As the calendar turns over, August settles on my chest like a weight. It’s hardly fair to this glorious summer season of lazy days and sunshine, holidays and festivals, trees full of leaves and such a sense of fullness everywhere, to lump it with November and February as one of my top three least favourite months. It took me years to realise why I feel such a dislike for the 8th month: my body seems to react to it, put me on edge, flatten my mood that has been so buoyant during July – which is my no.1 favourite (and/because birthday!) month. I thought for years it was that August is so often disappointing – all the flowers dying off in the heat or rain, the garden looking tired and and straggly, the end of summer knocking at the door, the best months over. We endure the endless school summer holidays and usually a wet bank holiday weekend to round things off but we try not to go anywhere because everywhere is so busy and the roads are hell. We did try going away on holiday a few times, but the feeling persists and I cope better with it at home.
There’s clearly something more going on and my body remembers even if I do not. It struck me only a seven years ago: the most traumatic event of my young life happened at the beginning of August, 50 then, 57 years ago now, when our father, my younger brother and I returned home from a morning trip to the nearby town to find our mother’s body blocking the back door into the bungalow. Dad hurried round to the front and the last I saw of my mum was him dragging her by the feet into their bedroom. I was just 12 years old.
These days everybody knows the effects of trauma and that it is stored in the body. I can’t remember my 12 year old feelings at all. Dad let us in and shut us in our bedrooms while he called an ambulance – we didn’t try to go and see what was happening. I knew my mother had previously taken an overdose of pills and we’d subsequently been taking her to the local ‘mental hospital’ for what must have been ECT: she came out clutching her head. But all these memories are very factual with no feelings attached. We weren’t a close family, there were lots of blazing rows which my brother and I hid from. My father later wrote (he only opened up once, in a letter on my 21st birthday) that their 14 year marriage swung between “bliss and hell.” Looking back with my sensible grown-up head, having found out more about her early life, I know she was ill and unable to cope. I still had to forgive her for abandoning us.
On that day – I’ve worked out it must have been a Saturday, probably 2nd August 1969 – after the ambulance had gone our father helped us to pack and drove us down to Devon where Aunty Iris and cousin Jill were on holiday in a caravan. He left us there, returning on – it must have been Tuesday or Wednesday – to tell us after 3 days in hospital she had died. Byllie Patricia née Small, age 34, suicide by cyanide found in mole poison in the garage. I don’t know how I found out this shocking fact, I don’t remember; I also don’t remember my feelings or reaction, sitting in a chair next to that caravan hearing that my whole world had shattered.
My mother was beautiful – but I didn’t really know her: she wasn’t my friend. I don’t remember affection or ‘growing up’ talks – there was a distance. She made our tea after school – fond memories of roe on toast, fishfingers and round spaghetti, even bread and (beef) dripping! We were just the kids who played together in the house and garden and went off to school in the mornings. Our dad shouted a lot – turns out they both had terrible tempers, a friend Byllie had made when I was starting school age filled me in on that when I traced her years later.
My memories of her are very few, notably her pretending to be ‘Tinkerbell’ (the tooth fairy) one bedtime, making me laugh and feel really happy, me having bad pain in my lower abdomen and her checking the toilet paper for blood before being given milk of magnesia – “just wind” – and her drying her auburn-dyed-black hair (just add a hairpiece for a classic 60’s beehive) and asking me what I thought was going on with my father… I had doodled on the magazine I was holding: “another woman?” No memories of cuddles and ‘I love you’s’ though.
It’s a sad tale. After Irene’s caravan our dad moved us to Aunty Frieda’s house for another 3 weeks of the long summer holiday. I picked all her garden blooms and placed them around the house. I remember him crying on one visit. He told us we were going to be sent to boarding schools next term and I wrote letters to my school friends saying ‘my mother died’ filled in with black crayon – but I still felt nothing. He was a man in his 40’s, 7 years older than she had been, but he simply couldn’t face being a single father. He could not and would not talk to me about her either, burying everything inside until he forgot who she was – but I think I reminded him of her and he always reacted to me: always shouting (it would be called verbal abuse these days) I cannot remember one loving thing he ever said, until he was dementing at 82. Yes, I have had to forgive him for abandonment too.
There was no funeral and no certainly no counselling in the early 70s, we were dressed in our new uniforms and sent off to new schools. We lost our home, bedrooms, each other as well as our. friends and any semblance of family. My brother was 9 years old: he hated it and later told me he was abused there. After 3 years he got himself expelled for shoplifting and spent his teenage years at home with our new, young step-mother. I fell in with a group of Christians and found myself a family of faith and Jesus’ healing. My life became a story of redemption – but I’ve always carried a mummy-hole. I have found ways to work round this, being remarkably independent, adopting older women substitutes, focussing on deep friendships, marrying the best husband in the world ever (a total gift from heaven!) and crying out to Abba/Amma God. I have missed her acutely on my wedding day and when the 2 babies were born: she would be 91 if she’d lived and could have shared and filled our lives… I do finally know know know I am loved, but it has taken years.
Writing has been therapeutic, cathartic. I have written Byllie’s story before – it was perhaps the first thing I did write, for ‘Stories from the Street’ back in the day. It’s now kept on my old blog… Words, words, words. I’ve been telling my extraordinary true story for 15+ years, all out in the open for whoever wants to read it. So much processing, with seasons of counselling thrown in – reaching a place of peace over both my parents, thank God, and grateful to bear witness to hope by telling a story of redemption.
But there’s been no more than a peep behind the curtain of my lost childhood. Have I blanked it all out? Probably. My coping mechanism was to go numb, and in every traumatic situation ever since that is what I do. Do I need to dig for those memories? I do not want to, I do not wish to return to a not especially happy, shortened childhood, particularly considering the way it ended. Does my ingrained ‘trauma response’ affect my life now? Yes and no – I simply don’t feel stuff, or maybe I ‘hide’ from it, at least initially.
And in August.
Heart Space 