Patriciawa

I am a long retired school principal who once taught French in the West Australian education system.   Here’s what I looked like a couple of years ago, in my late seventies, (eighty-fourth year now on August  lst, 2019) on one of my better days when my many wrinkles were somehow less obvious!  PS today I have lots more now, plain and clear!  No recent pictures, though my lovely daughter will take one if I ask!  I’m a scaredy cat!

13/12/2022 Just learned how to do it for myself (so important for us in our second childhood!) and have hopes of transferring this ‘selfie’ from mobile phone to desktop!

Me, in 2022, and trying again 28/03/2023

I was born in 1935 in the U.K., in a suburban village just outside London and raised in a large family of working poor, living in a 19th century terraced worker’s cottage.  In 1944 our street was blessedly wiped out by a German V2 or Doodlebug.   I say ‘blessedly‘ because, after escaping near-death and serious injury,  as homeless victims we topped the list for re-housing when local authorities built new council houses there on the very same street, but ‘detached’ and with three bedrooms, kitchen and bathroom,  both with hot and cold water,  and an inside toilet!  What luxury!

There were  other post-war benefits planned for our family by British politicians while Doodlebugs were falling around Westminster in the early 1940’s – new teeth for my haglike and tight lipped mother whom I rarely saw smile in my toddler and infant school years.   The NHS ( ‘National Health’ to us) was established in July, 1948, dental treatment was free and I suddenly had a pretty Mum who smiled at me! Demand on the service was enormous. About a quarter of the dentists joined the NHS and by November 1948 83% had joined. Before then around 75% of the adult population had no teeth of their own.  An awful statistic to read now in 2020 when I think that back in 1948 all I knew was that magically I had a Mum who could get a job as a cinema usherette; she wore a smart uniform and nylon stockings,  instead of ugly khaki overalls for cleaning out bucket loads of fag-ends from cinema seat ashtrays and scrubbing floors.

In 1947 I was one of the early beneficiaries of the wartime 1944 Education Act, achieving an Eleven Plus scholarship to the local grammar school.   Despite, or maybe because of, my struggles with the English class system during my years of secondary schooling I became a rusted-on supporter of the Labour Party to whom I felt I owed everything good that had ever come to me in my short life.    That conviction remains with me still and I have transferred my loyalty to the Australian Labor Party.

I also owe much to my years at grammar school, solitary though I often was, waiting on Walton-on-Thames railway station for the suburban train from London to Woking where middle class grammar school girls snubbed me as that ‘awful scholarship girl with a cockney accent‘ and wouldn’t include me in their giggling games and secrets. Not for long though!  Our French teacher, Mrs Roberts thought that if I could top her class and speak French so well I ought to be able to manage a good English accent!  She took me under her wing at morning play and lunch times and then we both surprised the whole school by my delivering the day’s Bible reading with perfect diction at a Remembrance Day assembly.

I still bless Mrs Roberts, Miss Wohlwill, the grim faced History  teacher who somehow claimed me as her student from Miss Hose, the softly plump and round-faced lady with whom I’d rather have learned more about English literature, as well as all those other teachers for whom I strove to excel as they took a special interest in me.  I was  always top of the class, except in Art and Maths, where a grim-faced Miss Andrews worked long and hard to help me pass my Schools’ Certificate.  You needed Maths as a pre-requisite for your Higher Schools’ Certificate and University Entrance for which I was determinedly bound, encouraged as I was by Miss Hill, the Headmistress, and my other teachers and supporters.   Note how so many of those teachers were ‘Miss’ with only one or two like ‘Mrs’ Roberts whom I always presumed to be married.  Now, with the hindsight of my own long life, I know why so many women were unmarried in those post-war years, having lost fiancés and sweethearts on the battlefields of World War II across Europe and elsewhere on land, sea and air. For all I knew, Mrs Roberts, too, could have been widowed by the war and her ample curves the result of many self-comforting cups of sweet tea and toasted crumpets!

