Escaping

by Henrietta Taylor

  It was this idyllic childhood experience — minus the illness — that I was trying to recapture for my own children.

  Twenty-four hours after takeoff from Sydney we arrived travel-weary at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam and changed for the plane to Glasgow. Tick. Two children were by my side and our two suitcases were in the trolley. Double tick.

  Auntie Mindel and Uncle Henry were waiting at the arrivals gate in Glasgow, looking extremely dapper in their naff Scottish cashmeres and tweeds. We would be staying with them for a few days until I could get a rental car organised and then — fingers crossed — we’d be off on three weeks of adventures by ourselves.

  As we all left the airport we went through the usual polite conversation about the trip. Just as Mimi was about to mention the fact that I had already lost her brother, albeit only for a minute or so, I rushed over and began wiping furiously at her face. There was no need to explain how Harry had been tired and had sat down on the moving luggage carousel and ended up travelling out to the loading bay. It wasn’t as if we hadn’t found him again. After all, I had pinned a label onto the inside of his coat. Calm. Zen. Earth Mother. This was the new me — only a little bit hung over from the free whisky on the plane and a tad exhausted from the jetlag.

  I had bought the best-quality wheeled luggage, which according to the very cute male sales assistant was ‘easy enough for a child to pull along’. But somehow it didn’t perform as expected crossing the long and uneven car park. As Mimi struggled beneath her bag I could see Auntie Mindel’s massive black eyebrows knot with tension and despair. Obviously she would have to sort out her brother’s wayward offspring. What was he thinking, allowing a highly unstable mother of two to wander the hills of Scotland by herself? By the looks of her she wouldn’t be able to find her way out of a paper bag, let alone a huge metropolis like Glasgow!

  Staying with relatives is always stressful, and when you have two little children who have never experienced the constraints of apartment living, plus the magic ingredient of massive jetlag, the combination shoots off the angst scale. The whole night nobody slept. I resorted to taking large swigs of the whisky I had actually bought as a present for my aunt but had forgotten to give her in the confusion; a very large nightcap at 7 am seemed more than reasonable.

  As Mindel handed me a morning cup of tea, she reeled back from a whiff of my whisky breath. Those eyebrows shot straight up, knitted together and then contorted into some sort of wriggling caterpillar, which is not a pretty sight when you are half-smashed and completely exhausted first thing in the morning.

  Within minutes, I could hear her on the telephone hotline to her younger sister: ‘Yes, Rita. She drinks first thing in the morning. I don’t know what we’re going to do with her. There is no way I am going to let her take those children out of this house. I’ve given up my golf this week to look after them. She seems completely deranged. I blame Jack and Sheilagh. Totally reckless. She has no idea about disciplining those children. They were running around last night at 2 am.’

  I could tell that Mindel was on a roll. Rita was more than likely busy making herself a cup of tea on the other end of the phone and just putting in the odd word of agreement.

  ‘Look, I’m just not prepared to look after her and the children for weeks on end. What are we going to do?’ Mindel wailed.

  What was she going to do? What was I going to do, more to the point! I could hear them making plans for me and the children to visit Rita and her husband Arthur for lunch that day. They were concerned that I might get lost. I wanted to shout out that the signs in Glasgow were written in English, not Chinese, but I bit my tongue. Mindel sighed, saying that she would probably end up having to drive us over to Rita’s house.

  My temper flared; I refused to be painted as the village idiot. I stormed out of the house, armed with my address book and clutching a child in each hand. I would show them that I could cope. Needless to say, my address book was out of date and I had to resort to calling Auntie Pearl’s son Lewis en route to find out Auntie Rita’s current address.

  Rita’s daughter Sheila had organised a large family dinner for the following night. The family clan congregated to fly the flag of support for the weeping widow cousin, who apparently was a dipsomaniac and probably a nymphomaniac as well. Sheila had taken over the role as eldest cousin; technically it should have gone to Lewis, but Sheila couldn’t stand the thought of coming second to anyone. None of us ever called her bossy — not to her face. I knew that if I weren’t careful she could easily sway me into staying with her for the entire month so she could ‘fix up’ my life.

