TWENTY

Oh, It’s You

It was in the hot summer of 1969 at 12.50 pm on July 10th that I met him. This time I knew at once that my life would never be the same again, I would never be the same again, for in that moment, that hour, that day, I was reduced to a state of awe and panic, joy, fear and elation. Hot protectiveness flooded through me and love so intense, its fierceness frightened me. I knew that in its power I was capable of anything, of opening bolted doors, running through fire, I knew that it was even capable of killing me. I looked at the sleeping baby with skin like a white fleshed peach, smooth, with tiny white dots the size of pin pricks on his nose, a faint fuzz of blond hair on his round head – not misshapen by the drama and traumas of birth.

He opened his eyes and I swear he peered steadily into my heart. I felt a stab of recognition and said, “Oh, it’s you.” For this was precisely the person I had been expecting. I had somehow known he was going to be a boy (no scans in those days) and I had called him Jamie for at least six months. And now, here he was, my Jamie. My source of anxiety that would last my life, this boy, my boy was here. I had the not uncommon primal urge that most mothers feel – that I would give up my life for his. I knew in that moment that I would passionately try to protect him from all harm if I could. I think I knew too that I would have to watch as he made his own mistakes, suffered hurts and slights and rejection. I knew that part of my love for him was to give him the confidence and strength to be his own man, carve his own path, walk away. I thought of C. Day Lewis again: “Love is proved in the letting go.” Of course, I didn’t really think that at all. Well, not then. Those thoughts only came with convenient hindsight. In that very moment I was too overwhelmed with love to even face the possibility of being parted from him for an instant.

Isla and Jamie

Photograph by Frazer Wood

I think I did know then, though, somewhere deep and far away, that just as I held him close he wasn’t really “mine” at all. He was his own person and part of my journey as his mother was to watch the struggles and challenges his journey had mapped out for him. As I gazed at him, it seemed impossible that one day he would go to school, that I would hand my precious boy into the hands of strangers. Of course, he could always come home and tell me of his triumphs and failures, his fears and forebodings and he knew I would take his part when the school bully lay in wait for him, when he wasn’t picked for the school cricket team… I would be utterly partial and partisan. And that thought took me right back to my parents and a surge of compassion for them, for I knew then how very much they had to give up, give away – when they let me go.

My parents had been concerned when I first told them about Julian, ten years older, married but separated and unable to have children. When I declared, aged twenty-one, that I would rather be with Julian and without children, they must have wondered if I would regret my decision when I was forty-one. I daresay they were sad that I would never give them grandchildren and they must have talked and argued and comforted each other privately, but – after a long discussion one Sunday afternoon – they saw that I was serious and never questioned me on the subject again. They swallowed their doubts and disappointment and, much later, came to love and respect Julian. They were surprised and almost overwhelmed with delight when I told them they were to be grandparents. No-one prepares you for the falling in love that you have with your grandchild and I saw tears in my mother’s eyes as Jamie folded his tiny fingers round hers; I know he held a special place in their hearts always.

Jamie’s primary school was round the corner from us and when the time came for him to go to secondary school, we faced a problem. The one in our catchment area had a terrible reputation and so we sent him to King’s College, Wimbledon, a very good school indeed, but not right for Jamie and he was wretched there. Of course, we took him away. We visited various schools and the one Jamie liked best – and we were equally impressed, mostly by the headmaster – was a coeducational, so–called “progressive” school near Farnham called Frensham Heights. But it would be impossible to do a daily commute to it and the thought of Jamie boarding was unthinkable to me. Admittedly it was only weekly boarding and weekends would be spent at home. Even so, the thought of being parted from him and him possibly being homesick or lonely was unbearable as, unlike me, he wouldn’t even have a Fiona to be his companion and protector.

Jamie, however, longed to go there and Julian and I chatted it out over several days that ran into weeks. Eventually Julian said, “Who is this decision for, Isla? For Jamie or for you?”

I felt as if I had been slapped. I was being utterly selfish. What was important was to find a school where Jamie would not only follow the curriculum but would grow in confidence, would find other interests, sport and music, and would learn to respect himself and his colleagues and also learn about self-discipline and understand how to work for exams, where he would gain friends and have some fun. Frensham Heights was perfect.

Jamie aged 3

He started in the autumn when he was eleven and I felt sick with grief as I waved him goodbye, handing my beloved boy into the hands of people I didn’t know, just as my parents had done all those years ago.