So teachers liked me, even if the other girls did not.  The English class culture was very much alive and well in those days.  Working class girls, whose mothers cleaned houses were snubbed and looked down on, no matter how clever and clean they were and wearing full school uniform.  “Look at her shoes, they’ve got holes in them!” Those sneers about my dirty socks have left me still obsessive about wearing perfectly clean white socks every day even with sneakers and old jeans!

By my mid-teens I spoke good English and was reasonably turned out, having discovered that church jumble sales and second-hand shops (these days ‘recycling’ is the term I think!) could fairly kit me out in near new clothes for pennies instead of pounds.  So I could choose my own clothes instead of charitable gifts to whose kind donors I would sometimes have to think up little white lies about ‘not quite fitting’ or anything other than that I loathed both their color and style!

After graduating from London University in 1956 with a BA Hons degree in History,  my early working life was first with the Overseas News Research Department of the BBC at Bush House in London.   I then travelled to Canada and worked for the CBC in Toronto from where I travelled up to the Yukon Territory in Whitehorse .   There I married and enjoyed a few years of many snowbound winter evenings with long dark nights and brief summers with days of extended sunlight.  It was there I learned,  with initial encouragement from my ‘aspiring playwright’ husband,  how to write short stories and travel articles about the Sub-Arctic and the Land of the Midnight Sun with its romantic Gold Rush history.   In 1961 we decided we’d better trek back to London and to Capetown in South Africa to introduce ourselves to our mutual families.

Shortly thereafter (April, 1962) we settled on Kenya as a good halfway stopover point between the two and somewhere to start a family.   As a memsahib in East Africa it would have been unheard of to resist having servants;  a cook,  a garden boy and an ayah for our two small children.   Every one of those lovely people badly needed a job, and therefore so did I!  Writing articles,  children’s stories and serial novellas for women’s magazines didn’t feel like real work.  That’s why I jumped at the chance of teaching French at the nearby Highlands’ girls’ boarding school when a desperate Principal approached me, having heard that I had lived in France as an ‘au paire’  in my student days.   This was how I began my ‘accidental’ teaching career in the early nineteen-sixties  and gave up a promising start to a writing career and the thrill of seeing one’s name and work in print.

Part-time teaching  was so reliable and well paid, rescuing as it did our finely balanced family budget, that it expanded naturally to a full time career later when we came to Australia after Uhuru!   In Swahili, the national language of Kenya, that word, Uhuru, means Independence!  Or Freedom!  It also meant a career change for my husband, a Chartered Accountant.   Our marriage break-up a few years later and financial necessity meant my focussing on getting professional qualifications for teaching and forgetting ideas I’d had about working as a journalist,  perhaps with the ABC or another media organization like Fairfax..  Like many women graduates with children I found that teaching, if not one’s career of choice,  is not a bad second best.

Besides,  I enjoyed it!  I also enjoyed the part-time study which I did over the years with WA Uni – first for a Dip.Ed,  which evolved to a B.Ed and ultimately my Masters’ degree.  I’ll leap-frog over my years with the West Australian education system and a subsequent training and management career in Sydney which are not immediately relevant here.   Suffice it to say that in 2005 I ultimately found myself living happily next door to my daughter and grandchildren here in Fremantle.   I was a fit and active retiree, enjoying reasonable pension support, looking for mental stimulation, and  promising myself that I would get back to focussed writing of some kind.

Meanwhile,  walking the dog, swimming,  crosswords and some teaching of adult classes in Memoir writing were not enough for my over-active mind, even though I was finding the internet fascinating and enjoying exchanges with like-minded people about politics on a few favorite sites like Larvatus Prodeo. Then in January, 2010,  the site ran a light- hearted competition in writing political satire in verse form, known as “In The Loop” which set off some mechanism in my brain for writing in rhyme which worked on over-drive through the competition weeks and just would not stop thereafter.