  I felt out of my depth once again when we were all gathered around the table and a benediction was said: ‘Baruch atah adonai, eloheinu melech ha-olam.’ I looked about me; did I fit in here? The three aunts, Mindel, Rita and Pearl, with their matching black caterpillar eyebrows, stern faces and snowy white hair, all looked like their brother Jack — in drag. I couldn’t see that I had much in common with them; even though they had hearts of gold, I was of their family but not of their religion.

  I didn’t want these virtual strangers interfering in my relationship with my children. I was resolute that time was the major factor in my rehabilitation — time alone with them, time to learn how to be a mother again. The moment had come to make a gracious exit.

  Luckily, I’d already managed to organise three weeks’ car hire for us. Straight after breakfast the following morning, we piled our luggage into the new car and headed off on our quest. Uncle Henry gave me very explicit instructions to get us onto the motorway out of Glasgow. Auntie Mindel stood in the hallway, shaking her head in dismay and hoping that no harm would come to us. I knew she’d be straight on the phone to my parents as soon as I left — she wouldn’t care what time it was in Sydney.

  I had no definite plans and no accommodation booked, but the west coast of Scotland looked very appealing. Uncle Henry’s instructions were perfect, but somehow while heading out of Glasgow I took the wrong turn on the motorway and realised that the Scottish west coast would have to wait: we were going south into England. The Lion King was blaring on the stereo and juice bottles, apples and toys tumbled around on the back seat. It was just the three of us again. What a relief.

  As we travelled south, I decided that the Lake District would be a good area to explore, starting with the town of Keswick. The Keswick tourist information centre gave me a list of suitable bed and breakfasts, but when I saw a hotel on their books with childcare, an indoor pool and heavily discounted winter rates, I knew that it was meant to be.

  We spent the next few days visiting beautiful villages like Windermere, Grasmere and Ambleside. The highlight was Bowness, where there was a museum of life-size characters from the books of Beatrix Potter. I wandered off into my own private daydreams, arriving at the end of the large exhibition only to find that I had managed to lose both Mimi and Harry. The attendant, handing back my sobbing children, sized me up and found me seriously lacking in the mothering department. As Mimi and Harry flung their little arms around my neck and covered my face with kisses, I realised once again that though I would happily walk across glass for my children, I wasn’t very good at keeping an eye on them.

  Travelling with young children is hard work. No matter how good they are, there comes a day when there is dissension among the troops, and today Mimi was leading it. No, they wouldn’t get into the car. They wanted to be on their own. Couldn’t I go somewhere and disappear? I wanted to spend every waking moment with them, but they were accustomed to an incomplete mother and were certainly in no hurry to change the routine. The back seat would erupt into chants that they wanted Paula from the nursery.

  So, leaving the children at the hotel’s childcare centre for a couple of hours, I went on my own to Cartmel and Hawkshead, where I half expected to see Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple marching along the pavement or coming out of one of the quaint little tea shoppes.

  But being on my own only brought my furies back out of their box.
The beauty of these villages did little to assuage the spectre that trailed me as my shadow. The empty pit never left me. No warm scones with clotted cream and pots of English Breakfast tea would ease this numbness. With Norman’s betrayal still hanging over me, I was desperate to sob my heart out, but still nothing was forthcoming. My heart had frozen over.

  There was no communication with family and friends except by outrageously expensive landline telephone every couple of days or weekly airmail letters or postcards. No mobile phones. No laptop computers. No emails at Internet cafés. In 1995, the great electronic breakthrough was on its way, but not for the average tourist travelling the wilds of the Lake District. So pouring out my heart to anyone was completely out of the question. I had to learn to cope on my own.

  Telephone calls back home to my parents were greeted with long silences and the ever-present pregnant pause. I could sense that my mother was weighing up the situation, ready to grab her passport and a handful of sterling pounds from the pile of travelling money stashed next to the vacuum cleaner.

