The Story So Far

Epilogue So what’s the matter with you? Sing me something new Don’t you know, the cold and wind and rain don’t know They only seem to come and go away Stand by me Nobody knows the way it’s gonna be Stand by me Nobody knows the way it’s gonna be Stand by me Nobody knows the way it’s gonna be Stand By me – Oasis, 1997   Introduction Cursor flashing. Empty page. I stare at the screen as if I were staring into the abyss. It’s been this way for some time. For far too long. I know I need to write my story. I want to write my story. However, I have struggled to begin it for same the reason I struggle to blog. Or struggle to post regularly on social media. I consider myself a very private person. So a public outpouring goes completely against my character. I have to change this. Or this won’t get written. Why does my story need to be told? It needs to be told so that anyone, or a partner or friend of anyone going through some of the life experiences I have gone through, can learn or take something from my journey. It needs to be told so my family and friends have the full picture. They’ve supported me throughout, and I hope this fills in some gaps. Each time I have sat down to write I have found myself procrastinating, getting upset and stepping back from the computer. To bring myself back to the job at hand, I’d play a song. Music has always meant so much to me. From the age of seven or eight, safely hidden underneath my Dad’s antique oak desk in the hallway, attuned to the Eurovision winning pop whimsy of The Brotherhood of Man drifting through the draughty hallway from the radio in the kitchen, through to a lifetime of musical discovery, music has always been my accompaniment, my companion, my therapy. Every significant moment in my life, a song has always accompanied it. A lyric has articulated it. A singer has encapsulated it. And so to elucidate my scrambled, sometimes obfuscated memories of joy and pain (and sunshine and rain), I devised a playlist of key life events in my life. I immersed myself in each song, and as the memories came flooding back, I have tried to relay them here on paper. I’m hoping this will help me write my story. These words are my own*. Clive France, 2021 *Although I am humming the 2004 song from Natasha Bedingfield as I write that.

I’ve nothing much to offer
There’s nothing much to take
I’m an absolute beginner
But I’m absolutely sane
As long as we’re together
The rest can go to hell
I absolutely love you
But we’re absolute beginners
With eyes completely open
But nervous all the same

Absolute Beginners, David Bowie, 1986

I’m not sure where my need for privacy stems from, but it has clearly been a part of my personality for as long as I can remember.

As a child and teenager, I exuded varying levels of sometimes misplaced confidence. Misplaced as I had had a challenging upbringing. I should have been an unassuming and muted student, but instead I became a disruptive, loud and annoying child and teenager, eager to be heard, with scant regard for who I irritated. It was attention-seeking behaviour, and I have now come to realise it was also a counteraction to a sometimes challenging upbringing at home and being bullied at school.

Had social media been a part of my life back then, I often wonder if my need for privacy would have ever taken hold of me. I can easily imagine an alternative me pouring out my soul onto social media. Friending all and sundry. A far cry from how I manage my social media accounts today. Which is to largely avoid it.

In some ways, I am glad I didn’t have the stress of social media and the constant validation that teenagers seek from it, to contend with back then. It would have been all-consuming I am sure, and I can imagine I wouldn’t have benefited massively from it.

As I exited my teenage years, I set about changing myself. I knew I was broken. I knew I had to rebuild.

I grew up in several towns in-between London and Brighton – and although formative years were spent bouncing from one town to the next every four years or so, from about the age of eleven we settled in an affluent commuter belt town about thirty miles outside of London.

As one of two children from middle class, self-made parents, educated privately at school, on the surface I had little to complain about. I’m very grateful for the opportunities that my parents provided for, but rudderless and clueless, I scuppered my chances, and ultimately this was a deeply unhappy period in my life.

Leaving that school and moving on to college, life changed rapidly for the better. And with a modicum of maturity and a little increased self-awareness, I started to discover the person I could be.

Bizarrely, the first change was when I took myself off to my first haircut. I was sixteen. I wanted shot of my much ridiculed mop of hair. One might call it a bowl haircut. I had the lot lopped off, and I replaced it with effectively a crew cut, and a striking new look.

It was a turning point for me. So much so that I became obsessed with my hair. That something as simple as a haircut could affect my life in such a positive way seems almost too ridiculous to believe, but it was true.

With the new haircut, I needed new clothes. I took myself off to the shopping centre, purchased a couple of new tops of my own choosing. This was living!

It was the mid-eighties. Frankie was asking us to Relax, Lionel wanted to say Hello, and George was carelessly whispering for our aural pleasure. It was a golden time for pop, and Grandmaster Flash was making waves and that emerging hip hop scene was about to explode.

