At 69, I sold my house to travel around the world despite my children's protests
At 69, I sold my house to travel around the world despite my children's protests — in Australia, a man invited me to his home for coffee, but when I walked into his living room, I froze.
I spent my whole life looking after other people.
Four children. A job. Grandchildren three days a week for nine years. And money, whenever anybody needed it, which was often.
And the strange part is that my children almost never looked after me.
They rang when they wanted a sitter, or a loan, or a favour. Hardly ever to ask how I was.
After Don died twelve years ago I spent about four years not being a person.
And then one morning I was sixty-nine, standing in a kitchen I had stood in since 1988, and I worked out that I had spent my entire life waiting for someday.
So I sold the house and booked a trip round the world.
My children were appalled.
"You're being selfish, Mum."
"What about the grandchildren?"
"You're going to waste all that on travelling?"
And Col, who is forty-one: "That house was meant to stay in the family."
When I would not be talked out of it, two of them blocked my number.
That hurt more than I let on at the time.
But while I could still walk and carry my own case, I wanted to do one thing for myself.
Australia was my fourth stop.
And that is where I met Alec.
Seventy-one, widowed, gentle, funny, and fond of exactly the things I am fond of: old films, jazz, the garden, and detective novels with bad covers.
After four or five afternoons he asked me over.
"I've got a shelf of records you'd lose your mind over. Come for a coffee and I'll put some on."
And I went, because I trusted him.
His house was ordinary and warm, with photographs all down the hall.
"I'll put the kettle on. Make yourself at home."
So I went into the front room.
And I stopped.
My hands started going.
Because above that man's fireplace there was something I had seen before, and it had absolutely no business being in Australia.
What was over the fireplace.
Two things in one frame.
A photograph, about six inches by four, of a family in a garden. Six people, squinting, in front of a privet hedge. 1965 or thereabouts.
And beside it, behind the same glass, a letter. One page, handwritten, on the pale blue Basildon Bond my mother used until the day she died.
The photograph is of my family.
My mother, my father, my two brothers, my aunt Noreen — and a girl of about nine in the front with her socks down, which is me.
I have the same photograph. It is in a tin in a storage unit in Marley Bridge, eleven thousand miles away.
And the letter next to it is in my handwriting.
Who Alec is.
He came to Australia in 1963, when he was nine years old, on a scheme, out of a home in the north of England.
There were a lot of them. He does not make a speech about it and I am not going to make one for him.
He went to a place called Carrow Downs, outside Winnamurra, which was a farm school, and he was there until he was fifteen.
And in the November of 1963, a woman in Marley Bridge called Edith Partridge put her name down through her church to write to a boy.
That was my mother.
She wrote to Alec Hartnoll every month for eleven years. She sent parcels — socks, a harmonica, humbugs, a book at Christmas. Twice a year she sent a postal order, which I now know she took out of the housekeeping and did not tell my father about for three years.
And in 1965 she sent a photograph of us all in the back garden, so that he would know who his letters came from.
That is the photograph over his fireplace. It has been on a wall in Australia for sixty years.
The letter.
And then there is the letter, and this is where it stops being a lovely coincidence.
The letters stopped in 1974.
I always understood that my mother had simply let it go — that he had grown up, that he was twenty, that these things end.
That is not what happened.
In the March of 1974 I was eighteen, and I was sitting at that kitchen table while my mother did the letter, and I said something.
I can remember the shape of my own mouth saying it.
I said that she had been doing it for eleven years and he never asked after any of us, that it was all one way, that she could not afford the postal orders, and that it was embarrassing — that was my word — to keep writing to a grown man in Australia who sent four lines back twice a year.
And my mother went quiet.
And then she said: "Well. You do it, then. You write and say we'll not be writing any more."
She thought she was calling my bluff. She told me so in 1986, which is the only time we ever discussed it.
And I called hers. I wrote it that night, on her paper, in my handwriting, and I posted it on the way to work in the morning.
One page. Eleven lines.
It is behind glass over a fireplace in Australia and I have read it standing up, at sixty-nine, with a kettle going in the next room.
What my letter says.
