Читать книгу Endal: How one extraordinary dog brought a family back from the brink - Sandra Parton - Страница 10

Allen and I met in November 1982 in a nightclub in Haslemere, Surrey. I was twenty-three years old and living near there in a village called Clanfield, where I was working as a live-in nanny for the children of a surgeon at the hospital where I’d trained as a nurse.

I liked nursing on the whole and knew I wanted to end up working in some kind of caring profession, but I’d recently been posted on a couple of difficult wards, including a unit for people with severe burns, which had been very traumatic and upsetting. I decided to take a bit of time out from nursing to decide what to do with my future, and the nanny job was ideal. I got on really well with the surgeon’s wife, and when I mentioned to her that I was finding it hard to meet new people in the area she arranged for me to go to the nightclub and be introduced to some of the locals by the club owner, who was a friend of hers.

‘I need to get you up to that naval base and meeting some of those young officers,’ she said, prophetically.

I tried on lots of different outfits and spent ages doing my hair and make-up that night. It seemed like a long time since I’d made the effort, and the surgeon’s wife sat and chatted to me as I got ready. I was very apprehensive about turning up at a club on my own, even though she said the doorman would look after me when I arrived. I’d led quite a sheltered upbringing and wasn’t really a clubbing type. The whole thought of it made me feel very awkward.

My shyness wasn’t helped by the fact that when I arrived the doorman who was supposed to be looking after me wasn’t there, but I hadn’t been in the club long before a scruffy-looking guy in ripped jeans and a tatty old duffel coat came up to me, completely the worse for wear.

‘You’ve got beautiful eyes,’ he said. ‘Will you marry me? I’m pregnant, and I need you to marry me or I’ll get into trouble with my mum.’

I thought it was a great opening line, and liked his handsome boyish looks and the twinkle in his eye.

He told me his name was Allen, and then he bought me a hugely potent cocktail called a JD, which had orange juice, angostura bitters, gin and vodka in it, together with something else completely lethal, I think.

I was definitely attracted to him but I didn’t much like the fact that he was drunk. I’ve never been comfortable around heavy drinkers, having grown up with an alcoholic father.

As his speech grew more incoherent and I saw he was having trouble standing upright, I made my excuses and walked away. I didn’t want to have to mop up after him if he was sick! But in the week that followed I found myself thinking about him and wondering if I’d see him again. Despite the alcohol, he definitely had charm.

The following week I went back to the same Haslemere club, hoping to see him, and was delighted when he came bounding over as soon as I walked in.

‘I’m sorry if I said anything rude last week. I hope I wasn’t too offensive.’

‘I’m surprised you even remember meeting me,’ I commented.

‘How could I forget that I was talking to the most beautiful girl in the room?’ he said, and I blushed. ‘Do you want to come and join me and my friends?’

‘All right,’ I said shyly.

We got chatting and I decided I liked him when he was sober. He was playful and engaging and there was definitely chemistry between us. I was very pleased when he asked if I’d accompany him to a cheese-and-wine evening at the naval base the following weekend.

As the week went by, however, I got a bit nervous. What should I wear? How formal was it? Allen had said he would book a bed and breakfast for me near the base in Fareham, but would he expect to stay over with me? I wasn’t sure yet how I felt about that. I knew I liked him but I didn’t want to rush things.

As it turned out, the evening was fantastic. Allen had booked a taxi to pick me up from my B & B. He met me at the gate, took my arm as we walked in and behaved like a perfect gentleman all night. It was the first time I’d seen him in uniform and he looked very attractive, not to mention sexy. I liked the fact that he held doors open for me and took my coat and went to the bar to get me a drink, and that he introduced me to all his friends. Everything went smoothly and being with him felt very natural.

Afterwards he came back with me to the B & B, and even though I hadn’t known him for long I asked him in to stay the night. It just felt right. The surgeon’s wife had given me half a bottle of champagne and we shared it over whispered conversation before we went to bed. Next morning, he had to sneak out early before the landlady saw him because he wasn’t registered as a guest. The sight of him tiptoeing down the stairs in his socks, shoes held aloft, trying not to make a noise, was hilarious.

We started seeing as much of each other as we could: we went to the pictures, had dinner together, walked in the countryside, and talked the whole time. I couldn’t stop thinking about him between dates and used to get a churning in my stomach when he called, or when I was on my way out to meet him. He was the most interesting, lively man I’d ever met, and I could tell he was a nice guy underneath the extrovert exterior. He definitely had a caring side.

