Tag: England

Posted on

Dark, by Gillian

I grew up in the dark. Quite literally. And yes, here we go again, back to the England of World War Two. (Pause for communal groan.) Born in 1942, I was three when the war ended and, along with it, the blackout regulations. So for the first three years of my life I truly had no experience, nor even concept, of artificial lights shining through the darkness outside. Every window of every single building, no matter it’s use, had to be completely covered in thick, black, material. If the tiniest chink of light showed through, one of the blackout wardens who roamed the dark streets would very shortly be banging on the door. For many people it was almost impossible to go through this entire process every evening as darkness began to descend, so they simply didn’t bother. Their windows remained covered, 24/7 as we’d say these days, for the duration of the war. I certainly don’t remember any of our upstairs windows ever being uncovered, though we had one window in the living-room which my dad relieved of it’s burden every morning before he left for work.

Equally needing to save their energy for all the other things demanded of them, shopkeepers often failed to remove much of the blackout covers when they opened their shops in the morning. They frequently had very little to sell anyway, so what did it matter? My very early memories of shopping with my mother provide vague glimpses of standing in line for what seemed to me to be the entire day, frequently – of course – in the rain. Finally gaining access beyond the dark doorway, we were encompassed in a cold gray gloom not much different from that outside. At least it was out of the rain, but as everyone in the crowded room was dripping water down onto the little toddler me, my environment seemed to have changed remarkably little. I would peer about me as my mother did, though I’m sure I had no idea what I was looking for.

“No bread today?” Mum gazed longingly at the rows of empty shelves behind the counter.

The exhausted-looking woman at the till shook her head.

“Just sold the last one Luv, sorry. Out of flour now so God knows when I’ll have more.

And so the dark days days went by.

Because of Dad’s war work we lived fairly close to London at that time, but London was as dark, or probably from necessity even darker, than our nearby town. There was very little civilian traffic at the time, but all vehicles – military or not – was made to have all lights covered or painted black. This made what traffic there was, and the streets and roads themselves, extremely hazardous. In fact, at first more people were dying from traffic accidents than were being killed by the enemy. In the first month of The War alone, there had been 1130 road deaths attributed to the blackout.* The whole of Britain, at that time, was a very, very, dark place.

The War over, we were free to move as needed. My father felt obligated to move us in with his aging parents to help care for them, and so we landed in a remote sheep-farming part of the west of England. All national improvements had been delayed for years by The War, the preceding years of preparation for it, and the recovery from it. Our new home, like all those for many miles around it, had no running water and no gas or electricity. Artificial light came in the form of candles and ancient oil lamps. We had flashlights but batteries were strictly rationed and hard to come by so mostly they were useless. We might as well have remained in the blackout. Inside, the house was cold and dark and silent. Outside after dark there were no lights from neighboring windows to help guide your footsteps, and certainly no street lights. Well, there were no streets, just a quiet winding country road. I fell quite often while scurrying to the little shed at the far end of the garden in the middle of the night, especially if I had waited a little too long and was really having to hurry.

This darkness never bothered me. I loved living there. I don’t remember exactly but I think I was in high-school by the time we got indoor plumbing and electricity. My dad never once as far as I know, deigned to use the new indoor toilet. Neither of them liked the electric lights, which Mum described as “much too harsh and glaring”. She, an avid reader, was quickly seduced, however, by the length of time her tired eyes could pour over a book under this new glaring light versus peering shortsightedly at the pages in the dim gray/yellow light of the oil lamp. I certainly found it much easier to do my homework!

When I went off to Sheffield to college, I couldn’t sleep at first. The curtains of my little dorm room were thin and beige, doing little to keep out the light: light from street lights, light from houses and businesses, light from passing cars and trucks and buses. Of course the hustle and bustle and bright lights of a city still recovering from The War were nothing compared to that of cities today, but I found it overwhelming.

Of course I got used to it; learned to love it. Yet occasionally, still, I long for the silent darkness of my childhood. But I know that’s nothing but nostalgia, which can fool us all. If I were to return to that darkness, I would also be returning to the other, metaphorical, darkness. The darkness of ignorance. The darkness of not even knowing there were homosexuals in this world, and far, far, from the acceptance that I was one of them. No thanks, I’ll stay here in that “harsh and glaring” light and be grateful for it.

*https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/nov/01/blackout-britain-wartime

© November 2017

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty years. We have been married since 2013.

Posted on

Assumptions, by Gillian

We all know the old saying that if you ass/u/me, you simply make an ass of u and me. I enjoy plays on words, so I like that one. It is also absolutely true. Assumptions of any kind are never safe, and we’re frequently sorry. We learn pretty fast about many assumptions we should never make: the bus/plane/train will leave or arrive on time, teachers and parents are always right and life is always fair, if I always tell the truth I will be rewarded, and Mr. Right will come along and we will live happily ever after.

