To Throw Away Unopened

by Viv Albertine

  Divorce made an honest woman of me. Vida was eight when my marriage began to disintegrate and I couldn’t bear pretending to her or anyone else any more. I was sick of trying to appear normal. Vida didn’t reject me for showing my true self – that’s what I imagined would happen. Far from it, we grew even closer. She especially enjoyed my swearing. (I only swore in front of her when she was older. Everything has to be revealed at an appropriate time.) A child derives a sense of safety from knowing the person who looks after them is respectful enough to be honest. Vida has never rooted around in my cupboards and drawers or turned the house upside down searching for letters and scraps of evidence to help her piece her mother together like I did. On the contrary, she knows too much. She’s not fascinated by secrets because I haven’t hidden anything from her, not even the ugly stuff. When I was young, as soon as Mum left the house I’d tear it apart. I didn’t know what I was looking for – the truth, I suppose. Is that where it started? This obsession with the truth? Vida is secure in the knowledge that, good or bad, she knows it all. There won’t be any shocks or nasty surprises for her when I’ve gone (although obviously I’ve made quite different mistakes).

  Kathleen I had a child, David, by a previous marriage. Lucien was so jealous of any time I spent on or with David that he even timed how long our ‘goodnights’ took. [David was six years old when Mum and Lucien met.] I used to get up early and do David’s mending so Lucien couldn’t see me doing it. I always bought David exactly the same kind of clothes as before so Lucien wouldn’t notice they were new, yet I was working full time.

  It got to such a state that he threatened either he would go or I must send David back to his father, he said I had to choose between them. This upset me so much, I was very distraught and half my face became paralysed for years. After two years [David was now eight] he sent my little boy back to his father – he said life would be much happier for us. I was so very unhappy about it. Lucien said we would have David back when we had established ourselves in Australia. [They had decided to emigrate to Australia as ‘Ten Pound Poms’. Mum also wrote that the day David was sent back to live with his father, Lucien insisted they go to the cinema, and she sat there like a zombie.]

  Lucien went to Australia and I followed about six months later after selling the furniture. During this six months I wrote and told him I was trying to get David back. [Gerry Mansfield now had custody of David and wouldn’t let Mum have him back. He said she’d lost her chance.] David was unhappy with his father and cried so when he had to go home, it was heartbreaking. Lucien was very angry when I went ahead and had a high court case to get custody of David again, but I lost it.

  ‘But I lost it.’ All the time, the anguish, the letter-writing, the appointments and interviews, all the days spent in the library looking up facts and past cases, all the waiting and the disappointment, struggles and setbacks that cannot be conveyed in those four words, But I lost it. Mum not only lost custody of David in 1947, she lost faith in the justice system, the Establishment, and men in general. Her attitude was unusual. Most people in 1940s Britain were deferential to authority and took it for granted that men ruled every sphere of society from health, education and justice to culture and the home. A combination of youth, inexperience, being under the control of men and living in a restrictive society resulted in Mum becoming pregnant by the first man she slept with, coerced into marriage, bullied into sending her son away and prevented from getting him back. For fear of being washed up, alone and on the shelf at twenty-five years old (this was standard thinking at the time), she left David behind to follow her new husband to Australia. These experiences must have built up into layer after layer of anger and disappointment as solid and bitter as an aniseed ball lodged in her gullet. ‘I always try not to think about the past, I find one can live on the surface and be bright, but I won’t allow myself to think. Writing this is like pulling one’s insides out,’ she wrote in the diary. Her buried pain, guilt and resentment, like the tiny black aniseed pip secreted under layers of hardened sugar, were bound to reveal themselves some time. They surfaced with a vengeance during the disintegration of her second marriage and tainted her thoughts and actions for the rest of her life, particularly in the way she raised Pascale and me.

  43 Pascale stood up, her hand clutching her head. She was off the bed. I felt my facial muscles shifting into a surprised expression but just managed to stop them. No. Wait. You’re not there yet. Don’t give her any clues. If she detects any sign of weakness she will win. I watched as she walked towards the door; it took all of my self-control to keep my mouth from dropping open as she reached the door, opened it and disappeared into the corridor. Mia followed her. As soon as the door closed behind them, the piss-heavy cloud hanging over us lifted and the room became suffused with a warm saffron glow. The change in the atmosphere was palpable, spiritual even.

  Little Psychos

  Six months after Lucien travelled to Australia, Mum left her son, her parents, her brothers and sisters, her work, her friends and her country, sailed over the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, through the Suez Canal, across the Indian Ocean, into the Pacific and joined her husband in Sydney to start a new life. That’s the sort of thing people did back then. Everyone was starting again after the war, after losing mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, children, husbands and wives. It seems shocking now, but there wasn’t such a sentimental attitude towards family or such a fear of death then as we have now. (People who live through wars often develop attachment disorders as a protection from loss.)

  During the six-week sea voyage Mum met a man. They were very attracted to each other. This is the story she told us about him:

  ‘He was Scottish with red hair. Such a nice, kind man, he liked me very much. I should have married him instead of your father.’

