When I was seven, I was sent away.
By Abi Symons
When I was seven, I was sent away.
It wasn’t romantic or even especially far away like in a novel or a period drama. I wasn’t disgraced. I was sent to stay with family friends for two weeks while my mum was in hospital.
She was pregnant with my sister but there were complications due to the fact that she also had cancer.
I’m oddly casual about the fact that my mum had cancer. I was young so I didn’t understand a lot of what was going on. It’s been 24 years, so I’ve had a lot of time to process it. I think mostly my blasé attitude towards it is because I was told the type of cancer she had – Hodgkin’s Disease (or Hodgkin’s Lymphoma) – was pretty much the best type of cancer you could get. It was slow growing, though it had been accelerated by her pregnancy. They’d caught it in time in the early stages. My mum had basically won the cancer lottery. For seven-year-old me, it wasn’t that traumatic. Plus, I was going to have a much longed for baby sister. So cancer shmancer.
So in early August 1995 I trundled off, twenty minutes from home, to Paul and Diana Goldstein. They had a son named Dan who was a similar age to me. I’d be sharing his room for two weeks and going to Camp Beaumont; the ever-popular summer day camp.
The first week I was fine. I didn’t love it there, but it was okay. I understood enough about the situation to know that things were at least vaguely serious. My sister was born by caesarean about eight weeks early due to what had become a balancing act between how long she needed to grow in the womb vs. how long they could leave the accelerating cancer.
Week one at the Goldstein residence I discovered I didn’t like curry. I also didn’t like rice pudding for dessert, and I especially didn’t like not being allowed said dessert because I couldn’t finish what was on my plate. They were much stricter in lots of ways. I didn’t like Dan’s cousin James who was around a lot and, for no reason anyone could fathom, had a stupid ponytail. Every day of my first week at Camp Beaumont he insisted on pulling the braids in my hair on a regular basis. On the third day I got so angry I snuck up behind him and yanked his ratty hair as hard as I could. His head snapped back and to this day I still remember how satisfying it was to get right up in his upside-down face and say “I will do that twice for every time you pull my hair again.” Unsurprisingly, he stopped.
One day at Camp I ate two full-size Curly Wurly chocolate bars one after the other and was promptly extremely sick. I have never touched one since. For a while even the words Curly Wurly made me feel nauseated. Life is full of swings and roundabouts.
My dad had taken me to visit my sister at the end of that first week. She was in an incubator and hooked up to loads of tubes but I stuck my hand through the hole like I was shown and tried to get my small, chubby finger into her tiny hand. I’d seen my mum too who looked… well, like a woman who had been taken straight from a C-section to a session of radiotherapy which, frankly, is not a good look for anyone. I think seeing her like that was the turning point for me. I didn’t want to be at the Goldstein’s anymore. I wanted my mum. I wanted my dad. I wanted to go home.
It took me a really long time to realise that the reason my parents sent me to stay with the Goldstein family was largely to do with logistics. My dad was going from work to the hospital to bed. There just wasn’t time for a seven-year-old. But I started to get really stressed out at bedtime. For the first couple of nights of the second week, I just lay awake, crying silently while Dan slept in his bed on the other side of the room, lit by a shaft of moonlight coming in through the skylight and quietly snoring.
On the third night I lost it. I cried hysterically until about 9.30pm when they finally called my dad and asked him to pick me up. I put my things into my bag, grabbed my teddy and sat on the stairs in my nightdress and slippers, sniffling. To be fair to Paul and Diana, everyone had done their best. It’s a big, kind-hearted thing to do to take in a kid who isn’t yours for two weeks. But it had all caught up with me. No one was really talking to me or making sure I understood what was going on or checking in on how I was feeling. I don’t think it was intentional. I’m not sure anyone really thought about it. It just wasn’t really like that in the ‘90s.
So my dad came to pick me up at 10pm and drove me home. I don’t think he was angry but he wasn’t delighted either. He put me to bed and… here’s where it gets weird.
I can’t remember why he needed to go out, but he did. He was going to a neighbour’s three doors away. I knew them, I knew where he would be. It was alright, he said, he won’t be far away. He said he wouldn’t be long and I should go to sleep.
Now, I’ve got no idea what my dad needed to do three doors away with our neighbours at 10.30pm at night. At times I’ve tried to imagine – was he going to get some eggs or milk from them? Had he been there earlier and wanted to finish a glass of something he’d been enjoying? Was he actually going down the road to Tesco to buy something he needed? I really don’t know.
What I do know is that the house was very quiet. We had a dog at the time called Merlin but I don’t remember him being there. Maybe he was sent away for those weeks too.
It was too quiet and I didn’t like it. I sat up in my bed, waiting to hear the front door so I’d know my dad was home.
Nothing.