My recollection at that time, later proven wrong, was that I had never before written a poem, so I was hard put to explain this outburst of rhyming commentary.  I called my creations ‘pomes’ because to call them ‘poems’ or ‘poetry’ seemed pretentious.  All this rhyming running through my head, however, has since inspired me to write a few non-political verses and give them a page of their own here which I’ve called ‘Poetry Proper’.  They need some editing and maybe which I’ll get around to it one day!

I guess I am a feminist though only late in life have I concerned myself with gender and race.  I care about social justice and the environment and I find the Australian ‘right’ an increasingly menacing force which threatens both.  Somehow being able to make fun of Tony Abbott and his team makes life bearable.  Commenting humorously in rhyme at their every new outrage makes my frustration at their seemingly favored treatment by the Murdoch media empire less intense than when I write in prose.   I’ve long learned that expressing rage and venting anger too seriously and too often only harms one’s self.

I have been surprised at the appreciative comments on the quality of the ‘polliepomes‘ which I’ve published often at web sites like Cafe Whispers and The Political Sword and less frequently now with Lavartus Prodeo and occasionally at Grog’s Gamut  when a post or comment seemed to invite a response in verse.   Recently I’ve had many requests to see others, even a suggestion I should print a collection of them all!   The printed word these days, environmental impact aside, is somehow more ephemeral than the World Wide Web, so I’m not likely to do that!   Mind you, even writers like Greg Jericho do migrate from sites like Grog’s Gamut, and I am glad to see him settled in as a regular, well regarded, commentator by a thoughtful mainstream paper like the Guardian.

I have, however, now managed, with much help from others, to collect and collate my polliepomes with many of the comments made by readers at the time they were first written.  I cherish those comments and the permission I’ve had to save and print them as made on the original posting.  Obviously this collection of almost two hundred   polliepomes shown as published over a few days posted over a few days in March, 2011, were not written then!   They are ‘tagged’ in date order for my own convenience with the very first dozen or so which I wrote for that “In The Loop” competition back then. They still amaze and excite me.  It felt then, and still does, a bit like a small child discovering that she can read and write!  I am also still awed by the pace of political events in Australia from January, 2010, to April, 2011.

I don’t intend to use this as a ‘blogging’ site, though new comments are welcome.  I’m just trying to be more efficient at storing my stuff in one place in date order!   For me, satire is best written close to the events and political dramas which first inspired it,  like political cartoons on the same page as commentary,  but I’ll welcome and reprint comment from anyone,  from anywhere and whenever it is made.  As well as writing polliepomes I am now enjoying contributing  articles to Cafe Whispers where I see myself as a senior citizen spectator of the political scene rather than someone with insider or specialist knowledge of things political.    Miglo, blog master of Café Whispers, and now the AIMN, or Australian Independent Media Network, has helped me enormously in my struggles with posting on the internet.   I am still finding my way around the Web as well as learning the intricacies of self-publishing.  I hope to scan some photos soon to illustrate this particular page and as well learn how to rescue old pictures from my past.   A bientot! 

07/01/2015 – I am still alive, reading and making the odd comment on favorite sites like Café Whispers, The Political Sword and the Pub – but the past year has been an effort to come to terms with memory problems and a few hospitalizations after black-outs.  The diagnosis is late onset epilepsy.   Now in my eightieth year I bless every day and enjoy my morning and evening walks with Tacker, a very intelligent and caring companion As you can see just by looking at him!

26/07/15   Sorry, AdAstra, I was trying to pull up a picture of Tacker, and up you came!  I am sure that if there is a Mrs. Ad Astra out there she would agree with that description though – of  your being a ‘very intelligent and caring companion’ and mentor too, as all we followers of The Political Sword have found you over the past few years!

10/11/16   Not writing much – I tell myself it’s because the political scene is not inspiring.  If I am honest, however, I think it’s because I keep forgetting what it was I wanted to say!   I am doing what I can to keep my memory in working order, but have to admit that it lets me down more and more often.   I am  attending the Perth Brain Centre a couple of times a week which my GP assures me help with memory problems even in one’s declining years .   Here’s hoping – early days yet, so I’ll review progress in 1917 if I’m still here and remember to check on this old head of mine.

