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Sunday 16 July 2023

Kindness, Acceptance, Peace.

I always thought that my ex-husband would die on the 3rd September. The lyrics of the song ‘Papa was a Rolling Stone’ were written for him: a stone that rolled his own way who baulked at responsibility and commitment leaving a trail of devastation in his wake. But he didn’t, he died at 2am on Tuesday July 11th, 2023 in Galway hospital. 

He moved to Ireland after we divorced twenty years ago and I haven’t seen him since. Our elder son has only the sketchiest memories, our younger son has none and my ex was never in touch with them – not a card, not a phone call. I heard from him only once when a letter arrived. He had obviously seen me on the TV and it had it inspired him to write a very short note to say as much and sending love to myself and the boys. No address. At least that proved he was alive, news that my beloved father-in-law was desperate for because no one knew for sure: we had no clue where he was. My father-in-law sadly died not knowing because his son hadn't been in touch with him for sixteen years and searches yielded no results. Yes it is possible to fly that low under the radar, even in this day and age. I was always convinced he would turn up when he was in need and as such I have always been on low alert waiting for it.

            A month ago I was contacted by someone asking if I had been married to him and a red light was activated. This person told me that my ex didn’t know he’d tried to track me down, but he felt obliged, on his behalf, to tell me that he was very poorly. I turned into a detective that would put Sherlock Holmes to shame to find out what all this was about because I was convinced of an ulterior motive. It stirred up a lot of things because our marriage was a car crash of the highest order, but back then I’d always hoped I could rescue it, and trust me I tried. No one marries expecting to divorce. I wanted us to be forever, but our forever ended short. Even when we divorced, I wanted to keep it civil because the guilt of having been the one to call an end to our marriage weighed heavy on me. I didn’t want our sons to come from a broken home yet I had been the one who filed for divorce. When my Decree Absolute came through – on Halloween – I popped the cork off a bottle of champagne, took the first sip and broke down. That piece of paper represented my failure and I think I’ve been flogging my guts out ever since to make it up to my lads. But I would never have cut their father off from them, he severed those ties and kept them severed. For too many years I’ve been angry at him for taking off without a thought for his lovely father, his brother, his sons without a backward glance at what that level of abandonment might do to them.

            I had barely begun to comprehend that his name was back on my horizon again when he died awaiting a major operation, frail and thin and so ravaged that his friends who had seen him only a short time before couldn’t recognise him. I couldn’t register it, I couldn’t define what I felt. I don’t know why I was so upset, I’m still processing it, still struggling with a situation that sits outside the norm. I can't explain it and I can't understand it, I can only feel it. It isn't anything to do with love, but it is everything to do with loss.

            My ex found his way to a gentle, accepting community in very Irish Ireland. He lived a simple life, labouring on people’s houses, on their land, on a dairy farm, his home a ramshackle lowly dwelling place with a wild feral cat running around for company, enjoying the craic in the local village pub. The few photos I was forwarded by people who knew him show him aged, smiling, as if he’d found his contentment. Trading home comforts for a harder life but one as free as it is possible to get is undoubtedly the highest state he could find: satisfying the ‘here for a good time, not a long time’ adage. People in that community gave him lifts when he needed them, work, companionship, donated clothes and bedding, washed his laundry when he was ill, took him at face value. The couple on the farm fed him when he was poorly at the end, forced him into hospital, cared for him. Then the community arranged his funeral for him, wrote their eulogies, liaised with the priest and turned out en masse to mourn for one of their own in church. We watched the service online and it was humble and touching and yes, they included our names out of their innate goodness. They asked us if it was okay if he stayed in the midst of them, in their churchyard. It was only right and proper than he rested among these wonderful people who had enfolded him. It was a funeral service with the purest sort of kindness at its heart, their consideration has deeply touched me. On his coffin was a photo I’d sent over of him in his younger days looking handsome with that full head of thick hair that he has passed on to his sons. But I don’t recognise this man they will miss. We all refine of course. I hope I’m not the same person I was years ago, I hope I have evolved somewhat from a much rougher copy (and will from this rough copy). He obviously moved away from the man I knew too. Maybe in shedding everything but that which served his basic needs – and that little feral cat running wild about the place – he found all he needed in life. Maybe it was just easier to keep focused on forward than to unknot everything that lay behind him, cut the ropes and let it sink to the depths of the sea that lay between us. Maybe addressing everything was too big, too much and so he reset his whole life and began afresh.

            It is the finality of it that is hard to comprehend for the family he left behind him. I know there was always the lingering hope of a reconciliatory pint, of them being able to talk, which has now been removed and can never be. It is a confusing time. Why else would I be so incensed that he has gone denying his sons a single scrap from his emotional table, worrying about the effect on them, and also poring over pictures of gravestones because I can’t bear to think of him in an unmarked pauper's grave. 

