Authors: Cathy Wilson
Both girls settled well into school in Peterborough. In fact, when Grandpa’s work moved the family to Saltdean, near Brighton, in 1960, he received a glowing report from Miss Franks, Mum’s headmistress. In it she said, ‘We shall be very sorry to lose Jennifer. She is one of our best scholars. Her reading is excellent. It is unusual for a child so young to be able to read so fluently.’
Reading the letter now is like reading about a stranger. Such potential . . .
Mum and Anne’s new school was Telscombe Cliffs Primary, after which they both qualified for the girls’ grammar school in Lewes, about a twenty-five-mile round trip every day. They’d catch the bus from Saltdean to Newhaven, then hop on a train to Lewes. Anne dutifully looked out for her little sister in the early years, but they were only together briefly before she left.
In short, each girl had a wonderful start to life. Most importantly, they had the
same
start. Same schools, same loving parents, same opportunities. So why did they take such different paths?
If Grandpa had plotted out the perfect blueprint for his daughters’ lives, I don’t think it would have been too dissimilar to the way Anne’s turned out. As far as I can tell, she did everything correctly. From school straight to nursing college. Aged twenty, she met the man of her dreams, but sensibly waited a year before tying the knot. After three years they had kids – one of each, obviously. The children were educated at grammar schools from the age of eleven, they both got fantastic degrees, have wonderful jobs and are now starting their own families. After a few years abroad Anne and her husband, Geoff, stayed briefly with my grandparents before moving to Portsmouth. They now live in a beautiful house on Hayling Island, mortgage-free. They’ve even got a dog. It’s the perfect family. Absolutely textbook.
And then there was Mum. It seems that when Anne turned right, young Jenny chose left. Again and again and again. We don’t know when exactly and we don’t know why. All we know is that eventually it cost Jenny her life.
It’s such a puzzle. What made Mum take the path she did? She had the same options, the same support network, the same genes. But it wasn’t enough. Nursing wasn’t for her. Academia seemed to be a waste of her time as well, although she was, according to her early reports, very bright. By the age of fourteen she was no longer interested in what Lewes Grammar School for Girls could offer her. And they, it’s fair to say, were running out of patience with her too.
I don’t have many of my mother’s possessions, but on my sixteenth birthday Granny and Grandpa gave me a box containing various letters and documents. For years I left that box unopened, too afraid of what I might discover. When curiosity did get the better of me, I felt sad that I hadn’t had the courage before. Wonderful new clues to a fuller picture of my mother’s life were hidden in letters, photographs and newspaper columns. It’s emotional stuff. I just wish Mum came out of it better.
One letter was a note to Grandpa from the headmistress of Lewes Grammar, Miss Margaret Medcalf. She claimed she’d gone to the café in Newhaven and discovered Mum and a couple of friends. Mum had sworn she was there with Grandpa’s blessing, but obviously she was playing hooky. In any case, the head wasn’t fooled and wrote to Grandpa, who replied, by return, saying he would do everything ‘to uphold the reputation of the school’. It all sounds wonderfully prim now, but at the time I’m sure it was mortifying for Grandpa. As a soldier, he’d been prepared to put his head above the parapet in the line of enemy fire. It was another matter in civilian life. All he wanted from his family was for them to keep their heads down. It wasn’t much to ask, was it?
It was for my mother.
The truanting school letter was dated 16 May 1968 – a week before Mum’s fourteenth birthday. I’m sure Grandpa hoped his intervention would be the end of it. Unfortunately, a few days later, things got worse.
A note from the school posted through my grandparents’ front door explained the bare bones: ‘Dear Mr Beavis, your daughter Jennifer was committed to the Victoria Hospital in Lewes today suffering from the effects of some pills she had taken. She is being kept overnight for some observation. I’m very worried indeed about the whole matter and I would be grateful if you could come and discuss it with me at your earliest convenience. I do hope Jennifer will recover soon.’ It was again signed by the headmistress.
