A Life More Ordinary

 
My relationship with my mother has always been a complicated one. Fundamentally, I think that she is unable to see past me as a ‘male Hepburn’ and as such I am a constant reminder of my father and everything that he did to her. Unfair, maybe? But as I said before, to me in some ways that’s understandable. As I grew older that became more of an issue and for that and numerous other reasons it has now been many years since we had any contact. I have long since grieved for her and I’m afraid that now I occasionally miss the idea of what I feel a mother should have been rather than the mother I actually knew.
 
That might sound harsh, so I’ll try to add a little flesh to those bones. It wasn’t always like that. I think that I inherited my creative side from my Mum, which means a lot to me. During my childhood, we had some happy times when I visited her in Horsham, endless afternoons playing cricket in a nearby park or evenings enjoying stoolball matches that she played in while I scored for the team. We had a shared love of sport and one summer, her stoolball team, Roffey, were playing in a tournament down in Rustington and the organisers were a team short, so they cobbled together a team of kids who had attended with their parents. I could only have been about nine or ten and at some point in the afternoon, I found myself bowling at a fully-grown woman with years of sporting experience behind her.
 
To the uninitiated, stoolball is similar to cricket but the wickets are higher, the bats smaller and more rounded and the ball perhaps a little softer, but not by that much. The bowler underarm bowls the ball to attempt to hit a square ‘top’ of the wicket at around shoulder height of the batter and the batter attempts to hit the ball and run/score boundaries. Batters can be bowled, caught or run out (keeping it to the very basic rules here) and after both teams have batted, the team with the most runs is the winner. It’s a great game and I spent many a happy evening at Roffey CC, which is a beautiful ground in Sussex, watching Mum and her teammates play. Anyway, back to this particular Sunday, there I was in my t-shirt and shorts, slowly walking up to the no-ball line, bowling at this woman who towered over me. I bowled the ball and she swung, mightily, connecting with the ball with a resounding thwack. The ball flashed back towards me and I stuck out my right hand, more as a reaction than anything else and the ground fell silent as the ball nestled in my palm. I shrugged as if it was the sort of thing that happened to me every day before the stunned batter walked off towards the boundary.
 
I genuinely adored those days around the stoolball team. I was painfully shy, especially around girls and women and suspect that during the early years I barely said a word, but as I grew older and moved through my early teens I began to feel more settled around everyone. I navigated a couple of crushes on older women as best as a young, insecure and socially awkward boy could do and there were a couple of occasions where things may have developed if I had possessed a) better timing and b) an understanding of subtlety and feminine wiles.

There was a woman who played for the club for around half a season, who I got on tremendously well with. I’m not going to mention her name, I don’t think that’s particularly fair on her, but it began with a K. She was really keen and I would regularly turn up before matches or stay late to help her practice after training. She must have been in her early twenties, while I, by now, would have probably turned 16 – at least I hope so or this story becomes decidedly dodgy! I also seem to remember that she had either recently married or was due to take the plunge, probably the former. So, over the course of this particular summer, we spent a reasonable amount of time with each other. Even back then, my ‘coaching’ style was more based around positive reinforcement and encouragement and we started to see her skills developing. There was an away game on the horizon that I think, for some reason, my mum wasn’t able to play in but I still went along to score and got a lift from the aforementioned K. We were very comfortable in each other’s company and if my memory serves me right, there was probably a little flirting going on, even though I usually need numerous signposts and occasionally a map to know when such shenanigans are afoot. After the game, driving back to Horsham, she pulled in to a garage to get petrol while I waited in the car.
 
She came back to the car, smiling, and dropped into the conversation that they’d asked at the counter why her ‘husband’ hadn’t got out to get petrol instead. We both laughed a little awkwardly and I completely missed the fact that it was probably an open goal in terms of letting her know that I liked her. Just a simple ‘I should be so lucky’ or a little throwaway ‘If only’ would probably have done the trick. And I really did like her, but she was married/getting married and in my head that was totally off limits. I also had ridiculously low self-esteem so the idea of anyone finding me attractive was almost laughable. Even now, I’m not sure I would ever have possessed the confidence to ‘make a move’…sometimes some of us need things spelling out very clearly! So I said nothing and ‘the moment’ passed and she gradually became less present at matches and practice, further cementing the feeling that I had missed the boat, for want of a better expression.
 
