Book 11 – Jill and the Wild Horses

Chapter One – Going to Australia

I climbed the steps to the plane in mid-winter. There was a tingling dawn frost lit up by a dazzling low sun. Everything was crystal clear, and I had a pang of regret. For a moment I wanted to stay in Britain, my native land and not face the heat and dust of the Antipodes and meet a man who was my long-lost father, who I had believed was dead. Throughout my childhood, I nurtured vague, cherished, and well-polished memories of him since I was a tot. Now, all these easy illusions, more imaginings than anything else, were to be blown apart by the reality of him being a flesh and blood convicted murderer, rather than an angelic presence.

“There is something I have to discuss with you, Jill,” said Mummy some days before I was due to leave for Australia.

I expected a litany of do’s and don’ts, although, to be fair, this was not Mummy’s usual style. I’m not sure why I expected her to suddenly become an instructor of correct behaviour at my advanced age of twenty years. Perhaps she was about to issue a note of caution about how to behave with the Heywards, the Australian family who had invited me to travel with them on a summer showjumping trip.

“This is a huge thing, and I’m afraid you may resent the fact that I haven’t told you before. In truth, I’ve been turning it over in my mind for some time now.”

I was barely listening, thinking about whether I had packed sufficient pairs of socks and underwear. Then, I contemplated the type of horses I was to showjump in a foreign land of dusty plains and sun-drenched bushland.

She persisted in her speech, which she must have rehearsed many times before this delivery. “Especially when I married Richard. I thought then that it might be something that I should do. But on balance, I decided that moving to Scotland with a new stepfather would be enough of a change for you to adjust to.”

“Mummy, this is weird. What on earth are you going on about?” I asked impatiently, thinking that I wanted to go down to the stables and spend some time with my horses before I swanned off for weeks and weeks of what was essentially a holiday, leaving behind Linda, Hugh and John to do all the work at Blainstock Stables, our joint business venture.

“Jill, please just concentrate; sometimes you have the attention span of a gnat. This is very, very important.”

It suddenly occurred to me that she was about to say that she was having another baby. Hamish was now a very naughty toddler, but surely, Mummy was getting a bit long in the tooth to have another child.

“Are you pregnant again?” I asked with just a hint of accusation.

“This is serious,” she said impatiently.

“And another baby isn’t?” I snapped churlishly.

“No, not at all, but this is very important. I must warn you that what I’m about to tell you is very serious. You must prepare yourself for a serious shock.”

“Well, tell me!” I demanded. The words of warning were wheeling and turning in my mind like gulls above a spawning tide. My mother paused as if to gather her courage, and then the words came out.

“It’s about your father.”

Now, this floored me. When I was young my father had gone away on a business trip and never returned. He had died. I didn’t even remember him very well. I suppose Mummy had quietly mourned him, but we had got on with our lives and moved from Wales to Pool Cottage in Chatton and managed very well on our own.

“He’s not dead. He’s alive.”

There was a moment of ringing silence. I wondered if Mummy was going a bit batty. My father had been dead for years, dead as a doornail. However, as Charles Dickens had written, why is a doornail dead?

“I told you he was dead. I told everyone he was dead. But he wasn’t.”

“Why on earth would you do that?” I asked impatiently, not really believing her. At least not believing the bit about him not being dead, not the bit about telling everyone he was dead.

“Because he went to prison. He went to prison for a very long time. I suppose I couldn’t bear the shame of it. I didn’t want you growing up and people pointing at you and saying, ‘There goes the murderer’s daughter.”

“My father was a murderer,” I whispered in horror—finally, the shock of this news breaking through my careless disbelief.

“Well, he did kill someone, but it was an accident. No one but me believed him. They said it was deliberate, and he went to prison for a very long time. But he got out last year, and he’s gone to Australia to make a new life for himself. I received a letter from him last week,” she said.

“How did he know where to write to you?” I asked inconsequentially.

“We hadn’t been corresponding for all those years. We thought it best to make a clean break of it. To give me and you a chance of a better life. But when we moved up here, I wrote to the prison informing them of my change of address. Just in case.”

“Oh!” was all I could manage to squeak.

“Who .. was killed?” I asked. I couldn’t quite bring myself to say, ‘Who did he kill?’

“It was his business partner. Your father went away. You know his name was David, and he found out that Jerry, his partner, had done something dastardly. When your father came back to England he had it out with him, and it came down to some pushing and shoving, and Jerry fell over, hit his head and died. It looked so suspicious, and they decided that your father had whacked him across the head deliberately.”