As we get older, we adjust to more subtle assumptions we should not make. Self-improvement books tell us not to assume everything in the world is about us; indeed, to remind ourselves on many occasions, this is not about me. Similarly the assumption we make that we constantly need to offer our opinions is erroneous. One book has an entire chapter challenging me constantly to ask myself, Why Am I Talking?

Erroneous assumptions about any given situation often turn out to be very embarrassing, even under circumstances where no-one else knows the assumptions I was making in my own heads. One of my favorite stories on these lines is from when I was somewhere in my mid-thirties. I managed an IBM department which employed several temporary employees in addition to the permanent staff. I began to notice one of the latest temporaries, a very attractive young man, eyeing me a little too often; a little too much. I groaned to myself. This was not good. I was married.

I was going to have to deal with this situation. And soon. Lo and behold, only a couple of days later, the man came into my office. He shuffled his feet and looked a little uncomfortable. Then he said,

‘Sorry if you’ve noticed me staring at you. I’m kind of embarrassed but I have to tell you. You remind me so very much of my mother.’

And if that statement doesn’t take the wind out of a girl’s sails, then I don’t know what does!

Although I have told the story quite often since, at the time I was so very glad that I had told no-one about this sexy young man who clearly had the hots for me!

Assumptions must change constantly with changes in time and space and circumstances, but I missed the boat on that one.

Changing political assumptions, now, another boat I missed although I did run to catch a later one. Growing up in in the extremely socialist Britain of the 1950’s, I always assumes that The Government, always with a psychological capital G, had my very best interests at heart. The very existence of The Government was in order to make my life better. I never once questioned that assumption. I had no doubts. Then, in this country, I encountered the likes of Reagan and Nixon and one more assumption bit the dust. That assumption was, of course, doomed, wherever I lived. Had I stayed in the UK it would have died just as swiftly, as the socialist Britain of my youth crumbled under the weight of Margaret Thatcher’s conservatism. I certainly see nothing in the current political scene that hints of any revival.

So as we age we leave a trail of broken and battered assumptions in our wake. Not that I claim to miss them much; their absence doubtless leaves me with a healthier, saner, ability to make rational decisions. But I notice, as I age, an occasional new assumption insinuates itself. I always assume, for instance, that at my time of life it is not a good idea to buy green bananas.

© March 2017

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty years. We have been married since 2013.

Posted on

Movies, by Gillian

I have never been a
really fully-paid-up member of the movie-goers club. In fact I seem to have
had, over my lifetime, something of a love/hate relationship with movies. The
love side has been made up mostly of documentaries, or what they call ‘docudramas’,
which probably makes me something of a dull person to be around; someone who
prefers, for the most part, fact over fiction. Strangely, though, the opposite
is true of books. I rarely read non-fiction books, much preferring to escape
into the land of make-believe.
Perhaps it is in fact
that very make-believe which has tripped me up. My childhood, in the time and
place that it was, related little to movies. There were cinemas in the towns in
the England of the 1940’s and ’50’s but I and my family and friends had no way
to get to them. There were early TV’s, too, in some places, but non of us had
one. So escape was down to books. And once you are accustomed to using your own
imagination, making the written story and characters look exactly the way you
want them, it’s hard to switch happily to strangers creating the images for
you.
And then, of course,
there was the gay thing. Though barely even subliminal, in my youth, it was
there. Reading the book, I could make Jane Eyre’s obsessive love be for a
somewhat androgynous Rochester. I could even, and this requires some strength
of imagination, believe me, picture poor innocent Catherine Earnshaw with a
vaguely unisex Heathcliff. But when, later in life, I saw the Wuthering Heights
movie with that darkly menacing Laurence Olivier, he was so completely
masculine that all fantasy faded. So, I couldn’t really get into movies because
they were so overwhelmingly, 100% at that time, heterosexual. So was
literature, but anyone can take it wherever they want. These days, of course,
we say that ol’ Larry was bisexual, if not homosexual. But either way he’s
completely masculine. Books offer more options than movies.
One member of this
Storytelling group, who rarely attends now, wrote one day of trying so hard to
hide his infatuation with Tab Hunter. I cannot recall that day’s topic, but I
had written of my attempts to fake an attraction to Tab Hunter. I
bought, in our nearest Woolworth’s, a black and white pin-up photo of him, to
attach to my school desk. Oh the sad irony of it, I thought. Two of us, sixty
years ago, thousands of miles apart, trying so hard to use Tab Hunter – and why
him, I ask myself – to define, or not define, our homosexuality. Thank God,
those days are largely gone.
Now, when there is such
vast choice of movies, I have favorites of all kinds. But I have still never
fully embraced ‘going to the movies’, except for drive-ins which I always found
to be great fun. For the most part, movies became more attractive to me when
they became readily available from the comfort of my own home and my own couch.
One of my very favorite,
totally fictional, movies, is ‘Cloudburst’, with Olympia Dukakis; the story of
two old lesbians running off to Canada to be married. It is funny and sad: that
perfect combination that creates fiction at it’s best. I also watch ‘The
History Boys’ every time it’s on TV. A wonderful ‘docudrama’, which Betsy and I
had somehow missed until it appeared on TV a couple of weeks ago, is ‘
Freeheld’, the true story of a New Jersey police lieutenant, dying of cancer,
fighting for her registered partner to receive her pension after her death, as
would be the case with a heterosexual couple. There are endless documentaries,
not to mention a full-length movie, about Alan Turing and all he suffered for
his homosexuality. It’s not that all I ever watch is movies, truth or fiction,
depicting the plight of members of the GLBT community; but they exist.
That is an ever-amazing
thing to me.
They exist.
Movies and I have
followed the same path. We have been on a long journey, but we have arrived.
And we will never, can never, go back. No matter what rhetoric spews from the
mouths of those filled with hate, from Anita Bryant to our newly anointed
vice-presidential candidate, we cannot, and they cannot, undo what we have
done. I, and all of us here, now know ourselves. Everyone else know us. We tell
our stories and the movies tell our stories; not the stories of us, in this
room, perhaps, individually,
but of us, anywhere and everywhere, collectively. We have travelled from
invisibility to out and proud.
If John Cray and I were
kids today, we could, at least in many schools, each embrace some modern
equivalent of Tab Hunter quite openly; I with indifference and John with
passion. Movies have played a huge part in our journey and we owe a debt of
gratitude to those who conceived them, financed them, produced them, and above
all to the many straight actors who were brave enough to act the part of a gay
or lesbian in the early days, when they put their careers at risk by doing so.
In fact, As Roger Ebert,
long-time film critic. stated so beautifully,
“We live in
a box of space and time. Movies are
windows in its walls. They allow us to enter other minds, not simply in the
sense of identifying with the characters, although that is an important part of
it, but by seeing the world as another person sees it.”
Through movies, others
perhaps learned not only to see us, to know us, but, just for a short time, to
be us.
© July 2016 
About
the Author 
 I was born and
raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S.
and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder
area since 1965, working for 30-years at IBM. I married, raised four
stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself
as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty-years.
We have been married since 2013.
Posted on

