My father's side of the family were for generations Quakers and my mother's were religious Jews, probably for millennia. Both minorities were denied access to England's Universities until the late 18th Century. Neither would swear allegiance to the English Monarch as G-d's representative on Earth and so were disenfranchised.
Despite this and because of it both families developed a culture of enterprise, learning and vigorous non-conformity. Befriending and championing the silenced and dispossessed. I see that influence in each of my children, and it has made their passage in life interesting and challenging.
By the time of my great grand mother, the direct female line to my Jewish ancestry had joined the Church of England through marriage, leaving me out of the tribe. Assimilation had brought disenfranchisement full circle.
Yet I continue to be drawn into a Jewish life or more accurately as one of my friends calls it, an integral spirituality - 'Jewish Hindu Sufi Buddhists'.
Whatever conclusions you may draw from reading this short history of my first eight years of life, I am truly the fruit of many lives. As I grow older and wiser I realise this ancestral influence often outweighs the influence of my parent's time - akin to being drawn to the complex half forgotten flavours of an old wine rather than the fruity bubble of new and now.
As a couple's therapist I find that a curious and challenging recognition.
Prior to birth
My mother and father buried my infant brother and sister two months before I was conceived. They had died of encephalitis aged three years old and six months old. Ignoring medical advice and Dad's fears, Mum conceived me with great hopes of rebuilding their lives after these irreparable losses. The pregnancy went well but was allowed to go 2 weeks overdue ignoring mother's previous difficult births.
On the day she went to hospital for an induction she was glowing and in good health. Later that night I was born by emergency caesarian as she haemorrhaged and later died. Although there was medical error in the blood transfusion, this tragedy still happens today even with the best of care. The funeral was a shocker for my grandparents and father, three dead in 12 months all buried beside each other.
At two weeks of age mum's best friend from medical school Beatrice, who was also my god mother, became my foster mum. Together with neighbour Gladys, I was collected from hospital. My biological father had agreed to a 6 month fostering, but he was absent, traumatised and broken. He came out of his childhood and later WWII with chronic dread and anxiety.
I nearly died from asthma/bronchitis at 9 months. Beatrice stayed up with me through 48 hours nursing until I was out of trouble. Beside my bed was a photograph of my birth mother. She was my very own guardian angel.
I was a sickly kid like my mother was as a child. Sickly kids who struggle to breath and survive each episode seem to develop a sharper will to live, a kind of pragmatic optimism and a pleasure in existence itself, since it is so arduously achieved (Peppiatt).
Beatrice was a physically strong, intelligent, tireless worker; a pious Christian; a medical practitioner and herself orphaned in her youth. She had been fostered with her elder sister in Anglican Church pastoral families during the war. Becoming a doctor was no small feat for a woman in those days and particularly for one without parents or an independent income.
However, I think the experiences of loss and deprivation in part had hardened her natural reserve and gratitude into a shame based piety. Her judgments were sometimes cruel, simultaneously denied and then covered in a mild form of toxic Christianity. She had learned to bite her tongue but you could cut that atmosphere with a knife.
She had married a charming doctor Edmund, whom she met and admired at medical school some years before my birth. He represented everything she believed possible of the profession of medicine. Their first child was a boy. Some months before I arrived, her second son Julian had 'died'. My mother and she had both been pregnant (mine with me) when they re-united after the war, living a few minutes walk of each other. Both looked forward to sharing their lives together.
Julian was born with spina bifida, was 'allowed to die' without life support and without Beatrice feeding him, unbonded and unheld. He was 'a lost cause' in medicine's view. Who was she to argue against medical authority for the life of a possibly severely damaged child? His body was incinerated with the hospital waste, uncommemorated and without a grave. Too strong to call it infanticide and too Freudian to impute medical rage at imperfection.
Beatrice carried Julian long after his death.
I can only imagine the burden of that desecration and how it worked it's way throughout the course of her life. Today I believe she suffered toxic shame and this also drove her dependence on the prescription pain killer, pethedine.
