New Year and the Nazi

So tonight is New Year's Eve. The start of a new year, my third year. Tonight I will mark the occasion with a proper cooked meal, a roast chicken, roast potatoes, butternut, broccoli.

I have a sense of calm. Christmas, our wedding anniversary and now New Year - nothing can touch me. I am managing to sail through this potentially choppy water - even if it's misty. Yesterday I returned to bowls, feeling somewhat repentant about my absence and looking forward to a game although oddly enough, I had to force myself to go.

Tabs - casual bowls, in which players are drawn out of a box and put into whatever teams come up; yesterday I was lucky, good players in a trips game.

Bowls is ever fascinating. From afar it looks tame - just people rolling heavy round things up and down and seemingly absorbed - what a drag. But get down and roll one of those round things, and calculate its curved line and weight to the very centimeter - and you're hooked. Line and balance is what it's all about. Balance in a perfect delivery, calculation and co-ordination. Very much like golf but regarded as a poor cousin. There is little glamour in bowls; rather, it is innate, subtle, and to some, enchanting. To me, enchanting. I think after F's death it saved my composure. I could lose myself in a game and concentrate on the bowl rather than my feelings. I could force time to tick by and be reasonably happy. Passion - I needed a passion and I had one.

Very few of my friends are going out tonight. I do not fancy driving out in any case; I do not fancy the drunk drivers, or the buzz of a party waiting for midnight - we are beyond all that. We never used to celebrate this night very much at all - F usually went to bed before me. Occasionally I would sit outside with a glass of wine and watch the surrounding neighbourhood let off rockets.

One noteable such evening my daughter K, who was still at university, had a major fight with a boyfriend F and I disliked - we thought he was controlling and erratic and did not trust him; I also thought he was a Right Winger and irrational and prejudiced. His grandfather had been a member of the Nazi SS, and while one cannot help one's grandfather being who he was, one could revise one's feelings about history and this Kenneth would not, at that time, see the film Schindler's List; I suspected it was because he had Nazi sympathies - he was that sort of person. The fact that he had something against that movie I found very disturbing.

Anyway this New Year's Eve K and Kenneth had had a typically major fight and he stormed off. My daughter went out to a party, in her own car. Come midnight and I hear noises coming from her room, which was above our garage. I went out to investigate - to find this boyfriend. She's gone out, I said. Gone where? To a party, I said, I don't know where it is.

He must have hung around, or left, I am not sure which and did not care as long as he did not cause trouble but K did not come home that night, she stayed out with friends. I woke up in the morning to that dull kind of tiredness after too little sleep but F had to go out somewhere and I was left alone in the house. I was writing. The phone rang - boyfriend Kenneth: where's my daughter? I do not know. Back to my computer, the phone rang again - his sister: where is K? I do not know. Back to the computer - the phone again, a friend, with the same question. Even his mother phoned. I realised that this was an arranged attack, an invasion, set up by this nutter, who had got everyone he knew to telephone our house and ask for my daughter. I pulled the plug on the phone, shaken. I had to leave it unhooked for hours.

They eventually broke up after more of this kind of drama - he was a nasty piece of work and it was a relief to get him out of our lives but it left scars on K, mentally. To this day I do not know how well those have healed, and I sympathise as I have similar scars from a similar man, an architectural student who was truly psychotic - today one would have called him bi-polar.

For five years from the age of eighteen I was bullied, harassed, teased, threatened, manipulated and shaken by a young man of uncertain temper who completely spoilt my university days. My weight dropped to 90 lbs, I had no friends, no self confidence and sometimes thought of suicide - but, my saving grace, I found a job somehow on the Financial Mail and discovered a host of uncomplicated, party-going, cynical, humorous, casually life enhancing people - life, not gloom! Fun, not doom! I immediately dropped this Patrick - I in fact went out to a party, and he went off to commit suicide. He didn't, of course; his departure from me took months. he could not believe that I had turned away. He would skulk outside and pounce on whoever I was with (leaving us shaken); he would arrive at my parents' home at the crack of dawn and tap on my window for an anguished, pre-work "talk" ... he would find my brother and beg for assistance. All this drama was abhorrent to me and everyone around me - no wonder I embraced my husband (later, years later, when we met), and within three months we were married - F was sane, rational, joyous, life affirming and reassuring. I felt safe with him, and what's more, he was damned attractive.