My Secret Sister: Jenny Lucas and Helen Edwards' Family Story (28 page)

They hated it. They’d say, ‘Get off, Mummy!’

There were occasions when my mother would do the old thing of saying, ‘I’m going to tell your mother when she comes in and you’re going to get a hiding for that.’

Of course, when I came in through the door, I’d get, ‘Scott has done this and Donna has done that.’

‘You have to deal with that at the time,’ I said. ‘Don’t expect me to do it when I come in from work, because I want to have a happy time with them. Don’t hand it all over to me.’ She took no notice of course.

In 1980, when the children were ten and eight, Simon and I decided to move our family to Australia as ‘£10 poms’. Our main reason was to provide the best future for Scott and Donna, but it was also to have a life of our own, far away from my mother. We were optimistic about this new start. ‘But what about me?’ wailed Mercia when we told her.

‘We’ve made our decision,’ I explained calmly. ‘It’s up to you to decide what you are going to do.’

Her response was immediate. ‘I’ll come with you, of course.’

The tide was pulling me down, like a drowning man. ‘You could have a good home here, with kind people living around you,’ I struggled. ‘There is no need for you to come halfway round the world just because we’re going there.’

‘I have to come. You can’t leave me behind. The bairns need me.’

At this time, Mercia was more or less estranged from all her siblings. She had wrapped herself entirely in the lives of my children, to the extent that she was no longer close to any of her own sisters and brothers. I had tried to encourage her to get on the bus to Seghill and visit them, but she always refused. We had even offered to drive her over, but she was always totally against the idea. As a result, she had deliberately put herself in the position of having no one but us.

Simon and I tried to think of a way out of this, but we couldn’t be that cruel to her, so, once again, we made it easy for her to make our lives difficult.

We spent two good years in Melbourne, despite Mercia’s manipulative endeavours and the extra shifts we both had to do to support her, but Donna’s asthma gradually worsened. Doctors told us she was allergic to something in the air, and it devastated us to see her struggle so hard to breathe. We had to return to England and, of course, mother came too.

CHAPTER 25

Jenny

The Knife

At the age of thirty-three, I had now earned enough in prize money to buy myself a house, and that’s when things went unexpectedly out of balance. My mother had an absolute fit. She went berserk.

‘How could you do this to me?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s a disgrace to the family, a single woman moving into a house on your own . . . to live with him.’

She obviously meant my partner, Richard, the man I’d been with for many years and whom she had always liked. I couldn’t believe how extreme her reaction was to my buying my own house. Especially since my relationship with Richard had very little to do with buying the house at all. My accountant had advised investing my money in a property and it seemed the sensible thing. That was the main reason.

‘I’m not going to live with him, Mam. He has his own house, so we’re not moving in together.’

She didn’t seem to have heard what I said. She certainly didn’t take it in. ‘I’ll never speak to you again!’ She was livid, her face almost as red as her hair.

While the house purchase was going through and I was still living at home with Mam, it was increasingly difficult. I couldn’t have a normal conversation with her any more, and our warm relationship shattered, for the time being at least.

She constantly jibed at me. ‘Of course, you know I’ll never come to this house you’ve bought. It’s a disgrace, bringing shame on me . . .’

It was as if she wanted to hurt me. In fact, she hit well below the belt when she said, ‘My cousin and his wife adopted a child. He warned me, you know. I should have listened to him, mind. He said, “You should never adopt a child. They always do you wrong.” I never thought that would come true with you. But now it has.’

This was not only the most hurtful thing she could say to me, but it was the only time she had ever made direct reference to the fact that she had adopted me. What a time to do it!

The day for me to move was approaching. One night, around two in the morning, something woke me. I realized it was the front door opening, so I went down and looked out through the open doorway to see her walking down the street, with nothing on but a skimpy shift. I went after her, struggled to turn her round and guided her back into the house, with great difficulty. I didn’t know what to think – it was very alarming.