11/11/16    I’m Eighty-One Today!

Who ever thought I’d live to say,                                                                                                   “I’m eighty-one today!”                                                                                                              Thanks to UK’s Labour Party                                                                                                          I’m still here, all hale and hearty.                                                                                                Good teeth, free education,                                                                                                       Product of the welfare nation.                                                                                                    Eighty one today!   Hip Hip – Hip Hooray!

13/11/16   I posted that little birthday memento verse at The Pub yesterday and time just ran away with me for responding to some really encouraging responses, and for recovering links to old friends like Miglo and Ad Astra.

Meantime my declining years continue to be cheered by other familiar and like-thinking friends at The Pub.  Comments from Bushfire Bill, Gravel, Fiona, Puff, Kafeeklatcher and others are heartwarming.   I was greatly heartened by this from  georgeous dunny:

“Bravo PatriciaWA and a very happy 81st birthday.  I hope you know what joy you bring to our lives with your witty ditties, forever known as “me pomes”.   Long may your health and your wit continue.

I’d like you to understand, as I mentioned to Fiona recently, what a joy it was to read your response to another of Bushfire Bill’s great posts.  I hadn’t realised how much we’d missed you until there you were, eloquent as ever.  My cup would overflow if we could also hear again from the great Ian, but I fear he may have departed us.

Have a wonderful day, Patricia, and many more besides, We need your little bits of sunshine!“

18/0l/2019    I think I’ll have another go at pulling up a picture of Tacker.   He is still here, a dear companion and very wise.   He stops at every corner and looks at me to make sure I look both ways!    He deserves to be preserved in the National Archives by Pandora! By the way,  have I mentioned our Pandora approval stamp here?  I was so thrilled when the lovely lady rang me from the National Archives and told me that my work had become part of Australia’s stored historical records.  I thought it was simply one article about our great PM Julia Gillard whom  I was championing in her struggle with the Krudd,  ALP destroyer!  Oh no, she reassured me.  They liked my other work too and the Pandora insignia would adorn this blog forever.  I found that a bit daunting at first, and felt I had to come up with good stuff all the time from then on, but I’ve settled down now and occasionally slip in mediocre and old stuff from early days.  No one’s called me from the National Library  to complain,  so I hope Tacker who now accompanies me on every new day of writing is duly appreciated.

        There you are, not as handsome as Ad Astra, but he is very popular with the ladies!    Which reminds me to tell you that his mother being a bitch means that I don’t take kindly to often being described as Tacker’s mum, when introduced to new friends breakfasting at South Beach Café.   Well I suppose it is a compliment of sorts…….. –

8/03/2019      This stuff below seems to fit here for the moment.  It’s from a decade ago when I started writing my own story – from pre-wartime years, i.e. late 1930’s.   Found it on my old desk top.

PATSY START S HER STORY – at last!  That was a decade back, February 20^th, 2009!

My very first memory is of my dad carrying me on his shoulders.  I was dressed in rare toddler finery with a pink dress, white socks and little patent leather shoes. I felt that pure, happy pride one often sees in small children carried aloft by fathers.  It was hard for any mother to compete with that, particularly one who already had three little boys of not yet school age and was worn down by work, worry and fear of a husband too fond of spending money they could ill afford at the pub.  But all that I was only to really understand later…….

Another early memory is of standing in front of the fireplace in the black iron kitchen range of  a neighbor’s house curious to see if my ragged sleeve lining could catch the flame. I must have succeeded because I can still vividly see myself standing in my cot in the kitchen at our own place, crying with pain from huge blisters running from my fingers up to my elbow. My right hand still bears the scars of that first playing with fire – maybe a metaphor for much of my later life!   My dad took me to the local hospital for treatment,  carrying me high and close through strange rooms and faces and then holding me in his lap as my hand was held under some black box for treatment to drain those cruel blisters.

