There's Something I've Been Dying to Tell You

by Lynda Bellingham

  He admitted though that one had to make oneself feel like that a bit just to be able to get up there in the clouds and go for it, and I am sure we can all understand that feeling. By contrast, however, years later something came up about the war and he just sat there with tears rolling down his face. He couldn’t talk about it.

  Carl’s sister Leona (the silent screen star) wrote her brother a poem and it was published in a local paper. It is heart-rending in its expression of love for her brother. It makes me wonder if perhaps his pursuit of women was to rediscover the kind of love he received from the likes of his sisters when he was young. It must have been very hard to return from Europe to a new world but with the same old work prospects. What were his dreams, I wonder? I don’t imagine he dreamt of ending up a welder in the same factory as his dad.

  This is Leona’s poem:

  A Sister’s Prayer

  Written to my beloved brother, Carl S. Hutton, serving God and his country in France.

  God pity Women – the Mothers most,

  When the world’s at war, and the fighting hosts

  Must take their Sons, the heart of their hearts,

  Oh – God it is pitiful when they must part.

  The sweethearts will miss them,

  Some will be true;

  But there is another, God, and I loved him, too.

  I am only his sister, older than he,

  But his boyish troubles he brought to me.

  Sweethearts would fail him, life wasn’t worthwhile

  ’Till he came to his sister, and she could smile,

  Then sweethearts forgotten and that laddie knew

  That a woman loved him, with a love

  That was true.

  I can’t reach him, God, he is ‘Over there’

  YOU take my message, YOU are everywhere.

  Tell him I am waiting and praying too,

  That his dear feet will trod the paths ever true.

  He will be tempted, God, his soul will be tried,

  But I shall be waiting, my heart open wide,

  Filled full of love, and joy, and pride.

  Though the years may be long, or his dear body maimed,

  His sister is waiting, her love the same.

  Please give him that message, God,

  It’s just from me,

  A sister’s prayer entrusted to thee.

  I cannot imagine that my father can have been such a bad man to have inspired such a poem. Weak, maybe, and disillusioned, but not bad. When I look now at a photo of him in his uniform, a cheeky grin on his face and these incredible eyes, I keep expecting him to wink at me!

  He died young at sixty-two, just as I am going to do at sixty-six. Is he trying to get me up there with him to make up for all those years he never communicated with any of his children? I say up, it could be down, couldn’t it?!

  But in the meantime, I have one more thing to do and that is to write to the father I was never able to know and hope to change his legacy a little, from the sad and lonely death on a gurney in Bellevue Hospital, Manhattan, on 22 December 1959, to the head of what is hoped will be a long line of strong and fulfilled Hutton men, with a good sprinkling of Italian seasoning to boot!

  A letter to my unknown father

  August 2014

  Dear Mr Hutton, or should I say Father? Dad? Mystery man? Everyman,

  My name is Lynda Bellingham and I was born in Canada in 1948. Your name was not on the birth certificate but there is ample evidence that you are my father and Marjorie Hughes was my mother. Perhaps you remember her? She was one of your conquests on the good ship Rangitiki. I get the feeling it wasn’t an unusual occurrence.

  Please don’t think this is going to be a letter of reproach, far from it, it is by way of setting the record straight in my head. I have neglected you too long, and now that time is short and I have so much to tie up before I drop off the twig, I wanted to make sure I’ve got it all out.

  I am looking at your photo on my desk as I write this and although you are the epitome of the handsome cheeky chappie with the ‘devil may care smile’, I cannot help but sense sadness and disappointment in your expression too. As you are now dead and gone, and have been for many years, I can in a way take as much theatrical licence as I like, and write a story to suit my needs as your abandoned daughter.

