NOTES
There are no notes for this chapter yet. Some of the notes on other pages are based on info YOU send me.
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We decided to call our son Felix - a good old name and a genuine Christian name. We hadn't, of course, bargained for popular culture, in which the name is neither of those things, and can only be associated with a cartoon cat. It inevitably caused problems at school. As a result, Felix changed his name legally as soon as he was old enough. For good measure, he changed his surname, too, because of the trouble everyone has spelling and pronouncing "Coughtrey". I'll leave it to you genealogy wizards to find out what his name is these days! He shall remain Felix throughout this saga. |
| We soon discovered that the mountain of advice available to first-time parents, from books, from pompous know-all know-nothing pediatricians and nurses, enthusiastically trapped in the latest five-minute theories, and from busybodies everywhere, was just one huge pile of contradictory crap. You just had to find out everything from trial and error - mostly error. No doubt it's still the same. Anyway, our baby thrived remarkably well - almost to our surprise - and grew strong and healthy. |
| When he was just a couple of months old, in the Autumn of 1972, we both realised that we had to make contact with our mothers again, and we wrote, telling them about Felix. Both mothers responded immediately, and Angela's mother Irene came round to see the baby. She was understandably a little frosty towards me at first, but we soon began to get on quite well, and visits to her flat in Fulham became fairly frequent. (Angela's father, the actor Roger Snowdon, was living apart from Irene and didn't respond to a letter from Angela). As for my mother, her letter was surprisingly cool, considering that she had not heard from me for five years and had not had a clue as to my whereabouts. She reported that my grandmother was still alive, at the age of 98, but was now blind and housebound. She said she would like to see the baby. She now, at last, had a telephone in the house, so I was able to phone her and arrange for us to visit. |
| Going back to that council house in Connaught Road, after five years, produced a dispiriting sensation of having gone round in a large but meaningless circle. That little corner of Barnet and all its associations was so far removed from the adventures described over the past thirty-five chapters, that there was a feeling of returning to grey reality after a long and colourful dream. My mother, now 62, was subdued and nervous at first, but soon switched to the familiar high-energy mode. I had forgotten how hard it was to cope with that. She was clearly delighted to meet Felix, and to be able to call herself a grandmother. However, there was some difficulty with my grandmother, who was very suspicious of what was going on. No longer able to see, she felt my face and took a lot of persuading that it was me and not some stranger with sinister intent. When she eventually accepted my identity, she became very emotional, asking me over and over again why I had done such a wicked thing as to disappear. She calmed down when allowed to hold the baby. |
| All-in-all the visit was an exhausting and in many ways unsatisfactory experience for both Angela and myself, but there was a sense of relief that the reunion had at last taken place. There was also relief that it had apparently not occurred to my mother to ask where I had been and what I had been doing. |