Chapter 5
Another layer peeled

Suddenly I become aware that the film credits are rolling, so I hurriedly pull on my hat before the lights go up, feeling the top to make sure it’s on the right way round. Michael says, “That was quite well done, wasn’t it?” I nod my agreement and we all shuffle out into the corridor, where Nat makes a bee- line for a soft drinks machine, and buys himself a Coke.
We go down the escalator into the main foyer and I turned Nat and said “Well what about this ice cream then?” He shrugs his shoulders, and replies “I’ve no money now that I’ve bought my Coke.” For some stupid reason his reply cuts me to the quick, probably because I’d actually been quite touched by the fact that he’d made the gesture in the first place. (Despite everything he seems to be handling my illness very fairly well. He continues to do well at school, and at home he behaves pretty much like any other thirteen year old. In fact he rarely makes any concessions to my treatment. Perhaps this is because Michael and I have tried very hard to keep normal routines going, or maybe it’s because just like any teenager he’s fairly self absorbed.) It was Michael who picked up on my disappointment and said “Two scoops of black cherry in a cone, right?” I look at him, smile and say “Thanks babe.”
We make the short walk back to the car. I’m knackered. We’ve been out for 6 hours, and the long day and my private review of the last few months have exhausted me.
We get into the car, and I pull my seat forward to give Nat more legroom. As I do so my ice cream tips and falls to the floor. I pick it up and it’s beyond salvage, covered in a “hundreds and thousands” sprinkling of sand and dog hair. I’d had precisely four licks. Very suddenly I feel savagely, uncontrollably angry - a red mist descending, Incredible Hulk, shirt busting kind of anger. “Story of my life! Four fucking licks and you’re out!” a voice shouts inside my head and then big, fat, childish tears are coursing down my face, and my breathing is coming in great heaving sobs just like some overgrown toddler in full blown tantrum mode.
Michael looks across at me, “What now?” he shouts angrily “For Christ’s sake can’t we just have a good time!” I feel terrible, I’m as shocked as he is at my reaction and I feel instantly guilty for upsetting him when he’s already put up with so much, but the snapping of this last tiny, wee straw had released a raging tide inside me. I’m thinking “Fuck this cancer! Just when I thought life was getting easier! Just when I thought that there might be some time and space for me! But oh no, let your guard down for a minute and “Bam” take that! I always have to do it the hard way? No silver friggin spoon, no leg up, not even a bastard bye into the next round! What did I do in a past life to deserve this? Was I Catherine the fucking Great? Or maybe one of the Borgias? I hope I bloody enjoyed myself, cos God knows I’m paying for it now!”
I gather up the remains of the ice cream, get out of the car, walk over to a litterbin and ram the cone ferociously into it, get back in the car and slam the door. Michael then drives far too fast out of the car park.
We exchange some more angry words on the way home, with Nat silent in the back. When we get home I go straight to bed, completely shattered by the strains of the day. Nat comes into the room and says “Mum, here’s two quid I had at home. You can get yourself another ice cream.” “Nat” I say, “I don’t want your money. What upset me was that you didn’t think enough of me to keep your promise.”
He says nothing and leaves the room. I can tell he is upset and I now feel like a stupid drama queen. It’s not his fault that his actions were the catalyst for me to blow a gasket. But I am genuinely hurt by his behaviour and I decide that it will do him no harm to know that he thoughtlessness is capable of hurting people. And suddenly I’m just very tired of being brave and uncomplaining.
A little while later there was a soft knock at the door, and Nat reappears. He hands me a cup of tea and says, “Sorry Mum, I behaved like a twat.” I take the tea, put it down, hug him, and say, “Thanks son, I wasn’t too clever either.”
After he leaves I lay back on the bed, still exhausted, but too wound up to sleep. I think about how strange it was that the cinema was only a stone’s throw from my office. I’ve not been back in the building since just before my operation, although I’m still in touch with work friends and colleagues. It seems like light years since I’d been there, when in fact it is only five months………
My hospital admission date came through in a matter of days. D-day for the actual operation was the 22 August. I returned to work on the Monday, knowing that the operation was three weeks away. Going into work this time was more difficult, as my immediate colleagues now knew of my diagnosis. I could sense their concern, but neither they nor I knew quite how to handle the situation. I found I could function perfectly normally as long as the focus remained on work, but I went to pieces if my cancer was mentioned.
