London Life ~ Part Two ... SAS
While I was living above the car sales showroom in Croydon, my weekday evenings were mostly spent in a local pub ~ The Purley Arms ~ which was run by one of the best landlords I've ever met ~ David Curtis-Lawrence (DCL). I started playing darts again, there not being a pool table there at that point. I've only ever been a fairly mediocre player, but could pull off a good win on occasion.
There was a good crowd drinking there, particularly the darts players, and DCL was pretty intolerant when it came to troublemakers, so the atmosphere was congenial most of the time.
One guy drinking there had just split up with his girlfriend. I thought he was more than just a bit of a knob, and the rest of us preferred her company rather than his, so he soon got the message and disappeared.
ST was around 12 years my junior, and around eight inches shorter than me, but she wasn't childish or immature in her manner. I don't know what drew her to me ~ perhaps it was feeling safe with the 'big fella', I really don't know, but we hit it off. We called ourselves the SAS! She made me feel special ... loved ... more than I had ever felt before. She was no pushover though, and spoke her mind. And it wasn't long before I started wondering if this could be 'the one'.
It was only a short while after we'd been dating that I bought the flat in Crouch End ~ right the other side of London and miles away from her family and work in Croydon. I gave her the option of moving in with me or continuing the relationship from a distance ~ which I would have been happy to do if she hadn't felt comfortable with taking such a step so soon. However, she was all for it, and we moved in there together.
But it wasn't a case of just her living with me ~ we chose most of the furnishings etc. between us, and she paid her way with the bills, relative to her earnings, which, at that time, were lower than my own. This was the first time I'd ever had a proper, sharing relationship and I can honestly say I thrived on it.
Her parents were probably a little dubious about the relationship at first, but I feel they warmed to me when they saw the strength of our relationship and knowing I'd never hurt their little girl. I remember telling her ~ with the age gap in mind ~ that if she ever wanted to leave me, to tell me and I wouldn't stand in her way. I swore never to hurt her, and physically (at least) I never did.
A short while after moving into the flat, my work went downhill, following the break-up of Panic Graphics. When I was hardly earning anything for a few months, she was the one who kept us going. When I finally realised I wasn't going to make enough money being freelance, I went out and got two jobs almost straight away ~ one daytime job with a small publishing company, and an evening job with another, similar company, just off Oxford Street.
During this time I was also helping with the design of a new motor trade magazine, which was eventually taken back in-house by the publisher's wife (who summarily screwed it up!). But they did pay me for the work I'd already done and, once debts were paid off, I used the rest to have an engagement rink made at an outlet in Hatton Garden (Katz & Co.). When I popped the question I was still unsure if she would say yes, but to my obvious delight, she did.
She convinced me to take a foreign holiday for the first time. I'd never been abroad (other than the junior school trip to Europe and a couple of days in Jersey), having wanted to explore mainland Britain first. We went to Port Alcudia in Majorca and I loved every minute of it ~ even the one day and night we suffered from sunstroke!
It was an eye-opener though and it wasn't long before I realised why English tourists are despised throughout the continent. Walking round on evening after dinner, ST needed the loo, but the English-run bars we went into were too disgusting to use. She wasn't a snob ~ but said she still wouldn't use a toilet that was saturated with urine, around the pans and the floors. As I waited around inside them, waiting for her to return 'unrelieved' from them, I saw the drunken males either arguing with each other or falling about the place, with their wives in similar states and kids running riot everywhere.
Eventually, we came across a German-run bar ~ she went in to find it was clean enough to eat your dinner off the floor and managed to finally relieve herself. We stayed there for a couple of hours, sitting at the open front of the bar, exchanging pleasantries with some of the German customers ~ though only through their broken English and sign language, as my German was non-existent. Beers paid for when you left, with slips put under the ashtrays ~ all immensely civilised. I could only imagine what would happen if they tried the same in an English bar ... they'd never make any money!
In 1996, as we were making preparations for our wedding, I sold the flat and bought a house in South Croydon ~ not only because it was a great deal, but also so the onus on commuting became mine and ST would be closer to her work. We were married the same year, on 4th May, and spent a fortnight's honeymoon in Zakynthos, where we first met the brothers I would later visit (see To Greece and back).
This whole period for me was amazing ~ work as good, home life was excellent ... we really felt like we had made it. But there was one thing that wasn't going to plan. ST (now SE) had suffered two miscarriages and was beginning to wonder if she would ever be able to become the mother she was so naturally suited to be.
I don't want to comment too much on the sex side of things for the sake of her privacy, but I believe she had suffered some abuse when she was younger (I never asked for details, and she never offered to expand on the little she did intimate). Our love making was intermittent and unadventurous. I never pushed her when she wasn't 'in the mood', but after the miscarriages her longing for a child led to her becoming more desperate, so matching intercourse with ovulation periods became the norm, even though I struggled with the 'on-demand' scenario.
Eventually she fell again, in early 1998, a short while before my father died. It gave the prospect of a new life coming to replace the one we'd lost, so was much awaited. We made our second bedroom into a nursery, with neutral colours, as initially we didn't want to know the baby's sex. On 3rd December she went into labour and we went to Mayday once more. SE was trying to have as natural a birth as possible, but the labour was long and she ended up needing every aid and comfort they could provide.