She had a way of distancing me and her other children whilst fulfilling her physical duties as a mother. I believe this was more than just the issues of her own losses and of the significant difficulties of fostering a baby. I think she had too much baggage, little emotional support in her marriage, no extended family to speak of and no language for addressing the issues.
She carried the shame of Julian's death for decades, spoken in a matter of fact way - if ever it was raised. Until the sister of one of her daughter-in-law's had a child who was still born and with her daughter-in-laws support, she was allowed to speak the horror of it and name her own grieving.
Julian's death was one of a number of critically significant choices made around children, her marriage and her own health where she believed she was helpless and indeed was without support.
My foster father Edmund was a Victorian gentleman. He had been smothered by a doting mother and an elder sister. He had become a country doctor providing the cradle to grave service in people homes if required. Beatrice admired his skills when she observed him as a medical student. However, his bedside manner did not transfer to marriage in quite the way she had hoped. He kept his spinster sister as the housekeeper for years before he married, then during the early years of their marriage and up until her first son was three months old. Beatrice could not convince him to move his sister out of their home until that time.
In a sense Beatrice then became Edmund's housekeeper. Edmund was fastidious in everything and set in his ways. He conveyed a sense of entitlement as the provider. It was Dickensian.
He gave his wife an allowance to keep house as he had given his sister and kept her in the dark about their financial position, until she had to manage it herself, when in old age he developed Alzheimer's. She then found the cupboard bare - with no explanation for where his savings and investments had gone nor the whereabouts of a house he had been given by one of his patients many years earlier.
Through his domestic demands he ensured that she did not gain financial independence by working in her career. She claimed helplessness in this too. He left for work after breakfast, returned for lunch and regularly came home at 9.30 pm - apparently on home visits. His days were always the same.
He wouldn't touch the kitchen; the garden; nor help with the children nor clean. According to my foster mum, he considered sex 'messy'. He drove his car always with a pair of leather gloves. Every Sunday 'a man' cleaned his car, whose son later took on the job after his father died, even though he too had no need of the money owning the local Rover dealership. All cow-towed to the great man, the good Doctor.
The house and garden 'servants' were treated as only the British upper class could and they were grateful for it. This was not an aristocratic family but upwardly mobile middle class with the pretensions of small town nobility. This was white middle class England in the 50's.
Edmund was a charmer - a fine pianist, raconteur, repertory actor and well read. His patients adored him. I adored him and I think he me and for that I suspect I was not forgiven. Freud's version of these family dramas is of triangles and it still holds true despite our modernity.
I used to bring them tea in the morning and hop into bed beside Edmund. At some level I may have wanted to replace Beatrice, seeing her as a rival for Edmund's affections, but no child thinks like that.
There is always an element of unlived life in every triangle and it seems we are sometimes unable to discover that unlived life except through the extreme emotional stress which triangles generate.
With a 15 hours x 6.5 days medical practice and that weird British WASP family of tightly held emotions and little overt affection, most of his children hardly knew Edmund. He was demonstrably affectionate both to me and to my later born foster sister, but I remember none of that expression toward Beatrice or my brothers. Mine was a secure attachment.
Infancy and childhood
As a child I would sometimes entertain Edmund's patients in the surgery at home, role playing the doctor. On home visits when I accompanied him, I kept a little note book of scribble like medical notes. I once left my birthday party to go 'doctoring' with him. He was a safe male for me and for my later born foster sister. My maiden maternal Aunt, that one person who stood by me throughout her life even when I was not a very likeable person, thought the relationship 'unhealthy' - code for incestuous.
My first six months stretched into many happy years. I grew strong, willful and as privileged as a cuckoo. I was loved and cared for well enough. Identifying with Edmund, I felt entitled to it. A golden haired boy in the middle between my two tall, dark haired foster brothers with whom I rioted. Three boys are a handful anyway but especially for Beatrice who was in effect a single parent. How did this generation of women deal with the loneliness of those kinds of marriages?
With this family I felt special. I thought, in command of my own life and at times a nightmare to discipline. Life seemed perfect to me. I had brothers, friendships, even a childhood sweetheart and a neighbourhood. I belonged and to a family. After I left for Australia they continued to tell the stories that included me but without my hearing of it. Without my bathing in that kinship and being reminded as I grew into a man of who I was as a boy. There is great freedom in that disconnection as well as loss.
