CHAPTER 7

A HOUSE BECOMES A HOME

Our leader Peter Green was gone; the reason we’d all come together. That would have spelled the end for most bands and everyone in the scene expected the same fate to befall us. But that wasn’t an option as far as John McVie and I were concerned. The band had been named after us and we didn’t want to look like quitters. I still believe, and time has convinced me that I’m absolutely right, this was Peter Green’s plan all along. John and I weren’t going to let it all dissolve, particularly when we’d finally got a taste of success. Then again, we didn’t have to front the band, write lyrics or sing. Jeremy Spencer and Danny Kirwan were charged with those duties and understandably they had their doubts about doing it all without Peter. They were such different players, united only by Peter, who could glide effortlessly between their two styles. He’d play sideman to Jeremy, laying down incredible rhythm guitar and harmonica, and with Danny he’d come to the fore and sing, or support his numbers by playing lead. Peter could do all of those things without a thought. He also had the charm and vision to lead us.

But he was gone and we needed a new leader, so out of necessity, I stepped into those shoes. I didn’t see any other way for it to happen and I thought it would be a temporary role until Danny, Jeremy, or perhaps a new frontman picked up the reins. Forty years later, I’m still at it, but hopefully with more wisdom and grace than I had back then. I had no experience in making decisions for a group, nor did I have a distinct musical direction in mind. I did have all the passion in the world and that is what won the day, as it has continued to do over the years. I wanted nothing more than to keep the band together, by whatever means necessary.

John has always been my confidant and co-pilot, so he and I decided that we had to get our guitar players some assistance in fronting the proceedings. Luckily we knew the finest blues-woman and piano player in all of England, Christine Perfect.

Chris was born in Birmingham into a musical and intellectual family. Her father, a professor, played organ and her mother sang and played several instruments as well. The house was full of music, which inspired Chris at a very young age to pursue it professionally. She went to art college in Birmingham and during that time met a young man who would become known as ‘The Professor’ and also played music, named Spencer Davis. The pair dated for a short time, fronted the university jazz band for a bit, and used to busk together around town. While doing so, they met a fifteen-year-old schoolboy named Steve Winwood who would spend his lunch hour playing blues piano at a local pub before going back for his afternoon classes. Spencer immediately snapped Winwood up and formed the Spencer Davis Group, at which point they were off and running. Steve Winwood, even at that age, already possessed the clear, wispy voice that has blown people’s minds ever since.

Chris went on to join a local band called Sounds of Blue, playing keyboards and singing, with Andy Sylvester on bass and Stan Webb on guitar. They gigged together for about a year, playing songs by Mose Allison, Ray Charles and Amos Milburn. By then Chris had graduated from college with a degree in sculpture and went off to London, where she got a job as a window dresser and looked around for a new band. When Andy asked her to join his new project with Stan Webb she jumped at the chance, because she hated working in fashion.

That band was Chicken Shack and Chris had to learn a great deal more about playing blues piano very quickly. She did it the right way, by picking up a stack of Freddie King records and studying the moves of Freddie’s legendary piano player Sonny Thompson. Chris’s style became an offshoot of Sonny’s, which in turn informed her singing. Her style evolved and although Chicken Shack was celebrated for their guitarist’s heavy presence, Christine Perfect’s plaintive blues interpretations set the band apart from their contemporaries. It didn’t hurt that women performers were very few in the English blues scene and Chris was hands-down the best of them.

Mike Vernon discovered Chicken Shack and immediately signed them to his Blue Horizon label, which is how we caught wind of them. He told us that Stan Webb and the rest were great, but that we should pay close attention to Chris.

‘Don’t miss them at Windsor Fest,’ he said. ‘Chris Perfect is going to take your breath away.’

Mike was right, she certainly did.

Chicken Shack, like every band starting out, put in months of touring in pubs and concert halls around the country, so we shared the bill with them often, especially as we were both on Blue Horizon. We all became great friends, which is how Chris came down in 1968 and played piano on our second album, Mr Wonderful. As I’ve said already, Peter and John both fancied Chris, but John made the move. He asked Chris out for a drink when she came round to one of our gigs. He might have been dating a girl at the time, but that was long gone the moment John and Chris got together. They had both met their match and it was lovely to watch.

