A Step Too Far

Chapter 1

Survive by Facing Reality

There are many stories of love and hate in this world, old stories wherein the two emotions seem as inevitable as gravity itself. Gravity appears to both love us and hate us and we have never really fathomed why this is. None of us knows exactly why this force of nature supports us and holds us to her heart with intense power but also pulverises and grinds us to dust on deciding when our time is over. We are slaves to these forces and this is a story about two such enslaved beings – a story about how love can uplift us and set us free and how, just as often, an equal force of hate will attempt to destroy us. If we have one of these passions in our life, we cannot live without experiencing the other. This is the knowledge of those who have lived, loved and hated in equal measure.

Alicia Millward was not an easy victim for any persecutor, whatever their purpose or calling. Difficult her childhood may have been from her birth in 1953, but she had found ways to wrestle with this. Nobody, she had decided, would take her peace of mind away from her. She could face down all that existence can give in terms of challenge – the kind of challenges that we all must stand up to in this world: the bank manager, the weather, the clock, ‘weight management’, men who fell in love with her and men who fell out of love with her. Her decision, her vow to stay always and fight with an honest fist, had been made at around the age of ten when, in an empty classroom all on her own with no witness, she had accidentally knocked a bottle of ink – a whole new fresh bottle of ink – all over the desk of her French teacher. Black ink, particularly destructive on paper if unguided. After an initial panic she decided the best policy was to own up even though nobody had seen what had happened. She could have got away with it, but she sought out the teacher concerned, explained her accident and fortunately for her she was met not only with understanding but with praise for her honesty and a request that the child’s explanation be repeated in French for good measure. The teacher would never know the lifelong consequences of her response to the child, although teachers should really realise the impact of their words. As a result, Alicia vowed always to tell the truth and face down threatening events. If only human beings understood the impact of their vows on their brains; they would understand themselves so much better. Alicia had not realised that, from that moment, she would be that person with that intention for the rest of her life through good and bad.

She had other good qualifications that might have helped with her competence – a degree in business management and a professional status in accountancy. Yes, that kind of qualification, but those certificates mean little really in terms of overcoming the challenges of life. As her family were poor both in their bank account and in group imagination, she worked her way through university without support. There then followed an apprenticeship during which she discovered another truth about life: ‘Work hard and conscientiously at anything and you will get results, if only in terms of your pay packet.’

If you come from a working-class family, you learn either that hard work will set you free if you become accomplished or that it will keep you a slave for the rest of your life. Her working-class credentials ensured that she ticked two boxes relating to survival. First, the achievement of financial independence through hard work and diligence, and second, the attainment of some status through a good profession. Status and profession, she knew, were what make us think we are protected just a little from the ravages of real life. In fact, they are but fragile defences that would not protect her from the unimaginable events of her later life.

But, as a young woman, she had preparedness for the real challenges of life: the everyday challenges for which she had qualifications in what we might call emotional resilience, and her particular badge of honour was ‘managing difficult people’. Yes, she could do this. This was not learned from a book but from experience and learned from a very early age, perhaps the cradle.

What does a baby do when a mother is hostile to their needs? They learn to keep quiet and wait. This can breed great anxiety or enormous patience depending on which way you look at the event. In her case, she had both – deep-seated and well disguised anxiety combined with an incredible ability to wait until she was old enough to look after herself so that no one ever again would be responsible for her needs except for her. There was little point in demonstrating too much anxiety, for as far as she was concerned those states all had to be kept under control. And what, then, does a toddler do when a parent wishes they would go away, just at a point when the child is most energetic and inquisitive and wants to explore their world? They become either naughty to gain attention or they learn to co-operate. In this case the girl learned to co-operate in order to gain the maximum approval from the scornful woman she was tied to for love, otherwise known as her mother.

