Issue No. 25: THE FAMILY - MAM

As you may have gathered from what I’ve written so far, my mother was the ever present factor in mine and Tom’s lives. Dad may have been the eminence grise but she was the one who brought us up, fed us, clothed us and protected us. Why then did she both allow and participate in the radically different treatment of her two sons?


Mam Marries Tom's Dad - 1940

Mam was the middle one of five children and she had lived as a child in the 1920s in the Scotswood Road area of Newcastle – a very tough neighbourhood. She adored her brother, Charlie, who was three years older than her and also worshipped her father. She had a very fractious relationship with her mother. Charlie had tuberculosis and died in 1936, when Mam was 16. That same year her father died. Mam no longer had a buffer to her domineering mother. Just four years later Mam was married and left Newcastle for her new life in South Shields. Tom was born four years later. I knew most of this story when I was growing up. What I didn’t know, until my Dad died in the early 1980s, was that the man she married, Tom’s Dad, wasn’t my Dad as well.

In 1950, Mam’s husband (Tom’s Dad) died. All Mam ever said to me about him (years later) was that he was ‘sickly’. By this time she lived with Tom in a new council house. They lived next door to a slightly older couple and their young daughter. Mam made friends with them. The husband of the next door neighbour was my Dad. They started an affair and Mam became pregnant with me. She moved back to her mother’s house in Newcastle to give birth and then later returned to South Shields. Within a few months Mam, Tom and I moved to the Cleadon Park estate. Then began that strange upbringing and those fleeting but frequent visits from my father and the rather far-fetched ‘cover story’ to explain his absences which, in my dumb-assed way, I swallowed whole for the next 29 years.



Dad at War - 1943

You can look at Mam and Dad’s relationship in a number of ways. It could be viewed as a romantic liaison which continued for over 30 years, and where the welfare of their son was paramount. The bare facts are rather more damning. Mam betrayed her friend next door by having an affair with her husband. He betrayed his wife and daughter. Once their son was born, he continued this affair, even though his wife and daughter were then both aware of it and suffering as a result. Although the relationship was known to most people (including most of our neighbours in Cleadon Park, apparently) he insisted and even threatened violence to ensure that I was not told what was going on. I and not Tom was the ‘bairn’ that musn’t be told the truth. He compounded Tom’s misery at losing his Dad by treating him badly and turning Mam against him too. He ruined the relationship between Tom and me as a consequence. Even when I was older, both Mam and Dad refused to tell me the truth and forbade Tom and his new wife from telling me. I remember that, when I was twelve, I worked out, from the story that Mam had told me, that she had been married 25 years. Tom, his wife and I then went through the ridiculous process of buying Mam and Dad a silver anniversary present, which they accepted; all to preserve a ridiculous lie. The lie extended to my wife and kids. The truth only emerged when Dad was about to die from cancer, and only then because Mam couldn’t explain where he was and why I couldn’t see or contact him.

After his death, Mam became a very bitter and an even angrier woman. She blamed Dad’s wife for hanging onto him, refusing to accept the obvious fact that he had chosen to stay with her all those years, whilst continuing his affair with Mam ‘on the side’. Mam waged her own petty but vicious vendettas against Tom’s wife, her own older sister (whose long-term husband had also just died) and, briefly, against my wife, until I stopped her. When she was not quite 50, and when Dad was still alive, Mam suffered a heart attack, but recovered from it. Twenty odd years later, in the early 1990s, Mam had two strokes, and her mind went with the second one. She died, oblivious to the world around her, in a care home bed in 1993.

The story of my childhood and adolescent family life should end there but, of course, these stories never really end. Mam’s bad temper and volatility have left their mark on both Tom and me. We both developed quick and vicious tempers. Additionally, I have acquired Dad’s authoritarian demeanour and unwillingness to show any feelings other than anger. Taken together, their traits have made me into a highly controlling and manipulative adult and a person given to violent mood swings and abusive behaviour towards my own family. This, over the decades, has dramatically affected their lives in turn. All crimes and misdemeanours have their costs and consequences. Mam’s and Dad’s are still being worked out, I regret to say, long after their deaths.

Mam’s passing acted as the guillotine to my relationship with my brother. We last saw one another at her funeral twenty years ago. We have only spoken on the phone twice since then. There is no rancour between us, just an acceptance of the truth – finally.

 



Tom

Me







Postscript

Dear Reader

Thank you for sharing my own and very personal 'Tales of Childhood, True and False'. You have just read, as you may have surmised, the final tale. However, I do intend to gather these tales together and publish them as an ebook. I will, therefore, be in touch with you all one last time to let you know when this happens.

I wish you all peace of mind, health and happiness.....and a good Christmas!

Yours sincerely,

Robert Fenwick.