My life is uncomplicated. I had very domineering parents, and my brother and sisters always demanded a lot more attention than I did. I didn’t do very well at school, but that was because I was always treated as though I was stupid. I’m not stupid, just quiet; have you noticed how often people make that mistake?
So my life has been lived in the C-stream, the bottom set, directed by fate and my own irreversible choices. C-stream girls could either marry or go into nursing, and in fact I did both. It seemed like a way of keeping my options open; but in fact I was pregnant, and therefore all of my options were closed.
My family considers that I married beneath me, because I could at least have quietly charmed some society bachelor at my private school, but I managed to fall for one of the local day-boys, there on a scholarship. I can’t even remember what I thought we had in common, can’t recall a moment’s whispered conversation or a gentle kiss, but it must have been good once, at least for a little while.
We were never going to be rich, but we managed well enough with our young family. Our children were plain and quiet, like me; we never tried to push them, just to give them a happy childhood and a wholesome upbringing. Raising a family is difficult, and we were really still both children when we became parents; all we had to go on was that we didn’t want our family to be anything like the ones that had produced us.
For a long time, I didn’t even consider whether or not this made me happy; it was just what my life was, and as far as I knew, this was how it was going to be for the rest of our days. I was wrong, though, because he started an affair with someone in the office, and it shattered my world.
These days, a marriage ends at that point, but we were still old-fashioned enough to think we had options. We left the area completely. The children were upset about changing schools, and I had to leave a job that I really enjoyed, but the idea was that a complete change would help us to move on. And get us away from that woman.
The town we moved to was a real step down. It was ugly, sliding downhill, with scruffy shops and a biting east wind. Among the few jobs available, there was little that suited me, but I took some work doing telesales. The new school uniforms were just as cheap and ugly, and we were far away from our friends and family. We were all doing penance for him, but maybe if we could survive this, we could survive anything.
In the end, we could not have been more wrong, because in my new job, I met someone who paid me attention in a new, sophisticated way, that I had never quite experienced before. It was exciting and passionate, and this was all new to me. He gave me flowers and chocolates and compliments, and I had never had that before; I loved it, and I thought I loved him.
Suddenly my family stopped being the main focus of my world. I didn’t care for house extensions and new curtains. I wasn’t interested in my daughter’s O-levels and I couldn’t even feel terribly sad that our old dog was sick and dying. Our summer holiday that year was the usual dreary camping trip, and all I could think was that I should have had a better life than this. One stormy night in a tent in Wales, I told him that I wanted a divorce.
My parents disapproved on so many levels, especially because we had almost reached what they considered to be an acceptable standard of living. At one point they even wanted to take custody of the children, to which we both objected strongly. The hardest thing was to tell the children that the family was so badly broken that we could not fix it. They were old enough to hurt, but too young to understand.
I moved out of our comfortable home into a terraced house with a few sticks of second-hand furniture, and I finally passed my driving test, because I had to. The children all but had to be forced to visit me that first Sunday; and their resentment and discomfort was palpable, as they huddled in blankets in front of my fizzing black and white TV. Their view of the world seemed to be just as monochrome and unfocussed: they simply blamed me for leaving their dad, and I knew I could not tell them that it was him who had brought us to this.
The true meaning of being alone is when you have made all the difficult decisions, gone through the administration and made the necessary arrangements, suffered the arguments and the shouting; and you are left reeling and dazed in an eerie calm, with no family to look after. The house is dark and cold, the rented bed is hard and lumpy, and you finally realise that your lover has never had any intention of leaving his wife.