They were a serious item, but much like the moment Jenny and I got together, Fleetwood Mac took off on a tour immediately afterwards. We went to America, while Chicken Shack departed for a tour of Germany. Chris was, and still is, such an irresistible, special woman that while she was away, I believe a German disc jockey asked her to marry him. Honestly, it was constant; there was always some man asking Chris to marry him. From what I understand, after she refused her German suitor, she wrote John a long letter telling him how she felt for him and when we returned, John proposed and Chris said yes. They were married ten days later, in August 1968, and we had quite the party.

Afterwards though, it was back to being apart from each other, because if we weren’t on the road, Chicken Shack was. They couldn’t go on like that, so Chris left her band to be with John full time, joining us on tour at the beginning of 1969. Mike Vernon understood her decision but he wouldn’t let Christine sit on her laurels. He got her into the studio to record a few sessions, which became the album Christine Perfect, a debut that went on to win her all manner of awards. She was voted best female vocalist for the second year running in Melody Maker as well as being celebrated in every other piece of the English music press. Though Chris was glad for the compliments, she wanted none of the attention that came with it. She announced publicly that she was retiring from the music business, which was met with tremendous disappointment.

That lasted all of two months.

This period of transition taught me what it means to be a band. A true band is a family and, like any family in crisis, a band must gather together privately, devoid of outside influence when under duress. It is the only way to re-establish the bonds that exist, for that family to remember who they are, and to decide their next steps together. To do that well, a refuge is required, which is why I insisted we go to Kiln House.

The fragmentation caused by losing Peter was amplified by the fact that none of us lived close to each other. Getting everyone together to rehearse and discuss what would come next was a project and a drag. London was full of so many other distractions that I knew we wouldn’t survive that. The only thing that made sense to me was a move to the country. Fresh air, a change of scene, and a bit of communal living was what we needed. Once again, my sister Sally came to the rescue and via a friend of hers, I arranged for us to rent a quirky old oast house near the old market town of Alton in Hampshire, that had been converted for domestic living. Oast houses are common in regions where hops and barley are grown for brewing beer; they are two- to three-storey structures where those grains are spread out to be dried by hot air rising from a large wood- or charcoal-fired kiln situated below. The house we lived in had once been two oast houses; it had a long narrow room upstairs, a simple kitchen at one end, and a long thin table in the middle of the room where we’d gather together at meal times. There were bedrooms leading off both ends of the great common room and at the very top, on the third floor, there was an attic that became our rehearsal room.

The band, our wives, children, and roadies all moved into Kiln House. They included me and Jenny (she was pregnant with our first daughter Amelia by then), John and Chris, Jeremy and Fiona and their son Dicken, Danny and his girlfriend, and the others, and we lived there for six wonderful months. I still look back on that time as some of the most creative and overall positive times of my life. It was summer in the country and we eventually turned one of the wide kiln rooms into our recording studio. We brought lots of hash–great big blocks of it–that we had lying about for all to share if they chose to.

Jenny and I got married there on 20 June 1970; I’d allowed the band’s schedule to come first for far too long. It was time. We set off at noon in my old Austin, which Jenny had nicknamed Lettuce Leaf, even though it was blue. I still have that car, by the way, it’s on my farm in Maui and when I had it restored, I had it painted green in honour of the name she gave it. That very hot day we drove down the country lanes to the public registry office where we met the rest of the band, our parents, our friends and families. Everybody filed in, but I took a moment and remained outside, soaking in the enormity of it. It was happening. I was going to marry my first love, my Jenny!

Lost in a reverie, I had no idea that everyone else had been waiting inside for over five minutes. Jenny told me recently that the registrar threatened to kick everybody out because he had more marriages to do that afternoon. She went to the window, bouquet in hand, and saw me there in my beige corduroy trousers, pink shirt, and fitted brown-checked waistcoat wandering in the garden, with my hands behind my back looking at the flowers, the trees, and up at the sky like I had not a care in the world. She was wearing a long custom-made dress in Liberty Print floral cotton with a rust-coloured background. It took a rap on the window and a stern glare from the registrar to snap me back to reality.

