One of the hazards of leaving home is
having nowhere to go, either because you have not planned anything, or because
your plans are thwarted in some way. The former hazard applies to me and I
cannot understand to this day why I never thought about it. I was going to
London. That’s all that mattered. Where I was going to lay my weary head was a
question I had simply not asked.
If most of those who disappear
survive, and presumably they do, how do they manage to cover their tracks so
efficiently? Why doesn’t anyone ever see them leave or even catch up with them
before they can disappear completely? Often a crime is suspected, and
justifiably so, if the missing person is a child that has been kidnapped or
someone with hitherto suppressed criminal energy. What has started out as an
adventure can end in murder if drugs or corruption are the motivating factors
in the disappearance. Upwards of 275 thousand people go missing every year in
the UK, I have just read. Someone is recorded by the police as missing every 2
minutes. How about that [I should add that these figure are official for about
2012 and were found during a review of this autobiography in 2015. The Missing
Persons bureau is kept busy].
For reasons of their
own, countless people take off for distant, often exotic destinations simply
because they want to be far away enough to be make it impossible to find them.
They just pop over to Australia or Brazil and start off a new life. Some of
them have an accomplice, but most don’t.
Whatever makes these people leave
home, it must be something pretty dramatic. The people left behind don’t
usually have an inkling why their spouse, kid, or lodger has gone, or at least,
they make out that this is the case. Money is seldom the reason. Debtors tend
to brazen it out. And a strange metamorphosis overcomes those left behind.
Whatever the relationship has been like, there is a genuine desire to have the
renegade back, to make up for past errors, to heal wounds, and so forth. But it
is usually too late, and that is perhaps the reason for the fervour of these
belated yearnings.
For those who leave I suppose it’s
quite frequently a case of choosing between an existence which has become
intolerable and the fulfilment of a dream and the key to freedom, without the
shackles of dependants or friends, neighbours or colleagues. So eager are these people to escape that they usually
leave all their possessions behind. Every day there are plaintive appeals in
the press for people to come back home, and the sole job of missing persons agencies
is to trace the absconders and drag them back to the life from which they have
run away.
None of this applies to me, though on
reflection the effects of leaving home at 17 were just as drastic.
Having secured my
place at music college, I have gone back to my daily routine, which includes
exams, tennis, parties, a tentative, radically unfulfilling romance in the form
of traipsing after my sort of boyfriend and his sort of jazz band – the Paris
episode having been short-lived. Not to be forgotten are the endless hours of
small talk about boys, boys and boys in that order with various girl friends in
the High Street coffee shop.
For me the act of leaving home is
painful. I am not running away like the other 275 thousand. I will be going
through the painful experience of leaving a protected atmosphere. That probably
explains why the whole idea of getting somewhere to live has been postponed
until there are only 2 weeks left in which to find somewhere.
I have not really
considered how I would feel about never again seeing the people with whom I
have shared so many of my waking hours for the last five years or so. As it
transpires, that last day at school is for me the absolute end of an era.
I am one of the fortunate few who
have a guaranteed future – or so I like to think. Most of my class-mates are
waiting anxiously for exam results, because their future depends on them. A
place at the Royal Academy of Music in the performers’ section is allocated
purely on talent proven in an audition. I’m later
not surprised to learn that relatively few have even bothered with advanced
exams if they are planning a concert career. I know exactly how they feel. I
have found it very difficult to concentrate after having my name in the paper
and everyone congratulating me on my good fortune to get such a coveted place.
I am quite a celebrity and bathing in the admiration showered on me.
It never even dawns
on me that there might have been stiff competition for a place and I never even
ask how many were turned down. I had never encountered any rivals, and I have
no reason to believe that I can’t cope with anything that comes my way. This
optimistic approach stood me in good stead, even when the going was
particularly hard. Defeat came much later in life in a guise that I
didn’t recognize and never would have believed possible. I thought marriage
partners were supportive. The bitter truth is that they are not always.
Partners in the same profession have rivalry problems I did not know existed
until it was too late. But that’s another story.
A few weeks before my adventure in
London begins and not much more than a year before my father’s final journey
through that valley reserved for the sick and dying, his much older brother
Norman, with whom he had had very little contact for many years, dies after a
long illness. This event makes my impending move to the Big Smoke fade into
even blinder insignificance, which is unfortunate because, as I have already explained
at length, I have nowhere to live and little idea how to solve the problem.
I don’t know what kind of a person
Dad’s brother Norman (Uncle Nom) was. Circumstances spread Dad’s siblings far
and wide, and Dad would probably never have known about Uncle Nom’s demise, had
not Aunt Jane kept a tight rein on the family fortunes, which in our case had
nothing to do with money, there being none, but everything to do with the fate
of every conceivable degree of relative.
Uncle Nom married late, like most of
Dad’s relations. Since fate had transported him to a poorer suburb of
Manchester to pursue some kind of white-collar work of a lowly kind, it was
there that he found happiness.
Dora, his widow, wanted to give Uncle Nom a big send-off.
She found Aunt Jane's address among Uncle Nom 's papers and bravely phoned up
to see if anyone would like to attend the ‘festivities’. I can only assume that
contact between uncle nom and his siblings had all but ceased after he married
Dora, who was extremely humble, though I’m quite sure my Dad would never have
thought less of her for that. Sadly, my father was too stricken with his own
sickness by then to be concerned about others in the family.
