The Long Road To Freedom

Chapter Three

After an inauspicious start in life, at the relatively young age of twenty-two, my life reached a very significant turning point. I met a slightly older, attractive, intelligent woman who inspired me to set about building a future far more successful than I could ever have imagined.

I came from a poorly achieving, lower-working-class family. We lived in a council house in a poor neighborhood, an area not unlike the poorer areas of The Bronx. We didn't have a car, a telephone, or even a television.

My father was in and out of work as an electrician and had developed an incurable and unsustainable gambling addiction. My mother somehow managed to keep our heads above water by taking on a series of part-time short-contract jobs at the local Huntley and Palmers biscuit factory. At the same time, she had eight unruly children to bring up almost single-handedly. At times, we were only a few short steps from dirt poor.

My father was not the luckiest of gamblers. He was constantly chasing the ace without getting anywhere near it. However, there was one time when he had a big win, which he tried to hide from my mother. I remember only too well the night she found out that my father had won a thousand pounds. The argument that ensued between my mother and father was off the scale.

It ended with my father offering my mother a hundred pounds to buy a new washing machine. She was so angry and insulted by such a paltry offer that she threw the bundle of bank notes on the fire in the living room. I seem to recall that the row escalated into a physical fight in which my mother's false teeth flew out of her mouth and into the fire, along with the desperately needed money.

I and my siblings witnessed the fight from halfway up the stairs We cried amongst ourselves as we peeked over the banister, fearful that our mother would get seriously injured, or worse. Eventually, it all calmed down with my poor mother in floods of tears.

The next morning, my father was on his knees at the fireplace, rummaging through the ashes with the vain hope of finding even just some corners of banknotes with the serial number intact. Apparently, the banks would accept such fragile evidence and freely replace the money. I don't think he found a single half-burnt corner.

To put my father's win into context, for one thousand pounds my parents could have bought a house. However, my father's sycophantic friends told him that owning a house was like having a millstone around your neck. And so the money was used for beers for his false friends and trying to win even more money at the betting shop. It was all gone within less than two weeks!

Meanwhile, I was totally overwhelmed by life in general due to being constantly bullied by my siblings, school colleagues, and street thugs. I was also sexually abused by a close male neighbor, and by my eldest sister, at the age of just ten. And due to that campaign of childhood terror and trauma, I was the archetypal poster boy for underachievement.

I left school with not a single qualification and embarked upon a series of dead-end manual labor jobs. I was little more than factory fodder and my life was going nowhere fast, except down the drain. I couldn't even get myself a girlfriend and didn't lose my virginity until I was twenty-one years old. I was what these days is called an incel.

In short, I felt imprisoned by my family background, my lack of personal and academic development, and my past history of abject failure. I was totally without any sort of hope for the future and I did not expect to live a long life. I so yearned for freedom from all of that, to escape that prison of circumstances I was born into, but I did not know which road to take.

For sure, my circumstances would be the end of me long before I got anywhere near thirty years of age. I was simply marking time until the day for me to leave this life came all too prematurely. At the age of just twenty-two, that was all about to change for the better in the form of a woman I met quite by chance.

Emily, the woman who was to become my fiance, wife, and mother of three children, came into my life like a breath of fresh air. She was elegant and very well-educated. Her father was a senior officer in the city fire service and her mother was a part-time shop assistant in a local electrical store.

As a result of her father's successful career and the constancy of employment that went with it, Emily's parents bought their own semi-detached house in a good neighborhood and had a new car, as well as a color tv and telephone. It was all a far cry from what I was used to.

Emily was hugely successful at school and gained a hat full of qualifications, enabling her to go to university to study for a degree in fine art. As Emily's siblings, a younger sister, and brother, lagged far behind in terms of academic achievement, she became the poster girl for successful offspring. She was the apple of her father's eye.

I met Emily towards the end of her final year at university, and since I had recently lost my job, we met at what was a crossroads for both of us. In a short time, we decided to move and went to live and work in London. One year later we returned back north to get married and settle down.

Not too long after our wedding, we managed to buy our first house and a car and found work in the town where we had chosen to live. Once again, I found myself in a series of dead-end jobs and started to wonder if I could somehow recover my lost education. I was inspired by Emily's academic success, enough to want to better myself by getting a degree. To this end, I started a course of after-work English classes at a local college of further education.

I spent three years doing one English course after another, going up a level at a time, until finally, I had what it took to be accepted by a university in the nearest big city.

My second bite at getting an education was truly transformative, to say the least. The three years studying at that higher level were among the best years of my life. I thoroughly enjoyed all of my lectures and seminars, my contact with my fellow academic and life aspirants, as well as some of the most wonderful, highly intelligent, teachers and tutors I had ever met in my entire life. To this day I am proud to count amongst my tutors and mentors, people who were world-leading authorities in their subject areas. People like Richard Kendal, who was a widely recognized, only recently deceased, expert on nineteenth-century French art.

At the end of three years, I graduated with a 2.1 degree in humanities and social studies. On graduation day, I was so, so proud of myself. It had taken over ten years of poorly paid, physically demanding, hugely demeaning, dead-end jobs, plus six years of hard part-time study, to be able to get up on that graduate's podium to receive my all-important scroll of parchment.

It is sad to reflect that Emily's underachieving mother and her inferiority complex, almost spoiled the day.

"Well, I wouldn't be too proud of yourself Ralph. It's not as if it's a proper degree, is it," she said scornfully.

"Really, Flo?" I replied. "Why is it not a proper degree then?"

"Well, it's not from Oxford or Cambridge, is it," she said snootily.

I could have reminded her that she did not have any degree from anywhere and that her precious little daughter's degree was in that case also not a proper degree. However, I was not prepared to let this stupid woman spoil my day with her nasty, supercilious, little act of petty jealousy.

I was absolutely seething with anger and a deeply felt sense of hurt. I would have loved to have grabbed hold of a roll of gaffa tape and plaster a strip of it across her offensively foul mouth. Instead, I said nothing and walked away in total and utter disgust.

As a matter of fact, this was not the first or last time that this superficial, overbearing woman, with her unwarranted airs and graces, had put me down with malicious insults. She was the sort of ogre that got mothers-in-law a bad name.

Flo may well have had all of the material signs of being a successful human being, but she totally lacked the loving heart and soul of a decent, empathetic, and compassionate member of civilized society.

Moving on, the effect of obtaining that degree completely changed my working life. Suddenly, I had a career rather than a job, and I got paid in one hour an amount I used to get paid for a week of hard slog. Within a few short years, Emily and I had moved up the property ladder, from a modest cottage to a highly desirable mansion. I had totally outperformed her parents, never mind my own. And I am absolutely sure that that success was something that really chewed Emily's mother up for the rest of her miserable life.

As for my own mother, she too got on in life after my father passed away. Her eight children had pretty much all left home, leaving her free to get a career of her own and even buy her own house. And she also managed to do a great deal of traveling abroad, in Europe and America. I was as proud of my lovely mother as I was of myself.

I like to think that my mother had been inspired by my own success. I was the first one in my entire family to buy his own house, to get a degree, to live a hugely fulfilling, highly rewarding life. I led the way, and my mother followed my lead. I know she was enormously proud of me and what I had achieved. She knew only too well, from bringing me up, that I hadn't had the greatest of starts in life. However, I had overcome all of those obstacles to become a shining example of how to get ahead in life, to enjoy what my friends in the USA like to call, the American Dream. However, like all dreams, that come and go like a change in the wind, it didn't last beyond twenty years. But it was a wonderful experience whilst it lasted before a new chapter took me on to a whole new world of trials and tribulations far, far across new horizons, on the other side of the world.