  ‘But then you wouldn’t have had us, Mummy!’

  ‘No, but I would have had other children. With red hair.’

  *

  Almost immediately Kathleen and Lucien’s new life in Australia, which had so much riding on it, began to unravel.

  Kathleen When I arrived in Sydney to join Lucien, we lived in a boarding house but life didn’t run smoothly. His work partner [my father and another man had a painting and decorating business] was having a baby and he was furious about it. When I said, Let’s have one too, he went into a terrible temper and hit me, saying I was always spoiling his chances of work.

  Since we were married I very much wanted children and offered to continue work afterwards if we could have one. But it was always, ‘We must get settled first’ and wait until after he’d had his ‘opportunities’. I never used any birth control and he used the withdrawal method as he preferred it. It wasn’t until I read a medical journal saying women who had such a sex life became sterile that he agreed to give me normal intercourse. Fortunately Viviane, the eldest, was born ten months after.

  I have never refused my husband intercourse except when he has demanded anal intercourse. He insisted on this, saying it was a wifely duty and threatened divorce if I would not do it. It was not until piles appeared, and were aggravated by the birth of Viviane, and I said I wanted to get a doctor’s opinion because they were bleeding and painful, that he stopped. He then started the practice of releasing into my mouth. He said he could not control himself. But when I answered that he could control himself when he was using the withdrawal method so I wouldn’t get pregnant, he became violent and sulked for days saying I was no good as a wife, he would have to find another woman and it was his entitlement, so I acquiesced.

  I squinted through the dark at the pastel-grey print on the lemon pages, not wanting to break the spell, even though it was a bad spell, by getting up and switching on the light. I was horrified but not surprised by what my mother said about the cruelty my father exhibited towards her: hitting her when she wouldn’t do what he wanted; repeatedly forcing her to have anal sex with him against her will; taunting her by saying he wanted younger women and prostitute
s; staying out all night; insisting she have a backstreet abortion (abortion wasn’t legal in England until 1967 and Australia in 1971) after Pascale and I were born. ‘I wanted the baby very much but he insisted I couldn’t have it. He organised a baby sitter and drove me there himself.’ During arguments he questioned whether Pascale and I were his and erupted into violent, jealous rages whenever she interacted with men, even her brother and the milkman.

  Kathleen He never spoke one word at my friend Joy’s wedding because her brother talked to me.

  I woke up and he was standing over me with a pan of boiling water. He stopped speaking to me and refused to answer when I spoke to him and sulked towards the children. After two weeks he admitted, ‘I was upset because I dreamed you had been out sleeping with other men.’

  We only go to the pictures once or twice a year, and when I asked the commissionaire the time of the main film, Lucien sulked afterwards saying I’d made a date with him.

  He kept on accusing me of being a prostitute. I’ve only slept with him and my first husband in my whole life. These sort of senseless accusations have gone on all through our marriage.

  I shifted my weight and stretched out my legs. I’d been sitting in the dusty bedroom for hours, my throat was dry and I was hungry, but I didn’t stop, even though these were not easy things to read about my mother. She must be lying, I reasoned to myself. Anal sex was illegal in the late fifties and early sixties, even within marriage. If she didn’t want it, she could have gone to the police. I couldn’t – didn’t want to – imagine my mother being hurt, or in that position, and tried to erase the mental image by naively explaining away the circumstances. And she’d never let a man hit her, I rationalised. She was so strong and always said to us, ‘Never let a man hit you. If a man hits you, walk away and never look back. If he does it once, he’ll do it again.’ But then other assertive women came to mind who I remembered had been hit or dominated: Colette, Vivienne Westwood, Rihanna and Tina Turner … myself. I know how strong I appear to my daughter, friends and colleagues, and yet how badly I’ve been treated by some men and how long it can take to extract yourself from an abusive relationship. Those two things can be found together – a strong, spirited woman and a violent, domineering partner.

  Kathleen I was eight months pregnant with Viviane when Lucien bought a car without telling me, using money we’d borrowed from my mother for rent. We had a quarrel about it. I always remember this, we were talking over the kitchen table and he was annoyed because I wouldn’t agree happily to him buying the car. He got in a rage, started swearing and calling me immoral things, then he picked up the ashtray which was full of ash and cigarette ends and threw it in my face. I sat there thinking of all the times he had hit and sworn at me. I thought of the baby I was pregnant with and said to myself, Am I giving birth to a coward? Would he go as far as to punch me now? So I stood up, picked up my coffee cup and threw the coffee over him. He sat there absolutely stunned. I walked down to the gate. After a long time I stopped trembling, went in and went to bed. That coffee I have heard about ever since, but I’m not sorry. [Quite a risk to include this in her diary, it could have been used against her in court.]

  Oh, Mum, there I am inside you, and there are my angry beginnings (and my liquid-throwing tendencies) in your boiling blood and your coffee-throwing. That’s me all over. And don’t worry:

  No coward soul is mine.

  No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere.