  It sounds very dramatic, doesn’t it? It’s also not entirely correct, but from what I have learnt you did seem to have made a habit of leaving children lying about! I get the feeling you did not feel empathy with the fruits of your loins. If you were my son I would have told you to be more careful and keep it in your pants! But again I sense you had a need to be loved and wanted by women, and then when the dratted children came along they got in the way and stole the attention away from you. You are not alone in this. I think quite a fair percentage of men feel neglected if the truth be known, and they probably have good reason to be.

  However, I want you to understand that I understand, and it is a great regret to me that we could never meet because I think you would have liked me. From all the information we have about you, I cannot tell if you had other daughters; I am sure you must have done even if you didn’t know about them, but maybe meeting them might have helped you get back on track.

  You were obviously the golden boy as a baby. You were loved to pieces and, dare I say it, spoiled rotten. You must have felt like the world was going to be your oyster. When you went off to Europe in 1916 you were so young; what dreams you must have had then. Yet you came back to the same old, same old. Why did you not escape like Leona did? You might have become a film star – you certainly had the looks. What happened to you, Carl? Was it the war? So many young men seemed to lose their nerve or their zest for life after seeing so much death and destruction. You got married to Helen when she was four months’ pregnant – was that what put a stop to your ambition?

  It is so strange because I can see in you so much of what I used to go for as a young woman, the bad choices I made with boyfriends. You are a Gemini like me. You were born 1 June, I was born 31 May. I had two Gemini boyfriends who both broke my heart because they could not commit. The first love of my life was called Karel (Czechoslovakian spelling), how is that for a coincidence? The second, in my twenties, was an actor who was always cheating on me. Then I married a man who had a constant stream of women and made me feel so small and insignificant I tried to commit suicide, just like your sister Leona did. Were you there for her then, I wonder? Then I married a man who really seemed to dislike women, and I feel had something in common with you in that I always felt he had to be the centre of the universe and would shout and scream if that didn’t happen. However, he did give me two beautiful sons and, unlike you, I engaged with them and made them part of my life, and they have kept me alive through thick and thin.

  My biggest problem has been to try and teach them how to be strong independent men, with hearts, and not let them think men are weak if they love a woman. I finally found the right man in 2004 and, dear Father, I wish you could have met him just as indeed I wish my adopted father Donald Bellingham could have met him too. He is kind and strong and, though he can be pig-headed and self-opinionated, he has a huge heart of gold and has taken us all on. How I can be so mean as to die on him is beyond my understanding.

  Talking about my other father, Donald Bellingham, brings me to the subject of nurture over nature. My dear dad (we will always assume I am referring now to Donald) was my hero. He was of a generation that no longer exists, I fear. He fought in the Second World War, in Bomber Command and was very brave and decorated for his war efforts. But he was also incredibly shy and self-effacing. People sometimes took this to be a weakness but that was always a big mistake. He was uncompromising in his outlook, though I like to think he was fair. I gave both my parents such grief as a teenager and used to say that it was all in my genes. Strangely I blamed my mother’s side and suggested because she gave me up for adoption she must have been weak and worthless. She probably drank too
much and had lots of men, that was my judgement of her. Looking at things now that was more to do with your side of the fence I think, Father dear. I gather from Marjorie that you liked a tipple!

  Thank God for my dear old dad. He never let me down. I would ring up in the middle of the night from some party or other and beg him to come and take me home. Oh how many trips must he have made down the M1 in the middle of the night. He had an enormous capacity for love. In fact he was one of the few men I have seen with babies who is not threatened by them, and Mum always said he was brilliant with us when we were little. So you see I had a perfect example to follow and knew exactly what I should be looking for in a husband. But such gems are difficult to find.

