The Half-Life of a Particle, Post 3

I return, perhaps wearier than when I left.

 

I became suicidal around the age of ten, as I have said. My mother’s disposal of my father because – he avers – he could not earn enough to please her, required me to obtain his signature to a document that would formalise the end of their relationship, the end of a relationship I did not want to end.

 

Lest others should think I too easily accept that my mother made this choice, rather than my father, I can point accurately to the fact that she cast aside no small number of subsequent suitors for similar reasons. In particular she met a man called Dennis, one of the loveliest human beings I ever met and whom we knew for no little time. Just thinking about him for a moment tugs the corners of my mouth towards a smile. She quit him, she said, because he wasn’t ‘ambitious’ enough.

 

Many years later, after the death of the wife he’d met after breaking up with mum, we visited him at home. He was dying at the time, though I don’t think we knew it, and he was exactly the same man I remembered. Only now, however it had been come by, he lived in a ‘lovely house’, had his own car and all those other things that my mother truly valued. One could see in her eyes and in her face how bitterly she repented of having ‘let him go’.

 

As to my dad? I loved my dad. I still do, though he’s dead now. I still ache inside with the awareness of his absence, with the awareness of the life we could have shared and never did. I feel my daughter’s absence in the same way. They are part of the same pain, part of the same void, the same longing for what cannot be.

 

The God Squad promise we will be reunited. I do not believe it.

 

Around ten/eleven years old I was a gangling, shy, nervous, bespectacled child, afraid of the dark, wetting the bed. I remember very little from before that time, mere flashes in the darkness.

 

Perhaps I’ve said it already – these spontaneous chapters are an odd way to write a biography, I guess – and I apologise if I repeat myself, but my mother told me she had ‘sent my father away because he did not love me enough’. Me, that is. His first-born.

 

To that she added, as I’m sure I’ve said, that I came into the world after the first occasion that alcohol lowered his inhibitions enough for him to engage in sex with her.

 

My father, she said, did not love me. Whilst she told me that she loved me herself I never really felt that she did, only came after a long time to the realisation that she loved me as well as she was able to. It was a very long time though.

 

And if my own father did not love me, so much did not love me that he was prepared to leave his wife and son behind in order to leave me, and if my own mother never loved me without condition, why should it surprise me that my prayers to God went unanswered?

 

The answer was simple. I was unlovable. By anyone. By anything.

 

I learned that the closest resemblance to love was something that had to be earned. I had already discovered that my mother’s love could be lost – my father had lost it. If she could send him away then, surely, she could do the same to me? And in truth she did once tell me that she had had the opportunity to ‘send me away’ too, that it had been recommended that I be placed in care so that her marriage might survive.

 

I doubt, now, that that reflected any more than an idea she might once have had, but passing thoughts, even brief conjectures drawn from a diet of Coronation Street, could and did gain weight with her when she was in that frame of mind. Or maybe it was true, and if it was I rather wish she had sent me into care. I wished it when she told me and wish it still.

 

Love, then, had to be earned. How was that to happen? Comics, movies and stories – including the great ‘Christian’ story – told me that love was earned by sacrifice. We remembered Christ for giving his life, we remembered our war dead for giving theirs, I wept for Kipling’s Gunga Din and Disney’s ‘Old Yeller’ dog, whose death was brought about by sacrifice.

 

My father was leaving us, leaving me, my mother and my younger brother. If I wasn’t there to leave, perhaps he would come back to them, perhaps they would be together again as a family, united in whatever grief they felt, forgiving each other. A good enough reason to die, I thought.

 

The attempt obviously failed.

 

If being unloved felt a burden, it was little less so than being unliked. Twice in my life I have had a friend – one my late daughter and one a lady who will be reading this. That’s as close as I get.

 

I had something like a friend at Beech Grove. I don’t remember much of our interaction, but I will never forget how it began.

 

The front door gave immediate access to a ‘living kitchen’ and faced another door which would lead to our ‘best room’ (the room one never really went into but which was intended for receiving guests). My mother and father were standing in the space between the two and I nearest the front door, so it was I who responded to the knock.

 

On the doorstep was a young man of a similar age to myself, wearing almost knee-length shorts and, if my memory serves, a flat cap. I can’t remember his facial expression, though I feel it was non-committal, the look of someone on an errand who thinks they may be turned away.

 

“I’m Victor,” he announced; “Arta cummin arter laike?”

 

Bewildered I turned to my mother, said something about a boy and his making reference, apparently, to a ‘lake’. She and my father smiled, being of Yorkshire stock and I was informed that he was inviting me out to play. “Arta”, it transpired, was a contraction of ‘Art thou’, “cummin” needs no translation, “arter” his contraction of ‘out to’ and “laike” a genuine Yorkshire alternative to the word play. Shortly afterwards we were “laikin’ art” together.

 

I knew Victor for some time but only a single memory sticks out. We were ‘laikin” on a bomb-site which was not a bomb-site other than in name but an empty plot remaining from civil demolition. Under foot was the gravelly detritus of the operation and, standing at a distance from each other, we began picking up small stones, taking turns to throw them at each other. They were not thrown with force or with intent to cause pain, merely a kind of exercise in marksmanship practised against our gladly volunteering bodies. That was, at least, until Victor picked up a large fragment of red chimney-pot and threw that instead, splitting my head open.

 

I don’t think that terminated our friendship, but I really don’t recall.

