« Roll Me Over in the Clover, and Do It Again... | HomePage | My Sista, the Ho' »
Friday, 12 January 2007
And It's Goodbye From Him...
PLEASE NOTE: If you are new to this site I would advise that you start reading this particular (related) series of blogs from the one entitled "Here There Be Tygers" in order to make sense of them.
Please bear in mind these are personal letters and were not written for publication. I found that after writing them I was unable to edit them. Apparently the inner child that mastered them did not wish them tampered with. I always respect the wishes of the client so all dangling prepositions and untidy sentences have been left as is, unpolished. They deal in emotions, not pretty phrasing, or reasonably thought-out arguments. They are intended to offload, not convince.
My family history is as follows. Father's name Andrew Henery, mother's name Mary Henery. Two children, myself and my brother, Andrew, younger by seven years.
Place of birth, 23 Falkland Place, East Kilbride. Later lived at 26 Lindores Drive, East Kilbride. Mother's maiden name, Mary Baxter Toole. Her father's name, Andrew Toole, married to Jean Toole. Address 1 Springwells Drive (I think), Blantyre. My cousin Isobel, daughter of my mother's brother, Ian, was permanently resident with them through her childhood. I stayed most weekends with them up till the age of eleven or so when Isobel left to stay with her father. My mother has two more brothers, the youngest of which is the Bobby referred to in these letters.
Father's family also hailed from Blantyre and later from East Kilbride. Father Francis, mother possibly Margaret? My father was the youngest of 8 (or possibly 9) children. His eldest brother was Joe. It is his sons, Joseph & Robert (a doctor & a headmaster, respectively), who are referred to in the text of these letters. Bill was one of the other brothers - very macho, male and misogynistic, as most of them were. The Maleys, also referred to, were family acquaintances, fellow-members of the communist party.
My father currently lives at Emerson Road, Bishopbriggs, Glasgow. My mother lives in Lochcarron, near Inverness.
My maternal grandfather was a known paedophile who had been in trouble with the police although, to my knowledge, never charged. No other member of my family has ever, to my knowledge, been accused of or been charged with a similar crime.
The name given to me by my parents was Jane Henery, which I changed by deed poll in the 1980's.
This is the last letter of three, to my brother.
I'm done.
Dear Andrew,
I am writing your letter as the last of three. I've already written to my Dad and then Mum.
How to describe the purpose of these letters….
Let's say they are doing two things, relieving me of the burden of their content and relieving me of the guilt and responsibility that goes with that content.
I don't doubt for one instant that these letters will cause you some pain, if for no other reason than you may consider them unmitigated lies and that, lies or no, you will undoubtedly be at the brunt of any of the unpleasant fall-out they produce. After all, it is you they have to convince, they already know I have gone to the dark side. But what can they do to me, withhold their love, call me a liar, a lunatic? Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.
I won't apologise to you for their reaction. That's their problem, and only you have the power to stop them using you as an emotional dumping ground. Just remember, if I am a liar and a madman then they have nothing to fear. No-one is frightened of the man on the bus who thinks his corned beef tin is a bomb and he is the Dalai Lama.
The letters themselves are about thirty years overdue. Unfortunately, although time may be a great healer it has no sense of itself and, in my case, seems to have taken fucking forever to 'heal' me sufficiently to talk about these things, or indeed, be able to venture into the territory of putting things right.
Sadly, putting things right in this instance can only mean telling the truth, not repairing the damage. In my case that is irreparable. All I am doing with these letters is letting the guilt and shame go back to the people who really own it – my parents.
I don't use the term 'my' parents lightly, because I did, indeed, have different parents from you. Your experience of them was substantially different from mine. Indeed, by the time you were born they were actually different people from the ones I'd known in the first seven years of my life.
As it seems highly likely the worst incidents of my life, at least with your father, occurred even before you were born then it was as if they happened in a whole different universe from yours.
I don't expect you, therefore, to have any experience of them, or even to care.
