More Than Just Coincidence

by Julie Wassmer

  A whiff of rebellion remained in the air after the events of 1968 and clearly it still motivated John. So as well as learning about the storming of the Bastille and the fall of the Ancien Régime, we were treated to updates on strikes at European car plants. Like all good teachers, he considered himself to be a student, too, and apart from being brilliant at his subject he was funny, irreverent and always ‘one of us’.

  A year later, I had my two A-Level passes: a B in English but an A for history—as, I assume, did all John’s other students. David, meanwhile, had won a place at Wimbledon School of Art. It wasn’t all plain sailing by any means, but we were going forward together.

  The first hiccup had come in the summer of 1972, immediately after I sat my final exam. I took off to the pub to celebrate with a group of fellow students and, in a moment of madness, accepted an invitation to head straight off for a weekend jaunt in the Hampshire countryside. There I ended up having a brief fling with another student from my English course. Maybe it was a kind of emotional altitude sickness after ascending from the depths of despair to the exhilaration of having finished college; maybe I was subconsciously trying to recapture the chunk of my teenage years I felt I’d missed out on. Whatever the reason, David was deeply upset and my dad, feeling for him, took him off dog racing to try to cheer him up.

  Once I’d recovered my equilibrium we patched things up, and when David started his foundation course at art school we set up home together in a rented flat in Wimbledon. He wasn’t awarded a grant for the foundation course so I did a variety of short-term jobs to support us financially—bar work, temping for an agency in central London and even the odd spell as an artists’ model at the art school.

  Times were tough and there were a lot of people on the dole searching for work. Only two weeks after Sarah Louise’s birth in 1970, the Conservatives had returned to power under Edward Heath and had set about trying to rein in the unions. Since then there had been massive inflation, pay restraints and high unemployment. War in the Middle East sent oil prices rocketing and there were strikes by everyone, it seemed, from civil servants to London dockers. Most significant were two mineworkers’ strikes over pay.

  My father was still fighting to save the Royal Mint from being moved to Llantrisant. By this time he was spending more time at Westminster than he was at the Mint, and counted several Labour MPs as his friends. Outraged and appalled by the government’s unwillingness to negotiate, he was encouraged by the strong popular support for the miners, which he saw as a good omen for his own cause.

  In the New Year of 1974, in an attempt to conserve fuel resources, the government introduced the infamous three-day week. People had to work by lamplight or candlelight, if they were able to work at all, government ministers advised us to take baths in the dark, there was a 50mph speed restriction on all roads and the television regularly shut down at 10pm. David and I dampened stale bread and reheated it in the oven. It was what I imagined wartime austerity to have been like.

  On the eve of my twenty-first birthday we were staying with my parents. It wasn’t much of a celebration as I’d ended up in bed with ’flu. My father brought me soup. He wasn’t well, either: he had a stomach upset. After a few days I was better but he was much worse. He was in a great deal of pain and could not keep any food down. He believed he suffered from gastric ulcers but he had little faith in the ability of the medical profession to cure them. It was clear to my mother and me that the stress and uncertainty of the situation at the Mint might well have aggravated my dad’s condition but he was too scared to see the doctor. He had watched an uncle of his develop stomach cancer and was haunted by a vivid memory of visiting him in hospital in his final days. Scanning the ward for the robust man he knew, my father had been horrified to see something resembling a shrivelled monkey in his place.

  My father was finally persuaded to see Dr Teverson, who recommended hospital tests. I was at work, temping in London, when I got a call from my mother. At the hospital, a doctor had informed her it was cancer. She hadn’t told my father and could not contemplate doing so. I understood exactly how she felt. Relying on my old friend denial, I convinced myself that he would pull through. My mother was equally convinced that he wasn’t going to survive. I knew she was haunted by her own ghost: her dead brother, Johnny.

  We told my father that he had an ulcer that required surgery. He was apprehensive about the operation but relieved to be having the problem attended to at last. He was even more relieved not to be hearing that it was cancer. He recovered quickly, declaring that he felt like a new man.

  In the meantime, Ted Heath had called a snap election and had been defeated, leaving Harold Wilson to lead a minority Labour administration. When Wilson accepted a pay board’s recommendation to award the miners an ‘exceptional’ pay rise and agreed to invest in new coalfields, my dad was grimly satisfied. There was to be no good news in his own battle with the government, however. The closure of the Mint at Tower Hill was by now irrevocable: the transfer to South Wales was on course to be completed by the end of the following year.

  My mum refused to even consider relocating to Wales. She had been evacuated to Fishguard during the war as a teenager and had been so homesick she had run away and returned to the East End to dodge the bombs with her mother. She would never cope with living away from London. But I knew my father would not cope with empty days. He had worked all his life and lived for his work. What on earth would he do without it?

  For now he took time off to convalesce and he and my mother started to get out and about in a way they hadn’t done for years, taking trips to Goodwood races and coach excursions to the seaside. In the background, the spectre of redundancy was looming.

  One morning at Gullane House, I hear him retching in the toilet. The cancer is back.