  I am truly deeply sad that when my sons came along I was in a marriage that restricted my children from seeing their grandparents. It would have made a huge difference to their take on life, I think, if they could have spent time on the farm with my parents, especially Dad. Only now am I beginning to understand what being a grandparent is all about. It is not, in my opinion, filling your time with your grandchildren because you have no other life, nor is it about babysitting endlessly while your daughter or son goes off to work to earn more money to have a bigger house. It is to offer the other side of the coin, the little things maybe that get forgotten in everyday life, like manners, or seeking advice on parts of life that they can’t ask their parents about. To me, it is offering a different view of the world and letting your grandchildren know that there is always someone rooting for you. Being a grandparent also gives you a sense of the continuation of life. One thing I think men don’t ever quite understand about women and their love for their children and families is that the more love we are asked to give the more we find. I think some men think there just won’t be enough to go round and they will miss out. Is that maybe why you could never really commit, Carl?

  But oh, what joy would you have now if you could see your great-grandson smiling into the camera exactly as you did as a little boy. I am trying to make sure that Sacha knows he will always have another family here with us if he needs an option – never taking away from his mother, who has done a fine job of bringing him up. It saddens me that Sacha is from a broken family too, so one thing I can do and I am doing is trying to leave my family a strong legacy that will bind them together. My parents were adamant we should always be loyal to each other. I remember my mother being very pedantic about the wording of her will in which she wanted it stressed that all her estate was to be divided ‘amicably’ between us three girls. We would take the mickey and tell her that had we wished to fight there would be nothing she could do about it!

  So I have nearly finished my little parcel of words which have helped me to tie up loose ends. There is a pain in my heart that I have to leave all my beloved family. Maybe we are meant to have a dialogue, you and I, to get together once this lifetime is over, but I wish you could have been more patient and left me alone a while longer to allow me to make sure all my boys will be OK. But then I suppose they have to carry on the legacy now, don’t they. If it is all too neatly tied up there will be nothing left of our family’s story for them to take forward.

  I hope you can look down and see my world. I have worked so hard to get it right before I go and I hope there is a way you can look after them all, just as I will be doing from wherever I am off to. Who knows we might just meet in the middle.

  Lots of love

  Lynda B x

  22

  TIME WILL TELL

  August 2014

  It is another fragrant summer’s day and I just cannot believe I am going to die soon. This whole year has been surreal and, in fact, given that the time allotted for most people with this stage of cancer is two years, I have already got halfway, which is great. I really am in a good place, all things considered, but yet, as I write this, I feel like screaming with the frustration of it all, and I think that is because, very slowly in the last couple of weeks, the effects of the chemo are getting to me more than they have before. My mouth is full of ulcers, so apart from the fact I can’t taste most food anymore anyway, I now can’t eat anything because it is so sore. I’m also suffering from thrush in the throat, which has made my voice go thin and reedy and that upsets me, because one of the things I have been able to do since I’ve been ill so far is the odd voice-over, so soon I won’t be able to do that either. Having said that, I did recently get a call to do a voice-over on the radio for re-writing of wills. My voice-over agent, Helen, was hysterical when she rang, she was all apologetic about it, saying, ‘Lynda, this is not a wind-up, I didn’t realise until I was ringing you what you might think about doing this, babe. Is it uncomfortable for you?’

  I laughed, ‘No, of course it’s not, it is actually something I know a good deal about now, Helen, and I am delighted someone has asked for me. Thanks, I will be there.’

  So you see? Every time I think I am finished and I have been tossed aside, something comes up. I am also editing the celebration edition to mark forty years of Yours magazine, which is great fun.

  But even though I am finding the chemo is taking its toll, I don’t want you all to think I am feeling sorry for myself, I just want to paint an honest picture of how things are progressing. So let us go back to the dreaded chemo effect and the Avastin that makes everything bleed, from my nose to my stoma to my bottom. I know, folks, it is all going on up here in North London. However, when I stop whingeing and get up and at it, I am almost fine.

  We had a lovely lunch yesterday with my eldest son and Sacha, and my sister came and my friend Pat too. I had cooked a whole salmon and made chocolate mousse for pud. I actually put some make-up on so my son Michael could have a nice photo of me and Sacha. We made a plan to go to Legoland sometime soon and I went to bed full of hope.