I can’t imagine how Grandpa must have felt. Obviously he was worried that Mum had been taken to hospital, but at the same time . . . the ignominy of it all! The knowledge that a daughter of his had taken some sort of overdose and ended up in hospital must have been so much for him to bear. The only saving grace was that, as far as he knew, only he and the head-mistress’s office were aware of the matter. Unfortunately, that wasn’t to last.
The case made all the local papers. They were fascinated by the story of three middle-class girls bunking off school to take, as they reported, ‘barbiturate tranquillizers known as Yellow Dollies’. Every report, while austere in its view, couldn’t help slathering over the fact that one of the girls was kept at Victoria Hospital for psychiatric tests. No prizes for guessing who that was.
Just when Grandpa thought things couldn’t get any worse, they did. The story of the pill-popping teens went national. Most excruciating of all, it reached the offices, and the front page, of his paper of choice – the
Sunday Telegraph
. By coincidence, they ran their story on Mum’s fourteenth birthday.
Part of me feels the shame my grandparents must have felt over what would be, in today’s schools, pretty much ignored by anyone other than the head. But part of me is grateful for the national attention. Without the report from the
Telegraph
, for example, and without my Granny cutting it out and storing it so carefully, I would never have known about this phase of my mother’s life. I would never have known that she and her friends were found in the school science laboratory, thought at first to be suffering the effects of ‘intoxication’. I would never have known they were sent to hospital and given eight pints of water to flush out their systems. And I would never have known Grandpa immediately made plans for Mum to change schools.
All Granny ever told me was that Mum ‘fell in with the wrong crowd’ and I never knew any more until I opened this box of letters. Thanks to them, I know that she was examined by the hospital’s consultant psychiatrist ‘as is normal in cases of emotional trouble’. Neither of her friends was. Just her. For some reason, Mum was identified as the ringleader – and the one most in need of help. The clue is in the line ‘as is normal in cases of emotional trouble’. What emotional trouble? What could she possibly have been going through that led her to nearly overdose on barbiturates?
I don’t know how long her treatment, if any, continued. Not long, I suspect, because it seems to have been considered enough to move Mum to another school. I don’t think everyone was satisfied with that. I might be reading too much into it, but there’s a rather condemnatory edge, I feel, to the way the
Telegraph
made a point of announcing the incident was ‘not reported to the police’. In their eyes, she’d got away with it – unless the police happened to read the country’s bestselling broadsheet.
So, with Anne away and unable to help, Mum was transferred to the local comprehensive. I don’t suppose she had a particularly easy time at home, having dragged the Beavis name through the mud.
I get the feeling the spotlight would have been on her. Not exactly like being frisked when you go through security at Heathrow, but not far off it either. If I know my grandparents, the constant interrogations would have been wearing enough. ‘Where are you going? What’s in your bag? Who were you with?’
In all likelihood, Mum avoided drugs for the rest of her school life. If her parents’ wrath wasn’t enough to keep her away from them, then the idea of being publicly humiliated in black and white again probably was. But if Granny and Grandpa thought that would be the end of her mischief, they were wrong. A girl like my mother will always find a way to fall into trouble. Longhill Secondary may not have given Jenny access to drugs, but it did present another distraction. Boys.
Putting a fourteen-year-old girl into a mixed school at a time when her hormones were just kicking into overdrive was always going to be explosive and I don’t think Mum lost any time in getting to grips with the rules of dating. I’m not saying she would have done anything wrong, but when you come from a single-sex school, boys are going to seem like this exotic new thing. It would have been like a kid tasting sugar for the first time. I’m sure she learned the truth about them soon enough!
Most girls soon realize that boys their own age tend to be a bit on the immature side and Mum was no different. Unfortunately, at fourteen or fifteen, there wasn’t anyone quite old enough still at school. Luckily, there were friends’ older brothers, dance halls and parties. It was at one of these that she met an older boy who whisked her off to the 1968 Isle of Wight Festival on the back of his motorbike – an absolute nightmare for her parents, who had read all about these ‘mods and rockers’ in the
Telegraph
.
