The Journey

By Sara Ann Key

Do I attract tragedy? Should I have made better choices? Why is my life and the lives of those before me so plagued? If I got another go, what would I do differently and why?

Riches to rags, happiness to despair, for better or worse – this is me.

On a journey to find out if love, trust, and faith in oneself is the key to breaking the generational curses that have plagued her family, Sara’s courageous reflections provide a unique and thought-provoking view on the path to discover inner peace and happiness.

In this inspirational memoir, a story of triumph over adversity, Sara’s transformational journey highlights the importance of mind and body healing to help achieve our greatest potential by living our truest self.

Her story is filled with broken pieces, terrible choices, and very ugly truths. But it is also filled with a major comeback, peace in her soul, and a grace that saved her life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Aug 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9781528916165

Sara Ann Key

Sara Ann Key is a mother of four grown up children and lives in Royal Tunbridge Wells Kent and is a professional Nanny and armchair psychologist. Working primarily in the early years of the childcare sector, she specialises in working with neuro diverse children and their families. Passionate about providing children with the best possible start in life, Sara advocates a holistic approach to parenting. In her spare time, she can be found strolling amongst the beautiful Kent countryside pondering the meaning of life and also, when she can, enjoys travelling to far-flung places. A protagonist at heart, Sara follows a universal pattern whereby she is undergoing a spiritual transformation that changes the way she sees herself to empower her life.

Book preview

About the Author

Sara Ann Key was born in Hendon, London. Mother and stepmother to seven, she is a reiki practitioner, self-taught healer and professional nanny.

Sara advocates a holistic approach to education and parenting. Being a highly sensitive person (HSP), she is passionate about supporting neurodiverse children and parents in the early years to connect and communicate with compassion to make sure the child is given the best possible start in life.

An animal and nature lover, Sara can be found strolling in the Kent countryside pondering the meaning of life and dreaming of exotic locations in far-flung places!

Dedication

Dedicated to my brother, Andrew.

Regrets at not being there for you at the end of your journey.

Copyright Information ©

Sara Ann Key 2023

The right of Sara Ann Key to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

All of the events in this memoir are true to the best of the author’s memory. The views expressed in this memoir are solely those of the author.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781528901659 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781528907651 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781528916165 (ePub e-book)

ISBN 9781528909181 (Audiobook)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2023

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

1 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5AA

Acknowledgement

A very special thanks to Cathy Anderson without whom this book would not have been written. Thank you so much for believing in me.

Helen Ostler, for your support in reading the original hard copy with suggestions and encouragement and introduction to scriptwriter Tara Byrne.

Writing a book was far harder than I expected but much more rewarding than I could have imagined. Tara’s professional advice of placing the story of my journey within the UK’s political events of the day was particularly welcome.

You Can Heal Your Life (Louise Hay)

The Power of Now (Eckhart Tolle)

The Road Less Travelled (M. Scott Peck)

Preface

Have you ever thought of writing a book? asked my new employer, a working mother of two young children of which I was now the full-time nanny.

Oh, no, I couldn’t, I said.

Why not? my new employer retorted.

Why not, I said out loud, why not?

And that is where this story begins. Why, when people hear my take on life, the tragedy, and the heartbreak, is that the common response? Are they surprised, cynical or genuinely interested in what I have to say? Do they think I attract tragedy? Do I think I attract tragedy? Do they think I should have made better choices? Could they have been avoided? Why is my life and the lives of those before me so plagued? If I got another go, what would I do differently and why? This book is about triumph over adversity and resilience. A true and honest life account of my human journey of people’s behaviour and events. It had been said many times by various people along the way that I should write a book. Until this point, I had not felt confident enough to do so. This was due to my lack of education, and also because events were still happening around me. My children tried to put me off by saying that I was not famous, so why would anyone be interested. Also that why would I want people to know my business. And also because everyone has a story to write so why would mine be any more interesting. All of this is quite correct. If for no other reason, I write it because I want my grandchildren to read it and break those generational curses that have followed my family throughout its history. These unanswered questions focus my thoughts and the route in which I have decided to take with the writing process of my memoirs. A considered and thought invoking exploration of the people and moments in my life. What is the connective thread? Will I be able to break them? Is love, trust and faith within oneself the cure? Will my grandchildren be paying the price? Not on my watch. The curse stops here. I am driven and determined by the desire to trace back the origin of the generational curses that have followed my family throughout its history. Looking back, knowing what I know now, would I make the same choices? If I had known then what I know now, who, what and where would I be now? I have decided to test this hypothesis. Framed by one life changing moment at a time I look back and ask myself, who was I then? How did it change me? For better or for worse? A study of my own creative process, I am exploring a selection of pivotal moments to better understand why I made the decisions I did. This exploration of me, for me and by me. At what point did I fully accept that who I am does matter in the great scheme of things. How have I changed? I wish to create peace within myself and try and promote it through others. When things get so bad, and when you feel there is no going forward, I want to show you that there is always hope.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.

