The roots of my character

 This is my first blog entry for a few months. I had to take time away, Viv has had some time in hospital and follow up treatment, life has been, unfortunately, just too busy for writing. Things are now settling down so normal service is slowly being resumed.

***

We got home from the shops a couple of weeks ago and there was a red card through the door, from the Royal Mail: I had been sent a parcel from Allied Newspapers that they had been unable to deliver. I had no idea what it might be. The card said they would try to deliver it again on Monday, when we were also going to be out; it mentioned I could request it to be sent to my local Post Office using their online tool. 

Several clicks later I thought I had achieved that, but no, they still tried to deliver it on Monday. Moreover, even two days later their online tool didn’t show the parcel being at the Post Office, but at the sorting office. The opening hours of that are 8am to 10am daily (yes, very customer-friendly), so we drove in there early one morning to try to track it down. 

‘The computer says it's here, but to go to the Post Office’, the lady behind the counter said, ‘but it isn’t’. It's great to see our public institutions have such reliable IT.

‘I’ll try the Post Office’, I replied. Viv and I got in the car and drove to the Post Office where, after some searching, they found it. We took it home and unwrapped it, to find it contained a black mug.

‘Oh’, I realised, ‘it’s one of those mugs that reveals something when you have a hot drink in it’. I boiled the kettle and filled it, following which some graphics revealed themselves: ‘Daily Mail Letter of the Week - Winner’. 

***

The penny dropped. A week or so previously I had read an article in the DM by Kate Spicer, about how she felt the toxicity of her parent’s relationship when she was growing up affected her, leaving her unable to to form good relationships, and, in her fifties, she has to accept she will never have a family.

I had read this while Viv was having treatment at the hospital, and, after we arrived home, had sat at the laptop and sent off part of my story, about how I felt that my parents’ problems and attitudes had affected me in a similar way. Unusually, I didn’t even show the email to Viv before sending it; the story was too personal, somehow I didn’t feel able to share it even with her. 

I was too occupied with other matters over the following days to buy a paper and never gave the letter a second thought. It turns out they published it on November 15 and gave it their ‘Letter of the Week’ award. 

***

In the print edition it came out at the top of the letters page:

***

Writing about such personal, private experiences was difficult; worse, it made me feel ungrateful, for no matter what went on, my parents did - in their own strange way - care and want the best for me. It was just that their (different) ideas on what was best for me did not align with mine, at the time nor subsequently. In a short (well, that’s short for me) newspaper letter it's impossible to relate all the stories and explain the ins and outs, so I’m going to expand on the experiences I had in the first couple of decades of life, and how they affected me, here.

***

It wasn’t just my parents who, to me, didn’t seem to consider the effects of their actions on me. My teachers didn’t, nor did people at church. But my parents did do some things I now feel to be somewhat careless or irresponsible; my father in particular. It didn’t help that I was perhaps an awkward child, asking questions and not always being comfortable with others - nowadays I might be considered to be ‘on the spectrum; maybe, in their dislike for each other, my parents had noticed, but my father was capable of some very poorly thought through actions.  For instance, although the courts had decreed he was only supposed to see my sister and me at certain times, he did, on more than one occasion, show up at the school at lunchtimes. 

(In those days our school gates were open at playtimes and lunchtimes; some children went home for lunch, and others played on the forest land just outside the school. It's not the same today, junior schools seem to have something more in common with prisons than they did then.)

So, one warm afternoon when I was in what is now called Year 3 my father turned up at the school gates. I was seven, or perhaps eight, years old. I don’t quite know why he was there, but I was very upset; I remember I was crying, and the other children were teasing and shouting at me - while he was there - telling me that Miss Tomlin (one of the teachers) wanted to see me. I ignored them and stayed with my father, until the bell went to call us into lessons.