I am going to put the worst of it in, because leaving it out would make this a different and much nicer story.
It thanks him for his letters.
It explains that my mother is getting on and has a lot on, and that we will not be writing regularly from now on.
It says — and this is the line — we're sure you're settled now and have your own people.
***Your own people.***
To a man of twenty who had been sent eleven thousand miles at nine years old and who did not have, at that point, one single person in the world who had known him before he was nine.
And then it signs off, in a style I apparently thought was very grown-up: With best wishes, on behalf of the Partridge family.
On behalf of.
Eleven years of my mother's handwriting, and the last thing that family ever sent him was a form letter from an eighteen-year-old who thought she was being efficient.
Why it is over his fireplace.
That is the question I asked him, about two minutes later, when he came in with the tray and found me standing in front of it with my hand over my mouth.
He had no idea I had worked out who I was. He thought the frame had upset me in some general way.
And then I said: "Alec. That's my mother."
And he put the tray down on a stool, which is the only thing he did at speed in that entire afternoon.
What came out over the next four hours is that Alec Hartnoll has had that frame on a wall since 1981.
It is the only photograph he has of anybody from before 1963. He does not have a picture of his own mother; he does not know what she looked like.
He put the letter in with the photograph because it was the last thing that came, and because — he said this quite matter-of-factly, in a front room, at seventy-one — you keep the last one.
And the reason he was in that town at all, and the reason he had spent four afternoons talking to a widow from England about jazz records, is the part I had not got to.
The four afternoons before that one, which look completely different to me now.
We met on the Tuesday in a café on the front at Winnamurra, over a dropped book — his, a detective novel with a terrible cover, and I picked it up and said I had read it twice.
Wednesday: the records came up. He asked me what my mother used to have on in the house, which I thought at the time was an unusually specific question and which I now understand was not a question about music.
Thursday: Marley Bridge. He asked where I was from and I said a town he would not have heard of, and he said try me, and I said Marley Bridge.
And he said — I remember this exactly — "Oh, right." And then he asked whether I wanted another coffee.
That is what that man did with it. A sixty-two-year-old search ended at a café table on a Thursday afternoon and he said oh, right and went to the counter.
Friday: he talked about his late wife Joyce for about half an hour, which I took as a man opening up to me, and which was, I think, him deciding whether he could trust himself.
Saturday: the records, and the kettle, and the frame.
He did not engineer a single conversation. I have been through it four times looking for the place where he steered me and it is not there.
What he did was wait, for four days, at seventy-one, with a folder in his spare room — and let a woman who had flown eleven thousand miles to be nobody's project carry on being nobody's project for another ninety-six hours.
What he already knew.
He knew who I was before he spoke to me.
On the second afternoon I had said that I came from Marley Bridge, because he asked.
He had been looking for that family since 1998.
He has a folder. He showed me, eventually, after the fourth cup of tea and about an hour of my crying, which he was extremely good about.
Two letters to the church in Marley Bridge, in 1998 and 2004, both answered politely by people who did not know. A paid search in 2011 that went nowhere because he had my mother's name down as Partridge and she had been widowed and remarried in 1979 and died a Harker. Four pages of notes.
And then a woman of sixty-nine in a café on a Tuesday said the words Marley Bridge, and he went home that night and sat up until one in the morning with the folder.
And then he did not say anything for four afternoons.
I asked him why. I was not gentle about it, because I had just found my own handwriting on a wall and I was not at my best.
And he said: "I was working out whether you'd want to be found."
He said that the people in his folder had, as far as he could tell, stopped. And that a woman who stops writing to you does not necessarily want a seventy-one-year-old man turning up with a frame.
So he made me four coffees and talked about Chet Baker and waited, and on the fifth afternoon he asked me to his house, and he put me in a room with it and went to put the kettle on.
He has told me since that he stood in that kitchen for a long time and did not pick up the kettle at all.
What I had to tell him.
I told him that evening. I could have left it. He did not know who had written that letter — it is signed on behalf of the family and the handwriting meant nothing to him.
