Friday reading

Every time Deb thinks she has her story straight new information raises more questions than it answers

When they heard about my meeting with Jim, Barb and Rose told me to forget about him and go ‘home’ at least for a while and then decide what I was going to do with the rest of my life. The way they put it it sounded like a death sentence! To shut them up I said I’d think about it. Meanwhile I was enjoying life at the camp. I got a job cleaning a pub four days a week in the village – I developed a strong stomach there! – and soon I was able to pay Barb back the £20.

Back at the base we took turns to keep up the chanting and drumming. A bit like the changing of the guards only we were coming from a different angle. ‘Make war on war’ and ‘Arms are for hugging not killing’ and so on. I believed in the protest and I discovered how strong it feels to be part of a group of people all with one purpose calling out together. After a while you stop hearing your own voice, or the big voice of the crowd is your voice and soon there’s only one heartbeat too. No different I suppose from the way football supporters feel when everyone in the stand is singing and cheering. Or other crazy dangerous mobs. How quickly you can come to believe you’re all powerful.

I’m not saying it was all hunky dory and happy clappy in the camp all of the time. For one thing it wasn’t very comfortable living in a tent with four or five others, especially when it rained. We didn’t get to wash very much – although I took advantage of cleaning the ladies loos in the pub to give myself a good scrub down at the basins too. There were plenty of fights, people accusing others of stealing their stuff or getting stoned and arguing about nothing. A few women had affairs with soldiers from the base and they were chased off as traitors.

Some had affairs with one another too. And yes, that’s when I got together with Rose. One night when we were all huddled around the camp fire she turned around and kissed me. At first I was so surprised I wasn’t sure what was happening. When my brain caught up my whole body was tingling. Everything about the sensation was strange and new and I knew I didn’t want it to stop.

I don’t mean to embarrass you Marge but the thing is I can’t help wondering if you understand what I’m saying here more than you might let on. It’s none of my business I know. It’s just that, well, you know we never heard of or saw a man in your life. Lucy asked Mam once why you weren’t married. Back then it seemed to us that women had to be married and we were made to expect that would be our destiny too. Married to a man that is. Now I realise you might have had a female lover and you couldn’t be out, which would be very sad. And as I’m on this tack now I might as well say it straight out – were you in love with Mam? No obligation to answer. You can tell me to get lost and mind my own bloody business only I know you’d never be that rude.

Photo by Vardan Papikyan on Unsplash

I’m still trying to put the jigsaw together. Probably it's a form of madness to want all the gaps filled in, to see the panorama complete. Just to spite me I expect life will go on tripping me up with knots to be unpicked. And I’ll sit down and worry at them. Rose tells me to stop putting two and two together and getting a hundred and five. Live in the moment, she says. Every time I try to be zen some new dimension opens to skew the picture. Like the latest letter from Ellen.

I’m jumping ahead of myself again. There I was, beginning to feel at last I had taken my life in my own hands, living in a community with a bunch of mostly like-minded people. The more insults and flak we got for the protest and even when women were arrested the more we dug our heels in. Women arrived every day from all over the country, and from other places. When we weren’t chanting or making a human chain or working in the village we formed groups, teaching one another different skills – I never got the hang of macramé! – and people gave talks on politics, history, taught foreign languages or set up reading circles to share books by early feminists, and in the evenings people recited their own poems and stories, or did skits and plays. The Wimmin’s University.

There were different sections and factions, including evangelicals who wanted to convert us all. I steered well clear of them! I also avoided the internal squabbling among people who wanted to take over as leaders, and make the protest bigger, louder, and more aggressive. I didn’t want anything to change because then I’d have to change with it.

Rose came to visit every few weeks and as she and I grew closer she began to persuaded me to at least go back to Dublin for a visit, to let you all know I was safe, although then, being with her gave me another strong reason not to go back to a place where I would have to pretend again to be someone I wasn’t. One day she brought me this letter from Mark’s house which put an end to any plans to go back to Dublin.

3 Sandy Gate

Hebden Bridge

Calderdale

West Yorks

19 May 1983

Dear Deb

I hope this finds you well as it leaves me.

