My father in law has lived in the same house in Bradmore,
Wolverhampton for 42 years. His parents and parents in law helped him and his
wife to buy it when they had one chubby, cheerful, bespectacled baby (my
husband) and badly needed a space of their own.
They were young parents- just 20- who had met in a club in
Torquay, danced to Rock Your Baby and
fallen into a kind of young love that resulted in angsty parents, the
uncomfortable overlap of middle and working class families, an early pregnancy
and hurried marriage. My husband likes to joke that he was ‘right up at the
front’ at his parents wedding.
If the walls of the house in Church Road in Bradmore could talk,
they would.
Two unhappy marriages, two divorces, a third, happier marriage.
Two children, some step grandchildren. Long-lived cats (who knew all three
wives), a short-lived rabbit, an agitated ghost, one amateur exorcism and present
through it all a hard-working man who kept the garden nice, shaped his view of
the world by reading The Sun (or latterly, The Daily Mail), made sure the fire
was burning well and refused to leave the house once he’d put on his dressing
gown.
The local pub, The Gunmakers Arms -a four minute walk away, is as
familiar to my father in law as the walls of his own home. He’s been going
there most nights for four decades; to drink, sometimes with a cheese and onion
cob or grey peas and bacon, but always, crucially, to connect with his
long-term friends. Their friendship which is enjoyed nightly in the pub, weekly
‘up town’, in the hallowed Billy Wright stand at their beloved Molineux and
during an annual ‘lads’ trip to Tenerife, seems eternal. Their friendship has
outlived marriages and weathered the ups and downs of Wolverhampton Wanderers
(We love you Nuno!), it is all important and runs through my father in laws’
veins like the elixir of life.
My relationship with all parents- natural or by marriage- has been
and continues to be problematic. There’s a book in me that needs to be written,
and perhaps there will be time to write it now. I bring relationship baggage to
my 4 in-laws whether they deserve it or not. I’m a Good Daughter In Law, but
don’t trust or let them in. I believe that I see their flaws more clearly than
anyone.
These are strange times. The over-thinkers among us have more
material than we can comfortably process, like always.
Last night, my husband was sitting on our bed on the phone. I
pushed my head close to his ear to hear who it was. There’s no one with a
thicker Wolves accent than my father in law. I rolled my eyes. ‘What does he want?, Will you be long’?
Convinced that my father in law’s obsessively regular trips to the
Gunmakers mean he is an alcoholic, I was almost sure that once the pubs closed
their doors he would have to drink at home. I expected to hear that it
had become a problem. I listened in to the conversation, waiting to hear him
confirm my view. He started strong with some mildly xenophobic views on the
virus and its spread but then my heart was forced to soften, and it softens
further as I write.
My father in law misses The Gunmakers Arms. He misses his friends.
He ‘sees no point in drinking' without his mates. He fears that this will last
six weeks. When my husband said it might be much longer, his dad said that
didn’t bear thinking about.
All this time I believed it was beer he needed, and that sometimes
he chose it over his family. What he is really choosing each time he leaves
home is friendship. And now that he cannot access that friendship in the comfortable
way he enjoys (and with no football either) he is sad.
I’ve never understood this before and am grateful (and sorry) to
understand it now.
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