Diamonds at the Lost and Found

by Sarah Aspinall

  The juggernaut of Audrey’s will mowed down everything in its path, and as long as it was getting you to where you wanted to be, that was fine. There was no better person to have on your side. But these days I could see it more clearly, the sheer size of it, and I was shocked to find rising up in me a strong desire to resist this force, to become just as powerful, and to show her what wonders I could achieve on my own.

  THE TIMING OF THE boyfriend theft from Amy had been particularly mean and particularly clever, as Dave and his parents were going on a holiday, and now they invited me to join them. It would be a proper holiday, which didn’t involve the shrimping nets and apple orchards so longed for in my childhood, but instead was all about my new jet-set aspirations of discos and sun loungers by the pool. Surprisingly, Peter didn’t seem worried by any of this, and he now backed off in the belief that Dave and I were in the throes of an innocent teenage romance.

  In fact, a few weeks before the holiday I had borrowed the keys to a friend of Cath’s caravan near the beach in Formby and taken Dave there. There had been heavy petting on the sofa, but now I wanted to move on to the real thing. The caravan site was a long walk from the station, through the gloomy pinewoods that had once been the scene of my mother’s heartbreak. When we opened up the caravan it was still dank after its winter abandonment. We made tea, and lay on the damp bed. Dave seemed nervous and I found the whole thing uncomfortable, and somewhat disappointingly my magic button was totally overlooked in the whole business. However, the attempt at adulthood seemed to have bonded us, and we walked back through the woods conscious that some rite had been undertaken.

  My mother looked on happily, eager to see me getting started and putting into action the many life lessons she believed she had instilled in me. She had never been very interested in my childhood clothes, but now we would drive into Liverpool where we crammed into changing rooms as she enthusiastically dressed me up in outfits that made me look older, and we splashed out on make-up and underwear. She bought me a set of knickers with slogans like ‘Please, please me’ on them and thought it was hilarious.

  On Saturday nights Dave and I would now come home from meeting friends in the pub to watch Match of the Day on the television in our downstairs party room, and we would shag, in an unimaginative teenage way, to the rousing rhythms of the closing theme tune. At one point my mother would shout down the stairs, ‘Get your knickers on,’ and bring us a tray bearing that Seventies treat of two cups of Nescafé made with frothy milk. I don’t remember whether the sex was pleasurable or not; it was a badge of honour and I imagined that the more we did it the better we would get at it. Dave was sweetly dedicated to being a good boyfriend, polishing up his mother’s white Vauxhall Viva before picking me up on a Friday night, taking on a Saturday job so that he could buy me the weekly Mixed Grill and an Irish coffee at the Fox and Goose Berni Inn, and saving up his No. 6 cigarette coupons for a locket he’d seen in the catalogue

  As the holiday approached my excitement rose, and soon Dave, his mum and dad and I were all on the plane heading to the Spanish resort of Benidorm, me reeking of my new Kiku perfume. Dave had bought this at duty free, and on the flight he whispered breathily in my ear ‘Faberge made love and called it Kiku.’ Everything about that holiday seemed the height of adult sophistication and way more exotic than any of the places I had travelled to with my mother. Fiji and Borneo paled beside the flowering oleanders and dark back-street bars of that Spanish town with its resort hotels and heady aroma of Ambre Solaire and cheap scent. At night we went to Tito’s disco with our holiday friends – Ken was a London cabbie and Estelle a beautician who gave me a makeover, false eyelashes and all – and we’d sway back drunkenly through the warm air to the hotel. It was heaven: no Mummy, just me all grown up with my very own man.

  We got home to what felt like a perfect teenage summer. There were Friday-night dances at a tennis or cricket club, or the church hall. The girls would dance around their handbags in a circle; the boys would play air guitar with their eyes closed. We bopped about to Mungo Jerry’s ‘In the Summertime’; if they lowered the lights and played T. Rex it felt decadent, and at the end of the evening we would find our mate and slow-dance to something like Herman and the Hermits’ ‘My Sentimental Friend’. On Sunday nights we piled into Vince’s three-wheeler, which stank of Brut aftershave, and listened to the radio play the top hits with a countdown to number one. Then we arrived at the youth club to smuggle in Vince’s father’s home-made brew, known as Old Fart, and play ping-pong and taunt the skinheads.

