NOTES
There are no notes for this chapter yet. Some of the notes on other pages are based on info YOU send me. |
We left Pant-y-Powsi with no idea at all where we were going next. Ken gave us a lift to Caersws and it was only while waiting at the station there that we forced ourselves to think the unthinkable. We were going to have to descend upon my mother! Only for a few days, of course, while we sorted something out. Well, that was what I told my mother when I phoned her from the station, and it was what we ourselves believed - a longer stay was just too terrible a prospect to contemplate. |
| We made the journey to Barnet by train and Tube, but I can't remember where the money came from for the fares. (The same applies to the Christmas visit of a few months earlier). We took nothing with us, except baby paraphernalia and a few clothes, and we never recovered Barry's records or a lovely Victorian copy of Alice in Wonderland. My grandmother had been given it when she was about eight or nine years old, but we had for some reason taken it to Pant-y-Powsi after the Christmas visit. |
| At first my mother was pleased to have Felix to make a fuss of, and to have some help with my grandmother, now in her hundredth year, blind and constantly suspicious that everyone was plotting against her. In fact there had been a noticeable deterioration in her mental state since the Christmas visit. She was now very reluctant to believe that I was her grandson Vicky (as she always used to call me). In fact, whenever she thought that I was in the room and my mother was not, she would struggle up from her chair and try to escape from the room. We were told not to allow her to walk about unaided, as she usually fell over in the attempt. But as soon as we tried to steer her back to her chair, she would scream and struggle. When my mother went shopping and Angela was out on modelling assignments, I found that the only possible way of restraining my grandmother was to terrify her into staying in the chair by pushing her into down into it roughly and yelling at her, thus reinforcing her belief that I was was some evil imposter. |
| Having this problem while struggling to cope with what seemed to us to be an exceptionally vigorous and demanding baby was bad enough, without the fact that the three-way mood swings of my mother between million-volt hilarity, black silent sulking and aggressive nastiness were more extreme than ever. As always, the good moods were almost as difficult to withstand as the bad ones. However, the good moods became less and less frequent as our stay extended from days into weeks. By the time it had extended from weeks into months, the situation had become dire. My mother became obsessed with getting us out, for the oft-stated reason that the Council would throw her and my grandmother out on the street if they found out that she had unauthorized lodgers. When we suggested that permission could probably be obtained, in the circumstances, she objected that her various State benefits would then be stopped, because it would be assumed that we were paying rent. When we in fact offered rent (out of Angela's steadily increasing earnings as a life model) she was horrified and said that 'they' would throw her in prison for profiting from her Council tenancy. She forbade us to go to the Council to seek accommodation, because that would involve having to divulge our criminal presence in her house. Instead, she was constantly pointing out adverts for flats to let in the local press. But by this time private rents in London were already beginning to soar well beyond the means of the low paid. |
| So we secretly went to the housing department of the council anyway. There, an Indian woman, who had not long been in the country, judging by her weak English, asked us why we had picked on Barnet to apply to for housing. When I explained that I was born in the place, had lived there until I was 21, that my mother had lived there for over 30 years and that I had other, more ancient, family connections with the place, she asked me angrily what difference all that was supposed to make, and stated flatly that there was not a hope in Hell of being helped in any way by Barnet council, as we were already adequately housed. When I pointed out that our being there was against council rules, she replied that if my mother were to seek permission for us to stay it would undoubtedly be granted. Despite my history of rebelliousness, I had always harboured some notion, somewhere deep inside, of 'belonging'. This encounter with a recent incomer to the country, let alone the area, triggered something of a Damascus moment, in which I realised that the notion of belonging was never intended to go beyond flags and football teams. Ideas about roots, of having claims on a place because you were born there, were not supposed to come into it. Well, not in England, anyway. It's a bit different where I live now. |
| I next tried the GLC (Greater London Council, abolished in 1986). The man there appeared to be very helpful and understanding and said that there was practically no waiting-list for flats on the vast new Thamesmead estate near Woolwich. I completed a form and was told that we would be given a flat within a few weeks. A few weeks later I telephoned and was told it would be another couple of weeks. After that, I 'phoned every two weeks and was always told "just another couple of weeks", until we realised there just wasn't going to be any flat in Thamesmead. This may well have been a good thing. I went over to Thamesmead one day to see what the place was like. Like all such 1960s and 70s housing projects, designed by people who were convinced they were building Paradise for the working class, it was a profoundly depressing place. Inevitably, my trip ended as a pub crawl around the area, during which I got into conversation with several people who said I must be insane to contemplate moving there. They informed me that it was a hell-hole controlled by violent gangs. Do any of you living there now (or then) have a different view? |
| Towards the end of the year, my grandmother became almost impossible for my mother to control, particularly as she began to get out of bed in the night and wander about screaming that I had gone into her bedroom with a torch and had been shining it into her eyes. Eventually, Doctor Norman, who had been the family doctor for 30 years, and had been calling almost every day for months to see my grandmother, decided that she should be sectioned under the Mental Health Act, and forcibly taken at once to Harperbury mental hospital. He was almost crying as he rushed into her bedroom early the next morning with a loaded syringe and stuck it into her arm while she screamed and struggled. The ambulance crew who had been waiting outside the room were then called in, to carry her, still screaming and struggling, to the ambulance. This, of course, was all profoundly upsetting for my mother, who blamed it all on our presence, and she may well have been right. I took my mother several times to Harperbury to visit my grandmother. On every occasion, we found her sitting still and silent, surrounding by people behaving in all sorts of bizarre ways. She showed no sign of recognizing our voices. A nurse said that they had pulled all her teeth out, thinking that toothache might have been the cause of her behaviour. I wasn't quite able to follow the reasoning, although she was certainly a lot quieter now. |
| Not having my grandmother to cope with made no difference to my mother's attitude towards us. She was now obsessed with getting us out. She had even gone to the police. Whatever it was she expected them to do, they showed no sign of being interested in doing it. By this time - late Autumn - I was staying out of the house as much as possible. Angela was out all day most days, modelling. I took to leaving the house, with Felix, soon after Angela had left, and pushing the pram for miles and miles until late afternoon. Of course, I always took a supply of baby food and nappies with me. Before long, I had latched onto the idea of stopping at pubs with gardens or with tables outside on the pavement. There must have been many times towards the end of 1973 when I ended up drunk in charge of a pram. |
| One day, I had been drinking outside the Duke of St Albans in Highgate, when I happened to glance at some advertising cards in a newsagent's window in Swaine's Lane, near the pub. One card was advertising a holiday cottage to let in Devon. The rent seemed affordable, and I immediately 'phoned from the nearest call box. The woman who answered - Mrs Need - explained that it was her mother's cottage, but her mother had gone into a care home. I asked how long the maximum holiday let would be and she said six months, payable in advance. I booked it for six months there and then, not having a clue where the six months' rent would come from. When I told Angela that night, she contacted her mother, who promptly wrote a cheque and sent it to Mrs Need. I have no recollection of meeting Mrs Need or being asked for any references (we couldn't have supplied any, of course), nor had we even seen the cottage before we moved in. The only formality I remember was signing an agreement that we would vacate the property after six months. |
| Just before Christmas, we said goodbye to my mother. Of course, rather than being overjoyed at our departure, my mother let us know how dreadful it was that we were suddenly abandoning her to spend Christmas completely alone for the first time ever, and with the problem of having to find her own way to Harperbury Hospital. I may have had some slight feeling of guilt, but I'm afraid it was impossible at the time to avoid a sense almost of satisfaction that my mother's intense campaign to get us out, which had made life so miserable for us, had come to fruition at the worst possible time for her. |