But the work itself continued to be a welcome distraction. I poured myself into taking forward my key project. I met again with the research consultant, and told her about my diagnosis, because I knew I was going to have to hand the project over to someone else. She was surprised that I was even at work, but I reassured her that it was preferable to sitting at home contemplating my own mortality. We were able to agree how to structure the next wave of the research, which was scheduled to take place in October. In the remainder of the time available to me I also managed to produce bidding guidelines for the following year’s challenge funding.
However, I began to appreciate that I needed to tell a wider circle of work contacts about my illness. This was because I ran a number of groups/committees, and was also a member of some others. So I drafted up an e-mail explaining my situation, appropriately topping and tailing it to meet a variety of audiences and gingerly pressed the send button. After doing this things became infinitely more difficult for me. A walk to the canteen meant running a gauntlet of sympathetic stares and opening my e-mail in box was like playing Russian roulette as expressions of concern and support popped up without warning. People were being enormously kind, but my pride was hurt, and I hated being pitied just about as much as I hated being vulnerable.
The days past, and the nearer it got to the operation date the more difficult it was to function. Finally, three days working days before it I told Frances that I really needed to spend the remaining days at home. She agreed with this, and touchingly walked me down the main door of the office. We embraced, and agreed to keep in touch.

As I walked away from the building I felt a very powerful mixture of emotions. The first was one of pure relief at putting down a large burden that, for the moment at least, I was simply not able to shoulder. However, this was tinged with a much stronger sense that this disease was steadily peeling away every layer of my life. I tried to console myself with the thought that for now I needed to concentrate all my energies on dealing with the illness and the treatment, and the fewer distractions the better. But I knew I was jumping into the unknown and I was mightily, gut wrenchingly afraid of what the future might hold.
Alice came through the Saturday after I stopped working. I’d asked her to come shopping with me to get the things I needed for going into hospital. We rarely do things like this together, but for some reason that I can’t rationally explain I felt that I wanted her to be there.
At 50 Alice is four years older than me, which shouldn’t make a heck of a lot of difference at our time of life. However, this four year gap was very significant when we were growing up, because when I was four Alice was eight, and when I was eight Alice was twelve, and when I was twelve Alice was sixteen. We were therefore always at different stages, if not different schools. We look different too; Alice has dark skin, and brown eyes, while I have blue-grey eyes and fair skin and freckles. We also have quite different personalities and interests, Alice was, and is, a girlie girl, she liked clothes, dolls, girls’ comics, make up, cooking, painting and making things. I was the opposite, I hated being dressed up, indeed the girls’ fashions of the1960s were pure torture for me. I hated the ribbons in my hair and the flouncy petticoats and dresses. Photographs of our childhood record my unease for all time; I’m the one not smiling, with my hair sticking out at all angles. I was a tomboy, I loved animals, climbing trees, catching insects and playing sports. Our wee brother Charlie was two years younger than me and he tended to tag around after me. My main childhood memory of him is of hearing the plaintiff cry of “You’ll kill yourself!” which usually came up from somewhere way below me or behind me, as I sat in the upper most branches of a tree, or went “No hands” on my bike or walked along the open second storey joists of a house still under construction. Odd that in later life he ended up taking much greater risks than me, maybe I got mine out of my system early, or maybe I ran out of courage.
The differences between Alice and me would’ve been insignificant if our upbringing and family life had been stable and conventional. But it wasn’t. Tolstoy begins Anna Karenina with the line “All happy family resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. It is a great opening line, but I completely disagree with it. My own experience suggests it is the other way around, unhappy families usually have a lot in common, and it’s the happy ones who are unique.
