Drowning in the Shallow End

by Charlie Mellor

  Visiting aunties and uncles I’d not seen in decades, I was presented with a series of faded photographs of someone I didn’t know. I discovered the wistful blonde girl in all of the pictures was called Janet. Here at last, in my hand was proof of her existence, the big sister who had never been discussed. According to relatives, this pretty little girl was the reason my parents had married - to avoid the scandal of a teenage couple with a baby out of wedlock. Only eight years later, the same Janet Mary Mellor who would rip them both apart when she was brutally killed in a head-on collision with a car travelling at speed on the road immediately outside their first house.

  The accident happened on Maundy Thursday or Holy Thursday, an important celebration for the Catholics. Janet was walking back alone from confession at the local church. On route, she spotted one of her school friends and darted across the road to say hello, but was knocked down before reaching the other side. It was late afternoon and Janet was just yards away from the security of her own front door. Both my parents were devastated, with Mum in particular struggling to get over the enormous guilt she felt.

  Unravelling all the clues, I carefully pieced together fragments from the past. While all of it was brand new information, the emotions each element provoked seemed uncomfortably familiar. Every detail unearthed, fuelled my desire for greater knowledge. More determined than ever, I orchestrated a series of unnecessary work trips to Lancashire breweries to enable access to a specific microfiche reader at the Harris Museum in Preston. I spent days painstakingly reading archived copies of local newspapers from the late 1960s, until I eventually found a single article ominously titled Instantaneous death following impact with a Landrover. According to the dispassionate report, buried on page thirty-two of an evening paper:

  An eight year old girl was killed in a road accident on Thursday March 23 The unnamed driver of the vehicle failed to stop immediately after the road traffic accident, but later handed himself over to the police. A police spokesman said the girl was killed instantly.

  Shortly after securing a print of this distressing article, a copy of the original death certificate arrived in Scunthorpe. Describing the cause of death, this was more visceral in its description:

  Transection of the brainstem and spinal cord due to crush injury to the skull sustained during incident with car.

  For a couple of days, I did nothing but read this fierce injunction over and over again, transfixed by its graphic description. As the weeks passed, it was this single statement which brought the impact of the terrible accident into full focus. While the brutality of the language hit me hard, I suspect it also helped me to accept the finality of it all.

  Conscious there was very little left to unearth, I decided to compose a short letter and travel to the gravestone to read it out loud. By taking time to craft all the things I wanted to say to my unsung sister, I forced myself to filter and sort a multitude of random thoughts and emotions which had probably been distracting me for years. The act of putting pen to paper somehow made her more concrete and in doing so made me feel a little more complete. Although standing in front of the weathered headstone was very sad; I didn’t feel the need to mourn, nor was there any urge to track down the driver of the vehicle involved and seek some kind of belated retribution. I accepted the tragedy was in the past. Thanks to Pennie Fenton, I had achieved what I’d set out to achieve and discovered precisely what had happened to my sister.

  This whole process took no more than a month, but by the time I’d finished I felt lighter and more restful with myself. Pennie had helped me. Somewhere in the depths of my subconscious this knowledge had always existed and now, assisted by her, was able to claw its way back to the surface.

  As I considered the impact of Janet on the wider family unit, I began to appreciate the sense of isolation my sisters and I had felt and why I’d often thought something was ‘missing’. Mum and Dad had refused to ever talk about the accident, with each other or with the wider family and immediately following Janet’s funeral all reminders of her were removed from the family home. According to relatives after the burial, we all became like grieving apes, who following a death in their band, stop communicating with each other. This made sense to me and helped me understand the slightly pushed-down sensation which I’d always believed characterised the emotional climate in our house. The only other house where I’d felt the same atmosphere was at Joe Morrit’s. It was no surprise I was able to function so effectively over there – I knew the rules. No wonder Joe and I had connected so well.

