Move over Hercules - started 16/1/09

Which story, which idea when your head is filled with lines that never stop coming? Like a stream of necessity of all that’s been lived before.

I’m not going to give you a happy ending because that’s the social mask that we all want to see. In any case I’ve no idea how it’s all going to end. In tears? Well that wouldn’t be the first time. Now here’s a funny thing. I’m having trouble adjusting to my contact lenses because, so I’m told, I don’t have enough tears. Laugh out loud (is that how we say it now?). It wouldn’t be any wonder because I could easily have used up all my tears. But no, it can’t even be that. When you live through so much loss there’s still room for more of those salt obsessed frenzies as you lie in your bed cursing your ability to go on enduring more of the same. I cast scorn on those lame sages who tell you that suffering makes you strong. How does it go? If it doesn’t kill you it makes you stronger – give me a break. I won’t say give me strength – I have all the strength any one woman would need to cope with more crap. But please spare me the phoney half truths in the vein of ‘children are so adaptable, they get over things so much more quickly than adults’. Has anyone bothered to ask? Does anyone even remember being a child? I certainly don’t. Surprise, surprise. What adult arrogance dares to hide the evidence, to avoid asking the right questions in order to spare the unfathomable guilt of repeating the mistakes of yester-year.

Friends all talk of wanting to call their mothers when they feel ill and in need of loving comfort. It would never have occurred to me that that was the right person. My mother was a lot of good things – just how many I only realised when I was living the end of her life for her. My mother made the first of a number of life saving acts when I was still little and so taught me how to do so myself when I needed to rescue my own children. But soft and cuddly and reassuring? Not. Any more than I – my eldest told me once ‘I thought you would be more material as a mother’ (read 'maternal' and smile, as I did). My youngest turned my smile into full blown laughter by telling me I wasn’t a bad mother ‘for a beginner’ – he should know as he was 6 at the time. My eldest was the age I was when my father died when he bemoaned my lack of TLC. It takes some mighty armour to fend off disintegration when bereavement comes knocking at a child’s door. Only the hedgehog knows just how soft is its belly. Living through violence, divorce and suicide is like that. You pass through calamity like a swan gliding smoothly daring onlookers to challenge the truth.The first lesson I learned even though I didn’t put it into action until it was almost too late is this. If you are living with a mentally ill man it is a good idea to move out and take your young children with you to a safe haven before they start to think that madness is reality (it can be easy to confuse the 2). It took 13 years for me to separate the strands; my mother took 15 so you see it gets easier. Like some sort of inter-generational relay race, by the time my children have grandchildren it will be happy lovin’ couples all round and no need for any more hasty exits.

My father was bi-polar before the word was invented. Is it any wonder? What men do to the world has consequences from root to crown. If his father hadn’t gone off to war and died leaving his wife to bring up my father and his sister alone, then maybe just maybe he would have been a happy chappy - still the loving, caring, skilled medical practitioner that he became - but maybe loving himself a wee bit too. OK so we can’t blame men’s constant warmongering for the bike accident that swept his 14 year old sister to an early grave. But who knows, maybe if my grandmother had been helped along by a loving husband her grief would have spared my father a guilt banquet that nourished the grey demons that got inside his head. A lot of ‘what if’s’ for the first couple of paragraphs I know but allow me them as the ‘if only’s’ would have robbed me of this story no doubt.

My father was a brilliant man. He was kind and good. He was very ill for most of the time I knew him and I didn’t know what to do about it. Nor, methinks, did the doctors. Quick - call him a doctor. So he’s a doctor? Now what? The ‘now what’s’ as it happens turned out to be several lobotomies, numerous stays in clinics, what would now be termed so quaintly ‘rehab’ as he tried to dry out from the drowning drink, and a chaotic home-life for big and small persons.

Our house was a megalith cornering two streets (High and Church). A stone house. Enormous slabs of matter that seemed hewn directly from Snowdon and forged together by some great Welsh giant in an act of devotion. It had belonged to my grandmother, herself now living in a council house in Castle Street preferring to hand it over to my father on his marriage as a sturdy fortress in which to go forth and procreate, with the advantage of being able to fit in a doctor’s surgery on the ground floor. So at least he didn’t have to take the car to get to work. Although home visits to ailing patients did pose somewhat of a problem. Did seat belts even exist? Do seat belts count when your blood is diluted by the levels of alcohol that were constant in his blood? Surgeon heal thyself. I don’t think so.