My parents were both only children, they were born in the late 1920s and grew up during World War II. Both had strange upbringings by modern, peacetime standards, my mother were raised by her paternal grandmother and a maiden aunt. I’m not sure of the reasons for this, all I know is that her grandmother took her out of whatever passed for care in those days and that her father was a wanderer who only put in an occasional appearance. The family lived in a tenement in Edinburgh. Like so many working class Scottish children of the time my mother proved to be able at school, and was even offered a place at Art School, but family pressures to earn a living meant that after she left school she trained as a nurse. From what little I can piece together about her early adult life it is clear that she was socially ambitious, and anxious to kick over the traces of her upbringing.
My father’s childhood was similarly fractured. His mother was Danish, and his father a Scots marine engineer. His parents met during his father’s travels and they had found that they had a lot in common due to the fact they had both been in Belgium during World War 1; he as a young Scottish soldier and she because her father was attached to the Danish embassy in Brussels. My grandfather spent World War II at sea as a chief engineer in the Royal Fleet Auxiliary. He had an amazing war, being one of the few to survive the Russian convoys, and then going on to see the Japanese surrender in the Far East. Ironically my grandmother died from a severe asthma attack while he was away on active service. With all the dislocation of war it was fully nine months before he got the news of her death and my father was cared for by a succession of relatives, until he was able to make landfall just long enough to make arrangements to send his son away to a boarding school that was run on Navy lines.

My parents met in the late forties, and they married in 1951, when my mother was 23 and my father 22, both terribly young by today’s standards. They never told us in any great detail about how they met, or what either of them was doing at that time; indeed neither of them was ever very romantic about their relationship. In fact my father used to whistle to attract my mother’s attention, which she’d ignore until he used her name.
What I do know is that very early in their married life my father landed a job in West Africa working for a shipping company, and Alice, myself and Charlie were all born there. Alice in Nigeria and me and Charlie in the Gold Coast, which is now Ghana. Like all “ex pats” we lived in some style, with servants, and a company house, and car. My parents enjoyed the hard drinking colonial lifestyle.
However, the Fifties and Sixties were a time of huge change in terms of the UK’s colonial interests in Africa, and following the granting of independence to Ghana we returned to Edinburgh in the early 1960s. I was about four years old at that time and therefore I have only fleeting memories of Africa. I remember the equatorial heat and humidity, the daily torrential downpours, which my brother and I used to dance in, delighting in the warm refreshing rain; the creepy crawlies that used to inhabit our house – the huge “sausage flies”, as I’d called them because they bodies were the size of a chipolata, that flew around the lights until they fried, the endless biting insects, the highly coloured King lizards and worst of all the snakes – big ones; the bright colours, of the red African earth, the women’s clothes and headdresses and the produce in the markets; and the sound of the talking drums beating out long into the night.
Alice was eight when we came home. She’d attended school in Africa, and therefore found it much more difficult to settle in Edinburgh. However, we all found it hard to adapt to the cold, grey, grimness of the city and when we moved into a brand new house the suburbs, it soon became obvious that we were not going to fit in. It was a caste- ridden place, where only three things seemed to matter, what your father did, what car he drove, and which private school you attended. We failed on all three counts, my father worked for a brewery, albeit in management, at that stage he didn’t drive a car, and we all attended the local state school.
This would have been bad enough, were it not for the fact that my parents habits were also considered unacceptable and unconventional. They both still liked a drink, and they spent a good deal of time of their in the local pub, often with us three kids parked outside with a bottle of Coke and packet of crisps. And while it was possible for my folks to drink hard in the tropics, where you simply sweat it out, in Edinburgh they just got very pissed. This lead to the fractures in their already unhappy marriage cracking open, there were long screaming matches and often violent battles, mostly about money or the lack of it. My mother also seemed to suffer from what today would probably be classified as mood swings, and these were not helped by mixing alcohol with some of the new tranquillisers, Mother’s little helpers as the Stones called them, that became available in 1960s. My father managed to absent himself from the home as much as possible, so she took her anger and frustrations out on us - to the extent that we were all very aware of the need to take the emotional temperature of the house when we arrived home from school, and to do our utmost to keep her on an even keel. It makes me laugh now to think that she used to collect Hummel figures, those ghastly, wee, porcelain, idealised figures of young children, and yet she beat the shit out of us. We did something we called our Red Indian dance because when we tried to get past her when she was in one of her foul mood we never knew whether to protect our backsides or our heads with our hands as we tried to dodged her blows and make it to the safety of the bathroom, the only room in the house with a lock on the door. Self- preservation became a way of life and we were all very adept at deflecting her rage away from ourselves and onto one another which really didn’t do much for our sibling relationships.
