Hitchhike to Love

By Harry Higgs

‘Hitchhike to Love’ is a highly engaging memoir that tells the true story of the complex and difficult life of the author Harry Higgs. This unsettling memoir describes how mental health ran among a close-knit Midlands family in England due to their overbearing and overprotective mother Doreen, who ruled the household in a strict manner which caused the brother and sister Wendy and Raymond to seek adventure in hitchhiking from the West Midlands in England to Glasgow in Scotland to meet their soccer hero, Ally McCoist. In the process, Wendy found the man of her dreams, lorry driver David, of which Doreen disapproved immensely.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Conrad Press
• Release date: May 10, 2024
• ISBN: 9781839787157

Book preview

Hitchhike to Love

a memoir

Harry Higgs

Hitchhike to Love

Published by The Conrad Press Ltd. in the United Kingdom 2024

Tel: [phone]

www.theconradpress.com

[e-mail]

ISBN 9781839787157

Copyright © Harry Higgs 2024

All rights reserved.

Typesetting and cover design by Michelle Emerson michelleemerson.co.uk

The Conrad Press logo was designed by Maria Priestley

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

Contents

Chapter 1 Escaping desperation

Chapter 2 Wendy leaves home

Chapter 3 What a surprise

Chapter 4 Suicidal tendencies

Chapter 5 Home is where the heart is

Chapter 6 A fall into decline

Chapter 7 The time has come

In memory of Doreen Higgs (1931-2009),

my mother.

Chapter 1

Escaping desperation

It was a cold bleak January in 1994 and all my family was lethargic and fed up sitting around watching rubbish on the television during the dark cold winter nights.

Wendy would always get frustrated and yearn for excitement in her life because she used to get bored very quickly and agitated. She hadn’t got a job at that moment, but she used to work as an office junior back in the 1980s for a while after leaving school and obtained RSA qualifications but due to the sarcastic remarks and innuendo lewd comments from the company bosses which made Wendy cringe with anger and would often get upset quite easily.

This kind of behaviour by her managers caused her a lot of anxiety and made her feel worthless and very depressed, so much so that she had enough and decided to leave.

When Wendy was at school she would often bunk off without Mom knowing and hang out with her Asian friend where they would quite regularly rendezvous with a an Asian guy who used to take them in his car driving out and about with his stereo blasting away and the drum and bass thumping away which vibrated his car which attracted the attention of members of the public on the streets.

Wendy kind of took a liking to him because she would always see him messing about with cars outside his house when she went to and from school. The tall slim Asian guy was six foot who had not long left school himself and he used to try to look flash to impress the girls with his gleaming shiny car and chrome alloys. With his long black hair styled like the 1980s Noel Edmonds look and wearing jumpers that clipped his slim frame and flared trousers, Wendy felt special that she had attracted his attention, maybe it was just a school girl crush, but he fancied her too. I got a ride off him a couple of times when I was walking down the street and I got caught in the pouring rain, which I thought was nice of him to do. Wendy would have these secret meetings even after school and she would tell Mom that she was going to her friend’s house, which was true, the problem was that Mom didn’t realise that Wendy and her school friend were going out with the Asian lad in his car riding around the city streets and enjoying  being in each other’s company. This went on until Wendy left school, then it kind of faded off after that.

We all had our various opinions on what each of us thought was best. My brother’s Ray and Alan, Wendy and Mom, myself and my younger sister Helen all had our opinions on various issues and topics so that was a recipe for a right old argument and that would be a daily occurrence. Then someone would get the hump because I guess you could say we all had our temperamental ways which would surface after a good old bust up, then someone would be in a mood for a rather long spell and then it would be up to Mom to coax them back into reality, unless of course something dramatic happened to shake them out of their silly mood swings.

Living in a small council three-bed semi in a crime-riddled area of Birmingham with no prospects would turn anyone’s state of mind I guess eventually. Our older brother Alan had found his own one-bed flat from the city council which wasn’t too far away, but he had suffered from mental health issues for quite a while of which was we were unaware of at that time, because he would often have strange mood swings which seemed to us quite out of character compared to the rest of us, but Mom and the rest of us dismissed it thinking he was possibly having a tantrum.

