Strays and Relations Read online

  Strays

  and

  Relations

  The Five Hours and Four Decades of Dizzy Greenfield

  Dizzy Greenfield

  Copyright © 2018 Dizzy Greenfield

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Many thanks to Gill Harry for the cover illustration.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Matador

  9 Priory Business Park,

  Wistow Road, Kibworth Beauchamp,

  Leicestershire. LE8 0RX

  Tel: 0116 279 2299

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador

  Twitter: @matadorbooks

  Published by Matador in association with Silver Crow Books

  www.silvercrowbooks.co.uk

  ISBN 9781788034302

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  To my brother because I love you,

  and of course, for all the strays.

  On July 21st 1968, eighteen-year-old Marie Kennedy went into premature labour. At the time, she didn’t realise she was carrying twins. The labour took forty-eight hours.

  The babies – both girls – weighed less than four pounds each. They were taken to the special care unit of the hospital. The nursing staff did not expect the more poorly of the twins to survive; they called the Catholic priest to baptise both the infants.

  As feared, only one twin lived. Marie Kennedy, the mother, hoped to take her remaining daughter home. In the end, though, she left hospital alone. This is the story of what happened thirty-six years later…

  Contents

  Chapter 1 On The Train

  Chapter 2 Will of Iron

  Chapter 3 Fifty shades of beige

  Chapter 4 The Great Craft Movement

  Chapter 5 Ireland

  Chapter 6 Emerald strikes again

  Chapter 7 A Discovery

  Chapter 8 A dog called Tuesday

  Chapter 9 Meeting Tommy

  Chapter 10 Scared of my own shadow

  Chapter 11 Everyone looks the same

  Chapter 12 The phone call

  Chapter 13 Words from my adoptive mum to me

  Chapter 14 Meeting Marie

  Chapter 15 Just an ordinary afternoon

  Chapter 16 The Jeremy Kyle experience

  Chapter 17 Tommy and the quad convoy

  Chapter 18 The Yorkshire Dales

  Chapter 19 A chat with Marie

  Chapter 20 Discussing celebrities and an invitation

  Chapter 21 The Irish

  Chapter 22 A night out

  Chapter 23 Marie gets run over

  Chapter 24 Miss Untidy

  Chapter 25 Beyond the Veil

  Chapter 26 Mum and Marie meet

  Chapter 27 Marie and the afterlife

  Chapter 28 Bleak January

  Chapter 29 Leaving

  Chapter 30 Another forest home

  Chapter 31 Similarities

  Chapter 32 And off I go again

  Chapter 33 Roots

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  On The Train

  I sat alone on the train, having declined all offers from the many kind friends who had volunteered to join me. They understood that this was something I had to face on my own. All the same, after five hours with no-one to distract my thoughts, I was becoming ever more anxious; I put on more lipstick, brushed my hair, checked my phone yet again. I was sure the guard had been eyeing me suspiciously since Birmingham, but my days of ticket avoidance were long gone. Finally, I put the brush and phone away. I had nothing left to do now but stare out of the window.

  In stark contrast with our soft West-Country fields, the view from the train was one of grey industrial warehouses and factories, mostly derelict-looking, all of which added to the general feeling of depression in this area. Who would want to live here?

  A large woman and her small son entered the aisle; I hadn’t noticed them boarding the train, but she filled the narrow gangway. Edging closer with the toddler and assorted bags of paraphernalia, she plonked herself down in the seat opposite me. On my half of the table there was a notebook, pen, and takeaway coffee. But her half was soon overflowing into mine with wet wipes, discarded toys, and half-eaten sandwiches, invading my space. The toddler upturned his mother’s bag, throwing crayons, empty crisp packets and nappies onto the floor, obviously intent on finding the sweets that his mother kept telling him he wasn’t allowed to eat until he had finished his lunch.

  ‘I told you to eat that sandwich, Scot. I’m goin’ to effin’ kill yer if you don’t behave.’ Her broad accent, a dialect unfamiliar to my ears, sounded harsh.

  Scot clamped his mouth shut as she tried to force the doughy white bread between his lips. Pale and scruffy, he looked like a decent meal and some warm clothes wouldn’t go amiss. His head was shaven and two green snot bubbles dripped from sore-looking nostrils. He pushed his mother and her sandwich away with his closed fist then looked up at me. I winked at him and he grinned, but his red eyes showed he had cried already today.

  ‘The little sod’s been really hard work since he got up this mornin’,’ the mother said, addressing me.

  ‘Perhaps he needs a nap,’ I suggested.

  ‘What he needs is a wee, but he won’t go.’ Then, through clenched teeth, ‘DO YOU WANT A WEE, SCOT?’

  The toddler shook his head, bringing an expression of rage to his mother’s face. Her jaw twisted, contorted. ‘If you wet yourself on this train, and I mean it this time, I’m goin’ to smack you.’