Early that afternoon I became the first of our year group  to ever be called out of class by the headmaster. He wanted to know what I’d been doing with my father that lunchtime, why I had been speaking to him, and shouted at me that I should not talk to my father when I was at school. No doubt my mother’s solicitor had written to the school warning them of grave consequences if the staff there allowed me to see my father, but the headmaster’s action was wholly unjustified and, needless to say, at seven or eight years old I was petrified. I returned to the class in tears; the children all thought I’d been caned for speaking to my father. Ghastly though the episode was, it did instil in me the realisation I retain to this day that those that have power over us can and sometimes do behave without a thought for the long term effect of their actions; it also reinforced my already evolving distrustful attitude towards authority,  which undoubtedly saved me from the fate of some of my housemates at Christ’s Hospital in the early seventies,  although has probably got me in to trouble on more than one occasion as well.

Whatever effect the headmaster intended to have on me, there’s no way that seemingly (to a seven year old) blaming me for my father’s transgression in coming to the school was ever justified. Not only had my father failed to show me that he respected my need to enjoy my school life with the other children (whose parents never visited the school at playtime), the headmaster had failed to show me that respect as well. 

My father did provide some other very questionable guidance to me as I grew up; from the age of eleven he would buy me cider, and I’d drink it like pop - sometimes to the point of going back to my mother and then throwing up over the carpet. He also encouraged (yes) me to go into pubs at fifteen; this, and the cider, didn’t exactly engender a healthy attitude to alcohol in my teens - although, perhaps from experiences I suffered then, I have never sunk into dependence in the way some do, and I was always very careful about alcohol with my son as he was growing up.

***

Some of the people at church could also act without thinking about the consequences on me. When in adult life I left my ex-wife I had planned the operation in great detail, and at the time discussed it with my (then seventeen year old) son, explaining to him the options open to me, and to him. I think he understood why I was leaving, and had the chance to leave with me if he had wished.

Forty years earlier, when I was just seven, I never had such a chance. My mother had been struggling for a few years, some might say she was depressed. She and I had never communicated well, I could say she found it difficult to engage with me, to communicate, on my level, and indeed we remained like this until I was well into my twenties. (It’s fair to say she had similar, probably worse, communication problems with my father - a factor in the mess they were in). Indeed, she seemed unable to cope with many aspects of life and relationships within the family group. She had though, all her life, been a regular church attender and believed that the community aspects of the church worked in everyone’s favour; I was not so sure, even at that tender age. My mother sought help and advice from others in the congregation, a bit as a Rotarian or Mason might seek support or guidance from a fellow member. The folks at the church did help her realise that she and my father couldn’t carry on, but they rather took over events from there; they found her (and my sister and me) a flat, they planned a raid on our family home to remove all our possessions, and indeed provided the resources one Monday to carry it out. I’m sure they all felt they were doing good; there being solicitors in the congregation, I am sure they all knew that what they were doing was within the law, seemingly in the interests of my mother. They might have considered me and my sister but I won’t go as far as to say they clearly did, or that they knew either of us at all well. But, right from that day, I was hugely offended that no one had seemed to bother to ask me how I felt, what I wanted, where I would like to live. I did not seem to warrant such a basic act of respect. Consequently I was never able to prepare for such a huge change in my life. Decisions had just been taken by the ‘good people who go to church’, and I would just have to accept them; my possessions were just bundled into boxes while I was at school and carted round the block to the flat we were moving to - or, if someone at the church had felt appropriate, left behind because they seemingly didn’t matter. (Three years later I still only had carriages and track of my train set; locos and power controller were only found in a search of the attic at the former family home). 

The long term effect of these actions, largely driven by the church folks, was that my mother and I struggled even more to understand each other. When I was aged eleven she (with church help) got me into Christ’s Hospital; at the start of the summer term in my first year I tried to explain to her that I didn’t like it there, that I didn’t get on with the others, that some of the teachers were horrible, and that I wanted to be at a normal school. "We'll talk about it at the end of term, I can’t arrange anything now”, she told me. But we never did talk about it again, I became more distant from her.  At sixteen I decided I wanted to leave CH, but was told by my father that he would never speak to me again if I did, and my mother told me I had to return until I had done my A levels. (No one ever discussed with me the option of doing my A levels at a ‘normal’ school; to this day, to this day I feel let down by that). 