  ‘Honestly, I’m fine. The children are wonderful. I’m coping so well. I’m not drinking and I’m eating really well. My skirt is almost tight.’ Most of it was true.

  At every local cinema the Disney movie Pocahontas always seemed to be showing. At least nobody died in this Disney film; it was about a love affair between Pocahontas and an English soldier named John Smith. The previous year both children had found The Lion King emotionally traumatic, as little Simba’s father Mustafa died early in the film — though luckily not from cancer. We had rented the movie weekly from the local video shop, as if it were a sore they had to pick. I tried to be circumspect about the types of films we viewed, but sometimes it all went wrong. Once we were asked to leave Sydney’s IMAX cinema after Harry, barely three years old, sobbed hysterically at seeing a baby elephant collapse during a drought in the African desert. That was bad enough, but then people in the surrounding rows burst into tears too after they saw us all crying, and heard both children wailing that it was just like when Daddy died. There hadn’t been a dry eye in the house. Needless to say, I was truly grateful for Pocahontas.

  So far, the freezing cold weather that had been forecast for England and Scotland hadn’t arrived, and every day we woke to clear blue skies and dry weather, unheard of in November. It was the fifth-mildest autumn since records had been kept, but of course there was an Arctic snap predicted. Our thermal woollies were at the ready as we headed up the Solway coast back to Scotland. Strong winds with possible snow flurries were making their way across the seas and were due to hit with a vengeance somewhere on the western shores of Scotland. Exactly where we were heading.

  Driving slowly and cautiously, we made it to the coastland around Ayr, where thirty years earlier I had chased my cousin Gerda up and down the promenade as we pedalled frantically on our little bicycles. Our month spent in Ayr with Auntie Pearl, Uncle David and their children had been full of happiness: learning to ride without training wheels, eating sherbets in straws, even attending the local school. But Pearl and David had moved back to Glasgow, and so far there didn’t seem to be even a glimmer of the same happiness to capture for my children. It was out there somewhere. I just had to find it.

  We headed further north, still driving along the west coast, and soft sleet began to fall as we literally slid into Oban. The last part of the drive had been frightening. I hoped the sleet wouldn’t turn into snow. I loved the snow, but I didn’t want to drive in it. Meanwhile, the children were more interested in the poster they had just spied on the building across the street from our hotel. Pocahontas was playing at the cinema opposite, so it was a must for the three of us to go to the early afternoon session followed by a celebratory arrival dinner. Life was almost fine. But feelings verging on maternal bliss were quickly eradicated when the children insisted that we go back after dinner for the evening session. Our quest for happiness was rapidly turning into a Pocahontas Tour.

  The feared snowstorm did not eventuate; instead, the sky was heavy with ominous grey clouds. When Mimi asked me if guardian angels could fix the weather I wasn’t entirely sure how to respond. We headed off on the ferryboat to the Isle of Mull — first stop Craignure, and then up to the northern tip of the island. We found our way to Strongarbh House, perched on top of a little hill overlooking the minuscule port of Tobermory, which was flanked by rows of primary-coloured houses. The sight was breathtaking. Memories of Portofino on the Ligurian coast of Italy sprang immediately to mind. The sheer physical beauty would surely have a positive effect on my emotional state.

  It also seemed to be affecting my physical state. There was an odd sensation in the pit of my stomach, something I hadn’t felt for a long time: I was finally becoming hungry. Maybe I was getting better. Finally I felt I was moving forward with my children. My friends the Wise Sages were wrong. I wasn’t taking two steps forward and one step back. I was marching full steam ahead.

  With the children safely tucked up in bed that night, I decided to splash out on a delicious meal for one. The restaurant at Strongarbh House was beautiful, decked out with huge bouquets of winter flowers and golden leaves and branches, and alive with a hum of activity. I could be accommodated in a little alcove off the main room, designed for intimate dinners or singles. I knew which category I fell into. Determined to enjoy myself, I perused the menu in anticipation of a gourmet Scottish dinner.

