I think that the coolest thing I have ever found was the nerve to say no to my very controlling mother!

She wasn’t always so bad. When I was a child (between five and ten or so) we, Judy and I, were allowed to play in the neighbourhood. From my birth until I was 7 plus, we lived in Zanesville and most people knew us. We were allowed to go visiting friends down at the end of the street or across the road and I never heard her say, “Don’t go there.”

The first time she forbade us doing something was when my sister Judy was told not to ride her bike in the road because of the potential traffic – in 1950 there were few cars in the roads around us and fewer trucks (which Judy had trouble saying – the sound tr came out as f !). A friend or neighbour happened to see Judy riding her bike in a nearby road and nearly being hit by a truck. Not only did Judy have her bike removed, so did I! I was not pleased, but I understood. (We were never again to have bikes!)

We moved to Cincinnati when I was seven and life went on much as before. Judy and I walked ourselves to school and home again every day. I took myself to church on Sundays (not because I was religious but I wanted to sing in the choir). I would often go to visit my friend Carol who had a player piano with quite a few rolls of music. We used to put these rolls on and sing along. Our favourite was a song about a vagabond. After a while, Carol’s mum must have been sick of hearing us sing about vagabonds as we were forbidden to play the song again! (I wish I could remember that song but it is gone.)

Judy was a rebel. She once skipped school with her friend, Cathy. When questioned about it, Judy blamed it all on Cathy and I imagine Cathy blamed it all on Judy. After that, Judy had to stay with me during recess and before and after school so Patty knew where Judy was. (She trusted that I would not skip school – which I wouldn’t!)

Patty’s marriage wasn’t happy. We all knew that her husband, Bill, drank too much beer and was often in a bad mood, shouting and swearing and threatening. He often punished Judy, partly because she was a rebel but mainly I believe, because she didn’t like him and let him know it.

One day Patty decided she’d had enough and we went off to Reno where divorces were quicker to get. I’ve written about this before – see various other posts including ‘Where Did She Come From part one’ and ‘The Super Chief.’

After that, in 1958, something terrible happened in Patty’s life – the death of a man that Patty loved very much. That tragedy changed Patty. She began drinking a lot. She was in the last year of her degree in architecture and desperately wanted to finish it but had difficulty concentrating. This was when she started to rely on me, a 14 year old, to plan and cook meals – not entirely but enough to make me become the adult and herself the child from time to time. (Patty was 36)

She did finish her degree and got a job as a civilian architect with the US Navy, which brought us to England. We went to school at the American Air Force base in Bushy Park, west of London. We got to school and back by school bus which was usually quite fun. After two years we went to the crammers I have written about in ‘Where Does She Come From’ part three.

Patty was always happy if my friends came round to the flat but she was not always happy when I went out. I would have to tell her exactly where I was going, with whom and what time I’d be back. That’s okay for a fourteen or fifteen year old’s mother to ask but she kept demanding to know these things when I was eighteen or nineteen.

Once I went out with friends, including Shaun, a girl I had known for some years whom I had met at school. We went to a party in Crouch End, an area of North London. Why I rang Patty, I don’t know, but when I told her where I was and that I didn’t know the name of the person who was having the party, she demanded I come home straight away. She knew I was with friends whom she knew, but that made no difference.

Most young people would have refused; I went home. I was so conditioned by then, that I knew things would be worse if I didn’t. So, if I went to a party where I didn’t know the host, I just didn’t mention it any longer.

It didn’t get any easier when I was in my twenties, or my thirties! When we lived in West Malling, I hardly went out in the evening and if I did it was usually with members of my family. Patty was getting more demanding, though.

If she wanted to go around the corner to a dress shop (literally less than a hundred steps away from our front door) she would ask me to go with her. If she wanted a half bottle of whiskey or brandy or even sherry, she’d ask me to go to the off-licence* which was next door! I was her taxi driver, her personal shopper, her financial backer.

One day she asked me to go to the chemist to get her a bottle of a medicine called ‘Dr Collis Brown’. I went to the chemist, as I had before, and asked at the special chemist counter (where one handed in prescriptions) for a bottle of Dr Collis Brown. The chemist looked at me, standing in front of a few others who were waiting to see him, then said, “No. I won’t sell any more to you. You must be an addict!” and he showed me the place in his ‘Poisons Book’ where I had signed for Dr CB several times in the past.

I explained that it wasn’t for me but for my mother. He continued to refuse. Embarrassed, I turned away from the counter and went home. I didn’t set foot in that shop again until years later.

Another very embarrassing moment occurred one evening. I had a ‘date’, an almost unique experience when I lived in West Malling. He was, I seem to remember, a carpenter and I have no memory of how or where we met.

Patty had been drinking through the early part of the evening but seemed to be pleased that I was going out with a man. I was upstairs putting on the last bit of make-up when there was a knock at the door. Judy answered it, then called up the stairs for me. As I was walking down the stairs, Patty shouted out, “Remember, no f**king on a first date!”

Happily, I met Julian not many months after that. Still, I was asked to do shopping, accompany Patty to the doctor, etc until Julian and I bought a house in East Malling (a mile or so away from Patty’s house). She was not happy with my moving out. She had come to depend on a large share of my teacher’s salary to pay the bills and buy things. So, she decided to sell her cottage on the High Street and move to a small house in a terrace on a country road nearby.

In the time we were living apart, Patty would ring me three or four times a day! I had a few months’ relief when she went to America to visit her mother, then she and Judy came back and the telephone calls started again. Often, she would ring about five o’clock in the evening and ask me to pop into West Malling to get her a bottle of whiskey or whatever. One evening I said no. Patty argued but I was firm.

After that, Patty would ring the taxi company and ask them to pick up whatever she wanted and bring it to her. They didn’t mind; they made money. And I breathed a sigh of relief!

xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo

(I loved my mother when I was young. I was always proud of how young and ‘with it’ she was. I know that my having a baby without being married was a terrible worry for her, but we survived that. I came to the conclusion some years ago, that Patty really shouldn’t have had children. Her life could have been so rich if she had become an artist or if she had been born 50 years later when women were not always expected to get married and have children. Her upbringing in a wealthy family did not enable her to be a mother of three living on only a little money.

As we both grew older, I found it more and more impossible to ‘forgive’ Patty. Underneath, I hope I still loved her but it wasn’t like when I was a kid. As I get older, I still don’t understand some of the things she did. I’m just glad that I am not an alcoholic like I’m certain she was. We are not, definitely, our parents and that’s something that pleases ‘Veronica’!)

*Off licence – a place to buy alcoholic drinks to take away