  Chapter Eight

  The Road Out

  Although we never spoke of it, my father must have known he was dying. Just as I had done when I was pregnant, he put off going into hospital for as long as he could. Like father, like daughter. But in his case there was a crucial difference: he was in no doubt that once he went in he would never come out.

  Eventually Dr Teverson admitted him to Homerton Hospital. The Salvation Army Mothers’ Hospital, where I had given birth, had since been assimilated into Homerton. The place where Sarah Louise had entered the world was to be the same place from which my father would leave it.

  During his last weeks he grew weak and was in constant pain. Having been a cheerful optimist all his life, he was now not only scared but dogged by depression. The workers at the Mint were being laid off and a friend came in to visit bringing papers for him to sign so that he wouldn’t lose out on a redundancy package. Everything was failing him: the Mint, his health and perhaps me, too. When I was sitting at his bedside one day he asked me to place my hands on his stomach. It was as if he believed I could heal him with my love. I leaned closer, spreading out my fingers across his abdomen. We never talked about the cancer growing in his belly or the baby that had grown in mine. He confessed only that he was irritable when visitors came and lonely when they didn’t.

  When the doctors administered morphine he was euphoric. With the pain suddenly alleviated, he thought he had been cured. When he learned that the improvement was down to drugs, he felt cheated. Now he began to deliver warnings: I should give up smoking, I must never take drugs, I should find a man to take good care of me. This last command was a clear criticism of David.

  It was now the autumn of 1974. In the summer David and I had bought a tiny flat in Wimbledon, which we could just about afford with the aid of a council mortgage. David, having completed his foundation course, was about to start his fine arts degree. From September he would be on a full mature student’s grant—and so would I. The casual work I’d taken on to support us wasn’t exactly fulfilling and, feeling that my life was losing momentum and my mind was beginning to stagnate, I had successfully applied for and won a place to study for an honours degree in English and hi
story at Kingston Polytechnic in Surrey. I relished the prospect of being able to lose myself in books for three whole years.

  Over the summer I had been spending a lot of time with my parents as my dad’s condition began to deteriorate. David and I had seen little of each other. But it had not escaped my notice that he was growing close to a girl from his foundation course. He always seemed too busy to visit my father and my parents sensed that something was wrong. It was clear to me that I was unwillingly becoming a corner of some kind of love triangle, but both David and his girlfriend kept insisting their relationship was platonic. We muddled on through the summer, with David absent most days but still technically living at home, until finally I was confronted with incontrovertible evidence that he was being unfaithful.

  I was hardly in position to cast the first stone, having briefly gone off the rails myself a couple of years earlier. This, however, was more than a fling: my boyfriend was in love, but not with me. I should have been heartbroken but my father’s illness put the fact that I was losing my partner into perspective. David was still alive and well, whereas my dad, the only constant male presence in my life, would soon be gone forever. There was no doubt in my mind as to where my priorities lay. The knowledge that my partner was involved with someone else, though upsetting, was not insurmountable. What did hurt me, and indeed made me feel utterly betrayed, was the deceit. And his timing was rotten, too.

  I made an appointment with a doctor in Wimbledon who prescribed Valium. It took the edge off my jagged emotions and gave me the confidence to do what I had decided I must do. I packed up David’s things, rang him at his new girlfriend’s flat and told him that if he had any feelings left for me at all, he should collect his belongings and move out.

  In the end it was a civilised split, thanks to a doctor’s prescription. With hindsight, I know that I made the right decision in bringing matters to a head because David’s relationship with his girlfriend turned out to be a significant one: they went on to have children and were to stay together for almost twenty years.

  My mother, on the other hand, was unable to accept what she saw as David’s desertion. One evening when I was at Gullane House she phoned him at his girlfriend’s flat and begged him to come home to me. He explained that he couldn’t, but she carried on relentlessly trying to persuade him. I listened from the kitchen, eyes tight shut, vowing that never again would I trust a man to catch me when I fell.

  So when I started college that September, I did so as a twenty-one-year-old singleton. I had been there only a matter of weeks when I had a late-night call in Wimbledon from the hospital to say that my father was fading fast. My mother was already at his bedside and I should have left home immediately, but instead I stalled for time, waiting for the morning light and hoping to be spared another goodbye in a hospital ward. I was. By the time I arrived, it was too late for words.

  I left my mother sitting in a corridor while I went into my father’s ward. The curtains around his bed were drawn but through a gap I could see doctors pounding on his chest, trying in vain to restart his heart. His mouth was open and the life was running out of him. I ran out too, back to the corridor, where my mother registered the terrible shock in my face. She, of all people, knew how obstinately I had been hiding from the truth, hoping against hope that by some miracle my father would survive. By now we were both world authorities on denial.

  We went home in a minicab. At some point in our journey a gentle reggae song by Ken Boothe began playing on the driver’s radio.

  …And I would give anything I own,

  Give up my life, my heart, my home.

  I would give anything I own,

  Just to have you back again.

  My mother started to sob quietly beside me. This time, as I took her hand in mine, it was my turn to say, ‘Don’t cry.’