  Revisiting my family’s past, helped me to understand some of my responses in the present. Now in a more informed position, a number of childhood reactions started to make a little more sense to me. Perhaps the reason for the extreme response to being left with nuns on the first day at school wasn’t just about feeling abandoned. Maybe some of my expressed trepidation was because I’d witnessed that ‘out of sight’ really did mean out of mind for my parents. If I wasn’t around for any period of time, perhaps I too would be forgotten in the same way Janet had been.

  Additionally, it was possible my years of dreadful driving may have been shaped by this ‘buried’ incident. The more I thought about it, the more I remembered how my mother had put the fear of God into me about cars, forcefully encouraging me to take great care when walking along the same pavements where Janet had been killed. The message I received as an impressionable toddler was clear and repetitive: Cars are dangerous, cars can kill. I am still able to hear this replayed tape as it loops over and over again inside my head. This adopted mantra makes every trip seem far more exhausting than it ever should, as I continue to overestimate the potential threat presented by the shortest journey in a modern-day Ford Focus.

  Each new realisation which followed, regarding who I was and why I behaved as I did, made me a little happier about myself. I could almost feel a sense of strength emerging which up until this time I’d never thought existed. The most sobering association I made was in relation to the potential consequence of pushing down all those feelings about what had happened to my departed sister. Could it be, I wondered, that an imposed repression of this event had actually sent me on a trajectory towards unhealthy relationships as a teenager? Had a failure to deal with the loss made it inevitable I’d suffer with poor esteem and ... perhaps as a teenager, be drawn to girls like Lucy and Bronwen? This was a chilling thought because if I followed the unpalatable suggestion through to conclusion; it implied that Pennie Fenton’s twisted calling card may also have been sent on the very day Janet died, printed on beautifully embossed hand-crafted card and marked for my attention.

  While Ms Fenton had certainly been the inspiration for my research, it was telling that she was nowhere to be seen during it. What was she afraid I might find? Her absence concerned me to start with but then the longer it continued, the more I was relieved she wasn’t about. I began to acknowledge that her company wasn’t as much fun as it used to be. Many friends had lost patience with her controlling ways and others were becoming annoyed by her increasingly spiteful asides. It was also undeniable that Pennie’s presence had contributed to Allan and me losing touch with many of our good mates. Given the choice of a pleasant meal with trusted friends or spending precious time with her, guess who won every single time. Therefore, I came to the easy conclusion that some distance between Miss Fenton might not be a bad thing. To achieve this aim I would need to resist her many charms and, crucially, admit to myself I had become almost as dependent on her company as a gambler is on that ‘one last flutter’.

  The self-imposed break from Pennie helped me to see more clearly how our insular association had made me feel quite miserable. By probing into the most deeply buried aspects of my childhood, Pennie had inadvertently provided me with the fortitude I needed to extricate myself from her. It really surprised me just how quickly this detachment came about. One day I was as tightly wrapped around her little finger as Annie’s bra had once been wrapped around mine (straight after The Last Ilfr
acombe Punk had tried to sever it with shears); the next day I had cast her aside. I effortlessly replaced all the ruminating about Pennie with an overwhelming desire to look forwards, to be with Annie and the kids, to drive my career and complete the renovation of our slightly shabby house.

  As soon as Pennie and I stopped seeing each other, everything positive in my life was accentuated. I felt happier and more alive than I’d been in years – like an elastic band which had been stretched further and further, had now been released. Relationships at home and at work immediately improved. With Pennie out of sight, no one could conquer the blue skies above. I felt clearer headed, more alive, less lethargic and mentally sharper.

  Not only was I more vital, but I also felt more willing to take on new challenges and new responsibilities at work and at home. Within a matter of months, I was the husband father and friend I should always have been. At work I was sponsored to do a professional qualification in human resources and following exam success, was promoted twice in the space of six months. Most importantly I had time. Time for Annie, time for the children and time for myself - so much so, I wondered where it’d all come from. I seemed to have a never ending well of reserves to draw on and this meant progress was made in virtually every aspect of life.

