Being an only child meant always being in the middle or, at least, the only spectator. In the middle of what was going on between my parents – arguing, screaming, or crying (sometimes laughing). Even if I wasn’t the subject of the row, I was always close enough to feel the waves of anger and pain coursing between my warring parents. Seeing so much, understanding so little. In an adult world with adult secrets, adult emotions, these adults absorbed with their own lives. I craved touch and hugs. I got neither.
My dad’s mother had died of cancer many years ago. My mother’s was dying. I recall standing at the end of her ornate bed in awe of the white-haired and leathery body still issuing orders to my mother who, later memory told me, took as if a little girl. I live that bed whenever I see the dead. One grandfather was in an asylum. Not something that would have him committed now – he preached to passers-by – but he was an embarrassment. My cousins were way older. And, of course, no siblings. I often wondered – and still wonder – what it would be like to be able to share my feelings and the burden of the volcano that was my father. How different would I be now? How might my life have turned out? Maybe I’ve got all that wrong.
My paternal grandfather was in my life for its first five years. He was bear of a man, or so he seemed. He spoke slowly through his pipe which was almost never lit. He came to us every weekend. I used to stand next to his chair while we watched sports on television. There were no volcanoes when he was there. He protected me, too, from my mother’s edicts. Grandpa Morris wrapped me in warmth, was my comrade in arms. Until we moved away and seldom visited. With his going, I lost my buddy.
My extended family always seemed at war. Two days was the maximum before some unknowable and irreconcilable wound surfaced. My eldest aunt (Beattie) had been in jail for a year for shoplifting. Draconian by today’s standard but in a narrow-minded 1920s small town, transgressions were as much social as criminal, and punished as such. It made my father’s family a pariah. Not shunned but distant, no longer welcome. Beattie lead a peripatetic life, strong-willed and not burdened by her past. My father was strong-willed and hardened by the damage she had caused. I liked Auntie Beattie, but two days was all I got, maybe three times over the years.
I loved, too, my uncle Ivor (father’s side). The enduring memory was sitting in the back of a van, doors open, swinging our legs and laughing. Left behind by the wedding party entourage, we were headed to my cousin’s reception and were late, dressed to the nines, in a shabby, totally out-of-place van.
My father’s sister (auntie Mollie) was a small woman, a martinet of unshakeable belief in her opinions, despising Beattie – except when she died, and her belongings were to be shared. A miniature version of my father when it came to putting my mother down. I dreaded Mollie’s visits, thankfully infrequent.
My mother’s side were a poisonous crew in fear of my father, always putting him down and setting my mother against him. Airs and graces, snobs with no substance. And in the middle, a confused boy.
And, returning to the beginning
An only child grows up in an adult world, absorbing their mores and behaviours.
I had a veneer of maturity but an empty space where the knocks and lessons of a shared childhood would be. My parents were too absorbed in their own lives to attend to my need of love and security. Adopting me seemed to be enough for them.
I often wondered – and still wonder – what it would be like to be able to share my own feelings and the burden of the volcano that was my father. How different would I be now. How might my life have turned out. Adrift and rudderless, I grew up a child-man, needing as I had needed, hurting as I had learned.