I can’t remember his face, only that he was tall and rangy and often used to have me on  his knee when he read stories to us from my brothers’ Rupert books.  I was his “Poppy”,  his fourth child and first daughter, born on Remembrance Day, 11^th of November, 1935, though my mother insisted I be named Patricia, second name, Violet, after her favourite sister.   There are no early photographs of my parents, though my brother, John, five years my senior, tells me our dad was good looking and cheerful, very popular with both men and women, particularly women!

My dad seems to have been there a lot in my very early years, or is it just that I have these happier memories followed by the years of yearning for him once he had left us and moved in with “his fancy woman”, as my mother called her.  I never saw this person, and they apparently lived in Green Lane which was less than a mile away, but he had gone quite completely from our daily lives. We children hardly saw him after the “separation” unless we sought him out, which we tried to do at his allotment where he grew vegetables and flowers, or at one of the pubs, of which there were three near by and several others not too far away.

I suspect now that there was no “fancy woman” as such, perhaps only a landlady happy to have a paying lodger in a spare room.   He didn’t leave but rather was told to go by the local ‘bobbie’ –  a police man who was called out once too often by frustrated and sleep-disturbed neighbours to intervene in his brawling with my mother.   Now I recall only flashes of noise, screaming and cursing, but mercifully none of that long ago pain of seeing two people I loved hitting each other in our tiny kitchen.  My bigger brothers tried to intervene, to stop them and to protect my mother, I thought,  though John, my second oldest brother, told me later that my mother was pretty handy with her fists too! Often we laid awake fearing those dreadful fights starting up,  late on Friday,  pay day, and sometimes Saturday, once closing time was called at the pubs at the top of our street. They escalated in frequency and terror after my baby brother was born in 1942.  The last dreadful scene was in early 1944. They were legally separated by court order and were divorced some time later.  They never spoke to each other again, though living less than a mile from each other.   Some thirty years later,  when Dad dropped dead in his favourite pub which became his home from home,  it was Mum who paid for,  arranged and attended his funeral,  after vowing for years that she would never bury him.

There were three pubs, the Bricklayers Arms, the Wagoners Arms and the Watermans Arms,  all within a hundred yards of each other,  opposite our village green and our primary school.   At least another two served our little suburban village within half a mile of these,  to say nothing of a string of hostelries and bars along every main road to neighbouring towns and suburban villages beside the railway route to London.   So drinking at the pub was normal and accepted behaviour particularly for working-class men who put in heavy days of manual labour.

PS here 19/09/2019   This reality of working class married life has translated into today’s ‘domestic violence’  a term I now understand,  with  a long life’s experience behind me, to be all that screaming and fighting which could include the whole family if Dad came home from the pub drunk and Mum was awake and wild and ready. If it was bath night she would have had all of us scrubbed up and dressed for bed but still wide awake too.  Other times we’d be in bed, long awake and waiting for him to come roaring down the street singing along with a few noisy neighbors before rolling into our place.

My dad was a porter, sometimes heaving bags of coal, sometimes meat, and after the ‘Separation‘ I often saw him lifting loads from lorries delivering carcasses to the local butcher or later, after he left home, bags of coal to nearby houses.   Not to ours though;  we had no money to pay for delivery.  It became the job of myself, then six, and my eight year old brother, Ronnie, to go to the coal merchants some two miles away with an old pram to buy a bag of coal whenever mum had the money for it.  The pram was, however, an improvement on an old bike on which we had to balance the filled coal sack on the crossbar. We had fun though getting there,  with Ronnie standing on the pedals and me double dinking on the seat.   But it was hard work pushing that loaded bike home and getting that bag of coal into the shed behind our house.  We sometimes saw our dad working at the coal yard but we never wondered  why he couldn’t have paid for a bag of coal and delivered it for us, even occasionally.

If we had, perhaps we might have better understood why our mum had always been so angry with him when he came home from work and went straight to the scullery to spruce himself up ‘for the pub‘.   I have a vivid memory of the two of them jostling around the kitchen fire where baby Jimmy’s nappies were airing which she refused to let him move so he could dry out a white handkerchief he’d just washed out in the scullery sink.  I thought she was being mean to him!   Poor daddy!  Looking back I can see why she became such a shrew. Five kids to feed and money going out to the pub night after night.

