Open Writing

I slump into the office chair and try to speak. My throat is choked and only cracked partial words escape. The little girl’s eyes round with fear and she backs into the secretary’s silent grasp. I put the phone down. I can’t explain. ‘We have to meet the consultant without our son’ doesn’t seem to justify my reaction. But I can’t say that other word out loud.

I’m at work. The fragments of my old life remind me there are things to do. Like wreckage in a storm, I want to grip on to them. Somehow, I’m back in my classroom trying to read a story to thirty 6 and 7 year olds. Immediately, they sense a change.

‘Have you been crying?’

‘Why?’

‘James will be OK, though, won’t he?’

Their questions go right to the heart of the matter. I manage to get through the half hour to home time. The children don’t know any platitudes so offer instead small, sad smiles. Many touch my hand or hug my waist on their way out.

My boss materialises. Gently, she says, ‘take whatever time you need.’

I know I should be grateful but I panic. I want to escape in the familiar. The demands of teaching young children are so intense you can feel like you operate in two parallel existences, one at work and the other outside work. I mumble.
She is wise enough to leave her offer open until I’m ready. She can also see that I’m too fragile for anything else. Silently, she leaves.

Frantically, mechanically I busy myself. Then it’s time. Howard and I sit beside each other, separately locked in our own fears.

The man, who only a few months ago told us it was nothing to worry about, looks distressed and uncomfortable. He won’t meet my eyes or give definite answers. I am paralysed with pain.

An appointment has been made for us, later in the week, with Dr Edwards, a leading paediatric oncologist based in a teaching hospital in Leeds. We drive home alone, each in our own car having come straight from work. We tell the boys. Push food around plates. James insists we keep it secret until he’s met the oncologist, not ready to believe what the appointment implies until the details are spelled out.

Howard and I go to Parent’s Night. We listen in agony, as the teachers tell us what a wonderful, clever boy James is and that he needs to make sure he works hard next year for the all-important GCSE exams.

In bed, my eyes won’t close. My skin and muscles prickle with the fight or flight instinct. But who can I fight, where can I run? Under attack, we’ve curled in on ourselves. Unable to comfort one another, we lie side by side in shocked silence.
I tiptoe into James’ room. He’s awake, full of hard questions with no answers. I bring him back to our room to lie between us. But he’s as tall as I am and I have to cling to the edge until I hear his breathing deepen. I finally sleep in his bed, taking an irrational comfort in knowing he is safe with his dad.

*

On New Year’s Eve 1976, my twenty-first birthday, I was home alone making a winter coat for my trip to England. My friends were scattered around Michigan and other family members were out with their friends. My belongings had been brought back to my dad’s house, from university, for the last time. All I would need, for my four-month teaching practice in Yorkshire, was packed for the journey.

I never really liked New Year’s Eve. The foot-stamping, self-centred child in me blamed ‘her’ for stealing the special-ness of my birthday. A disturbance, as I fell off to sleep, reminded me of another reason I wasn’t keen. My fourteen-year-old step-sister had arrived home and was vomiting in the bathroom. I managed to manhandle her into the bath, shower the filth off then dump her into bed. Black thoughts grumbled out of me, as I cleaned up the mess.

The flight from Detroit to London was long and I was wearied as much by my nerves as by the journey. Sometimes it seemed as though there were two of me, one that signed up for adventures and the other who had to go on them, amazed to find herself there.

I located the bus into London from the metropolis that is Heathrow and, struggling with heavy bags, made my way to the accommodation information desk at Kings Cross station. I wasn’t due to meet the other exchange students until the next day and hadn’t booked anywhere to stay overnight.

‘I’m sorry, there are no more single rooms available.’ The woman behind the desk announced to the person in front of me in the queue. She didn’t appear to be sorry at all, more bored and fed up with the never ending supply of poorly-prepared tourists she had to deal with.

Panic rushed through me. I had visions of freezing to death on a park bench, being robbed and raped.

‘Would you consider sharing a room with me?’ A heavily accented voice penetrated my fear.

‘There aren’t any rooms,’ I babbled, when I realised the Middle Eastern woman behind was speaking to me. She was old enough to be my mother and had warm, kind eyes.

‘There aren’t any single rooms,’ she said, gently.

She spoke to the woman on the desk and booked a double room for the two of us. It was perfect for me, as I felt safer and it was cheaper. We shared easy conversation, which filled our evening.

More luggage-lugging, the next day, and a coach journey north among yet more strangers brought me finally to my destination. Wentworth Castle College of Education, Barnsley, was a world away from home, literally and figuratively. It didn’t look like the Disneyland, fairy-tale kind of castle but it was impressive all the same. Rebuilt and renamed in 1708, it was older than the United States. It sat grandly at the top of a hill surrounded by forty acres of historic gardens. We walked in through enormous double doors into a vast hall with wide, twin staircases curving upwards like embracing arms. Between them stood a carved brass gong the size of a table.

I was allotted a large sunny room on the third floor, once probably servants’ quarters. My roommates were a quiet girl from London and a lively girl from Newcastle, whose accent I could barely understand.