You might have called her lucky, but Alicia Millward would have challenged you on this. She had a philosophical view of luck: ‘You make your own luck in this world.’ You can line up events so that they work in your favour and still something can come along when you don’t notice and knock you down, and yet at the same time a chain of events may smooth your pathway to success. Was it God, she wondered, or a special event called luck? Or was hope what we are all really seeking rather than luck? Raised as a Catholic, there was definitely a God in place in her mind, but education got in the way of this and a module on evolution in her first-year options at university made her consider the idea that the whole of existence was up for grabs and had a will of its own that was not necessarily divine or benign, and this became one of the more anxiety-provoking realisations of her life. She concluded in the end, though, that she was open to the possibility that there may be a God.

The woman we find in this story is a woman willing to face reality, accept what life brings to her door and manage the unknown with the knowledge that one should be hopeful, while at the same time not surprised by the unexpected onslaught of difficulty. This position brought her strength and informed her reactions to life, and such was the state of her mind as she comes into our story at the age of thirty-seven, divorced, without children, in control and believing in prayer and hard work as being the major forces for coping. One may think that Alicia would be impossible to knock off her feet, but we will see how her strategy works out as she meets a challenge more unfair and unreasonable than anyone of her design should ever have to meet.

Or was it? Maybe she deserved what she got … Was it fate in the workings of her unconscious mind replicating the threat in the form of a young man who would want her dead? Or was it more likely due to the presence of the older man she was about to meet and fall in love with for the rest of her life?

Chapter 2

Survive by Avoiding Reality

If you want to understand the life philosophy of Charles Bradshaw, Alicia’s second husband, then think of Mr Darcy …yes, Mr Darcy, the aloof romantic hero of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Like Charles Bradshaw he was a noble character at heart. Like Alicia, by the formative age of fourteen in 1956 Charles had made the vow that would carry him through life, and the vow was that he would behave as would a hero in all matters that came before him.

This idea was especially put to the test when the boys at school bullied him, often via boxing matches in the playground that usually ended up with Charles’s nose being bloodied: a sign of the hero that he would one day become. ‘Valiant’ is the word, the word that describes our man with the intention to be the hero, to put things right, to get on in life by being jolly decent.

Luckily, our putative hero also had the good sense to keep secrets. The major secret that he kept from the bullies was that his favourite thing to do in the whole world was to go to the stables and help a stable girl with whom he was in love. His mother wondered where he was going after tea so quickly in the summer evenings. He had an unquestioning affinity with horses and the animals returned his connection to them with abiding obedience and understanding. He was never once thrown off a horse and they always stepped aside when he was mucking out their stables. This was where his Herculean intention in life was realised – he could be the genteel hero, and all was well in the world in the stables.

The smells uplifted him, the sweet musky hay, the soft oats, the smell of leather and polish. In addition to which, he was paid some very charming attention by this fourteen-year-old stable girl who was enormously sweet to him. She rather saw him as her little pet. She liked his soft horse-brown eyes that peered out at her from under his schoolboy fringe. He would do absolutely anything she asked of him – even the beastly jobs like wheel-barrowing horse dung down to the steaming dung heap in the heat of summer.

His faithful and unquestioning loyalty to her (loyalty being another of his heroic traits) was rewarded by smiles, soft gazes and more work to do. His world was complete. This was someone who showed him affection and was kind to him. And this girl’s name? Alicia! The same name as that of his future partner. He would repeat it softly to himself as he walked to the stables and told himself he would never forget her. Alicia was scored into his brain and everything he did at that time was for her. Thinking of her even helped him to endure the beatings and humiliations at school.

Since he loved the stable and horses and Alicia so much you might understand why his future in the insurance industry did not immediately feel like home to him. But, being one to accept and settle, he soon made a good living from his work. Since he had loved Alicia the stable girl you might also wonder why he married June, who did not like horses and possibly did not even like Charles very much if she was honest. In fact, June was never honest with the most important person in her world, and that was herself.

