Nowhere to Run: Where do you go when there’s nowhere left to hide?. Judy Westwater

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СКАЧАТЬ meal and didn’t utter a single word all night. There was such a crowd of them and I desperately wanted to feel comfortable enough to join in, but I couldn’t. I’d had to learn how to survive for the whole of my life, alone. I was very streetwise and canny, but emotionally I was nothing more than a naïve child.

      One night at the Globe, after we had taken our bows and the audience was leaving, Roger caught my hand briefly.

      ‘Judy,’ he started. ‘You shouldn’t have to work like this.’

      I was puzzled. I loved working.

      ‘It’s dangerous,’ he continued. ‘You risk your life every time you get on stage. I don’t want that for you. I want to look after you,’ he said. ‘I want you to be with me.’

      This was all very odd. Roger fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a little diamond ring. It flashed in the lights. ‘Will you marry me?’ he asked.

      I was stunned. Roger wanted to be married to me. I slowly ran through everything I thought that meant. I imagined our home. I pictured a place full of love and security like those I had seen in the movies. For me, this was a dream greater than any other. Roger wanted to live with me.

      ‘You want us to have a home together?’

      He nodded. ‘Think about it,’ he said. ‘We can talk about it later.’

      After the final show we went for a meal. There was a restaurant down the road that was open late. As we walked in I suddenly felt very special. Roger ordered for both of us —some ham and potatoes. I could see he was nervous. I had no nerves at all—I just felt excited. Was this really happening to me? To little, skinny Judy with the scruffy hair? Judy whom no one had ever loved? Judy with no family and no proper home?

      ‘Did you have a think about it?’ Roger asked.

      I hesitated, shyly.

      ‘I want you to be mine,’ he said. ‘That’s what it is. I love you, Judy.’

      I looked up at him. There were tears in my eyes. His words sent floods of emotions coursing through me that I couldn’t understand. I just wanted to feel like this forever and to give him my whole soul.

      ‘Yes. I’ll marry you,’ I said.

      And we were both laughing all of a sudden.

      ‘Mrs Roger Lethbridge. I’m going to be Mrs Roger Lethbridge,’ I thought to myself as if in a dream.

      Roger was twenty-one the following month and when he told his family that we were getting married his mother insisted on organizing the wedding. She had already made a booking for his birthday party and the whole wedding celebration just became an extension of that. Speedy had organized a lot of touring for us during that month and I came back from a few days away to find that the wedding flowers had been organized, the invitations sent out and a few dresses set aside for me to try. It was like being carried along on a tidal wave.

      Normally the bride’s father pays for weddings but, given the circumstances with my family, Mrs Lethbridge was paying for everything. I wondered whether I should invite my Mum and sisters, but I didn’t like to add to the cost of everything and I couldn’t imagine how I would have introduced them. Anyway, I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t have come.

      Sometimes, late at night as I lay down to sleep on the bus, I did wonder if this was right for me but I had no way of telling and no one I could turn to for advice. I couldn’t talk to Bobby or Vicky because I didn’t know how to put into words what I was feeling, and didn’t want to be disloyal to Roger. Besides, the wedding was his 21st birthday celebration and I couldn’t spoil that for him. I had doubts nipping at my heels—just little things. Sometimes he would interrupt or undermine me in public in a way that felt quite rude to me. Sometimes he was critical and made me feel inferior, but I had no way of knowing that these things weren’t part of a normal loving relationship so I tried to kick my doubts away. I liked Roger. Everyone was being so kind. ‘It’ll all work out,’ I told myself.

      One day a minister friend of Vicky’s came to the amusement park. I was worried because I thought that I might need to get permission to get married. If you were under twenty-one that was normal, so I plucked up the courage to ask this man. He was quite serious but he had a kind face and he was older, which made me feel secure.

      ‘I was abandoned by my parents,’ I explained. ‘My mother doesn’t want anything to do with me and my father is in South Africa. He never wanted to look after me. Do you think that I can still marry Roger? Do I need to get parental permission?’

      ‘Well, you are only eighteen,’ he said kindly, ‘but this is a unique situation. Let me look into it for you.’

      A couple of days later he came back and said that everything would be fine. I remember wishing that I could ask him for more advice, but I couldn’t quite think how to frame the unformed question that was hovering in my mind. It felt so disloyal. These doubts surely were about my own inadequacies. Here it was—everything I had ever dreamed of. I pinned my hopes on that.

      When I walked down the aisle at St Luke’s Church in Wythenshawe in November 1963, I wore white. Mrs Lethbridge had done a good job—everything ran like clockwork. Most of all, my heart was full of hope. I believed I was walking into a world full of love. I thought things were going to be perfect.

      ‘Do you promise to love, honour and obey?’ the minister asked and I took that question very seriously.

      ‘I do,’ I said firmly.

      I felt wonderful that day. But within days after the wedding I realized that Roger had a very different kind of life in mind—and love had nothing to do with it.

       Chapter Five

      After the wedding party was over, there was no honeymoon. Roger and I moved to a small brick house opposite his Grandad’s place in Compass Street, Openshawe, and everything changed completely. We didn’t have marital relations that first night because he was too drunk but on the second night of married life he insisted. For some reason, I hadn’t made the connection between marriage and sex but now I realized I’d just have to put up with it. It was extremely hard for me because I had been raped twice as a child: once on a beach on the Isle of Man when I was eight when Freda and Dad had left me on my own all day; and then again when I was twelve and sleeping rough in an alleyway in Johannesburg. I hadn’t told Roger about those occasions but he must have been able to see how nervous I was about going to bed with him.

      As soon as our marriage was consummated, everything changed. Roger made it clear he considered himself the master of the house and as far as he was concerned it was his job to keep me in line. From the moment we first walked through the front door into the small, dark rooms inside, I sensed a difference in my new husband. He was no longer loving or warm towards me. When people realize that you’ve got no one behind you and nowhere to run, they can become very manipulative and controlling. I was his chattel, his possession. He’d made me give up the job at Belle Vue so now he controlled the purse strings and he was determined I was going to earn my keep. Overnight, my time at the circus became a distant dream and the run-up to the wedding and our courtship days seemed like an impossible fairy tale. I was back in a position of being abused, but at least I knew how to deal with that. It’s what I had grown up with after all.

      I tried to be positive. СКАЧАТЬ