Chapters of life

 I was listening to Angela Harding on Desert Island Discs a few weeks ago.  She is an artist, a very successful one.  She explained how growing up she had not been in a very happy household until her mother left and her and her sisters, I believe,  stayed with their father.  Mother moved well away from the family and they rarely saw her.  There was no other man involved, she just went.   They were all much happier after mother left.

This situation is fairly unusual I would say and it was very honest of Angela Harding to speak about it in a forthright, unemotional manner on radio.  She said that after her mother left she rarely saw her and in later life had only seen her once or twice.  Mother was happier without the husband and children and they were happier without her.  This, to me, is a very difficult and unusual situation.  

My father died when he was 52, well over 50 years ago, and I was a teenager.  I have often wondered over the years how different my life would have been if it had been mother who died then and father had lived.  I got on well with him, he was hard-working and kind and didn't have much free time but when he did take some time out if was always for us and we would go out as a family to the beach or cinema or a long drive followed by a picnic or fish and chips.  Mother was in charge of the house and chickens and vegetable growing and most things really and basically ruled and father just took it all in his stride in a very quiet way and got on with the farm and the haulage.   

After father died I left home almost straightaway at 17 going off to London and living in a hostel.  I didn't get on very well with my mother and that was the beginning of my adult life and I never lived at home again.    I have always felt guilty that I was not a good daughter at the time of his death  and she had no hesitation in reminding me of this and my failings as she saw them and rarely, if ever, gave me any support in what I was doing and would regularly talk me down.  I grew up with her knocking my confidence a lot  and I still secretly suffer from lack of confidence.  

If I had grown up with dad I feel that things would have been different as I remember him as a kind person and supportive of me and it was him who said I could stay on at school after 16 if I wanted to and he was happy either way.  As it happened he died very soon after saying this and I never took the option to stay at school after O levels, I left, I learned to type and then left home because I could now support myself. My mother gave me nothing and I set off with £7.10s.00p in my pocket which was my last week's pay as junior office worker in Norwich.    The hostel cost 5 guineas per week, bed, breakfast and evening meal.  (I got work immediately through the Alfred Marks bureau so wasn't without money).

We didn't really mourn father's death, mum was very stiff upper lip British and once he was gone he wasn't talked about and although mum and I would share memories sometimes it was always done in a very cold kind of way by mum without emotion.  He died at a time when it was quite taboo to talk about cancer and mum displayed that she felt shame that he had died from cancer and she would never talk about it.  When he was ill in his last six months she never told anybody that he had cancer.  She hastily arranged a private funeral and hurriedly got it all out of the way.

So this is where I come from and this is where I left home and went away and somehow I think life would have been different if it had been me, dad and the boys who were left.  I doubt very much, for example, that I would have left home in the way I did at 17.   Maybe one day I will come to terms with a lot of things but even at my mature age I am still working my way through it.   It takes a lifetime.