I was born in1956 in New Zealand, the youngest of 5 children. We lived in a detached council house with a large garden in a tree-lined street in the valley. My father was a design engineer, my mother a housewife.
In many ways it was an idyllic childhood. There was very little traffic (and very few more people!) so we played on the street and roamed freely, often bare-foot. We climbed hills and swam in the river and rode our bikes.
My parents were an unusual couple, my father of white European descent (father German and rumoured to be of royal descent/mother English, possibly with Welsh antecedents) and my mother half Polynesian (father English/mother Tongan and a true-blue princess). They met in Fiji during the war. She was beautiful but by time I was five she was fundamentalist, paranoid schizophrenic and violent. Home was chaotic and terrifying. There was no protection from my mother or my siblings. My father chose to absent himself.
I escaped the greater terrors of my home by spending as much time as I could around the corner at the home of “Sister ______”, a fellow Jehovah’s Witness and older friend of my mother. I loved “Nanna” as I called her. Her home was spotlessly clean and tidy, peaceful and organised, everything my own home was not. Unfortunately it was also occupied by her paedophile son. Shame and terror have lived in me ever since, tainting every moment, every event. I had my first thoughts of suicide at maybe 5 years old, certainly by 6.
At 16 I left school, got a job in the office of a music company where I met my first husband, S___, and left home. It was the 70s and all about flares, rock music and road trips. But I was dissociated most of the time so remember very little of it, or anything else that’s ever happened to me for that matter. Every flash of memory I have is accompanied and dominated by feelings of terror and anxiety.
My parents were anglophiles and from the time I was 6 years old I was determined to live in England. I think escape was the driving force. S___ and I left NZ in 1979. We went to California then down through Central and South America, across to Spain then to England by ferry. It was an amazing trip. I just wish I could remember more of it.
We spent time in Devon, firstly as domestic staff in a private manor house, then as admin staff in a seaside holiday camp. We bought a little Morris Minor and travelled all over Devon before moving to Buckinghamshire and our first pub jobs. Leaving there we travelled across Europe before more pub work in Greenwich. I hated pub work so we moved to South Kensington and I began admin temping.
Actually, I’ve hated, in varying degrees, every job I’ve ever done. In some I was simply bored, but I realise now that I was so ceaselessly anxious and depressed that having to interact with anyone stressed me to the limit. This included S___. I never told him about my childhood sexual abuse and I had no idea of the extent of my own unconscious thoughts, feelings and behaviours. I could not express myself healthily, any more than he was mature enough to hear and understand me. Even after 11 years, I was sometimes swamped by a sense of being married to a complete stranger. So much energy went towards repressing my shame and terror in order to appear “normal”, even to S___. Especially to S___ who remains the most talented, amiable and normal person I’ve ever known. Our relationship couldn’t last. I felt as if I were being buried alive and I was beginning to hate him for his complacency. We separated in Oxfordshire, after a miscarriage. It was the last straw for me. It proved I could never be “normal”.
Working for a literary agent, I was able to get my own local history book published. After being asked to speak to schoolchildren about it I decided to train as a teacher. Four of the best years of my life were spent in Oxford studying for my degree, in the middle of which I married for the second time, J___, a disgraced vicar 22 years my senior who had been welcomed back into the fold. In retrospect I think I was seeking my own redemption.
I found teaching extremely difficult but through it I discovered a talent I had no idea I possessed. I had been performing amateur dramatics on and off since I was a teenager so volunteered my services when a stage director was desperately needed. I loved it - Annie, Grease, Fame, The Wiz, Chess, Little Shop of Horrors and my pièce de résistance, Les Misérables.
Something else I loved was my little 18th Century Methodist chapel in a secluded village. I bought this in my second attempt to leave J___. My first attempt and home of my very own had been a charming little Victorian rose-covered cottage. But my efforts were futile. CFS was diagnosed, a result of continuous stress from my past, marriage and teaching. My health deteriorated to the point where I could no longer work. I lost my job, my home and most of my possessions. All I had left were debts I could not pay.
I could have returned to my family in New Zealand. Despite the dysfunctional family life of our childhood, we hold each other in great affection now. But that’s easier from a distance of 12,000 miles and when we barely see each other from decade to decade. To have to live in someone else’s home and be beholden to them, whether mother (my father is no longer in this world) or sibling would have felt a failure too great to bear. And I could not have subjected Rosie, my adored Cairn bitch, to the long, long flight then six month quarantine. Not to mention the fact that I was physically incapable of organising, let alone performing, such a move.
J___ had retired and moved to the other side of the country when I bought the Old Chapel but we kept in constant contact through visits and almost daily phone calls. We never cut the cord (although our relationship has been strictly platonic almost from the beginning). Then after six years of separation, life seemed to conspire to put us back under the same roof. I was becoming too ill to even feed myself, then J___ lost his own little dog. He was so grief-stricken and lonely that he was glad to have me live with him again (but gladder, I think, to have Rosie!) My dependency and lack of activity suited him too. He could be in control and continue to do everything his own way. We vowed “...for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death us do part” and so it is. (I won’t comment on the other promises he made that he was breaking even as he said them.) Although it is very far from the ideal relationship I once hoped for, I am extremely grateful for the security which J___ provides. The house is rented but it is in the most beautiful situation. I have my own bedroom and study, and we have added two more gorgeous Cairns to our household. Even though I feel totally powerless, my life could be so much worse.