As chance would have it, I was touring in a terrible production of a Keith Waterhouse play when Jamie was delivered to his new school. Julian was in Corfu, being the villain in a James Bond film, “For Your Eyes Only”. It was my parents who took Jamie there and saw him into his dormitory shared with five other boys. It must have been a painful déjà vu for them, unpacking the trunks with the name-taped towels and sheets and his school clothes all neatly folded, and waving him goodbye as their car sped away down the rhododendron-ed drive (rhododendrons again, as there had been at Kilbryde Castle), the blue Surrey hills in the distance the backdrop for his small blonde figure, standing erect, not letting his apprehension show. But, of course, they had seen his wide, round, dark-pupiled eyes, his slightly wobbly chin, as my mother kissed him and my father shook his hand and patted him gently on the shoulder. Jamie, at that age had a marked resemblance to me. Perhaps their little stab of pain was as much for their conker-haired daughter as it was for their vulnerable, strong but sensitive grandson.

I made sure that I was at his school early on each Saturday morning to pick him up and to take him back on Sunday evenings. Weekends became sacrosanct, a time when it was just the three of us, with visits occasionally from Jamie’s friends, but a time when we would be together. He was never left at school and there was no play or concert, no cricket or football match that Julian or I did not attend. Being able to support and encourage Jamie became a matter of huge importance and there were jobs I turned down because it meant being away during the holidays or not being able to get back for his weekends. Not different from many working actors really. But I wonder if my need of Julian and Jamie, my need of our family unit, was not coloured by the absence of one when I was a child. I was aware that a protective love of Jamie could be stifling, so when he was accepted for drama school, aged only just eighteen, I remembered my parents allowing me to share a room in London aged only seventeen. They let me go and that was what I would have to do with Jamie. It felt right, it was time, it was his turn to “walk away” and discover the world for himself.

* * * * *

Fiona and I spent our early adulthood apart. I had been used to phoning her with a triumph, with a disappointment, with a rejection, with news of a new boyfriend or a new role. I enjoyed her tales of the hospital ward – pranks and jokes as well as the inevitable sadness that being a nurse brings, however hard they try to stay objective. It seemed strange at first phoning my parents with life’s daily occurrences. For so long they had not been party to joys or woes, but it took me less time than I could have imagined for it to become a daily routine and this persisted until each of their deaths 24 years apart.

Fiona married a dark haired “man-of-the-sea” (so I called him), Chris, who had piercing blue eyes and a remarkable resemblance to Paul Newman. The first years of their marriage were spent in Bermuda, where she nursed and he was an officer in the marine police.

When their first daughter, Joanna, was six weeks old, they travelled to Virgin Gorda, part of the British Virgin Islands which, in 1970, was a “virgin island” – no electricity, no running water and certainly no shops and no doctor. Chris went to fill the post of Harbour Master in the newly opened Little Dix Bay marina. Fiona spent much of her time alone with her new daughter, sometimes literally isolated when the rain washed away the road. She occasionally had misgivings about her pioneer spirit, in the same way our grandmother Sara had trepidations as she stepped out of the dhooli onto the jungle floor that was soon to make way for tea.

I went to visit Fiona when Jamie was six and marvelled at her resilience as she batted away sand crabs and spiders the size of tea cups and steered her daughters (her second, Sara, was a small baby) away from poison apples and sea urchins. One day I had the misfortune to stand on one and the pain that shot up my leg took my breath away. Fiona came to find me and a distressed Jamie on the shore and bundled us into her little beach buggy and drove us to her house where she inquired if I needed a pee. She produced a bowl and urged me to try and I was in too much pain to argue. She placed my foot in the urine in the bowl – her nurse’s nous had told her that the acid in the urine would remove the urchin’s spines. It did. The strange things you learned as a nurse on an almost desert island. As her children grew, she and Chris decided it was time to return to England for their education. There was never any question of boarding school, sending the girls “home”, or any separation. She was central to their lives as their friend, confidante and very much their mother.

When the girls were on the point of leaving school, she returned to nursing. She had various exams to take to bring her up to speed with all the new techniques and approaches and worked in a hospital in Maldon near her home and spent several years on the geriatric wing. She became a ward sister and I know enriched the lives of those she helped and the nurses she encouraged. But as a ward sister she wasn’t doing much nursing – just long hours filling in forms or on the computer, responsible for her team, her patients and the ward. She loved her work, was fond of her colleagues and felt more than a little sad when she retired at 60. She now works as a volunteer in a hospice and derives as much pleasure from her grandchildren as I do from mine. She has remained my friend, my heroine really; what older sisters cannot know is that, in their younger sister, they have a fan for life. So it is with us.

Fiona