But Charles was happy in the year that he met June. He had been travelling with his friends across Europe and Iran to India and Tibet, stopping to wonder at Everest and every day breathing in the elixir of just being alive. At the age of twenty-eight, in 1970, all his adventures came to an end when he returned home to England for a visit and was prompted by family and friends to think about settling down and getting married. This was his moment of truth with the call of the wild about to be taken from his hands. Would he stay, or would he go? Now, he was a fully-fledged adult, a man in his own right – quite tough but still quite tender – the man he wanted to be at this stage in his life. And so he stayed and re-established his role in insurance.

The adventure was over, and so the vivid and colourful pictures of his life of freedom – Tibet, Everest, Iran and India – gathered dust in the loft of the home that he bought with his wife June, as they began to raise their children. The colours of his life, his youth and his mythic dream were locked away in boxes in their loft. He would not find them again for years. The gold, lilac, saffron, and the brilliant sunshine of his travels, the pungent smells and the daily adventures were ended, and he resigned himself to marriage to someone he was not sure he loved and a career that he was not sure he enjoyed but at which he was at least prospering. Charles quietly forgot for nearly fifteen years until he met the woman who would bring the joy back to his life. Then, his endurance would be stretched much further than his early travels had demanded of him, and he would be forced to find that rarest of traits: the courage that rises in maturity out of the dream of adolescent heroism.

Chapter 3

Evolution of a Stepson – Freddie

Bradshaw – Born, 1976

The problems with Freddie Bradshaw, son of Charles and June, were many years in the making. He was their long-awaited child, cherished and adored by his mother, yet eventually avoided and abandoned by his father. His was a personality forged on the fire of love and fear, just as his future stepmother, Alicia’s, had been. Yet many facets to his being were the polar-opposite to hers, based more on privilege and over-indulgence than on deprivation.

The very great entitlement that this boy had in his life was that his mother had thought that he was a ‘King’, and he would remain a King in his own mind for his whole life as well as hers. As with most formative life experiences, as he grew older this mistaken projection of supremacy was a double-edged sword. He just could not understand why others did not think and realise he was also an entitled being, just as his mother had demonstrated to him every day of his life. So, long before Alicia Millward came on the scene as his stepmother there was a problem evolving. Freddie’s construction was essentially tied to the personality traits of both his mother and his father, and we must go back to the relationship between the two of them to really understand the pathway and temperament of the child they raised together and to understand why he was not actually the person he had been led to believe he could be.

June had met Charles when he was twenty-eight and decided that he was the man for her. She was not by any means a good temperamental or even intellectual match for him. Her family were country people from the Somerset Levels living in the market town of Blessingham situated twenty miles from the county town of Taunton. The beautiful, rich and accessible land was subject to flooding due to its remarkably level terrain. Although at times disastrous to the generations who lived there, this ever-present hazard made the area uniquely fertile for farmland.

People had traded in the town with arable and animal agriculture – particularly wool, sheep, fruit and corn – for more than ten centuries and now Blessingham was a bustling market town with a population of around 30,000, hosting shops, offices, schools and amenities for the local community yet still surrounded by acres of flattened unspoiled landscape and endless waterways. The town was home to families across the social spectrum, with the unique status of serving many farming families, blue-collar workers, landed gentry and a smattering of the glitterati who escaped from London at weekends to their country retreats, as well as families living on social benefits and scraping together an existence. Much work was created by the farmers who inhabited the area. The Somerset Levels are just another example of the polarities of nature and the aforementioned forces of gravity, producing opportunity as well as great risk.