I’d asked Peter Green to be my best man and he’d agreed to, but in the end he showed up too late and when he did arrive he made a point of telling Jenny and me that he didn’t believe in marriage. I would have asked John McVie but he’s rather shy; doing something like that all on his own wouldn’t be fun for him. Instead, our long-time road manager and friend Dennis Keane stood in and did a wonderful job. Peter was there but he was distant; he was still hanging out with the German hippies and taking acid regularly and was on his own plane, further away with each passing day. It wasn’t easy to see him, but I’m glad he was there. Our wedding reception was bucolic and gorgeous; the sun was out and we all sat on the grass at the foot of a wooden stepladder that led up to Kiln House. We ate sandwiches, drank wine and passed joints all afternoon, into the evening and then into the night (except for Jenny, who was pregnant), sitting there around the table in our country home. Jenny’s pregnancy made her feel nauseous and combined with her necessary chemical abstinence, it made her feel out of place.

That was a beautiful day, but it wasn’t always like that; there were many nights when the pressure got to everyone. We had to follow up Then Play On, we had to prove we were something without Peter Green, and all of us knew it. At one point or another every single member aside from me, McVie included, wanted to quit. John used to have a go at us all the time, saying he’d like to be a roadie for a while instead of a member. I was the one to step in and convince them, some nights one after the other, not to leave. I became the torchbearer, the zealot, the one urging everyone to play on, by hook or by crook. Somehow it worked. Little did I know how often I’d find myself in that position in the years to come.

It took a full six months for us to find the answer and reconfigure ourselves. We didn’t plan to bring Christine in as a songwriter and member, but we leaned on her a lot because we didn’t know what else to do. Jeremy was terrified of being the frontman on his own and the pressure on Danny’s sensitive temperament was tremendous. We’d jam for hours and days and work out some great musical ideas, with Danny humming ‘la-la-la’ into the mike. It seemed he was scared to write, to sing or to fill Peter’s shoes. We knew what we could do, but there was a terrible vacuum there without Peter. We needed it all to sound better and Chris was safe, familiar, and more than capable of elevating us. Her piano playing fitted in perfectly with our blues numbers and she filled the harmonic space that Peter had vacated. She found herself, sang a few songs that she knew well, and eventually began to write new ones. The lyrics to one of them, ‘Jewel Eyed Judy’, emerged from words she wrote with my wife Jenny while the pair sat together at the communal table, when Jenny was about four months pregnant.

The band’s new formula remained true to our roots, showcasing Jeremy’s skills, while allowing Danny to do more melodic rock. In the end Christine became the glue; she not only drew the cover art for the resulting album, Kiln House, but filled out our sound beautifully. When we set out on a three-month tour of America in August 1970, Chris did so as an official member of our band and was from then on known professionally as Christine McVie.

The lease for Kiln House ended when we left for the tour but I didn’t want to let the vibe of the place go, so I suggested pooling our money together to buy a country house of our own. I didn’t want us to lose our momentum and I worried that if we separated again we might splinter for good. Everyone agreed, so we bought a place jointly for £23,000, most of which came from the advance on our next record. It was a secluded Victorian mansion up on a hill and it was called Benifold. This place was also in Hampshire, just a few miles from Kiln House, but it wasn’t rustic at all; it had been built in 1899, had twenty rooms and was truly gorgeous. At the time it was owned by an ecumenical society that took in devotees of any religious denomination seeking a spiritual retreat. It sat on seven beautiful acres of forest and had a dilapidated tennis court surrounded by lush trees. To us it was paradise. We had a billiard room and set up a music room so we could rehearse any time of day or night. There were bedrooms for everyone and plenty of extra space for guests and relatives to visit when we weren’t on tour.

I’d found the house while Jenny and I were searching for a place of our own, and as was the way in much of our relationship, I substituted our needs for the band’s when I saw Benifold. It didn’t register with me at the time, in fact I’ve only just learned this through talking to Jenny, but that decision truly hurt her. She had a dream of starting a family with me in a country cottage and she craved a haven of normality in our lives. That dream and her needs went out the window the instant I laid eyes on Benifold and it made her very sad. She had wanted to start our marriage in a home, not in a commune. If I had been more in tune, more considerate, I would have seen it. But there was no time; shortly after we bought the house, the band was off to America. Since we’d done nothing to make the interior of Benifold hospitable, Jenny went to live with her mother for the next three months.

That three-month tour was very tough on our families. I’d wanted Jenny to come on the road with me, but she was pregnant and I understood how hard that would be on her. On that tour we focused primarily on our new material in the first set, followed by a second set where Jeremy played blues and oldies the way we’d always done. It was well-received by our fans, although in England it didn’t touch the commercial success of our work with Peter Green.