We didn’t bring our friends home, for fear of exposing them to her unpredictable behaviour, indeed on the odd occasion we tried she would scare them half to death by screaming at anyone in sight to “Get out of my kitchen.” She had a great way with words my mother, she’d invent her own stock phrase, things like “Are congenitally incapable of shutting a door?” She didn’t like it when I once replied “Well you should know!” and I got a thick ear for my trouble.
It was a miserable existence, made worse because both of my parents added infidelity to the mix, my mother sleeping with some of the neighbours and my father having an affair with a woman he met through his work.
Then one day suddenly and out of the blue they announced that we were moving. My parents had decided they needed a fresh start and they’d decided to sell the house in Edinburgh and use the proceeds to buy a pub, rather grandly called the King’s Hotel, in a village in Ayrshire. Looking back I can see that this move was simply a case of throwing petrol on a bonfire, but at the time, as ten year old, I was prepared to accept the bait of living in the country, right beside a river, and of being allowed to have a fishing rod and reel.
On the day of the move we set off for Ayrshire in my father’s pride and joy, his newly acquired Vauxhall Viva, which was packed to gunwales with children, a dog and five puppies. Travelling any distance by car as a family was never much fun, as my father had only learned to drive relatively late in life, and he was never very confident behind the wheel. We children were told to stay quiet, because he maintained that the slightest noise interfered with his concentration. No I-Spy or spotting number plates or anything even vaguely amusing was allowed, so journeys in the car always felt like you were the passenger of a tightrope act. Needless to say as normal children we were never able to stay quiet or still for very long, and out of boredom we usually resorted to pinching one another to see who would cry out first, and then incur my mother’s and/or father’s wrath.
In those days there were hardly any motorways, so we travelled by A and B roads that took us ever west to Ayrshire. A journey that now takes about an hour and a half back then felt as momentous as the Oakies setting off for California and almost as long given the need to stop and toilet three kids and a dog and accommodate my sister’s travel sickness.
After five hours of enforced purgatory the car finally crested the brow of a hill on a minor road, and we looked down on the village that was to be our home. Having been used to the size and grandeur of Edinburgh we were shocked to see two long straggly rows of mostly single storey cottages which bisected one another in the shape of a cross, attached to these streets was a small scheme of grey, bog standard “corpie” houses and a church. And that was it. Nothing else for miles, but rolling green hills and fields, which were greener than anything I had ever seen before. (The link between this vivid shade of green and the annual rainfall was a lesson that we would learn later.) My mother pointed out the river as we crossed the bridge into the village. She told me that it flowed round by the back of the hotel.
We pulled up at the back of the pub. It was a two storey, T shaped building, with old coaching stables round the back. Inside the first thing that had struck me was the smell, that typical pub smell of old beer and stale tobacco. Downstairs there was the public bar, which had a lovely old mahogany bar and gantry, with a spittoon rail at the foot. A dartboard was mounted on the wall, which had a tractor tyre around it to protect the wall from stray darts, and there were cast iron tables and solid old chairs around the walls. The floor was covered with old, jute- backed linoleum that must have been made in Dundee circa 1930. There was also a lounge, which was where the women were expected to drink. It had a battered upright piano against one wall, and stained glass windows. The rest of the ground floor consisted of the public toilets, a large kitchen and an oak panelled private sitting room.