Mushrooms by Gillian

I thought of writing about mushrooms the other week when our topic was “Magic” but that led too inevitably to the psychedelic connection, which is far from the kind of magic I personally attach to mushrooms. They bring, for me, a nostalgia for the magic of innocent childhood days.

One of my very favorite things was when my mum and dad and I would go off together into the fields and woodlands to pick mushrooms. My vision of it is my mother with the basket on one arm and me swinging from the free hand between her and my dad. Perhaps this happened for just one instant, once, but you know how it goes. These things from the distant past expand themselves until they occupy vast stretches of time, and in my memory every time we went what we called “mushrooming,” I clasped each of them by the hand and swung my feet off the ground between them. We were not a touchy-feely kind of family and holding both their hands is a thing I cannot remember doing at other times or in other circumstances. It was just part of the magic of mushrooms.

Mostly we went in autumn, early in the morning, though I think occasionally we went at other times of the day and year. I associate mist with these morning jaunts, though again this might, in reality, have been just once. We looked for the mushrooms in open grassy meadows among sleepily grazing cows and sheep, and in glades of old oak trees where they grew happily on old rotting stumps. I have no idea what kind they were, though the ones from the fields were different from those in the trees. We worried little about accidentally picking poisonous ones, but I have no idea whether we were simply lucky or whether my parents had some learned or inherited knowledge about such things. Even I knew that you never picked toadstools, but they were easy to tell apart from mushrooms. Every child knew that fairies only live in toadstools; never in mushrooms! Though mushrooms do form what we always called “fairy rings,” growing in clear circles on the grass. Even when the mushrooms were not there, the rings still were visible as mounds or depressions in the grass, and as the mushrooms tended to grow again in that same ring, it was always a good place to look. These circles were sometimes just a yard or so across, but some were huge, ten to twenty feet in diameter. No-one knew why they grew in these circles so of course who else was to be held responsible but the little people? Stones the size of a pinkie or a fist or occasionally a football were also sometimes arranged in circles, always called “fairy rings” for the same reason. I loved to imagine these little creatures busily pushing and tugging at the rocks to get them arranged correctly, but was never too sure how they got the mushrooms to grow that way. Perhaps, I thought, they planted the wee seeds in a circular trench, the way my dad planted the potatoes in a straight trench.

For me, mushrooms were all about the gathering. I rather lost interest in them when we got the overflowing basket home, though I enjoyed eating them well enough. Had they been readily available in stores via mushroom farms as they are now, I probably would not have liked them, as many children do not, but back then they were rare enough to be attractive.