Allen explained that he could get a posting at any time that would mean he’d have to go overseas, and I told him plainly that I wasn’t going to wait around being ‘the girl he saw when his ship happened to be in Fareham’. I was at a stage in my life when I knew I wanted a husband and a home of my own and I didn’t want to waste time on a relationship that wasn’t going anywhere. I also knew I was falling in love with Allen and I wanted to be sure I wasn’t going to get my heart broken.

Fortunately he seemed to feel the same way because it wasn’t long before we started talking about marriage. Allen wanted to do it all properly though. At Easter 1983, just four months after we met, he was booked to go skiing in Switzerland with five of his friends. He’d learned to ski in the Navy and was seemingly very good. He suggested that I came along and shared the chalet with them, then he could propose to me formally out there, against the dramatic backdrop of snow-covered mountains. Before we left, he went to see my dad and asked his permission, which was a typically old-fashioned, gentlemanly touch.

I’d never skied before but I picked it up quite quickly and really enjoyed myself. Allen was a brilliant skier, whizzing down the slopes like a streak of lightning. It was a shame it wasn’t just the two of us but he had already arranged the holiday with his mates from the Navy and couldn’t cancel.

We’d talked about it and I knew he was going to propose at some point but he wouldn’t tell me which day he was going to do it. The way it happened was incredibly romantic. We’d just got off the chairlift at the top of the mountain and were carrying our skis to the top of a run, with a stunning view spread out below us, when Allen got down on bended knee in the snow.

‘I love you, Sandra, and want to spend the rest of my life with you,’ he said. ‘Please will you do me the honour of agreeing to be my wife?’ He produced a very pretty diamond ring from the pocket of his ski suit.

I was on the verge of tears. ‘Yes, I will,’ I said straight away. I loved his perfect manners and the way he could always make me feel so special. It couldn’t have been a more beautiful proposal.

That night, though, we went out to a local restaurant with his friends and they decided to celebrate by getting smashed. As the evening wore on, they grew more and more raucous until the owner of the place finally asked them to leave. Allen’s friends couldn’t understand why I didn’t like heavy drinking, and obviously thought I was a killjoy. They even tried to spike my drink. I was humiliated and angry, and really I thought we should have been having dinner on our own that evening.

The next morning, I was still tetchy with Allen and, sensing it, he became tetchy back. It all blew up when I asked him to brush the snow off my ski boots and he refused, snapping, ‘Do it yourself.’

That was it. My temper finally erupted. I pulled the engagement ring off my finger and hurled it into the snow.

‘In that case, you can forget all about getting married,’ I snarled.

We had a furious stand-up argument, in which I yelled at him that he had ruined our engagement by getting drunk. ‘I grew up with a father who always smelled of booze. He was scary and unpredictable when he was drunk and there’s no way I’m going to marry a man who drinks too much.’

‘I don’t drink too much. I just know how to let my hair down and you don’t.’

‘No, and I don’t want to if it means getting thrown out of a restaurant. I don’t want to live like that.’

I knew in my heart of hearts that Allen wasn’t an alcoholic. He just liked having fun with his friends. He was gregarious and obviously very popular with the other lads, whereas I was quieter and more reserved, but somehow we complemented each other.

‘That wasn’t my fault,’ he said, and blamed one of the other lads. ‘He’s just back from the Falklands where he saw friends of his killed and maimed, and he needs to let off steam.’

The whole time we were arguing, I kept my eye on the spot where the ring had landed, right in the middle of a snowdrift. I’d wanted to make a point but I didn’t want to lose it.

‘Come on,’ he said finally. ‘Can we kiss and make up? I’m sorry we ruined your evening and I promise I’ll make it up to you.’

I felt safe with him, and life was always fun when he was around, so there was no question that I would forgive him. We both got down on our hands and knees and scrabbled around in the snow until I found the ring, sparkling away in the sunlight. Allen slipped it back on to my finger and we fell into each other’s arms.

We’d planned to wait a year before getting married, but in August 1983 he was told he was being posted overseas. If we got married first, I could go with him and we’d be allocated married quarters, so that’s what we decided to do. It was only after we were already committed that they told us the posting was going to be Scotland rather than some far-flung sunny place as I’d hoped. Meanwhile, I had just three months to plan and organize a wedding for around a hundred people, so it was all a bit frenzied and chaotic.

