Escaping from Nan and Granddad - Part 2

Mum and Dad used to make running the home look simple. Trust me when I say that it isn’t. 

My first job once Nan and Granddad had driven off without seeing me was to find some clean bedclothes so that I had somewhere to sleep. But of course since the heating had been turned off the clothes cupboard wasn’t warm and so all the bed clothes were cold and slightly damp feeling.  So I put them on the drying rack in front of the fire to air and warm through while I wrote down the list of jobs that I needed to do. And so it went on for several hours; every routine job seemed to take an age and before I realised it was tea-time.

Ah, no food in the house. Food shopping had been Mum’s area so off I drove the superstore. I never realised that food was so expensive! Who needs meat anyway? Cooking I could manage so I had a decent tea before looking again at the massive list of chores that needed doing.

The garden was a mess. It had been designed to be low maintenance because neither Mum nor Dad liked gardening but low maintenance doesn’t mean zero maintenance. I never did master this part of running a house and I think the neighbours used to fret a bit at how untidy it was.

I went to bed fairly early and it was such a pleasure not to have to worry about Granddad coming into my room without knocking. I remember walking around with nothing on feeling very adventurous.

And then I started to cry. Almost my first real, let it all come out, cry since the accident. When people talk about floods of tears they must have been thinking about me.  I just lay on my bed bashing the pillow as hard as I could saying again and again to Mum and Dad, “Why did you have to leave me to face all this crap on my own?”  This wasn’t some silly game, this wasn’t some horrid phase with a clear end point, this was how it was going to be for as far into the future as I could see!

Eventually I calmed down. And as I lay there thinking I realised that I had a simple choice. Force myself to be a grown-up long enough to finish all my exams and go off to university or give up on all my dreams by being weak and feeble.  I knew I didn’t want to go through life wishing, if only I had done this, that or the other so that first night really was the first day of the rest of my life.

It was what they call a steep learning curve for the first few weeks. My aunt came over to help me with some paperwork jobs that I had no idea how to start and she brokered a “peace treaty” between Nan and Granddad and me. Basically we ignored each other and agreed never to discuss what had happened when I was living with them. This was an agreement they broke later on and this will be part of a later blog entry.

Escaping from Nan and Granddad

It was just after school had closed for the summer that I decided that I was going to have to move out of Nan and Granddad’s house and back into my family home. By now all the paperwork had been sorted and all the tax had been paid so the house was mine.

I had to move out because I simply didn’t feel safe living with Nan and Granddad. I was tired of being battered, both emotionally and physically, by him. The number and severity of the hits I was getting was going up and up and it was just a matter of time before something really serious happened. So I decided to leave and once the decision was made I felt much calmer in myself. Of course I didn’t give either Nan or Granddad any hint at all that I was leaving. I chose a morning when he was at the Bowls Club and she was having her hair done. I just packed everything I had into my little car, drove the short distance to my house, unpacked the car and started the rest of my life.

I left a short note on their kitchen table to say where I was but I didn’t bother explaining why I had left. They never agreed with anything I said so it wasn’t worth the effort. I knew that as soon as they read the note they would come round and sure enough at 12:30 their car arrived. I was hiding upstairs where they couldn’t see me and I stayed there until after lots of door bell ringing and banging and shouting they finally left.

It was so strange being in the house on my own. It felt as if Mum and Dad were just away for a while and that if I was patient I would eventually hear them arrive back. I knew in my head that they were dead but a part of me was still struggling to accept the truth. Strangest of all was going into their bedroom. One of Dad’s astronomy magazines was on the bedside table just as he had left it the morning of the day he was killed.

The phone was still working so I phoned my Aunt – Mum’s sister and my Uncle – Dad’s brother – to tell them what had happened. Well part of what had happened because I didn’t know whose side they were going to be on. It was a little while before I realised that they were 100% on my side – basically once they found out about the lies Granddad had told them and about all the hitting.

I didn’t know very much about running a home and the first few months were very difficult but they were a lot, lot better than feeling scared all the time. And that is how it felt when I was near Granddad. I did know enough to cancel the standing order that paid the rent that Nan and Granddad had been charging me and that was one of the very first jobs I did. I can remember feeling quite grown-up sorting that out on my own.   

The isolation created by parental bereavement.

There was a time when I worried that I might be overwhelmed with people trying to help me “get over” Mum and Dad’s death. That certainly didn’t happen; it was a lack of support and normal social contact that was so horrible. Neither Nan nor Granddad was in favour of expressing emotions. Their way of mourning for their daughter was to never mention her name and if I mentioned Mum, or, far worse, mentioned Dad, is wasn’t long before I got a warning or a slap or both from Granddad. Even the weekly phone chat with my Mum’s sister was very heavily monitored by Nan.