Leaving for Australia
At age 7 my natural father in Australia thought he was ready to care for me. He had no idea what he was taking on. He was very unsettled, not in command of himself and a lonely, single guy prone to anguished doubts, depression and anxiety. He had not recovered from the deaths preceding my birth let alone his own childhood. During WWI his mother had tried to reach her four dead brothers with seances at home. which freaked him out. And then he had been hospitalised as a soldier during the WWII, for 'a mental breakdown'.
My foster parents knowing none of this, nevertheless delayed him. Beatrice believed I was not ready. My Dad threatened legal action, probably not realising it would have favoured the foster arrangement in British courts at the time. Beatrice was not prepared to let me go until I was a bit older and according to Beatrice, Edmund wouldn't agree to help around the house and with the kids so that I could stay. Thankfully, I was saved from becoming a trading chip for scarce resources in their marriage.
One of my occasional carers stepped into the breach and offered to come with her husband if my Dad in Australia would agree to house them. They would also have traveled as one pound migrants. Dad declined, in retrospect, wisely. He was prone to jealousy. By age 8, the negotiations had concluded, the delay ended and this coincided with my foster mother falling pregnant with twins. Had my time come, had I outgrown the nest or had the nest suddenly shrunk?
Abandoned, rejected, homeless - all the stuff of later self-indulgent, self-pitying story telling. But back then? I was liberated, released and ready for a new life away from this Dickensian bog. The quality of my breathing was so much better in Australia, even though bronchitis continued.
I caught the train to London with my 18 year cousin. She accompanied me to Australia and stayed with us until Dad's jealousy got the better of him. It was a big adventure for both of us. She had left her widowed father to cope on his own. First time for both of us away from our suffocating families into the brilliant sunshine, fresh air and freedom of Australia.
My apprenticeship over, my second life begun.
Dad took the time to learn about the issues of attachment and loss and the likely impact of losing my home and family in England. He read John Bowlby. For a single father in 1950's this was remarkable. His inability to come and collect me in England, however, showed how little of what he read could overcome his fear of confronting the memories he buried back in England.
Feelings buried alive seldom die.
On the day I left I gave Gladys a six penny piece and told her I would get it back from her next weekend. I was probably conned about the distance. What does an 8 year old know about the world. I know I didn't choose to leave and if I had been asked and understood I would have said no. But I had an 8 year old's time frame. I never shed a tear, nor looked back except to wonder about my lambie pie that had been with me since I was about a year old. When I returned 14 years later I found the picture of me aged 8 still sat on Edmund's grand piano where I left it and the six penny piece still in Glady's safekeeping, but no lambie pie.
For the week following my departure Beatrice suffered migraines and Edmund didn't eat - he didn't know how to cook for himself. In the months that followed, my younger foster brother lost all the hair on his head and began to hide under the stairs. As he grew older, he kept Beatrice company until Edmund returned from home visits, often later at night than before. When he went to boarding school he bought her a radio to keep her company.
The overall effect on their family was not dissimilar to that of a missing child, forever absent and always in their thoughts, somehow frozen at the point they were last seen. Yet in that wealthy austere family, no one picked up the phone and called me in Australia on Christmas day or on my birthdays as other families did at that time. In those days one had to book the trunk call, which I remember having done from Australia once. I got birthday cards and letters of course, but I didn't celebrate another birthday in Australia, not for 40 years. And birthdays continue to be non-events for my eldest son - the sins of the father!
I had wondered why my grandparents didn't play a more active role. It wasn't until after my Aunt's death that I went looking for my grandmother's diaries that were missing from the years around my birth. I heard from my cousin who knew them, that grandpa had probably insisted grandma destroy those two years or diaries. Just two out of a lifetime of diaries from a diarist, poet and a play write. Grandpa was a navy man from a proud British naval family. After my brother and sister's and then mum's death I think he decided they had to put the past behind them, as if I had not existed. They came to visit me once in my foster family.