These days, sadly, in my opinion, picking mushrooms has, like so many things, lost its simplicity and become hugely complex. For one thing, of course, you can no longer wander freely over your neighbors’ fields and woods and help yourself to anything growing there. For another, mushrooms have fallen victim to TMI. We have way Too Much Information about them, as about most things. Did you know that there are an estimated 10,000 different species of mushrooms in North America; that a mushroom specialist is called a mycologist? Do you care?

On Google Earth, I find, you can see mushrooms from space, honest! Well, not the mushrooms themselves, but the tell-tale fairy rings left by some species. These rings are clearly visible satellite images, so you can select likely fields to visit whilst sitting at your computer. Talk about taking all the fun out of things! How can that possibly compare with tucking cold hands into Mom and Dad’s warm ones, watching the frost turn your breath to fog? How can finding something on the internet bring you memories to last a lifetime? And the rings themselves have some completely scientific explanation to do with fungus, and have lost all their magic. Worse than that, they sometimes appear on a pristine lawn and no amount of digging will destroy them so the Web recommends destroying them with chemicals. The poor old fairies are in big trouble in the modern world. And their fairy stone rings, apparently, are causes by the continuous winter freeze/thaw cycle pushing the rocks, not the little people at all, at all.

In Britain, where of course my childhood memories originate, mushrooms have become big business; not only via mushroom farms where they are cultivated en masse but also the picking of wild ones. Far from the “mushrooming” of my youth, it has now gone upscale and is invariably termed mushroom “foraging.” It seems that in order to partake of this, what at least used to be, simple pleasure one first needs to buy some expensive basket via one of many international online boutique such as fungi.com, (yes, there really is such a place!) along with an equally costly knife, the purpose of which escapes me as we always pulled them up and they exited the wet ground with a wonderfully pleasing plop. One then arms oneself with a variety of books and maps and charts so as to identify what one is searching for, and to identify the best place and time to search for it, so as not to waste valuable time and to avoid the hazard of poisoning oneself, even though only about one percent of all mushrooms can be lethal. And after all that, of course, you’ve run out of time and simply hire a “Mushroom Foraging Guide,” to lead you by the hand, instead. (Yes, there really are such people!)

Just reading about it all on WildMushroomsOnline.co.uk wore me out.

And d’you know what upset me most; the worst thing I discovered in my researches way down in the TMI depths? There is actually no scientific basis for differentiating so-called toadstools from mushrooms. They are just variations of the same thing. Oh no! Haven’t those poor fairies suffered enough? How are they to know where to live? I tell you one thing, if I ever suffered from little people envy, I’m cured. The last place I want to live in these challenging times is down at the bottom of the garden with the fairies!

And so the magic goes; the magic fantasies of fairies and the magic moments of mushrooming. It’s partly my age, of course, and partly the age. The world has changed so very much in the time that I have inhabited it, and I would be the last one to claim that it is all for the worse. Those days gone by were not necessarily better, but there’s no denying they were simpler. I have to wonder where the children of this fast-paced electronic era will find the magic, but I try to keep the faith that they will, and fortunately I shall never know.

© December 2013

About
the Author  


I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.

Posted on

Humor by Gillian

My parents both had a wonderful sense of humor, though each quite different from the other.

My mother loved words, so much of her humor involved quotations, jokes, and stories. She filled up dozens of little notebooks with such things and, apparently as a reminder to herself, lest she should slacken, an embroidered wall hanging pronounced that the day is wasted in which one has not laughed. Painfully correct grammar for such a relaxed sentiment.

As an elementary school teacher in an old two-room school she reveled in stories told by or about the children she taught, laughing the more with every telling. She would start giggling like a little kid herself. “Oh, you will never believe what little Jimmy Owen said this morning……..” and she was off.

My father’s humor, on the other hand, was, like him, much more quiet. Most frequently it necessitated no word at all, but rather an almost imperceptible eyebrow twitch, or my favorite, the one naughty wink, in my direction. Somehow I always understood what the joke was, what my dad’s gesture was indicating. I think we shared some very special intuitive connection there. Unlike my mum’s happy giggling, which lit up a room, my dad and I sat in silence without even our lips twitching to acknowledge our inner laughter. Oh such delicious secrets we shared in our secret mirth.

Rather unfortunately, I suppose, when my father did use a few words to facilitate some humor, it was usually at my mother’s expense though it was just silliness, never mean. And in a whole lifetime she never stopped setting herself up. “….you will never believe what little Jimmy Owen said this morning….” Dad solemnly winks at me and rises from the chair, heading to the door. “Edward! I was telling a funny story…” “Well, maybe we don’t want to hear something we’ll never believe…” And they’re off.

“Oh, Edward, honestly! You know it’s just an expression!” He sits obediently back down and hears her story, which is wonderfully amusing in it’s own right. We’ve had our little bit of fun.

As I grew older, I sometimes initiated the silent joke with my dad, although it had to be via a wink as I never learned to do the eyebrow-twitch thing in spite of endless hours of teenage practice before the mirror. I also, from quite a young age, spent considerable time and effort making my mother laugh. She loved to laugh and I loved to laugh with her, but one of my main youthful entertainments was making her giggle at inappropriate times and places.

