by Ford, Donna
I realised that the anger I felt watching displays of affection came from the fact that I had a huge problem with close contact. It was almost as if I had to set myself challenges. My first task became clear – I had to learn to cuddle and accept physical closeness.
One of the girls who worked beside me was called Elaine. She was a beautiful tall girl with long curly red hair, reminiscent of a pre-Raphaelite painting. Elaine had a wonderful sense of humour and would always have us laughing at any opportunity. The most important thing of all was that she was one of those girls who thought nothing of hugging people. She would just come up and hug you for no reason! At first I found this difficult and I can recall feeling myself freeze, going absolutely rigid at this innocent display of genuine affection. As time went on, however, I grew more and more responsive to her hugs, and before long I was able not only to receive but to give as well.
Those few initial steps towards recognising how I needed to put myself together coincided with two other important developments in my life. First, I was put in charge of an art group in Canaan Lodge – the children's home – and received the first acceptance of my artistic talents I'd ever experienced. Second, I met my future husband.
Meeting Robert was my first big breakthrough. I adored him from the moment I saw him. First and foremost, I liked the look of him, especially his big brown soft eyes, the same eyes our daughter Claire has. As I got to know him, I liked his gentle ways most of all. He was intelligent and kind, and had no problem sharing his knowledge.
I used to go out with other members of staff at the children's home who were the same age – to the local pub or downtown to a disco. What was important here for me was that I was accepted. I was just like all the other young people. They had come from good homes and been reared with strong values but they didn't see the scars or the filth I felt was etched on me.
Robert played a huge part in my transformation. On one of our evenings out in the pub with all the others he asked me out on a date, a proper date! I was bowled over, excited and nervous, but I needn't have been. Our first date was wonderful. We met in a local pub and had a few drinks before going for a meal. It was so lovely, so normal. Robert walked me back to the children's home and was very gentlemanly throughout, even when he kissed me. He asked if we could go out again, and of course I said 'yes'.
The more we saw of each other, the more we fell in love. He never came on to me; he never asked anything of me and he would say lovely things to me. He told me that I was beautiful and that he adored me. These words were so alien to me, words I had never heard before. It was easy and wonderful and very, very normal. I never told him about my past because I didn't want anything to sully this special time. All that I told him was that we were very poor. Robert never asked any more than that as he just liked me for me.
This was my first real reciprocal adult relationship. It was also my first opportunity to discover that I could enjoy sex, although that took a long time to happen. When we eventually made love for the first time it was the most natural thing in the world because that's what it was – making love. Meeting Robert turned my life around. Just as importantly, he came with precious baggage – a loving family.
His Mum and Dad lived in a big detached house in the grounds of Greenlea Old People's Home where Robert's Dad was the officer in charge. As our relationship developed, I began living with them, although in a separate bedroom. When Bob and Flora heard that it was going to be my 21st birthday they said that they would like to throw a party for me. This was a revelation. As they had a big garden we decided it would be nice if we had a garden party, so that's what we did. There was a barbecue, a buffet and music outside. All my friends from work were there, as well as all of Robert's friends. It was a party that I had never seen the like of before, a proper, happy party with dancing and singing and lots and lots of fun. It was the party of my dreams and, to top it all, we then got engaged and moved into our own home together.
My life was finally beginning.
Chapter Twenty-three
CONTRASTS
THE HAPPIEST MOMENTS OF MY life are etched in my mind so deeply that I can call on them whenever life is hard and I feel at a low point. Those moments are my relationship and marriage to my first husband Robert, the births of my three children, and my achievements as an artist. These memories are magical – the times when I have truly been at my happiest.
I called on this magic throughout relationships that were threatening and abusive; and I called on it again when my world was being turned upside down by researching my past. Doing this reassured me that I had succeeded, and that I was entitled to wonderful experiences. I haven't enjoyed looking into my past because of the pain and distress it has caused me, and because so much of it is ugly and wrong, but it is comforting to know that some areas of my life – the areas I have had control over – have been good and rewarding.
I have been married twice. The two marriages – and weddings – were in stark contrast to each other. When I married Robert, I was young, happy and in love. I looked forward to my life with my husband, to building a home together and planning our future. I thought we would be a couple for ever. Robert proposed to me by getting down on one knee. We each chose a ring, and mine came from a little jeweller called Bassi in Bruntsfield, south Edinburgh. They designed and made all their own pieces, and I was so pleased to have a say in what my ring was to look like. I chose a tiny gold lovers' knot with two perfect diamonds sitting in each of the loops. It was such a pretty ring and I was overjoyed with it because it was the nicest thing I had ever owned. More importantly, it united me with the man I was madly in love with. The ring for Robert came from a jeweller in Edinburgh's Rose Street called Scott's. His was a masculine square band striped with yellow, red and white gold.