College nights down at the local disco , complete with a slow dance at the end, to try and get a snog in. With my new haircut, getting that snog wasn’t as elusive as it had been, and this is where I met my first proper girlfriend, and the six-month relationship (hey – at that age, that’s long term!) marked the beginning of my journey from adolescence into adulthood.

Through this period, I met my closest male friend, Patrick. Highly intelligent, fiercely loyal, wickedly funny and delightfully mischievous, we became as thick as thieves. He knows me better than almost anyone. He is my sounding board, my confidante, my devil’s advocate, and I’d be lost without him. His childhood was equally complex as mine, and without a doubt this bonded us together.

The need to share, the need to confide. The need for open discussion, the need for privacy. It’s the great dilemma of the early 2020s largely driven by social media. 

The confidentiality discussion with my partner Jane began in an Italian restaurant, in my current home city of Brisbane, Australia. 

The evening began as all our evenings began, with lots of conversation and laughter. She’s easy company, intelligent and compassionate.

The conversation turned to the latest issue that had been plaguing me since the toxic fallout of my marriage four years before.

My sixteen year old son, Henry, struggling with his workload at school, had recently taken a part time job at a well know burger joint. We had been encouraging him to get work through the holidays, but now we were back in the school term – he’d taken on multiple shifts during the week, which would mean finishing at 11pm, me picking him up at 11.20/11.30pm and that would mean he wouldn’t be getting to bed before midnight.

I had been clear before the term started, that he could work at the weekends, and maybe take one shift on during the week as long as it finished by 10pm.

But the week before he was to due come to me (I share the boys with my ex-wife – they are with me for one week, then with their her for one week) he emailed me details of the shifts he had accepted for the following week.

He’d agreed on four shifts on nights before school the next day, with three of them finishing past 11pm.

What then followed was a too-ing and fro-ing of text messages over the next few days, and a stubborn refusal on his part to change the shifts. 

I reached out to his mother by text. We were not on speaking terms. 

“I am having issues with Henry at the moment and McDonalds.

He has four late night shifts planned for next week, on nights before school, on my week, after I told him he could do one weekday shift as long as he his home by 10pm – and whatever he wants Friday to Sunday 5pm. I think this generous. I have been very clear about what he can and can’t do and he is defying that.

Three of these shifts would mean he’s not asleep til gone Midnight which is what has happened previously. 

I have told him he can’t do them, he’s refusing to budge. If he does that I may have to call McDonalds.

These are crucial years at school, he is tired, struggling with schoolwork and his interpersonal relationships, he’s getting into school late – his priority must be school not McDonalds.

What is your position please? No doubt he will have discussed this with you.”

As was often the case, I didn’t hear back.

I told Henry I would ring the branch if he didn’t comply, which I ended up doing (albeit simply to establish how he could go about changing those shifts) and still he refused.

I was to later learn that his mother supported him working those shifts, despite the fact that, when he was with her, he was often late to school as evidenced by numerous messages from the school, and the fact that, according to the school, he was struggling and would have to change his subjects or risk outright failure.

He was in the two final years of school – and he was going in late, tired, angry and was doing everything he practically could do to avoid doing any homework. He would complain when I pressed him about his homework – saying it is easier at his mother’s house as, “She is never there. Leaves early, comes back late.”

Something had to give. And he didn’t have long term plans to work at McDonalds, so surely school had to be the priority, right?

As always, I picked the boys up on the Sunday. He got in the car. He looked angry. The conversation quickly turned to McDonalds.

“No, I haven’t cancelled the shifts. In fact I have one tonight” he said indignantly.

A spirited conversation followed, and after we arrived back at my house, I left him there, as I wanted to avoid any further conflict. 

I would wait until he had left for the shift before I returned back to the house, to spend some time with my other son Zac.

With Henry at work, I reflected on the conversation. I also reflected on the fact that I still had his confiscated iPhone (he had broken it for the third or forth time, and I was insisting on it’s repair) and thus had no means of contacting him.

I got ready for bed, and tried to reassure myself that he’d be back and all would be well. I ruminated on my own youth and part time jobs at his age, and how I would get around at night without the luxury of a mobile phone – and we were OK, and he’d be OK on this one occasion too.

The clock turned midnight. Henry was not back. I checked the bus schedules. The last bus had finished for the night. 

No Henry in sight.