  Acutely aware of how much better I was feeling, I started to resent Miss Fenton and the way she had falsely positioned herself as ally and confidante to us all. She was always superb at subterfuge and, looking back, I could see she’d managed to deceive Allan, Kirsty and myself about the extent of our reliance on her. Perhaps we’d been kidding ourselves all along that we called the shots. Maybe Pennie had been pulling our strings for years, maintaining her stranglehold by ensuring those of us closest to her had neither the time nor the inclination to explore what she was really all about. My God, this was starting to make sense. By getting us to fixate on our many demons, we’d failed to consider the possibility that Pennie was our biggest vice, our one all-encompassing foible. It suddenly struck me with all the force of a cartoon anvil falling from a cliff, that the greatest of all our secrets may actually be the one about her. Pennie Fenton had become our leper messiah and we were her loyal disciples.

  Finally, the Pennie drops, I thought to myself.

  Pennie Fenton could never be the girl we all wanted her to be. Truth be told, Pennie Fenton wasn’t even her real name. Her full title was actually Miss Tetrahydrocannabinol, more commonly referred to as cannabis, also known to many as marijuana, spliff, hemp, ganja, weed, grass, gear, stash, hash, blow or pot. The term ‘Pennie Fenton’ was always intended to be a ruse - a way of concealing our dirty little secret. She was, after all, simply an alias – an invented name used by Allan and myself to allow us to talk more freely about our growing obsession – our engulfing dependency on this so-called soft drug.

  Over a year without a single joint had at last brought me to my senses. I saw what Stacey and Stuart had seen, what everyone from outside our immediate smoking clique had been telling me for ages… Allan and I had gone to pot and cannabis was messing with our minds. All at once the sandstorm blowing in my head stopped spinning. Cannabis was not my friend, my confidante or my ally. Cannabis was my compulsive addiction, my drug. It was the ultimate expression of my many weaknesses. Acting as an ambassador for my failings, it undertook its duties with incredible zest. Gifts and talents were systematically undermined as increasingly strong joints seeped into my subconscious in search of hidden vulnerabilities. Preposterously, the more that was brought to light, the more I thanked cannabis for it, wrongly assuming its presence was in some way helpful. The more I praised it, the closer we became until eventually I was pretty much unable to function without it. Benefiting immensely from our recent unexplained break, I could see that I hadn’t simply become dependent on my old flame; I was addicted in every sense of the word.

  As with many forms of slavish adherence, my unhealthy infatuation with cannabis had developed at a slow and insidious pace. I’d heard the terms pot, blow, and resin many times before my inaugural spliff, but naively thought these were all different drugs. I first saw a lump of cannabis resin on that fateful afternoon at Lucy’s house when a tiny bit had been left on the arm of the sofa. Studying it, I was hit by an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. It was like I was looking at something I recognised well, but couldn’t understand why. Perhaps I was witnessing an omen of great portent – a glimpse of an important future memory – sending a signal to myself about how familiar this substance would eventually become.

  Cannabis intrigued me after hearing about its effects, as described to us by Andrew Hoare’s sister. She’d hung out with many of the local Ripon bands and enjoyed showing off just how cool she really was. Her many references to the drug were her way of letting her little brother’s friends know we were in the presence of a sophisticated girl about town.

  Initially, I didn’t enjoy smoking it very much, as it made me feel a little nauseous. Witnessing the inebriating effect it had on others (who usually spent hours giggling and laughing about the most inane things); I’d put up with the queasiness and persevered. After a few smokes, I enjoyed how everyone became less reserved, less guarded and more inclined to share their true thoughts about things. I also loved the fact that smoking a joint was probably the most rebellious thing I’d ever done. Something a little subversive: an illegal activity.