Our house at 32 North Road was one of a string of brick terraced worker cottages, two down, two up and a tiny scullery with a gas stove and a one tap sink. There was no bathroom and our weekly bath in an old tin tub was shared by one after another of all in the family. There was an outside lavatory with a splintery wooden seat and stacks of torn up newspapers,  Daily Mirrors and News of the World,  for bottom wiping.  Once I had learned to read,  it was here I was fascinated by all sorts of stories about men accused of “interfering with” little boys and vicars who “were intimate” with their lady parishioners. Why would you write a story in a newspaper about that sort of thing?   Later I learned to take my library book into the lavatory where it was private for long stretches of time.  There I could enjoy “Heidi” or “Swiss Family Robinson” which had somehow come into my hands from the tiny library run by the local Women’s Institute at the village church.

On either side of North Road ran Primrose Road and Snellings Grove, the latter having detached houses with good sized gardens where flowers and vegetables were grown and there were fruit trees.  ‘Scrumping’ or stealing of apples and pears from these was a popular summer time activity after dark!  My brother Ronnie once left his shoes behind and so was caught and identified by the local bobby who came to our house with them warning us all of dire punishment from the law.  We continued scrumping and nothing much happened,  mainly, I think, because it was known that this forbidden fruit was a useful part of our very limited diet.  Mrs. Burwood, wife of the owner of our workers’ cottages, would appear from time to time at her fence at the end of our street with a bucket of “windfalls” to give away to the children playing nearby. We’d crowd around that fence like a flock of hungry birds.

When war was declared in 1939 gangs of council workmen came round to build brick air raid shelters in our mean little back yards. I don’t think we ever used ours during an air raid,  but it was good place out of the rain for me and friends to play “houses” with our stuffed lisle stocking dolls.

I was too young to know what there “being a war on” meant but I do remember watching the women in our street as they pointed up at two planes in the blue sky far above, shooting out spurts of flame and puffs of smoke before one fell spiralling to earth.  The women wailed and pulled their pinnies over their faces.  It didn’t seem to matter if it was one of “ours” or “theirs” that plummeted to earth.  “Poor boys!” they wept.   It was very soon after the war had begun in earnest that sunny September Sunday morning – apparently it was within an hour of its being announced on the wireless.  There must have been other “dog fights” in the sky but that first one stays vivid in my mind. I was not yet four years old and I had never before seen grown-ups crying like that.

For a long time their weeping puzzled me, because life seemed to improve all round for everyone who lived in or around North Road from then on.  Even our being ‘bombed out’ by a ‘doodlebug’ or flying bomb was a blessing;  our crumbling old house was replaced by a brand new one after the war,  with a bathroom and indoor toilet.  I think we had priority because we and another North Road family, those rough Stevenses, had been housed since 1944 in the spacious local vicarage, requisitioned for emergencies such as this by the County Council.  For a few years we had our own orchard of apple and pear trees!  School was just over the road and we were very, very protective against would-be scrumpers! They could have windfalls though, at our pleasure!   Neither my Mum and we children,  nor any of the Stevens family,  attended Church which was next door.   We often,  however,  heard ourselves being disapproved of by members of the Vicar’s flock as they passed the now ruined Vicarage garden and made their way to and from Sunday services and attended weekday parish meetings.

By 1947 when we moved back in to our ‘new’ home in North Road I was nearly twelve and suddenly an Eleven Plus scholarship had propelled me to a grammar school some miles  away.   Life was never the same again for me and those early hungry years were soon forgotten.  It might have been because of the physical changes around me wrought by war.  Or free school lunches!   I understand now it was because of the changes wrought within me by my education.

