The 501: The Journey

By Sue Humphres and The Kilns Creative Ltd

The 501 is an emotionally powerful and poignant memoir about family and belonging, self-discovery, and what makes us who we are.

Sue Humphies grew up without knowing who her father was. Driven by the yearning to find her biological

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nielsen
• Release date: Dec 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781739229221

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Iknow it sounds silly, but when I was little, I imagined my father to be like a character from Dallas. A broad-shouldered, successful oil tycoon, big and strong and lovely. He roamed my imagination in his cowboy boots and Stetson hat, and one day, he was going to come and take me away. I told everyone so, for it was what I wanted so badly. He would come and scoop me up, and I would be Daddy’s little girl. I would be treated like a princess. I would be loved.

Apparently, it’s a common fantasy. Not the Dallas part. But the idealised father – dreamed of, yearned for, conjured up and finessed to perfection, filling the void left by the real one – the one unknown. I looked around and saw other children with fathers. I saw them being chased around the garden, with Daddy playing monster, I’m coming to get you! Raaaaaaah! I saw the fun, laughter and love. I longed for a real family too.

One day, I decided to ask Mother. It was Christmas time, and she was sitting in the lounge. Nan was in the kitchen making a lemon meringue pie. The TV was on, and over its murmurings, I said, Mummy, where’s my daddy?

Mother turned to me, and without a second’s warning, THWACK! She’d pulled a slipper from her foot and smacked me with it with all her might. "He doesn’t care about you!" she yelled, walloping the hard plastic wedge down on me again. "HE – DOESN’T – CARE – ABOUT – YOU!" Each word was punctuated with another whack. She carried on screaming. It was as if a red mist had engulfed her, and she just couldn’t stop. The blows rained down, stinging every part of me. I curled in a ball, howling, uselessly trying to cover my head with my arms.

If it hadn’t been for Nan, I honestly think my short life might have ended there. Hearing the commotion, she flew in from the kitchen and somehow managed to pull my raging mother away.

Crumpled, shocked, bruised and broken, I whimpered as Nan tended my battered body, applying cream to all the sorest parts. Inside, my mind was still whirling. What did I say? Why couldn’t I know? Why couldn’t I have a daddy?

I was six years old. It would be nearly 40 years before I dared ask Mother that question again. To my great surprise, this time she gave me an answer.

1

WHAT’S WRONG WITH MOTHER?

Iwas having my nappy changed. The woman was gripping my ankles tightly as she hitched my bottom up in the air. It was too tight – far too tight. Stay still! she remonstrated through clenched teeth. I could see my toes up in front of me as I wriggled with pain. But as I squirmed, she just squeezed harder, forcing more pressure on my little legs. I wanted my mother to love me, but she was hurting me. Why couldn’t she be gentle? Why couldn’t she be nice to me?

It was only many years after this earliest memory that I could begin to understand. Mother was simply never capable of being the ‘proper mummy’ I longed for her to be.

16th July 1971; that’s the day I was born, at St John’s Hospital in Chelmsford, Essex. I was born to Patricia Bolton, who was giving birth for the third time, unmarried and aged 19. One day, she would tell me that in her agony, with no offer of relief for the pain, the midwives only screamed at her, You’ve had your fun, now you pay your penance! Perhaps next time, you will learn! Legs up in stirrups, my mother had gripped the sides of the bench and screamed in anguish.

My mother was never ‘normal’. She was certainly different from all the other mums at school. ‘Retarded’ was what she was labelled then – it even said so on her social service records.

But perhaps she hadn’t always been so. When I was in my teens, Nan told me something I’d never known before. She described the terrifying moment when Mother was only 14 months old. Following a persistent cough and then a temperature, Nan had felt her baby go completely limp. With no one else at home and no telephone, Nan had had to leave her on the floor, surrounded with cushions, as she flew to get help from a neighbour. When the doctor arrived, he took one look at the lifeless infant and dashed her straight to hospital. Nan was left there, contemplating her baby’s bottles still perched on the draining board and the many hours before her husband’s return from work.

Later, at the Isolation Hospital on Honey Lane, my grandparents were informed that Patricia was ‘gravely ill’. Nan reached into the painted wooden cot where her little daughter lay and placed her favourite bunny beside her. She stroked her hair, smoothing it from her red-flushed face.

My mother was diagnosed with bronchial pneumonia, measles and whooping cough – diseases she had been due to be vaccinated against only a few days later. She wasn’t expected to live, but there were some new drugs, as yet at an experimental stage, that the doctors offered to try.

Who knows whether her brain was affected by the illness or the new medicine, but my mother – though she astonishingly survived – never had the same capacities as other people. She had no ‘filter’ on her speech or behaviour, which were often inappropriate. As a child, I remember Mother wearing extremely short skirts. She was five foot three and a size 20 by then. I remember wishing she would wear something longer. She was very promiscuous. I think she must have believed that the way to feel loved by men was by sleeping with them. Even when very small, I remember being in a bus shelter after dark, whilst Mother got up to something with her boyfriend under the folds of her coat. I was sent to wait at the other side, but I could still hear the noises.

In those days, there was no support for parents bringing up a child with special needs, and Nan and Grandad struggled with Patricia. They didn’t know how to encourage her and would just become infuriated with her. My mother would get in with the wrong crowd and often be in trouble with the police. At school, she was made to attend the ‘retarded’ class, despite Nan bitterly protesting against it. It’s shocking to think that term was so commonplace back then. I think the stigma haunted Mother all her life.

For Grandad, I believe it was a burden he bore for many years. The decision to medically intervene, when his only child was dying, had ultimately fallen to him. Of course, he would have been willing to try anything at that moment. But how could he have known the consequences – and the compromise? Patricia’s life was saved, but the cost was high. It wasn’t the life her parents had hoped for her. I sometimes look at the old photos of Nan and Grandad on a sunny Southend beach with my little mother, holding her aloft and gazing adoringly at their only daughter. It’s tragic to think Grandad might have wondered if he had made the right decision. They certainly did not feel able to have any more children. As Nan often commented over the years, she couldn’t cope with the child they had, let alone have any more.

I didn’t find out I had a sister until I was five. It was a summer morning in 1975, and Nan was scurrying around the house, half-dressed, frantically making last-minute preparations for our trip to Southend. I can still see her, with a bottle of bleach in one hand and gold-cased red lipstick in the other. She had been packing for weeks, laying out pile after pile on the box room’s saggy old bed. That morning, I was the first to be ready. I was under strict instructions not to touch anything and not to get dirty. Grandad was under the same instructions too!

I knew it was a ‘good’ day for Grandad’s sometimes-bad back, as he gave me a piggy-back down the 13 stairs into our lounge, counting as he went, Uno, dos, tres … He had studied Spanish at night school some years earlier, and – as Nan would say – he loved to speak the ‘lingo’ whenever he could. They had often holidayed in Spain before I was born.

I joined him in the garden as he looked out for the taxi. I can recall it so clearly: walking down our garden path, between the two patches of grass, bordered by a box hedge. And at the end of the path, the wooden gate, with its large crack where grass and weeds would grow. There stood Grandad, dutifully waiting, arms folded across his belly. He was five foot seven, with grey hair and NHS glasses sitting on his rounded face. I can still picture his brown tweed jacket and grey trousers, with their ever-present braces, which I would like to twang from time