Robert had many friends from school and we would all meet as a big group to go to dances and parties or just to each other's houses. Sometimes we went on holiday together. Many of these friends got engaged and married at the same time as us, and we all loved to show off our engagement and wedding rings and talk about our plans.
Our wedding was very different from those of most of these friends. They had grand plans, and most of the girls had mothers who took them to look for dresses, organised invites and dealt with all the machinations that go into a wedding. Robert and I set about trying to organise it ourselves, and I think this was the first time it hit me how different I was from other people.
I didn't have a clue how to organise a wedding so I was fortunate to have a good friend called Maura who had worked with me in the children's home. Maura was a little bit older than me and was to be my maid of honour. She helped me look for a dress and for shoes and all the things that go with a girl's big day.
I have such fond memories of Maura. She was a lovely, kind person and great fun, almost like an older sister to me, given that I felt I no longer had my real one. She left the children's home because she wanted to start a family, but we kept in touch with each other. When she gave birth to twin boys I often travelled down on the bus to Penicuik where she lived to help her out; it was a struggle for her as one of the boys was quite poorly. Her husband was a wine merchant and had a cellar full of the most wonderful bottles. One time when I visited we opened one of these bottles of wine after a hard day of seeing to the twins' needs. When her husband came home from work and spotted the wine bottle almost empty, he said to us, 'Did you enjoy that, girls?' We'd thought it was wonderful, which was lucky given that he told us it was vintage and worth about £50, a fortune back then!
Robert's Dad organised and paid for our service and reception. With his help, we had the best wedding ever. We were married in Queen Street Registry Office on 12 June 1981, just a week after my 22nd birthday. I felt funny that day – happy, but odd. I was delighted that I was going to marry the man I loved, and I was so appreciative of all that his parents were doing, but I was obviously aware of the fact that I had no real family beside me on what should have been the happiest day of my
life.
I remember beaming from ear to ear when Robert kissed me as we were declared man and wife. As I looked around at that moment, I saw Robert's Mum and Dad, his two sisters and their husbands, my two-year-old nephew Matthew, my little niece Hannah, who was only a couple of weeks old, and our mutual friends. I felt full of love and belonging for the first time in my life.
From the registry office we were driven to the hotel in Humbie where we had our reception. It was a beautiful Scottish baronial mansion set in its own grounds with wonderful gardens. At the end of the day Robert carried me over the threshold of our house, which was next door to his parents' home. This was the first night we spent in this house together. Up until that point we had lived with Robert's Mum and Dad. Through respect for them, we'd slept in separate bedrooms, even though we were enjoying a healthy and happy sex life by this point. I was in love and I really belonged somewhere.
As we honeymooned in Corfu, we made plans for our future. How could I fail to be happy in a world so very far removed from the one I'd known as a child? I was loved and protected, but I was also young and, at last, I was allowed to enjoy the wonders of my youth.
Chapter Twenty-four
MR AND MRS
I LOVED THOSE EARLY DAYS OF married life, of making a home. I painted and decorated our little cottage and made all my own curtains. I cooked lovely meals for Robert and we went out with our many friends. For the first time I was a homemaker in the real sense of the word as I was making a home for me just as much as I was for Robert.
Our life was a little eccentric, I guess. Robert loved animals and we had a menagerie which included a parrot, some lizards and a golden Labrador called Sally whom we would take for long walks up the Pentland Hills. We travelled a lot, holidaying in Greece during the summer of our first year together and going on weekend trips to Amsterdam or over to St Monance in Fife with Robert's Dad.
The pair of us would often babysit for Robert's older sisters, Fiona and Andrea. I loved my nephew and niece, Matthew and Hannah, from the moment I met them. I painted a wardrobe for each of them – Matthew had a brightly coloured jungle scene all over his. He was fascinated watching me paint, and leaned on my shoulder as I covered the wardrobe with snakes and monkeys, lions and tigers, all hidden in green tropical foliage. Hannah's, in complete contrast, was painted with butterflies and flowers. They are grown-up now, and we all laugh at the stories I still like to tell them of my nappy-changing exploits. They love to hear of the times when they were little, and I am so happy to be able to give them some of those memories knowing that they were safe and protected as children within a loving family. These were happy, wonderful times and it seemed as if nothing could ever spoil the joy I was feeling.
Robert left his job in the Social Work Department and set up his own business in the grounds of a garden centre, selling both tropical and pond fish. This was the business that was intended to set us up for life. He sold ponds too, and would fit them into people's gardens, full of plants and koi carp. I still worked in the Social Work Department. I had moved from the children's home just before we got married. Word had gone around that they were going to close this big home, and many of the staff were being moved to smaller units throughout Edinburgh. I decided to move before that happened and managed to get a position working in an adolescent unit in the Southhouse area of the city.