“Gosh!” I gasped, feeling as if all the air was being sucked out of my lungs. “That sounds like something out of a penny dreadful.”

“His parents, who lived in Wales, died while he was in prison. I think, in a way, they died of shame. Everyone in the village knew what had happened. That was one reason why we left Wales to go to Oxfordshire for a new start. He inherited their terraced house and it was sold. He wrote and wanted me to have the proceeds of the sale, but I explained that we were getting on very well now. That was before Richard lost all his money,” she said a little ruefully. “I suggested he take the money and use it to set himself up with a new life.”

“I suppose Australia is where we sent our convicts,” I quipped, with a weak attempt at humour.

“Now that the Heywards have invited you, it might be an opportunity for you to meet him.”

Again, there was one of those silences. I was finding it hard to process all this startling information. My father was alive! I suppose I had never really thought much about him. He had been a shadowy figure in my childish imagination. There were a couple of photos, grainy snapshots of him holding me as a baby, and one professional photo of Mummy’s wedding. He had been tall and thin with blonde hair. I suppose that was where I got my blonde hair, as Mummy’s had always been light brown. As they say in books, he had not been classically handsome but had a very pleasant countenance. I was still thinking of him in the past tense. It had indeed not occurred to me as a child that there was something malevolent in his face. I was thankful that the death of his partner had been an accident. Without even considering it, I believed that he was innocent of evil intent. He had been outraged by the corrupt practices of his partner and had been flailing about in the throes of righteous indignation.

You might wonder if I resented the fact that Mummy had kept this from me for all these years, if I felt betrayed by lies. But I didn’t. I could see the impeccable reasoning behind her actions. I had never really felt the loss of a father, as I could barely remember ever having one. My best friend Ann had a father who was a remote figure who disappeared behind a newspaper at breakfast and caught the train to London every day. I supposed it was better to have a dead father than to live with the awful secret knowledge of being the progeny of a convicted murderer. That would have been a heavy weight upon my soul.

“I’ve wondered of late if that was one of the reasons why you haven’t got yourself a boyfriend,” said Mummy. She made it sound like I had gone shopping and forgotten to purchase myself a young man. I had been concentrating on gloves and handbags rather than a life companion. “You know, with Ann and Henry, and even Susan Pyke married to that man, Bartholomew. They grew up with fathers, and that prepared them for the idea of marriage.”

Now, this did make me feel uncomfortable. Inside, I was twisting around in excruciating embarrassment. It sounded like Mummy was saying in some ineffable way that I was immature, unfit to grow into adulthood. I remembered my unfortunate infatuation with the dastardly Jack Lasky when I had gone to Porlock Vale. I was glad I had never mentioned that to Mummy. He had been forty years old but a very glamorous and attractive forty years old. Undoubtedly, someone might have diagnosed me as suffering from a complex whereby I was looking for a father. This was entirely untrue. It was simply a schoolgirl crush, and I had gotten over it!

I could have gone off on a tangent, hating this somewhat unfavourable examination of my psyche and obviously (!) deficient personality, but there was no time for such gruesome thoughts. I had to grapple with the fact of a father. Not just some shadowy figure who I had always fondly believed ‘had had a way with horses’ but a real live human being with a beating heart and a very unfortunate life story. He lived in Australia, and I was about to board an aeroplane and fly halfway around the world to find him. 

“I know it’s a big thing for you to cope with, and I would have preferred to have told you before. It was just the coincidence of Australia, with the chance that you might take the opportunity to meet him. I had to tell you. Have I done the right thing?” she looked at me searchingly. There was a note of pleading in her eyes. “Perhaps I should have told you a long time ago, but it was such a can of worms that I couldn’t bring myself to do it”.

“Can of worms,” I echoed. It was a great big barrel of worms. Then, my imagination began to zoom into the most over-used of all tropes. “Next, you’ll be telling me I have a twin brother – called Bill! Bill and Jill! He’s living in Wales, brought up by my grandparents, and when they died, he went to the local orphanage,” I continued constructing a Victorian melodrama. Reflecting on this delusion later I realised that if he were the same age as me then he would have been rather old to go into an orphanage just a few years ago.

“Oh Jill, darling. This is hard enough, and you’re not taking me at all seriously,” said Mummy, looking very anxious. I began to see this from her point of view. To have carried this secret all these years must have been a heavy burden.