It was the equivalent connection with my mother that the wink was with my father. She pretended to try to make me behave but really she loved it. I made her giggle in church, at school, during concerts and speeches. I especially liked to get her going somewhere like on the bus, where there was no bathroom. Her bladder-control was nothing to brag about and laughter could bring about some challenging results. “Ooooh Gillian, STOPPIT!” She’d whisper, shuffling in the seat, crossing and uncrossing her legs.

A teenage girl of the Fifties I had heard rumors that when a woman said no she really meant yes, and I have to say that in my mother’s case, with humor, it was true. The more she fought to control her helpless daughter-induced giggles during the graveside service, the more she loved it.

My parents had lost two children to meningitis before I was born, and I truly believe some intuition told me that it was my job to cheer them along. In any case, it served to bring humor to all three of us, and that’s a gift from the gods if ever there was.

My father developed dementia in his eighties, and had no idea who I was. He no longer winked at me, and my wink to him brought no response. My mother, amazingly, still had the embroidered laugh injunction beside her bed in the Nursing Home, though a broken hip had reduced the humor, along with most positive emotional and physical abilities, to a minimum.

If you ask me what is the greatest thing I inherited from my parents, I would say my sense of humor. If you ask me what I miss most I would say their sense of humor. And my father’s wonderful, wicked, wink.

© 2 February 2013

About the Author 

I was born and raised in England. After
graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered
Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965,
working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got
divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have
now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.

Posted on

The Long Wrong Road by Gillian

My mother thought it was the wrong road, anyway, this railroad rushing us off in the wrong direction. And I knew, in the way only a child can know these things, that it was all my father’s fault.

I was about four and we were leaving our comfortable home in a quiet village in the genteel gently rolling south of England for the untamed and unsophisticated rugged sheep farming hill country of the Welsh border, where my dad grew up. His parents were no longer capable of living alone, he was an only child with no one else to share the responsibility so he was doing the only thing he could do, as they categorically refused to move south to live with us. We had to go to live with them.

So Dad quit his job, something that became quite a hobby with him over the years, and we moved to another world.

My mother was not happy.

I was perfectly happy. Too young to have formed attachments to any place, I was simply reveling in this new train ride experience.

Travel having been severely restricted during World War Two, which had recently ended, I had never met any of my grandparents. I don’t think I quite grasped the concept. I certainly had no storybook image in my head of the classic rosy-cheeked plump and cuddly grandmother beaming over her flowered apron and offering fresh-baked cookies. Just as well. I would have been sorely disappointed. My grandmother was as eaten up with resentment towards my grandfather for years, as my mother was towards my dad on that train ride.

My mother’s ground to a halt not long after we arrived at the end of our wrong road, she adjusted as people do, but my grandmother kept her anger well fed and it flourished.

My grandfather was what we would call these days a recovering alcoholic. In those days he was just one of several local drunks. The fact that he no longer touched the booze seemed to be ignored and he was still thought of as a drunk by neighbors and family alike. Certainly my grandmother never gave him any credit, nor even acknowledgement, for having quit.

He had drunk his way out of a good job, lost the lovely old house that they had owned when my dad was a little boy, and had to settle for moving to the cold dark damp dreary dwelling I now found myself living in.

My grandfather rarely spoke, or moved for that matter. He sat in his armchair beside the fireplace, which rarely had a fire in it, hour after hour, doing nothing. For all the attention he paid us, we all might as well not have been there. At least he was harmless, unlike my grandmother. Far from showing even a spark of gratitude for my parents’ sacrifice, she acted as if she hated us all. She never spoke a civil word to anyone, but droned on with an endless litany of complaints. She walked with the aid of a cane, and any time I was foolish enough to get anywhere near her she took a vicious swipe at me with the thing. I learned very fast to stay a good cane-length away!

You might possibly think that she and my mother, both resenting having been forced down that long wrong road by their husbands, might have bonded a little but this was most certainly not to be. That house was not a place of bonding.

Looking back after I had come to know my maternal grandparents I can certainly appreciate how hard all this was on my mother. Her parents were very different. Her mother actually did approach the storybook image, and my Irish maternal grandpa was one of the delights of my later youth. He was a stonemason, creating gravestones from the local marble. I loved to sit and watch him, and occasionally I was even allowed to help. He sang while he worked, or regaled my fascinated ears with endless fantastical tales in which I doubt there was an ounce of truth.

They lived in a gorgeous rambling old house, built in 1742. It was light and warm with welcome, and different in every way from that of my other grandparents, the one in which I was to grow up. But I was just a kid, and I was oblivious to all the negatives of our new life. With the exception of that flailing walking stick, I loved it all. We had dogs and cats and chickens and pigs and a goat. Surrounded by farms, I was free to wander wherever I chose as long as I carefully closed all farm gates. I made friends with staring-eyed sheep and slobbering cows and hairy-hoofed horses. What did I care if the house was dark and cold, had no running water, no electricity, no indoor toilet? Having to shiver my way to the far end of the yard, stumbling in the waving flashlight beam, to the rickety old outhouse, was all fuel to the fire of my new life adventure.