Dad can no longer drive. His health is deteriorating fast
and on bad days I drive him around when he needs to go somewhere, especially if
a longer distance is involved. That is why I have gained my driving licence at
the earliest opportunity, with Dad as my teacher, though he sent me to a
driving school to make sure I knew everything I would have to know at the
driving test. To this day I can hear Dad’s instructions. When I overtake, I still
make sure I can see the whole vehicle I have overtaken before moving back in. I
think ahead and drive defensively. When I am in my car he is still with me. That
may be why I love driving so much.
The journey to Manchester is not going to be pleasant. I
have never driven such a long way before, and I am nervous about finding the
way and what might happen if Dada is too ill to cope. We set off early. Mum is
staying at home. She doesn't like funerals. Seven of her relatives passed away
in quick succession and she can't face the lugubrious faces at the funeral
itself and the forced jollity at the wake thereafter. The other reason is that
she does not want to spend the day with someone else’s relations. Mum has never
really taken Dad’s family on board. I’m not even sure she knows all their
names.
We make our way to the back street of the Manchester suburb
through the perennial Manchester drizzle. The streets and rows of terraced
houses all look much the same except for the variegated net curtains, but Dada
has an unerring sense of direction. He is feeling fairly well, but I know he is
glad to have me with him.
Our spirits are low.
We enter the small terraced abode, sparkling with
cleanliness and furnished comfortably, and embrace Dora, who is very small and
looks tired and washed out in her black mourning outfit. Most of the other
people who are joining the procession to the crematorium have already arrived,
and presently the funeral car appears bearing the modest wooden coffin and
covered with a mound of flowers. We set off in order of precedence. We are
three cars back, after Dora and her family, and other members of Norman and Dad’s
family.
Manchester is a big city and it is mid-morning. The
procession following the hearse is travelling at about 5 miles per hour, which
is hardly more than walking speed. We are holding the traffic up, but nobody is
protesting. Whoever the silent passenger in the hearse happens to be, the
Mancunians doff their caps and allow things to proceed in dignity. There is no
real hurry to get to our destination.
I have real difficulty in following the leaders of this
sorry procession, so blurred are my eyes from the tears I am shedding for us
all. Dad sits quietly, occasionally giving me directions when I lose sight of
the way forward. This isn’t the time for small talk and Dad has his own
grieving to do. Eventually we get to the crematorium. I have no recollection of
the chapel, the service, the people, or anything else. The only thing that
stands out in my mind is what happened afterwards.
We are gathered on the lawn outside the reception area. It
is raining and bleak. We are all gripped by sadness. Suddenly there is a
familiar voice. Aunt Ada the witch-dragon has brought her camera along. I
remember that as usual she has a cigarette dangling from the corner of her
mouth. She is dressed slightly more modestly than usual, but with a frivolous
and entirely unsuitable hat with feathers and froth perched rakishly on her
thin wisps of crimped hair. As always, she is bare-footed except for open
sandals showing scarlet lacquered toenails.
“Come along, everyone! Get in a row, will you?” she is
shouting against the wind. “Let’s make a record of all the family together.”
To my utter surprise, instead of protesting that this is not
the time or place, the whole bunch of mourners, except for me, arranged itself
in a semi-circle and poses.
“That’s nice,” the witch-dragon praises.
“Faith, get next to your father!”
“No.”
“Come along, girl. This is the only chance I ever have of
getting the whole family together.”
Except for the one in whose honour we are here, I am
thinking. And me, of course. I think what she is doing is in appalling taste
and I’m not going to be forced to condone it.
Down the years the witch-dragon has been recording every
funeral of every relative and friend she has attended. She takes morbid delight
in lining up grief-stricken people with tear-stained faces.
I stand my ground.
“Well, with your father, then,” she is saying. “You never
know when it’s going to be the last time…”
Her callous words echo to this day. In the end, I did I pose
for that photograph, but I never saw it, or any of the others, for that matter.
Then it is all over. We clamber back into our cars and drive
back to Dora’s little house, this time at a cracking pace, with me terrified at
the traffic and Dad trying to keep me from taking wrong turns.
“Don’t think any more about Ada,” he advises. “She’s always
been like that. She doesn’t mean to be cruel.”
“I hate her,” I admit. “She has no feelings and no tact.”
“That’s true,” says Dad. “But if we behave like she does, we
are no better. Pull yourself together now. Norman had a good life and nothing
can bring him back. We’ll eat a sandwich and drink some tea so as not to hurt
Dora’s feelings, and then we’ll make for home.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
And so it was. We joined the group overflowing the tiny
sitting room with the three-piece suite, glass cabinet and little tables and
piping hot tea and fresh ham on tiny triangles of bread and said very little.
Dad went out of the room once and talked to Dora for a bit, pressing some pound
notes into her hand to cover some of the costs. Dad was like that. Then he gave
me a nod and we made our apologies that it was a long drive home.
Exactly one year later it was my father’s turn for the black
limousine and the witch-dragon again took out her camera and told us to line
up. This time I screamed at her and fled. It was to be the last time I attended
a funeral with her. And the funeral for her, a good twenty years later, was
related to me by Mum and my brother, whose account was certainly more neutral
and made me laugh heartily.
And the lodgings? What about them?
My father has days when he is not quite so ill and his
breathing is not quite so laboured. He phones people on the outskirts of London
where he has himself had lodgings and persuades them to give me a bed while I look
for somewhere. So that problem is solved with one phone-call. I am nearly a student
and nearly a lodger, and Mum fondly thinks I will be more out of harm’s way
than at a youth hostel, which was going to be my fate had this stroke of luck
not struck.
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