During my later days around the stoolball club, before we moved to Southampton, I was in a couple of unhealthy relationships while being aware of someone who seemed shy, like me. I think, while never taking anything for granted, that she liked me but I was deeply embedded in those situations whenever an opportunity arose. One of the girls I went out with went to the same school as her and I suspect was particularly unpleasant in ‘warning her off’ even though there may have been nothing to be warned off about! The irony of that girlfriend being a flirt of the highest order and ultimately cheating on me wasn’t lost on me at the time. Again, I think it’s unfair to name the other girl in question, L will suffice. L seemed very much the opposite to the girl I was with and I wonder if things could have been different. We would often run into each other and whenever I returned to Horsham, she would inevitably be one of the first people I saw. Fate? I’m undecided, but there was something amiss in the Universe and my timing was clearly horrendous – something I tried to explore in the short story ‘We Let the Stars Go’.
 
But there I go again, off on another tangent. I should be talking about Mother. After my parents separated, I would go and see her during school holidays once all of the custody battles had ended. These trips involved me travelling by coach to London Victoria on my own (a prime target for noncery, something I was fortunate enough to avoid) where Mum would meet me and we would walk to the train station, red buses and black taxis flashing by in a city environment that was totally alien and a little alarming to me. Once we had navigated the busy streets that had so inspired Ralph McTell, we boarded a train and made our way back to Horsham. I found those trips particularly unnerving, especially given that many of them would have been around the time when IRA activity in the capital was a very real possibility. I would have loved to have viewed those streets as an adventure to be had rather than something to fear, but I was a timid child, full of loss and doubt with a permanent expectation that the worst of times was always just around the corner.

I’d spend a lot of my time writing while at my Mum’s house, avoiding her second husband, John, as much as possible. Any combination of my siblings and half-siblings would have been present during those days and visits would often produce encounters fraught with emotion and drama.
 
Carole’s propensity to seek attention would often rear its head along with numerous police visits to inform us that one or more of the girls had absconded from the care homes that they intermittently resided at. On more than one occasion the house would have to be searched, including any personal belongings if the police were looking for Alison, I guess because of her history of addiction. There was also a time when Carole was bathing our youngest half-sister, Hannah, who could only have been two or three at the time. She came running out of the bathroom telling us to phone an ambulance because she’d left Hannah alone for a few moments and had ‘come back’ to a bottle of bleach in the bath with her and was afraid that she’d had a drink from the bottle. Cue the rapid arrival of a couple of paramedics and absolute pandemonium, which I think really pressed Carole’s buttons. If I sound dismissive or unnecessarily harsh I don’t mean to but these things happened regularly whenever Carole was about – there was hardly ever a night out that didn’t descend into chaos or a visit that went by without any drama. She was a product of a violent, failed marriage and of the system into which she was placed to provide ‘care’ for her. Maybe it affected her this way because she was the oldest, but all four of the girls who ended up in care homes struggled to adapt and lead a ’normal’ life. I often wonder how bad things must have been for them and I sometimes think that I’m better off not knowing – it will do nothing to diminish the frustration I feel.
 
My biggest struggle regarding both of my parents has been the absolute refusal to take responsibility and acknowledge their roles in the difficulties that their children have suffered. At no point am I suggesting that they should have stayed together, I think that particular scenario would never have ended well. But there is no doubt in my mind that the subsequent custody battles were never about the good of the children, merely about point-scoring and running each other into the ground. At no point was the overall welfare of the children considered during the early days of their separation and it was a spiteful, vicious situation. How the hell do you come through that unscathed as a child? I’m sure that there were times when the behaviour of the children was difficult, maybe it even felt impossible to manage but I think you reap what you sow and the troubles that we had to navigate were very much a result of the consequences of our parents’ actions.
 
