Simon Mark Smith’s Autobiography
CHAPTER 3
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Angela
1942 – First Memories
Angela’s first memory was being held in her mother’s arms while she pointed at the distant anti-aircraft gunfire glistening amongst the stars. For her first three years, most nights were spent sleeping in the air raid shelter which, shaped like an old gipsy caravan, caused her to imagine travelling to mythical worlds as she’d fall asleep, and some nights she was sure she did. But one morning the ground shook her awake as a bomb fell nearby, when a badly damaged Luftwaffe plane kindly emptied its payload as it descended, blowing in the windows of her house, and knocking a few tiles off the roof. Angela’s brother, Sydney, came back a few hours later saying he’d found the burnt-out plane and removed the papers from the bodies of the crew. No doubt his ability to act with such cold efficiency also contributed to his later success as a bank manager.
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1940s – The Cost of Bombs
Between 1985 and 2004 I lived in a flat in a terraced house in Fulham, London. During World War Two it was bombed when, once again a shot-up German bomber careered towards the river Thames. As with the one that crashed near my mum’s place, this one’s crew also emptied their bombs as well, etching upon the landscape a line of craters, fires and tales of devastation that ended in the ultimate crash course of arrivals.
One of the bombs they jettisoned, an incendiary device, landed on the house I lived in on Bronsart Road, which set it on fire. This was forty-two years before I moved in, I hasten to add. The fire brigade turned up, extinguished the smouldering roof, and found the air raid shelter in the backyard full of black-market petrol. The owner was summarily arrested and charged while the bodies of the crew were buried in the cemetery just behind the house.
My next-door neighbours in the mid-1980s, Nellie, Elsie, and Claude, told me this story. At the time they were still shuffling to the outside toilet through wintry nights and cleaning themselves at the kitchen sink. For them, the 1940s and 80s were but a moment apart from each other. World War Two did not end in 1945 but continues to fade around us today. Just as the Big Bang Theory proposes there’s a background hum of radioactive “noise” crackling around the universe as a direct result of the initial singularity, the same goes for most of our traumas. There’s a symphony of hums within us that continually reminds us of the sufferings that originally touched us.
During the last years of Elsie and Claude living together, having been married for fifty years, he became demented and abused his wife verbally. She would come around to my place crying in her nightgown because she didn’t know how to cope, saying she’d had fifty wonderful years with him, but never imagined it would end like this. That’s the thing about endings, apart from us being sure there will be one, the ‘how’ and ‘when’ tend to come to us very unexpectedly.
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2005 – Our Unappreciated Potency
Many of us feel we have no potency or effect on others, but even when merely passing someone we may enter their mind’s internal dramas and affect them without us ever doing or saying anything apart from just being there. To think, a look we give someone, or the words we say have no effect, isn’t realistic at all. We’re continually affecting the world and those around us, even if we believe we’ve gone completely unnoticed.
I used to hide my arms when I was in public, but now I think people seeing me will probably provoke some questions and feelings in their minds. Of course, I can’t control where their thoughts go, or if it’s ultimately a good or bad thing, but just as if I’d skimmed a stone across a pond, I know I’m sending ripples out, and there’s something very satisfying about that.
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Angela – 1950s
Angela didn’t do particularly well at school. From puberty onwards, she had the added complication of an undiagnosed condition, Narcolepsy, which manifested itself as sudden periods of drowsiness. This combined with her lack of interest in a subject made learning very difficult, however, where she did have some talent was in her artistic pursuits, especially dancing, ice skating, and painting. When I was at Art College, I had a lecturer who said that make-up artists were latent painters, so, I’d better add to Angela’s list “latent sculptor” because at 15 she left school to become a hairdresser.
When Angela was nine years old, she noticed a boy called Ian and immediately fell for him. He was older than her but by the time she was fourteen, they started seeing each other. Ian, who was studying art, adored her, as she did him, but one day, as if a comedy songwriter was pulling the strings of fate, the son of the local greengrocer caught her eye too, so she dumped the Artist and pulled out a plumb. A short while later realising the mistake she’d made, she dumped the greengrocer’s son and got back with the Artist. This time though the Artist’s vision of his muse was damaged, so, while still enthralled by her beauty, he began to notice the differences between reality and his dream girl. Then one day, as they made love, she felt like he was no longer thinking about her and sure enough, a short while later he left her and moved on forever.
Angela was devastated. If one of the first stages in dealing with trauma is denial, then it was here she became stuck. For Angela, the dream became one of her and the Artist reuniting but while she harboured this, she couldn’t accept that he was gone. The space in her heart for a new love was still occupied by her dream man and as Freud phrased it, she was “trapped in the grave” of a relationship. Unable to move on to pastures new. With her heart still engaged to an absent ‘other’, her body found solace in acts of love and hate, and this is where my father came in.
If Angela represents the face of a coin that doesn’t let go of those we love, then Boris represents the other, the one that can’t ever hold on to anyone. This is the bad penny that’s passed from one generation to the next, the hard currency of love between parents and their children, and when some of it is counterfeit, then it may be perceived as a lack of love. If both my parents had their issues, then my perception of not being loved enough was about me, but in reality, it was all about them. Even so, there was no way I was ever going to get away with it unscathed.
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Angela – 1958
When Angela was eighteen, she became pregnant. Knowing full well her parents would have been mortified, she went to a back-street abortionist who used a syringe to pierce her embryonic sack, and unsurprisingly, when she got home afterwards, she started to feel very ill. A doctor was called who quickly worked out what had happened and suggested to her parents that by using the excuse that she was mentally unfit to be a mother, they could legally obtain an abortion through a private clinic. So, her parents hurriedly got a Harley Street doctor to create the necessary paperwork and within two days the matter was dealt with. But for Angela, who was already making emotional connections with the “baby”, it was far from over. While in the recovery unit, she tried to see the children who’d just been born but was pulled aside and told to go back to sleep. When she came home the sense of shame and failure bore down on her so powerfully that she was unable to grieve. However, years later she saw Mr Moppet, a “psychic”, who, maybe taking a calculated guess, referred to there being a child, “who was alright,” and whether this was just a lucky break as far as he was concerned, it was also one for Angela too, because it allowed her to cry about this episode for the first time finally.
For me as well, the abortion was significant because when my mother realised at twenty-four, that she was pregnant again, she decided she couldn’t go through another abortion and knew before we ever met, she wanted me.
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End of Chapter 3