Around that time Peter released The End of the Game, an album of acid-rock guitar excursions on wah-wah pedal that left me bewildered and hurt. He’d talked so much about wanting to go in a new direction, and it was, but it wasn’t so far off from what we’d been doing. The way he spoke about his intentions I expected his next music to sound completely different and it didn’t. He could have done those songs with us and I didn’t understand why he hadn’t even tried to. We would have followed him into whatever uncharted musical terrain he chose to explore, without question.

We continued to tour and after about five months, we really found our identity as a collective. Christine was a smash, and her playing and voice became a focal point, filling the gap between the two guitarists.

Our first year of living at Benifold was heaven. Jenny and I lived in what used to be the servants’ quarters, which were large, because a mansion of that size would have demanded a sizeable staff. John and Chris had their own wing with its own kitchen and living room, and Danny and his girlfriend Clare, who was pregnant with their son and whom he later married, lived upstairs in the attic. Jeremy and his wife also lived there for a short time.

John and Chris’s quarters were the nicest because Chris knew how to make a cosy home. Jenny used to get upset with me because when I was there, I’d spend most of my time over in the McVies’ wing, sitting at their table, talking about the band. This didn’t lessen her alienation in an already large and rambling manor, when she’d wanted time alone with her husband after waiting patiently for his return. She had no friends living close by, but that wasn’t it, she wanted me to be more of a part of her life when I was around, particularly during the last term of her pregnancy.

We were on tour in Scotland in January 1971 when our first daughter Amelia was born and it was one of the scariest days of my life. When I got the call, I was told that the delivery was going wrong and both the baby and mother might not survive. I fell to pieces; there were no mobile phones then, no way to stay in touch moment to moment, so I boarded the plane to return to Jenny, with no idea what news would greet me when I landed. The doctors performed an emergency Caesarean section and though it was hard on both of them, Amelia and Jenny pulled through. I was there at her bedside when Jenny woke up and I’d never been happier to see her face. Our mutual joy was short-lived however, because I had to catch a train the next day to rejoin the band.

Talking to Jenny for the book all these years later, her perspective has taught me so much about me, about us and about our marriage. The hardest pill to swallow was just how poorly we communicated, both of us, and just how much of our marriage she spent oblivious of how deeply I loved her. We’re soulmates, always have been, and we’ve remained close through the years, connected not only by the bond of the two beautiful daughters we brought into the world but also by a bond of true friendship. Yet I have to laugh to keep from crying when I grasp the fact that we’re both in our late sixties and only now are we able to speak to each other honestly and openly. I’m so thankful to have had the chance, because life is about understanding who we are and why we are here, and that process continues–if your mind remains open–until the moment you draw your last breath.

After Amelia was born, life at Benifold was even tougher for Jenny, because she was torn between two different lives; the one she lived when the house was full and we were home, and the one she lived on her own during the long weeks we were away. She’s told me how scary it was for her at first, living there with a newborn baby, all alone in a big old mansion in the woods. Gradually she adjusted, fell into a routine and came to enjoy her privacy and the stunning natural setting. When the band and crew returned, however, the house filled up and was transformed and what Jenny had come to see as her personal space was overrun with a rowdy group of miscreants who had been gone so long, they were virtually strangers to her, myself included.

A band on the road, even without the type of trauma our circle had come to regard as routine, is a tightly-knit unit. The shared experience of the effort of getting from here to there, of performing, of living in the moment of whatever collection of songs you’re out there delivering to the audience, is an adventure that only those who are a part of the endeavour understand. The inside jokes you make to pass the time, to alleviate the strain and exhaustion, the shared memories both good and bad–to an outsider all of that time spent together becomes a language they can’t decipher or hope to learn. In the same way, those who lived it first-hand can’t explain it to those who weren’t there, because it won’t make sense. I never wanted Jenny to feel like an outsider but it was unavoidable. She didn’t possess the constitution or desire to spend her life on the road. She didn’t want to deny me that life, she just wanted a private life with me that existed apart from all of that. She never got to have that, so our love, deep and true as it was and still is for each other, simply couldn’t survive.