Of course, you could argue that there is always an opportunity for individuals to make the ‘right decision’ but some of the abuse and treatment that we had to endure has scarred us forever. It’s not as simple as doing the right thing. Even now, at the age of 52, I struggle to understand why people love me, why they would want to spend time with me. If you are told that you are nothing and nobody often enough you do start to believe it. And that’s not just the direct use of such words, it relates to the whole underlying approach to one’s own existence, being encouraged to remain downtrodden and not even try to better yourself can be as damaging as somebody telling you that you are a worthless piece of shit, that you’re thick and useless and that you will never amount to anything.

‘Now don’t wake me up again
Don’t let me feel anything
But when you go, let me dream that I go with you
So you won’t make my heart ache anymore
Leave the light on and don’t shut the door‘

Mother’s Ruin by Kirsty MacColl

I’m very much aware of an attitude towards me from within the family that I ‘seem to think that I’m better than them’. It’s not that at all, not that I need to justify any decisions that I’ve made. I want to be better than the version of me that I used to be. I don’t want my children exposed to attitudes and behaviours that are damaging and at times unpleasant. I also grew up at a time and in a place where racist, homophobic and generally demeaning ‘jokes’ were the norm. Some of my family also seem to have clung to their Tory principles that have now descended into the UKIP/Reform gutter and I will never apologise for dragging myself out of that particular shithole. I have been through a lot to get to where I am today and I have made an awful lot of mistakes to learn what I’ve needed to. I can understand a difference of opinion, although I do struggle a little politically. What’s harder to navigate is a difference in values. If misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia…well, any hatred, really is for you, then I neither want nor need that in my life.
 
My relationship with my mother became more strained after I left Plymouth to move in with her in August 1990. Things were fine at first but she was either in the process of divorcing my stepfather or it was on the horizon and he would spend a lot of time stalking her and following her if she went out for the night. By this point, I think she had developed a selfish streak and at times the priority would be for a bottle of wine over other familial essentials. Maybe she felt she deserved to be selfish after two failed marriages and to some extent I can kind of see that. I can remember one night, being stood on the corner of the road where we live in Horsham, some four or five houses down from our humble abode, just hanging out with (not of) my girlfriend at the time. It was gone eleven o’clock and the lights in most houses were off and I knew that Mum had been out on a date. During a flirty, whispered conversation with my girlfriend, we became aware of a loud (and I mean loud!) wailing sound coming from one of the houses. It took about thirty seconds for us to realise that it was coming from my house and…well, I’m sure that I don’t need to spell it out. I was absolutely mortified. On an on it went and lights in the other houses came on. I didn’t go home that night. It became a regular occurrence and an embarrassing one. I mean, she was clearly enjoying herself, good for her, but…
 
Around the same time, we ended up working together in a factory in Denne Road, G P Instruments that made the optics, self-measuring drink dispensers for spirits at bars. Mum was involved with one of the managers/directors, a tall, pot-bellied chap named Cliff, who looked a little like Roger Mellie (the man on the telly) from the Viz comics. Anyway, no-one was supposed to know about their affair but of course, everyone did. It was a small factory with only 6 or 7 employees, one of whom, Richard, was one of the funniest people I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting. We forged a decent friendship for a time, mainly based on trying to make each other spit our drinks out, childish humour and songwriting. On a Friday afternoon, the highlight of the working week would occur when owner, John (Gibbs, I think, we nicknamed him Gibbo, though not to his face, he was a feisty man with a purple face and poor people skills), would tip his skip in the work toilets producing a monumental turd that inspired the game ‘Sink the Bismarck’, where we would have to take it in turns to attempt to flush the obstinate log away.

The affair continued for some time and Mum would regularly be let down as Cliff would have to change his plans at short notice and leave her thoroughly miserable at home, listening to the songs of the broken-hearted and guzzling cheap wine to numb the pain of further rejection. He had a partner who was clearly his priority and didn’t treat Mum particularly well at all. I sometimes wish that I’d taken a moment to put him in his place, but that wasn’t for me to do. But he was as responsible for my mother’s unhappiness as anyone who had gone before him. Mother did not have a good track record for choosing men.

Copyright Alec Hepburn, 2026