I guess the whole family suffered from mental health issues in one form or another, but we didn’t realise that. Alan regularly locked himself in his bedroom and would be in there all day and night.  He tried to studying for an ‘Open University’ degree at home because he wanted to improve on his qualifications that he acquired at secondary school, but studying at home made him rather withdrawn and his university course didn’t go well, so he dropped out because of the family distractions which annoyed him a great deal. He also had some knock backs when he was hoping to aspire to become a professional footballer, but someone had made comments that he wasn’t tall enough which I think hurt his feelings quite a bit. He did have football trials at Arsenal and Birmingham City football clubs, but that too came to an end rather abruptly and we never got the full story from him on what happened, but I suppose when you have your dreams killed off like that,  maybe it triggered something in him mentally. 

When he left school Alan would try out various jobs and one job in particular Alan worked on an action centre building site doing renovation work where he would come home covered in dust. He would slouch in the armchair in his dirty clothes and big dusty boots putting his feet up on a clean armchair, and you could sense that something was wrong with him because he wanted to start an argument and he was edging for a fight with anyone one of us with his peculiar ways. Mom and Dad saw this attitude with Alan and they didn’t like it and spoke out to him about it, then all hell would break loose and trouble erupted. Alan would have manic moments and would square up to Dad and even lash out at him into fight if anyone disagreed with him, he had the same tendencies towards us all, Mom, me, Ray, Wendy, and Helen, when he was like that, we all ran out the house scared of what he might do next, so we left him to it. It was in our best interest to avoid him at all costs because of his severe mood swings and his aggressive behaviour.  Alan would often pick fights with Dad and it wasn’t very nice to see and if we intervened to stop it getting out of hand, Alan would set upon one of us if we did. Dad was getting on his years and it wasn’t very nice to see him being punched in the face and knocked to the ground by Alan.

When we were kids, Mom and Dad always disciplined us if we were getting too noisy, in fact Dad wouldn’t often wallop us around the head with his slipper if we didn’t do as we were told and behave ourselves, because he used to get very annoyed if he couldn’t read the newspaper in peace and quiet.

I remember Dad chasing us when we played it up too much, that he chased me and Ray up the stairs, I climbed out the bedroom window and shimmered down the drainpipe out into the back garden. Unfortunately, Ray wasn’t able to follow me out the bedroom window because he was too frightened plus he wasn’t agile enough, so he bore the brunt of Dad’s anger and got a beating.

Mom and Dad always had blazing arguments especially when Mom had the dinner cooking on the stove, Mom always said ‘Whenever I turn my back for a few minutes to do something, someone will always start acting up.’ I remember Mom was preparing a meal in the kitchen for quite a while, when Dad was having a go at one of us over something trivial. I think Ray rushed out the front door leaving it wide open when a breeze blew through the house slamming the middle door inside the house between the kitchen and living room shut with such a force, it broke the glass in it which frightened Mom out of her skin.

These argument situations would sometimes get so out of control, things would get smashed accidentally or even deliberately which ended up turning into physical violence between Mom and Dad. As kids growing up in a house like that, it kind of made us all a bit fearful of people and maybe that’s why I think Wendy, Alan, Ray and Helen and I like to distance ourselves from people as much as possible.

As grown-ups nowadays we often say we’d all like to live away from people because we can’t stand to be around neighbours. I’ve always said, ‘I’d be quite happy left on a desert island and hope nobody rescues me,’ but with health issues that have developed now later in my life, I tend to think differently about that idea now, but we’d all still like to be living in detached properties away from people preferably in a small village just handy to the city but not in it. That’s how things have affected us all over the years I guess.

As time went on, Alan became withdrawn from people and wanted to be on his own all the time, Mom was worried about him and he was eventually assessed by medical doctors who diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia in the1980s.

Alan wanted his own space because he too couldn’t stand the stressful environment of an overcrowded household. He would often come to see the family from time to time when he felt bored, but he soon went back to his own place after witnessing intense moments and arguments amongst us all, plus he couldn’t tolerate the smoky atmosphere caused by Mom’s cigarette smoking which he used to say always gave him a sore throat, plus he couldn’t tolerate the noisy arguments that erupted amongst the family members either. 