  How kind of her, I thought, to have shared the intimate details of Scot’s urinary efforts with the rest of the carriage. But I smiled at her, attempting what I thought was a sympathetic expression, hoping that would make her less angry with Scot, then stared at my cup of coffee.

  She leaned back in her seat, crossed her arms over her ample chest, and gave me the once over. I expect she thought that it was all right for the likes of me, no toddler to deal with or to potty train, out on a jolly. After a few more minutes, they started up again, but this time she lost patience with Scot. She dragged him from his seat by his arm. Should I call social services now? The yells got fainter as the toddler was manhandled down the carriage to the toilet.

  This spectacle had upset me so much that my own eyes were prickling with tears; seeing Scot’s distress was the last straw for me. I hated seeing children unhappy; hated seeing parents making children unhappy. My mum, Paula, put it down to me being overly sensitive; for a moment I was gripped by panic. I need to get off this train!

  Instead of pulling the communication cord, I took a deep breath and sipped my coffee. Then I rummaged in my
bag for my mobile, to see if my friend, Sugar, had texted me again.

  Sugar was one of my dearest friends, and godmother to my daughter. We had met when we were both working at a wildlife park. She’d been my lifeline on that journey – keeping up a steady text support service all day, even though she was meant to be concentrating on giving a work presentation in the Canary Islands. There was another message now:

  ‘They are going to love you, Dizzy, everything will be grand. True, Brave and Fearless remember?’

  ‘Thanks, Sugar,’ I replied, ‘but right now I wish I could go home.’

  Scot and his mother were heading back down the carriage towards me. Scot’s face was red and blotchy, his mother’s face determined, satisfied. I guessed that she had got her way and managed to enforce her offspring’s compliance. It was then I noticed her pregnancy bump. How would she cope? I wondered how I would have turned out if I’d been brought up by another mother than Paula, in a regime of imposed urination.

  The journey seemed interminable – but now it was ending. I wanted it to end – and didn’t want it to end. Was terrified of the meeting ahead.

  The train slowed down as it approached the platform and I made my way to the exit with growing dread.

  As I stood by the doors waiting to disembark, I found I wasn’t alone. Beside me was a man with his head in his jacket, sniffing glue. He came up for air, raising his head out of his jacket just enough to squint at the light, while still masking his joy under his coat.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked me.

  ‘Just visiting,’ I told him. ‘I haven’t been here before.’

  ‘The best way to see this city is from a distance, love. I’d just keep going if I were you. It’s a fuckin’ awful place.’

  He tucked his head back inside his coat, then turned away but his words made me think… He was far from being a reliable travel advisor, but the idea of going back home was getting more attractive. Had I made the right decision to come?

  There was still time to disappear; it wouldn’t matter – it wouldn’t be personal if I hadn’t actually met her, would it? I could stay on-board, jump off at the next station and catch a connection home.

  As the train ground to a halt alongside the platform, my stomach lurched. My journey was at an end – a journey that had taken five hours and four decades.

  Chapter 2

  Will of Iron

  It was my partner, Will’s fault I was even on the train – and my fault, of course, for falling in love with him in the first place.

  If that hadn’t happened; if I hadn’t moved away from my adoptive family to live with him all those years ago; if Will hadn’t encouraged me to go searching for my birth mother – if Will hadn’t been so bloody supportive, I probably wouldn’t be on this stupid train.

  He kept saying it would be good for me.

  ‘I think you need to know where you’re from, Diz. Your mum thinks so too. You keep dashing from one thing to the next; it’s like something’s missing in you that you’re trying to fill. Your mum and I just want you to be happy!’ Then he’d grin. Will was like that, always grounded, always wanting the best for everyone – sometimes his unfailing good nature was hard to cope with!

  We hadn’t had the easiest of starts together. With only a selection of donated furniture and family cast offs, we had moved into the rickety farmhouse that had been occupied by Will’s family since the 1940s. We were excited about the future.

  In truth though, it was only love that kept the quirky house from falling down. As the colours deepened in the woods that surrounded us, Mother Nature threatened to get hold of our dreams, tried to blow them away in a gust of autumnal disappointment. We were putting out new shoots, tentatively wrapping them round the ancestral roots put down by Will’s family in the decades before us, entwining with them so we too could become rock-steady. The cold reality of a draughty house with no heating, plus long hours on the farm for Will, was bad enough. If he hadn’t been so very placid, we wouldn’t have lasted until the spring, let alone for the last seventeen years. But the main problem, even after all our spats over the years, was that during that first winter I missed my mum, Paula. And then there were the fixtures and fittings! Amid the emulsion paint, young love and renovations, we started the battle with the resident Rayburn. Most people would have thrown it out and bought a cooker, but the Rayburn was vital. We had both grown up with one. A Rayburn had kept warm the kitchens of both our respective childhoods.