Upstairs there were four bedrooms, and a bathroom. One bedroom was set aside for guests to maintain hotel status, this was vital as it meant we were allowed to open on Sundays, which the other nearest pub was not allowed to do. This arrangement meant Alice and I had to share the bedroom directly above the pub lounge downstairs. We would soon learn to fall asleep while our ears were assaulted by fairly tortuous renditions of old songs like “Nobody’s Child”
The whole place was dank and dark, and full of heavy old furniture. It was a real contrast to our previous house in Edinburgh, which had been light and modern. However, outside there were two large outbuildings, with a sheltered garden behind one of these, and over the garden fence, about a quarter of a mile across the fields, was the river. It was a small, spate river, flowing through dairy pasture. In it were salmon, sea trout and brown trout, and I just couldn’t wait to catch them.
I can’t remember what Alice made of the move. But at fourteen she could hardly have been pleased to swap what Edinburgh had to offer for some backwater village in deepest Ayrshire.
We arrived in the last few days of the summer holidays, so we started school soon after we’d arrived. Alice, being almost fifteen, went to the secondary school in the nearest big town, which meant catching the school bus every day. Charlie and I went to the village school. I joined Primary 7 and Charlie went into Primary 5. We were both very shocked by our first day at school. In Edinburgh we’d attended a large, modern city school, which had had all the latest equipment and followed all the latest teaching practices, including it has be said a disastrous arithmetic system we called “rods” which had taught me that two pink ones make a big brown one, as opposed to knowing that 5 + 5 = 10, which is probably a little more useful.
Our new school was tiny, so small in fact that some of the primary years were run together in composite classes. The building itself was a single storey Victorian affair, and it was virtually the same as the day it went up, in that the toilets were outside and school desks still had inkwells. Even the maps on the walls still showed that the sun never set on the British Empire.

My class was small, with only ten pupils. Most came from the village, but one or two were from the surrounding farms, you could tell who they were by the grooves their welly boots left just below their knees, and their occasional ringworm scabs. On that first day in the playground my fellow classmates walked round Charlie and I, almost like a pack of circling dogs trying to smell what was different about us. They were led by an odd looking girl, who would have pretty except for a rather unfortunate scar from a badly sewn up hair lip.
I tried really hard to understand what they were saying, but found it hard to make them out. There were comments like “who dus she think she is, but” and “Aye she’s posh, fucking minted likely”. There were other words that sounded like a foreign language, words like glaikit, hackit, and stummer. Lunch times and play times were spent fighting off the attentions of these kids as they tried to acquaint me with the inside of the janny’s cupboard. However, they soon learned that I was prepared to fight back, and that I was not averse to kicking the odd shin, or smacking someone on the nose. I also spent a lot of time defending Charlie, who was receiving similar treatment for being deemed “a Jessie”. It never fails to amaze me how good children are at immediately sussing out people’s, and especially teachers’ frailties. They should use kids to conduct interrogations, they’d have a conman or double agent sussed before you could say Smarties.
However my classmates soon became aware that I was at least as bright as Ian “Ollie” Oliver the cleverest boy in the class, who parents were also considered to be posh. I liked Ollie, and we sometimes played tennis together on the one court in the village, that his parents maintained. Long summer days were spent playing interminable games and sets because neither of us was prepared to let the other win. Often I could barely see because of hay fever, as the court was surrounded by fields, but that didn’t stop me playing.
But I spent most of my time on my own, and I preferred it that way. The puppies that we’d brought from Edinburgh had all been found homes, save one bitch that resembled a pedigree bearded collie. We kept this puppy and I called her Jenny. She followed me went everywhere, and slept on the end of my bed. She even knew when school came out as she’d always be sitting outside the hotel waiting for me to come home and sometimes she’d even wander up and meet me at the school gates..
Initially my parents’ business went well and my mother threw herself energetically into the running the place. She provided free bar snacks, especially on a Sunday to boost trade. She also started doing pub suppers on the weekends, which provided basic 1970s fare, like gammon steaks and chips. And there were singsongs in the lounge bar. All of these things were new and novel in the village, and the punters flocked in.
