Still juggling lightbulbs forty years on.

On being loved and learning to love myself

I’m not certain of the exact date but it was just before my birthday, forty years ago, that there was a ring at the front door of my flat in Woodlands Grove, Isleworth in West London. Clattering down two flights of stairs, I pulled open the oak door to find a guy with dangly earrings and long henna hair hanging in ringlets from a battered brown trilby. He wore a leather jacket, a folded bandana tied around his neck, skintight drainpipe trousers and Cuban heels on boots that made his long legs seem even longer. On his back was a rucksack and, in his hands, a bunch of daffs pinched from next door’s garden.

This guy called Tim, had not only stayed for breakfast a week ago but had hitched back down from Liverpool to London to see me again. To see me. I could not believe it.

Three years before this, woefully unprepared for life in the early 1980s at a teacher training college where life bounced between two campuses, one focused on sport, with the rugby club taking centre stage and the other the arts, with The Ballet Rambert in residence, I answered an ad on the halls of residence notice board: ‘Wanted, Freshers for Tennis Lessons. Ring Clifford on ….’

Clifford was six foot four inches, of Nigerian origin and gave me lessons, but no racquets were involved. What then followed were three years stuck in a downward spiral of one-night stands, drinking, binge eating and diets, desperately trying to find love and stuck in a groove of rebellion with a button to self-destruct. I was on the floor and couldn’t have sunk any lower.

 My reputation meant many gave me a wide berth, but I had two good friends at the time: Jane, sadly no longer with us and to whom I dedicated The Rewilding of Molly McFlynn, (I wrote about her in ‘Meet Jane, a True Friend’), and Kate, who is Tim’s sister. We’d gone to Camden Market, Kate, Tim and me, and I remember being acutely aware of this guy, looking to see where he’d gone amongst the crowds, and wanting to be by his side. The three of us spent the evening in the college bar drinking pints of snakebite and juggling lightbulbs in the student union.

The next evening, at a party full of rugby players dropping their trousers and waving their willies, we escaped to my flat for a smoke. One thing led to another on a settee covered in an Indian throw, but I thought that would be it and I’d never see him again after he hitched back up to Liverpool.

But I did, and after he stayed that memorable second time, we kept in touch by letter. I still have these folded sheets of Basildon Bond in a cardboard box upstairs. These of course were the days before mobile phones and WhatsApp. He wrote letters of life on the dole in Toxteth, of his morning exercise routine, juggling three rubber balls stuffed with lentils to ‘Buckingham Palace’ by Peter Tosh. He wrote of plans to get wax candles and Dylon dyes and try to do some batik designs on cloth.

I spent the next few months travelling up and down to Liverpool, often drunk, on National Express coaches from Victoria and he came down to West London where we cycled along the Thames towpath, explored Kew Gardens, and fell in love.

I moved to Toxteth to live with him as soon as college finished. We had self-contained flats in a large building on Princes Avenue that had once been the Cuban consulate, one to live in and the other turned into a workshop. The batik idea took off, and we made a range of clothing, taking it to the King’s Road in Chelsea and Stonehenge Free Festival.

Stonehenge Free Festival blew my mind! Literally, and was, I believe a pivotal point in my life. Maybe it was standing amongst the stones as the midsummer sun hit the heel stone, or maybe it was juggling naked together in the sun, tripping on acid, or maybe it was discovering a whole way of life that hitherto I had not known about. I set my course with this man, and I had never been happier.  

We did not stay in Toxteth for long. It was 1985 and jobs were almost impossible to come by, especially with a Liverpool address. Using his parent’s address in Harpenden, Hertfordshire, Tim applied to ICI over on Teesside to become an accountant. A far cry from making and selling batik clothes, and when the letter came through offering him a job, we had a decision to make. Do we go ahead with the grant from the Prince’s Trust to buy an industrial sewing machine and stay in Liverpool, a city Tim loved, or do we pack up and move to Teesside?

We chose the latter, got married, and lived in a Victorian mid-terrace that had a window full of plants in Stockton-on-Tees for two years, trundling our wheelbarrow along the cobbled alleyways to our allotment. But when glue sniffers Stanley knifed our allotment crops to the ground, Tim sank to his knees and wept and we decided there and then to move out of the city and find ourselves a house on a hill, which we did.

After much searching, we found two derelict lead miners’ cottages and an acre of land, which be bought for a song, and we lived in a caravan while we renovated the properties. With no YouTube tutorials to hand, we bought books on plumbing and wiring from the library and apart from the septic tank, roof and plastering, did everything ourselves. We both gave up our ‘respectable’ jobs as a teacher and an accountant, quartering our income as our first son was born and lived simple lives, growing veg in a polytunnel, desperately skint but happy. Our love of festivals continued, and we now took our kids along with us, all three of them perfecting their juggling skills, often with fire.

Despite what may seem on the outside, an idyllic life, my mental health continued to fluctuate, the trauma of earlier years taking its toll, but Tim stuck by me through thick and thin. There were some very dark times, and I made one heck of a lot of mistakes as wounds re-opened and bled, but throughout everything, I have had this man by my side.

There’s so much more I could write about our journey to the present date, but I’ll stop here. Now we are in our sixties and are grandparents, and although we are not literally juggling light bulbs, the fun times are still rolling in. I wanted to mark our forty years together in this piece and pay homage to this man who not only stayed for breakfast but came back for more, who not only loved me but helped me learn to love myself.

Find me at Alnwick Story Fest on February 17th at 10 am talking to Liz Allard, the producer of Radio 4’s Book of the Week, about my novel. The Rewilding of Molly McFlynn and daring to be different.

Find out more about my debut novel, The Rewilding of Molly McFlynn, wherever you buy your books or at www.suereedwrites.co.uk