  The days went by in a happy haze of lying on rugs in the sand dunes, with languid afternoons listening to more sophisticated rock music in our party room – Cream and Led Zeppelin – and then wandering into town to pubs and coffee bars just for the sake of going somewhere.

  My mother was constantly in the wings of this new teenage life, wanting to join in or give me advice. She made it clear that, while Dave was a nice boy, we were aiming for something much greater than this, although I had no idea what she imagined. She just needed to feel involved, and I would catch her peering in through the windows of the cricket club as we danced, and I’d run out to see her driving off. I was often torn between wanting to include her and wanting to keep her out. At times there was perhaps a faint taste of revenge for all the occasions when she had made me feel excluded.

  My dread of summer boredom had passed during those weeks, and I only felt a lazy contentment made possible by my sense that I was now a proper grown-up. I was sure that some foggily imagined amazing new life was about to begin.

  But that Summer of Love was the summer of shagging and clumsily used condoms. I had ignored my missed period and for some weeks my breasts had been swelling. I woke in the night with waves of agonizing pain, sheets wet with blood. I reluctantly called my mother who summoned our kindly local GP, Dr Farnsworth. He knew us well and looked very grave as he sent us to the hospital to have the remains of my pregnancy dealt with.

  The news that I’d been pregnant at the age of fourteen somehow galvanized Peter into action. He was appalled, and no longer able to watch from the sidelines. He had possibly worked out other things about my lack of schooling, and about our life before their marriage. Whatever the catalyst, there was a sudden change in the balance of power, and the chief effect of the unbalancing was the disastrous impact on my relationship with my mother.

  25

  Rebellion

  IF MY MOTHER had been aware that I was taking off those ‘Please please me’ panties she had bought me she certainly didn’t confess that fact to Peter. She played dumb and acted as shocked as he was. He was so horrified that she couldn’t argue with the rules he now insisted on.

  I was banned from seeing Dave, who was going off to Manchester University and a new life, despite his protestations that he would be faithful to me and ‘wait’. I never for a moment considered waiting, and had already found someone else.

  Phil was a printer at the Southport Visitor, and to my eyes quite perfect; he was a bearded, long-haired hippy and several years older than Dave. As an escort he was ideal, as he looked so grown up. We went off to London, and my Honey magazine diary from that year records: ‘Went to a club near Piccadilly Circus, had breakfast in Soho.’ But Peter was furious, and my mother was told to take immediate action. She discovered that Phil was desperate to go away on a trip to France with some mates, so she gave him a hundred pounds and my stepbrother Keith’s camping equipment in return for going off and never seeing me again. I was shocked that he accepted.

  My reaction to this was to behave as badly as possible. I had travelled through some gateway to the world beyond home, and I couldn’t find my way back even if I’d wanted to. The house I’d been so delighted with, the family life I’d craved – normal meals around a kitchen table with a nice daddy looking after us – had all been realized … but too late.

  Peter looked on in misery as I told him to fuck off, screaming, ‘You aren’t my father, stop telling me what to do!’


  My feelings towards my mother were more confusing. I hadn’t missed what I hadn’t had; I hadn’t blamed Audrey for being an unconventional mother or for making her way in the world as she did. I had mostly adored her, admired her and found her hugely entertaining and amusing. I had also, at times, found her jaw-droppingly selfish, wilful and demanding. Above all, I knew that I didn’t want to be like her and that this was a danger. The force field of her will had been such a part of the air I breathed that I needed to escape it, but I had no idea where to go. There was fury that my own independent dreams of a bigger life might depend on an education that I’d now scuppered, so all that remained for me was to find a man who could take me away.

