The Missing Years - Part 1

During the ten years between finishing high school and getting married, I led a strange existence. To a degree I was still shackled by the chains of the previous sixteen years but, concurrently, I experienced a glorious sense of liberation and felt free to make my own decisions and chart my own course through life.

Inevitably I made mistakes, but I also had some wonderful adventures and learned a great deal about myself and about the world around me. Looking back, I marvel at how reckless and brave I was at times. I also find myself disapproving of certain actions and wondering how I came through some situations unscathed. Having escaped from hell, perhaps I considered myself invulnerable.

My final exam results were less brilliant than most teachers had anticipated, but then they had no idea what was occurring in my private life. Few sixteen-year-olds - in the course of a just month or two - break free of sexual abuse, discover a long-lost mother, set up house alone and then manage to sit their final exams as if all's well with the world. That said, I did score well enough to receive both an offer from the Law Faculty and a tertiary education scholarship from the Government.

One difficulty was that I would not turn seventeen until the March of an academic year that commences in February. In those days my preferred university had a policy that precluded the enrolment of students not yet seventeen by March 1st. It was a close call, and an exemption could have been sought and obtained, but I suddenly realised I had no immediate interest in staying on the education treadmill. I obtained permission to defer to the following year and then set off on a quest to meet my mother.

I feel no guilt about my father's bankrolling of my life over the ensuing five years. It's not nice to admit this, but I spent a period feeling the whole world owed me plenty. That feeling did not last long - perhaps a few months - but, even when it was gone, I continued to accept financial support from my father. I continued to love him too. It was easier to do that now there was distance between us. It was also easier because I had resolved to forgive him for past neglect and abuse. I realised I could never move forward harbouring bitterness and hatred. It would have been like driving while perpetually staring at the rear-vision mirror.

Before leaving Australia, I established regular correspondence with my mother and my half-sister. They both wrote well and I enjoyed receiving their letters, especially my mother's. She sent me a few old black-and-white photographs. For the first time ever I had pictures of me as a baby. In one photograph she was holding me. So I had been cuddled once upon a time. Through other photographs I first "met" my older half-sister and younger half-brother. God, I even had a grandfather and there was a photo of me in his arms too. It was thrilling to think I might actually belong somewhere.

The only difficulty was that my mother refused to touch upon aspects of the past that I desperately wanted to know about. Today I know this was very unfair but, at the time, I simply accepted that I was never going to find out without considerable effort and investigation. I was an avid whodunnit reader at the time - I decided to go to England and meet my mother, do some sleuthing and unravel the mysteries like some junior Perry Mason.

One clue I overlooked at the time was a paragraph in one of my mother's letters. Having assured me that she had always thought about me and wondered how I was faring each time my Birthday came around, my mother went on to say that, after I was gone, she went to church and prayed that she might have another little boy to take my place. And she did - my half-brother was born just fifteen months after me. As a naive teenager I regarded this as a wonderful blessing for my mother, but I know now that I also felt some resentment - I had been "replaced". Deep down, I felt like some mislaid fashion accessory.

Perhaps it is a measure of my father's desperation to retain my affection that he made no objection to paying for me to visit England and meet my mother. Maybe he even felt remorse. If so, he never expressed it. Pushing the envelope somewhat, I declared that I did not want to fly to England. I insisted on going by sea - a far more expensive option. Selfishly, I wanted to spend time resting and thinking before landing on English soil once more. I wanted to be in a clear space while I thought my way into this new role I was taking on. I was going to have a mother. I was going to be a brother. It was too much to expect I could effect this magical transformation during a mere twenty hours in the air.

So I sailed from Melbourne via Auckland, Fiji, Los Angeles, Acapulco, Panama, Curacao, Miami and New York. Six weeks at sea that helped transform my life. There were other teenagers on board. There were discotheques, swimming pools and endless good food. I went ashore at exotic places and revelled in the freedom of being me, really me - not just some paper cut-out doll for people to pose and play with; not some genius whom everyone expected to receive top marks. The only expectations I dealt with were my own and it was a heady feeling.

The voyage came to its inevitable end at Southampton where I was met by my father's younger sister - a woman I had, apparently, met before and even stayed with when very young. She was a complete stranger to me, however. Fortunately, she turned out to be by far the nicest of the many new relatives I was to meet on this voyage of discovery. Certainly she was the first adult woman I had ever met who hugged me, kissed me and exclaimed over my height, my suntan, my hair and my eyes. I grew almost giddy in the glow of her approbation! Maybe I was home at last.

I arrived in England on August 4th and my arrival happened to coincide with what the British call summer. I felt under no time pressure and spent several weeks meeting other relatives on my father's side of the family. He was the fourth child in a brood of six boys and two girls so there were a great many aunts, uncles and cousins to deal with. Every one of them knew me. Most claimed to have known me when I was little. Try as I might, I could not recall ever having met them before and it was sometimes difficult to engender much enthusiasm about people with whom I shared nothing except similar DNA and a surname.

It wasn't long before two rather sinister threads began to register in my head.

Firstly, it was apparent from the outset that my father's family considered me an ingrate. As they saw it, I had deserted my father in order to meet "that woman". It's not often you can actually hear the quotation marks when someone speaks. When these people spoke of my mother, however, the inverted commas sounded louder than the words.

The second problem was that everyone regarded my father as the success story of the family - the one who went to Australia and made his fortune. For those who never went anywhere, for those who still lived in much the same area as where they were born, there was more than a little resentment. Some of this resentment, this envy spilled over and landed on me. I was a very rare breed in their small island aviary. Here was this tall, healthy, well-spoken, well-educated and well-dressed lad boasting - as they saw it - about hitting the beach after school and on weekends; routine trips to Sydney or Tasmania; and visits to the theatre or the opera. Of course I was not boasting. Australians take so many such things for granted.

Looking back, I should have been sensitive to the contrast between Australian life and life in a mostly cool, crowded and uninspiring English city. But I was only seventeen and lacked the savoir faire to know this in advance. Indeed, looking back, it seems remarkable that I was sufficiently sensitive to pick up on this at all.

Two things I did pick up on were sex and girls. I was an exotic animal in the average English teenage girl's menagerie too! It wasn't long before I was out most of the night and screwing myself senseless with three different girls, each of them friends with the other two and each of them believing she was my one and only love. I was a very naughty boy and my tom-cattish behaviour did not sit well with the family's grim, almost Calvinistic view of life.

I was speeding and weaving my way along the road to perdition and needed a good whack to get me back on track. It came the evening I finally rang my mother and actually spoke to her for the first time in my life.

Comments

Isn't that first bit of freedom intoxicating? Particularly when it is freedom from the abuse & neglect. Interesting how we handle that freedom, the decisions we make and the path we choose. Knowing you now, I know ulitimately your decision was to be healthy and live! Thank goodness you did.
 
Written as a wonderful novel -- except its biography. OK. Written as a wonder biography. A completely fascinating life and lifestyle.

I'm not surprised that you found the girls in England interesting and that their attraction to you was mutual. I am surprised that you make no mention of similar involvements on a six week cruise. A handsome, strapping, well spoken young lad in the environs of a cruise must have turned more than one head.

Great that you took time to enjoy things! I would never have been so smart.
 
Your writing is amazing, your story even more so. I certainly can identify with the feeling of freedom, and sense of being indestructable. It is almost as if the world moves from black and white to vivid living color. I salute you!
 
Your whole life is amazing. You did more at 16 then I have done my whole life. I can not wait to read the rest.
 

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