My grandfather died not long after our arrival and my mother commented that she rather expected my grandmother to dance on his grave. I couldn’t imagine this at all and quite looked forward to it but in the event she did not even go to his funeral.

My grandmother, I never called her grandma either out loud or in my head, died about two years later. I could well imagine my mother dancing on her grave, and she did attend the funeral but simply looked suitably somber.

Now we were free to return to the civilized south. I lived in terror of this announcement for some time, life was much more fun on the wild Welsh border as far as I was concerned, but eventually I realized I need not worry. By that time, my mother had returned to teaching in the nearby elementary school where she taught before marrying my dad. My dad had a good job not too far away, we made improvements to the house, and we stayed. But somehow it felt as if my grandmother’s misery had invaded the very walls. She would not go away.

Years later, home for Xmas from college, I was helping my parents clear out the old cellar and what should surface but that gnarled old walking cane. I held it up and we all started to laugh. My dad took it from me and calmly sawed it into four short pieces, which he handed solemnly to me. Without a word, we went back upstairs into the living room where these days a hearty fire roared, and I equally solemnly placed the lengths of wood on the fire. Silently we watched until they were completely consumed. My grandmother was gone.

© October 2011 

About the Author


I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.

Posted on

Ambitious Changes by Gillian

For many years I was driven by just one ambition. It ruled the major decisions of my life.
I was going to find a way to fix this unidentified, at best only subliminally recognized, problem.

In high school, and for that matter as far back as I could remember, I simply felt zero excitement over boys. 
I liked them, I had plenty of boy friends, but not boyfriends; sexual stimulations of puberty were engendered exclusively by girls. I was in love with my best girl friend all through high school.

Well. This would not do.
It was all the problem of these country bumpkin boys of the remote hill country I inhabited. Somehow I failed to notice that the girls came from the same place.
I would go off to College and there the young men would at least be intellectually stimulating which in turn would surely lead to……?

That worked well. 
I was madly in love with the same woman all through college. There were many intellectually stimulating men but that failed to lead to …….? 

Well. This would not do.
It was all the problem of these dull boring Englishmen. After all, the jokes are endless.
The Englishman can get along with sex quite perfectly so long as he can pretend that it isn’t sex but something else. 
The rest of the world has sex, the Englishman has cricket.
I didn’t know he was dead; I thought he was British.
On and on.
I would go off to the United States where men were men and that would lead to….?

That worked well. 
I was in love with my female workmate in no time. 

Well. This would not do. 
I had simply not found the RIGHT man. I became quite promiscuous in my search.

That worked well. 
I remained madly in love with the same woman. Even when it is all confined to some underground segment of my being, I am hopelessly monogamous.

Well. This would not do. 
The problem was all these one night stands, all this messing around. I would find a good man and get married.

That worked well.
I remained in love with the same incurably hetero woman, but increasingly more consciously. The reality of what I was became abundantly clear.

Well. This would not do. 
I would get divorced. And I would stand my ambition on its head.

And that did work well. My ambition became to embrace, if sadly belatedly, my sexuality. 
I would not hide it, I would come out to my family and friends and coworkers almost as soon as I came out to myself.

I met Betsy, fell madly in love, and in my monogamous way have loved her for twenty-five years.
I do, completely, embrace my lesbianism. 
In fact, I have to put it more strongly. 
After I turned my ambition around 180 degrees I can honestly say that I am grateful to be gay. It has brought so much meaning and purpose, such joy, such support. (This storytelling group is the perfect example.)

I have been buffeted by one ambition, then by another in the completely opposite direction. 
And now, not driven at all, I am content simply to be.

© 18 July
2011

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.

Posted on

Baths by Gillian

There’s a city in England called Bath, and it has baths.
Does it ever!
It’s had them since the Romans settled there around the time of Christ, though there was a Celtic shrine there dating from about 800 B.C. 
By the 2nd century A.D. the baths were enclosed in a wooden building and included a caldarium bath, a tepidarium, and a frigidarium – no translations required, I think!

After the Romans left Britain in the 5th century the baths fell into disrepair but were later revived in several stages and the original hot spring is now housed in an 18th century building which contains the baths themselves and the Grand Pump Room where one could, and can, drink the waters.

Anyone who has ever read any Jane Austen has heard of Bath, and those watching the movies of her books have seen it on screen, as Austen’s heroine’s are inevitably off to Bath to “take the waters.”
In the early 1960’s you could still bathe and/or drink the waters flowing through the original Roman lead pipes, though for health reasons the waters have now been rerouted since the 1970’s. Just one more reason my brain is addled, I guess, as I was there lounging in the steaming water in 1963.

