JUMP, HE SAID.

I left home for the second time at the age of forty-seven. It was five-forty on a freezing Sunday morning in January and nobody was about. My mother, who always rose early, was dead. The funeral had been in October; now it was New Year and a terrible madness had settled upon the family. My father snored upstairs in the stuffy bedroom they had shared until her last illness, bitter, angry, and exhausted. My brother was, I imagined, locked in his bedroom as he always was, listening to the sounds of his house in the darkness on the edge of sleep, vigilant; still waiting for my mother's call.
I warmed my hands on the Aga and rooted around for a biro in the kitchen drawer. I left a note for my brother telling him that I wasn't staying where I wasn't welcome and to please give back the things my mother had left me in her will. Then I stepped out into the icy darkness. I pushed the key carefully through the letterbox so that it just rested inside the flap without falling. I didn't want it to fall with a clang on the kitchen tiles. Someone might have woken and although I knew they wouldn't come after me, I wanted them to understand that I was already far away. Long gone.
So. I was on the outside now, and my heart was beating fast.
Around me was a total, soft, dense, familiar blackness, unbroken by any glimmer of light. The house was up a long drive bordered by overhanging trees and there were no street-lights in the lane. There were no neighbours. I wasn't frightened; all the frightening things were back in the house I had just left. The madness of grief, my brother's anger that my mother had deserted him and left him in charge of my father, the crazy finances, my sister's hatred; these I was glad to be leaving. The sun would not be up for more than two hours. Ice glittered on the driveway in spangles; stars glittered above. I felt exhilarated and free. Down the dark road I walked, blood racing through my veins, to the station two miles away and the London train. I had my own home, my own family. Reclaiming them would help me put the past where it belonged, back in the house I had just left. Self-willed, mulish, I had escaped before, many years ago, and there was no going back.
Then, I was seventeen. I was a stroppy, opinionated girl, who did not treat men with the reverence my mother thought seemly, though she was hardly a good example, as she hated my father and took her frustrations out on me, letting me know how worthless she felt he was. I was supposed to side with her but somehow I couldn't. Really, I just wanted her to sort it all out with him and leave me alone to get on with my life. I had fallen in love.
My boyfriend Charles had a motorbike and a leather jacket - I'm not sure which impressed me more - and wanted me to go with him to Eel-Pie Island. My mother was dead set against the idea; my father was indifferent. He reasoned that if I was old enough to go to work I was old enough to decide how to spend my leisure time, and my mother was furious with him for not backing her. I remember what I was wearing that night, skin-tight jeans and a black roll neck sweater. I don't remember the shoes, I preferred going barefoot then. It was orthodox clothing, but my mother complained bitterly about the jeans. I had rings of kohl around my eyes, and black mascara. My hair was plaited in a single braid, which fell over my left shoulder.
After a bitter row I escaped from the house. She wouldn't give me a key and told me that if I came back late I would be locked out. This was the ultimate sanction and one I had never dared to break. I thought about this. It was a warm midsummer evening, and there was a wild restless magic in the air. I was in love. I could live with locked out. Sensing trouble when he came, Charles did not go into the house, instead he turned the bike around and I climbed on, my long plait tucked inside my jacket, arms wrapped around his broad chest, comfortingly. And we left. It seemed so unbelievably simple, so straightforward an action after all the rows and recriminations.
Oh the exhilaration of that summer night! Flying along the country lanes, bending and rolling, sweeping round corners, weaving through potholes, all the way up to London.
I pictured my mother in the kitchen with the words she'd never say to me now: Be Careful, Don't Let Him Take Advantage of You, Don't Let Anyone Put Something in Your Drink, Arab Men Will Make You Their White Slave, The Best Contraceptive Is The Little Word No, Men Won't Respect You If, and You Think You Know It All (true).
The things I would like to have heard her say were Have a Good Time, How Exciting! I Trust You To Use Your Common Sense, I'll Leave a Key Out, You Look Great and Tell Charles I'm Trusting Him To Look After You. But trust was something my mother didn't have; too many bad things had happened to her and she would never trust anyone until the day she died, especially men.
She must have known we'd gone anyway, and when we zoomed back in the wee small hours, elated with the night, each other and the expresso coffee drunk in the all night Cafe Macabre, to find the door locked and the key missing from its usual place on the lilac tree, we took the coats from the porch and spread them under the trees at the end of the garden and slept together there. Although I crept in the next morning while my mother was in the washhouse, I didn't fool her for a moment and she let me have the full force of her contempt and fury. But by then it was too late, my ears were blocked with freedom and my eyes had seen the bright lights of the Holy City and there was no turning back. Shortly after I turned eighteen I left home.
Don't You Think You Should, and What On Earth Do You Want To, and You'll Never, became watchwords, stabbing and accusing. I kept my distance; attacks could be dealt with better if I had the bodyguard of my family around me. See, somebody likes me, even if you don't. And they didn't. I had freedom and didn't have to put up with what they endured, so often disguised as love, with I'm Only Concerned For Your Happiness and You Children Are All I've Got, and I'm Just Trying To Give You Some Advice, and, most insidious of all, What Would I Do Without You? There were warning messages about Out There, and a degree of paranoia, with They All, and You Can't Trust Them and They're All The Same.
I told my husband after a particularly difficult visit: 'I feel I'm all alone,'� and he sensibly replied, 'You've got us - they're the ones that are alone.'� And it was true, and I recognised it eagerly and knew why I'd married this man. And the friendly concerned faces of my children told me it was their truth too. Neither of my siblings made the journey to freedom after me; too afraid of Out There to flee the nest, too confused to understand why they were prisoners, their dreary years of waiting ending only when my mother died and a new sort of waiting began. The words of William Blake rang in my ears: 'For the time of youth had fled/And grey hairs were on my head.'� Never now would they have their own partners or children. Bitter and bereft, they clung to the nest breaking up beneath them, snatching at anything to protect them from the abyss below.
Now they became my accusers and You Weren't Here and You Don't Know and Why Are You Doing This and She Would Have Wanted became the cries. Unable to communicate, and unwilling to face the real loss of their adulthood, their bitterness became palpable. My father, full of regrets and his own sorrow, withdrew into his own private world. Always his habitual retreat when life was not paying him attention, he vanished more and more into the prison of his past.
So it was that once again, at the age of forty-seven, I stepped through the front door of what had once been my childhood home and knew that I had left it for a second time, and this time it was for good.

From THE ENGINEER'S DAUGHTER available on amazon.

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