Charles had not chosen his own career and he had not really chosen his wife. She had chosen for him. He had wanted to farm and felt a deep affinity for the land, but he had been overruled by his father who threw him from public school into work in insurance. His marriage to June evolved in a similar fashion: she came along and pretty well threw him into wedlock with her. She had seemed nice enough but there was a fatal flaw in their chemistry, a fault line that would eventually crack, and this was the shocking differential in their deepest responses to being alive. Charles valued peace, quiet and the respectful gentlemanly pleasantries in life. He loved art and music and was deeply sensitive to others. Quite like his royal counterpart Prince Charles born the same year he was a sensitive gentleman, and perhaps his own parents had unconsciously named and therefore aligned him with the Prince as many parents do in Great Britain. Like Prince Charles, Charles Bradshaw was not happy at school and needed more love and affection in his life, whereas June was a sturdy character and made of altogether tougher material. She was both vivacious, pleasant enough and engaged enough with life to make her very appealing, but she was also limited by a mind that was unimaginative and which simply did not see far enough into the future. This difference accounted for many unreachable differences between them, especially in the raising of their child. If Charles argued that the child was being spoilt by doing and getting everything that he wanted, June would argue passionately that he was only young and did not fully understand things yet.

Charles’s first real puzzlement and consternation with his child was when he, at the age of three, felt perfectly free to urinate behind the settee. All fair enough as a childish experiment and pushing of limits and boundaries, but guidance should have been given to get the behaviour on track. His mother, though, saw it as a creative act after which she was perfectly happy to clear up. By the age of five Freddie thought he could pee wherever he wanted, and could not understand why he was told off with great haste when demonstrating this at his school by urinating in the sink instead of the lavatory and encouraging his little classmates to do the same. Clearly a problem was emerging, and these were the early telltale signs that a child might have been affected by a mother’s obsessive love and a father’s ineffectiveness.

Initially, June was not without the capacity to enchant her man. She was petite, charismatic, and powerful in her self-belief, and in the early stages of their relationship her vibrancy and youthful enthusiasm were a panacea to Charles’s natural tendency to despondency. She gave him hope, and in the early days of their relationship that was fatally attractive. As time went by the hope that she inspired was maladjusted to become a kind of prison in which he entombed himself. When baby Freddie was born they had already begun to establish this pattern of relating, with Charles relatively withdrawn into himself and June taking charge and running their family show.

Twelve years later these opposing forces would prove to be the catalyst for a divorce, throughout which June would never cease to battle for her right to keep her man, and by which means Charles just had to remove himself from the relationship, otherwise he felt he would quite literally hang himself. His parents could see this despair in his life and they wanted him to leave June as quickly as possible. Tough as they had been as parents in his childhood, they deeply loved their son and were more sensitive in their old age as they watched the story, and its inevitable outcome, unfold over the years. The coup de grâce was that June was an only child and had never really separated herself from her parental apron strings. Charles had been made to feel as if he lived in his home with her parents, to whom she remained invisibly bonded – they may as well have moved into Charles and June’s home with them. As the iconic first wife of his royal counterpart, Prince Charles, had once declared to the world: ‘There were three of us in this marriage,’ Charles’s quieter moments revealed to him that there were ‘four of us in this marriage’, the other three being his wife and her parents. They just would not distance themselves from June’s life, and to prove this they moved to a cottage only one hundred yards down the road from their daughter so that they could help out when she finally gave birth to her extra special firstborn. Charles became the spare part to her family, who all thought ill of him. His strategy for peace and avoidance of conflict gained him no respect, and he quietly lost his footing in his marriage completely.

It is not surprising, then, that his son Freddie also grew up to disregard his father and have little respect for him. There was little in his environment that advised him otherwise, but some of the reasons for this were of Charles’s own making. He survived in the relationship by doing what his wife wanted him to do: earning the money, driving her to the shops, paying for Freddie’s expensive private school and taking them on holiday. He would do all of these things without question, wishing to please and keep a smile on her face, to maintain the illusion that the marriage was working. Unhappy as he was, his abiding principle was that he just could not fail at marriage. That would be too much shame and disillusionment for him to bear.