After I left England, Beatrice gave birth to healthy twins, a boy and a girl. The latter took my place as the chosen child, soon hopping into bed beside Edmund with a cup of tea in the morning. Beatrice continued to use pethedine for relief of migraines but also likely for relief of her withdrawals, until she was exposed and put on the medical register, obliged to accept drug rehabilitation in her 50's. There was so much more to her in life and in her laughter, in service to community, church, friends and family, but I imagine this public exposure was deeply humiliating for a tender heart, who could judge others with pious severity.
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you; Don't go back to sleep. You must ask for what you really want; Don't go back to sleep. People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch. The door is round and open. Don't go back to sleep. Rumi
Unpacking memories
My memories from my time there are of a warm, close family; of wonderful aromas always wafting from her kitchen kept warm overnight by the cream coloured Arga stove she loved; that delicious sweetness of composting elm and oak leaves in a huge, soft, moist garden she tended and taught me to garden, and looking down to the estuary in the distance where we sometimes went to play after school; of wonderful summer picnics and berry collecting on the moors; the occasional white Christmas and snowmen in the front garden; of beach holidays at Pra Sands and Bude; cracker jack Guy Fawkes parties, all of us dressed up in costumes dancing around a monstrous communal pyre; of birthday parties and cakes and family stories and prayers before bed at night, and the call that promised a home visit with Edmund to a farm house offering clotted cream and jam on bread for the little boy in the car. Sometimes I was invited in and fussed over. Oh what joy!
Australia
At the age of 8, I was greeted at Melbourne's Essendon airport by a 45 year old stranger standing on the tarmac, next to his black FJ Holden. I recognized him from his and Mum's photo on my bedside table at home. I ran and jumped into his arms. He froze, stiff as a brick.
I worked out later what he was suffering from, but at the time he just seemed a great big worrier that needed soothing. He would only become fully my dad in the last eighteen months of his life, aged 73, his heart opened by the proximity of death and re-union with mum and the kids. How does one carry a broken heart for so long with so little support? Was his commitment and his love for me enough? Having four kids of my own now, I think probably it is enough.
In the early days, however, there was trouble between us. I was constantly sick and acting out and that became a pattern for many years of my childhood and well into adult life. Dad was a single parent without any family support, a great cook and provider but isolated, badly messed up in his head and with few friends and only me and cigarettes for company. I was it, the 'surrogate spouse' and painfully for both of us, I looked just like my Mum. I lived on penicillin shots for bronchitis and began smoking cigarettes. I re-enacted the trauma into my forties with a compulsion to connect and reject like an abandaholic.
We moved cities every two or three years. A new neighbourhood, new school, fewer friends each time, more disconnection. In Hobart I was targeted by a pedophile head teacher and left there without telling anyone. I arrived in Brisbane numb and depressed. Finally, after dropping out of first year Vet science in Queensland, I moved to study psychology in Sydney. There I met my first wife, daughter of holocaust survivors and yet rejecting her Jewish identity. Significantly, that changed for her once we separated and she then embraced it. And then I finally faced up to the profound effects of having been sexually abused at school, some 30 years after the event. Sometimes it takes a divorce to open such deep wounds to healing.
Back then when we had first met, to the extent that any one can, she saved my life by getting me to a university counselor, the late George Gray a devoted student of Carl Rogers. Four years of counseling with as near to an apprentice of the great man himself. What a gift! What a blessing! And I am still drawing on that well of wisdom and praxis.
Then, I was badly fragmented, out of contact with myself and suffering from what we now know to be PTSD. Many years elapsed before I understood that and sought effective treatment for trauma. Too late to ease my dear old dad's burden but he seemed to recover from his own traumatic grief with death nearby, by time and faith and a little bit of yoga.
It took an equally long time to for me unpack this journey without fear or shame. Even longer to know the layers of re-enacting the trauma, to gain control of my life and thus to stop hurting people very dear to me, including myself.
Trauma
I have to read and re-read the following sources and the quote even today - slowly, to remind myself (and my clients) of the lasting effects of trauma through physical changes to the brain stem, amygdala and hippocampus. They affect subsequent learning, memory and stress management - typically I joined Mensa with ease, but I struggled every day at school and University.
