Authors: Jean Hill
‘Well,’ James had retorted when she told him about Richard’s request, ‘they may be my niece and nephew but as far as I am concerned they are a dead loss. You can entertain them, I’m not going to stay around and put up with that silly Felicity. Ugh, kids ... Richard is too keen to get rid of the little brats. He should have made more effort to stop his wife from drinking, especially when driving that old car. She was unhappy. It was probably his fault anyway.’
Janet agreed and regretted her generosity. Richard soon obtained a job which entailed working abroad for an oil company.
‘I won’t be able to get home as often as I would like to see the children,’ he had bleated at the time but Janet knew he really did not want to see them.
There were no grandparents to help and Richard’s aunt and uncle in Northumberland, though really too elderly to take on two children, were the only relatives who had, though with some reluctance, agreed to help. Richard had jumped at their initial tentative offer to take the youngsters off his hands.
‘Poor little children,’ his soft-hearted aunt had said at the time. A statement she was later to regret.
In no time Richard had a string of girlfriends who were far more interesting than his children. He didn’t want to get married again and enjoyed his freedom. He continued to doubt whether they were really his children anyway. Ronald might be but he was not a child he felt pleased to call his own. The boy was intelligent but had no spirit and was weak and useless, and probably wouldn’t amount to much anyway.
The first holiday the children spent with Janet and James was a disaster. It was one year before James decided to leave Enderly and he was morose and miserable most of the time. Felicity at just seven years old was pining for her mother and hated living with her great aunt in Northumberland.
‘Can’t I live with you and Uncle James?’ she would ask every day.
‘Not possible dear,’ Janet had replied quickly. She knew that James would be livid if he thought he was stuck with ‘those children’ as he labelled them and for once she agreed with him.
Ronald was quiet and subdued and he hardly uttered a word during the time he stayed in Primrose House. Janet was concerned for the boy and did her best to make him welcome. She feared he was afraid to speak and would benefit from speech training which could help him release his inhibitions but James thought that would be silly and Janet’s efforts to obtain a teacher for him were quickly squashed.
Felicity was spiteful and jealous of any attention Janet paid her brother. James disappeared to the Green Man Pub most evenings to enjoy a pint of local ale in peace, leaving Janet on her own to put the children to bed and attempt to read to them. She tried playing cards, various games she had played as a child like snap and sevens. She introduced them to Snakes and Ladders and got out her old Monopoly set. Ronald tried to concentrate on the games but Felicity made sure he could not succeed or win anything. Her lack of concentration became contagious.
‘Silly boy,’ she would chant, ‘can’t play any games properly, just a Dumbo.’ Ronald burnt his arm on the Aga twice and managed to injure himself however carefully Janet tried to avoid accidents, and that worried her. Felicity was agitated, restless and unpredictable and appeared determined to ensure Ronald could not think clearly about anything he was doing for long. Janet heaved a sigh of relief when their father appeared at the end of their stay, having flown home from the Middle East, to take them back to Northumberland.
‘They need help, Richard,’ she stressed. ‘Felicity is like a jack in the box most of the time and Ronald’s withdrawn and miserable. The poor lad can’t concentrate and is accident prone.’
‘Oh, they will be all right,’ Richard had answered cheerily with a flippant wave of his hand and with what appeared to Janet to be an appalling lack of concern. ‘Aunt Dolly and Uncle Bert will keep them in order.’
Janet thought the best thing would be for Richard to meet some nice homely woman who could be a mother to his children, although she would feel sorry for any person who had the bad luck to cope with Felicity.
Richard was daydreaming about the luscious dark girl he had met at work the week before, not the marrying or motherly type but fair game for a while and no strings attached, which suited him. He had not been happy with Anne and their daughter Felicity was nothing less than a nightmare. His son lacked backbone and his affection for his children was fast diminishing.
The children came twice more to stay with Janet after James had left her. Janet coped with them with mounting dismay. Things did not improve.
