into an unplanned, unknown future

The truth is I had no firm idea of where I was going.
My brains were mince.
Sleep deprivation is quite a trippy experience, not that I had ever tried drugs at that time but I can now recognise what I was going through.

I toyed with going to my Dad's but didn't want to hear "I told you so". Not yet, anyway.
As the train passed Brentwood I thought of going to the pub I had lived in during my teenage years but I didn't move to the doors in time to get off the train.
I stayed semi-conscious right to the end of the line at Liverpool Street Station in London. I walked, or rather tottered and wavered, to the underground connection.
I looked at the map on the wall and saw Mile End almost jumping out at me.
My Mum lived in a large flat not far from that station and she was working full-time as an accountant. I could probably have more peace staying with her than any other place.

Mum and I had never had a good relationship.
She was certain that she had given birth to a red-haired white skinned child, a lot like herself. However, due to her childhood diagnosis of a hole in the heart, the staff at University College, St Pancras Hospital in London, where I was born when she was only 20 years old, had taken me away from her for a couple of days because they insisted that she needed to rest.
When I was returned to her, washed and wrapped in a white blanket, she became hysterical, swearing that this was not her child, this was a Pakistani baby! I had very dark skin, strange gold hair and weird violet eyes. Nothing like she remembered. My hair and eyes later turned dark chestnut brown which seemed to confirm her suspicions. My father’s mother was called to the hospital to confirm that I looked exactly like my father when he was born. The gypsy looks, inherited from her, were easy to recognise, as was the unusual blood type, O rhesus negative. My mother remained unconvinced for several months, I have been told.
All through my childhood I referred to my mother as a "wicked woman" because from the birth of my brother Roy, a mere eighteen months later, I could see clearly that he was the favoured child, being blond with blue eyes.
When I reached thirteen years of age I was taller than my Mum and very fit. I was an enthusiastic swimmer, a training ballet dancer and I was doing well at school, but at home I was deeply miserable after my father had suddenly left us when I was about 10 years old.
My mum had been given a prescription for Valium by her doctor to cope with the stress of her divorce but, at that time, she worked as a book-keeper in a large public house in Romford and soon added gin to her already poor diet.
She became stick thin, frequently angry and explosively violent.

Finally, when she had hit me in the face with a hot iron, I had lost my temper completely and I had knocked her to the ground, hard. Sitting astride her body and pinning her arms to the floor I had snarled "That is the last time you will ever hit me!"

Within days I took up lodgings in a friend's public house with the invaluable support of my school Headmistress, who gave me full access to the swimming pool, library and sewing room, out of school hours. She did not report the circumstances to the education authorities and she helped me in many other ways thereafter. I stayed living over the public bar, paying my way by cleaning the pub before school in the mornings and with part-time work in Woolworths on Saturdays and at a local laundrette on Sundays until I was seventeen.

The first time I had seen my Mum again was for my wedding day.
Obviously I had to invite her and she had surprised me by accepting.
We had kept in touch throughout my short marriage; the odd visit, a few long phone calls. She loved Tony, Dan, Dylan and Nicki. She seemed to be very much more sane and relaxed that she had ever been when I was young.

All this played like a film in my head as I made my way through the underground system to Mile End. When I finally arrived at my Mum's doorstep, facing Victoria Park, in the early evening, she was not there. I sat down on my suitcase and waited.
I was so exhausted by that point that I must have dozed off because I remember the anxiety in her voice piercing my consciousness "Frances! Frances! Wake up!" Once inside and refreshed with a hot drink she listened as I told her the bones of what had happened. Her face was showing me that she knew how much it hurt. She had, after all, been through a very similar scenario herself many years before.
At bedtime, we went up the stairs of her two storey apartment and I was completely taken aback to see, upon entering her spare bedroom, the suite of furniture that had been in my childhood home. My old dressing table, chest of drawers and matching wardrobe, still bearing the ink blobs and familiar scratches was waiting silently there for me, all those years. It was spooky. Like visiting myself as a child.

Over the following days I slept a lot, I cried a lot and I worked hard cleaning my Mum's home while she was at her office, just to keep myself from going insane.
Eventually she asked, "When will Tony be going back to the oil rig?" I calculated the date and she persuaded that I should return to Clacton for Dan and Dylan. Nicki, the cat, would be alright in the care of Adele who was still living upstairs at my former home. My mother was of the opinion that a mother leaving her child, in any circumstance, was shameful. I agreed.