But having alcohol quite literally on tap wasn’t helpful to say the least, and this coupled with the fact that the place needed a lot of money spent on it to make it a truly viable proposition took its toll. They’d also picked the least auspicious time to start a small business, as it was a time of tremendous economic uncertainty, with the Three Day Week, and the Middle East Oil Crisis. Under all of these pressures they both started to drink even more heavily and this made their regular fights all the more savage. They took little interest in us, in fact I can’t remember either of them even attending a school parents’night, thank God for small mercies, or helping us with our homework. Indeed, we were usually told to stop doing schoolwork so that we could help in the kitchen, or restock the bar shelves.
I remember one epic Christmas dinner when my mother got so smashed that she tried to roast the potatoes in a tray of disinfectant. I happened to go into the kitchen and the fumes from the boiling, neat Dettol hung around the room like fog, making my eyes smart and my throat ache. Somehow I managed to get the tray out of the oven and outside the backdoor without her noticing; in fact she was so out of it that I went on and finished cooking the meal.
There were also some laughs. I remember local members of a strict Christian sect, which favoured absolute observance of the Sabbath, turning up one Sunday and singing hymns outside the pub front door, in protest at us being open. They even brought a little pedal powered organ with them to accompany the singers. My Dad’s response to all of this was to go out with a crate of beer, which he offered to them saying “After all that singing I thought you might be thirsty!” They never came back.
Alice being older also helped out behind the bar, starting when she was still under age. She liked to wear the mini skirts and those dreadful white vinyl boots that were the fashion of the time and she’d grown into a very attractive girl; her dark hair was cut, a la Mia Farrow, and she’d mastered all the eyeliner and heavy make up techniques of the day. She was a great hit with all the village boys and young men, and I found that some of the older boys started to speak to me, asking if I would mention them to my sister. I treated them fairly scornful because at that stage I’d no interest in boys, other than as someone to play football with.
I noticed that my mother was very uncomfortable with the attention that Alice attracted, and this only added to the tensions in the house. Looking back I can see that this was the start of a chain of events that lead to the final implosion of our family.
The first of these was that Alice, who was in her final year at school, got pregnant to a boy slightly older than herself. As we shared a bedroom I think I was the first to notice the physical changes in her and I suspected that she was pregnant from very early on. But I was only thirteen or fourteen at the time and I didn’t have a clue how to broach the subject with her, and I was also savvy enough to know that all hell was going to break loose once my mother found out, which was probably why Alice herself stayed firmly in denial. When her condition became glaringly obvious my mother finally noticed and very predictably went ballistic, making a string of abusive phone calls to the boy’s parents, which did nothing to help Alice. But true to form no- one actually sat down and talked about the situation, least of all to Charlie and I. Alice was just spirited away one day, and from snippets of things that I overheard I managed to piece together that she had been sent away to a mother and baby home in Glasgow until after her confinement.
One of the side effects of Alice’s pregnancy was that my life became much more constrained; my parents constantly quizzed me about where I was going and whom I was going to be with. My life at school, the one place I could escape the madness, was also affected as the rumour mill went into overdrive, and I had to put up with endless comments about my sister being “up the stick” and being asked if I was a slag like her. It was all good character building stuff, and it made me all the more determined to get out of the place at the earliest opportunity.
Alice came home without her child, a boy, and she and our parents simply didn’t discuss the matter. The gulf between us was now a yawning chasm, because the difference in our life experience was now huge, she’d already experienced pain both physical and mental that I could only guess at and there was probably unspoken resentments on both sides.
Soon after that she started dating another young guy, this time from Ayr. He had come into the pub as part of a visiting football team. My mother was not pleased about this new relationship, and they had heated arguments about it. Then quite suddenly Alice announced that she was going to get married and she packed her bags and left. My parents told her flatly that “the family” such as it was would not be attending her wedding.
With Alice gone the whole situation became even more volatile, and I noticed that my mother was paying particular attention to a man who had only recently started calling into the pub. He appeared to be well heeled, and he drove an expensive car. He did nothing for me; I thought he was just a rather boorish, overweight, middle-aged man. However, my mother started spending more time away from the pub with him, and after a few weeks she announced she was moving out to go and live with him. I was not entirely surprised as she’d had various relationships over the years, but this was the first time she actually moved out of the house, and I put this down to the new man appearing to be a better financial bet than my father. My mother duly moved out, and Charlie, who was always closest to her, elected to go with her. I was asked if I wanted to go too, but my instincts told me I would only be swapping one mess for another. And I didn’t want to leave my dog behind.