All through the night, she just wasn't dilating enough, as nursing staff, doctors and midwives came and went. Between around 3am and 6am the visits were less frequent, however, and when a new doctor came on duty they said she shouldn't have had to wait this long and that it would be safer to have a caesarean. By this time, SE knew she'd done as much as she could, so it was agreed. It took around 15 minutes for them to get SE into the operating theatre, while they gave me a gown and mask and got me to scrub up as well, so I could be in there with her. We'd only been there a few minutes, when the staff put a screen up halfway down ST's midriff and we started to fear something was wrong.
Apparently, during that 15 minutes ST was off the monitors, the baby had turned around and the umbilical cord had wrapped around her neck. She was delivered, but irrevocable brain damage had occurred. Our baby girl, EE, never showed any sign of life ~ she never uttered a word, she never cried. But she was still beautiful and she was ours.
We stayed with her in the post natal care unit and the days passed as we kept hoping for a miracle ... hoping the doctors had got it wrong, and holding on in the hope she'd never go away. We had to speak about what to do. They said she'd never have any life, but could feel no pain ~ no sense at all. Between us we decided to let fate take its course and remove her from artificial life support. If she lived, we would look after her for as long as it took, but if she died, then at least we knew it was meant to be. She lived for a full seven days before finally passing away peacefully. The doctors told us she would never have felt any pain, which was some consolation.
Her funeral was probably the saddest day of my life ...
EEs passing didn't split us. We had experienced parenthood and I knew SE would make a perfect mother ~ she was born to be one. However, I was reluctant to start trying again. Part of the reason was my not wanting to physically hurt her ~ I know she'd suffered during the long labour.
But I still think something else was playing on my mind. It was early 1999 and although SE was 26, I was about to turn 38, or, as I thought of it, approaching my forties. If another child came, would I end up being a ridiculously old father? This played on my mind more than I was aware at the time, and something else was stirring in the background.
While doing my best to be SE's (and everyone else's) rock after EEs death, I hadn't fully comprehended the effect it had on me. It wasn't until I underwent depression counselling around 10 years later that my counsellor identified this period as the catalyst for a condition that haunts me to this day.
We spent 1999 in a flux. In January we had a short break in Paris, to try and take our minds off things. We went back to Zakynthos for our usual fortnight in May and even had another break later in the year in Malta. Life was ticking on, but this was also the period when the unknown illness (much later diagnosed as sleep apnoea) started to take a hold on me. Everything was becoming more and more difficult to handle. As we went further into 2000, much of my memory is a blur. I know work went downhill, I was probably drinking more ~ and possibly avoiding the sex side of things, although I do remember we did try some experimentation during that last year, although once more the details are very fuzzy.
I seem to remember becoming more short-tempered as I was continuing to lose control of situations that were once easily manageable, but I'll never know how my change in behaviour affected those around me, particularly SE. The one thing I do remember is I never physically hurt SE, but I can never be sure how much my changed attitude affected her.
When she finally came to me to ask for a divorce ~ because she had been seeing someone who I loathed ~ I agreed, remembering what I'd said to her when we were first together, that I'd never stand in her way if she asked to leave. I can't fully blame her for being unfaithful, as I don't know how much I might have hurt her mentally. But there isn't a day goes past still that I don't wish I had been able to stop our splitting.
I wish I'd had the wherewithal about me to change ... to fight to keep her. But my mind was in such disarray there was nothing I could do.
I let her keep the house, taking a £20k payment (over half of which was in the form of my original endowment) and relinquishing any future claim on it. At least I knew in this way she would be set up for life, as the house I'd bought for £70.5k back in 1996 was already worth double that on the market by that time.
I finished my job, bought a cheap camper van, said my goodbyes and headed off to Zakynthos, with no intention of ever returning. I wasn't going there to start a new life ... much as the idea appealed to me ... I was going there to die.
Addendum ...
Despite a few attempts over the past 20+ years, SE (now SS) has never responded to my requests to even open a dialogue. Back in around 2012 I found her on Facebook and saw a picture of her young daughter, who was the spitting image of her, and was pleased. I decided to pm her through Messenger with a long note asking for her help to fill in some of the gaps in my memory from 2000, so I might better understand how my life started falling apart, and how I ended up losing her. I also wrote a brief outline of how my life was at that point, mentioning my daughter with whom I'd been reunited and giving some details of the sleep apnoea. I received no response. I don't know if she ever read it.
I did receive a pm from her recently to say she wanted to move our daughter nearer to where she is living now and she'd let me know where she was once the move had taken place so I could continue my occasional visits. I replied to thank her for letting me know and added another request to either speak with her or to have an exchange of emails or messages for the same reasons as before. I explained about the death of my other daughter and how I had become a surrogate second parent, helping our my grandchildren's father as much as I could. I even added a photo of them. This time I could tell she saw both message and picture, but she still didn't respond, which made me sad, but it also got me thinking.
To my mind there could only be one of three reasons why she doesn't want to speak to me:
1) If she has a partner who doesn't want her to speak to me, which I suppose I could at least understand;
2) That the hurt I inflicted upon her is too unforgivable for her to consider speaking to me again, however, I honestly can't believe there was anything I could have done that would cause her to resent me for such long a time;
3) Perhaps the split had more to do with her infidelity than my behaviour and she doesn't want to explain herself to me.
The third option I could possibly believe, but don't want to. Whichever way it happened, if I hadn't been doing something wrong, I can't believe she would have looked elsewhere, because we were just so good together. That's not being conceited ~ just an acknowledgement of how good we were as a couple.
There could be other reasons, I suppose, that perhaps I just can't get my head around, but without being able to discuss it with her, I'll never know. She is the only person who could ever fill in those gaps.