My Mum contacted my brother, Roy and asked him to meet me at Clacton train station. Roy didn't want to be involved and said so quite sharply. The story he had heard was quite damning. Tony had told him that I had ‘run off with a shopfitter’ and that he had dropped off Dan and Dylan to live with his brother Pete and his new girlfriend. They had a toddler called Christopher. My Mum told him that he had been misinformed and I was in a terrible state at her house. Eventually he reluctantly relented and the necessary arrangements were made.

Just after Tony left to return to the oil rig I arrived back in Clacton on the train.
I used my key to quietly gain entry to the house. It was a mess, which shocked me quite a bit. It looked as if Tony, rather than being in any way unhappy, had been partying like there was no tomorrow. Everywhere was loaded with detritus from takeaway meals and drinking parties. I quickly collected a couple of large bags of clothes, my sewing machine, the pushchair and lots of Dan's toys and spare clothing. All this was piled into the back of Roy's van before we set off to collect Dan and Dylan from Pete's house.
When we arrived, completely unannounced, Pete had been given the same false story that I had ‘run off with a shopfitter’. He was not willing to let me take Dan away from him.
An argument developed and resulted in me grabbing Dan and diving into the van with Dylan scrambling to get through the door before I closed and locked it.
"Drive!" I ordered Roy and he pulled away, yelling at me. "Now look what you have done! You always mess everything up!" He was shouting and driving erratically until I screamed at him to stop. I made him listen to me or dump us on the street right there and then. He listened to my harrowing tale of Lorraine and her sick diary. Finally, we drove to London in relative peace.

The stress and drama of having to kidnap Dan and Dylan was the final straw for my nerves. I became uncontrollably neurotic. Nothing seemed clean enough for me. I began to bleach and disinfect everything at my mothers house. I couldn't stop cleaning. My poor Mum would come home every evening to a sparkling home stinking of Dettol, a meal cooked for her and a daughter biting her nails until they bled. She tried giving me things to do, like making new curtains for her lounge, but I was whizzing through every chore she gave me in no time. Every day, I walked for miles around the park with Dylan and Dan. I visited my grandparents who lived nearby and even they remarked to my mother that I was fidgety and visibly shaking all the time. I was losing weight at a tremendous rate.

I claimed a single parent benefit and I dissolved in tears when I had to explain the circumstances to the officer handling my case. I was inside the local benefits office for such a long time that Dylan got fed up waiting outside and made his way back to my Mum's flat by himself. Upon leaving the benefits office, when I found that he was missing, I was once again hysterical. I should have known that Dylan could negotiate traffic and London without a moment of hesitation. He was a border collie after all. A dog with more brains than most humans.

My grandfather decided that London was not suiting me. I had no friends there and the dirty environment was clearly adding to my distress.
He very kindly took charge, gave me enough money to put a deposit on a tiny flat in Clacton and drove me back there, together with all that I possessed. He fully understood that I could not return to my own home as it was likely to rob me of whatever modicum of sanity remained.

Lady Luck gave me one glimmer of hope. When we arrived in Clacton, my grandfather insisted that we went for lunch at a nice restaurant. I vaguely knew the young woman who served us. She lived in a large nearby house which had been converted into bedsits. I asked if there were any vacancies there and she immediately confirmed that one flat was empty. She gave me the landlord's phone number and, when I called him from a nearby phone box, he arranged to meet my grandfather and I outside the property in ten minutes. The vacant flatlet was two small furnished rooms on the second floor, filthy and hopping with fleas. I paid the deposit and a week’s rent in advance, in exchange for the keys. There was a shared bathroom on the first floor, also filthy. My grandfather was mortified at the general shabbiness of the place but I assured him that it would not take me long to clean it up. I thanked him and somehow, convinced him to go home; we would be alright.

A few weeks later, I remember waking up on the kitchen floor, still holding my paintbrush which was stuck to the leg of a chair I had been painting. I don't remember much else about that period, except that every item of clothing I possessed was no longer fitting me. I was getting very thin.