‘I can’t have your children again,’ she told Richard after a gruelling few days with them in the first school holiday after James had left her. ‘I have a large house and garden to look after and a new post as deputy head. I need to do a lot more preparation and paperwork for the school. James isn’t here to help and life is difficult. You are responsible for them, Richard.’
The children were an unwelcome burden. She thought with burning resentment that James had done enough to ruin her life and she needed to move on. She certainly did not need his unpredictable niece and her young brother in her life. The only person she wanted now was John Lacey.
Richard’s Aunt Dolly too was finding Felicity increasingly difficult.
‘Bert,’ she would grumble to her husband day after day, ‘I’m getting too old to cope with a kid like Felicity. I just can’t do with it now.’ She would sigh and groan. ‘Richard will have to make other arrangements. Ronald isn’t too bad, the poor little devil would be better on his own.’
Richard despaired. It would cost him hard-earned money but he agreed to send Felicity to a boarding school in a small village outside Bristol. He hoped it would be worthwhile. At least it would give him and Aunt Dolly some breathing space. He looked forward to concentrating on his latest girlfriend, a young busty blonde who had just joined his work team; a relationship that was promising and had even prompted him to think about marrying again one day.
The boarding school classes were small and the atmosphere friendly but Felicity made no attempt at first to befriend other girls or learn. This was her father’s way of getting rid of her and separating her from her brother. A deep resentment almost consumed her and twisted her thinking. She endured the lessons and cheeked the staff as often as she could. The majority of the teachers became exasperated with her but her fees were paid on time and that was the Head’s chief concern, at least at first.
The school boasted a small commercial department, consisting of a tiny room with four typewriters, and an inexperienced young woman, Miss Badley, who had little teaching experience, in charge. When she was fourteen Felicity opted for the commercial course. It must be better than French she told herself, and the French mistress Miss Lamont cheered when she realised that the disruptive Felicity would no longer be a member of her class. Felicity had spattered ink over the textbooks, spat in other pupils’ faces and made herself objectionable during the time Miss Lamont had tried to teach her. Letters of complaint to the Head from parents and a string of detentions and threats of expulsion made no impression upon Felicity. She would have been delighted to have been thrown out of the wretched school, especially that boring French class.
‘Come on Felicity, you could become an excellent secretary one day,’ the pretty, young and somewhat naive Miss Badley told her. ‘You have a natural aptitude for commercial subjects.’ She was unaware of Miss Lamont’s unusual jollity and pats on the back from other colleagues in the staffroom. In fact, Miss Lamont produced a bottle of good French wine to share with her colleagues when Miss Badley was not around, something she had never done before. Until she met Felicity she considered that she was an excellent disciplinarian.
‘That girl is really something,’ she declared with passion to her fellow teachers. It was a sentiment they all endorsed.
Felicity thought Miss Badley was a soft touch and liked the attention she received. The woman was in her opinion a tad dopey but she would go along with the commercial course for a while. To her amazement she discovered something she liked doing. Her fingers flew over the typewriter keys and she even managed to pass three examinations and reach an advanced standard. She was too busy and intrigued to be a nuisance. Her English skills were weak but she managed with the help of a dictionary to improve her spelling and achieve a reasonable command of punctuation and grammar. She made a conscientious effort to write shorthand but that proved difficult for her, though she boasted later on when filling in job applications: ‘I have almost achieved verbatim standard.’ She actually had difficulty in deciphering any of her so-called shorthand notes and more often than not resorted to writing quickly in longhand and hoping that her translations were acceptable. Miss Badley, as she had anticipated, didn’t notice, or pretended she didn’t. Felicity relaxed and her behaviour improved.
Simple accounts were no obstacle. At least she understood the difference between debtors and creditors and the necessity to make accounts balance. The dream of obtaining a secretarial post with a handsome wealthy boss who would want to marry her sustained her interest in her studies. A secretarial post could be her passport to riches in the future.
