My dilemma: how to you patch things up with a stepmother when you really don’t give a fuck whether or not things are patched up? It would only be for her sake.

Although this blog is the descendant of a diary I once kept for about 15 years, it differs in at least one respect in that I have so far avoided writing about people - family and friends - who might read it. Neither do I care emotionally to spill my guts. As it happens I don’t have a great much to spill emotionally, certainly a lot less than when I was writing my diary from around 1980 to 1995 and splitting up with girls (especially one in particular), but even if I did, I wouldn’t record it here for the world to drool over. The major advantage of keeping a written diary is that, with very few exceptions, no one will ever read it. Blogs, on the other hand, are public knowldge. If you don’t want something to become public, don’t put it in your bloody blog.

As for friends and family - not so much news of them, which I do occasionally record here, but comments about them which might not always be complimentary - they, too, must accept that they will have no place here. As far I know, no family have ever read my blog, except in the early days my sister, and only two friends occasionally do so, and I have nothing unpleasant or even uncomplimentary to say about either of them.

But I am about to break my rule and give an account of a very recent family matter, and the reason I have no compunction about breaking my rule is that I really don’t give a fuck who gets upset. It concerns my stepmother, and two very odd and very hurtful comments she made. As a rule and given her less than happy circumstances, I would allow them to wash off my back like water off a duck, but oddly when she made the second comment - and given our history - something snapped in me.

. . .

She hooked up with my father more than 55 years ago when she was in her mid-twenties and he was just over 40, though who hooked up with whom I can’t say and I don’t know. It would be dishonest to say that she thereby wrecked my father’s marriage as I don’t think it was in a very healthy state anyway. Nor shall I speculate further, as no one can know the dynamic of a relationship a couple - in this case my father and mother - has. But I do know from there on in there was often an uncomfortable and edgy atmosphere in the house, and Christmas breaks were never very happy going on on occasion quite awful.

My mother died suddenly of a heart attack in January 1981 at the comparatively early age of 30 - I found her dead - and in the months and years following her death, I got to know far more details of the affair and just what had been going on.

When we returned from Paris in 1972 (the year I graduated) we were back living in Henley-on-Thames, from where many commute to London where my father worked (indeed my sister did daily as she attended a French school in London). My father chose not to commute and to stay in London during the week, telling my mother he slept in one of the bedrooms at Broadcasting House the BBC kept for late night/early morning announcers. I doubt she believed him though. My stepmother, who also worked for the BBC, owned a flat in Blackheath, and my father had been shacking up with her there since 1972.

In the mid-seventies my stepmother inherited several thousand pounds from an aunt and bought herself an old granite cottage in the village of St Breward, about six miles from Bodmin. Her parents were both Irish and had moved to Cornwall in the mid-1930s where her father took over running a mental health hospital in North Cornwall. Her two sisters and brother were born in Ireland, but she was born in Bodmin.  (NB Wrong, as I discovered tonight, after asking her oldest sibling. They were all born in Bodmin. The parents came over in the late 1920s and all of their children were born in Cornwall.) Apart from living with my stepmother in London, my father also used to spend weekends with her at the cottage, telling my mother he was staying with a friend while he was ‘working on his book’. There was no phone, he said, so he could not be contacted. I doubt any sane woman would accept such a story, especially as I’m sure my mother already knew of the affair.

After my mother died, my father sold the house he and my mother had built on Greys Road, on the outskirts of Henley (at Gillotts Corner if you know Henley) for around £82,000. That - a tidy sum - would be the equivalent of around £276,000 in 2018. The money was used to add to and extend my stepmother’s cottage substantially. In 1983, my father retired and my stepmother took early retirement.

. . .

I have known my stepmother since I was 15 in 1965. She, her sisters and their uncle, a GP who was not short of a penny and who owned a small holiday cottage on small island on the Thames at Henley which they all used to visit, I simply knew as my father’s friends. When my stepmother met my father and found out we lived in Henley, our he (and his family) were invited to join them there on a weekend afternoon, but we only went once or twice as I’m sure my mother suspected something was going on.