He told himself that he was willing to tolerate anything – even when she began bullying him into submission and treating him with disdain. When Charles adopted the role of the family butler, the child knew no different. His father had become a servant to mother and child, and within a very few months of the child’s birth, mother and son had become the primary unit – a love affair had emerged: ‘There were three of them in this marriage and the doting grandparents made five.’ Charles tried to hold on to each passing day as it came, but he gradually came to reject Freddie, and the child knew it and felt it.

June was thriving – and why not? She had everything she wanted in life. They had managed to buy their own home through a generous donation from the out-laws, which Charles had not wanted to accept. But accept it he had, and this weakness moved them forward so that the Little King could be born into a home that was owned rather than rented. She did not have to work and could remain at home doting on her child twenty-four hours a day. Her glory was in motherhood and to her, she may as well have been local royalty as she took her baby in his pram down the high street of Blessingham. She knew all the shopkeepers and local people by name, and they had known her from childhood. Her perambulation to town would make her day. A trip to the shops where everyone would recognise that she was the mother of a baby boy who was perfect and beautiful was all she required to feel perfect herself. She spent her days in a reverie of maternal joy and the glory of her unique child was reflected to her. As far as she was concerned she had made it. Everything was in place in her life. All the building blocks were there. She would live as local people did, just as her parents had done in this farming community. All of this was as normal to her and as inevitable as the passing of time, and the geological and geographical processes that formed the Somerset countryside and laid it flat, making a natural pathway for water to flow.

Chapter 4

Who Is Watching You

Their struggle was recorded by the octogenarian Gwen Knight, living five doors down from the Bradshaw household on the opposite side of the road. Gwen was enjoying the prospect of her morning tea with her closest companion, Abigail Farley, one day as she held forth on her opinion. They would frequently observe the mother and son going by on their trips into town, and as the child grew older their trips to the park, the toddler group, and then the posh private infants’ school.

Gwen was fully retired and able to observe and scrutinise life to the full without the necessity of holding back on her thoughts any longer. She was both wily and wise and, even though she had no children of her own, spotted very soon that this Bradshaw child was out of control, and considered that the mother ‘completely ruined him’.

She chattered to Abigail as she wheeled in their tea and biscuits on the tea trolley. They sat in the front room looking out of the window, which had a panoramic view of the road from one end to the other. To the left the road led to a small housing estate; to the right it led to a small T-junction.

When they reached the T-junction, Gwen could see whether the inhabitants turned right to go into town, or turned left to the rough track that could reach the river that flowed on through the countryside. She knew the river well – the River Exe, heading from a stream in the tiny village of Simonsbath, babbled through the county of Somerset and then expanded massively into the adjoining county of Devon and out to sea via the Exe estuary at Exmouth.

Gwen joked to Abigail that being in her lounge was like being at the cinema. But watching was much more than a hobby for them both. Even after Abigail went home Gwen would resume her afternoon shift and keep her seat late into the night. Abigail, being more inclined to record information following a lifetime as a secretary, took things a step further and really did keep a diary of the small daily events that they observed and discussed. No subject was too sacred between these two well-practised custodians of Blessingham life. Although they were invisible except to the very few, they felt this cloak of invisibility only added to the importance of the role they had carved out for themselves. In this world, Gwen and Abigail felt no despair at all at the limitations of old age. Together they had uncovered and developed the gift of quiet watching and waiting which is silently bequeathed to the elderly. They may have looked like two vacant old women staring from the window and gossiping, but they were far from this.

The two veterans had uncovered together one of the secrets of life itself: that it never actually comes to a halt and that it continues for ever, like their gossip and the River Exe. As a result, these ladies felt they had found their purpose. Their watching was their art form and their goal was to consider the implications of the universal forces unfolding through the small events that they saw through Gwen’s window. They were devoted to their task and to each other. Together they were strong as they chattered, bantered and considered. They concluded that their importance to life was not over. They were the sisterhood of hope. Ordinary they may have looked, but few knew what Gwen and Abigail knew by now.