Jenny has told me that when we did return, she saw how tight we’d all become, how bound together. It was as if we’d re-emerged from a secluded alternate reality, where we’d relied on each other and no one else to get through it. She saw that bond amongst us and longed for that with me, but knew she could never be a part of it. She saw how we all looked out for each other, how if one of the team had strayed from their partner on the road, the others, ever their ally, never uttered a word. She said that she saw us protect each other and how that fortified her alienation. She felt that it was all of us against the world, which included her. I was never unfaithful to Jenny, because she would always find out if I were. There was one rare occasion when all the boys in the crew convinced me to bring some girl, who was up for it, back to my room and I was eventually drunk enough to agree to the idea. We got up there and I had to go to the bathroom, so I told the girl whatever she did not to answer the phone. As I was going to the bathroom, the phone rang and of course the girl answered it, and of course it was Jenny. I told the girl to get lost and I talked to Jenny, who I don’t think believed me when I said there was a party in the hallway. We never spoke of it, so I don’t know if she believed me, but the truth is I was always faithful. In fact, I was the guy on tour reminding the other guys that they had girlfriends whenever temptation crossed our path.

I saw very little of my newborn daughter in the next few months because our manager Clifford Davis kept us touring non-stop, and though we weren’t fighting him, we were being stretched to our limits. We returned to America in February, this time for three months, and that US tour nearly destroyed us. An English or European tour might have been easier; less travel and less time away from loved ones, but the truth was, our audience and our album sales had shifted to the States. At the time we were on the charts alongside Jenny’s brother-in-law George Harrison’s ‘My Sweet Lord’, which was at number 1, and Santana’s meringue-flavoured tribute to Peter Green, their cover of ‘Black Magic Woman’. We were nowhere close to that anywhere else in the world.

I should have known that things were not well with us the moment the plane set down in California on our first tour stop. When we arrived in San Francisco, Danny and Jeremy took some mescaline and it really did a number on them, Jeremy in particular. The effects of the drug seemed to last far longer than they should have, and I saw it first-hand because I still roomed with Jeremy, the way I had for years. Something was off and I was concerned. He was consumed with reading his Bible and completely detached from the group. I had to coax him into doing his set that night, which was bizarre because we’d never had to wait for Jeremy to take the stage; usually he was like a racehorse chomping at the bit. For the first time since the day I met him, he was uninterested in playing. He dragged his feet and he wasn’t himself, though when we finally got him out there, he was positively on fire. I found that even stranger. Nonetheless I was transported by him; his performance was stunning. He was possessed, playing at a level I’d never seen from him, just absolutely out of this world. That also turned out to be Jeremy’s last show with Fleetwood Mac.

Our next stop was Los Angeles, which had been rocked by an earthquake severe enough that our arrival was delayed. News of the earthquake sent Jeremy into a state of foreboding; he didn’t want to go to LA and insisted that something dreadful was going to happen there. It took all of us to talk him down and assure him that we would be safe. He kept repeating that Los Angeles was full of evil (he had a point there), so we told him that we had each other and we’d be all right. We’d just go down there, do our job, and leave immediately. He eventually came round, though he still wasn’t the Jeremy we knew and loved. I was terrified that the psychedelics he’d taken had done permanent damage to him and that he was going the way of Peter Green. I tried to put that fear aside and focused on keeping him close by. He was all right on the trip to LA but once we got there, he was nervous and jumpy. He grew calm again once we reached the hotel room and I felt like Jeremy was back. We chatted, made a few jokes, and for the first time in days I felt as if he was himself once more.

‘Mick, I’m going to go out for a bit,’ he said. ‘I want to go down and browse this book store on Hollywood Boulevard that I like. Be back in a bit.’

I didn’t think anything of it, but clearly I should have, because he never came back. We waited until six o’clock, when we had to cancel the gig, then we set out together to track him down. We went to the bookstore, which was actually a head shop, and learned that the owners hadn’t seen him. We tried to remain calm and did some deductive reasoning. We knew Jeremy–there was no way he’d gone off with some girl, and he wasn’t the type to meet a stranger and hide out doing drugs with them. The remaining possibilities were more sinister. Either he’d been kidnapped or killed or, more logically, he’d run off with one of the hippie Christian sects that fished for converts on Hollywood Boulevard. We’d passed a few of them earlier in the day. I felt so foolish for letting him go out on that walk alone.

Jeremy didn’t return that night, so the next morning we went to the police. We asked around about those cults, who were known for taking in runaways and others ripe for the picking. They’d sequester them away and brainwash them until they’d renounced their former lives, donated their worldly possessions, and pledged allegiance to the cult. We didn’t wait for the police, we went out and searched on our own for four fevered days among the destroyed buildings and roads of a city recovering from an earthquake. We got Jeremy’s picture on the news and on flyers and with the help of several local Christian churches, we learned where the city’s more radical cults were housed. One of them was out in the San Fernando Valley, close to the epicentre of the earthquake, and driving out there was bleak. Surrounded by fractured highway overpasses and felled buildings, all of us felt desperate that we’d never find Jeremy. When we got to the door of the house, they wouldn’t even open it, nor answer our questions. The expressions of the pale, thin faces peering out through the windows were chilling.