Uncontrollable disruptions or distortions of attachment bonds precede the development of post-traumatic stress syndromes. People seek increased attachment in the face of danger. Adults, as well as children, may develop strong emotional ties with people who intermittently harass, beat, and threaten them. The persistence of these attachment bonds leads to confusion of pain and love. Trauma can be repeated on behavioural, emotional, physiologic and neuroendocriniologic levels. Repetition on these different levels causes a large variety of individual and social suffering.
Anger directed against the self or others is always a central problem in the lives of people who have been violated and this is itself a repetitive re-enactment of real events from the past. Compulsive repetition of the trauma usually is an unconscious process that, although it may provide a temporary sense of mastery or even pleasure, ultimately perpetuates chronic feelings of helplessness and a subjective sense of being bad and out of control. Gaining control over one's current life, rather than repeating trauma in action, mood, or somatic states, is the goal of healing. Vanderkolk
The advantages of knowing the rhythm of my mother's voice as she sang to me and stroked me through her belly and those first eight years in my foster family sustained me. Though grateful to my foster parents, it took me decades to forgive them for taking my place in life away, for sending me to a strange country, with strange people who didn't know where I came from and to endure more of the emotional incest that began with them.
Although a bit rough and ready, I look back on the years growing up in Australia with fondness and humour. Just the space, the air and the light alone were a fantastic change from the interminable gray of wet England. Dad and I went bush, camping and caravanning, meeting eccentric bush characters who lived in the back of beyond, some living on only condensed milk and rabbits. Dad was a huntin', shootin' fishin' kind of guy. I learnt to do all of that.
I first considered suicide on the Great Ocean Road in Victoria and first planned patricide on a sheep station near Cooma, and all before I turned 14. Thank God, I did neither.
My interest in the heart's awakening arose out of all these issues. My Dad was fascinated by philosophy, history, science and faith. We used to have the greatest talks about religion and healing and I miss them and him. He loved the bush, the sky and Turner watercolours, and among my favourite things are cooking, gardening and my visual arts practice.
In my twenties I felt compelled to replace the family I lost as a kid with the security of a family of my own. I was blessed by a long first marriage and three magic children, unique and beautiful people who between them, taught me what I know about parenting, love and leaving and so much more. I now have a second marriage, a fourth child and another little miracle.
Postscript
Many months after Edmund's death, when I was in my thirties, I told Beatrice in a letter that she had had a loveless marriage. She wrote back and told me that I should have been put in an orphanage. In this only instance and thank god after all, she was capable of having a straightforward love hate relationship with me - Winnicott's definition of a good enough mother. True love is ambivalent!
Beatrice died in 2005 and the dear soul in a cryptic farewell, bequeathed me an antique kettle possibly belonging to Admiral Nelson and allegedly the last one from which he drank his toddy before being shot. It may have had some sentimental value for her. It was given by a patient of my foster father, worth perhaps two hundred pounds. My younger foster brother called me to tell me of Beatrice's death the previous night. Through his tears, he asked me what I wanted to do with her 'strange' bequest.
Of course she may have seen a BBC TV antiques roadshow and thought it worth a small fortune and on the face of it, this would be generous.
One of my friends found the sole bequest unutterably sad for me. However, as I thought about it I realised it was indeed sorrow that I was feeling but it was for her. My elder brother later told me that she had died owning a couple of thousand pounds in the bank and the house worth about 400k less death duties. He wondered where had all the money that a much loved doctor had earned over his long career.
I gave my brother permission to give the kettle to a museum as he had suggested. I asked for one of Beatrice's own tea pots, since she gave special afternoon teas, which he and I fondly remember.
In the years before her death she had sent my inheritance in the form of precious (to me and her) family photographs that she kept near her bed and of the correspondence between she and my Dad before and during my early years in Australia. The last of these little parcels she gave to my son when he was in England a couple of years ago.
All of these painted the picture she treasured of us - a big happy family in which she and Edmund did their very best.
© 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 Ziji Fox All Rights Reserved www.peterfox.com.au