  My school attendance had always been poor, but I now never went at all and instead spent my days hanging around the town looking for trouble. I smoked dope constantly and met a much older man, a drug dealer with a fancy car, and spent afternoons in his bed. I ran away to Manchester and was brought back by the police. I came home hours later to an ashen-faced Peter, and at one point I hit my mother, knocking her over. Rage would rise up in me at the sight of her.

  My mother went through her own crisis, pale and unrecognizable, as if her power had somehow ebbed away. Peter just looked on, shocked at what was being revealed, but not knowing how to help us. My mother would suddenly get up from the kitchen table in tears at my coldness, or shut herself away in her bedroom. She felt some rewriting of our history was happening, behind her back, and didn’t know how to defend herself. I remember once, not long after she and Peter had got married, hearing Grace call her ‘a delinquent mother’, and she wept at this and said that she was ‘only trying to find us a future and someone to take care of us’, and she had, hadn’t she? She had found us a daddy.

  During those months of unhappiness I felt that our hunt for love had never been about me. It had all been for her. Throughout those years, I reflected, I’d always been right there at her side, someone who loved her, and whom she could have loved back; but I was never enough. It wasn’t me she wanted; it had never been me. She had wanted a man, someone who would take care of her and give her the life she was searching for. I wondered whether, as well as sharing my father’s two left feet and bookish ways, I also shared his sad eyes: filled with the knowledge that she could never love us enough. Had I always been not good enough? Was I a mistake?

  Me in my teens, Southport.

  Then I managed to get pregnant again. I think it was an act of rebellion, a signal that I was an adult not a child, a desire to provoke change, and in some ways it worked. The Young Eve, with its delightful promises of a happy and successful life, now lay abandoned, languishing on the bookshelf with my once-loved novels and poetry books. I might have burnt them all if I’d thought of it, as they felt full of some false promise of a life I could never achieve.

  The three of us drove in silence to Edgbaston on the outskirts of Birmingham, where the abortion clinic was buried in a residential area of huge impersonal houses. The doctor was rough with me as he examined me internally, and when I protested he said, ‘If you are old enough to get into this condition you are old enough to deal with the consequences.’ My mother hovered around me, paler and quieter than I’d ever known her.

  The night before the operation we stayed in a hotel and I remember how Peter couldn’t eat his meal, and had to leave the dinner table and find a quiet corner of the lounge where he sat with his head in his hands. My mother looked guilty, clearly feeling she had brought this on him. He had married her and taken on a lovely young daughter, and within a couple of years that daughter had turned into a monster.

  It was at that moment that things changed for me. I saw this man sitting almost in tears and realized that he really cared. He wasn’t upset for himself; he was upset for me. He wasn’t angry; he was terribly sad. This idea slowly took root in my mind and then became inescapable. He was a nice, kind man and he wanted to help me. The thought finally penetrated the shell of teenage anger and self-absorption.

  I remembered how far we had come to find him. The travelling, the men, and how much I’d longed for a normal father figure. My mother’s search may have been driven by her own needs, but hadn’t I been on my own search too? Now we had found what we had been looking for, just what I had always desired, and here I was hurting him. He only wanted to be ‘the daddy man’ and I wasn’t letting him. I had needed to be saved, and now I wasn’t letting him save me.

  When we got back home, he sat me down and offered me a life. I remember the conversation clearly. He said that if I carried on like this, I would never do the things I had once talked about. He said I would be lucky to get any sort of job. His trump card was suggesting that I could go south, and not live with my mother any more. If I would let him coach me, and pass just four O levels, then I could go to a sixth-form college in Oxford where Keith, my stepbrother, was now at university. He would find me a room and pay an allowance into a bank account for me. And if I got a place at university he promised that I would find the life I was looking for. He said that I was clever enough to do any of the things I had talked about – to be a writer or film-maker, or put on plays – any life was possible, but this was the decisive moment.