Late in 1965 we moved to Paris where my father had been posted as the BBC’s ‘Paris representative’. (It is only recently that I have been wondering why the BBC had ‘correspondents’ all over the world, but ‘representatives’ in only one or two cities, but I can’t tell you or even suggest why. Perhaps his posting had something to do with what I suspect was the second string to his bow, his obscure connection to Britain’s SIS (more here 1 and here 2). Perhaps it wasn’t, but I’m not going to speculate.)

From 1965 until 1968 I was at school in England and until 1972, when we returned from Paris, I was at university in Dundee, and such was the rather fraught and generally unhappy atmosphere at home that I rarely ever spent school breaks at home in Paris. (It didn’t help that although I generally got one reasonably well with my father, he and my older brother clashed quite regularly.) I particularly remember the first Christmas in Paris, in 1965 (I turned 16 in the November of that year). My father picked up myself and my older brother from the Gare du Nord and drove us home in a taxi. It was evening and as we drove along beside the Seine with all its lights, I distinctly remember feeling very proud of my father. I also distinctly remember that he stank of whisky.

It was late, and we went to bed almost as soon as we got in, but within minutes a terrible row broke out downstairs - the house had three floors - between my mother and father which went on for some time. My mother appeared and came upstairs to where we children were sleeping (my sister was only ten and my younger brother eight) mother, not a small women, wearing a pink baby doll night dress and weeping. I suspect she had tried to initiate ‘intimate relations’ - sex - with my father but he had wanted none of it. The rest of the Christmas break was downhill from there on.

. . .

I wasn’t reacquainted with my stepmother for 15 years until after my mother died. When she died, and, to but it bluntly, she was out of the way an no longer a barrier to my father and stepmother going public, my father set about easing me in on the fact of his affair. I discovered my younger brother had been eased in rather earlier than me.

I was invited to spend a weekend at my stepmother’s flat in Blackheath and immediately sensed that the story I had been told - that she was an old friend he had turned to when my mother died - was bullshit. There was an especially silly charade when I was given the guest room to sleep in and he made out he was sleeping on a camp bed in the living room. I offered him the guest room and said I would sleep on the camp bed. No, no, no, he said that’s fine, don’t bother.

I didn’t take to my stepmother, but didn’t dislike her, either. I was neutral. I found her pretentious, and her snobbery and airs and graces irritated me, and she had a very annoying habit of pulling me - and my young brother and, for all I know, everyone else - up short on points of etiquette. But I said nothing, probably because I am by nature quite direct and I either speak out or not at all. Although my years working shifts on the nationals in London taught me a modicum of diplomacy, I had not then learnt the little I might now have.

My mother died in January 1982, and I spent the Christmas of 1982 with my girlfriend’s mother in Harwich where she, who had split from her father, now lived. The following year my younger brother and I were invited down here to Cornwall to spend Christmas with my father and my stepmother.

. . .

From the off it was agony. Everything was phoney, no one could relax, the bonhomie abounding was so fake, it could well have been prosecuted by trading standards. Before my mother died we had always celebrated Christmas in the German way on Christmas Eve. Hoping, I suppose, somehow to recreate those Christmases, my father and stepmother emulated them. I suppose they deserve credit for trying but I wished to Christ they hadn’t.

The following morning on Christmas Day, I woke up and thought ‘I don’t want to be here’. I realised the huge upset I would cause by walking out, but I also remember thinking that this was a watershed: I could carry on trying to be honest with myself (after a fashion, I should add, because I don’t doubt I am just as capable of kidding myself as everyone else) or start playing the silly, phoney games my stepmother seemed to prefer, the ‘let’s pretend for the sake of form’ crap. I decided to leave.

I packed, went downstairs to the kitchen where my stepmother was preparing Christmas lunch and told her I was leaving. She said something along the lines of ‘I think you are very wrong’ and I left. My father and brother were out somewhere at the time and my father didn’t speak to me for several years. But to this day I know I did the right thing.

I don’t quite remember how long it took, but there came about a reconciliation of sorts with my father. But it was by no means immediate. My brother was living with me at the time in my house in the Maypole, Birmingham, and whenever my father rang him and I andwered the phone, he would not say a word except to ask for Mark. But in time, at least two years, the situation began to ease and I began to visit him and my stepmother down here in Cornwall.