(BBC Home Service Radio Program)

Listen with Mother.

Chapter 1

The winter of 1963 was the coldest for more than 200 years. It brought blizzards, snowdrifts, blocks of ice and temperatures lower than -20°C. It was colder than the winter of 1947, and the coldest since 1740. It started abruptly just before Christmas in 1962 with a huge blizzard for two whole days resulting in great snow drifts and blocking several roads and railway lines. In January 1963, the sea froze for one mile out from the shore in northern Kent, and parts of the northern beaches of the river Thames froze over. Of course I knew nothing of this at the time, as I was safe and warm in the womb of my mother, not due to be born until the end of May that year.

My mother, Heather, was 19 at the time and a dental nurse in London’s fashionable Wimpole Street. It was at the height of Beatlemania. Paul McCartney had moved into and stayed for almost three years as a guest of the upper-class Asher family. He was given a room at 57 Wimpole Street at the top of the house at the back, almost a self-contained apartment with a bed, easy chair, record player and small piano. Living there with his then 18-year-old girlfriend Jane Asher, he wrote many of the Beatles’ most famous songs. My mother herself came from a middle/upper-class family who had been coach and carriage makers from the time of horse-drawn carriages up until the invention of the motorcar. Brainsby and Co, later to become Brainsby and Woollard, made car chassis for the likes of Hotchkiss, Fiat and the occasional Rolls-Royce and had spanned and survived two world wars right through to the 1950s. My mother was a beautiful redhead not unlike Jane Asher herself. She was born during the Second World War during an air raid and under the kitchen table. Due to the circumstances of her birth, the midwife on call who delivered the baby gave her her given name of Heather. This was to torment my mother for most of her life. She lived with this chip on her shoulder until the day she died, that it was not her mother who had named her, but a stranger. This was an example of how my mother looked at the negative in life rather than the positive.

My father Geoffrey, or Geoff, was 23-years-old, a tall, handsome, strikingly good-looking man. He was East End London made good, my mother used to say. His family had been landlords for public houses and coaching taverns. Dad had been a Scots guard while doing his national service and had been deployed to protect The Tower of London which he was convinced was haunted; he had seen things whilst there. A very sensitive man, my mother used to tell me, and as a child he had done a lot of sleep walking causing his parents to seek medical attention. He worked hard to pull himself up by his boot strings and, when they met, he was an independent salesman selling paints to industry. They lived in Arkley, North London. I was born on 30 May 1963 in Hendon, next to the police college which was the principal training centre for London’s metropolitan police service, in a private nursing home that also doubled up as an abortion clinic. I remember my mother telling me that she was the only lady at the time in the hospital ward with her baby. When I think about it now, I was one of the lucky ones, the special one who was allowed to take its first breath of life. That feeling of being special and different followed me into my early years. I could not articulate it at the time because I was so very young but I was to feel different from everyone else.

My earliest memory is that of arriving at my first day of school – I must have been around five years old – at St Martha’s Convent Church School in Chipping Barnet, Finchley. My parents were not Catholic; in fact, they were not anything. They did not have a faith-based belief system. I know that my mother in particular was agnostic. My father, a sensitive man, as I mentioned, had gifts, insights and spiritual depth, but that generation had not explored today’s contemporary spirituality or post traditional spirituality or new-age thinking. Despite all this they decided to enrol me in a Catholic school. It was a good school, the best that London could offer for their first-born. I was greeted that day in the main entrance of the grade 2 listed building by Sister St Martha the headmistress. Everything about that moment was cold, from the marble black and white stone floor in the expansive entrance hall, to the foreboding sweeping grand staircase which led up to the boarding rooms and the nuns’ accommodation. This vision cloaked in black from head to foot stood in front of me as I was handed over to her. I was terrified.

