The Times They Are A-Changin’

September is always a time of reflection for me. As the summer draws to a close, I ready myself for the chilly mornings and start to bunker in for what I hope won’t be a long and hard winter. My summer clothes get packed away and my summer memories with them; fun times with family and with friends, Shakespeare in the park, road trips, blueberry picking, cold beers enjoyed on hot and sticky evenings.

I also find myself thinking about other Septembers from years past. In the UK, school starts in the first week of September, and so I have very clear memories of key transitional years. In September 1972, after leaving my warm and nurturing junior school at the beginning of the summer, I moved to the local comprehensive. There,  my hopes, dreams and aspirations were almost crushed. Bullying was the norm at that school, and I was an easy target. My life was made a living hell,  and after my parents complained to the school, the headmaster’s downplaying of the situation and chronic mishandling only made it worse.

After 5 years that could not pass quickly enough for me, I changed schools again, and in September 1977, moved to the local Sixth Form. This was the school that my brothers had both attended, the school that had filled their heads with knowledge and shaped them both into confident and capable young men. I quickly realized that I was far behind my peers, and was frustrated at the five years I’d wasted. I tried to catch up, but the situation felt hopeless.  Outside of school, other events were about to overtake me and my family. My mother had had her gall bladder removed in the summer of 1973, and they’d found that her liver was damaged. She was of that generation of women that were treated for depression (after a triple whammy of her mother dying, a late-term miscarriage and a slipped disc that left her in a lot of pain) with ‘happy’ pills (Librium, Nobrium, and Valium). They were considered miracle pills back then, and when my mum told her doctor about the side-effects she was experiencing, he diagnosed ‘nervous stomach’ and increased the dose. What no-one knew at the time was that my mum was slowly being poisoned, and that by the time of her surgery 10 years later, they found she had cirrhosis of the liver. In September 1977, we didn’t know it, but her liver was starting to fail. It was picked up at her routine check up at Hampstead Royal Free early the following year, and within 3 months she was dead.

On Sunday, September 30th, 1979, I started the next chapter of my life, when I went to college. I found it hard to leave my dad on his own, and had talked about putting it off for a year, or not going at all. I don’t think that I was really serious, but we were both still healing, and I was really worried about him taking care of himself. After my mum died, he threw himself into his work, and I threw myself into anything that would stop the pain. We found it hard to talk to one another, each of us nursing our own private grief. As he dropped me off at Brinsford Lodge (a series of prefabricated buildings in the middle of nowhere, that served as student accommodation for Wolverhampton Polytechnic), we were both crying when we said our goodbyes.

Fast forward to September 1993, and we celebrated my dad’s 68th birthday and mourned his passing just 8 days later. He’d been diagnosed with kidney cancer 2 years earlier, and  they’d originally thought that the tumor was fully contained in  one of his kidneys. ‘Remove the kidney, remove the cancer’, they’d said, but things didn’t turn out so straightforward, and he almost on the operating table. They told us that he had 2 weeks to live, and I completely reorganized my life around that. He was moved to the local hospice, and thanks to an understanding boss, I started working out of an ICI facility that was 20 miles from him. At the hospice, he stabilized. The two weeks he was given turned out to be almost 2.5 years, and looking back, his quality of life was good. He’d been pushed into early retirement at 62, and I think that was when everyone realized that after my mother’s death, his work had become almost his entire life. Now, as the hospice managed his pain and got him strong enough to return home, his life became fuller again. Both me and my brother John carried on as if that two weeks was all we were going to get, so every weekend one or both of us (and our families) made the trek to Derbyshire to see him. I’d moved to South Wales in 1991, but I’d make that 320 mile round trip twice a week. When my dad died, my world fell apart. I’d been pushing myself hard for 2 years, and it was as if the music suddenly stopped and I crashed to the floor. Looking back, I think I had a nervous breakdown, but rather than seeking help, I did that ‘stiff upper lip’ thing and bottled it all up. It took me a long time to come to term with my dad’s death, and what helped me immensely was writing about my feelings. Our Last Conversation was something I wrote in 1996, but I remember reliving those moments as if they’d been the previous day.

In September 1995, I moved to the US. After DuPont had acquired ICI FIbres, I’d worked to bring the two company’s manufacturing systems together. My work had been noticed in the US, and I was asked to lead a global project, doing the same thing for all DuPont Nylon’s plants across 5 continents. For 18 months, I’d visited the US every 6 weeks, and as the project came to an end in the summer of 1995, I’d cashed in all of my frequent flier miles and flew my family over for a ‘once in a lifetime’ vacation. After a 3,000 mile road trip, we called back in Wilmington for a couple of days before heading home, and that was when we were given the opportunity to relocate. I was given just 6 weeks to get home, get my work visa and get back to the US. We talked about it as a family, and decided that this was a great chance to start over, and open up a new chapter in our life. As it turned out, it was the beginning of the end of our life together, and in less than 2 years, my wife and daughter had returned to the UK.

In September 2001, I returned to the UK to finalize my divorce. On September 10th, there was a boozy reunion in Chesterfield, and after a very late night, September 11th got off to a slow start. All of the revellers met up at a local ‘greasy spoon’ for a ‘full English’ breakfast, and I slowly started to feel less fragile. I was staying with a friend, and we spent the day chatting about old times, and were oblivious to the news.  Mid afternoon, we went off to pick up his son from school, and as we stood in the school yard, we overheard people talking about what had just happened in New York. No-one there knew that the South Tower had collapsed at that point, or that the North Tower would follow it just 29 minutes later.  I numbly kissed and hugged my friends goodbye, and started to drive to Gloucester. It was when that I heard that the second tower had collapsed, that I pulled over to the side of the road. I didn’t want to be on my own that night, and I was frustrated that I’d not been able to reach my friends in New York. I thumbed through my address book, and found Stephen’s number. He answered the phone on the 2nd ring, and I could hear the TV in the background. He was working from home that day, and when he learned that I was in the UK, he invited me over before I had a chance to ask. He met me at the door with a glass of whisky, and we sat in front of his TV and watched the world change before our eyes. It was late when we went to bed, and only after we drained the last of the bottle.

The drive to Gloucester the following morning was a blur, as were the court proceedings. It was only when the magistrate announced that our paperwork wasn’t in order, and that we’d have to apply for another court date, that I woke up. I blurted out that I lived in the US, that I didn’t want to have to make any unnecessary trans-Atlantic trips given the circumstances, and asked if there was any other way that we could resolve things. He seemed to think for a minute, and then said that if we could get the paperwork completed in the next 90 minutes, we could come back at the end of the morning session and he would grant our divorce. We nodded, and like a scene from The Great Adventure, we dashed out of the courtroom, criss-crossing the city to get papers stamped and forms completed. We made it with minutes to spare, and after reviewing the documents, our 20 year marriage was over.  That afternoon, I drove to London to be with my brother and his family, and no house ever felt more inviting. I was supposed to be on an early flight the following day, but all flights were grounded for a few days. Each day, I’d call British Airways, and each day they’d tell me to call again the following day. Finally, they told me ‘Yes, flights are operational and your seat is confirmed’. Before hanging up, I thought to ask if there were people trying to get back to their families in the US. “Yes”, they replied. “Can you give my seat to one of them?”, I asked. “Yes”, they said.. “thank you”. “No, thank you”, I replied. It meant that I was able to stay with my family, where I felt safe. I ended up doing that 3 more  times, before I returned to the US.