  After my father’s death, I took to spending every weekend with my mother. I managed to suppress my grief over the double loss of my partner and my father —or suppress it enough to be able to function normally. I took sanctuary at college, just as I had at the library after I’d given up my baby for adoption, immersing myself in my studies while I recovered, knowing that here I didn’t have to explain anything to anyone. I was just another student working hard for her degree.

  My mother, however, wasn’t coping on her own. She still had her job at the coffee house but she would return at night to an empty home and drink three bottles of Guinness to help her sleep. Gradually she developed the habit of adding nips of vodka or brandy. Alcohol was becoming her refuge, just as the pub had been all those years earlier. Now, though, she didn’t seem to go out anywhere except to work and the hairdresser’s. Increasingly, she began to live her life vicariously through mine.

  She gave me £2,000 of the money my dad had left her—most of which must have consisted of his redundancy compensation from the Mint—to assist me in holding on to the Wimbledon flat. Even so, with the whole mortgage to pay on my own I still needed to work to supplement my grant. As I had to keep weekends free for my mother, I got an evening bar job.

  Not long after my father died, we heard that he was to be awarded the British Empire Medal. My mother and I were invited to tea at 11 Downing Street to receive it on his behalf from the latest chancellor of the exchequer, Denis Healey, who sent a smart car to collect us from her council flat. Had my father been alive it might have been quite an occasion. Although he had never been one for pomp or titles (and leaving aside his feelings about what had happened to the Mint), I think he would have allowed himself a little pride at having been recognised for his loyal service to the institution and to his fellow workers. He might also have been keen to take a quick shufti round the chancellor’s quarters.

  During his struggle to keep the Mint at Tower Hill, my father would not have dealt much with Denis Healey, if at all, as by the time Healey took office in the Wilson government elected in 1974, my dad was already ill. Evidently the chancellor had not been properly briefed about the recipient of the medal because he put his foot in it straight away by asking why Mr Wassmer had been unable to make it that day. If my father had been alive my mother would have been chuffed to have entered 11 Downing Street on his arm. But her grief was still too raw and her reaction to the chancellor’s mistake was bitter. She dropped her usual deference to her ‘betters’, filled him in on his error and proceeded to berate him about the high mortgage rate I was paying.

  The last coin to come out of Tower Hill, a gold sovereign, would be struck in November 1975—almost exactly a year after my father’s death. It was the end of an era.

  Meanwhile, my dad’s sister, Aunt Joan, and her husband Fred came to visit my mother, bringing a stranger with them, an elderly lady. I stood up quickly as my mum showed her into the sitting room and introduced her to me. ‘This is Lil. Your grandmother.’

  At long last Lil Wassmer, née Tolliday, was standing in front of me—short, plump and dressed in a black coat with a bright paste brooch on the lapel. I scanned her face, searching for similarities between us. I could detect only one: she had the same dark, curly hair I had struggled to straighten as a teenager, though as she must have been eighty years old by this time, she may have needed a little help with the colour these days. I could see she was the woman I remembered from a small black-and-white photograph I had once glued into an album. It showed my father as a young man, sitting on a country fence with his mother standing beside him. It had been taken on a working holiday they had spent together picking hops in Kent. In the picture my father wears a short-sleeved shirt, unbuttoned at the neck. Suntanned and healthy, he smiles for the camera. Lil’s arm is behind him, possibly holding him, a warm palm pressed against his back. They are close, not just physically, but tied by the bonds of blood and love. What caused them to break those bonds? And perhaps more important, what was it that prevented them from ever being reconciled?

  Lil took off her coat and sat down on the sofa beside me, accepting tea from my mother. I wanted to ask about an argument ov
er the cooking of roast beef but my mum was chatting nervously, filling the conversational gaps created by my father’s absence. Did Lil know I was studying for an honours degree? Did she know that Billy had received a posthumous honour which had been presented to us at Downing Street by Denis Healey?

  As my mother talked, my grandmother looked at me sitting there beside her. Perhaps now it was her turn to search my face for evidence of herself or her Billy. But I was a stranger, too. Her son was gone and we all knew it was too late for them to be reunited.

  I spoke up and told Lil about the day we had all gone to visit her. She glanced at my mother, as though seeking confirmation.

  ‘It’s true,’ my mother said.

  I explained how, on that rainy afternoon, we had stood on Lil’s front doorstep. As I recounted the story, I had an image in mind of my father lighting damp cigarettes with nervous fingers. Lil thought for a moment. ‘I would’ve been at Joan’s,’ she decided. ‘I was there most weekends.’

  She didn’t ask why we hadn’t come again or why we had never mentioned our abortive visit to Aunt Joan. An almost reverential hush descended on the room as if everyone was privately mourning a lost opportunity.

  My mother stood up and went into the kitchen to make more tea. Lil stared down at tense fingers. The blood that ran through her veined hands was the same as mine, and I was considering something else we had in common: we were both mothers who had lost our children. I kept that to myself. And my mum, returning now with fresh tea, did the same.