The Anniversaries

It has been a week filled with anniversaries: three birthdays, one arrival and one memorial. All five are family, but only two of these are still living. It sounds like a conundrum, but it is not. Let me elaborate a little.

The first two birthdays are of my late father and late brother. They were born on the same day in mid-January, thirty six years apart.

Raymond Jeffcutt was born in 1918, although his later records put it as 1917 because he lied about his age in order to join the army at 15. He ran away from home, joined up and was soon posted to Egypt. His father was badly wounded in the First World War and returned home an invalid, so all of the children, there were nine, had to leave school at 14 and work. My father got a job as a shop delivery boy: he hated it. After he joined the army he always sent money home. His favourite memory of army life was a series of long expeditions through the Western Sahara map-making. He worked hard and was promoted rapidly during wartime to Captain, commanding a squadron of tanks at the battle of El Alemain. Sent on a suicide night-attack by Montgomery, he was wounded and captured while most of his squadron were killed. He spent three and a half years in POW camps in Italy and Germany. Returning home he married, had three children and worked in a series of mundane jobs. He died in 2000 aged 82.

Robert Jeffcutt was born in 1954. Like my father, he left school as soon as he could at 16. And again like my father, he worked his way up to become a civil engineer and the head of a highways contractor. He married young and had two children. He was a good athlete and won prizes for cross-country and road racing. Like my father, he was very practical and spent much time improving and extending the family home. In 2009 he contracted a fast-growing cancer which was diagnosed too late to be treated. He died in 2010 aged 56. Had he lived, he would have seen three grandchildren.

Gillian Banks was born in 1959 and became my first wife. She was cosseted as a child because her parents believed she had a heart defect. She became a medical secretary in the NHS, got her heart checked to find that she had no problem whatsoever. She began to cycle and joined a hill-walking club in Manchester, where I met her. We moved together to Southampton in 1984, my first lectureship. Buying our first house, we moved in at Xmas 1986. A few weeks later we went away for the weekend to Snowdonia. Gill had some sort of blackout and fell to her death from the Snowdon horseshoe ridge. She was 27. I barely survived the ordeal that followed.

Amongst other things, I suffered depression and lost my job. I was glad to find another, but it was in Stirling. So I moved five hundred miles away to Scotland, a place where I knew nobody. I rented out the house in Southampton and lived in bed-sits. Within a year I met another woman (also an academic) who persuaded me to come and live with her in Glasgow. I was reluctant but still did so. I was very emotionally confused and in plenty of pain. We competed rather than supporting each other. I became workaholic, got promoted and became the head of an international research network. I began to apply for Professorships and on my third interview was appointed at QUB. I arrived in Belfast in mid-January 1998, another place where I knew nobody. She then phoned to tell me our marriage was over.

Oddly enough, Northern Ireland has been the place where I have sorted out all the problems from my past. It was a lot of hard work over the early part of the twenty years that I’ve now been here. But I’m very glad that this happened, because four and a half years ago I met my dearest T. This was at a difficult time for her; she was leaving a bad marriage. But there was that indefinable something special between us, which we both recognised. We have since thrived together, despite the many challenges we’ve faced: her messy contested divorce, my cancer recurrences. We are now stronger, closer and happier than we have ever been. I just couldn’t imagine being with anyone else.

I am writing this on T’s birthday.

Many happy returns my dearest love.