In Spite of Everything
by Charles Lacey
Chapter 13
Paul
A letter had arrived from Dad. Mother was very ill with rheumatic fever. I showed Aiden the letter and he asked whether I wanted to go to see her. I wondered, for about two seconds, whether I should. But the only thing that came to my mind was that if I did, it would be with Aiden by my side, so that she could see how strong and enduring our love was. But no, I had left the life of my childhood behind, and I had no desire to re-visit it. So I wrote back to Dad, and asked him to give her my best wishes. But then another letter arrived, to say that she had died. I did go to her funeral, which was in the Chapel. Aiden was with me, of course. Old Hodges had retired – for which I was profoundly thankful, having no wish ever to see him again - and the new Pastor, a man called Williams, gave a long sermon telling everyone what a good woman Mary Blandy had been, how she set such a good example, and so on, until I nearly stood up and shouted, Yes, and she threw her own son out of his home. But I kept quiet, mostly for Dad's sake.
After the funeral, and the tea-and-buns afterwards, which took place in the meeting room next to the Chapel, Aiden and I went back with Dad to keep him company. We did say he was welcome to stay with us, but he decided to stay put. It was the first time I had been back to the cottage since she threw me out. I went to my old bedroom in the hope of recovering a few of my things that I had had to leave behind, but I found that my mother had thrown them all away.
But a couple of weeks later a very curious thing happened. I had a letter from her solicitor. Some years earlier, her father had died, and had left some money in trust for me when I reached twenty-one. She'd kept the money, and never told me about it. But she had put it in a Savings Bank, where it had earned a little interest, and in consequence I found myself better off to the tune of nearly two thousand pounds. By this time Aiden was coming near to qualifying, so we decided to stay put for the time being. But it did mean that once Aiden had qualified, and we had decided where to settle, I could buy a small house, as long as it was not in an excessively expensive area, or put a substantial deposit on a larger one.
So we had a decision to make. Would we stay in Liverpool? Or go back to Derby? Or go somewhere else entirely? We were clear that we didn't much care for in Liverpool and would like to move away. There was no hurry to make a decision, but we discussed it endlessly. We even wondered whether to go and live in Poland, or Denmark, or some other sensible country where our kind could live openly without fear. But in the end we decided that Aiden would try to find a job in or near Derby, and we would move back to that area. Neither of us really liked city life, but there were some pleasant suburbs where we might settle.
Around this time a huge uproar blew up over the journalist Peter Wildeblood, Michael Pitt-Rivers and Lord Montagu. They had been involved in a homosexual scandal which rocked Britain, and were sent to prison. But it had the effect of directing people's minds onto the real issues. There were plenty of prejudiced people, of course. I could imagine what my mother would have made of it! But there was also a growing sense of So what? It's a victimless crime. And I am sure this was the event that started the process that led to the Wolfenden Report, and the eventual acceptance of same-sex unions.
Well, Aiden qualified, and was now Dr Aiden Mitchell, MB, ChB, and he starting looking round for posts. As luck would have it, there was a house surgeon's job going at Derby General. So that was that. We found a lovely house in a quiet street in Mickleover, and the fact that I was able to put down a substantial deposit meant that it was easy to get a mortgage. We decided that as we owned the house, and the mortgage payments were a good bit less than we would have been paying in rent, and as Aiden would be earning, even as a junior doctor in the hospital, quite a good salary, I wouldn't be going back to being a joiner in the building trade, but would build a workshop in the garden and concentrate on making furniture, which was what I'd always really wanted to do.
Aiden and I had spent a good deal of time discussing, in great depth and detail, the moral aspects of our relationship. Each of us had come from a religious background, against which any kind of sexual behaviour other than for purely reproductive purposes within a conventional marriage was forbidden. But we were intelligent young men, and Aiden at least was well educated. We could read the Scriptures for ourselves and could find no indication that sex was not to be enjoyed, or that any two people might not love each other. We had not so much left our churches as drifted away from them. There was no way in which I would ever return to the kind of narrow-minded, self-righteous evangelical church that I had perforce attended as a child. I'd wondered whether to join the Roman church, but after attending one for a while I found it riddled with formula and ritual. While we'd been living with Grannie we attended St Michael's which was Church of England, but much more out of a desire to please her than anything else, though we had found the Vicar, the Reverend Theodore Light, pleasant and approachable.