  The moment I saw the balloons and streamers decorating the room I should have realised what was happening. Some lucky man was celebrating his fortieth birthday, and everyone present was in fine form — except me. Norman had only just made it to his fortieth year.

  Choking back the tears, I only managed to swallow one mouthful of the delicious prawn and salmon concoction I’d ordered before I rushed out of my discreet alcove and stumbled up the stairs to seek refuge in our room. Even several glasses of malt whisky had little effect on my shaking hands, the cold beads of sweat on my forehead, the erratic beating of my heart and the shivers going up and down my spine.

  Eventually I returned to my alcove, to be greeted by a worried waiter fussing around my table. ‘Just checking on the children,’ I told him firmly, hoping that he wouldn’t notice my jittery hands and slightly tear-stained face.

  Picking up my fork and opening my well-thumbed guide to Scotland, I was ready for my first meal in a restaurant by myself. I could do this. Two steps forward.

  After two days touring round the Isle of Mull, the whole place was making us feel claustrophobic. I was tired and cranky and the children were fighting with each other. Both of them bleated that they missed their videos and television. There wasn’t enough on the island to occupy two children their age. So we waved goodbye to the Isle of Mull and turned our attention to Loch Ness Monster hunting. Finally the children entered into the spirit of things as we headed for Loch Ness, spying three-headed monsters behind trees and rocks, which obviously meant we were going in the right direction.

  But after Loch Ness we’d all had our fill of car travel and constantly changing hotels. We’d visited countless museums, aquariums and gift shops, and every cinema and playground on the west coast of Scotland. We had a bag stuffed to the brim with treasures found along the shore: strange driftwood, weird shells and smooth pieces of glass. Sometimes I could barely make out the children’s faces on the back seat, as they were submerged under a sea of stuffed toys of every colour and size.

  By now we had spent seventeen days driving around Scotland, the expected bad weather staved off with help from our guardian angel. Mimi stated that she knew Norman had come on the trip with us, and I had to admit that most times I didn’t feel completely alone. The whole thing had turned out better than expected, but the constant decision-making was starting to lose its appeal. We started the journey back towards Glasgow.

  En route we stopped at the town of Crieff, passing cinemas with posters for Pocahontas plastered everywhere as we headed towards our accommodation at the wonderful Crieff Hydro, w
hich had seen better days but had tremendous childcare facilities. No backward glances as Mimi and Harry trotted off to the nursery hand in hand, with a new Paula to care for their every need. There was an indoor pool thrown in for good measure. Who could ask for more?

  In retrospect, things seem so much clearer. The pool water went straight into Harry’s fragile ears and began to brew a lethal infection that would manifest itself forty-eight hours later on our flight to Amsterdam.

  My cousin Lewis and his wife Carol had invited us to stay at their farm outside Glasgow for a couple of days before we flew across to the continent. Carol and Lewis both had a reputation in the family for being almost too kind and generous. I crossed my fingers that they would extend some kindness to me in the form of childcare. I was falling in love with my children all over again, but I was still desperate every now and then for some time alone.

  The two days with Carol and Lewis were superb: the children drawing with coloured pencils in front of the fire, the adults in socks and casual attire sipping on Italian wine, the bubbling stew on the stove wafting its fragrance throughout the house. On the Sunday we had a memorable brunch of smoked salmon and other goodies with Pearl and David and other family members. Another two steps forward. I was in recovery mode, almost confident and happy. Scotland and my family seemed to be curing me.

  But our idyll came to an end too soon. We had to be in Amsterdam to pick up Kate’s daughter Zoë. Kate and Mark had eventually agreed to let me take her with us to the French Alps. I can’t remember what I said to convince them that I was capable — more fibs, most likely. We waved goodbye to Lewis and Carol and their Labrador, Spike, who was still recovering from the shower of vomit he had received by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Mimi had thought it was a spectacular show from her little brother. Carol was worried it was a sign that something more serious was developing in Harry’s little system, but I was sure it had more to do with the excess of chocolate he’d consumed. If only I’d listened to her.