Chapter 5
The Crunch
Colin had a busy life when he was 20 years old. His brother had a young family that lived sometimes in Portsmouth and sometimes at home and as Peter was often away and did not have a driving licence, Colin often drove them around. Peter’s daughter spent much of her early years in a Children’s hospital and there were regular forty mile round trips to visit.
He was at college for six months each year and worked with father the other six months. He had a social life with his friends from college and another one with his girlfriend and her friends. They went dancing regularly and he still managed to see Paul occasionally.
His father was preparing the Old Man’s bungalow before moving in and Colin was helping with this. He also had a car and his motor cycle which both required regular maintenance. He never dreamed of allowing anyone else near his vehicles. He could not have afforded to pay them anyway. He had been brought up in the exigencies of a wartime economy and had learned to live with it. It was to be another thirty years before he could stop going round switching lights off.
He cycled occasionally but his motor cycle and the lure of the open road occupied much more time. Things were good. The Country and the family had got through the worst of its poverty. Colin was getting a good education, had a reasonable job and enjoyed everything he was doing. There was only one flaw that kept nagging away at him. He had never yet got his end away.
His girlfriend was too straight laced to go beyond petting even though they were engaged to be married. He went out with a few other girls but found them either too sluttish to contemplate getting into bed with or too nice to contemplate getting into bed with him. He often felt quite frustrated.
Eventually he began to have doubts about getting married. Like most couples their affair had its ups and downs. But he began to realise there was nothing magic in their relationship. The spark he had occasionally found with other girls was missing. Her constant refusal to bed him hurt. He suffered a severe dichotomy between his relatively high personal standards and his fundamental male urge to shag.
For the first time in his life he had taken the initiative with his girlfriend. They had fallen out and he had no intention of calling her again. It was Easter and he stayed at home with his family. He knew her strength of mind and believed she was unlikely to call him. He thought he could carry this separation through. Beyond that he had not planned but was quite calm about the situation.
The family business always closed for Easter Monday and Tuesday. It was 6.30 on Tuesday evening and they had settled down to watch the television that was quite a new arrival in their home. There was a knock on the door and Colin answered it to find his girlfriend’s brother-in-law on the doorstep. Colin got on well with him and greeted him cordially.
“Can you come now. The old man is dead “.
Colin froze. In a daze he collected his coat and got into the car.Almost exactly a year earlier his girlfriend’s mother had been taken ill quite suddenly. She had had dizzy spells and been taken into hospital. She was released after a few days. Six days later she fell over in the bathroom and was admitted to hospital again. The following day she died. The inquest established she had died of an aneurysm in her neck. In those days brain scans and ultrasonic scans did not exist. The family was devastated and Colin with them.
This day his girlfriend had had to work. She had come home to find her father with his head in the gas oven. He was quite dead. He had left a letter saying he could not live without his daughter to be his housekeeper so would get out of the way so that she could marry her boyfriend.
On Tuesday the 19th April 1960 Fay, who was 22 years old, forgot how to cry.
When the formalities had been completed and the undertaker, police and relatives had left, Colin and his girlfriend sat in silence looking into a cold fireplace. The shock had wiped any thought of their differences totally out of her mind. She expected him to be there. He sat not sure what to do. He would rather not have been there. He had another agenda; he had other things to do. He had no way of knowing where his relationship with her would have gone in other circumstances. But he had not the faintest idea how to deal with this. He felt well and truly fucked.
How do you tell a girl who has just found her father in the gas oven that you do not want to see her anymore? How do you tell her that her father had wasted his life for you were not going to marry her anyway? How can you tell a girl who has lost both her parents and just found her father dead in the oven that you think he is a selfish and vicious bastard? How the fuck can you make any decision about anything with a loaded gun like this pointed at your fucking head? He kept silent.
He had no one to ask for advice or to counsel him. He was far too well educated, erudite, adult and successful for anyone he knew to even imagine he did not know how to handle this situation. No one ever guessed that he had a problem. Not even his girlfriend. He had become an expert at avoiding issues and hiding his feelings. Vast amounts of his huge talent went into this effort and no one ever came near to guessing the agonies he suffered. No one had the slightest idea that he seriously wished he were not in this world.
He put his intellect to work to cover up, suppress, repress, rationalize and totally fuck up his emotions. All so that he would not have to hurt this girl for whom he was no longer aware what he felt. If things had been different he might well have been reconciled and come to love her. But things were not different and he was set on the longest and most tortuous path that any man has ever trodden.
Again, the unfortunate coincidence of two acts had fucked him. The separation from, and possibly reconciliation with his girlfriend he could have handled. The suicide of a very selfish father-in-law he could have handled. But the two together deprived him of the ability to make his own decisions. And that was to have serious consequences for ever more. But how can you expect a relatively naive and inexperienced twenty year old to know? It was simply impossible for Colin ever to settle within himself the emotional problems he had been working on at the time of this event. His emotional development with regard to his relationships to women was for ever frozen. Nothing he did at any time in the future could possibly alter this simple matter. he would simply never be able to know.
