At ten days old, I was adopted into a family of strict Baptists, Elsie the mother, Frank the father, John my adoptive brother, nearly 3 years older than me and Grandad, Elsie’s father. The entire family were staunch Church-goers and Sunday was exclusively reserved for a day of reverent rumination. The parents went twice on Sundays to a large Baptist Church in Harrow and Grandad went to the local Baptist Church in Pinner. I could hear him saying his prayers loudly each night when he went to bed. He was very zealous, and didn’t tolerate anything on a Sunday, that wasn’t patently devout; no gardening, no music and no reading other than the Bible. Grandad was a little man, with a head of vibrant white hair trimmed into a crew cut. He sported a moustache, as stiff as a hard garden brush, and which invariably harboured some evidence of his previous meal. His good wife Ada had passed away some tong time before and he lived with Elsie and Frank, which was just a well, as he could not cook or clean, due to ‘no idea’. He spent his whole life in a room upstairs, when he wasn’t in the garden, reading vast quantities of books from the library. He even ate all his food, tucked away from human contact. He also had no friends at all, and was quite content to live his life as a monastery hermit. Otherwise, he was quite amenable and with almost everyone he casually met.
He had sold vacuum cleaners door to door at the height of his working career. He wasn’t overly animated at his job, which he had an irritating history of losing, as working wasn’t his greatest skill. When he finally accepted defeat, he became a private gardener, crawling around on a little sack, weeding and cutting the edges for obliging neighbours, close to home. His talents with the lawn mower were on a par with the vacuum cleaner, but his hourly tariff was befitting with his weeding speed and his diligence with the roses.
This brought some substantial financial shortfalls into the household budget, but there was always Auntie Jane to help out. She was the widow of a former railway worker who had met an untimely death. As unfortunate as that was, he left her with good pension and a sizeable house for the times. And so it was that little Elsie, Grandad and Ada had moved in with Auntie Jane until she joined her late husband in a more peaceful setting. When Elsie met and married Frank, it was a stroke of celestial luck that Frank agreed to accommodate the whole package with Grandad too. Shortly after adopting me, the family moved down to Stanmore near London, where Grandad devoted his retirement to playing, ‘find the weeds – terminate the weeds’.
On a bright sunny afternoon when I was about three, I was in the garden on my own, when I heard Grandad calling me from behind a very tall fir tree, halfway down the garden. I don’t remember how he said it, but the gist of his request as always, was for me to take down my knickers and lay them on the grass beside me. Then I had to pull up my skirt and he bent down and did all kinds of things that felt repulsive, weird and very wrong. Then he sat back in his deckchair and told me to stay there for a minute or two and just let him look at me – naked from the waist down. This was a grim ritual which became a sickening, daily routine and which he referred to as «our little cuddle». It was a strict secret that no one should ever know about – could I keep a secret??? This was part of the hypocrisy and travesty of my adoptive life. I’m not sure when it started or even, when it stopped, but he was my adoptive grandfather and the only person in the household who ever took notice of me.
One day, Elsie told me that the neighbour had been watching the scene from her upstairs back-bedroom window and thought Elsie should know. Elsie asked me if it was true. For a little girl of four, terrified of her mother – for good reason – and labouring under an oath of secrecy, this was a big ask. So of course, I lied. Yes, I lied, not because I didn’t want it to stop, but I knew I would get another hiding. When I was five, we moved away to a much larger house, with a bigger garden, and the procedure with «Grandad» continued. If there was nothing else to do, I was sent up to Grandad, to play dominoes or (ironically) Happy Families, which authenticated my visit to his bedroom. I was also consigned, to take his breakfast, lunch and tea to his bedroom, where he preferred to eat. On collecting the breakfast tray each morning, I recall with horror, his bristly moustache, sometimes with egg yolk dripping from it, as he embedded it into my young skin. Twice a year I got severe bronchitis, which confined me to bed for some time. It was uncomfortable, but a welcome relief from the groping incidents with Grandad.
Elsie never referred to her neighbour’s remarks again, and Frank never mentioned it at all. I’m not aware that there were any repercussions, and life went on. When I was 13 my grandfather died, aged 90, so whatever my perceptions at the time, he was evidently 81 when I first became alert to what he was doing to me, even if I didn’t understand what it was all about. With the best will in the world, I could never reconcile Grandad’s personal ethics and his actions which caused such repulsive feelings and of which he was very much aware. As I grew up, I wondered, if he had any inkling of how I dreaded each day, and if he had any idea that it was not only illegal but morally sinful. I wondered also, if he would have done this, had I been of his own flesh and blood. Or was he of the opinion that I was in some way so detached from his bloodline, that I was just an available body to use, with no special bond to him in the family hierarchy. I also wondered, how his behaviour with me, would have been endorsed by the Lord, to whom he prayed so ardently each night.
Many unfortunate happenings clouded my existence in my first twenty years of life, none of which gave me the firm foundation that would have been particularly appropriate for an adoptive child. I had no one and nowhere to turn to. I felt caught up in a labyrinth so foreign to my own persona. It was a nightmare that wouldn’t disappear, and I had no idea how to escape it. I may forget what I had for breakfast this morning, but I will never forget these insidious episodes with this pious, little man I was told to call «Grandad». And all under the pious cloak of religion.
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