By then I was living in Cardiff, working for the South Wales Echo. But I never felt at all easy with her and I didn’t much like her. Being a middle-class sort of chap, I was polite and affable, but what was especially galling - quite apart from her airs and graces, snobbery, and her habit of lecturing on matters of etiquette - was when she informed me, referring to my crime of walking out on Christmas Day, that ‘all was forgiven’. She didn’t just say it once or twice, but rather often over the years, far, far too often for my liking. I, who would either have to let rip or say nothing, always said nothing. Christ, I deserve a medal.

My father developed cancer in the early 1990s and died in 1991. My stepmother, unsurprisingly, was devastated. She had retired in 1983 at the same time as my father when she was just 46 and had looked forward to many years of a comfortable life with him. I visited her once or twice while I was living in London, when I married a local woman and myself moved down here to St Breward (although I carried on working in London for another 22 years).

While he was on his deathbed, my father asked myself and my younger brother ‘to take care of Paddy’, and I took the request seriously. My stepmother and I rubbed along OK, although we weren’t in each other’s pockets and I never felt at ease in her company, but with my father no longer around, I was conscious that she needed a bit of company. I can’t say we became bosom pals. And the ‘all is forgiven line’ was still trotted out on occasion.

Eleven years ago, two days before her 70th birthday, my stepmother suffered a very bad stroke. She was in a coma for three days and stayed in hospital for several months, first in Truro then in Bodmin. A few days after she had come out of her coma, she gave me enduring power of attorney, and I have been making sure her bills are paid on time and all the rest ever since.

After leaving hospital, she moved into a care home near the north coast and lived there for several years. She then moved into one of the two cottages she owns adjacent to hers (she had jointly bought the first with my brother, and later inherited the second from her sister when her sister died). She moved into that because at the time it was thought easier to adapt to someone who was as physically disabled as she was. Several years later she moved back into her original home, and that is where she lives now.

. . .

To some it might seem that the account above indicates it has all been at the back of my mind and that I have been chewing it all over for the past 36 years. Actually, I haven’t. So my dad had an affair? So? I haven’t had one while married, although I did a fair bit of two-timing, but none of us is kitchen-clean and I gather my parents’ marriage was most certainly not in the best of health. (In fact, my sister told me that she had been informed - by whom I can’t remember but whoever it was should have known better - that my parents had her ‘to save the marriage’. Not a nice thing to be told.) I honestly thought it was all water under the bridge, and I astonished myself when all this came rushing back to me the other morning - especially that sanctimonious and infuriating ‘all is forgiven’.

I shan’t go into details of what was said because that would be too tedious, but several months ago my stepmother pretty much accused me of trying to steal a table from her. That did sour me rather badly. Then the other morning she said something similar and something inside me snapped. And that was it.

I know myself well: I can get noisily angry but that is always just like a sudden summer storm, over almost before it has started. But when, as has happened and has happened again, I get so furious that I am in complete calm, but in a state of white fury, I make sure I watch my step and keep my mother shut. And there is no going back.

My stepmother has been affected by her strokes - she had two more a few years ago - and can do little for herself. But mentally she is all there, although she sometimes takes a little longer to respond to questions. I have no idea what is going through here mind, but it wasn’t what she said, but what she obviously believes about me. As I say something snapped.

My dilemma is that she is helpless, pretty much, and relies on me in several ways, so this state of affairs cannot carry on. But I don’t care whether or not I ever see her again. I have had it with her, completely, but I can’t abandon her. And I shall not, but . . .

I am going to try to patch things up for her sake - me, I really don’t give a fuck - but not at any price. I am certainly not going to play some phoney little game about it all being ‘a misunderstanding’, the line she took before, and I am not and shall never engage in more of that thoroughly fake middle-class politeness and phoney bonhomie which gets up my nose at the best of times. I have had it - but somehow I’ve got to find a way through. And, dear reader, at this point I am utterly clueless.

Even ‘talking about it’ with my stepmother as my ‘cousin’, her nephew (he, his wife and his mother are staying) suggests is out of the question because I would have to say things she would hurt her very badly indeed - how do you tell someone that she is a total pain in the arse and that her airs and graces and snobbery are supremely irritating and still hope to have a reasonably friendly relationship?

As I say, I am utterly clueless.