Saint Martha’s convent, the Mount House, was a fine redbrick mansion with stone dressings, quoins and string courses, two stories high. It was an impressive building, grade 2 with listed sash windows and Ionic columns frames, six-panelled door with fanlight and pediment. It had once been the home of Joseph Henry Green. Green was perhaps the most eminent English surgeon of the day, from 1836 until his death at the house in 1863. He trained at Saint Thomas’ hospital before setting up practice at Lincolns Inn Fields. In 1820, he returned to the hospital and was elected professor of Anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons. He was also the literary executor to Samuel Taylor Coleridge and he edited Spiritual Philosophy, Coleridge’s book on his philosophical teachings which he had written at the Mount House. Between 1941 and 1945 the Mount House was the home of the architectural Association. Subsequently it was taken over by Saint Martha’s senior school for girls until 2017 when it became Mount House School.

In 1968, it was now a convent school run by the sisters of Saint Martha. They came in 1903 to the borough from Perigueux in France and within two years their school housed 15 girls. By 1911, a chapel had been built and the school had 60 children. It was a beautiful place with extensive grounds and gardens. We were allowed on occasions to sit in the grounds surrounded by lawns and paths, seating areas, remains of old brick walls and mature trees. There was a large pond and statues of the Madonna and other religious figures. It was quite a magical place and we would be read to by the nuns. I remember playing in the chapel when I should have been in the playground outside, dipping my fingers in the holy water stoup placed on the wall near the entrance, knowing it was something special but not fully understanding its significance. A friend and I would play tag among the chapel pews, and admire the framed pictures, the stone font and the religious figurines. It felt reverent. On many occasions, I would fall over on the black tarmac playground outside and have to be taken to nurse for medical attention. I would be taken up that sweeping foreboding staircase into the medical room and have pieces of small stones picked out from my knee with tweezers and then neat alcohol placed over the top with cotton wool and a plaster. It would sting like mad. My mum would call me names like dozy Alice, or potatoes legs because I was always tripping over, and other names like ‘Fanny by gas light’, whatever that meant. The words were not said with malice, yet she said them in a critical manner to express annoyance at my clumsiness. With plain white walls and metal chairs, the medical room was an empty and cold space, void of warmth and any real comfort, just like the nuns themselves. Often the nuns had small sales of religious trinkets. Rosary bead necklaces, cards, books and all things depicting the apparition of Christ in different shapes and sizes including Crucifixes, medals, jewellery. I use to love all this paraphernalia and always had money to buy something or other. I was fascinated by them.

It was a happy time. My parents moved into a bigger house in Totteridge, West Hill Way which was near the golf club and common. My father continued to work hard and did very well for himself. Two more children were born and I now had two younger brothers to play with. Andrew who was three years younger than me and Justin six years younger. We played in the street on our bikes and roller skates with our friends. We knocked on doors and got invited in by elderly neighbours given chocolate and sweets and shown the goldfish in their fishponds.

My father had a couple of male friends, one man called Graham Muir was an unusual character. I remember my father taking me to his house where he kept monkeys as pets and there was a stand in the entrance hallway which always had a marmoset or another species sitting on it. They used to also sit on his shoulder and he would feed them peanuts. On one visit, he took us into his garage. Bearing in mind that this was the middle of suburbia, within the garage was a cage and inside there was a large black panther cat. I have vague memories of Graham getting inside the cage with the panther to show off to my dad although not surprisingly he did not stay in there very long. I remember feeling sad as the wild cat paced frantically up and down in its prison cage. When I look back at this memory, I wonder if he was trafficking illegal wild animals. The two friends that I knew of that my father had were both dubious characters. Another guy known as ‘Johnny from Norfolk’ had been involved in importing illegal immigrants into the country using his boat. He had been caught by the coastguard off the Norfolk coast and had been sent to prison for illegal trafficking. He had thrown his human cargo over the side of his boat in an attempt to try and avoid capture.

