I was on my own as my husband hadn't spoken to me since Christmas, and we were giving him some space to do his MA thesis in the house, rather than moving out to do it, which I suspected was so he could do something else - be that as it may, he did that too anyway...

But the family, released from the heavy gloom of his presence, depression, disapproval, or whatever it was, had an idyllic week in Bala, playing on the sands, so much so that we decided to stay another week. The children built sand castles, I sat in the shade with the baby under a green parachute attached to the smooth grey slate rocks, and read Colin Wilson 'Mysteries' (I'd started it eleven years previously, I think) and Richard Bach, 'Jonathan Livingston Seagull.'

We found starfish, and Maryjane was stung by a jelly fish; I can still picture them in my mind's eye, running along the sand on the beach, the clean salty tang of the breeze, the terns and black backed gulls, wheeling and crying, the perfectly blue sky going on forever, and creamy curds of curling white horses' manes in the wide shallow sea...

With all the children, camping cot, buggy, frame tent (for the second week) and camping gear, piled into and onto my fiat 127 ( a diddy little car) the roof rack (you had a roof rack, on a fiat 127?) was counterbalanced by the weight inside the vehicle. The AA man at the Services pointed out it should not really be loaded so much that the luggage doubled the height of the car, and pointed out that it was probably why the car was swaying a bit as I was driving along, but fortunately we arrived and returned as far as the West Country safely, although we had yet to get home to the South East...

I felt an inordinate sense of joy and freedom, which was not surprising as my husband was in the process of wooing 'the love of his life' (as he subsequently described her) with the proceeds of anything he could sell from inside the house - books, bric a brac, my clothes, the child benefit... When I became stranded in Bath, a few weeks later, having run out of money, I had to busk with my guitar in the pedestrian areas around the cathedral in order to just to feed the children, much less to get petrol money to get back home - but that was another story.

The children had just got out of intensive care, four of them, having gone down with amoebic Asian dysentery at the Big Green Gathering, a festival in the West Country, where we had only been for a day before the eldest started to show violent symptoms, it was that virulent.

It was when I asked him (my then husband)to come and help me with the baby whilst I was visiting the other four in hospital, and he refused, that I realised he'd lost his marbles. (I didn't think the intensive care ward was the best place for the youngest to accompany my visits, since, breast fed, he hadn't yet caught the bug.) I was having to visit them in two separate rooms, the three and five year old in one, and the six and twelve year old in another, and they were very ill.

It was a sizzling hot summer; I had no intention of leaving my youngest anywhere else or with anyone else, but the infection was so very contagious that I was nervous about taking him into the hospital ward where his brother and sisters were.

The other children were the victims of the Gathering's maladministration, whereby the water was not turned on until everyone had been on site for two days, so the queues for the only standpipe were up to 2 hours in fierce heat, and the toilets had no handwashing facilities. Shades of Glastonbury festival, but worse! Those who crouched, squatting over latrine seats did not think of little children climbing on with their hands, and there was no water available for two days, until a bright spark put a bucket with water and Jeyes fluid (disinfectant) in as a rinse.

We were there for six hours and the children were ill. Before I had realised the danger, it was already too late.. So I asked my husband to come - as I was staying in a friend's flat in Bath, where we were when the children were taken to Hospital. He wrote back to say he couldn't tear himself away from his new woman's side, and no, he needed all the Social Security Benefits and Child Benefits, (he was unemployed) as she (the love of his life) needed the money; besotted wasn't the word.

So I busked with my guitar, and visited Intensive Care, until the children were allowed to leave the hospital, when I took them to my girlfriend's loaned flat, and scrubbed, and Jeyes-fluided the floor, walls, potties, (I needed three for simultaneous use.) I realised then that a man who was not even a prop when needed was of less use than an ornament, and I determined that a person who used a crutch before it was necessary would lose the use of his/her legs. So I let him go, immediately, finally, after having tried to cope with his taciturn silences, mood swings, withdrawal and refusal to speak to me, having hoped to reconcile our relationship for over a year.

I realise now that there were a many differences between us - but he was so obliging for the first few years, that he would manifest whatever I wanted to believe about him. I rarely flash back to those years, but just for an instant there, I did, and caught a glimpse of my eldest, aged thirteen, her hair cut and permed and looking so different, and so cheeky - it makes me smile, as she is a grown woman now.

However bad they seem as teenagers, they are adorable, and later, when they've left home, you'd have them back just the way they were, just to gaze, admire, smile, and shake your head, and to give thanks, and pray their safety, one more time...

My husband had decided to insist on being granted custody of my eldest daughter along with the rest of my children, having thrown me out of our home, and although the council said I had a right to live there too, they would not make him leave or enable me to be there with him. He threw me out bodily, and as far as the police were concerned it was a 'domestic' incident so I had to get an injunction to get him to leave in the end, for me to return.

The children all came to live with me in my tiny little flat the Council gave me, and he was sitting alone (having split up with the new girlfriend) for a year in our four-bedroomed house. As he applied for custody of all the children - even my eldest although she was from my first marriage, as a 'child of the family' - which amazed me - it got to the point where there was nothing I did not consider him to be capable of, in terms of doing strange and unaccountable things. I once caught him walking out of the house with my canteen of cutlery that I won in a raffle, concealed in a holdall. I think perhaps it was a nervous breakdown, and he should have been hopitalised, but at the time I thought him merely cussed.

So the holiday provided the other kind of healing - two men, walking in a field, one shall be taken and the other shall be left. The sword of Truth- or of Damocles, sliced through the fragile bonds that bound us, and I was free. The girlfriend had said to me 'Jane, you must set him free, or I will' - but then she thought of herself as the new, female Messiah - and slapped me when I suggested in the face of her arrogance that she was 'a woman, just like me.' The holiday was a turning point, and the start of a whole new episode in our lives...

I remember the sheep all over the roads, aimlessly wandering. That was the thing I remember most about the mountains. Then, as usual, it was quite wet and misty, but who cared? We were all going on our Summer Holiday. We weren't to know that everything about our lives was about to change...

Copyright 2000 Jane Johnson

Yours and Mine