I put my clothes back on, and I ventured out into the night. I drove down the road from our house, which is a nine kilometre drive away from the centre of the city. I looked along the pathways to see if he had walked home. Nothing.

I get down into the city. Whilst Brisbane is a relatively safe city, it is still not without its social problems. As with anywhere these days, drink and drugs are an issue. I drive all over the city. I can’t find him anywhere. 

I am petrified. My heart is pounding. What have I done? Where is my boy? The boy I loved so dearly. The boy, who we had almost lost, at the age of one.

You got wires, goin’ in
You got wires, comin’ out of your skin
You got tears
Making tracks
I got tears
That are scared of the facts
Running down corridors
Through automatic doors
Got to get to you
Got to see this through
I see hope is here in a plastic box
I’ve seen Christmas lights reflect in your eyes

Wires, Athlete, 2005.

He was one. Henry had lived just one year on this planet. This little boy, usually a whirling dervish of exuberance, vibrancy and energy, now laden silently in my arms, sporting a febrile temperature, unknowingly teetering on life’s precipice. We just knew. We had to get him admitted to hospital. I stood before the Accident and Emergency desk at St Thomas’ hospital in Tooting, South West London. Yet again, we were about to be turned away, told to take him home and to treat with Paracetamol and Ibuprofen.

Not this time.

“You need to admit him. We’re not leaving.” I leant over the counter slightly as if to emphasise my words. “We are NOT leaving.”

We had been pushed from pillar to post, from hospital to doctor and back to hospital, and each time the advice had been the same. But he wasn’t right. He was staring blankly into space. The colour had drained from him. He’d had temperatures before. This time it was different.

They somewhat reluctantly agreed to admit him and as the process of admission began, Henry started to have a seizure in my arms.

I called for help, and people quickly started to assemble around us.

At that moment, his short life to date played out before me. Memories came flooding back, overwhelming so, interspersed with panic and noise as the medics determined what to do next.

The next few hours were terrifying, surreal and disorientating, and we ended up in Paediatric Intensive Care (PICU)

A specialist sat us down in a room and closed the door. It became clear this wasn’t going to be an easy discussion.

And without hesitation, we were told in a no nonsense fashion Henry had encephalitis, inflammation of the brain, and he was in a critical condition. He had a fifty per cent chance of survival. If he survived, there was no telling on how his life would be affected.

Our world was tumbling down around us. I held my wife’s hand and squeezed it. Her eyes, like mine, were bloodshot and tearful.

Our boy, our happy go lucky, sweetest boy, teetering precariously on the precipice between life and death.

Now:  Henry continued…

As each plate of perfectly presented and utterly delicious food arrived at our table at Marios that night, Jane and I continued to chat about Henry’s situation, and the best way to approach dealing with it.

She asked me how I was feeling about the situation with Henry. In truth I was devastated. But I understood the dynamics of what had happened.

I had driven around central Brisbane and he was nowhere to be seen. 

If somehow he had made his way home, I figured the first thing he would do would be to go on Instagram and Snapchat. So I pulled the car over to the side of the road, and opened up Instagram.

Sure enough, there is was – I have never been more grateful to see a green “Active now” status in my life. I was relieved. I fought back tears, as relief turned to frustration. And I still didn’t know where he was.

I’m 52 years old, chasing my sixteen year old around town, fighting cancer and undergoing chemotherapy, it’s half past midnight, and my son is scrolling through Instagram. 

I text him.

Me: “Where are you?”

Henry: “I am in the city.”

Henry: “I’m at Mums.”

Me: “Why?”

Henry: “Because. Didn’t Zac tell you?”

Me: “No why? I have been sick with worry I will pick you up, there in 2 mins.”

Henry: “No, I don’t want you too. What did you expect when you said I had to buy my own lunch, buy my own dinner, buy my own snacks, pay for phone bills and pay for everything when I have no money.  And when you said I have to find my way to places on my own when I cant even drive.”

Me: “Make your own lunch. Make your dinner. You keep telling me you are 16 and you can do whatever you like. But the fact is you are 16 and you can’t, and I was trying to illustrate that.”

Me: “Why did you not tell me where you were? I have been sick with worry.”

Henry: “Because i thought Zac would and you were out. Believe it or not I didn’t have a phone”

Me: “Zac didn’t say anything. What did you say to him?”

Henry: “I told him I’m  going to Moms”

Me: “Anyway I am here in Ashgrove. We can sort this out.”

Me: “Do you want to come home and talk this over? I love you.”

Henry: “I love you too but not tonight at least maybe. We need a bit of a break”

Me: “We just had a week! Anyway.”

