Chapter One

 

It was raining heavily outside; the sky was dark with not a cloud in sight as I gazed at my reflection on the window of my bedroom. Suddenly a flash of lightning lit up the room for a few seconds and then as the darkness overtook again, it was like looking again at my face in the window pane, as if in that few last seconds, I had grown at least twenty years older. I smiled as I thought about that . . . twenty years indeed . . . that’s a laugh, I thought as I was thirty-seven years of age and would be thirty-eight in four months’ time.

What had happened in my life? Did everyone have joy, happiness and sad times, I thought again and my thoughts went out to Aaron . . . he was my older brother and would be 42 this year. Aaron was most women’s dream of a man. He was tall, dark and handsome with a Jewish appearance. . . He loved himself to an extreme and I always knew that, but I still loved him despite that fault. He was married with two children and divorced after only four years of marriage. He didn’t give that much of a chance and those kids would have to grow up without a daddy. Well, at least Aaron and I did have a daddy and a mummy, even if it was only for a short time. They were both dead now and I sighed heavily as I reflected on the few years we had been with them. Those were years that I would rather forget, but sadly memories last for a very long time.

Mummy was a heavy drinker in her time and she and daddy had many rows. Daddy was a solicitor in the city of London and we had lived in Belgravia in a rather posh house with no financial worries that I could think of and perhaps that was one of the reasons why mummy was such a boozer. She could down a bottle of gin a day and if we had been poorer, she couldn’t have afforded such drink and I know she could drink nearly a bottle of gin every day, together with a fair ration of whisky Daddy liked a drink, as most men do, but he was liberal in what he had and that was for more reasons than I cared to think of. Daddy had an eye for the ladies and this was the cause of most of the rows at home. Mummy could strike out and give daddy quite a thrashing, but it is only now that I understand why he did not reciprocate. He wanted a peaceful life in order to pursue his own pleasures whilst mummy could find all the happiness and rest in her life, if you could call it that, with a bottle or so a day . . . and daddy could afford that. It was cheaper than having a divorce, where he felt sure she would demand more than he was prepared to give.

When I was very little, daddy used to drive me to school and pick me up again at four o’clock when the school lessons were over. He did this with Aaron too, but on one particular day when the school holidays were in session and it was daddy’s birthday, I bought him a book from Smith’s that I knew he wanted and took it to his offices as a surprise for him, but when I got to the offices, the secretary who was sitting at a desk outside daddy’s own little office in the building, asked me if I would just take a seat until she returned as she had to do some business in an office on the lower floor. She told me she would be about twenty minutes and I agreed to wait until she returned, but twenty minutes went by and there was no sign of the lady, so I glanced at the door of daddy’s office and decided I would pop in there and give him the surprise I had bought for him. I knocked quietly but there was no answer, so I slowly opened the door and went in. . . where I got the shock of my life. I could see daddy’s naked bum over a pair of ladies legs on his desk and there were grunts coming from both of them. I got out as quickly as I could . . .

When he came out of the office and knowing that I had seen him in there, partially clothed, to say the least, he told me not to mention anything of what I had seen to mother and added, ‘Nothing for you to worry about Dear. You will understand better when you get older. You see, that’s just what men do . . .’

I was very worried about what I had seen and more worriedly concerned about daddy’s explanation ‘that was just what men did’ as I would hate to think that I could marry a man when I grew up, who did things like that . . . regardless of what other men did. . . but daddy drove me home as we both sat in the car in silence and nothing more was said.

It was a very long drive and an even longer silence . . .

That same evening I could hear a great row going on between my parents and I hadn’t said a word to my mother about my father’s office nonsense, however it was two weeks after this that the same row went on when I WAS IN BED. It must have been about midnight and I could hear doors slamming and screeches as both my parents were at it in the upstairs hall and then only a few moments after that, I could hear a terrible crash which made me get up to see what had happened. Both of them had fallen down the stairs and were lying together on the floor near the lounge. I was worried and telephoned for an ambulance, where each of them was taken to the hospital. Mummy was dead when they arrived there and daddy died three days afterwards with a broken spine.

The thought of them both being dead when only such a short time before they were full of life and arguing like mad, was hard to comprehend. I was particularly upset and sad because Mummy had spanked Aaron earlier that day and he went to bed crying and complaining of a sore head where he had been hit several times, so that when the parents were taken to hospital and Aaron could see me sobbing uncontrollably, he took me to his bed and cuddled me to sleep.

With the death of both my mummy and my daddy, Aaron and I had to go and live with my uncle Martin and Aunt Sarah. They had only been married for about a year and lived in the south of London but the change was quite a relief to both Aaron and myself except for the fact that because it had been raining heavily when we travelled to Sarah and Martin’s house I contracted a dreadful cold which developed into pneumonia and then I had to go into hospital. I was there for nearly three months and I am told I kept going in and out of consciousness until my pneumonia cleared up, but it was when I was in hospital that I kept being sick and one of the nursing staff asked me one day if I was always being sick or was it something that happened occasionally but before I could reply to her question I was sick again.

“How old are you darling?” the nurse asked me and I told her I was eleven going on for twelve and she raised her eyebrows and made a funny noise with her mouth. I kept being sick every morning and often during the day and as I could feel my belly getting bigger by the day, to my utter horror and morning sicknesses I realized I was pregnant. I could never understand how this could happen to me as I had never ever slept with a man . . . and only Aaron had shared my bed and that was only for one night when mummy and daddy were taken to hospital. Could it have been Aaron? Could that be possible? I don’t remember anything and Aaron was only fifteen years of age. . . AND I WAS ELEVEN . . . I remembered at that point that I had been going in and out of consciousness when I was in hospital, but surely there could have been no connection to my state of ‘motherhood’ when I was lying there in that hospital not knowing where I was or what I was doing. . .