‘There she is with that little horror,’ Gwen said. ‘Do you know, I saw him pull up flowers in the park the other day and it was so obvious that he needed to be told off. Instead, she thanked him. Abigail, how wrong can a mother be in spoiling a child? I swear that one will end up in borstal. I can see exactly where he’s heading.’

‘Two sugars, Gwen. And a little extra – I need it today, and have you noticed that the child has a big head?’ Abigail dunked her biscuit in her tea as she considered the matter and blurted out her unedited thoughts as one can only do with an old friend.

‘What? Literally?’ Gwen gave her three sugars, knowing that this was what she really meant when she said she needed more.

‘Well, yes, literally he has quite a big head, but I mean in his personality. He’s only four and it’s as if he is the boss of everything. It’s a most unattractive quality in a child. My children knew where they were in life. I think it makes them happier. Speaking of unattractive, I also think he looks odd.’ Abigail half meant what she said and realised that her words sounded unkind, but she did find him a very unappealing little boy, and she considered this uneasy feeling.

‘How do you mean?’ Gwen wasn’t sure whether Abigail was going to make a joke or not.

‘Like he’s possessed.’ Abigail finally blurted out the words.

‘Oh, I see,’ said Gwen. ‘Well, I’ve not had children of my own, but I’ve seen enough in my time and looked after enough. Pass the biscuits, dear, I really want to try those peanut cookies, as they’re called; they look much more interesting than digestives, though why we have to start calling them cookies, I don’t know – peanut biscuits will do nicely.’

Gwen sipped her tea and crunched her biscuit, enjoying the new taste of peanut which she thought was very agreeable.

‘How is it that you eat so many biscuits and still remain stick-thin while I am most careful about how many I eat and look as if I eat cake all day?’ said Abigail. ‘I just cannot eat another one but would love another tea from the pot … two sugars again, dear … don’t skimp.’

Gwen knew that Abigail was only half-joking when she made observations about Freddie and the way he looked. All the same, she went back in her mind to see if she had seen signs of demonic possession in Freddie when she had watched him over the previous weeks. She had not thought of that before. It was a sad indictment of a child that two women should be joking about him in this way, but his behaviour was noticeably out of the ordinary. Despite not having had children of her own, somehow, she knew this little boy’s behaviour was a problem for his parents.

Gwen knew about relationships and knew about people. Of the two friends she was the more dominant and sure-footed. She had worked her whole life in service as a housekeeper and she understood how to read someone from the way they looked. When you always lived and worked in other people’s houses you had to learn to do this for your own security. You had to notice the climate around people and make predictions about what was going on in their minds. Gwen had been so good at this that her employer, Captain Shields, in his dying days had bequeathed her his home for all the hours of mind-reading she had offered to him. This was a gift for the dedicated care and patience she had shown him; he was grateful for her simple human kindness that turned his slow demise into a more comfortable experience and gave meaning to his days in the departure lounge of life. He returned to her the great gift she had given him. The difference in their social standing became irrelevant to him. He had been a handsome, cultured man with status and money and she had been a plain and sensible woman who apparently only understood housekeeping. But he admired her with a passion for her capability and enduring practicality that made his life so ordered following the death of his wife.

They chatted daily, and he came to understand that her housekeeping had taught her science, and that her observation of people was the study of psychology, and that her nursing and care had the skill of any professional medic. There was nothing ordinary about her at all. She became his muse and object of fascination in the life that was left in him. Her care for him was an act of devotion in which she took great pleasure, and which gave her purpose. The act of giving fulfilled her lifelong ambition to serve others to perfection. As he became more ill she cared for him as if he were her child, and her importance to him increased beyond measure. He wanted to give her something for the immense love and loyalty she had shown him. So he left her his home and, with this great gift, his heart. The house became a monument to the devotional love that had flowed between them. She was always grateful for this act of generosity that so handsomely repaid her for years of service, but which gave her also an abiding sense of the something wonderful that had quietly passed between them unspoken, daily.

So,