But of course we had discussed all this between ourselves in relation to sex. By now we slept in the same bed every night, and very comfortable it was. If I woke in the night, I could feel Aiden next to me, reassuring and warm. And when, as still happened occasionally, Aiden dreamed of Belsen and woke up, sweating and trembling, I could hold him in my arms and soothe him back to sleep. And we had developed a repertoire of sexual acts. We had eventually put aside the prejudices which we had acquired as children and taken a logical, common-sense view which was that whatever two people in love choose to do together in private, which gives pleasure to both and harms no-one, is a good thing. It doesn't matter whether it is eating a meal, kissing, going for a walk or full-blown sex, if it is done as an act of love, it is a gift of God and to be enjoyed without guilt or regret.
And so we made love whenever we felt like it, which in those days was most nights. We came to know each other's bodies intimately, I suspect more intimately than most conventionally married couples. Sometimes, when we lay together, relaxed and sleepy after love-making, I would think about my mother, and how little enjoyment she'd had in life. Though she had a kind and faithful husband, a pleasant house in a pretty village, a son who, whatever his faults, genuinely did his best to be dutiful, and an income at least sufficient, she chose to follow a gloomy, sin-obsessed religion and deny herself, and those around her, any real pleasure in life. And when I thought these things, I would turn and look at Aiden, and think, how incredibly lucky I am. I have work I enjoy doing, a lovely home in a pleasant area, and beyond anything else a clever, kind, stunningly handsome man who loves me and whom I love. And we've just had a lot of fun together, and now we're going to sleep. And tomorrow will be a new day, and that will be good too.
Well, I've nearly finished my story now. Aiden and I have lived together for a good many years, and we've seen a good many changes. While there is still a good deal of prejudice around, it has become better for people like us. Since the law changed in 1967 it has been possible for what we now call 'gay' couples to live together openly, and our friends and neighbours are very sociable and happy to visit us or for us to visit them. Aiden didn't become a surgeon in the end as he found he enjoyed being a general practitioner. A few years after he qualified, Dr Fleet retired and Aiden took over his practice. He now has a partner: Dr Deborah Hillyard who was a fellow student with him at Liverpool. Nowadays, of course, we have the National Health Service, and in consequence the health of the British population is very greatly improved from how it was when I was growing up.
Drs Mitchell and Hillyard are greatly loved and respected in these parts. Dr Fleet's house was turned into their surgery – they call it the Samuel Fleet Medical Centre - and I was called upon to re-fit and furnish it. Perkins and Bright did the building alterations, but I made the consulting room desks and chairs, a table for the waiting room and an examination couch for each of the consulting rooms. Aiden tells me that everyone who goes there admires the furnishings!
Yes, we have a good life, Aiden and I. We celebrated our fiftieth birthdays this year. Aiden's younger sister Betty is married; she and her husband have two children that we see from time to time, though not often as they live in Scotland! We don't see his older sister Margaret as she joined a closed religious order. We even have some adopted nephews and nieces, the children of Deborah and her husband Andrew. They call us their 'two uncles'. Perhaps one day gay couples will be allowed to adopt children. Who knows? What I am sure of is this: that society is gradually becoming more accepting of difference, and that couples like Aiden and I, living in our own house, paying rates and taxes, contributing through our work to the community, will in the end lead to the situation where everyone can love as they choose, not as popular prejudice dictates that they ought to.
Yes, prejudice… a strange thing. I think it comes from fear of the unknown. It can lead to terrible things. In my own life it led to my being thrown out of my home at the age of fourteen. But that's a pinprick in comparison to what happened under the Nazis: their prejudices against Jews, Poles, homosexuals, gypsies, led to mass slaughter on a scale never before seen in the world. We must see to it that it never happens again.
But let me end with a happier thought. Aiden and I are accepted as members of our community. Sick people look to him to make them better. People in need of wooden furniture come to me. We are not Different, we are Special. In the same way that every human being on this planet is Special. Each of us is unique. So let us celebrate that uniqueness and rejoice in the rich diversity of God's creation. My poor mother could not accept that diversity, and so she led a life that was drab, colourless and filled with imperfectly suppressed anger. I rejoice that through my friendship, and later my deeper relationship, with Aiden, I moved away from that drabness, that miserable uniformity, and became the person I was always meant to be: Paul Blandy, neighbour, friend, maker of fine furniture and beloved of Aiden.
THE END
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