So I stayed with my father, and things just went from bad to worse. He upped his daily intake of booze to achieve the necessary oblivion, and I would often arrive home from school to find that the pub, in the days before all day opening, had never actually closed. I would find myself turfing the village deadbeats and bar flies out, and getting my father to go to bed for a few hours, trying to get the shoes off someone who’s dead drunk is no easy task. I also had to feed myself and exercised and fed the dogs. After that I tried to study for my school exams. Needless to say this state of affairs didn’t continue for long and one day out of the blue Alice showed up and told me I had to move into town with her. Even now I still don’t know if this move was as a result of a discussion between her and my father, but at the time I accepted her offer because I knew that I couldn’t continue to live as I was, not least because I simply didn’t feel safe what with my Dad’s drinking and never being sure what I was coming home to. I still remember the day I left the village. I wasn’t able to take Jenny, my dog, with me, as Alice wasn’t allowed pets in her flat. Our car went up the hill leading out of the village with Jenny chasing it, and we’d gone over a mile before she finally gave up, and stood staring in the middle of the road.
I never saw her again, years later I learned that before my father moved out of the pub he had had both dogs destroyed and failed to make suitable arrangements for the storage of any of our possessions, so I lost almost all traces of my life prior to the age of seventeen. The experience taught me to never ever rely on my father as he can barely take care of himself, let alone anyone else, and I suppose it made me deeply suspicious of other people motives. At Alice’s I had to sleep on the couch, which meant I could only go to bed once everyone else had. She was now twenty- one years of age and was the mother of a daughter. To me her marriage seemed typically Scottish, in that her husband seemed to make little or no concessions to married life and my sister appeared to do all the managing and worrying.
While living with Alice I got a part time job in a local supermarket. I worked evenings after school and all day on a Saturday and gave my earnings to my sister to contribute to my keep. I received no support from my father or mother. Then one day at school someone mentioned that a former pupil had written asking if anyone was interested in taking her place as au pair to a family in Zurich. I asked to see the letter. I’d already decided that I couldn’t go on living with Alice, particularly as my mother had started to come round to harangue me about going to stay with her. Having spoken to Charlie at school I knew that things were no different in my mother’s new relationship, if anything they were worse as her new partner had threatened Charlie with physical harm. I didn’t know if Alice and my mother had had discussions behind my back, but I knew I couldn’t stay at my sister’s to finish school, and even if I’d managed to find another place to stay I knew neither parent would support me through university. So I noted the address of the Swiss family and decided to write and enquire about the job because it would give me a roof over my head for a year, and some breathing space to think about what I wanted to do next.
I couldn’t believe it the day I got the letter from the Lehmann family offering me the job. It was even better than the day I got my exam results, which ironically enough, and despite all the hassles, were enough to get me a university place. For the first time in my life I felt that I’d got some control over my own destiny. From a very young age, probably as young as five, I’d felt completely powerless and at the mercy of my chaotic family. I vowed that this would be the start of a new life, one my own terms. I’d close the door on my childhood, and if I ever had children of my own I’d do my utmost to give them a safe, secure and loving home.
So that's the background to why Alice and I have problems relating to each other. To my mind she functions by compartmentalising her life, never really revealing the “full deck” to anyone, least of all herself. She either tells people what she thinks they want to hear, or just enough of the truth to get the outcome that she desires. I, on the other hand, am horribly straightforward and direct. Neither approach is perfect, but what's disappointing is that at some very basic level we just don’t “get” each other, or maybe it’s the opposite, may be we simply understand and know each other all too well! I think it is probably the latter.
We share a history, not one that makes either of us proud or happy, but with Charlie gone we both know that the other sister is the only other person left in the world who knows where we’ve come from and what we’ve been through and why we are as we are. I’m her Peter Sarsted, I know where she goes to my lovely, I can look inside her head.
