Friends for Life. Jan Fennell
my mother, he was absolutely determined not to let history repeat itself. No wonder he made her the centre of his universe, no wonder he rarely took his eyes off her.
My father’s story was sad, but my mother’s turned out to be even more poignant. It was many years before I got to know the full story. There were questions I needed to ask my mother when I became a mother myself. It was then that, slowly, she revealed what had happened.
It turned out that my mum had been just sixteen when she’d had Ron. The father was a local boy of the same age, Dan Godbeer. Mum told me she had been so naive she didn’t even know she was pregnant. She didn’t know the facts of life. She got married two days before he was born. The marriage didn’t last, however. Dan went back to live with his mum and dad, my mum went back to live with her sister and her mother. Dan’s mother was a poisonous woman and was determined to keep the baby in her family. The case went to court and the judge sided with her, saying in essence that a little boy couldn’t be brought up by three women living in the poor, cramped conditions my mum and grandmother had to cope with. So Ron was taken from her.
The loss was terrible, but it was made even more painful by the fact that she would see him regularly. And when she did he was always dirty and badly dressed, sometimes in clothes that were one step removed from rags. Sometimes he was barefoot. She would spend ages making clothes for him and would then leave them in parcels on her mother-in-law’s doorstep. But the packages would be sent back to her unopened. She was rejected. When he was about seven she gave up. She said it was the war that changed it for her. She adopted the same attitude as everyone else: ‘We’re going to die, let’s make the most of the time we’ve got left.’
The story never came out in its entirety. I was given bits and pieces, which I had to put together. I eventually learned that it was my nan who reunited them. Sadly for Ron his father died when he was just nineteen. My dad took my mum to the funeral, but Ron didn’t want to know her because he felt she’d abandoned him. Ron had joined the RAF as soon as he was old enough and my nan, bless her, invited him round for tea, because he was still in touch with her. She engineered it so that my mum would be there too, locked them in a room and said: ‘Talk to each other.’
This, apparently, was soon after I was born. But I knew nothing of it. Even then, sadly, Ron fought against it. His grandmother was still bitter and made sure he thought the worst of my mother. But, as so often happens, when he was about to become a parent himself for the first time he finally came back. That strange, bewildering night in November 1958 was their reconciliation.
Again, with the benefit of hindsight I can see that it would have been a hugely significant night in my mother’s life. I can only guess at some of the emotions she must have been feeling. But I can see how it must have affected her relationship with me. Her coldness, her distance from me, was perhaps her way of insulating herself from the pain of suffering a loss again. Maybe she daren’t form too close a bond with me for fear of losing me too. It would also explain her possessiveness and over-controlling nature. She didn’t want me to run away. And I can see now why she was so determined to dress me well and keep me immaculate at all times. She was not going to have me walking around the way her son had done. Part of me wonders, too, whether she felt angry still and took some of that out on me. Who knows?
Time has allowed me to realize why she reacted to Ron’s reappearance in her life the way she did. In the immediate aftermath of that night, I watched her unleash all her money and affection on Ron, Anne and the new baby, David. Almost the next day she went out and bought Anne a lovely expensive necklace. When the baby arrived, they moved in near us. I was besotted with the baby too. It was the closest I had come to having a real brother myself and I spent every spare moment I could with David. Mum was around there all the time, however. It transformed her beyond all recognition into a loving, warm-hearted mother.
Now I understand she saw this as her second chance, a God-given opportunity to put things right between her and her son. As a ten-year-old, however, I perceived none of these things. I remember lying in bed that night thinking to myself: ‘There isn’t much love here for me as it is, am I going to have to share that now?’
One bright summer’s day when I was fourteen, I was driving through the suburbs of west London in the cab of my father’s lorry. This was something I often did during the school holidays. I enjoyed being out and about with him, getting to see different parts of London and the surrounding countryside. At that time he was working on the new runway at Heathrow Airport, so there was an extra excitement to the trips we made. We were driving through the town of West Drayton in Middlesex when, without any warning, he suddenly pulled off the road and into the drive of a house. There was a small sign hanging from the porch. It read: ‘Mrs Stephens’ Boarding Kennels’.
At first I just sat there, unsure what was going on.
‘Come on, are you getting out or not?’ my father said, swinging open the driver’s door.
‘Why?’
‘You wanted a dog, didn’t you?’
I thought my heart was going to jump out of my mouth.
As I’d entered my teens, I had increasingly found the affection I needed in dogs and the pets we had at home – even if they brought as much heartache as comfort at times.
By now we had moved out of the Clyde Flats on Rylston Road into an upstairs flat in a property on Rowallan Road. It was bigger than the old place, but still cramped. There was only one bedroom; the front room doubled up as a bedsit for me. We had a sitting room and a scullery.
Bluey came with us but soon after we moved he became ill. The talkative charmer of the past disappeared and he became a quieter, sadder creature. He developed the habit of picking at his coat, which left him looking in a terrible state. It was soon clear that his days were numbered, but the end – when it came – was still poignant.
Bluey had been sitting on the bottom of his cage for three days, becoming quieter and quieter. Then one day he got up and seemed chirpier. We let him out of the cage and he was his old affectionate self. He climbed up my dad’s arm and sort of nibbled at it as if he was kissing him. Then he hopped around, performing the same routine with each of us. Thinking he was better, we put him back in his cage. He died that night. He had obviously wanted to say goodbye. I was mortified.
By then my father in particular had realized I wouldn’t be settled without a pet of some kind. I really did love the companionship. That same week he suddenly appeared with a black and white old English rabbit I called Domino.
But my run of bad luck hadn’t ended. Domino soon became sick. One day I was carrying him to the vet, covered in a blue blanket. I can still remember the blanket, it had white swallows on it. Suddenly he screamed. I had never heard a rabbit scream before and before I knew it he had died in my arms. It broke my heart. I was nowhere near the surgery and was just as far away from home so I ended up running to the nearest house I knew, that of my mother’s in-laws the Cowpers. Nora Cowper was related through marriage to my mother’s brother Sonny and lived off Lillie Road with her three daughters, Jacquie, Geraldine and Debbie. They were a lovely family who meant a lot to me. The moment Nora opened the door I burst into tears. She took me under her wing and dealt with poor Domino. ‘Give her to me Janice, I’ll lay her to rest here,’ she said. With the girls we went to the garden where we conducted a little burial service before placing her in a box in a hole in the corner.
We never found out what had killed Domino so suddenly. The poor thing may have caught an infection, but we simply didn’t know.
For a time, I can remember feeling I was a curse to these animals. As I scampered after my father towards the doors of Mrs Stephens’ Boarding Kennels, however, all that was forgotten.
We rang the bell and a woman appeared. It was clearly the owner, Mrs Stephens.
She