The man who should have been one of those protecting him on the springboard of his life had totally fucked him by committing suicide and leaving a letter that effectively blamed him. Later Colin was to feel that he had committed a murder and had been tried, found guilty, and sentenced to life, all in the space of one evening. Game set and fucking match. Checkmate in one easy move.
The man had brought his disaster on himself. He had in all his years never learned how to make a bed or sweep a floor or cook a meal or wash his clothes. Without a woman to look after him he could not survive. Colin had learned all these things by the time he was five years old and had no respect for a man who had spent fifty years studiously avoiding doing anything. He deserved what he got. He was not heartbroken at the loss of his wife and daughter. He was just too idle to get off his arse and do the washing up. It was easier to kill himself.
But how do you say that to his daughter when she has just found him in the gas oven? You don’t. At least you do not when you are twenty years old and not too sure of your emotions. You shut up and say nothing and do nothing for fear of hurting beyond belief a person who had done nothing to deserve such shit.
His girlfriend never mentioned the events of that day and has never spoken a single word about them to anyone in the thirty-five years since that day. Colin has spent most of that time on a knife-edge. Waiting for he knows not what. Never knowing what his girlfriend thinks and never daring to find out what might be in this Pandora’s box. Struggling to reconcile his own damaged emotions and his frozen development with the apparently normal life he has managed to front for thirty-five years.
If he left her now would he be doing it as an adverse reaction to the suicide or would he be doing it because it was his free wish? If he stayed with her, would it be because of guilt and pity, or because it was his free wish? Whatever he did, he could never be free of the shadow of this evil act. Thirty-five years on he still could not answer the questions.
From this point on everything in his life was to be adversely influenced by this event and for several years he didn't even know it.
Many years later his son was to observe that Colin did not swear in words but in sentences. In retrospect that is quite understandable. It was around this time that his college friends found his incessant petty swearing was becoming objectionable.
Postscript 8th April 2021
First person narrative.
On Tuesday the 19th April 1960 Fay, who was 22 years old, forgot how to cry.
This week is exactly 61 years after the events described above. Our daughter, Amanda had her 54th birthday on which day she took her mother, Fay, to hospital to learn that the pain in her mother's throat was a stage 4 cancer which had spread to her lungs. Our family is devastated. This includes son Nick aged 56, Amanda aged 54 and grandchildren Lucy (26), Adam (25), Sophie(23) and Reece(19). All have done well in this world and are a fine tribute to Fay and I.
We have been locked down by Covid 19 for over a year now and that has not helped at all. Association has been curtailed and Fay has hardly been out of her house. Medical care has been very thin on the ground. We have a letter from our hospital apologising to Fay for missing the early signs of her cancer.
I have spent much time during lockdown reading and researching the things that I believe are wrong with our world. My researches have revealed to me that age has one advantage; that is that you start to get your life events into perspective. History is revealing. It is only in recent years that I realised that I had been a Cold-War warrior. At the time I just did a series of very interesting jobs here and in the US and Canada. But now that most of the devices I worked on are in museums and the Official Secrets Act no longer applies I can see that I worked upon a whole series of weapon systems, each of which was aimed at the Russians. I was a creative and useful individual. I never led any large company although I did lead and aid in several useful projects. I just worked and played my part together with hundreds or perhaps thousands of others. Together we matched and eventually out-ran the Russians and fought the Cold War from our laboratories and workshops and factories. Eventually we effectively bankrupted the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics without either them or us firing a shot. And that pleases me.
I have just heard (8/4/21 19:00) that Fay's cancer is very aggressive and the hospital expect her to live only three weeks. I have reviewed the history of my life, The terrible trauma I described above and our marriage, our lives, divorce and subsequent relationship.
Sixty one years ago the lives of Fay and myself were ripped apart. We were a young couple working to plan our futures. Then Fay's mother died suddenly and unexpectedly from a brain aneurysm. Exactly a year later her father killed himself and left a note effectively blaming Fay and me. Fay has never talked about that day since. I tried to get her to talk in the early days but she never has. Now the cancer is ensuring she never will.
I eventually went into melt-down and spent 42 years in psychotherapy. That was a new technique in those days and had come from California. I was lucky to find a lovely guy in Montreal called Andre Cadieux who eventually set me on the right course. He said I was the most difficult patient he had ever had. But that is not surprising. Nobody within the family ever new of my therapy except Fay and she never talked of it. Only after it was over I did tell my children and grandchildren.
I finally terminated my therapy and took back my life when Fay and I divorced after 42 years of struggle. We had had plenty of good times and had brought up two wonderful children. We were renowned for our bickering. We had got used to it and considered it a normal mode of interaction. We still do. It was our accommodation to the trauma. When we retired Fay wanted to go off to the Mediterranean and sit on beaches drinking coffee.