  Emily Brontë, ‘No Coward Soul Is Mine’, 1846,

  Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell

  I was timid when I was young, I was shy until my late teens, and I’ve become embroiled in some negative relationships, but that’s all stopped. Now I’m alone like you were at my age. That’s the only way either of us could be sure it would never happen again.

  Mum was so intent that Pascale and I wouldn’t be bullied by men or intimidated by authority that she ingrained in us, from the moment we were born, the need to suppress the ‘flight’ response in our brains and respond to any threat with the ‘fight’ response. It’s easy enough to manipulate the plasticity of a child’s brain. Bit by bit, year after year, in their own ways, our mother and father endeavoured to turn my sister and me into little psychopaths.

  Kathleen He catches flies in the summer, pulls off their wings and dashes them to the ground. In the last flat, the dog next door kept coming into our garden, Lucien piled up stones and rocks and told the children to chuck them at the dog and he threw stones himself until the man next door said he would get the law on him.

  Last summer there was a bird in the garden – a cat had been after it – with its wing torn right off and its little heart and insides exposed. Lucien wanted to sew it together with a large needle and cotton, with me holding it. It was cruel. I refused, the bird was in awful pain. Lucien was furious with me and stuck the bird together with sticking plaster instead. It died that night. He said, ‘If that’s the way you want it, you can have it. I’m sick of you always pleasing other people instead of me.’ All wrapped up in a lot of swearing. I have to think, act and say what he thinks acts and says or I am abused and threatened with divorce. That same night he moved out of our bedroom and it was later that week I found out he’d secretly been planning to divorce me for months.

  My sister and I harassed all our pets. We were rough with the cat, neglected our budgies and fish and treated our puppy as if she were a plaything. We even persecuted the bees. In summer they buzzed in and out of the hollyhocks in our back garden, collecting pollen. We’d pull off a hollyhock flower and clamp it over the one the bee was working in, trapping it inside a pink prison. As the buzzing got louder, higher-pitched and angrier we’d realise that not only had we trapped the bee, we’d trapped ourselves. If we freed the bee, it would fly out in a rage and sting us. I’d stand beside the gangly hollyhock stem, which was as tall as I was, knees shaking, arm outstretched, pressing the flower heads together, bee whirring furiously inside, for as long as I could bear, then fling the petals to the ground and run away screaming. (As I was the oldest, I have to take responsibility for initiating this game.)

  44 I heard Pascale in the corridor talking on the phone to her partner in Canada. ‘Get me on the next flight home.’ A little part of me was shocked that she’d walk away from Mum while she was dying. Nothing and no one could have got me out of that room. Pascale’s response – to leave Mum, the care home and the country – was so swift, it occurred to me that maybe she unconsciously didn’t want to be there and face Mum’s death. That she’d got what she wanted – a way out.

  Mia returned and told us that Pascale had taken herself off to A & E. Then she looked at me with a worried expression and said, ‘Do you think she’ll come back?’ And that was it. I was in control of myself again. I was back in the room.

  ‘No,’ I replied. ‘She won’t come back.’

  ‘But how do you know?’

  ‘She might come back,’ said Vida.

  ‘She won’t. I know her.’

  The reason I was so certain that Pascale wasn’t coming back was because I did know her. She always runs away. The way I saw it, she ran away from us to Canada. And she ran out on Mum two years ago, on her ninety-third birthday, when Mum was frail and falling over all the time and just beginning the round of trips to hospital every couple of weeks covered in cuts and bruises. Pascale arrived from Canada for a visit and they had an argument. I wasn’t there but Mum hinted that it was something to do with Pascale accusing her of treating me like the favourite and Mum replying, ‘So what? All parents have a favourite,’ which wasn’t very diplomatic of her. (I think Mum was too ashamed to tell me outright what she’d said.) I don’t know how much of this sort of thing Pascale had to endure from Mum, but Mum was also saying hurtful things like that to me: ‘I love Vida much more than I ever loved you’; ‘If it weren’t for Vida I wouldn’t bother seeing you any more.’ (She always apologised later.) After the argument on Mum’s birthday Pascale stormed out and caug
ht a plane home – without telling Mum. She’d been in England for less than a day. Mum spent her ninety-third birthday ringing round hotels, trying to locate her daughter to say sorry. Eventually it dawned on her that Pascale had gone. It must have been so upsetting for Pascale to hear those words after travelling all the way from Canada to see her mother. If only she’d talked to me about it, I could have assured her that it wasn’t personal. Mum’s mind was breaking down and she was losing control of her thoughts and speech. I could also have told Pascale that she had nothing to worry about. I wasn’t the favourite at all. Not our mother’s favourite anyway.

  Sanatorium

  Children remember things without understanding them: they are oceans of goodwill drinking in an ocean of words.

  Violette Leduc, La bâtarde, 1964

  Kathleen and Lucien left Australia in 1958 and arrived back in England with Pascale and me in tow.

  Kathleen David had for years dreamed of joining us in Australia, I had always written to him and said I hope to see him one day, and when he was older perhaps he could join us at sixteen. It was a silly thing to promise, now I can see it, but one is made of hope.