A couple of nights later, as I was lying awake worrying about whether I should go and tell her doctor about this, I heard some movement outside my bedroom. We had glazed doors, so I turned to look across my bedroom to my dressing table, where I saw reflections in the mirrors of a person’s shape walking around on the landing. My mouth went dry and I kept very still for a few moments, wondering what was happening. Then I realized it must be my mother. I got out of bed and opened my door to find her wandering about with a glazed look in her eyes and a vacant expression on her face, holding a carving knife.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked. But she made no response. At first I thought she might be sleepwalking, but she was obviously awake because she paused when she heard my voice the second time. ‘What’s the matter?’ She was clearly distressed and made no attempt to answer me. She just stood still with the knife held firmly in her hand. I was struck with fear and started to edge backwards, a step at a time, into my bedroom. I quickly closed the door and wedged a chair under the handle.

I listened in silence as she moved again, this time going back into her bedroom. I was wide awake now and couldn’t sleep. I dared not sleep, worrying about her and what she might do, but I didn’t dare move the chair and go to see if she was all right either. I lay in the dark and turned it all over in my mind, distraught to see my mother in such a state and with that frightening vacant stare. I couldn’t get it out of my mind.

I was still awake when, an hour or two later, in the early hours of the morning before dawn, I heard her get up again and walk along the landing and down the stairs, and then the sound of the front door opening. I jumped out of bed and rushed down to see what she was doing, though I kept my distance, just in case. As I looked out of our front window, I could see her outside, walking down the road again, moving along in the moonlight like a ghost. Then she turned round, walked back into the house, up the stairs and into her bedroom.

I barricaded myself back into my own bedroom, but now I was shaking with shock as well as the cold. I feared for myself, but I feared even more for her. I lay awake worrying about what I should do, and it was a long time before I heard her snores and could begin to relax. I eventually fell into a fitful sleep of nightmares no more frightening than what I’d just witnessed.

In the morning, I tried to think it all through. What was wrong with her? Was she ill, or was it all, as she tried to make me believe, her extreme anguish at my decision to ‘disgrace’ her by moving into a house of my own. I reflected ruefully on the irony of this situation, since she had herself bought a house before she was married, though she had rented hers out for financial reasons. What really upset her was that I would be living in my house as a single woman, or worse, as a single woman with a partner to whom I wasn’t married, even though he wouldn’t be living there.

I rang my closest cousin, Wendy, and told her about the walkabouts and last night’s incident with the knife.

‘I don’t know what’s wrong with her. It’s all come on very suddenly. When she went out walking down the street the first time, I thought perhaps she was putting it on, to show me how hurt she felt, but last night was different. She looked so detached, as if she was in a trance. She almost seemed not to know who I was.’

‘Oh dear, it doesn’t sound like Auntie Connie at all,’ agreed Wendy.

‘I don’t know what to do. What should I do?’

‘You’ve got to do something, Jen. You can’t go through another night like that. For your own sake, your safety, you’ve got to call the doctor. It sounds like some sort of nervous breakdown to me, mind, but whatever the reason, she’s a danger to you and to herself. She needs specialist help.’

Wendy was a tower of strength, the closest thing I had to a sister. Though of course we didn’t share the same domestic problems, we were always there for each other. On that occasion, I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t been able to talk it through with her. She held me together.

The doctor straightaway decided to section my mother and admitted her to the psychiatric unit at St Nicholas’s Hospital in Gosforth. ‘I believe she is having a nervous breakdown,’ he said. ‘Although it can be frightening for the relatives, it is usually a short-lived situation and they will help her to get better at the unit.’

I felt awful, almost guilty, though I knew it was the only option. At first, when I visited her, she seemed unaware of what had happened to her. She was heavily medicated, in a zombie state. I visited her in a room where all the people were sitting in a circle, most of them in a daze. One man stood up every now and then to drop his trousers. It was both shocking and depressing. Gradually, as they reduced the dosage, she became more aware, and more resentful. She didn’t remember how she came to be there, but blamed me anyway. I blamed myself too.

