Friday 13 March 2015

Ankh


In 1971, I was just about to finish a sculpture course at art school, when I was riding down the High Street on a 1940s bicycle and a girl who I had never seen before stepped out into the street to flag me down.

"Do you want to come to see a film with me tonight?" she asked, without any pretence at preamble.

I just said 'yes', and we arranged to meet later that evening. I wondered how she had noticed me, but was a little flattered that she had. I was quite shy in those days.

She turned out to be a student of about 3 years my junior, and was beginning a course in ceramics which she would never complete.

The film was Ingmar Bergman's 'The Hour of the Wolf' - a dark, eerie and haunting psychological fantasy which has haunted me ever since.

After the film, we went back to her house and sat around drinking herbal tea and chatting, during which time I learned that she was a vegan, half French and spent quite a lot of her childhood in special schools for children with domestic problems. I later learned that her specific domestic problem was her father - an arrogant and authoritarian, self-centred bastard who thought of nothing but the clockwork way in which his household was to be run when he returned from his East London council panning job to his long-suffering but charming wife in the arse-end of the city - Wanstead.

When we had reached our own 'hour of the wolf' at around 4 in the morning, we went to bed. The only two things that stick in my mind about that night were the crudely-carved, wooden, Egyptian 'Ankh' symbol she wore round her neck on a piece of simple string, and the utter blackness of the room once the curtains were drawn and the lights were out.

There are two types of nocturnal people - those who like their rooms to be as dark as possible, and those who do not feel comfortable without whatever ambient light there is for spacial reference. More than once, she informed me that the Ankh symbolised 'life', and for this reason I do not believe there were any accidents that night, even though if any decisions were made, they were made unconsciously.

The following day I went home and I did not here a word from her for about 2 months. Then the phone rang and she told me that there was something she wished to discuss with me. I had a strong feeling I knew what it was.

So I found myself back in the kitchen drinking herbal tea and waiting for the hour of the wolf again, by which time we had decided that - because of our youth and poverty, she would book herself in for an abortion, despite my insistence that I would support her in whatever choice she made about the situation. I asked if she wanted me to come with her to the clinic, and she said that she did not.

On the day of her appointment, she had a last-minute change of heart and fled the clinic. She called me again to say what she had - or had not - done, and I went around to her house to continue the talk about the future of all three of us.

I could not have known at the time, that pregnancy affected her in a very negative way, causing her to be downright hostile to everyone around her, not least the father of her unborn child, and after ten or so attempts to visit her and have a rational conversation with her, I eventually gave up.

On the last visit, she told me to fuck off and not come back because I was only visiting because I felt guilty, and her flatmate of the time was shocked at the way she spoke to me and came to my defence - to no avail. The hormones had taken over and I was fed up with being told to go away.

So I kept away for the duration, and in the days immediately preceding the birth, I booked a one-way ticket to Copenhagen with the intention of never coming back. Christ knows why I chose Denmark, but by this time I had become a little imbalanced myself.

During this time I went slightly off the rails and ended up taking all sorts of drugs, drinking a lot (no change there, then) and finally being convicted of theft by stealing some burglar's tools from the college and trying to sell them to a shop which sold brand-new ones. It was bad luck that two plain-clothes coppers happened to be right outside the shop when the owner dialled 999.

A mutual friend came round to see me one day, to tell me that I was the father of a little girl, and that I should go round and see them both. I asked what the point of this would be, since she would only tell me to fuck off again, but my friend said that things would be different now, knowing as she did that the hormones had stopped kicking up a fuss, so I did.

"What are your plans?" asked the new mother, when the preliminary inspection of the child had been made.

"I'm going to Copenhagen tomorrow." Even as I said them, the words did not have the ring of truth about them, even though I could prove the intention with a plane ticket.

"Don't go. Stay with us," was her simple response. So I did.

I stayed for as long as I could before our diverging paths took us further and further away from each other, and the decision to live apart was a mutual one for fear of blighting the child's life with endless arguments about nothing big, or so big that it would seem like nothing to an outsider.

I used to have a recurring dream in which I would be paying for groceries in a supermarket, and when I had done this, the unknown girl at the till would look up and say, "What time are you coming home tonight?"

Within a year or two, she had married another vegetarian whose attitude to domestic life was very similar to her father's.

He used to visit me and my then girlfriend and proudly tell me the correct way to handle all women in general, and her in particular, as if he was the world's expert on woman-taming. Then she became pregnant by him and he visited me again - this time for advice.

"She keeps telling me to fuck off!" he cried, "How do you handle her when she is in this state?"

"I don't know. You're the expert. You tell me." Revenge was so sweet.

In a couple of years they had moved to the North of Scotland to run a small-holding, like puritanical settlers living the dream.

He began having an affair with a young girl working for them - for no money - and eventually made it official when the girl turned 16. I have my theories about how my daughter ended up in the mental state she is now - with three virtually disabled children of her own and never having had a job in her life - but to voice them here without proof would be a dangerous thing to do.

Her step-father moved to New Zealand with the young girl, and a couple of years after that, the mother of my daughter moved over there too - possibly to be closer to them - leaving my daughter on her own, as I seem to have done over the last 40 years.