I waited for what felt like a really long time. It might have been 40 seconds. It might have been 20 minutes. I don’t know and I don’t trust my memory of it to give an accurate time frame. I started to cry.
“I know,” I thought. “I’ll go and sleep in Mum and Dad’s bed. That will make me feel better.”
I took myself and my favourite teddy bear into my parents’ room and climbed into their bed. I settled down on my mum’s side. By this point I was nearing hysteria for the second time that night. Let’s be honest, I probably hadn’t fully recovered from my first melt down.
I oscillated between crying and trying to get myself to be quiet in case my dad had come home and I’d missed it by making too much noise. This actually only fed the hysteria because each time I realised he wasn’t there I erupted into further wails of disappointment.
I cried so hard I started to do that weird hiccough thing that kids do. Normally that happens at the end of a long crying stint but I was still in the middle of it. Somewhere in all the sobbing, the sniffing, the hiccoughing and the wailing I started coughing too. I worked myself up into such a state, I threw up in my parents’ bed.
I wasn’t sure what to do. Did I go back into my bed and pretend it hadn’t happened? Did I try to change the sheets? I was seven, I had no idea how to do that. I thought
“He has to be back soon.”
I decided to wait a few more minutes.
“I’ll just tell him what’s happened. He’ll understand.” I lied to myself.
For context, my dad is not a naturally reasonable man. He has many good qualities but alongside them he also has a temper. He doesn’t swear, but he does make up insults. He’ll call you “goat brain” when what he really means is “fucking idiot”.
After a few more minutes (or seconds – who can say?), I decided there was only one sensible and reasonable course of action. I called the police. I tumbled over to the phone in my parents’ bedroom and dialled 999.
“Hello, which emergency service do you need?”
“Heh-llo? I-think-I (gasp) -need-the-police (hiccough) – pleeeeeaaaaasseee.”
That last word was a full wail and I’d managed to give it approximately five syllables.
The operator put me through to the police and a friendly, kind-sounding lady answered.
“Hello, police what is your location and what is your emergency?” She asked.
“Hello, I’m-at-home-but-my-mum-is-in-hospital- (hiccough) -and-I-don’t-know-where-my-dad-has-gone-but-I’m-only-seven-and-he’s-left-me-on-my-owwwwwwwwwwn.”
More sobbing. More hysterical breathing. There’s no hint of trying to remain calm. In my defence, I was only seven.
“Ok, can you tell me your name?”
“Abigail.”
“And are you at this address?”
She reads out my parents’ address.
“Yes.”
“And you say you’re seven?”
“Yes”
More sobs.
“Right, ok well I think we’re going to send someone over, if you just sit tight and try to calm down we’re just going to-”
But I don’t know what they were going to do because I interrupted her. I’d finally heard the reassuring sound I’d been waiting for. The front door.
“Never mind he’s here now, don’t worry. Bye!”
I put the phone down. It immediately rang.
I stared at it.
I didn’t know what to do.
Then it stopped.
“Hello?” I heard my dad’s voice downstairs.
Uh-oh.
I crept to the top of the stairs to listen.
“What? SHE WHAT?”
A pause. He’s listening. When my dad – a round man who looks like a cross between Bob Hoskins, Pavarotti and a walrus – gets angry, he swells. He’s not tall. He’s only 5 ft 5. But somehow he grows, expanding in all directions. I imagined this happening as he listened to what the police officer had to say. Turns out if you call the police and hang up suddenly, they immediately call you back. How was I supposed to know that? I’d never called the police before.
“Well of course I’m here,” he said. “I’m on the phone to you, now aren’t I?”
Unarguable, irrefutable evidence that he is indeed here.
“There’s absolutely no need to send someone round. I’m here, I’m not going anywhere. I don’t know why she called you, she knew exactly where I was. She’s probably over-tired.”
That last one was probably true.
“No, I won’t leave a child on her own in the house. Thank you. Goodnight.”
I braced myself.
“ABIGAIL!!!”
Oh dear.
He marched up the stairs, stomping, larger than life, filling the entire staircase. I immediately burst into tears again. I must have looked the absolute definition of pathetic. Sitting on the stairs in my nightdress clutching my favourite teddy bear, face tear-stained, eyes puffy and red.
“Why on EARTH did you call THE POLICE?”
The hiccoughs started again.
“I-just-got-really-scared-you-were (hiccough) -gone-for-ages-and-I-didn’t-know-where-you-weeeeerrrrrreeeeee.”
He looked at me.
“I told you where I was.”
“But-I-didn’t-knooooowwwwwww (splutter) and-I-missed-you.”
He softened.
“Okay.”
I looked up at him. He’d mostly deflated.
“It’s very serious to call the police. Don’t do that again unless it’s an emergency. Into bed now. Let’s get you to sleep. Come on.”
He turned towards my room. I took a deep, shuddery breath.
“Dad – By the way. I threw up in your bed.”
