MORNING SERIAL
IT WAS a stroke of luck that just recently my house had been vacated so I could stay there with Mum while she recuperated. I was relieved that I didn’t have to go and live at her house where I would be completely isolated from everyone and everything I knew.
But there were other things in the frame apart from practicalities. Things had not been easy between Mum and me in the past. I knew that there were deep, old feelings that I had tucked neatly away in a vault labelled: The Past: Do Not Open. Could I really live with my mother for more than just a few weeks? What were the chances of keeping the lid on things now that we were sharing a home?
MY PARENTS married in the fifties and had two sons. They were switched-on thirtysomethings in the Swinging Sixties, when I was born, and they were navigating a world that was changing rapidly, even in small towns like ours in south Wales. In the seventies, reality continued to shift until the grey old, good old days slipped out of sight and out of reach. But there were remnants, customs that were cherished or that had sneaked, unexamined, into the new world. We’d all been trained to be seen and not heard. Nobody seemed to talk about anything that needed talking about. “Less said, the better” was a treasured motto.
We had a lovely house, we were not particularly poor and there was a vibrant social life that accompanied the competitive sailing scene for which my parents shared a passion that bordered on obsession. They sailed a lot and left me on a variety of beaches to look after myself. Presumably they thought these were safe and enjoyable places for a little girl to spend a few hours on Saturdays and Sundays. But I felt lonely, anxious and bored. On one occasion, when I was about six, I was saved from drowning by my mum’s friend who had spotted me reaching out from a pier to try and catch my parents as they glided by, unaware. I fell into the murky sea and sank. Perhaps that single event coloured my thinking and created a terrible story of a miserable childhood.
Scrabble in the Afternoon by Biddy Wells is published by Parthian at £8.99.
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