And my poor little mother wallowing in the tampered luxury of an unquiet hearth and home. She’d really not had time to read the instruction manual. Her 21 gun salute wedding with her 18” waist couldn’t have prepared her for what was in store. And I don’t know the half of it. The fraction I do know is what urges me to write. The details don’t matter – it’s the cake as is comes out of the oven I’m talking about. But I did glimpse the ingredients nonetheless. In varying doses and at various stages of composition – cries in the night, tears in the morning, fear at dusk and doubt at dawn. Upstairs, me, my brother and sister, downstairs our mother and father relaying us up the banisters the recipe of fading innocence and stark reality. Police on the phone, on the doorstep, over the threshold, in the house. No wonder my gonk took on sinister overtones in the unquiet night where sleep increased the risk of drama. That, and the witches in the attic and the conger eel in the bucket under my brother’s bed did little to coax slumber into me. To this day a moth opening its wings can wake me. I’d have beaten Fireman Sam to the inferno hands down, fully dressed and revving the engine before he’d got his pyjamas off. When I think of this time it’s these nocturnal vigils that occupy the space normally allotted to memories of sack races, gold stars in exercise books, sheet-clad angels in the nativity and doubtful magicians at birthday parties. I can see our school scarves fluttering out of the back of the land-rover on the school run rota; the crabs that scuttled pointlessly from our grasp in the seaweed on the shingle; the cardboard sledges down the flanks of the castle walls; the ice laden pond in the park with the bewildered swans clawing at their dignity, but these are photos, they are stills. The action shots happened after dark like some sort of muffled backdrop. No vampires but spirits aplenty. And so the unthinkable became the norm; the un-nameable the reference.
There are the photos but what do they say? That we grow up in spite of parenting. That the generations did a merry dance. That things are not black and white despite the gloss of the paper. Wearing wellingtons with shorts and a t-shirt – had someone forgotten to buy the shoes? Or did they just know that shoes were likely to come back caked in mud, salt and sand like some sort of leather stew from a trip to the beach with bacon rind and white bread crusts for Charlie the one-legged seagull. The photos are not dated and are piled in the album disdaining all logic, temporal or thematic. Our mother salvaged what she could when she left the house and knew the value of what she couldn’t take. Having folks left to tell you the story is evidently better than the mere celluloid facsimile but beggars can’t be choosers. Random images that dance from year to year in merry mayhem in dog-eared scrap-books do nothing to reconcile you with a past that spawned such waste, but they chart the waters of survival.

My brother was sent off to school first – in the great tradition of making boys into men this 8 year old soldier loaded up his ammunition and left barracks. His uniform shrouding the willing smile. It was for the best not at his behest. He is standing on the ledge down by the shipping beacon, the bright whitewashed paint of the wall framing his cap and his blazer. He’s saying ‘why me?’ but the photo captures ‘I can do this’. Photos always hide the evidence. He is 8 and he is scarred. He refused to defecate for weeks on end no doubt terrified that all the shit he had to endure would be too great for the world to cope with. He was taken to hospital to be unplugged but left to its own devices his sphincter would have fought them on the beaches. As it was they sucked out his muck, they packed up his trunk and his trial began. The cap didn’t fit but he wore it anyway. The rules didn’t suit but they still applied to him. He’d been through the mill (and boy was there trouble there) but that would be no excuse for him not conforming.

My sister was next. Older and wiser, even excited to be out in the world where girls could share secrets and hair-bands in the dorm. She was ready, had probably had too much of playing the underage mother to my brother and me. She was ready to rock. They dressed her up in bottle green serge, wool and bri-nylon and filled her trunk with sanitary towels. Off down the toll road to another county on another planet.

That left me a little pig in a straw house to face the wolf who, far from huffing and puffing, was weeping and wailing in bouts long past lights out. What can they have been thinking of? Me, David, my father a depressive Goliath, with his own slings of outrageous misfortune firing off in all directions. All the harp-playing (Welsh or otherwise) wouldn’t have defeated the monster that had taken up residence in my father’s psyche nor made me shout for joy, hallelujah! I mourned my living father, my loving ailing father. It wasn’t him I feared – it was the bedlam that had claimed him, chained him. Let me out he might have cried. Let me help I might have replied. So I let it be but then he died.

My mother had left a few years before and my father had found himself one morning married to an English Rose, drinking partner par excellence, breathing vulgar fumes into my heightened senses. The grand larceny began. New wife cleaned up - body, soul and all the consumer durables that the age could offer. Losing our home a hapless calamity, losing our father an ordinary injury, losing our heritage a crime against my humanity. Unwilling nomad, not quite mad but no thanks to anyone else. Part of the inventory of family disaster that squabbles over crockery and neglects the child’s beating heart, ignores the dimming pulse as joy and life’s desire evaporate like the salt on the shore. Drama needs no queen, no royal nomination. Drama is democracy’s handmaid but of course you have to be of age to vote. Minors must accept what is dished out to them before they get their electoral card. No, drama is anarchy and such freedom is our undoing.

Like I say, or imply, we always think we are going to do better than our parents and when we don’t we start to hear their voices loud and clear, we start to paraphrase their beliefs and wish we had been more humble in what we were prepared to accept from our elders. My mother’s advice was always make sure you have a job and money in the bank – never rely on a man to put food on the table. Mother knew. She had copped out and relied on the men in her life and paid a high price for the privilege of being the kept woman. Kept in fearful doubt, kept in cold comfort – Hobson made the choice for her. She didn’t know she could have done something about it that involved her, that she could have handled things on her own. And that was her legacy to me, the not wanting to know. The Cinderella complex in all its redundant splendour. I only had ourselves to blame. I knew better but acted the same. Like a child who teases the dog until it bites them, I jumped headfirst into a toxic web of passion and veiled truths. My children’s father to be recognised the fault in me and filled it in with his own version of me. And I let him because he seemed so sound.

As Stephen King says (but was it easier for him because Tabitha also gave her permission?) : “Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy”