Flint & Steel Full Circle Writing Challenge
No Time To Say Goodbye
If you could see into the future, would you? I certainly would not have chosen to see what life had in store for me.
Seeing how happy I was as a child in the photograph, nobody could have predicted the tragedies that would befall our family.
Hearing the beautiful sound of birdsong takes me back to when I was a child when we lived in a small council house in the south of England. Things were tough. The leather coat that I am wearing in the picture was a hand-me-down from my cousin.
My brother, Gary, and I went to the local state school just around the corner. Growing up on a council estate in the 1960’s could have turned out either way. Fortunately, our parents worked hard and bought a smallholding in Surrey, so we moved away when I was eight - about the year the photograph was taken. A baby brother joined us shortly afterwards and so it was that we became a family of six. Mum, Dad, two boys and two girls.
Dad ran his engineering business from the out-buildings and managed to buy the twenty acres surrounding the family home. Gary and I worked hard on the smallholding, helping Mum out in the one hundred foot long greenhouse and working with Dad in his workshop, and we were rewarded with a pony each.
When we weren’t out pony trekking or galloping through open countryside, we were bird watching. Gary would tell me in great detail all about the different types of birds that we saw: Blue Tits, Chaffinches, Robins and many, many more. He knew all about their habitats, what color eggs they laid, how many and so on. I was fascinated and hung on his every word.
Sometimes we would let our ponies drink from a stream while we waited for a Kingfisher to flash through or watch enchanted by a Dipper bobbing about on the rocks as we ate the sandwiches we had packed for our outings during the long school summer holidays. They were magical times.
I wish those long, balmy, carefree days could have lasted forever. But they didn’t. We grew up and the motorway network in the UK was expanding in the early 1970’s and so when the M23 carved off a chunk of our land with a Compulsory Purchase Order, Dad decided it was time to move. He and Mum went to Portugal to see a farm while my cousin and her boyfriend came to oversee the running of the smallholding, which was no mean feat, but we were hard working, sensible and trustworthy. Just as our parents had taught us to be.
Returning from their trip to Lisbon, Mum was adamant about not moving there because Portugal had conscription and she didn’t want Gary to go into the army.
Plan B — a hill farm in Wales and we could take our ponies with us. As kids, we had little say in the matter and so it was that one cold, wet day in November 1972, we drove for hours and hours until eventually, we bumped our way down a long farm track and when Dad parked up, an old lady wearing what looked like a knitted tea cozy on her head, asked us if we wanted to come inside to warm up. Bemused by her unusual appearance, which included a chin full of white whiskers and crooked yellow teeth, we declined, opting to stay in the back of the cozy van that we had traveled down in, leaving Mum and Dad to brave the unknown territory that was to become our home.
The decision had been made. We were moving to Wales. I cried when I had to say goodbye to my school friends. They had clubbed together and bought me a Donny Osmond and a David Cassidy LP and I will never forget waving goodbye to them for the very last time.
It rained a lot in Wales and the long farm track soon became muddy and full of puddles. In the cold and wet, Gary and I trudged the mile or so to the end of the lane to catch the school bus and then back again at the end of the day. It was a drudge of a journey.
The kids were not very welcoming. Back then, in the early 1970’s, houses were being burned because the Welsh, rightly so, didn’t like ‘Saes’ (‘the English’) buying up second properties as holiday homes. Fortunately for us, we didn’t fall into that category and eventually, we were accepted into the community.
Time passed and Gary left home. I went to the local College and trained as a secretary and landed my first job as a Legal Secretary and got engaged to my boyfriend of just over a year. I was very happy.
Then, one day, Mum and Dad came into the office and I was called out to meet them. I will never forget that day as long as I live. They had come to tell me that Gary had been killed in a road accident. I was eighteen and he was just two weeks past his twentieth birthday. Life stood still and everything became a blur.
The small Welsh community that we had become a part of rallied around and the kindness they showed us as a family was immeasurable. Mum and Dad had lost their first born and my younger brother and sister and I had lost a sibling. I had also lost a dear friend. A young life snuffed out just as he was heading into adulthood.
My father had to identify his son’s body and I don’t think he ever recovered from seeing his child lying on a mortuary slab having been fatally injured. My mother couldn’t stop crying and kept saying that she hadn’t said goodbye to him. Dad refused to let her see him, presumably because of the catastrophic injuries that he had sustained in the accident.
The event took its toll on all of us as a family and we each grieved in our own separate ways, trying to come to terms with the loss of a dear, loved one. It was a very difficult time.
A few years after the accident Dad was diagnosed with cancer and died suddenly and not long after, Mum died from breast cancer. They were aged just 51 and 53.
Fast forward to the year 2022.
The anniversary of what would have been Gary’s 65th birthday hit me hard and I couldn’t stop crying. My beautiful thirty-three year old daughter was wonderful and we met up so that she could comfort me.
It was a warm, sunny day and we met in the beautiful Brecon Beacons (in Wales, where she still lives). We sat outside sipping coffee while I talked about Gary and she listened.
A Blue Tit came and sat on a branch above us then a Robin and then a beautiful Chaffinch perched on one of the empty wooden seats next to us. A chorus of garden birds were singing their hearts out all around us and we were certain that they were a sign from Gary. I am sure that I felt his presence in that moment because I felt a wonderful calm settle over me and no longer felt so incredibly sad.
Life throws us some curved balls and I feel that I have come full circle in coming to terms with the sudden and tragic loss of my brother all those years ago followed by the loss of my dear mother and father. It doesn’t make the pain of losing them any easier, but I am comforted by the knowledge that we had a full and happy life together before they sadly passed on and hope that they are all together once again.
Life is so precious. We should enjoy each day as if it were our last because, for all we know, it could well be. My fun-loving, gregarious and handsome brother certainly had no idea what lay in store for him that fateful day in August 1977.
Thanks to Ellie Jacobson for tagging me in on this challenge, which I found difficult to write, but hope that I have done my family justice in the way that I have told my story.
If you enjoyed my personal essay, you might also enjoy my writing on relationships and the serialisation of my crime novel on my blog, Rosy’s Ramblings. I also have a book available on Amazon: