Friends for Life. Jan Fennell

uncontrollably. Luckily the damage was only cosmetic, although – naturally – my mother failed to appreciate that.

      Throughout it all I sat there, consumed by what I knew would be the inevitable consequence of what was occurring. I kept thinking: ‘Bye bye, Bobo.’

      Bobo went next door to the neighbours, who had their own budgie, Pippa. When they bred I persuaded my dad to let me have one of the babies, a tiny lump of fluffy blue.

      It took some doing, I can tell you. My mother, of course, was adamant that it would have to have a cage large enough to exercise in and could never be left free to fly around and wreak the kind of mayhem poor Bobo had inflicted. We agreed.

      But as it turned out, Bluey, as the new arrival was christened, turned into my mother’s personal favourite.

      He was an absolute character, a real gold-plated star. He used to talk to me in the morning; he’d say: ‘Janice, come on, get up.’ He’d recite nursery rhymes but say them upside down. ‘Hickory dickory dock, up the Queen’, was one of his favourites. He would dive into the lettuce bowl. What a character he was. My mother loved him, she was absolutely besotted by him, probably because he lavished so much attention on her. He’d say, ‘Oh, you’re beautiful,’ and she loved that. Mum even deigned to let him fly around the house in the evenings.

      We used to take him everywhere we went. He even came camping with us. I remember we once stayed next door to a family who had a bird called Bobby. One day the two birds were out in their cages and we heard ours talking. My mother’s face turned scarlet when she heard her bird say: ‘Bobby’s a bugger, Bluey’s beautiful.’ We all burst out laughing. That bird was the light of our lives.

      The time we had with Bluey was wonderful to me. To be honest, despite all my love for animals, until then I hadn’t realized an animal could be so loving in return. And the fact that he was the first successful pet I’d had made me love him back even more.

      I was about to let Bluey out of his cage one November night in 1958, when there was a knock on the door. I opened it to discover a couple standing on the landing outside. They were an odd-looking pair: she looked nervous and was quite clearly heavily pregnant, he was a cocky young man in his twenties with the biggest Teddy Boy quiff I had ever seen. Whenever I see Woody Woodpecker I remember him.

      ‘Is your mum in?’ he asked.

      I went to the sitting room to get Mum and was surprised when she recognized the Teddy Boy.

      ‘Oh, hello, Ron,’ she said, seemingly quite pleased to see him.

      ‘Hello, this is my wife, Anne,’ he replied, gesturing to the woman.

      My mother ushered them into the sitting room and I, well-trained young girl that I was, headed to the kitchen to put the kettle on for a cup of tea.

      I had been there for a minute or two when my mother reappeared. We didn’t get many visitors at that time of the night. They weren’t encouraged. Yet she seemed almost excited that these strangers had turned up out of the blue. I, on the other hand, had a dozen questions flying around my head. I only got to ask one, however.

      ‘Who’s that?’ I said.

      ‘That’s your brother,’ Mum replied breezily.

      I’d always dreamt of having a brother or sister. I used to look enviously at my cousins playing, fighting and doing all the normal things siblings do together. I saw that when one got told off there would be huddles and muttered secrets would be shared. They were together.

      But there was no prospect of me having one. Cousin Les had been the closest I’d had to a relative of my own age, but since our separation for school I’d seen less and less of him. Whenever I asked my parents, ‘Can we have a baby?’ they replied, ‘No, we can’t afford one.’ And that was it, end of story. There was no discussion after that.

      So to say the discovery that I already had a brother was a bombshell would be the understatement of the century. As my mother rushed back into the living room that night, I felt as if I’d been punched in the head.

      The strange disorientation I felt was increased by the fact that my ‘brother’ seemed such an unlikely candidate to be my mother’s son. I could hear him laughing in the sitting room. He was very loud and he spoke in a strong London accent. He was the sort of person my mother would normally have crossed the road to avoid. ‘Common’ would have been the word she used, most likely.

      Eventually I took the tea tray in, but I might as well have been invisible. Anne was quiet because she’d just met her in-laws. I just sat on the floor listening, trying to take in what was going on.

      I don’t know whether I was pleased or hurt. In truth, I didn’t know what I felt.

      He’d say things like: ‘I remember you when you were a snotty-nosed kid.’ But that didn’t add up. I had no memory of him at all. And besides, if I had a cold my family had the fastest hankies in town.

      They backed him up though. They kept saying: ‘You’ve met him before, you know Ron.’ And I thought: ‘No, I haven’t. When? Where?’

      There was no helping me to come to terms with the situation. There were no child psychologists around then to tell them ‘This is a traumatic occasion for a child, a major event in her life, and you should proceed this way …’ You just had to get on with it.

      As I sat there listening it dawned on me that he was indeed my mother’s son. He was calling my mother Mum and my father Wal. The only thing I could focus on that night was Anne’s bump. I was thinking, young as I was, ‘Maybe there’s hope there.’ I thought, ‘I’m going to be an auntie.’ Which would possibly give me a chance to be close to another human being.

      I wasn’t allowed to hang around for long. They obviously had important things to talk about, so I was sent to bed. I lay there in my bed with the door partially open. I can remember looking at the pattern that the paraffin heater left on the ceiling.

      I heard them laughing. And eventually I heard them go, full of ‘See you soon’ and ‘Pop round anytime’.

      I went to school the next day telling everyone I had a brother. They did what they’d done when I said I had an uncle who worked with Buffalo Bill. They called me a liar again.

      The aftershocks of that night continued for days and weeks. I couldn’t help myself asking my mother questions. Who had she been married to? Where was he now? Why had she and Ron been separated? My mother really didn’t want to discuss any of it. She’d get cross whenever I raised the subject. Divorce was not the done thing at that time and she clearly felt shame. A week or so after Ron had called round she snapped. I’d asked her another question about her divorce.

      ‘I don’t know why it’s only me you’re pestering with all your questions,’ she said. ‘Your father was married before too.’

      This was another bolt from the blue. At least when I asked my father about it he was willing to talk to me. I sensed that he’d been expecting the question. He just sighed, shrugged his shoulders and said: ‘Well, it was just one of those things love, there’s not much to say really.’

      It turned out that he had married before he’d gone off to war. His wife’s name was Doris and she was a local girl. While my father was being blown to pieces in Europe, Doris did what a lot of young girls did and started becoming a little too familiar with some of the American GIs who were stationed in and around London. It had been when my dad came home for his father’s funeral that he had discovered what she was up to. As if the pain of having to come home to bury his father hadn’t been traumatic enough for him, he had walked into their home and caught her in flagrante. After the funeral he’d gone straight to the servicemen’s charity, SAAFA, and asked them to organize a divorce. It wasn’t particularly unusual for something like that to happen during the war, particularly to couples as young as my dad and Doris. They were both nineteen or so. But it still hit him hard. Looking back on it now it explained a lot about my father. It explained why he decided to stay on in Europe after the end of the war. He obviously didn’t want to