  Then I woke at three and the darkness took over and I got so frightened. I don’t want to leave my husband Michael, because I know he is going to be so lonely. I know Brad and Stacey will rally round, and I hope my two do as well. But he can be a cantankerous old bugger at times, and I don’t want him to put everybody off! Then there is my sister, who has had so much sadness in her life the last ten years, and now I am going to leave her too. Mind you, that could be a relief for her, no more running round finding me plastic jugs and taking me to cake shops. My sweet tooth has really taken over lately, and Jean and I find amazing purveyors of cakes to feed our habit.

  The one thing Jean and I do keep putting off is going through my jewellery. Don’t get me wrong, there is hardly a hidden treasure trove of diamonds, but I do like things to go to the right people, and there are things in my trinket box that have certain people’s names on them, whether they are valuable or not. I also think it is a job, just like going through a loved one’s clothes, that can be so distressing for the person left behind, so if I can make things easier for everyone then I will. I am always having clear-outs now – it is a great way of assuaging any guilt one might have about buying something new if you can give away something else to a friend in the meantime.

  Mind you, I have to psyche myself up to go into one of those second-hand shops because I sometimes just want to hit the saleswomen in there. The snobbery is unbelievable in some of these establishments. I suppose I live in one of the worst areas, being Hampstead and Highgate, but honestly it makes me so mad. The shops are often full of disgusting designer garb to start with, like the worst indulgences of Roberto Cavalli on speed, and they have the gall to turn their noses up at a brand-new evening dress I bought in John Lewis, a brand new, size twelve, black dress.

  ‘Sorry, Madam, just not for us, I am afraid, and really a size too large,’ simpered the woman in a bright yellow dress which clung to her fat bits! I am sorry to be so mean but really people should take a reality check sometimes. Still, it is good to have these things in hand while I am able to do them myself.

  Then there are the boys. My beautiful boys who give me grief but also so much joy. I have told them that I do really believe that they will bene
fit from my death in ways they will not recognise until later in life. I will leave them my energy, which is why I don’t want to hang about once everything kicks in and starts to fall apart. I want them to remember me as I was at my best: fighting, laughing, crying and being theatrical maybe, but that is part of me.

  Looking at the photos of my real father I realise I was right to feel there had to be an emotional connection somewhere with my birth family, but I had taken the wrong path originally. It was the male side that was calling me, and interestingly my whole life, looking back now, has been surrounded by men! Yes, I was adopted by a family of girls but I then gave birth to boys and joined the land of lads. My birth mother, Marjorie, on the other hand, is the sensible side but also the weak side, in that she did not find herself either but instead lived a lie and let other people tell her what to do. I forgive her but not the rest of that family.

  I just want my children to find themselves and take the good with the bad. I am frustrated because I think I still have a great deal to discover about myself, and my family, and I do feel cheated. I really know nothing about my birth family at all apart from some ‘interesting’ facts. My aunt committing suicide brings back my own terrible loneliness in 1976 when my first marriage broke down. I had no work and a mortgage to pay, and the man I had loved thought I was worthless. The thin thread in my heart is there though now, and I understand Luella and her suicide. I do believe it is a very selfish act though and I would never have done it to my sons.

  I feel differently when it comes to my beloved Mum and Dad Bellingham. The thing that really sticks out is that I loved them as people, just as much as I did as parents, and I don’t think many people can honestly say that.

  And then we come back to my relationship with my boys. Do we ever know our children? Since dealing with my cancer, Robert often comes up and gives me this quiet intense hug, and just looks at me. It is as if he is trying to memorise my face for when I am gone. My elder son, Michael, who is much more extrovert, does it with phone calls, and when he comes to visit he is all bonhomie – but now there is a sadness and a small panic in his eyes, and I know he is thinking about life without me. That is not a bad thing for him to learn because he is that sort of man. I want him to find a woman who will really ‘look after him’. He needs that security and she will benefit. If he is happy and secure he will be a wonderful husband. That much I do know.