From old desk top and dated July 20 09

We’ve had lots of lovely rain here today but it’s not been too overcast, rather like Ireland with its “smiles and tears”.  Plenty of blue skies with rolling rain-filled clouds, sunshine between the showers and the subsequent rainbows!  As always just before we came home the sun did its usual brilliant South Beach spectacular.  No red sky, of course, because we’re having more rain tomorrow, instead she bowed out behind silver tipped banks of clouds.  Not a lot of wind on the beach,  but the threat of rain kept all but the most stalwart regulars away.  So we had a great time chasing the ball and flirting with waves until Tacker caught sight of a red, blue and green kite flaunting itself above us and then sweeping down into the dunes.  Talk about excitement……..

I could say it doesn’t get much better than this.  But I’ve been saying that for years now! And it does.  Again and again.

Still from that old desk top computer and dated July 20 09.     Have just returned from walking my dog, Tacker, on South Beach.  I can’t say it’s a lazy Sunday activity since I do it every week day as well as every morning around the block,  accompanied by his best friend our cat.  Sheba seems to think she’s a dog too and mooches along with him around his favourite sniffing spots and stops with him at intersections to check for cars. She has achieved minor celebrity around here, particularly with mums and dads with strollers and little kids.

Re-starting my story which somehow dropped out after this comment I wrote about divorce to Ad Astra on July 20 09 at Lavartus Prodeo…………..

“When I read your comment at 5pm today I was reminded that my own late 60s divorce would have looked rather like that of your parents’ friends. And could have been just as messy and painful. But it was the marriage which had become messy and painful in the extreme for all of us, particularly our children, try as we both might to protect them.

The separation followed by the court process was the easiest part. I was blessed with a very practical and perceptive lawyer who listened to me for an hour, asked me how long I’d been seeing the “trick cyclists”,  made a note of the doctor who’d seen my bruises and the time of the one call-out of police to a “domestic”;  he asked me if I’d ever strayed and made me sign a discretionary statement for the court admitting to one count of adultery. Within a month I had left the marital home, petitioned for a legal separation and in due time for a divorce settlement.  My lawyer presented an open and shut case showing fault on the part of my husband.

It was all probably made easier by my being able to support myself and the children and asking for minimal maintenance and my willingness to be generous about access.  But essentially credit went to a humane and persuasive lawyer who had dealt with many such marriage break-ups over the years and found a way to make the existing divorce laws work for families.  There was a lot of collateral damage to our lives from the later years of marriage and its breakdown,  but the divorce process itself was least to blame.

Finding my husband guilty of physical and mental cruelty and desertion seemed to me a harsh judgement even then.  Technically true though it was.  My own “adultery” was not mentioned.  I remember in our one and only interview the lawyer did not encourage me to blame or to think of myself as a victim.  (Which the psychiatrist certainly did!)  He merely observed that it sounded as if things were pretty bad and all of us would be better off if I left.  In other words there were irreconcilable differences and the marriage had entirely broken down.

My husband died suddenly at 85 a few months ago and our children spoke movingly at his wake. An Irish atheist, inadvertently having left a good stock of red behind for us all to share,  he would have appreciated their expressions of love and stories of their weekend adventures with him thoughout their childhood.  He was a great dad and they were as angry with me for leaving him as six and seven year olds can be.  But life did improve for all of us once he and I had parted, and I was somehow forgiven.

I do remember early on suggesting that we shouldn’t bother to get married,  just live together which would have been pretty daring in the fifties.  I even suggested our taking a holiday and coming back to to our friends “married”.  But we did want children and in those days that seemed to clinch it.  Nowadays why would you bother?  And yes, I do sympathise with all those same-sex couples who want to make the same mistakes as straight couples,  to get married and live locked in an institution!

Still lots of editing to do here…………………………………… having rescued this from old desktop.   Must check out Lavartus Prodeo  archives for July 20, 2009

…….https://wordpress.com/page/polliepomes.wordpress.com/3920

17/08/2019   https://wordpress.com/page/polliep

mes.wordpress.com/3920

PS 28/03/2023 – Trying again to record that latest selfie which won’t go into ‘text’ –