And with that we left it there. March 1^st, 2021. I have just been blanked and dumped by my sixteen year old son.

Yes, it hurt. A lot. But I’m still so relieved he is safe. I make my way home. 

But I can’t sleep.

With each delectable morsel passing from plate to paunch, I reflected on the two weeks before.

With that last Instagram message I decided to give Henry the space that he needed. I knew his mother’s position on working during the week. We didn’t see eye to eye on this. We didn’t see eye to eye on anything. 

As far as I was concerned, due to the situation with his schooling, I really felt he shouldn’t be working late during the week before school – bar one shift – it was a non-negotiable. He needed the sleep.

But Henry clearly had other ideas, and backed up by his Mum he chose the path that best suited him needs. Arguing with him about it wasn’t working. He was right – it probably was good to have some space.

There was an exchange of texts between his mother and I a few days later, although it was largely unhelpful and as an advisor put it, “She’s just trying to rub your nose in it”, which or may not have been the truth.

What was true was that my happy-go-lucky Henry was at this point in time an angry and defiant sixteen year old craving autonomy and independence, perhaps trying to take control of his life, and I was going to have to take a different approach. 

My current mode of communication with him wasn’t working, and needed fixing.

At this moment my role as a parent to guide and discipline him had been completely redefined, and I was now very much on the back foot.

I sought the advice of specialists to determine if my position was fair. I was told that he needs his sleep – that there was no way he’d function properly working the hours he was proposing. 

Given that though, how could I get this boy back on side, without completely caving into his demands? How can we get through this phase, and both of us retain some integrity and respect in the process. 

Or was something else at play here?

Now: Jane – broken

From a mild mannered dispute over confidentiality on Saturday to full blown relationship break down just days later. A trip wire has been crossed in our relationship and it has set off a incendiary chain reaction of raw emotions, needless complications and questioning.

As a consequence, that light in my life is flickering, and I’m not sure I can resolve the problem, because I have become the problem. 

She’s had to deal with issues pertaining to my ex and my children, and my cancer. And her outlook about my cancer appears to have changed too. 

She gave me three of the best years of my life. And I am so grateful for that. 

Three years of love and laughter, music and light. 

We barely had any disputes (a total of four minor disagreements in three years), voices were never raised, heated arguments never happened. Our love was resplendent, pure and possessed of raw innocence. 

The greatest love of all, and I am privileged to have been a part of it.

I am lucky.

In might not look that way on paper, and writing this book has been traumatic at points to say the least. But, despite everything, despite all my many flaws, I have experienced life at it’s fullest.

Compartmentalising

Writing this memoir hasn’t come easy. I have procrastinated over several years about the right way to tell the story. I know in my heart of hearts that I _should_tell the story — for my children, other family members, friends; but especially for anyone that has gone through any aspect of what I have gone through. 

The process of unpicking the past I find to be confronting and unsettling. There are other things I’d rather be doing. Pretty much anything else.

One of the ways I have dealt with many aspects of what I have gone through is to compartmentalise my feelings. 

I can’t control what’s happening to me. But I can control how I manage what I think about it. And although I ruminate on my situation regularly, I refuse to let those feelings consume me. 

So, after a scan, regardless of the outcome, once I have digested the results and discussed what I need to discuss, I put everything back in the compartment and close it.  

That’s not to say the compartment is fully closed. A friend’s innocent enquiry as to my wellbeing for example can reopen that compartment as I am forced to confront my reality, but as the conversation fades, so that compartment is closed.

The compartment is metaphorical, yet in my mind’s eye it is literal. I visualise the compartment, the top shelf to the left of the hob in the kitchen. It’s a drawer with a lid, a perspex drawer. I can see the documents inside through the frosted panels. I slide open the drawer, put the documents inside and close it.

This form of visualisation was taught to me by a therapist when I was battling the after effects from my prostate cancer operation. It’s powerful and it works.

A newspaper article, a song on the radio, signage for a hospital — it doesn’t take much to reopen the compartment. I will allow myself to entertain those thoughts for a while too, but then the compartment is closed, and I turn my thoughts to other matters.

For what is the point of entertaining a cavalcade of never-ending worries, when there’s nothing you can do between now and your next appointment, other than following doctor’s orders, leading a healthy lifestyle and praying for better news?

Meditation and leg pain

Having grown up with a cynical disdain for anything relating to holistic mental health, it is amusing how much I now rely on meditation to keep my balances in check. 