  The promise of independence swung it, and a growing desire to please him. My mother regarded us with pity, sometimes making unhelpful remarks about not turning me into a bluestocking. Her comment that ‘men don’t like women who are too clever’ almost caused their first row. It was a rare thing for him to be so annoyed with her, but he couldn’t conceal his displeasure. So she went quiet and simply looked on as this new plan unfolded. She was clearly horrified by the idea of my leaving home, but never believed it would happen. My recent anger had shocked her enough to allow Peter to take charge, but she told herself that this was just some horrible phase I was going through and she would soon win me back.

  Peter drove me to Oxford to see the city in early summer. It was Eights Week, when students race rowing boats along the river and sit on grassy banks beneath weeping willows eating strawberries and drinking Pimm’s. It was beautiful and seemed full of promise.

  Looking back, I see how much this shy man had thought about how to handle me. He not only showed me the grander pleasures of the university colleges, but he also took me to a darkly romantic folk cellar and drove me through an area of squatted houses where the hippies roamed. We went to a student production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a college garden with a huge magnolia tree from which Puck climbed down while Titania danced through the audience as we sat on blankets among candlelight.

  By the time we got home to Southport I was more than convinced; I was dying to go there and would do anything to achieve it. Without this new passion for Oxford I would never have got through the following months. The long hours of tutoring at the dining table were agony at first. Peter tried in vain to explain some basic mathematics, and was horrified at my total ignorance of many subjects. Only my English essays seemed likely to get a good grade without much effort. He thought I might enjoy art history, so bought me lovely art books and took me on trips to Liverpool to explore the paintings in the Walker Art Gallery. As we talked about them, I became excited, finding that, with his gentle encouragement, I had things to say about them. He also found ways of making history more interesting to me, and gradually I began to love these sessions. They gave me the same feeling I’d had during those moments as a small child, when my father and I would be together in his darkroom, quietly sharing some activity or other.

  My mother seemed sad and excluded, waiting restlessly for me to come back into her orbit. She never believed that I would really go.

  Me, happy at fifteen.

  By the summer exams I was reasonably prepared and the O levels were attained. It was real; I was about to leave home and Southport for ever.

  AT FIFTEEN I am taking the first steps along my own yellow brick road, and the towers of Oz are glittering ahead in the sunlight. Peter drives us all down in his big brown Mercedes, the b
oot and back seat piled with suitcases full of my jumble-sale costume collection. It takes several hours and my mother is pale and fretting, worried about the idea of ever doing this journey in her small Triumph Herald, but she doesn’t like to drive a big car. Peter says that she has got the pair of us ‘round the world and back’ so should be able to drive herself to Oxford. Now he is settled into married life he is finding his voice, which is firm but gentle, with an edge of light teasing. I realize that she is feeling bereft, and my own anger ebbs away, now that I am leaving her behind. I suddenly adore her again, and feel that I will miss her terribly.

  At last we arrive at a large red-brick house in North Oxford, with a driveway packed with cars and excited girls. They all seem unreal and slightly theatrical, with several astonishing beauties. My mother is looking around in wonder and I can see how she loves it all. She keeps remarking how everyone seems so much more glamorous than she expected. Her dislike of education and general suspicion of Oxford as a nest of bluestockings is quickly evaporating.

  Peter is now struggling up the stairs of the big Victorian villa that houses the first-year sixth-form girls. He brings up the second load of my luggage to the room that I’ll be sharing with three others, and I look at the narrow wardrobe wondering where to put it all. My mother can’t bear to leave the theatre going on around her, a first act from which she will soon be cruelly taken away.

  She has been busily finding out the names of all the more flamboyant-looking girls and making them laugh, and now whispers to me which ones I should be friends with. Finally, Peter manages to coax her away by suggesting tea by the river. She makes me promise to call her every night, and even has tears in her eyes. Are the tears just about leaving me? Or are they because it isn’t her who is about to live this amazing new life? I can’t tell.