I was restless and felt like an intruder so, after introductions, I set off to explore nearby Barnsley. There wasn’t a lot to see and soon I was trying to negotiate my way round the unfamiliar bus station to find a way back to the college. ‘What am I doing here?’ kept repeating like a mantra in my mind. I was lost amongst busy people rushing confidently around me.

My shabby hooded sweatshirt and short, dark hair, that I cut myself, were probably only two of many signs that announced that I was a foreigner.
‘Are you one of the exchange students from the college?’

The Yorkshire voice drew my eyes from the incomprehensible signs above the bus bays. Two fair-haired young men were grinning at me.

‘We’re on our way up to the college now, if you want to join us.’

I was pleased to have their company and chatter and especially relieved to know I was on the right bus. As we parted company, they invited me to join them and some of the other students in the pub later.

The Stamford Arms was unlike the strident, frantic nightclubs in the university town I’d come from, with their ‘conquest’ games and superficial contact. The pub was a maze of small cosy rooms with roaring coal fires, shining brasses and baffling unwritten rules of etiquette. There was a snug and a ‘men only’ room, darts and dominoes to play and ‘rounds’ of drinks to buy.

Despite not knowing my fellow American students or any of the English ones, I quickly felt comfortable. There was plenty of light-hearted banter, as the lads tried to find a drink I would like. I could recall tasting one, when I was in England two years earlier, that was warm and smooth as honey but I couldn’t remember what it was called. Eventually, they decided it must be mead but it wasn’t sold in this pub.

There were 25,000 students at my university in Michigan, 500 or so at this college. Already, I felt less anonymous then I did during the three and a half years I lived in Kalamazoo. Perhaps in a smaller group, people on their own are noticed and attempts made to draw them in.

With a thrill of excitement, I realised one of the two men from the bus station, Howard, the one with the blue eyes and curly blonde hair, was interested in me. Considering my pale, freckled face, unruly hair, scruffy clothes and generally scrawny appearance, this was nothing short of amazing.

‘I’ll walk you back up to college,’ he offered, when I tried unsuccessfully to stifle another yawn. The male students were housed in another building in town so it was out of his way but the path back to the college was lonely and went through a stretch of woodland.

‘Thank you, I would really appreciate that.’

It was magical walking through the moon-dazzled snow that had fallen whilst we were in the pub. We chatted and laughed and threw snowballs, exhilarated by the crisp night air and the chemistry between us. Little alarm bells began to ring in my mind. There were only twelve guys and 500 or so girls studying at this college and he was fun, charming and gorgeous. My plans were to be in England for four months then back home to work and study for my master’s degree in Florida.

‘Are you the local lady-killer?’ I asked, as he held me in his arms. But I could no sooner resist that first kiss or control my feelings than make the snow stop falling.

We arranged to meet in the morning. I was to give him a lesson in swimming crawl-stroke in exchange for being shown the local sights. I was very self-conscious about my body and used to swim in my jeans and tee-shirt when I was a teen. I changed as quickly as I could in an effort to be in the pool before Howard but he still beat me to it. Luckily for me, without his long-distance glasses, I looked sufficiently fuzzy that he wasn’t put off.

It didn’t take me long to become accustomed to taking baths instead of showers and responding to the massive gong that summoned us to the four enormous meals we were given each day in the sumptuous dining rooms. After surviving on homemade granola cereal, yoghurt and fruit for the previous four months, it was a miracle I wasn’t the shape of the gong by the end of the first week.

I discovered a new way of life. Howard introduced me to walking as a pastime and not just a means to an end. We spent many glorious hours hiking through woodland, round sparkling reservoirs and over rolling moorland. I always found it easier to talk to someone without looking at him or her and this was the perfect opportunity to get to know one another. There were no distractions and it was just the two of us surrounded by peace and beauty. I was enthralled by his knowledge of the plants and animals we saw but really showed myself up when Howard made a comment about ‘dickey birds’ and I asked him how he knew it was a dickey bird.

From the beginning, Howard and I spent every bit of time available to us, together. It was as if we were two parts of a whole and I had found my home, yet was seeing everything through brand new eyes. All the clichés were true. Within two weeks, we were talking about marriage, as naturally as if reading each other’s minds.

Of course, it wasn’t quite so clear-cut for everyone else. Friends, family, college tutors, even the dinner ladies couldn’t fail to register what was happening between us. I’d never had so many letters from my dad before, as he began to realise I might not come back. The college were anxious about any perceived responsibility and we were summoned to ‘serious chats’ with a number of important people. The dinner ladies were aghast that one of their favourites would choose an American girl when there were so many ‘English roses’ available.

Neither were we insensitive to the difficulties before us. At a time when divorce rates continued to climb, we knew marriage was a huge step for anyone to take. I couldn’t imagine my life without Howard, but would I be able to settle in a strange country, away from all of my family, and forever be a little bit different from everyone else? I was once at a function with Howard when a ‘friend’ of his told me, quite calmly, that he hated all Americans (a miniscule peek at prejudice).

We joked about the fact that Howard was exactly nine months younger than me, saying that God must have whispered to his mum and dad to get a move on, as I was already here. But there was a part of me that knew this was God’s will for me and I wondered at His plan for my life.