I had never had a proper boyfriend but I used to get quite a lot of invitations to birthday parties or social trips to the cinema or the pub and if it was an event that needed a partner there was never a shortage of lads from my year at school willing to take on the job. After the accident the invitations pretty much stopped coming. I suppose people thought that I wouldn’t want to come or that I would suddenly burst into tears and spoil things for everybody else. Of course what I really wanted was the chance to feel normal, if just for a few hours, but knowing that a party was happening but that I hadn’t been invited made me feel like a total freak. I almost stopped going on Facebook for this reason. All the pictures of people having a good time just made me feel even more isolated.

Mum and Dad’s friends were the same. I saw lots of them at the funeral but then most of them just vanished and I have had no further contact with them. Mum’s best friend – a good enough friend to be an “auntie” to me – hasn’t had a conversation with me since a week after the funeral!  I see her in town sometimes and although she might say “Oh, hello Sally” it is never anything more than this.

Once I moved out of Nan and Granddad’s house and back into the family home I had inherited things improved a bit. The neighbours knew I was living there on my own and although if I ever needed to ask them for help they were fine they absolutely never initiated contact with me.

In year 13 at school when we were doing small group projects we sometimes used to meet up at somebody’s house to do extra work. It wasn’t long before I realised that one or two of the Mothers were unhappy about their sons being unsupervised in my house. I never dared ask if they worried about what their son might do to me or what I might do to their son!

It wasn’t until I started at university, 18+ months after the accident, that I felt that the social side of my life was starting to get more normal.

How much I loved my Mum and Dad

I came across something I wrote about my Mum and Dad in June 2012 to a friend of mine. What I wrote then is still what I feel now so I’m happy to share it.

I loved my mum and dad. Not all teenagers would say that but I really did love them so much. It was like some utter nightmare when they had to leave me. They were both science teachers but they never worked in the same school. They were both Head of Science so we were fairly well off. They met when they were on their PGCE course and got they got married when the course finished. They always encouraged me with my athletics and it we were running late I used to get changed in the back of the car as were drove along with dad under strict instructions not to look in the mirror! They were always interested in me and me in them and so we had lots of happy shared times together.

Mum was tall and slim (5ft 10 in her 20's) and dad taller still at 6ft 2 which explains the way I look. I know now that they loved each other very much and it would have been so horrible for one to have died and the other survived

Mum had me quite late in life (35) and had such a terrible time while she was pregnant that she said "never again". That is why I am their only child.  Me being so late was a bit strange because Nan had my mum and aunt very young (she was still in her teens). Given what happened I don't know if it was a good thing or not I was an only child. I think we would have been separated - Nan and Granddad moaned at having just me stay so having two of us wouldn't have happened. But I would have had somebody to share the pain.

Mum and dad didn't have many friends (they were a bit nerdy) but the ones they did have were very close. I have always been cross and hurt that apart from coming to the funeral almost none of these friends have ever been in touch with me. Not even a card at Christmas.

We used to go on holiday every summer. I can remember Florida, Cyprus and Malta best of all. We used to do a mixture of cultural and fun things and they were good times. I can remember going topless in Cyprus - because mum was brave enough to I did to. Neither of us had very much to show!

Mum and dad were very progressive and sensible about things like periods. When I started, I was 11, it was all very low key and non-stressful. I was quite OK about telling them both that I had needed to use the supplies kept in the bathroom cabinet. She, a bit later (14?), talked my through how to explore my own body. It was just taken for granted it was something daughters should be taught. When I was 16 all three of us talked a lot about relationships. How sex was for both parties and all sorts like that. I'm so very proud of my mum and dad for teaching me these things!

I don't dream about mum and dad that much which is quite sad. The only one I can remember, I think I have had it 3 times now, happens in a brilliantly lit room, rather like a hospital waiting room, with nothing in the room except 3 chairs around an oval table. Mum and dad are standing on one side of the table and I am on the other but no matter how fast I ran they are on always on the other side to me. Although they know I was at university they still ask me all sorts of questions about what had happened to me since they had died. In the middle of the conversation they just walk over to one of the doors, wave goodbye and leave me behind. It isn't a happy dream.

Mum and Dad wouldn't be pleased at how Nan and Granddad treated me. Mum and Dad never spanked me but I wasn't a naughty girl either so it was easy all round. I didn't have the terrible teens. But Mum and Dad wouldn't be pleased with me that I sometimes seemed happy and cheerful to outsiders when I was actually being beaten, slapped and deprived of food. "You should have spoken up" is what they would have said.