I was at a loose end, having recently graduated from the University of Sheffield with a degree in Geography – and what is God’s name was I supposed to do with that? In a shattered still-post-war Britain jobs were hard to come by and anything remotely to do with geography – cartography, geology, exploration in general – was male-dominated. I had a temporary job in Bristol, a city close to Bath, transferring eons of data onto Hollerith punch card – do not bend, fold, staple or mutilate – somewhat ironic as I spent most of my later life working for IBM where in the later 1960’s everything was taken off punch cards and put onto magnetic tape!

I met Lucie at a lecture. I have no memory of that talk, not even of the subject, nor how I got to talk to Lucie, but it was one of those immediate bonding moments. I might rather have thought of it as simply lust, or at best infatuation, on my part that is, but I had not come anywhere close to acknowledging such feelings for women in myself back then. We became friends, hiking at weekends, “doing lunch,” going off for picnics in her rattletrap old Austin 7 – something of an equivalent in Britain to the Model T in this country.
I was deliriously happy.

Lucie was extremely attractive and sexy. I’m sure I was not the only woman whose body parts twitched simply at the thought of her, and an endless line of men constantly offered to lay their lives at her feet. She went from one torrid affair to another, or sometimes indulged in them simultaneously, but every man fell short in one way or another.

So one day Lucie and I rattled off to Bath, not to take the waters – we had packed bottles of cheap chianti – but at least to lounge in them. For this purpose Lucie wore a very sexy very skimpy bikini that drove my heart rate up to what I’m sure was a dangerous level, especially while coming slowly to a boil in the “caldarium!”
She talked of her latest inamoratas, mainly grieving for one who had recently left to do a post-grad year at Rice in Houston. I had noticed with before that Lucie’s men were frequently viewed more favorably in absentia.

After a few minutes’ silence, bobbing about it the hot water, I was practically asleep despite my elevated blood pressure. Suddenly I heard Lucie’s voice, as if in a dream.
“Let’s go to America.”
I started and gulped and did in fact take the waters, if unintentionally.
‘Yeah. OK.”
And that was that.

Just as well for me that she wasn’t hankering after some guy in Baghdad or Darfur. My answer would probably have been the same.
Doesn’t it seem that the pivotal moment that changes the course of your life forever should be marked with something more dramatic, more insightful, than,
“Yeah. OK.”

©  10/22/2012

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After
graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered
Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965,
working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got
divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have
now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.
Posted on

Bishop’s Castle and Beyond by Gillian

Bishop’s Castle, where I went to high school, is a tiny town on the border between England and Wales, and about as far from being a city as a settlement can get, but it’s what I had. It had a population of a little over a thousand then, and less than 1500 now. A prehistoric Bronze Age route runs from the town but there is evidence of human habitation there several thousand years before that.
In the early 1200s the Bishop of Hereford built a castle there, hence the name, and the settlement received royal borough status in 1249.
In 1642, the Three Tuns Brewery was established on its current site, making it the oldest licensed brewery site in Britain. Now that is a real claim to fame. Need I say that any time I visit my friends who still live in B.C. as it’s known locally, I make it a point to have a pint or two in the Three Tuns pub?
Some of my friends live in a row of cottages all with curved back walls and flanking a gently curving street, as the original curved castle wall was used as it stood when they were built in the 1600s.  
Now I see it as a fascinating spot alive with history, but of course when I was at school there I simply found it a peacefully boring backwater I couldn’t wait to leave.
I did leave a little piece of my heart there, though. Inevitably, I think, we are left with some fondness for anywhere we spend much time, even if it is all distorted by nostalgia.
And anyway, I was in love there.
I was in love everywhere.
In that serial monogamy existing, secretly, only in my mind, I have been in love everywhere I have lived, and so scattered other little pieces of my heart.

In B.C. I was in love with Sarah who now lives in New Zealand and is a great-grandmother.

Bishop’s Castle, with its few tiny medieval shops, was useless for serious shopping so for that we rode the local bus into Shrewsbury, a town of 100,000 now and maybe half that in the 1940s.
Shrewsbury was founded as a town in the 8th century, built on the site of the Roman town of Viriconium of which many beautiful parts remain. The earliest written mention of the town is from the year 901, when it was part an important border post between the Anglo-Saxons of England and the Britons in Wales. By the reign of Athelstan (925-939) coinage was being issued by the Shrewsbury mint and many coins from that time are still being unearthed today.
The town fell to Welsh forces led by Llywelyn the Great in 1215 and again in 1234. In 1283 Edward I held a Parliament, the first to include a House of Commons, at Shrewsbury to decide the fate of Dafydd ap Gruffydd, the last free Welsh ruler of Wales. Dafydd was executed – hanged, drawn and quartered – for high treason in Shrewsbury.
Personally, I prefer the history of the Three Tuns!
Later, after the formation of the Church of England, the town was offered  a cathedral  by Henry VIII, but for some undocumented reason the citizens of the town rejected this offer. 
I like to think they had enough sense to know that Henry Vlll was mad bad and dangerous to know and preferred to keep their distance.
One of Shrewsbury’s main claims to fame is that it was the home of Charles Darwin.