We wanted to get married in a big Italian church in Wilton, the town where I grew up, and the only date it was available when Allen was also free was 5 November. It was a very traditional wedding, with my sisters, nieces and nephews in the bridal party. My sister Jenny made all the bridesmaids’ dresses and it was so cold in the church that she left room for everyone to wear thermal vests underneath. I saw a beautiful picture in a wedding magazine of some swans made out of choux pastry and asked the local bakery to recreate them but on the day they came out looking like Loch Ness monsters rather than swans. Everyone said how appropriate that was since we were going to Scotland.

The day flashed past for me. We had the reception at the Pembroke Arms hotel opposite the church, and then we dashed off to catch an overnight sleeper up to Scotland just as everyone around the country was enjoying their bonfires and fireworks displays. Allen’s friends entered into the spirit of the night by putting bangers in the exhaust pipe of our car and placing kippers in the car heater, which wafted out intense fishy smells during the journey.

Our honeymoon consisted of a week together in Scotland in naval quarters, where we had no heating, no TV and single duvets on the bed, but it gave us the chance to explore a bit. After that Allen had to go off on a training course and I went back down to my mum’s, so it was 16 December 1983 before we moved into our first marital home together, a lovely three-bed maisonette in Rosyth with views over the Firth of Forth. I found a job working at a local hospital and joined the fitness club for naval wives, and started to get used to my new life.

We decided to get a dog as we both loved them. Allen had had pet dogs as a boy, and our shifts could be juggled so that it would never be left on its own for more than a couple of hours. We went to the Rescue Centre together and picked out a scruffy black Labrador cross, who was about four or five months old. We reckoned he was probably an unwanted Christmas present. No matter how much you tried to tidy him up, he always looked messy and disreputable, so the obvious name for him was Scruffy. He was a spirited and demanding dog from the start, but we enjoyed taking him for long walks in the surrounding countryside, and shared the responsibility for his care with each other.

Around June 1984, they wanted to give me a routine chest X-ray at work and asked if there was any chance I could be pregnant. I had come off the pill and my periods were a bit erratic so I didn’t think there was, but they decided to run a pregnancy test to be on the safe side and, to my complete astonishment, it was positive.

I couldn’t get through to Allen on the phone to tell him, so I went to Mothercare and bought a tiny babygro and when he walked in the door that evening I just handed it to him and said, ‘Guess what?’

He was over the moon – we both were. We thought the Rosyth posting was going to last three years and Allen would be on shore so it was an ideal time for us to have a family. But only a week later we were told that the following April he would have to leave his job there and go to sea on a ship that was based in Portsmouth. I was beginning to experience one of the realities of life as a naval wife: unpredictability! Whatever plans you make for the future, you always have to be ready to change them at the drop of a hat.

Almost exactly a year to the day after moving to Scotland, by now heavily pregnant, I turned around and had to move back down to Portsmouth in the week before Christmas. There was all the palaver of packing up our stuff, finding acceptable accommodation, transporting the dog and changing my antenatal appointments from one hospital to another.

Baby Liam was born on Valentine’s Day 1985 and thankfully Allen was able to be with me. Nurses make terrible patients. As I lay in pain in the maternity unit, I noticed that the nurse looking after me had put the straps in the wrong place and I kept worrying about when they were going to give me the promised epidural. Would they be too late? Then the nurse confessed that she hadn’t delivered a baby for twenty years and was on a refresher course, which didn’t do a lot for my confidence! But all went well and I brought home my beautiful little boy.

Allen was fantastic in those early weeks. I fed the baby and he did everything else: nappy changing, winding, housework, meals for us, laundry, shopping. He was always good around the house, and he obviously doted on Liam as well. He had a real knack with babies.

Sadly, Scruffy the dog wasn’t quite so good. After the move he began chewing things and being generally obstreperous. If I was going out, I had to leave him shut in the kitchen, but the final straw came when I got home one day to find he had chewed up the entire base of the door frame in our rented house. I realized I just couldn’t cope any more. Allen was due to go to sea when Liam was ten or eleven weeks old and I knew I couldn’t manage a destructive dog and a new baby at the same time. We agonized over it but I was feeling very tired and run down after the birth and I didn’t have the energy to try and retrain a boisterous dog. If Allen had been there we would have managed together, but it just felt like too much for me on my own, so finally we agreed that Scruffy would go back to the RSPCA. When we phoned them, they were in no doubt that they would find another home for him quickly, and that settled it.