It was also at one of these parties that Jenny was introduced to my father, five years her senior and just about the most sophisticated person she’d ever met.
I’m sure Mum wasn’t the only girl of her age fooling around with older boys at the time. But, whichever way you look at it, she was one of the unlucky ones. At some point shortly after her fifteenth birthday, she had to admit to herself that she was pregnant. I can’t imagine how scared she must have been, but that was the easy part. Next she had to admit it to her parents.
Like so many of their time, all Granny and Grandpa wanted from life was respectability. Mum knew this better than anyone. She’d heard enough lectures. So, terrified at how her news would affect them, she did what so many young girls in her position do: absolutely nothing. It was only by chance, when Granny spotted a bikini-clad Jenny sunbathing during the summer of 1969 and said, ‘Your tummy looks bigger than usual,’ that the subject came up at all.
It’s fair to say that Mr and Mrs Beavis weren’t happy. The whole Yellow Dollies affair had been bad, but at least it had blown over. I’m sure plenty of people told them that today’s headlines are tomorrow’s fish wrappers and I’m sure they didn’t believe it – I know because I hate it when people say it to me. But it’s true. Mum left hospital, switched schools and got on with her life. That feeling of everyone knowing your business, imagining strangers staring at you wherever you go, would have stayed with Granny and Grandpa for ages. But there came a point when even they had to admit the only people still talking about the scandal were themselves.
On the other hand, this new family catastrophe could not be so easily ignored. In a week or two people would start to notice Mum’s size. Then, at the end of the year, there would be an actual baby. This was just not the way things were done in 1969. Not the way nice people did things, anyway.
I feel for my grandparents, I really do. They must have felt their world was crumbling when Mum presented this latest bombshell. But, unlike the newspaper headlines about the drugs, this was one family embarrassment that could not be swept under the carpet. Or so I thought.
Once I came to terms with the fact that I was actually present at my own sixteen-year-old mother’s wedding, I assumed I knew the rest of the story. Okay, my parents had been a bit careless – I accept that I probably wasn’t planned! – but they were in love, so of course marriage was something they were going to do anyway. My arrival had just sped up the natural course of things, that’s all. How naïve.
When I sat down to write this book I forced myself to open the treasure chest of letters again. As soon as I’d read the first one I instantly remembered why I hadn’t finished them all those years before. Just a couple of lines in, even skimming over the words, and I began to choke up. It wasn’t a treasure chest. That little wooden container held my kryptonite. It was the only thing I still had from my parents’ life – and it had so much power to hurt me.
Flicking through the contents was like opening Pandora’s box. Every note, every scrap of paper inflicted another wound. I wanted to learn as much as possible about my mum’s life. At least I thought I did. But when I came across the letter stamped with the adoption agency’s address, I knew I’d seen too much.
Adoption agency?
Just two words, but enough to strike fear into anyone – whatever your age.
No, it’s not possible. She wouldn’t have done it!
She couldn’t have, could she?
I’ve spent thirty years trying to come to terms with the idea that my mother abandoned me. Yes, I know she died. Yes, she would have done anything to stay with me – and often did. But grief isn’t logical. She died and I was suddenly alone. Those were the facts. She’d gone and I was left behind. Alone and abandoned. That’s how I felt.
At least I’ve always known it wasn’t her choice. But adoption? That’s a very different story. I had to prove it wasn’t true.
Tears streaming down my face, I tore through the box, pulling out sheet after sheet of all that remained of my mother’s life. Then I saw it. It wasn’t much, but the first few words told me it contained what I needed to hear.
My hand was shaking as I clutched the letter. It was neatly typewritten and dated November 1969 – the month I was born. The text barely covered half a page, but in those few words my life had been decided.