She fantasized. He would be rich and handsome and she would walk down the aisle in a white satin dress. They would live in a large mansion in the country. She looked forward to the day when she could live in perfect luxury. She longed to have money but so far she had very little experience of possessing much or the security and pleasures in life that she imagined it could bring. Many of the girls in the school had wealthy parents, snobs she labelled them, and on occasions envy shot through her, twisting further her already muddled thinking.
Some of the teenage girls were quite worldly and they chatted at length about their sexual experiences and life abroad during the school holidays, and bragged about their affairs to the innocent Felicity.
‘When I return to Africa with my parents in the holidays I have sex with several men,’ Betty Smart boasted frequently when the lights had been turned out in the dormitory at night and the girls chatted quietly so that Matron would not hear them. Her voice would quiver with excitement. ‘I am going to marry one of them when I leave school. He owns a big farm and is a rich and handsome fellow and has promised to buy me a big diamond engagement ring.’
Hmm … Felicity thought. It’s probably all lies, he only wants to sleep with her.
Felicity’s bed was next to Betty’s in the dormitory they shared with three other girls. Betty would describe her experiences to the other girls in minute detail.
‘Come on Betty, what is it like?’ they would ask and the answers always provoked many oohs and aaahs. Felicity was convinced that she was missing something wonderful and the sooner she was able to leave school and indulge herself the better.
When she was just sixteen Felicity persuaded her father that she was ready for the big wide world.
‘I’m not going to learn any more here,’ she urged. Richard, after a chat with the Headmistress, was inclined to agree. The Head made it quite clear that she would like to see the back of the unpredictable Felicity and the sooner the better. Nothing it seemed could subdue the girl’s restlessness and often unpleasant behaviour. There had been too many occasions when ink had been splashed on the back of the blouses of other girls and broken pencils hurled with force across a classroom when Felicity had failed to understand some minor point in a lesson. Without the commercial course to fall back on she would have got rid of her long ago whatever the consequences for her father, who was a weak character in the Head’s opinion and should have taken that girl in hand long ago.
‘It may be sensible,’ she told Richard, ‘for Felicity to be assessed by a child psychologist.’ Heaven knows the girl needs that, she thought.
‘There is no point in having an assessment,’ Richard insisted. ‘I don’t want my daughter to be labelled mentally deficient by some quack. She is just high spirited.’
Richard was far from weak, he was just uninterested and was convinced that Felicity was not his daughter. The sooner she stood on her own feet, preferably a long way away from him, the happier he would feel. That day could not come fast enough for him.
With Richard’s help Felicity obtained a job in London as a typist in a Government Office, and a place to stay in a hostel for girls. She was lucky. So was Richard, at least he thought so. She did not stay long, however, there were too many rules and regulations.
‘Be in by ten, keep your room tidy, make your bed. It’s like a damned prison,’ Felicity fumed. She was not very well organised and tended to put off tidying up her things, to the annoyance of two other girls with whom she shared a room. She couldn’t see any hope of getting out of the tedious typing pool so that she could enjoy bright lights, sex and true independence. She was not in any case earning enough money. The wizened old bat who supervised the typing pool was far from the handsome boss she had dreamed about marrying one day. She would leave. Richard despaired.
Felicity moved erratically from one job to another, insurance offices, solicitors, stockbrokers, estate agents and others, only staying a few months in each one until she went to Canada to work for a friend of her father’s when she was twenty.
‘He’s a good chap, my friend Bob,’ Richard told her. ‘He’s doing us a favour by taking you on. It will be a wonderful experience for you. Canada is a lovely country.’
It was Richard’s last desperate attempt to do something to rid himself of his difficult and trying daughter.
Bob had told Richard that he needed some secretarial help in his lumber business and he agreed to employ Felicity to repay a favour he owed Richard.
‘Any good, is she?’ Bob had asked. ‘Marvellous’, Richard had replied. ‘She’s a really good typist.’ That at least was true. ‘She takes shorthand and can handle all your accounts,’ he continued, with his tongue in his cheek.
Arrangements were made for Felicity to travel to Canada and Richard heaved a sigh of relief. It was worth every penny he had paid for her air fare.