Allen was quite upset about it, especially since he was away on the ship when the call came to tell me to take Scruffy in to their kennels so he never got the chance to say goodbye. I was sad too, but my overwhelming emotion was relief that I wouldn’t be clearing up the mess any more and could focus on my new baby.

Liam was only a few months old when I discovered I was pregnant again. It was totally unplanned and a huge shock, if I’m honest. I was still learning how to cope with one baby and couldn’t imagine doing so with two. How did other women ever manage?

I put my back out really badly during the pregnancy, while carrying Liam on one hip and wheeling a shopping trolley across a supermarket car park. My entire spine just seized up and I couldn’t even get Liam into his car seat. I had to place him on the floor of the hatchback boot and drive home really carefully, and then get a neighbour to carry him into the house. A midwife came round and told me I needed complete bed rest, which is easier said than done when you’ve got a one-year-old crawling around the house. Allen took some time off to help, but that meant he didn’t get so much leave when Zoe was born, which was very hard on both of us. My sister Marion came to stay for the first couple of weeks, and returned whenever she could take days off work, but I still had to manage most of the time on my own.

Liam had been a lovely lazy baby, who slept through the night at five days old, took his feeds well and was happy to have a nap whenever you put him in his cot. Zoe was more difficult, though. She flatly refused to feed from me after about two weeks. I started to bottle-feed her, but if I took the teat away to wind her she wouldn’t have the same teat back again. Feeding her was a complex business, and she cried a lot.

She’d had a very quick delivery and, looking back, I think she may have suffered some trauma during the birth, so perhaps she was in pain. Nowadays I might have taken her to a cranial osteopath but I didn’t think of that back then. All I knew was that she wailed endlessly and nothing seemed to calm her. At night I’d walk round the house holding and rocking her, then in the daytime I’d put her in the car and take her out for a drive to try and get her to stop crying and go to sleep.

Meanwhile I had Liam crawling round my ankles, having to be watched constantly in case he tried to stick his fingers in an electric socket or bashed his head. Allen was away on a long trip right through this period and I had no idea when he would be back. I was sleep-deprived, my back still hurt, the housework started to pile up and I felt increasingly desperate. I’ve always been someone who copes, who just gets on with things, but I knew I was reaching my limits.

Then one morning, Zoe just cried non-stop. She refused to feed, she didn’t want cuddles, her nappy was dry and I was at my wits’ end. I put both babies in the car and drove round for an hour but still she wouldn’t stop crying. I lifted her out of the car in her car seat to bring her back into the house, and suddenly it all got too much.

‘Will you just shut up?’ I screamed, and I shook the car seat as hard as I could. Immediately afterwards, I put the seat down and sank on to the floor beside it, horrified at myself. What if I had hurt her? She was still crying but not so loudly. It was then I knew I needed help. This couldn’t go on.

I called the health visitor and she came round to visit. At first she tried to be reassuring, saying that it was normal for a new mother to find it difficult to cope, especially with two so close together. She said she thought it sounded as though I had post-natal depression and maybe I should get some antidepressants from my doctor. It was an interesting thought that hadn’t occurred to me. I’d assumed it was all my fault, that I was doing something wrong or I just wasn’t suited to motherhood, but maybe there was a physical cause. Maybe I wasn’t going mad after all.

‘I’m scared that I might really hurt her,’ I said, and told the health visitor about how I had shaken Zoe’s car seat.

She listened quietly and asked me more questions about exactly what happened. I think she must have been seriously worried because she went off to make some phone calls then came back and said: ‘It might be a good idea to give you a break for a couple of weeks so you can catch up on your sleep and get your strength back. How would you feel if we took Zoe into temporary foster care?’

I was shocked to the core. Did that mean she didn’t think I was capable of looking after my baby? Having a child taken into care seemed a terrible stigma.

‘Just think of it as a bit of help with babysitting. You’ll be able to visit her whenever you like, but these people are experienced parents who should be able to get a feeding and sleeping routine established for you. She can come back home as soon as you’re feeling better.’

I was flooded with anxieties. What would Allen say? Would he think I had failed as a mother? Is that how everyone would see me? But I couldn’t think of an alternative, so I agreed.

