Page 26 of Escape to the Country

I told Rebecca a little of my background and that I’d recently moved to the farm. I suggested that she brought the children over one day and I could show them around. She said that her and Beth had talked about this before, but they were both so busy that they hadn’t got round to it yet, but she said that she would make the time because she knew the children would love it. It would be more fun next spring when the ewes had their little lambs dancing about, but they could come over soon and help me to feed them and help me to find the eggs in the chicken coops. I always found it really fulfilling to eat poached eggs on toast when I’d had to find those eggs for myself. I bet the children would love it too.

Somehow, the chickens over the last few days had become my responsibility and my first job of the morning was to spend a good while rummaging around in the bedding hay to see what delights we’d been left from the night before. And my evening job was to lock them away, which was easier said than done when you had to find and persuade twenty chickens and one gobby cockerel to go into their coop all at the same time, locking them away so the foxes didn’t get them in the night.

The children could come and look round the allotment too and maybe we could find them their own little patch with their own jobs to do, and maybe they could grow some fruit and veg and watch the food literally go from farm to fork. Even though she realised that it would be a long-term project, Rebecca loved this idea and said that they’d never done anything like this, so we arranged for them to come over one evening after school and see how they enjoyed it.

We parted with Rebecca also promising to see if there were any other projects in the community that I could get involved with or whether the women’s refuge needed any help at all. If nothing else, I was sure there was stuff I wouldn’t need any more that I could pass their way while I was moving out. I’d gone from not having anything to do to filling my days quite easily, and I felt that the things I was doing these days, although simpler, were way more fulfilling. I gave her a hug as we left. I’d turned into a right hugger these last few weeks and I felt good that I’d made a new friend.

13

As the rest of the week passed we fell into an easy routine at the farm, which suited us all, with me going home each evening and packing my old life away.

Friday soon rolled round. Uncle Tom very kindly let me have the afternoon off and Alex offered to come over with me to give me a hand with all the lifting for which I was extremely grateful. It was great living in a flat until you moved in or out, or had tons of shopping to carry.

I’d learned to calm down a bit more around Alex over the last week and to stop blushing every time he looked at me. He was going to be grabbing a flight back to the US soon, so there was no point getting too attached to him again even just as friends.

Mum was coming over later; I was really looking forward to seeing her. She was going to bring a measuring tape and jot down anything that we needed and we were going shopping the next morning. There wasn’t much I needed but there were a few ornamental things that I wanted to pop around the place to make it feel more like mine than a temporary let. I was hoping to catch Mum in a good mood too as I wanted to ask her more about my father.

It seemed like she’d got the same idea as me though, because as soon as she arrived that evening, she was looking pretty serious and said that she’d got something on her mind that she wanted to discuss. I held up the bottle of wine that she’d brought over, and she nodded, so I poured us both half a glass. I wasn’t sure if wine glasses were getting bigger or wine bottles were getting smaller but you could easily lose a bottle in a couple of glasses these days.

As I sat opposite Mum, I noticed her handbag at the side of the coffee table, and there sat on the top was the mysterious red tin box. She clocked that I’d seen it and passed it to me.

‘I’m sorry, darling, I wasn’t quite truthful with you when you asked about this box before but I really feel that the time is right to give it to you now. I’m going to pop to the loo and leave you to look through it. Hopefully it’ll start to make sense as you go through it.’

I had no real idea what to expect, but as I opened the box, there on the top was one of those photo booth strips of four black and white pictures of Mum when she was younger with a very handsome man. I turned the pictures over, and it said ‘Josie and Theo, Blackpool, 1981’. Oh my bloody God! Was this my father? I stared at him, devouring every single detail of his face. I couldn’t see much, but I could see that he had a neck scarf on top of a collarless white shirt and he looked like he should be a member of Duran Duran. He had strawberry blond hair, which flopped over to one side. In one photo, he was kissing Mum’s cheek and she was laughing, and in another they were staring at each other and looked very much in love. I gulped as I took in every tiny detail of his face. His eyes, his nose. Oh my! I put my hand up to touch his nose on the photograph. He also had a freckle right on the end of his nose. It was just like mine. Or should I say, mine was just like his? Touching his face on the photograph made me feel like I was reaching out and touching him in person.