For a long time I have wanted to apologise to you for the second-rate child-care you received at my hands. But I confess I was reluctant to do it because I did not want to get back into a relationship with you in any shape manner or form. Understand, this was never about you but about what you were part of. You were a connection to my parents and I wanted nothing by word or deed to suggest to them that I wished to have any connection with them.
Also when you decided to stop talking to me I was never exactly sure why. I suspected it was because I'd moved the goal posts, rewritten the family script, by taking myself out of the role of fat, academic frump and venturing into the territory of slim, extrovert performer. It can be deeply intimidating when someone in the family suddenly behaves "out of character" but, nevertheless, it was a fairly open statement that you did not think I 'should' be doing it, and that was not good news for me. Subsequently I made no attempt to heal the breach.
I am second-guessing you here, and your reasons may have been entirely different. Fearing I was going to 'expose' the family, for instance, and later the publication of my book must have looked that way to you. Certainly your reaction, as my mother reported it (not necessarily reliable), indicated that you thought I was indeed a bad person, shaming the family.
If so I'm afraid you're in for a whole lot worse.
To you, of all people, I wish more than anything that I could give you facts and figures. To you I wish I could make you believe. Not because, as when you saw me last, I wish to convince you of our parents 'evil'. I am absolutely sure you are aware of at least some of their shortcomings. I no longer have a zealot's zeal (is there any other kind?) to go out and evangelise on our family dysfunction. When I say to you that I don't care what you think of our family, our parents or me I mean that wholeheartedly. It is no longer a defensive statement. I mean that if you told me you loved them with all your heart I would not hate, resent or dislike you for it. Nor would I try to convince you otherwise. Whereas I might get pissed off if you called me a liar I wouldn't care if you said, Mum really loves me (as opposed to me, I mean).
The fact that I don't believe either of our parents can love is born of my experience and as such may well be limited. The fact that I don't think it is, changes nothing about what you feel. Your feelings and experiences are unique to you and not for me to decide.
It may sound like stating the obvious but I am me and you are you, and ne'er the twain shall meet. The only thing I ask of you is to understand that no child would willingly make up experiences like mine. No child willingly gives up on their parents. It is a long, slow, painful battle to come to terms with being unloved, and therefore unlovable, so nothing I have done was done lightly. I don't believe it was ever really revenge, although I believe I would have been entitled to that. Maybe my motives on that one is for God to decide.
I am publishing all three letters on my web blog. Blog publication is a second rate alternative to sending letters to all my relatives, better still putting a notice in the local paper. But everyone is dead now, I can't publicly name and shame them, so this is the next best thing.
If it is of any comfort to you I doubt if any relatives will even see it. I have a readership of around 2,000 every month. I don't know if it's the same 2,000 every month or some are different, but either way it's just entertainment to them. They'll have forgotten it in a week.
This act is the closest I can come to blowing the lid off the ugly, festering pile of filth that is our family heritage and you'll either have to forgive me for it or learn to live with it, because it's done.
As I say I have no facts to offer you. Those I do have, such as they are, are very flimsy indeed. And, yes, trust me, I understand more than you can possibly imagine just how terrible it is to denounce someone without concrete evidence. Nevertheless it must be done if I am to find any peace at all.
I thought I was doing my bit to stop this canker by not having children but it was a foolish notion, like killing the dog to stop it getting rabies. This is the only way to stop it. Too late for all the sad little girls who suffered but there you have it – I'm not my mother's daughter for nothing. Silence was always second nature to me.
So, now I need to apologise to you. Not for this. For this I am not sorry, and never will be. Even if everything I thought my father had done to me was a fantasy, some kind of deranged dream shorthand for my own sickness, the fact would still remain that the thought and idea of it was in his heart. And, try as everyone would like to deny it, my grandfather was a paedophile of the finest water and the outside world knew it, thus, tragically, vindicating me and Isobel and any other female relative who suffered at his hands.
No, I need to apologise to you for all the exported stress I passed on to you. I was bitterly unhappy as a child and chronically depressed as a teenager. Much as I loved you – and I did, very much – I deeply resented my imprisonment in that home and my constant unrelenting labour of which, sadly, for both me and you, you were just another facet.