This transition was quite strange for me. I was happy to be moving, even though the move brought with it a certain amount of trepidation. I was settled in the place where I'd been working; I had lots of friends there, and was a little worried that I wouldn't find this in my new environment. Luckily for me that wasn't the case, and I soon made friends with the staff in the unit and the young people who were resident there.
The only blot on this new landscape came in a confrontation I had with someone else who worked there. This man was an older member of staff in a relatively senior position. I didn't take to him from the word go because I saw in his character something I didn't like, something I recognised from my childhood. Very soon, I could see that he intimidated many of the young people there. He was a bully and extremely threatening, quite a loathsome man.
The unit was small, with around 12 young people living there. Usually, there were two members of staff on shift at a time. One evening when I was working there with him, I witnessed at first hand his bullying behaviour towards the young people. I just couldn't stand it. I was outraged – he was misusing his position of authority, and being abusive to the very people he was supposed to be protecting. All my sense of injustice and unfairness about my own childhood flared up at that precise moment, and I challenged him. He obviously saw me as a young person too. I was only 20 at the time and looked very young for my age. He then started bullying me and threw me out of the unit, saying I'd been sacked.
He had no authority to do this, so I went to a phone box and called a very senior member of staff at the Social Work headquarters. It ended with me taking out a grievance procedure against this man for his conduct. He was demoted and put under supervision, but continued to work in the unit. A few years later, he was finally sacked over another incident. This time I wasn't involved. Why he was ever given a job in the first place is beyond me. What I did take from the incident was that my sense of there being bad in people was heightened, no doubt due to my childhood abuse, and that I should be aware of this part of me.
While this business was going on, it was a difficult time for Robert and I because it threw up things for me from my past. I still didn't tell him anything. I just couldn't. I was very stressed during this period, and for a while I was unable to be as intimate with Robert as we had previously been. We did argue a little about it but I refused to even consider that it might have any connection with my childhood. At that point, those years were buried for me – or at least that was what I thought.
We did get over things and our life sailed along as normal. I helped him with his new business when I could and we went back to having fun together. I liked my job but was beginning to look to the future, and took various night classes in art, English and history. I passed all of my exams in these subjects and felt good about myself. I also started to learn to drive. Inspired by the fun we had with our niece and nephew, Robert and I began discussing when we would start a family.
We were looking to the future, but my past was still there, waiting to creep into my life again.
Chapter Twenty-five
OBLIGATIONS
WHEN I WAS IN MY TWENTIES, my father was admitted to hospital. He was suffering from emphysema, as he had done for years, but now he had also had a stroke so things were looking particularly bad. With enormous trepidation I went up to Edinburgh's Royal Infirmary to visit him. I say with trepidation because I hadn't had any contact with him for a couple of years as I had decided to get on with my life with my new husband and put the past behind me.
I was shown into the big ward where he was and pointed in the direction of his bed. Don Ford, my Daddy, lay there in a big hospital bed. He looked like a very weak and broken man, surrounded by hospital paraphernalia and struggling to breathe. Looking up at me through his thick glasses, in a laboured way he said, 'Hiya, hen!' as if it was only yesterday that I had seen him.
On that first visit, we made small talk; he asked me to get him cigarettes and I refused. He had hospital pyjamas on that were far too big for him and, as I stood there uncomfortably, I cringed with embarrassment at the thought that this was my father. I'm ashamed to say that I just wanted to get out of there.
After being on the ward for 10 minutes or so, I was taken aside by one of the nurses who, knowing that I was his daughter, asked me many questions about his lifestyle and suchlike. I answered as best I could; I couldn't really give her any information as I hadn't seen my Dad for such a long time. I was uncomfortable, but I couldn't leave just yet as the nurse wanted to explain a few things to me. She said that he was malnourished, and that they were having difficulty getting him to eat. She paused and then aske
d if I could maybe coax him to have a few mouthfuls of something. I reluctantly said I would try. So the nurse went off and returned quite quickly with a bowl of scrambled egg. Handing it to me, she said: 'If he doesn't eat, he'll die.' To be perfectly honest, that comment didn't bother me as he meant so little to me. When I look back, I find it very sad that this was all there was between a father and daughter. I knew by then how good father and daughter relationships worked because I saw how my sisters-in-law had caring, loving relationships with their father; but here I was in this hospital with my own, desperately ill Dad, and I resented every minute of it.
I approached him, clutching the bowl of scrambled egg. He looked up through his glasses and said, 'What are they saying? What are they saying about me? Did you get me some fags?' I said that he wasn't to smoke and that he was to eat. 'Look,' I said, avoiding calling him Dad, 'I've got some scrambled egg here. You need to eat if you want to get better.' I put the bowl down on the table in front of his bed, beside the used tissues and little paper cup that he spat into, and tried to coax him to eat.