Just before my marriage ended, I was exploring just about anything to rid myself of the persistent leg pain that was keeping me from sleeping each night. 

Nothing was off limits. I even revisited hypnotism in an attempt, perhaps, to reprogram my pain. I thought I was on to something, as I drifted off in one session, as the hypnotist took me further and further into her story. 

I realised later that I had simply fallen asleep, dozed off, due to years of sporadic lack of sleep. My body was giving in, the endless stamina I had once been blessed with, was now draining away, tested to its limit.

No, hypnotism wasn’t for me. 

And it wasn’t for me when I was something like twelve years of age, either, when, in an attempt to help me deal with the issues I was facing at school, I was taken (practically screaming and kicking) to a hypnotist just off Epsom Racecourse by my mother. 

I remember being sat in a fusty darkened room, with a blanket placed over me (I kicked it off) with a softly spoken gentlemen trying to hold my attention, to get me to focus on his words. 

I obstinately had other plans, and repeatedly told the man that the wrong person was seated in the chair and it was my mother who needed to by hypnotised, in order that she and my father could communicate better. 

From that point on I have actively avoided anything relating to mental health.

However, now as a forty nine-year-old, I was pursuing a significant number of alternative health rabbit holes regarding pain management, and somewhere along the way I found myself on the floor of a meditation and yoga centre.

It seemed to be a popular class, with a mixture of participants from all walks of life and some interesting characters abounding.

I lay down on the floor, and opened my mind to it. I had nothing to lose. They dimmed the lights.

We began with a body scan (which I would soon realise formed part of many a meditation session) and as my mind listened intently to the instructor, focussing attention to different sections of the body as we moved slowly from head to toes and then back again, I found myself relaxing, even enjoying the moment.

But it wasn’t until I stepped back outside into the golden glow of the setting sun, that I realised just how relaxed I was. For a moment, it seemed that I didn’t have a care in the world. 

I was calm, and I was happy.

And then I drove home. 

I planned to return, and soon. What I didn’t realise at that point, was how important and game-changing the process of meditation was to become to me.

Leaving home

I’d changed in my late teens, but I hadn’t changed enough. 

I knew it especially after a relationship ended in a fashion I am particularly not proud of. I was deeply in love for the first time in my life, it was an extraordinary, all consuming feeling that I had never experienced before, and she was the most delightful person without a bad bone in her body. I was only seventeen but I thought we’d be together forever. 

Yet, over a minor dispute, somehow a destructive streak in me snapped, ruined everything in the worst possible fashion and my relationship with her was rightfully but irretrievably over. 

I was pathetically indignant at the time, but it didn’t take me long to realise the mistakes that I had made, and that I needed to change.

That said, it took a couple of years before I hit twenty and realised what I needed to do. I had to get away. I had to get away to escape my current self, to reinvent, to become the person I needed to be. The person I could be. The person I should have been. 

I have done a fair bit of travelling over the years, but I was definitely more a short haul traveller, due to the logistics of running a business and needing to remain close to it.

As such I was a frequent visitor to Europe, taking full advantage of the boom in short-haul travel back through the nineties and into the noughties. The occasional visit to America, but not much further.

Australia had been fairly low down on my list of must-get-to places – simply due to the twenty-four plus flight to get there – so it was going to take something pretty special to get me down under…

We met at a mutual friends’ party in London. I was thirty-five at the time. As things started to develop she asked me to go with her to Australia for her thirtieth birthday.

I accepted the invitation and a month or two later I travelled out to Australia.

Following the disorientating flight, I was immediately whisked from the airport to her party in central Brisbane, on the river.

I’m not sure what I was expected from Australia – my familiarity with the place seemed to stem from the Aussies I knew in London, and from re-runs of Skippy, the Men at Work / Down Under music video, and Paul Hogan / Clive James / Dame Edna.

Having lived in places like Turkey and Spain, Australia seemed very familiar.

Many towns and streets were named after British towns and streets, although often the pronunciation left something to be desired.

For example one day I spied a town on the Gold Coast called Arundel. Now, I know Arundel in England – my parents live near there and it is a beautiful market town with a medieval castle.

At a function, I asked a local what Arundel was like. “Arundel?” he said. “Anyone heard of Arundel?”, he continued. The men around him look mystified until one piped up: “Arundel? Awwwww – you mean “Ah-Raaann-dull”. It seemed my pronunciation left something to be desired.

But despite the bastardisation of town names, everything else I encountered seemed very familiar, and for want of a better word – very “liveable”.

To be continued.