Rediscovery and Recovery

I'm going to tell you a true story, or at least as true as I can remember it. Let's be honest here and concede that when we're in the middle of something, we don't stop to write down the exact detail, we don't have a voice recorder to capture every aspect of who said what and when. So even in stories like this, we use writing skills and some imagination. As a writer, I've always thought that imagination is borne of experience; sometimes it's our experience, sometimes it's that of others. This is my experience, even if all the words and actions were not mine, and even if the names have been changed (which they most certainly have!).

Chapter One: To set the scene

My name is John and at 34 years of age, three long years after my first marriage had been declared over, I finally gave up on my so-called 'life' in London. I want to tell you about that transition, and what I discovered. I think it will take several chapters, and since I'm new to this writing thing, even as I tap at my keyboard, I'm not sure how much detail to share. Let's find out, together.

To rewind: At 22 I had qualified as a secondary school history teacher; a year later I married Eve, who I had met whilst training, and who, like me had got a job at a school in London. The schools were almost twenty miles apart, but that seemed for the best at the time, because there was next to no chance of professional overlap. For five years we worked like Trojans, sharing a small 2-bed flat in the north of the city and travelling everywhere by public transport. With two meagre salaries in an expensive city, we saved very little. I still think it was right that we spent our spare time, and a fair proportion of our spare money, enjoying the weekends and holidays in each others' company. We ate out each and every Sunday lunchtime; we chose a film or concert one weekend each month; we travelled to major European cities once or twice a year, went skiing once with some other teacher-friends, and even got as far as New York for 5-night long weekend. We were much in love and there are very few twenty-somethings who worry about the medium to long term future, even if they spend some time thinking about it or discussing it.

Our plan had been a simple one. Somewhere between the fifth and tenth years of our marriage (that's 28-33 years of age) we would hope to have one or two children. We would almost certainly move away from London, to both a cheaper part of the country and one in which children might have more freedom. We might both continue working, or if economically possible, Eve might take a career break. She was a great geography teacher (correction, still is, I'm sure), and would go back to work, as family circumstance allowed.

Then, just as we hit the sixth year of marriage, three things happen (they always come in threes, as you probably know). Firstly, and tragically, Eve's mother, Margaret, died. Death is never ever easy, but Eve's mother was barely 50 years old when diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. From first pain to the end was just 7 months, and though we tried so hard to be 'normal' during that time, the strain was immense. Eve's parents lived in the north of England, a 3-hour journey at the best of times; Eve wanting to visit as often as possible wrecked our weekend habitual patterns of life, and I confess to you, as I did to her much later, I found myself resenting it.

It's personally painful for me to recount the second thing which happened, but I must, so please be kind. Awareness of her mother's mortality (and its coinciding with our family plans) triggered a mother instinct in Eve. I guess it was about 3 months after hearing that there was no prospect of recovery for Margaret that Eve announced, almost without consultation, that she had stopped taking oral contraception. I think she would dearly have loved to have told her mother that she was expecting a child, that somehow the prospect of Grandparenthood may have been enough to give Margaret just a few more months of life. I have to say, I was completely happy with that aspect, though less happy that the strain of parenthood would most likely hit at the same time as bereavement. Anyway, it wasn't to be; two months after Margaret's death, and six months of trying to conceive, Eve and I went to check our fertility, only to find that I'm the one with the problem. Though I can produce buckets of semen, there are very few fish in the sea. Eve had been chemically messing around with her hormones for years, but I was the one incapable of parenthood - or not completely incapable, just a less-than-five-percent chance; very long odds.

And so within the space of twelve months we had seen a member of the generation before us cut down in her prime and our hopes of natural parenthood dashed. We never ever got round to discussion about adoption or fostering children; I'd hate to think it's true, but it may be that teachers who look after other people's kids for six hours a day want to retain the option of handing them back......

And so to the third thing, and the one which, quite literally, drove us apart. Permanently. Eve decided, again without much consultation, that she wanted to move closer to her father. George was still in perfect health, managing a small local bank branch, and didn't need his daughter closer, but Eve was not to be persuaded. I don't know where her decision came from, and that has always bothered me a little bit, but it was made, and she was never able to explain it fully. She applied for, and got appointed to a teaching job at a school which was not now 20 miles from mine, but 220 miles.

And so Eve 'half-moved' up north and declared her intention to wait for me to join her. For another 18 months, we tolerated a long-distance relationship, of the sort which, I'm told, is far more common than we might imagine. I moved to a smaller, cheaper, flat in London, and Eve lived with her father. Each Friday, one of us would make the 3-hour journey to join the other and after our lunch on Sunday, we'd return to our separate week-day lives. We'd spend the school holidays together of course, but it was a pretty miserable and lonely life. Perhaps it's because teaching can be such a tiring profession, but the evening phone conversations became shorter and of less interest, and far too much of the weekends were spent talking about what we'd been doing on our own, when marriage is something you're supposed to experience together.

Eventually, and with no malice, we both came to the view that enough was enough. It took another year for a divorce proper to be agreed and sorted out, by which time I know that Eve had met someone else. Me? I was now almost 31 years old, not unattractive, and free to be anonymous in one of the biggest cities in the world. I had short, always passionate relationships with other young and single teachers in my area, and once, a weekend with a woman who threw herself on me one Friday night. I holidayed alone (Amsterdam is a different city without your wife on your arm!!) and if I travelled anywhere at a weekend, it was to see my parents in the West Country. I had my job, was good at it, and wondered whether this would now be my lot in life.