I left CH at seventeen and went straight on to a middle-low ranked university close by, so that I could live at home - the experiences of boarding school had made me wary of staying away. My mother and I managed to cope under the same roof - just - for the first two years of my degree course; towards the end of the second she went away for a while, I had a few friends around, and half the local pub heard a ‘party’ was going on at our house, and there was damage. I hadn’t prepared for so many people, I hadn’t considered my mum’s property and valuables - but then, had any of mine been considered all those years earlier? What I had done wasn’t right, and I was upset by it, but at the time I didn't know any better. (So much for a public school education!). I spent the last year of my course in halls, staying with my father outside of term time; it was only then that I even began to figure out the importance of respect in a relationship.

***

Early involvement with the opposite sex was challenging. I had related to some girls quite well at primary school, but boarding away made matters difficult; I met up with one girl I had known at primary school a couple of times during school holidays when I was 12 or 13, and we did experiment somewhat - never doing anything terribly involved. She moved to New Zealand, and I got back in touch with some other friends from primary school - who I met occasionally at church in school holidays (not that I went very often), but I really couldn’t quite hack what I now know to be respect. I went skiing with the school one Easter, I must have been fourteen, and bought a present back for one of the girls who had previously bought me a birthday present; for some reason I couldn’t quite sum up the courage to give it to her. My nerves went; I didn’t understand that I was failing myself in not showing her the respect she had shown me. It was the sort of thing that had happened to me through my childhood and seem to shape my adolescence.

On more than one occasion I agreed to meet a girl and then didn’t show up; maybe what had happened to my parents was making me nervous of relationships. I tended to show off, rather than listen to the girl in question and get to know her; I recall one short dalliance involving a girl who fancied me, and we got on fine until I took her for a ride on the pillion of my new (750cc) motorbike. I drove it, shall we say, a little faster than she was comfortable at; she never spoke to me again.  

It was only when I was older, living in my own house, that I  became confident to invite girls round and seek to develop a relationship. One girl I’d known on and off for five years came over several times, and we did hit it off quite well, until I made the mistake of introducing her to my father and stepmother - who said something tactless, I recall, and that led to the end of things. I later got together with a Greek girl, we got on very well, until one day when she had been at my house while I’d been at work, and she started asking questions about things - rather in the way my father had done - and almost telling me what I should do to improve myself. That set alarm bells ringing, we stayed to gather a while longer but, in the end, she called me at work one day making arrangements for something, and I said ‘no’. In a way I’ve regretted doing that, for we were good together, but I had the feeling that I wouldn’t be happy, living someone else’s idea of what my life should be. 

A couple more somewhat clumsy relationships followed over the next couple of years; I began to realise I was getting older. I met someone with whom I got on quite well, in many ways rather as I had done with the Greek girl; this lady also had a tendency to be somewhat presumptive about what I wanted in life, and what I would be happy with her doing. Perhaps I was regretting splitting up with the Greek girl, for, this time, I didn’t speak out, and the relationship continued. We ended up getting married and having a son, but as time passed I became less and less comfortable with being a ‘normal’ tweed-jacket-and-cord-trouser husband, and very unhappy at her casual attitude to debt and overspending. She also had the habit of being rather more inquisitive than was polite; when we stayed with my father and stepmother once she invented a reason to stay alone in the house and, she later revealed, had used the opportunity to go through a load of their private paperwork. I was horrified, but said nothing, perhaps through wanting to make the relationship a success. More bad experiences followed; she threw out my address book, she read through my emails; the success was clearly not going to happen for me, indeed the relationship became controlling and violent at times. I knew I had to get out of it, or spend the rest of my life regretting not. It was only after this realisation that I met other women who found me attractive, and formed more positive relationships with them; the experience of the previous decade or more had, I think, helped me to develop my social skills so that I treated them, and our relationship, rather better than perhaps I had done those girls in my relative youth.  