For a very young man who was highly inexperienced in matters of the heart, this is such a massively high price to pay for a single night of muted passion, don't you think? The debt will never be written-off for the rest of all of our lives, and the benefits it has brought have been slender to say the least.


35 comments:

  1. A cautionary tale indeed. There but for the grace of god etc...

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    1. Funnily enough, you had just got together with Mrs Magnon and when I told you, you said - "You are going to love it!" I am very sorry to say that you were very wrong, but you were not to know.

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  2. Cro is so right ….. could have been any of us. Do you get to see your daughter and grandchildren much Tom, if you don't mind me asking ? XXXX

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    1. Not as much as she would have liked - partly through distance, and partly for reasons you would only understand if you knew the family.

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  3. Confessional time on a Friday morning Tom. I hope the telling of it got some of the obvious guilt off you chest. We all do things of which there is a lot of regret when we are young.

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    1. Yes, but it will never be off my chest. Some people have accused me in the past of being a disgracefully bad father, but they don't know anything - absolutely nothing. I now take great delight in other people's children and my step-grandchildren, and for that I really do feel guilty.

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  4. Bloody hell......i kind of enjoyed all that
    It feels as though ive just sat through one of the better Jenny Murray set pieces

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    1. Perhaps enjoyed wasnt quite theword

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    2. Well the telling of it makes ordinary families feel a bit happier about their lot I suppose. How do you and Chris feel about children? I have the impression that neither of you are much interested, but you do have all sorts of other creatures to give your spare love and devotion to.

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    3. I would have loved kids........but you cant lock em in the kitchen when you want to sneak out to the cinema

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    4. Why not? There's no law against it... oh, maybe there is.

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  5. It fucked me up all day. It fucks you up for ever too. I am truly sorry Stephenson.

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    1. Them's the breaks. I feel more sorry for my daughter than I do for myself, and that's the truth.

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    2. I feel sorry for me sometimes when I allow myself to.

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    3. I wouldn't feel sorry for you, but only out of respect!

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    4. You would if you knew. Well, you might.

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    5. I seem to have sparked-off a guts-spilling session.

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  6. Very sad. When your daughter's mother traipsed off to NZ, did you try to establish some sort of relationship with your daughter then?

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    1. I have been trying to establish some sort of relationship with her since she was born, but unfortunately her life and mine are even further apart than mine and her mother's. This sounds harsh, but she is a 12 year-old trapped in a middle-aged body, all the while expected to take care of real children. The first children were almost taken away from her by the Social Services, and that was a wake-up call - literally. She let them sleep until 2.00 am, then brought them into school at around 11.00.

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  7. Replies
    1. It is. I think it is the most saddest thing about my otherwise happy life. I feel vile for not wanting to be around them, but you would only understand this if you spent an hour with them. I look like a complete bastard from the outside, and - who knows - maybe I am, not wanting to sacrifice the rest of my life to an impossible situation.

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    2. Sorry - bad English. 'Most saddest' is very bad English. 'Most sad', or 'the saddest' would have been better.

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    3. You are very special.
      And that is a big, big compliment.

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    4. And I am very grateful for it. Thank you, Britta.

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  8. I've read this before and wished again you could find a way to come to terms with is, and had to answer myself, "But how?" Maudlin as it sounds, it is best to be with people who love you and you love them.

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    1. I haven't written it before, have I? Re the last bit, this is how I have ordered my life.

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    2. Oh - Sarah says I have. I am becoming forgetful after 2 thousand posts.

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  9. A massively high price indeed. Very sad.

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    1. The things some people do just to get their leg over, eh?

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  10. the high price of naivity is clearly shown here. You were too young and so was she I am sure.. the poor child that resulted has had life damage her and you cannot help.. Sad all round and a very high cost for young blood hormones... hugs from Derbyshire, and best wishes, you live with it, but it must be so hard for all of you,thank you for sharing though, it does help to share.. the blame is always there, but you have done all that you could given the circumstances.. best wishes, j

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    1. I thought you said the high price of 'nativity' for a second. That would have been accurate too.

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  11. You're only human, Tom. We all do the best we can with the hand life deals us. It sounds like this situation was destined to end badly for everyone involved no matter how good your intentions were/are. It was one youthful mistake that you've done your best to rectify. Just the fact that you care so much is proof that you are a good man. I hope you can forgive yourself and make some kind of peace with the situation.

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    1. I'm not sure I have done my best to rectify it. Whenever I wince at the sight of someone hurting themselves, I console myself that it is proof that I am not a psychopath, but not many of us are. There are still more out there than you might imagine, though.

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  12. A sad story Tom, and yes I've read it before on your site but not so eloquently or in the same kind of detail.
    In some way it reminds me of how my own daughter came about (genders reversed but sort of the same story but different). Her father, a wayfairer/sojourner sort died when she was five and she had a difficult childhood - but she succeeded in the beautiful mother stakes when she had Gracie two years ago.
    I think for as long as we live there is time ...
    Though what Jennifer says rings true - we all do the best with what life hands us.
    Thanks x Sarah

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    1. Do you know, I really thought that this was the first time I had even alluded to it, let alone written in detail about it. I must have been drunk the first time. I still consider myself to be lucky, this being the most bitter thing in my life. I could be holed up in Syria, for instance.

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