Friends for Life. Jan Fennell

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СКАЧАТЬ on the other hand, had a dozen questions flying around my head. I only got to ask one, however.

      ‘Who’s that?’ I said.

      ‘That’s your brother,’ Mum replied breezily.

      I’d always dreamt of having a brother or sister. I used to look enviously at my cousins playing, fighting and doing all the normal things siblings do together. I saw that when one got told off there would be huddles and muttered secrets would be shared. They were together.

      But there was no prospect of me having one. Cousin Les had been the closest I’d had to a relative of my own age, but since our separation for school I’d seen less and less of him. Whenever I asked my parents, ‘Can we have a baby?’ they replied, ‘No, we can’t afford one.’ And that was it, end of story. There was no discussion after that.

      So to say the discovery that I already had a brother was a bombshell would be the understatement of the century. As my mother rushed back into the living room that night, I felt as if I’d been punched in the head.

      The strange disorientation I felt was increased by the fact that my ‘brother’ seemed such an unlikely candidate to be my mother’s son. I could hear him laughing in the sitting room. He was very loud and he spoke in a strong London accent. He was the sort of person my mother would normally have crossed the road to avoid. ‘Common’ would have been the word she used, most likely.

      Eventually I took the tea tray in, but I might as well have been invisible. Anne was quiet because she’d just met her in-laws. I just sat on the floor listening, trying to take in what was going on.

      I don’t know whether I was pleased or hurt. In truth, I didn’t know what I felt.

      He’d say things like: ‘I remember you when you were a snotty-nosed kid.’ But that didn’t add up. I had no memory of him at all. And besides, if I had a cold my family had the fastest hankies in town.

      They backed him up though. They kept saying: ‘You’ve met him before, you know Ron.’ And I thought: ‘No, I haven’t. When? Where?’

      There was no helping me to come to terms with the situation. There were no child psychologists around then to tell them ‘This is a traumatic occasion for a child, a major event in her life, and you should proceed this way …’ You just had to get on with it.

      As I sat there listening it dawned on me that he was indeed my mother’s son. He was calling my mother Mum and my father Wal. The only thing I could focus on that night was Anne’s bump. I was thinking, young as I was, ‘Maybe there’s hope there.’ I thought, ‘I’m going to be an auntie.’ Which would possibly give me a chance to be close to another human being.

      I wasn’t allowed to hang around for long. They obviously had important things to talk about, so I was sent to bed. I lay there in my bed with the door partially open. I can remember looking at the pattern that the paraffin heater left on the ceiling.

      I heard them laughing. And eventually I heard them go, full of ‘See you soon’ and ‘Pop round anytime’.

      I went to school the next day telling everyone I had a brother. They did what they’d done when I said I had an uncle who worked with Buffalo Bill. They called me a liar again.

      The aftershocks of that night continued for days and weeks. I couldn’t help myself asking my mother questions. Who had she been married to? Where was he now? Why had she and Ron been separated? My mother really didn’t want to discuss any of it. She’d get cross whenever I raised the subject. Divorce was not the done thing at that time and she clearly felt shame. A week or so after Ron had called round she snapped. I’d asked her another question about her divorce.

      ‘I don’t know why it’s only me you’re pestering with all your questions,’ she said. ‘Your father was married before too.’

      This was another bolt from the blue. At least when I asked my father about it he was willing to talk to me. I sensed that he’d been expecting the question. He just sighed, shrugged his shoulders and said: ‘Well, it was just one of those things love, there’s not much to say really.’

      It turned out that he had married before he’d gone off to war. His wife’s name was Doris and she was a local girl. While my father was being blown to pieces in Europe, Doris did what a lot of young girls did and started becoming a little too familiar with some of the American GIs who were stationed in and around London. It had been when my dad came home for his father’s funeral that he had discovered what she was up to. As if the pain of having to come home to bury his father hadn’t been traumatic enough for him, he had walked into their home and caught her in flagrante. After the funeral he’d gone straight to the servicemen’s charity, SAAFA, and asked them to organize a divorce. It wasn’t particularly unusual for something like that to happen during the war, particularly to couples as young as my dad and Doris. They were both nineteen or so. But it still hit him hard. Looking back on it now it explained a lot about my father. It explained why he decided to stay on in Europe after the end of the war. He obviously didn’t want to come home to be reminded of his heartache. It also explained why, having been given a second chance with my mother, he was absolutely determined not to let history repeat itself. No wonder he made her the centre of his universe, no wonder he rarely took his eyes off her.

      My father’s story was sad, but my mother’s turned out to be even more poignant. It was many years before I got to know the full story. There were questions I needed to ask my mother when I became a mother myself. It was then that, slowly, she revealed what had happened.

      It turned out that my mum had been just sixteen when she’d had Ron. The father was a local boy of the same age, Dan Godbeer. Mum told me she had been so naive she didn’t even know she was pregnant. She didn’t know the facts of life. She got married two days before he was born. The marriage didn’t last, however. Dan went back to live with his mum and dad, my mum went back to live with her sister and her mother. Dan’s mother was a poisonous woman and was determined to keep the baby in her family. The case went to court and the judge sided with her, saying in essence that a little boy couldn’t be brought up by three women living in the poor, cramped conditions my mum and grandmother had to cope with. So Ron was taken from her.

      The loss was terrible, but it was made even more painful by the fact that she would see him regularly. And when she did he was always dirty and badly dressed, sometimes in clothes that were one step removed from rags. Sometimes he was barefoot. She would spend ages making clothes for him and would then leave them in parcels on her mother-in-law’s doorstep. But the packages would be sent back to her unopened. She was rejected. When he was about seven she gave up. She said it was the war that changed it for her. She adopted the same attitude as everyone else: ‘We’re going to die, let’s make the most of the time we’ve got left.’

      The story never came out in its entirety. I was given bits and pieces, which I had to put together. I eventually learned that it was my nan who reunited them. Sadly for Ron his father died when he was just nineteen. My dad took my mum to the funeral, but Ron didn’t want to know her because he felt she’d abandoned him. Ron had joined the RAF as soon as he was old enough and my nan, bless her, invited him round for tea, because he was still in touch with her. She engineered it so that my mum would be there too, locked them in a room and said: ‘Talk to each other.’

      This, apparently, was soon after I was born. But I knew nothing of it. Even then, sadly, Ron fought against it. His grandmother was still bitter and made sure he thought the worst of my mother. But, as so often happens, when he was about to become a parent himself for the first time he finally came back. That strange, bewildering night in November 1958 was their reconciliation.

      Again, СКАЧАТЬ