My doctor diagnosed me as having severe post-natal depression, and said he thought it had started after Liam’s birth and got worse after Zoe’s. I was relieved to have a cast-iron excuse for my behaviour, but still desperately ashamed that I had been unable to cope.

The foster family were very kind people. They lived nearby so I could go round and visit Zoe whenever I wanted. She stayed there for five or six weeks, and after she came back to live with me again they continued to look after her one day a week to give me a break. I genuinely don’t know how I could have got through that period without their help.

Still, it was several months before I could scrape myself back up off the floor and manage to feed both babies, get them in the car and go down to the local shops for some groceries. It was hard even to get out of my dressing gown some mornings. I worried that people would be watching me the whole time for signs that I was cracking up, and that they would be keeping an eye on the kids to look for bruises or signs of malnutrition. I’d lost confidence in my ability to care for myself, never mind these two alien little beings. I felt anxious whenever I had to go out of the house and started having panic attacks over the least little things, but gradually, with lots of help from my doctor and health visitor and those wonderful foster parents, I got back on track again.

Allen came back to work on shore when Zoe was a year old, but he was based in Bath from Monday to Friday and we only saw him at weekends. With that job he was promoted to Chief Petty Officer, and in 1987 we moved to a nicer house in a place called Emsworth, between Chichester and Portsmouth. Once the kids were at nursery school I went to work part-time in a nursing home on Hayling Island, and I really enjoyed it there. You can make a big difference to someone’s final years by finding the time to stop and chat with them, doing their hair and such like, and it was a fulfilling job for me. It helped to make me feel like a capable person again, so was very good for my battered confidence.

When Allen announced in 1990 that he’d volunteered for the Gulf War, we didn’t discuss the possibility of him being killed or injured but I suppose it was in the back of our minds. I resigned from my job and during the last weeks before he left we spent a lot of quality time together with the kids. They’d just got bikes so we taught them how to ride them. We had day trips to London and a holiday in Center Parcs and we had loads of fun, but always with the shadow of the war hanging over us. I’d switch off the TV or radio if the news came on to avoid hearing about any casualties or helicopter crashes or the speculation that was rife at the time that Saddam Hussein might use poison gas against our troops.

Some of my favourite family memories come from that period when it was just the four of us enjoying time together. Allen hadn’t come from a particularly close family, but I always thought it was important to get down on the floor and play with the kids, to take them on outings, and for us all to have special family Christmases and celebrations together. I liked creating a close-knit unit, with our own family jokes and traditions and games. I’ve got lots of pictures in my head of us all smiling and messing about in those last weeks before he set sail, and they’re very precious.

Allen set off in April, but in early July I was invited to go and join him for a holiday in Singapore and Penang. I was reluctant at first because I’d never left the children for any length of time before, but my sister Marion offered to have them and finally I said I would go. I wrapped a little gift for them to open each day that I was away and I phoned them as well, but it was hard for me to leave a five-year-old and a six-year-old. They were still so young. In retrospect, however, I’m so glad I did have that last, very special time in the sun with Allen, just the two of us. The memories are bitter-sweet but I’m so happy I have them to treasure.

We’d talked about the future before, but I remember we had more discussions about our plans while we were in Malaysia. Basically we decided that I would continue to move around following Allen’s postings until the children were at secondary school, at which point I would stay in one place with them so their education didn’t suffer. A lot of naval kids went to boarding school but I wasn’t in favour of that; I wanted to keep them at home with me till they were at least eighteen. Allen would serve his contractual twenty-two years with the Navy; then we would decide where we wanted to live and buy our dream home there. We’d only be in our forties and we could start a whole new life doing whatever we wanted.

It’s ironic, I suppose. I think it was John Lennon who said, ‘Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.’ I knew Allen was going into a war zone but the Navy weren’t supposed to be directly involved in the fighting because it had been a ground and air war, driving the Iraqi army out of Kuwait, and now the main action was over and they were just on peacekeeping duty. It never occurred to me that Allen might be injured because of that. Anyway, he was too good at his job. I suppose I couldn’t even contemplate him being hurt because I needed him so much. He was the stable one, and I was still prone to bouts of anxiety and depression that he helped to pull me out of. That was the dynamic of our relationship at the time.

And then the news of his accident filtered through and everything changed overnight.