Our dad had a couple of heart attacks and was in hospital a few times, and then they moved him into a geriatric ward because Dad had seemed to have developed dementia and he would often lean to one side. We thought he may have had a stroke, but no one could figure it out. Dad was then later transferred to a care home near where we lived where he died on Sunday 17th May 1987 the age of seventy-seven of cerebral thrombosis and cerebral arteriosclerosis.

Dad was the seventh brother in his family and I remember someone from the care home came around to our house to inform us about Dad’s passing which happened to be around 7pm that night. I looked at those details and thought how strange that was for that date and time and his age to all be linked like that. Alan and I went around to the care home where they showed us Dad lying in his bed. I immediately broke down even though I tried to hold back my emotions, but I couldn’t. I quickly composed myself; Alan had tears in his eyes too and probably regretted all the anger that he gave Dad over the years.

Sometime later, Alan was placed on medication of injections for his severe depressive episodes when he had a relapse in his condition; we had to call the GP to see him from time to time because he would start acting strange. I remember one time we bought him some sweets, but then he would take a sweet out of the packet and start rubbing them along a wall where we sat. Then there was a time when we had to move out of our council house because we couldn’t stand the noisy neighbours who used to play their stereo full blast into the early hours every night. 

So we took sanctuary in a flat above our doctor’s surgery where he let us live there in order to get some peace and quiet.  As we all began to settle down to go to sleep one night, Alan had a manic episode where he had thrown his mattress down the stairs and he started ranting and raving about something, we were all in a state of shock and wondered what had happened to him. He settled down after a while when Mom and Ray calmed him by talking to him, but these moments caused Mom and all of us a lot of worry not knowing what he was going to do next. He was later sectioned in a mental hospital for a while at Highcroft hospital in Birmingham where he was given electric shock treatment, which in my opinion may have made him worse. His medication of tablets and injections calmed him down quite a bit, but also they made him rather tired too.

Alan would come out with strange comments like when he told my sister Helen stupid things like wash her clothes in a saucepan instead of using the washing machine to save money on the electricity bill.  We later found out from the staff at the mental health unit he was in, that he was making small fires in his living room to keep warm in order to save on the gas and electricity bills because he couldn’t afford to pay them. When my sister Helen took him shopping one time in her car, he would say scary things to her like, ‘Go on, put your foot down Helen, go faster, faster,’ and then Helen said he would pick out various individuals on the street as Helen was driving.

‘Look at that f******making his dog s*** on the grass,’ Alan aggressively yelled. It was these kinds of moments that frightened Helen and after that episode; she vowed never to take him again in her car. Apart from those issues happening in the family home, there were problems going on outside on the streets too.

We would often hear the roaring sounds of a police chase speeding up and down the main road in the middle of the night with their blue lights flashing; we could see the blue flashing lights through our thin bedroom curtains as we tried to sleep. The pitch blackness of the spooky looking park opposite our house even had two murders occur in there. Police helicopters would often hover overhead after midnight near our house patrolling the area; it was difficult to get any sleep. We were returning back home one night from being out all day just to avoid the nuisance neighbours when we noticed that all our house lights were all switched on.

We quickly pulled onto our driveway and rushed hastily to see what was going on, and we noticed a note stuck on the front door. It was a note from the West Midlands police to say that we had been burgled. This was our third burglary now. We were all trembling with shock as we looked around the ransacked house and the burglars even slashed our leather furniture. The bedroom drawers and built-in wardrobes had all the contents thrown across the floor which looked like a bomb had gone off. We hadn’t got anything valuable anyway, but the burglars thought we had I suppose. Its actions like this that makes you feel angry and bitter but also a fear that it could happen again. I was checking on my personal belongings to see if anything had been stolen and Ray and Wendy and Helen did the same too as Mom stood looking around not knowing what to do and beginning to get upset. I went into the kitchen to look for a broom and dustpan and brush when I noticed the back kitchen window had been broken where the burglars got in. So I cleaned up all that broken glass lying on the kitchen worktop and on the floor, but there was a terrible draught blowing through the broken window and I wanted to cover it up somehow temporarily until the police forensics arrived which won’t be for a few days, so I taped up some cardboard to cover the hole.

Mom, Ray, Wendy and Helen all ran out of the house and left me to clean up the house myself. They couldn’t stand to be in the house after that ordeal because they all felt afraid to be there, and yet we were all