A cough brought me back to my senses and I noticed Mum standing beside me.

‘Is this him?’

‘Yes, darling. Your father. This is Theo.’ She rested her hand on my shoulder and I just looked up at her. I couldn’t speak. Nothing would come out. I was thirty-seven years old and this was the very first time that I’d seen my dad. In my head he was becoming ‘Dad’ now, because I’d seen him and his features were familiar to me. I was gobsmacked.

‘OK, darling, I can see that you are totally stunned, so pass me the box back and I’ll give you things one by one and explain what they are. That might help. They’re all things that really meant something to me from the time that Theo and I spent together.

‘Theo normally left work after me, but one night we were on the same bus and he sat by me and we chatted like old friends. He asked me if he could take me to watch a film. This is a cinema ticket from our very first date. We went to seeRaiders of the Lost Ark. How romantic!’ She giggled at the memory. ‘It was such a lovely evening; I didn’t want it to end. We went for a drink in a late-night café and they had to throw us out because they were desperate to close but we just didn’t want to part company. We walked around talking until around onea.m. when he walked me home to the flat I lived in above a florist shop.

‘I’ll never forget that first kiss as long as I live.’ As Mum spoke, I could see just how painful it was for her to relive this memory, and a tear trickled down her cheek as I held her hand in mine.

She wiped away the tear and delved back into the box. She laughed as she passed another ticket across to me. ‘Adam and the Ants at the Odeon in Birmingham. It was our next date and the first pop concert I had ever been to. I had never seen anything like it. Girls were screaming and crying and there was one girl at the front who passed out when Adam Ant touched her hand. It was brilliant. The bass vibrated through your body, it was so loud and so fantastic. One of the most exciting moments of my life.’

A menu was the next thing that she passed over. I couldn’t bring myself to speak. I was mesmerised by these mementoes that my Mum had kept for over thirty-eight years.

‘This was from the first meal we ever had at Romano Italiano in Birmingham. Not sure why I kept the menu; I just wanted to treasure the memories, I suppose. They all meant such a lot to me.’

Taking a sip of her wine, she passed me another keepsake, and I was surprised to see that it was a handwritten note. My breath caught in my throat when I realised that I was looking at my father’s writing. This was such a weird feeling.

My darling Josie, I’m trying to work, but cannot think of anything but you and our kisses. Meet me at the bus stop after work. I just cannot wait to feel you in my arms and your lips upon mine once more. Just four more hours to go. Theoxxx

‘This was a note that was on my desk when I got back from lunch one day. He took a risk putting it there, but I suppose it was in an envelope, so no one could read it. I remember slipping it into my handbag and then when I met him that night he said that being able to see me but not touch me at work was driving him crazy. It was strange because he was so quiet at work, didn’t say boo to a goose, just got on with his job and very rarely came out of his office. But then there was this passionate side to him too. That was the first time in the short few months we’d been together that he told me he loved me. We were sat on the top deck of the bus holding hands and he just blurted it out. I couldn’t believe it. It seemed so soon, but then again, it seemed so right, too.’

Mum’s cheeks started to flush as more memories came flooding back to her. ‘We caught the bus back to the shop and we stumbled through the front door, and, well, you can probably guess what happened next.’

At this point, I was torn between wanting to know what happened next as it sounded so romantic and wanting to hold my hands over my ears and shout ‘la la la!’ This was my mum after all and there are some things you really don’t need to know about what your mother gets up to in the bedroom department.

‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to go into detail, darling.’

Thank God for that! She was sparing me the intimate details. I was thankful for small mercies.

‘This is a birthday card from the one and only birthday of mine that we spent together.’ She passed over a beautiful card with ‘To the One I Love’ on the front, and once again, seeing his writing on the inside, declaring his undying love, made my stomach lurch.

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