I sat in that front room and told a seventy-one-year-old man that the last letter he ever got from the only family who had written to him was written by an eighteen-year-old who thought his mother's kindness was embarrassing.
And he listened to all of it without saying anything.
And then he said: "I know what it says, love."
And I said: I know it says it, I'm telling you I wrote it—
And he said: "No. I mean I know what it says. I've had it on a wall for forty-four years."
And then he said the thing that I have not been able to get past, and that I have now repeated to four different people, and that I still cannot say out loud without stopping in the middle.
He said: "I knew at twenty that it was a brush-off. I'm not stupid. I just never had anything else with my name on it."
***Nothing else with my name on it.***
Eleven years of my mother's letters were addressed to the farm school, which held them and distributed them, and which he had to hand back.
The envelope of my letter — the last one, the unkind one — came after he had left, to a boarding house in Winnamurra, addressed to Mr A. Hartnoll.
It is the first piece of post that man ever received at an address of his own.
That is why it is in the frame.
And the four hours in that front room, which I am told by Lorraine I have described eleven different ways and which I am going to do once more properly.
The coffee went cold. Neither of us drank it.
He got the folder about an hour in and put it on the arm of the chair and did not open it for another forty minutes, because he kept saying "in a minute" and then asking me another question about my mother.
What did she do. Did she have a job. Was she funny.
He wanted to know whether she was funny. I said yes, dryly, and mostly at my father's expense, and he laughed as though I had given him something.
He asked whether she had a good life. He asked what she died of and when, and how old, and whether it was quick.
He asked about my father's hands, because there is a detail in a letter from 1968 about my father mending a clock.
A man asked me questions about my mother for four hours. Nobody has asked me a question about my mother in twenty years, including my own children.
And about three hours in he said, not looking at me: "I used to pick which one of you I'd have been."
And I said what.
And he said: "In the photo. Your brothers. I used to pick one and have a go at being him for a bit."
He is seventy-one years old and he told me that in an ordinary voice, in a front room, with a tray of cold coffee on a stool.
What I have had to take.
And here is mine, and it is not 1974, because I have decided I am not going to flog an eighteen-year-old who was tired and poor and wrong.
Mine is 1986.
That is the year my mother told me what she had done about it — which is that she wrote to him herself, once, in the May of 1974, two months after my letter, to say that she was still thinking of him.
He never got it. It went to the farm school, which he had left in 1969, and it came back, and she put it in a drawer.
She told me that at her kitchen table when she was sixty-two and I was thirty, and she said: "I always wondered if he thought that was it."
And I said something comforting and we had a biscuit and we never mentioned it again.
I was thirty years old. My mother handed me, in one sentence, the information that there was a man in Australia who had probably been dropped by our family without a word, and that it had been bothering her for twelve years.
And I did nothing. Not that year and not in the thirty-nine years after it.
I had his name. I had the farm school's name. For the last twenty of those years I had the internet.
And the honest reason — which took a long walk on a beach in Winnamurra and about six months of thinking since — is that doing anything about it meant finding out what my letter had done, and I preferred not to know.
My children.
I rang all four of them from Australia.
Stephen and Lorraine answered. Yvonne and Col were still blocking me, so I wrote, on paper, which it turns out they both read.
I told them about Alec and the frame and the letter. All of it, including my own eleven lines.
Lorraine cried. Stephen said, "Mum, that's a lot," and then rang back two days later having clearly thought about it, which is the most he has done in about a decade.
Col unblocked me in the November. We are not right and we may not get right. His position has moved from that house was meant to stay in the family to you should have talked to us about it, which is not an apology but is a different sentence.
Yvonne has not. Fourteen months. She sends the grandchildren's photographs through Lorraine.
And I have had to accept something about my four, which is that I taught them.
I did everything for thirty years and I asked for nothing, ever, and then at sixty-nine I asked for one thing and they were astonished.
They were not astonished because they are monsters. They were astonished because in forty years I had never once given them a reason to expect it.
And Yvonne, who is forty-six and who has not unblocked me, and who I am not going to pretend about.
She is the one I did the most for. That is not a coincidence and I did not work it out until this year.