  But neither of us had lived with such a badly-behaved stove, one that had such spirit. The Rayburn, whom we loved and called Daphne, hated us in return, but, as she was our only source of heat and cooking, we battled on, trying to tame her. She billowed smoke from her crevices even on the stillest days when there wasn’t even a light breeze to upset her temperamental flue. Daphne continued to have a laugh at our expense at every given opportunity. Often, her ovens struggled to become lukewarm – any request seemed a bit too much of an effort for her. A roast dinner could take her anywhere from between six to eight hours. Other days, her oven raged at temperatures more suited to a crematorium.

  My mother, Paula, became increasingly worried about Christmas dinner.

  ‘Would you like to come over here, my love?’

  ‘No, thank you, it’s our first Christmas in our very own home. Come here to us. Wouldn’t you like a country Christmas, Mum?’

  ‘Um, well, yes… it’s just you’re not used to that Rayburn, are you? You’ve only ever used a microwave. Would you like the one we have here at home by the way?’

  ‘No. thank you. I don’t believe in microwaves now. I’m going to cook everything in Daphne. It will be magical. Leave it to me.’

  Will acquired a turkey from one of his farming mates, and I made promising preparations with sage stuffing, a phone call to my Mum, and the help of an onion.

  ‘Daphne’s trying to die,’ said Will. He knelt down and opened the bottom door to shove more coal and logs into her cavernous depths, trying to coax her into life. ‘There’s nothing for it,’ he continued. ‘I’ll have to get the blowtorch.’

  ‘My mum, Al and your mother will be here in less than three hours and you can’t blowtorch a turkey’ I said, ‘It has to go in the oven.’

  ‘It’s nothing I can’t handle,’ said Will, heading out to his workshop.

  He returned a few minutes later with blowtorch in hand.

  ‘Stand back, Diz, this’ll teach Daphne a lesson.’ Will reached into his overalls pocket for a Zippo lighter. He lit the gas. Bending over he held out the blowtorch at arm’s length, turned his head away, and shoved his hand into the dark, unknown void that held the mysterious workings of Daphne.

  But she was spiteful. Not only that, she was older and wiser. She must have been getting on for sixty years of age and she obviously thought she should retire. Clearly, she had made mincemeat of better cooks than me over the years and wasn’t given to helping a novice girl attempt her first Christmas lunch. Incensed by the use of the blowtorch, Daphne flew into a fiery rage. One minute the turkey was still so raw it was quivering then, moments later, it had shrunk closer to the size of a sparrow and its once pink flesh turned crow black.

  Will lifted up the tin foil that hid his superb free-range bird, then stumbled backwards as the smell of the charcoaled remains hit him. Our two greyhounds, who had been waiting patiently at his feet for a little pre-lunch morsel, turned in disgust and wandered back to their beds.

  The lunch was late. We finally ate what was left of Daphne’s and my combined effort at four o’clock in the afternoon.

  ‘Well, Dizzy, that was a very good Christmas lunch, considering the problems with the oven,’ Mum said, setting down her knife and fork. She always said something positive, years of being a teacher had trained her well, but the look on her face gave her away. She smiled across the table debris at Will.

  Will’s mum
fought with the blackened turkey, stoic in her efforts to keep going. Her cutlery scraped across the plate and her knife clinked against the bird’s bones as she battled with the scorched sinews of the overdone offering. She was polite right up to the bitter end of the carcass.

  ‘Still, it’s thanks to you we had a lunch, Will. You always sort everything out,’ said Mum.

  Sometimes, I thought my mum preferred Will to me, but who could blame her?

  We left the table and moved into the front room, where Will set another small blaze into life and he and I settled back onto the sofa. The greyhounds slumbered away the winter’s day on their beanbag, curled back on themselves as long dogs do, resting their heads on each others’ backs.

  During the coffee and mints, there was small talk about our plans for the renovation of the farmhouse and when we’d be taking delivery of the ewes we had ordered. I even had a quick tidy round, piling red and gold wrapping paper onto Will’s fire. But achieving a successful Christmas was still “mission unaccomplished.”

  It was while Will and I were washing up in the kitchen, that we smelt the acrid whiffs quite unlike the normal woody smell that I found comforting in the winter. Then a few black plumes billowed back down the chimney into the front room.

  By the time anyone registered alarm, the smoke had begun spreading throughout the rest of the house, curling up the stairs in a lethargic but menacing way, as if pretending not to mean it. We had another flue emergency on our hands. There was, as Will put it, ‘Something wrong with the asshole of a chimney.’

  *

  ‘Fire’s out now, Diz,’ said Will, sometime later. His face was so carbon-blackened, only the whites of his eyes were showing. He began shovelling tar and soot from the fireplace into a muck-encrusted wheelbarrow that he had brought across the new carpet into the front room.

  ‘Wasn’t exactly the Christmas we planned, was it?’ I said.