            I know the priest is surprised that the quiet man who stood at the back during Mass had chosen such a different life from his ex-wife, who is doing okay at writing books. And she made that happen so she could support her children as a single mum, and had enough material from that marriage to write novels until the pen drops out of her hand at her own end. Books featuring women rising like phoenixes from the ashes of bad relationships. That marriage was rocket fuel for my literary ambitions. The end of us was the beginning of me, and probably the beginning of him too, even if the path he took led to a wilder, harsher terrain.

            There are a lot of feelings here that refuse to sit in pigeon holes. I don’t know what the correct protocol is for a long-divorced ‘not-widow’. There is a template when someone close dies, but this chapter was left out of the textbook. I have few good memories of our time together, they were all snuffed out by the weight of too many bad ones. I have no idea why all this has affected me so much because I can hold (and have held) grudges for decades, trust me, I’m no saint… except to say that I gave birth to his sons, who have the best of him in them, and who I love more than my own life and that link will always be - maybe that is it. My overwhelming feeling is one of sadness, of something ended, even though for me it had ended long ago. And yet it feels now as if it has ended again, but properly this time. Maybe I am worried about the effect of that ending on those I love with all their questions left unanswered. It is impossible to get into someone’s head who thinks so differently from you, who has such opposing values. It was also impossible back then to see someone continually swimming against the tide, taking the path of most resistance when it would have been so easy to go with the flow and I could never work out why he did it. He was an apprentice-trained joiner. He had a trade, a way of living well but he threw that away too. He was a puzzle that defied solving beyond his last breath, the ultimate enigma.

            These are uncharted waters: losing the father of your children. Someone who, apparently, spoke of us fondly to his Irish friends who knew this different version of him. Every time I think I have a grasp of it, it slips away as if greased and it will not be pinned down. He told people about us, but he wouldn't answer any questions. Information given was on his terms only. 

Then I found that letting him go with my forgiveness freed me. There is no longer a need to try and untangle the knotted emotions, I have buried any enmity in its own grave. It is all finally done. There was a weight inside me that I didn’t know I was carrying but now it has gone. I have told my sons to let him go with forgiveness also and move on. Any ends that remained untied, we have to tie off ourselves now, make our own closure. 

It will take the soil on his grave time to settle, in line with our feelings, but settle it will.  And I will see to it that there is a stone erected so that one day his sons can go and see his resting place if they choose. It is a marker for what was once but is no more. It is time for us all – living and dead – to be at peace. 

Tuesday 30 May 2023

The Power of Nancy

 


My friend Nancy died last week. I wept buckets. I wept like someone who saw her every day of our lives but the truth was I rarely saw her. We wrote - always a VERY lengthy one at Christmas - and I went to visit her last year, the last time being before Covid. But therein lies the strength of a good friendship, we picked up as if we HAD just seen each other the previous day. And she was never far from my mind because she turns up as a mention every time I do a presentation about my career. 

Our friendship started when I was twenty-five. I lived in Haworth and had secured a job at a local furniture and antiques shop and I was introduced to the three women who I would be working with - Nancy, in her fifties, Sheila in her sixties, Mary in her seventies. My initial thought was 'My god, this is going to be fun working with these old farts' but it WAS the best fun. We called ourselves the Golden Girls. Mary was the flighty Blanche, Sheila was dizzy Rose, Nancy was the pragmatic Dorothy - and it was ME who was the old Sophia, because they were far younger in spirit than I was. We went bowling together, to dinner, to the theatre... they taught me how women's friendship batters down all the barriers of age, background, colour, creed. It was the best lesson of my young life. 

The place we worked at well, you had to be there to believe it and a tale for another time, but thirty-odd years later and Nancy and I we were still laughing and coming out in cold sweats at what we experienced there. The big Christmas letter was the one I looked forward to writing and receiving most. But there will be no more. Nancy didn't want me to know she was poorly so it all came as a bolt from the blue and there will be no funeral because she didn't want anyone who barely knew her telling a congregation all about her as if they were best mates and she thought religion caused more problems than it solved. She wanted no fuss. That was her, strong, straight but you can be both of those and also full of joy too and she was. And, when I came to write my books, because of that friendship I had a lot in my scrapbook to draw from. Nancy's first husband was a serial adulterer, she told me, but he couldn't understand why she got upset because 'he saved her for best'. That turned up in a book, I tell you. (And yes, she moved on and met the most wonderful new husband.)

So when I read the article in the Mail at the weekend about the rise of 'mid-lit' - and how it had become this summer's literary sensation, my initial thought was 'about bloody time'. It's good that it's now in vogue - plus a double-whammy with some nice press for romantic fiction. But it has been around for quite some time waiting for the sun to shine on it, and there are many novelists out there writing about middle-aged and older women.

When I first started writing, I took a chance and wrote a story that was relevant to me rather than the ones I read - and loved - which were mainly set in the south and featured younger women. I was forty and badly in need of a Renaissance after a long drawn-out divorce. I couldn't see books about there about ME, so I wrote them.