Nine years of Mondays and Wednesdays with her two. Four thousand pounds in 2017 that was called a loan by both of us and was not. The deposit on the car in 2021.
And when I sold that house, she said one thing to me on the telephone before she went, which I did not understand at the time and which I understand now.
She said: "So what am I supposed to do?"
Not how could you. Not what about us.
***What am I supposed to do.***
I had spent eighteen years being that woman's infrastructure, and then at sixty-nine I took the infrastructure to Australia, and a forty-five-year-old woman stood in her own kitchen and genuinely did not know what the arrangement was any more.
That is not an excuse for a year of silence and she is not a child.
But I built it, the same way my mother built her own version of it in Marley Bridge, and I have had to stop describing my children as ungrateful and start describing them as people who were given one role and never offered another.
Where things are.
I did not stay in Australia and I did not marry Alec Hartnoll, which is what everybody who hears forty seconds of this assumes.
I finished the trip. Eleven countries, fourteen months, one suitcase and a bad knee in the April.
I live in a rented flat near Lorraine now, which is a sentence my children find reassuring and that I find completely fine.
Alec and I speak on a Sunday. Sometimes forty minutes, sometimes four. He has been over once, in the June, for three weeks, and stayed with Lorraine and me and met all of them except Yvonne.
He is a friend. We are both too old and too specific to be anything else, and when people wink at me about it I have started saying that out loud, which shuts them up.
And the tin in the storage unit, which I had to ring Lorraine about from eleven thousand miles away at six in the morning her time.
I asked her to go and find a biscuit tin with a Scottie dog on it, in a box marked PHOTOS, in a unit on the industrial estate at Marley Bridge, and to photograph one picture in it.
She did it on her lunch break and sent it to me and said: "Mum, what's going on?"
It is the same photograph. Of course it is. Same six people, same hedge, same squint.
But my mother had two copies printed in 1965 and sent one to Australia, and there is a difference between them that took me about four days to spot and that has done more to me than the frame did.
Mine is creased across the corner and has a tea ring on it and somebody has written on the front in biro, in about 1971, MUM'S LOT — which is my brother Keith being funny at fifteen.
His has not got a mark on it. Not one. Sixty years.
Two copies of one afternoon in a garden in 1965. One of them lived in a family, got knocked about, got written on, got put in a tin with four hundred others and shoved in a loft and then a storage unit.
The other one was handled by one person, very carefully, for sixty years, and put behind glass in 1981 because he was frightened of damaging it.
I have the creased one. I would not swap.
But I have had to look at the fact that the people in that photograph were not precious to anybody in that photograph, and were extremely precious to a boy on the other side of the world who was never in it.
And the last thing.
He took the frame apart in the October, after I had gone home, which he rang to tell me about and which took him two days to work up to.
Not to throw the letter away. He has not thrown it away and I did not ask him to.
He wanted to see the back of the photograph.
It had been behind glass since 1981 and he had never had it out, because he was frightened of damaging it, which is a thing people of our generation do.
And on the back, in my mother's hand, in pencil, there is a line he had never seen.
***The Partridges, July 1965. Hester is the one at the front — she's the one who writes the envelopes.***
I did. I was nine. My mother had terrible handwriting and the addresses had to be clear, so from about 1965 I wrote the envelopes for those letters, at that table, eleven times a year, for nine years.
So the first thing of mine that man ever saw was his own name.
Hundreds of times. In a child's handwriting, getting steadily better, on every envelope that ever came to a farm school in Winnamurra with something kind inside it.
And in 1974 I wrote that name one last time and put something unkind in.
He rang me at eleven o'clock at night his time to read me the pencil line down the phone, and he was not upset at all. He was delighted. He kept saying, "Sixty years, and it was on the back."
And then he said: "So it was you all along, love. Both ends of it."
And that is the whole thing, and I have stopped trying to make it into a tidier one.
May you like
I have spent sixty-nine years being the person who does things for other people and never once asks, and I flew eleven thousand miles to get away from being that woman — and what was waiting for me over a fireplace in Australia was proof that I had been doing it since I was nine years old, and proof of the one time I stopped.
Both in the same frame.