I was in love with Rosemary who sold her mother’s beautiful hand-knitted creations in the market held in the Shrewsbury town square every Saturday.

I left this tranquil corner and went to college in the rough tough and extremely polluted city of Sheffield which at that time was wall to wall steel mills belching endless plumes of black choking smoke. We used to have “smog days” when the whole city was instructed to shut down, with the exception, of course, of the factories actually producing the smog. Classes were cancelled, shops closed, no buses ran. We all stayed inside with doors and windows tightly shut and did our best not to breathe.
And don’t panic, we’re not going on another forced march through history but I do have to say that Sheffield is where stainless steel was invented and patented, and recent discoveries date human habitation of that area to the end of the last ice age 13,000 years ago.

My years in Sheffield were blessed or cursed, depending on my mood at the time, with a deeply felt and equally deeply hidden love for Jane, who had lost her home and family to German bombs.

Next it was across The Pond to New York City. That’s as far as the ship went so that’s far as I went, at least till I earned some money. It was late October and the stores were all hiring temps for the Xmas rush. For some reason I don’t even remember, I ended up at Altman’s on 5th Avenue. 
There’s a line in the movie Miracle on 34th Street, I can’t quote it exactly but the gist of it is that Hell is Altman’s department store at Xmas. It was all such a new and foreign world to me that I don’t think I was even capable of judging it as Hell, but it certainly was not my idea of Heaven. I mean, Bishop’s Castle can get a bit rowdy at the Three Tuns on a Saturday night, and those Sheffield foundry workers could quite frighten the opposition crowd at a soccer game, but those women battling for basement bargains at Altman’s took aggression to a whole new level. I had simply never experienced anything remotely like any of it.
But one thing I adored. 
In the display windows of Alman’s, and many other of the big department stores nearby, there were wonderful mechanical toys, animated depictions of Santa’s Workshop in one window, his slay and reindeer swooping over snowy rooftops in another, excited children opening presents in a third.
I was completely enchanted.
I had never seen such things in my life. Depressed post-war Europe had had no excess resources to squander on such things. Every coffee break I dashed outside to gaze at them along with crowds of little children. Children, not to mention a few adults, were less sophisticated in those days.
(Some years later I dragged my reluctant husband and step-children all the way from Jamestown in a snowstorm to see similar displays in the May D&F windows in Denver. Dean, a mechanical engineer, was interested objectively in their workings, The kids were clearly if politely mystified as to why we were there. The overall reaction was a resounding hmmmmm.)

The other bit of my heart that remains in New York was extracted that first Xmas Day of my life in this country, when some kind family took pity on my friends and me, poor hopeless helpless imigrantes, and invited us to their home.
How on earth we had met these people I don’t remember, but their chauffeur-driven Cadillac carried us in a style I had never known to a mansion somewhere on Long Island. There were Xmas lights in the trees with bigger, richer lights blazing in the windows. Our gracious hosts had gifts for each of us, and managed to make us feel like much-loved daughters returning home for the holidays. 
I can’t remember their name or where exactly they lived, but I have never forgotten that Xmas and that family’s kindness to strangers. So, yes, New York does hold on to little pieces of my heart.

And anyway I was madly, secretly, in love. Infatuated with Lucie, the woman I had followed to New York as I would have followed her to Timbuktu.
And I did.

Well, I followed her to Houston: much the same thing.
This was as strange and foreign a world to me as New York City but in a very different way, and there for the first time in my life I encountered blatant discrimination.
I worked as a waitress at a diner in a new sprawling outdoor shopping mall in a completely white part of town. On my second day, I served coffee to two black people. Now this was the early sixties and racial discrimination was no longer legal, but I guess Texas, along with many parts of the South at that time, simply ignored that little detail. I was told to refuse to serve them any food and ask them to leave.
Needless to say, that was the end of my job at that café, but if I thank Houston for little else, I am grateful for it slapping me in the face with the realities of certain aspects of life in the Land of the Free.

I finally broke free of my obsession with Lucie, who married a multi-millionaire Texan and now lives in Venezuela.

Yes, I had scattered bits of my heart about, but it was intact enough to engulf Denver when I arrived here, and later, my beautiful Betsy.

1954’s #1 hit was Doris Day singing:

          Once I Had a Secret Love
          That lived within the heart of me
          All too soon my secret love
          Became impatient to be free

          So I told a friendly star
          The way that dreamers often do
          Just how wonderful you are
          And why I am so in love with you

          Now I shout it from the highest hills
          Even told the golden daffodils

          At last my heart’s an open door
          And my secret love’s no secret anymore

My love is certainly no secret, anymore.

1/23/2012


About the Author





I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.