Believe me when I say I never really did mind looking after you in the deepest part of my heart, because I did love you, and I genuinely enjoyed your company. You were the closest thing I had to a kindred spirit and you were a truly beautiful little boy, very fey and sweet with a wonderfully gentle and zany sense of humour and some of the most fabulous flights of imagination I ever saw. Even although you could be scarily destructive I never really believed that was truly you, even while it was happening and I didn't understand it. Dad was hardly a good role model in that respect and you must have been terribly adrift since he was completely indifferent to you.
I always take great comfort from the fact that when Max first met our family he thought, and I quote, "that you were like some kid that had wandered in from next door." I take comfort because I always felt (deluded myself?) that I tried to connect with you, that I was the only real bond you had, that I loved you, even if they were too busy to notice you.
Unfortunately I realise you may have a completely different picture of me, as some bad-tempered harridan who never let up, who was always on your case, nagging, harping. Like three parents in one. Believe it or not some of this was actually produced by anxiety for your sake. To me you looked frighteningly rootless. You often used to wander around like a little waif, with neither parent giving a fuck what happened to you. Dad's only real moments of connection came when he caught you stealing, or some such, and then it was just to punch you up and down the floor while he blamed the rest of us for your failings, as if parenting wasn't his responsibility at all.
Sadly though, honesty forces me to admit there was definite jealousy and resentment in the mix. I had been doing cooking, cleaning and child care since ten or eleven – you never did any. The power of possessing a penis, indeed. Likewise, there was virtually no pressure on you to achieve. You had been designated the funny, charming, good-looking one (see what I mean about playing family roles?) and academic achievement was very half-hearted when it came to you.
Unfortunately I had the opposite experience. A report card full of six A's and one B was met with "What's the meaning of this B?" Never good enough. I watched you be 'loved', however half-heartedly, for doing nothing at all, just being, and that hurt.
So, for all the ugly sides of my personality I apologise. I hope you will take into account that I was only a child being badly raised by two seriously damaged human beings and find it in your heart to forgive me.
I can only repeat you were always very dear to me, the only good thing in the family, and it would have killed me if anything bad had ever happened to you. I'd like to think I'd have defended you to the death, but for all I know one of them got to you anyway. If so, although it was not my responsibility, I am more sorry than you can possibly imagine.
I'd very much like to close by saying I still love you, but I no longer know you and I don't want to add insincerity to my other misdemeanours. Let's just leave it at I did love you, very much, and still absolutely, with no shadow of a doubt, love my memories of you.
If you do get horrendous fall-out from these letters please remember that they are nothing to do with you. Your parents knew that, ultimately, there would be repercussions to what they did, and still they went ahead and did it anyway. You are not there to make excuses for them, defend them, or make them feel better about themselves. They are your parents, you are not theirs. No matter how old or sick they are they need to take responsibility for their own actions. And if you are tempted to feel sorry for their 'public' humiliation, especially your father, remember what Tracey Emin said when someone was offended by her including their name on her People I've Slept With tent, "You should have thought of that before you fucked me."
All the best, Chancery.
P.S. Should you wish to read their letters you'll find them on Blogspirit at http://danny.blogspirit.com/
Not yet read DANNY? You can check it out now at Poison Pixie where you can read a BIG extract for Free! Or grab a copy on Amazon here.
Once you've bagged your masterpiece you can rub shoulders with DANNY's other rich and famous readers at Chancery Fans
There is also an independent Live Journal DANNY Discussion Board run by fans, C Stone's DANNY. If you would like to talk about the upcoming new volumes or find out why you should read Volume 1 (and you should) Jill & Jodie are experts, so please go along and badger them with questions and unreasonable demands for proof that it's worth reading before you part with your readies. I guarantee they will provide the most hardened literary cynics with a reason, or die trying.
17:38 Posted in Blog | Permalink | Email this
Trackbacks
The URL to Trackback this post is: http://danny.blogspirit.com/trackback/1154222