I’m writing to say I’m sorry I could not stay longer to talk to you. I wanted to buy you a cake as well as the chips. You looked very hungry. I hope you understand that I had to catch my bus home. I hope you had a safe journey home as I did.

In fact actually Ellen – the missus – told me to write this letter to you because she said I owed you an apology. The truth of the matter is you see in fact she didn’t know who I was meeting the day that I met you. I had only told her I was meeting an old pal from Dublin. Which in a way wasn’t too far from the truth was it? You see I need to tell you I hadn’t a clue who you really were or who would be with you or if the whole business was a hoax, some busybody looking for money or something from me.

At the same time I was thinking that if it was true and you really were who you said you were that in fact it would be very nice to meet you. It's not every day a long lost daughter turns up. I mean I did wonder about you over the years. She – Ellen – the missus – knew by me that something was up when I came home that night. On and on she went at me, you know the way women are and after a while I had to tell her everything. I needn’t tell you she was raging. She said I should be ashamed of myself. It was disgraceful abdikating my responsibilities. I suppose I knew all along she was right but I had to tell her your Mam wanted nothing to do with me. That’s not the point she said.

Honest to God, not a word of a lie I thought she was going to throw me out on the street then and there. In the end she didn’t. Thanks be. Instead she told me to write this letter to you and tell you your very welcome to come and visit us any time you like. So there it is. If you think you’d like to come up here we have a spare room and there’d be a welcome on the mat.

Yours sincerely,

Your loving father,

Jim

P.S.

Dear Deb

I’m so very very sorry about what happened the day you met Jim. Had he told me beforehand where he was going and who he was meeting I’d have insisted he bring you here to our home for a proper visit. I’d have given you more hospitality than a plate of chips in a greasy spoon! I would love to meet you. Please do come and visit us. We live in a nice market town, not far from the dales where there are lovely places to walk. The hawthorn is in bloom now so please come soon. I have made up the bed in our little attic bedroom for you.

Yours in anticipation,

Ellen (the missus!)

You see what I mean Marge, about how my life gets knotted up? One piece of paper can knock me sideways. I wrote back to Jim and Ellen immediately and a couple of weeks later I visited them for three days. I can’t tell you how nice she is to me. I really get on with her. Jim was more relaxed this time. He’s a funny person. A bit eccentric I think. He’s an electrician and their house is full of machines that have been taken apart and not put together again, the wires and batteries spilling out of corners and shelves like the insides of the frog we dissected in school. Ellen calls him the master of the unfinished work. When he’s not driving around the place in his work van he’s tearing over the dales on his motorbike. She’s a nurse and works in the local old folks home.

Photo by Illiya Vjestica on Unsplash

I visited them now and again. Their house is part of an old stone terrace with a pocket handkerchief garden where Ellen manages to grow lots of vegetables and flowers, sweet pea and hollyhocks and roses. I think you’d like it and I know you’d like her. Oh and they had a cute dog, a Parson’s terrier called Mr. Digby. We used to bring him for walks on the dales. I’ve never seen countryside like it, billowing mounds as far as the eye can see. I’d help Ellen in her garden and go out for a spin on the back of Jim’s bike.

Ellen’s a great cook! She bakes cakes and scones and bread like you wouldn’t believe – not like Mam! Ellen never had children. She told me she couldn’t. She and Jim thought about adopting but he wasn’t too keen on the idea of raising another person’s child. She said when he told her about me she thought she understood him better. It was like already he was a bad father and didn’t want to push his luck at failing again. Besides, she said, there were other problems they had to deal with. All in the past now, she would tell me.

Long story short, I began to spend more time with them. Ellen persuaded me to start drawing again and even bought me a big sketchpad and charcoal. Partly I needed to get away because life at the camp was changing. Barb got ill and had to go to hospital to have her gall stones out. Rose was beginning to tell me I had to make something more of myself and my life, that I couldn’t stay there forever. I knew she was right but I didn’t have the energy to move on. She talked about moving to London where we could be together which scared me a little. She saw what I was afraid to acknowledge, that the camp had become a refuge for me and while I believed in the campaign that wasn’t really why I stayed on.

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