***

One big difference between me and my parents is that they were always very keen to use their social contacts - through church, or wherever - to seek advice on any little challenges they may be facing at the time; I have always been one to research things myself, determining what I want, or what solution is best for me. Viv and I, for instance, have our relationship set up in a very unconventional way; not married, our affairs will end up being managed entirely through trusts and powers of attorney as we get older and lose our faculties. There is no way my parents would ever think things through in the way Viv and I have done; even after his painful divorce, my father married again. He and my stepmother never made effective powers of attorney, nor did they ever plan finances to support them should they ever need long term care. They did put their (not very valuable) West Midlands bungalow into trust, something which caused great confusion when handling their affairs later on; the reason was never clear, but they had been told to do this at a pensioner’s club. (Actually it may have worked out, but not for any of the reasons that are usually given for putting property into trust.) After my father died I did try to persuade my stepmother to sort out her Powers of Attorney, but she “spoke to someone at the pensioners club who told her she didn’t need to”; even well into my fifties I knew what it was like to not be respected by a (step-)parent. 

Going further back, I think my parents might have set the scene for problems for, and with, me from my birth. They were Peter and Joy; my sister was Judith, I was Philip. We had the same initials as our parents, and, quite probably, it was felt right that I should follow my father’s interests and ideas of career patterns. My sister was encouraged to follow in her mother’s footsteps, with piano lessons, Brownies and dance classes - all things my mother had done as a child. I don’t ever recall music being considered as something I might like; I was independent, and well into my twenties, before I learnt the joys of the D minor scale on those black and white keys. 

My father encouraged me into lines of education and work that he would have liked to be in, or actually what he wanted me to be in; lots of maths, numbers and rules, a job in an office, wearing a suit and with a good pension. I was never sure of what else I might do, but, at the time, the thought of an office job was abhorrent to me, and fifty years on, I am only now realising how much I enjoy writing and investigative work. It is an eternal regret that, when I was young, no-one seemed willing to help me to think through what, career-wise, made, or would make, me happy; the non-conformist response of ‘we can’t all do things that we like in this world’ was said to me so often that I believed it, to the point of getting into a job I didn’t really like, not to mention a marriage that was clearly going to be disastrous.

The problem with having the same initial as my father really struck home when, in my late teens and early twenties and living with him and my stepmother around university terms, I (naturally) started to receive post addressed to ‘Mr. P. Button’. My father (or possibly my stepmother, on his behalf)  again, quite naturally, opened it, including, of course; letters from girlfriends, parcels of things I’d ordered, and letters telling me I’d forgotten to pay a credit card bill (once). Were they opened by accident? Who knows, but I felt as if I was deprived of the privacy I felt entitled to expect - and that I had had when living in university halls of residence. It may have been their way of encouraging me to move out, who knows, but the question of ‘why on earth did you give me the same initial as you’ was raised a couple of times; it felt to me that, even at the time of my birth, my parents might have shown me the respect of considering the problems that would happen as I got older.

***

We can’t wind back the clock, and the attitudes my parents and the people around them had sixty odd years ago were, perhaps, understandable for the time. They had all been through one or more major wars; my father had been in the RAF but attached to the Royal Artillery, and - among other distinctions - was involved in sorting out survivors (and perhaps others) at Bergen-Belsen. Like many, he came out of the war with ideas that, even to baby boomers like me, seem strange; what today’s twenty-one year-olds would do if ordered to help clear up a concentration camp can only be imagined. My parents made mistakes with me; it may seem impolite for me to point out some of them, but that is one way we, and future generations, can learn and benefit - which surely our forefathers would want. 

So, to anyone who has children, or even looks after or them from time to time, here are my key points of advice:

• Ask your children about things, and listen to what they say - they may know more than you think, and could give you useful advice

• Explain to them why you are having to do something, and listen to their comments

• If they have a problem, ask them about it, listen to what they have to say, and follow up to help them arrive at a solution

• Allow them to plan and manage their own lives; do not treat them as you would any ordinary possession that has come into your life

• For those of a religious persuasion - take note of Matthew chapter 7 verse 12: it applies when you are dealing with children too!.