  The reason for calling cannabis ‘Pennie Fenton’ came long after those teenage adventures. The name ended up being an invention born out of necessity, a construction deliberately designed to mask the insatiable appetite which Allan, Kirsty and I had developed for getting stoned. To help understand how things descended into such a ludicrous situation, I need to rewind to what happened just after my school days.

  Nene College was always much more about alcohol than cannabis and for those three carefree years, I was either, too loved-up, too drunk or too busy revising to need any additional forms of stimulation. It wasn’t until Gav Langham arrived in Ilfracombe that I reflected on how much I enjoyed smoking the stuff. If I’m honest, the real reason why Langham pissed me off so much back then was partly because he was a lazy bastard, but mainly because he would never share his stash of cannabis. Fast forward a decade, we were all in our thirties and suddenly access to cannabis became a whole lot easier... as a matter of fact, in the mid-nineties I knew more people who ‘spliffed-up’ than didn’t. While alcohol continued to be our main relaxant; the addition of a ‘bit of blow’ every so often provided an exotic accompaniment to any ensemble. The fact that smoking cannabis remained the wrong side of legal enhanced its appeal, in the same way it had done when I was a teenager.

  I’d been especially surprised to discover my little sister smoked the stuff and then equally pleased to find out our new friend Allan Hewitt also partook. Egged on by such social approval; it was inevitable my intermittent flirtation with the intoxicating relaxant would evolve into heavy petting. This was long before cannabis became the narrow and tedious experience I grew to adore. I was pleased the drug wasn’t anything horrifying like heroin, cocaine or LSD. Cannabis was after all, made from simple plant leaves – the very same ingredients used for medicinal purposes in China for five thousand years we would tell ourselves. It was a few years before we heard how unscrupulous dealers mix the cannabis resin with all sorts of bulking agents - crap like henna, beeswax, milk powder and old engine oil.

  In an attempt to manage my obvious enthusiasm for getting stoned, I’d decided to cadge joints off people rather than purchase any for myself. I was always happy to pay Kirsty and Allan for whatever I wangled off them, just reluctant to deal with outsiders. It wasn’t a money thing or being tight; I just felt the need to distance myself from the sharp end of this social lubricant. This way if someone else brought some ‘gear’, I would readily participate, but once they’d gone back home; the option for me to continue smoking had effectively been removed. I remember Stuart summarised my lack of control very succinctly one night after watching me get wasted at a party
.

  “I hate it when you smoke pot because you never know when to stop,” he said.

  “As ever Stuart, you are probably right – I’ll try anything twice,” I glibly replied.

  Even though I’d told myself that cannabis wasn’t addictive; some part of me was aware of an innate orientation towards dependency. Therefore, my own rule of engagement was never to have any left in the house after a social event. The only time I ever actually broke this regulatory measure was if one of my smoking partners came round for a big weekend session. On such occasions, I’d always ask them to leave me with a little piece of resin so I could roll one for myself on the Sunday night as a way of relaxing before returning to work.

  Stoned, everything became a little lighter, brighter and more vivid. Jokes and anecdotes were more believable, music and films more absorbing. Verbal fluency was improved and it was easier to make associations between concepts and events. Back then, I particularly enjoyed the relaxation cannabis offered. It took the edge off things and made me feel very content. For someone with a tendency to be quite a worrier, perhaps a little tense, this was really beneficial.

  Actor Anthony Hopkins once said he’d been attracted to alcohol because he’d lived with an enduring suspicion there was something else in life, something more. I could relate to this. In those early days, cannabis provided me with an opportunity to channel my own desire for ‘more’ of something. Like Hopkins, I felt incomplete at the time and thought that smoking (much more so than drinking alcohol) would help to fill this void. By getting stoned, I saw myself in search of enlightenment, on a voyage of discovery. I genuinely believed the ‘authentic spiritual self’ was more likely to emerge after a few spliffs. The intention was that one day, under the right conditions, if I smoked enough of the stuff, I would undergo some form of wonderful awakening - experiencing a revelation which would miraculously transform the way I viewed the world.