After four days, we received an anonymous tip at the hotel. We’d find Jeremy if we went to the Children of God’s warehouse in downtown LA. He was staying there under an assumed name. I was so spooked by then that I didn’t go, but our manager Clifford Davis did. He conned his way inside by claiming that Jeremy’s wife was seriously ill and he found a very different Jeremy. His long hair had been shorn to his skull, he was wearing dirty clothes and he would only answer to the name Jonathan.

As we guessed, he’d been approached by the brethren on the street and been taken with them. He’d seen the earthquake as a portent of the end of the world and had decided then and there that he had to pursue salvation. He didn’t care about the band, the tour, not even his family back home.

‘Jeremy, don’t you—’ our manager said.

‘My name is Jonathan.’

‘Jonathan, don’t you want to see your wife and child? What will become of them if you don’t go home?’

‘Jesus will take care of them,’ Jeremy said.

He’d been completely brainwashed; he was like a child, star-struck. Jeremy Spencer was gone.

We had six weeks of the tour left; the revenue we’d lose cancelling those dates would cost us our house, Benifold, and probably the band. We were at a loss as to what to do, we really were. Out of desperation we reached out to Peter Green and asked him to fill in. We had little faith that he’d do it; his album had flopped and we’d heard from mutual friends that he’d given away all of his guitars. When our manager got in touch with him he learned that Peter had taken a job doing manual labour on a farm. I’m not sure what Clifford said to him, but he convinced Peter to play with us for the six weeks, though he insisted repeatedly that he had no interest in playing music anymore. He said he’d do the tour in honour of the friendship he’d shared with us for all those years.

Whatever the reason, Clifford got Peter a flight to California, while Jeremy flew to Texas, where he was joined by his wife Fiona and their son to live with the Children of God, while their youngest child remained behind to be raised by Fiona’s mother. Jeremy became a major recruiter for the sect and the two of them spent the rest of the year visiting branches all over the country.

Peter showed up looking the worse for wear, but his playing was great, though he had a few demands that we had to honour. He agreed to play ‘Black Magic Woman’, at whatever point in the set he felt inspired to do so, after which we would do ninety minutes of free-form jamming. This made for an interesting six weeks because not once did we take the stage knowing what the set was going to be.

Stranger still, that six-week tour ended up being the most lucrative American run we’d ever had. Peter never once engaged with the audience, he’d come to the mike occasionally to murmur something or just laugh. He took none of it seriously, yet at times his playing was so beautiful that it raised gooseflesh on my arms. Those moments made it all the sadder; this was the long goodbye.

At the end of the tour, Peter went back to his life on the farm and we retreated to Benifold. We were exhausted and at our wits’ end, which made Jenny all the more self-conscious about the presence of a crying baby, knowing the state of everyone’s nerves. We’d been through a lot, but to be fair, she’d been on her own raising a baby. Once Jeremy’s wife and child had departed, she was quite literally all by herself. She began to resent the band for taking me away from her and I began to feel it, although I dismissed it, blaming it on the stress of caring for the baby. Neither of us ever talked about how we felt, so things between us would work themselves out slowly, non-verbally. After a tour it would take a few weeks for us to feel connected again and to resume our normal life together. But as soon as we’d re-connected, it was usually time for the band to set out on another tour.

Now that I look back on it, the best times we shared in those days were spent away from Benifold. We used to get away, at Jenny’s urging, and go to Salisbury to visit my parents, Mike and Biddy. They lived in a long white house with a river running past the bottom of their garden called Bridge House. My mother would make delicious meals and we’d sit at their dining table for hours telling stories and laughing. The atmosphere was warm and inviting, the evenings filled with as much serious discussion as with crude jokes and silliness. Jenny loved my family as they did her; our family dynamic was quite a departure for her, as she had come from a broken home. She treasured my parents, regarding my mother as her role model when it came to raising our children, and my father as the wise, gentle influence he was to everyone who knew him. She saw the value of family from my own family and wanted to emulate that environment with me.