Around the age of 12 my parents decided to move out of London and we relocated to a pretty village in Hertfordshire named Sarratt. It was a parish in the Watford district on the River Chess and 3½ miles north-west of Rickmansworth. Situated around a beautiful green with village shops and two public houses, it was essentially a genteel location. Our home was situated down a quiet country lane and was surrounded by a large garden. It had fruit trees and mature shrub borders and a fruit garden covered in netting that had gooseberries, raspberries, blackberries and blackcurrants. The garden had been lovingly attended to by the previous owner’s private gardener for many years. We inherited the gardener when we bought the house until my mother decided to rescue a donkey from the local vicarage and turn the fruit garden into its paddock. After years of hard work and loving attention by the previous gardener he left in disgust. This was the start of my mother’s love of animals and we soon went on to acquire a menagerie of them.

Our donkey was called Snowy due to her colour and was an old animal and typically stubborn. She was a lovely creature, but she had been neglected by her previous owners and her hooves were in a terrible state. Years of standing in deep mud in her field had caused mud fever and damage to them. Mum had done the best she could in getting the blacksmith and farrier to sort them out but they were twisted and hot and she was in pain most of the time. We would saddle and bridal her up and ride her across Sarratt Green to the village sweet shop. My brothers and I would make her trot by teasing her with food and running in front of her. One day while doing this she managed to bite me under the armpit which was very painful this served me right, and I never teased her again. I never forgot Snowy to this day – she was my first four-legged friend.

Country life was suiting us all so well. My brothers and I went to the local village primary school. We also joined a local riding school and my love of horses began. The owner of the riding school was married to a pig farmer, a rather unusual mix as she was a rather sophisticated, pretty lady. They had two children but the husband, as you might expect, was very down to earth and very different from his wife. The farm was run as a pig farm while the riding school was in its infancy. I used to love the smell of the pigpens and the sounds of the pigs’ squeals; it used to assault my senses. The piglets were so cute and clean and we would go into the large, concrete tin roofed pigpens filled with ten pens either side of the building to watch the sows give birth. It was a free-range farm and the pigs had large fields or pigpens to roam in. No fetid smell of pigs here. The farm house at that time was still being lived in, but was soon abandoned as unsafe and thereafter stood empty and forlorn. The spirit of the house had rescued itself by sleeping in the walls, by retreating into the wood away from the dust and rubble that had now fallen from the roof. We were not allowed to go inside. As children our curiosity took the better of us and we would sneak inside when no one was looking. The floors were bare and paintwork in need of loving care, wallpaper hung down from the walls in strips falling off. It was a creepy place and felt stagnant, full of dust and the odour of nothing. The abandoned house stood in the centre of stabling in a composed way as if it had chosen solitude for itself. Yet the busy workings of the farm and riding school went about its business around it.

The first pony I rode was a little black Shetland called Teddy. He was fluffy and cute and I remember the rides I had by lead rein through the muddy bridle paths around the farm, so liquid and thick with mud that you felt if you fell off, you would sink into its deep, sticky, glutinous abyss; the smell of the pigs always following us around each corner.

Mum soon became friends with the riding school owner, who had two beautiful expensive horses of her own. They grazed in a separate paddock looking noble and proud segregated from the other ordinary horses exulting their superiority. I used to admire their beauty and longed to ride them one day. It was about this time that I began to notice that my parents did not seem to have many friends, maybe acquaintances but not firm friendships. We never had people around to our house and we never joined in with community events, we were a very insular family. Once I remember Mum taking me with her for a coffee at some woman’s house in the village one morning, a potential friend. They appear to get on very well and I think the next step of the friendship was to introduce the husbands, and I overheard Dad saying he did not like this woman’s husband, so Mum did not see that person again. So it was nice to see Mum having fun and doing something with another person other than my dad. She took up riding with us children and we all soon became addicted and I would look forward to each Saturday mornings lesson. Sometimes, I would wish the week away just so I could ride again. Some mornings, Mum was up late so we were late getting up to the yard. It was quite common for her to oversleep. She would get in the car in her dressing gown and slippers, hiding in case anyone spotted her. Mum was very glamorous and beautiful;