I don’t mean any of this to sound callous, in fact until now I’ve always tried to be supportive of Alice, especially during the breakdown of her two marriages. And when she was a young, single parent I looked after my nieces virtually every weekend for four years, while she worked to augment her student grant. This was at a time when I was a young single woman, already working Monday to Friday, trying to establish a career as well as a social life of my own.
So, why did I ask my sister to come with me to buy clothes for the hospital? Who knows, I suppose when you’re in shock you automatically believe in old clichés, like “blood is thicker than water”. I’d asked myself how she’d react to my illness, I was hoping that just this once she’d make the effort to support me, because she didn’t do it when I miscarried, or even when Nat was born.
Anyway this time she came and we went to a large store to get me front buttoning pyjamas, the hospital had recommended these, rather than nightdresses, as they said they’d provide easier access to my mastectomy wound, and some baggy comfortable tops that would be comfortable to wear when I got home.
I was surprised when we arrived at the store that she seemed to be treating the whole thing as a normal shopping expedition, so much so that she just floated off to look at things for herself, and when I had finally found the PJ’s I couldn’t believe it when I looked up and spotted her looking at, of all things, the frigging bras!
Not the best of starts then, so why I did what I did next? God alone knows, but I could hear myself trying to explain to her how I felt about my cancer diagnosis. To say it was a hard thing to do is something of an understatement, I’d have found it easier to tell a four year old that Santa doesn’t exist, but I was trying to articulate some of the things that were buzzing round in my head, and I hoped that she’d at least give me a hearing as I struggled to order my thoughts and reactions.
I knew I couldn’t talk to Michael; I could feel his sense of desperation as keenly as my own. Frances, my boss, sent me a lovely letter which simply said, “This is unfair. It should not be happening to you. I think I’m as angry at the unfairness of it all as I am sorry about the news. I’m not sure how that helps you, but it helps me to tell you so.”
Alice hadn’t given me any indication of how she felt about my diagnosis; indeed she hadn’t even said she was sorry about it. I explained to her the effects that breast cancer had had on a family that I knew of, how the poor woman had died after a five- year battle with the disease, how devastated her family were, particularly her children, and how they would no longer even speak about her.
I said to Alice “ I’ve got this ominous feelings about my diagnosis. If it’s going to help extend my life I can see that it makes sense to sacrifice my breast. But my gut feeling is that losing it isn’t going to be enough. And what I’m most afraid of is being sucked down a route that’ll mean having a lot of awful treatment, that it’ll have a shattering effect on me, and Michael and Nat, but that it won’t change the final outcome one iota. So, I’ve been wondering, in the wee, small hours when I can’t sleep, whether it might be better to just end it now? That way everybody’ll be spared at lot of pain and suffering, and Michael and Nat could start rebuilding their lives.
The only thing stopping me is I’m a coward, that and the fact that I can’t bear the thought of leaving them or of missing out on the chance of seeing Nat grow up a bit more.”
I look up at Alice and without pausing for even breath she immediately said, “I know about missing out on a child growing up!”
I couldn’t believe what I’d just heard, “Oh for Christ’s sake!” I thought, “Here we go! As if this is some kind of beauty contest to see whose suffering the most!”
And then I started to cry very freely, still half expecting my sister to comfort me. But no, she just got more animated, “Why are you laying all this on me anway?
What makes you think I can handle this any better than you? Don’t you know what this is doing to me? Be more positive about the whole situation! OK you are losing your breast, but you are in a loving relationship – it’s not like you’re on your own (the subtext to that remark being, “Like me!”) From here on in you’re just going to have to find joy where you can!”
She moved about the room with her arms crossed while she delivered this stream of “advice”. Her reaction stung me, “Arrghhh to hear that “positive” word coming out of her mouth, - her of all people!”
But then I reflected that it had been stupid to open up to her. I’d need to look elsewhere for meaningful female support. What is it that the Sunday magazines say? “Friends are the new family” – how right they are!