As the weeks went by, she became more herself, and every time I went in to see her, she would plead, ‘Get me out of here!’ It was heartbreaking to have to turn my back on her and walk out of the door.

Finally the day came when I collected the keys to my first house, a three-bedroomed brick-built townhouse in a row of eight in Cramlington, a new town built round an old mining village about a twenty-minute drive from our family home at West Jesmond and just a couple of miles away from the pit villages of Seghill and Seaton Delaval.

I still felt slightly uncomfortable and perhaps even a little guilty that I was going against my mother’s wishes in moving into this house – ‘betraying’ her, as she called it – but I was determined to make it my home and hoped to persuade her to get over the ‘disgrace’ and accept my living there. To be honest, what seemed to be her main concern, the fact that Richard and I weren’t married, was something that didn’t look likely to be resolved, but it had never worried us. In fact, we hadn’t at any point discussed or planned our future, let along the idea of marriage or having children. We just drifted along as we were, content in our relationship. I suppose all our friends and relatives thought we would get married when the time was right, as people did in those days, but I think I probably felt it wouldn’t be fair while I was away so much. In the back of my mind, however, I was becoming more and more aware of time going by.

Putting such thoughts out of my head, I was buzzing with excitement when I first opened the front door to my new house and started to plan how I would have it all. Over the next few days I took my cousin Wendy with me to choose furnishings and colour schemes, and we had a lot of laughs trying out chairs and beds in the showrooms. It was such a joy buying things for my own home. I spent several more days painting and decorating the rooms, with great help from Wendy and my friend Val.

In between these home-making sessions and golfing trips abroad, I made frequent visits to my mother in the psychiatric unit, where she seemed to be making good progress. She lived for my visits, so I always tried to be light-hearted and think of silly things to talk about – maybe something one of my aunties had done, or a funny incident on the golf course. It was very difficult to keep off the subject, but somehow I managed not to mention my house at all. I wanted to wait till she was well enough to be discharged before we could talk about that.

When the decor was finished and all the furniture had finally arrived and was arranged how I wanted it, I walked round and round the house on my own, just looking at everything with amazement. It was a fantastic feeling, like walking on air. I had earned this house by my own hard work . . . and had a lot of enjoyment in doing it. My over-riding feeling as I drove back to Jesmond that night was of a special sort of freedom that I would soon be living there.

After seven weeks my mother was nearly ready to be discharged, and in preparation she came home to our Jesmond house for the weekend. I had everything ready for her and she seemed pleased. I stayed awake for a long time the first night, but Mam never moved, and finally I drifted off. The next day she was bright and breezy, as if she hadn’t been away. But that evening she became subdued. I wanted to cheer her up.

‘I think you’ll be home for good soon.’

‘Ee, I would have been here all the time if you hadn’t upset me so much. It was the shock.’

‘Let’s not worry about that now.’

‘I suppose you’ve gone ahead and bought the house?’ she blurted.

‘Yes,’ I nodded. ‘Shall I take you over to see it tomorrow?’

Her quiet mood melted away as her whole body suddenly shook with sharp anger. ‘I said I wouldn’t ever come to your house, and I won’t.’ She looked away. ‘You bring shame on me, and on yourself, moving in before you’re even married.’

‘But it’s my own home I’m moving into.’

‘Well, don’t expect me to come round, because I never will.’

That week my mother reluctantly spent her last few days in the unit while I was away playing a tournament in the States, and then I helped her settle in back home, which was difficult because she would barely talk to me by now.

Finally I took the last of my stuff over to Cramlington and spent my first night there. It was an exciting new start, but it was marred by my mother’s attitude. As I lay in bed that night, I felt sad about her apparent inability to accept the situation and I worried about her. I still couldn’t shake off the feeling of guilt, but it was clear I could do nothing to change her. Maybe she never would come round to see me, but this was my life now and it was a wonderful feeling to sleep in my own home at last.