 

Victor went to the same school as I, but he had all the advantages. He wasn’t particularly bright, was of small-to-average build, patently poor and local from birth. I was tall, bespectacled, intelligent and not able or wise enough to hide it, had a very wide vocabulary and spoke with the army accent my father, who had aspired to be an officer, had encouraged.

 

By definition of the tribe I joined my speech was ‘posh’, and that inevitably meant – to them – that I came from money. It wasn’t true, of course. But to that difference was added my height, on account of which I already stooped in order to make myself less visible, my National Health spectacles and a remarkable incapacity for anything related to sport or PE.

 

Cue bullies.

Cue the first day of entry into the school and some total stranger running past me towards the school doors and punching me in the abdomen as he went by. I doubled up in agony, but the physical pain was nothing in comparison to the unhappy bewilderment I felt that anyone would choose to inflict such a blow for no reason and upon someone they did not know in the slightest.

 

It happened again not long afterwards, although on this occasion I was on what felt like the long walk home. It was a downhill walk between two stone walls. Invisible behind one lay a stretch of ‘Private Property’ whilst beyond the other a large area of ‘allotments’ (small tracts of land on which the allotment holders grew fruit and vegetables for their own use) stretched down to the main road.

 

The youth running by punched me in exactly the same way the other had. They may have been the same person, I really didn’t and don’t know. He continued on his way and, in pain and misery, I did the same.

 

The path we had followed led to a junction, the main road passing up by the allotments and down towards the town, a sweetshop on the near corner, and the road up to Beech Grove stretching uphill opposite. Crossing the road I saw the youth who had hit me enter into another sweetshop on one of the many streets that ran off the uphill road and I progressed up the hill to home, leaving him behind.

 

It is odd, when I think of it, for the roads involved seemed too long then to allow such a time scale, yet the fact is that I got home, was interrogated by my mother as to why I was in such misery and then dragged by her down to the corner sweetshop before the other child had concluded his business there.

 

In the shop she demanded of me if this was the boy who had punched me and I answered, honestly, that yes, it was. She then demanded that I hit him.

 

I was aware of the shopkeeper as merely an onlooker, of the frightened child I faced and of the fury of my mother – not that he had punched me but that I had a) cried as a result and b) had done nothing in retribution. I was aware that my mother by my side tilted the balance of power steeply in my direction and I knew that it was unfair. The boy’s offence was to inflict pain on a stranger. I was being told I must reciprocate.

 

I don’t entirely recall what happened, but I know that I did not hit him, that I couldn’t. I know that I was bewildered by this willingness of others to inflict pain on strangers – she knew the boy no more than I did – and I know that she excoriated me for my cowardice.

 

She was wrong, I was right, but it was only one of many similar hurts.

 

“Big boys,” she clearly believed, “don’t cry.”

 

Atop this particular rise I stumble and fall down the slope in a tumble of memories newly or freshly awoken.

 

“Your dad’s gone, Richard. It’s up to you to be the man of the house now.” Freely translated that means, “Your dad’s gone, Richard. It’s up to you to carry whatever adult responsibilities I decide appropriate to inflict upon you whilst at the same time I will continue to treat you entirely as a child when you do anything that I don’t like.”

 

There is an addition to my height, spectacles, manner of speech and so on that I think I have not yet mentioned. I was born with a form of club-feet. Around the age of 14 it would lead to my being hospitalised and treated surgically in order to prevent the condition worsening, but at 10/11 years old it was being treated with exercises I constantly forgot to do and two strips of leather fixed under my shoes to exert upward pressure beneath the arch. I was also regularly visiting a Child Guidance clinic because of my ‘anxiety disorder’ – an anxiety disorder for which my mother had first referred me to specialists when I was all of four years old.

 

In truth, I guess, she was the problem, whilst received wisdom about child development made it mine.

 

The orthopaedic issues gave me something, I think, to which I could attribute my clumsiness and lack of sporting ability. It could at least be seen to be a source of some of the unworthiness I felt and for which, in this instance, I couldn’t hold myself entirely to blame.

 

The so-called ‘metatarsal bars’ beneath my shoes, supervised exercises and visits to the Child Guidance department took me often out of school. This did not add to my popularity, nor did my consequent exclusion from most sports and PE activities. My successes in anything related to art, English and History also rather failed to go down well.

 

I must have been attending the Child Guidance clinic at the time I first tried to take my own life, unless there was a second attempt that I don’t now remember – and it’s possible, even though it seems unlikely. They key fact in the memory is that I was very popular with the Child Guidance folk. We were given a weekly mark for our presentation, our involvement in the games and tasks we were set, our manners, behaviour and so on, and mine were always 9 or 10 out of 10. One week, without explanation, my mark was 1.

 

As my mother fetched me away I expressed my bewilderment at this apparent diminution of regard, this punitive score. “That will be because you tried to kill yourself,” she told me, going on to say that not long before that time my attempt at suicide would have branded me a criminal (for the theft from the Crown of one of its subjects, I later discovered).

 

The attempt had not been discussed at the Guidance session and to this day I do not know if what happened occurred because of that suicide attempt. I do know that I was told it by her and believed it, that in trying to remove myself, in trying to sacrifice myself in order that I might both end my own desperate unhappiness and contribute to the restoration of the rest of the family I had done something selfish, wicked and criminal. I had not yet reached my 11^th birthday.