My first book, The Yorkshire Pudding Club, about three northern women having babies aged forty, was a risk. But it paid off. And it sold because a load of women out there, like me, wanted books that were about women closer to their own age, who'd been kicked around the ring a few times and wanted hope that better things lay ahead. That book came out in 2006. I liked writing about women my own age, I knew what they'd been through, I knew that a few had been whittled away at in life, become doormats, and were ripe for a change of life. But I knew that a lot had gone the other way and embraced getting older, riding the age wave, pushing their boundaries. By this time I was finally free of the husband, I was running my own copyrighting company and doing a lot better than just surviving. Roll back seven years before though and I was standing crying in a corner thinking that if all I was going to have in life was what I already had, I might as well not be here. That low. So I absolutely know that however bad it gets, there is always the prospect of hope, of things getting much better, of reuniting yourself with the path your young self imagined lay in front of them which had some gold on it. As you age you realise sometimes that the gold is actually turds with a lucky light on them. But it doesn't have to be like that. Women have renaissances and when that biological clock hits forty and beyond... it seems to awaken a dragon within that says, 'Time's ticking, I want more.' It happened to me exactly like that. My life now couldn't be more different to how it was back then. I had no connections in this industry, just a hope that I could one day see my name on a book and see that book on a shelf in a shop. Change is scary and messy, but the end result is magnificent and that's why I write about such things.

I know that Jane Austen wrote about much younger women, but in those days you were finished if you were mid-twenties and hadn't got spliced. So when she writes about women like Anne Elliot, she's more or less writing the equivalent of middle-aged women, past it, heading for old-maid-dom, given a new lease of life. She was ahead of her time. She'd have worn a #RespectRomFic badge.

Sometimes my characters are younger (I still can remember what it's like to be that), sometimes they are much older than me, I have a wide range of ages in my books because I want to appeal to all readers. And even though I'm not a pensioner (yet), I've had enough friends of that age group to know that they are far from Scrapheap Farm and a switch hasn't been turned on that forces them to start an annual subscription to 'What Denture Paste?' and collecting thimbles. Let's not go down the lazy stereotype route. Women in their sixties don't start calling people dear and checking out retirement homes. They are going pole-dancing (yes some WIs so this) and trying all manner of new things, including internet dating and finding love. My friend is mid-fifties and she's about to climb Kilimanjaro, and not for the first time either. In many cases 'mature' women care less what people think of them which frees them. I was far more paranoid in my twenties than now. And I wear much brighter colours.

In Here Come The Girls, I have four friends who go on their first cruise for their fortieth birthdays. They're not in the best way, in need of that renaissance.  In Afternoon Tea at the Sunflower Cafe, Connie has become prematurely middle-aged, but she finds a fire in her belly when she finds her husband is cheating on her. In The Teashop on the Corner, one of my main characters Molly is a pensioner who, in My One True North, starts up her own business in her seventies. In Sunshine Over Wildflower Cottage, I fought to have my middle-aged characters going through the menopause because 'it wasn't a sexy subject' but I had a feeling it would be. I didn't want their symptoms being shoved under the carpet. I didn't want them to become superwomen either because of something entirely natural, but I did want to acknowledge it happens to women and so it should be mentioned. In The Mother of All Christmases, Annie has a baby late in life. In The Woman in the Middle, I write about Shay, in the sandwich generation, where a massive proportion of women find themselves these days - looking out for adult children, looking after elderly parents, juggling a job, the menopause, housework - and running on empty, squeezed out of their own lives. In Together, Again, Jolene is mid-forties and writing about love and romance but desperately unhappy at home. That 'insta-perfect' life jarring with reality. In A Summer Fling. one of my early books, there is a cross-generational friendship of women in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s. I'll leave you to work out where the inspiration for this one came from. A group of females who are bonded by life, by friendship and give support to each other at work. Yes, my precious Golden Girls group. 

You don't just stop having sex when you leave your thirties. You don't start buying brogues (although Crocs are blimming marvellous) and wearing twinsets and pearls. Women are having renaissances everywhere. They're being brave and leaving shit marriages and opening their own businesses. And often they find the bravery to do that by reading books in which fictional characters do this, written by writers who have taken their inspiration from real life - so there's a fabulous cycle of reality and fiction feeding each other. And it's a sign of a well-written book that a real person can take inspiration from a fictional person because they feel so authentic. That is the power of 'our books'. 

My lovely Nancy would never have believed the amount of material our friendship gave to me. Or the impact of it on my life, on my career. I will miss her wisdom, cackling over 'that place' we worked at which was as surreal as a Salvador Dali painting. I will miss the joy she gave me and I'll send a great big fat thank you to whatever it was that decided our paths should cross all those years ago. I owe it a pint.

Read the article online here