By that time I had developed a very strong personal ethic which did not really encompass hedonism. I was quite happy for her to do what she wished but I was not going to subject myself to what I considered purgatory. So we agreed to divorce. Fay still did not drive so I helped her find a house. Then she consulted a solicitor who happened to be the daughter of some friends. She wanted a fee of £15,000 up front and started setting up barriers immediately. Fay and I talked and we agreed to appoint our mutual financial advisor to split our estate in two. This he did for £600 and the divorce I did myself for about £500. It was complete in little more than a year. No solicitor got a penny. Twenty years later we still both live comfortably on our former estate.
Fay still did not drive and so we got into the habit of shopping together with our own trolleys. But she usually made me a cup of tea and a sandwich. We remained perfectly civil friends and often accompanied each other to family events and even went out to dinner with our then circle of old friends. One day we decided to go and see Pete and Bren whom we hadn't seen for years. I picked her up and we had two arguments before we reached the end of her road, about 100 yards long. We laughed and had a very pleasant ten-hour day together driving to Peterborough and back.
We were very pleased when, a few years later some much younger acquaintances of ours decided to separate but stay friends. They said "If Fay and Colin can do it then so can we". So they did and are now together again. There is something very sad in our society which demands that if you divorce then you must hate each other. Really sad rubbish. Fay and I don't hate each other. We suffered a terrible trauma together and did our best to overcome it together over the last 62 years. And now Fay has finally succumbed. She was an extremely good wife and mother. I could not have asked for more. Today she became fully aware that she has not long to live but her life force still kicked in and she demanded that I take her for her second Covid19 jab tomorrow.
I suffered a massive dissection of the aorta 18 years ago last week. It has a death rate of 98.4% but I am still hanging in there. One of my granddaughters introduces me with the comment " He has tourettes".
Do you wonder why?
From 1980 until 2010 or thereabouts there were eight of us who ate out and partied together regularly. I once calculated that each one of had known each of the others of a grand total of around 4000 years. Some of had met when only four years old. We all had met each other befor the age of 18. Geoff gave up the ghost around 2010 and Paul developed Altzheimers and died in 2020. Barbara is suffering severe deprssion and Fay is being slowly strangled to death. The rest of us are still meeting and gathered with Fay this week.
Last week I asked Fay about coming to this meeting and she got confused and nearly started to cry. That was when I realised that I have known her closely for 64 years and I have never seen her cry. On Tuesday the 19th April 1960 Fay, who was 22 years, old forgot how to cry.
25 September 2021
Fay's funeral is next Friday. Amanda and Sophie and I went to see her in the Funeral palour yesterday. I am not sure whether it is a good or bad thng that she is resting less than three hundred yards away from the house in which she lived with her parents when I met her and where those fateful events took place sixty years ago. It is also only one hundred yards from the location of our wedding feast. It was Sophie's first time that she had seen a dead body and she took her time but performed with her usual aplomb.
Amanda took Fay into her home on the first of April 2021 after she had been fitted with a 'peg' into her stomach through which she could be fed. Amanda, Sopie, lucy, Nick and myself took turns in administering the feeds, five times a day, which were inserted using a syringe. Several times Fay said that she was not happy to be in this condition and would not have consented had she fully understood the consequences. But, as always she stuck it out stoically and consoled herself waiting for her daughter's wedding. Amanda married Alex on 6th August 2021 at Coventry Registy Office. She had a party in her new house and Fay stopped up to see the wedding party antics and had to be ordered to bed shorlty after midnight.
The degeneration became much more pronounced after that. Soon she could not walk without two people to support her and her mood changed. The nurses from the local hospice visited twice daily and one day Fay told them she wanted 'out'. They gently explained that they could not do that. A few days late she was taken into another hospice where she surviced for seven days.
We took it in turns maintaining a constant vigil at the hospice until the nurses sedated her in the evening for sleep. Amanda carried the greatest load but Nick came to stay and shared the burden. Sophie stepped up to the mark and I supported Sophie as best I could.
On the 8th September 2021Alex went to work very early and Amanda found Fred, Alex's black Labrador of fourteeen years, had got through the fence into next door's garden and collapsed. She managed to get him back indoors and phoned Alex to come home. He came and took the dog to his works where he left the engine of his car running all day with the air conditioning on to keep Fred cool. He made an apointment with the vet for 3:30 pm.
Amanda went and sat with Fay and at lunch time Nick relieved her. Amanda had just reached home when the nurses advised Nick to call her back. They stood over her at 3:30 and Nick said gently to his mother "It's all right to go now, Mum." And she went. He had always been very close to her.
At four o'clock Alex held Fred while the vet put him to sleep.
Around six o'clock Sopie phoned me and we each drove to Amanda's house. I arrived first to be told Fred had also gone. Sophie was devastated. Fred had been one of the best things in her life. She loved him to bits. She could hardly handle the double tragedy. She sobbed and blarted out " This is the worst day of my life" and later "I don't want you to think I loved Fred more than Grandma" She could not reconcile the double blow.
All of this took place during the restictions of Covid. The saga has brought back many memories ot me and given me food for thought.