Escape From Evil Read Free

national attention. Without the report from the Telegraph , for example, and without my Granny cutting it out and storing it so carefully, I would never have known about this phase of my mother’s life. I would never have known that she and her friends were found in the school science laboratory, thought at first to be suffering the effects of ‘intoxication’. I would never have known they were sent to hospital and given eight pints of water to flush out their systems. And I would never have known Grandpa immediately made plans for Mum to change schools.
    All Granny ever told me was that Mum ‘fell in with the wrong crowd’ and I never knew any more until I opened this box of letters. Thanks to them, I know that she was examined by the hospital’s consultant psychiatrist ‘as is normal in cases of emotional trouble’. Neither of her friends was. Just her. For some reason, Mum was identified as the ringleader – and the one most in need of help. The clue is in the line ‘as is normal in cases of emotional trouble’. What emotional trouble? What could she possibly have been going through that led her to nearly overdose on barbiturates?
    I don’t know how long her treatment, if any, continued. Not long, I suspect, because it seems to have been considered enough to move Mum to another school. I don’t think everyone was satisfied with that. I might be reading too much into it, but there’s a rather condemnatory edge, I feel, to the way the Telegraph made a point of announcing the incident was ‘not reported to the police’. In their eyes, she’d got away with it – unless the police happened to read the country’s bestselling broadsheet.
    So, with Anne away and unable to help, Mum was transferred to the local comprehensive. I don’t suppose she had a particularly easy time at home, having dragged the Beavis name through the mud.
    I get the feeling the spotlight would have been on her. Not exactly like being frisked when you go through security at Heathrow, but not far off it either. If I know my grandparents, the constant interrogations would have been wearing enough. ‘Where are you going? What’s in your bag? Who were you with?’
    In all likelihood, Mum avoided drugs for the rest of her school life. If her parents’ wrath wasn’t enough to keep her away from them, then the idea of being publicly humiliated in black and white again probably was. But if Granny and Grandpa thought that would be the end of her mischief, they were wrong. A girl like my mother will always find a way to fall into trouble. Longhill Secondary may not have given Jenny access to drugs, but it did present another distraction. Boys.
    Putting a fourteen-year-old girl into a mixed school at a time when her hormones were just kicking into overdrive was always going to be explosive and I don’t think Mum lost any time in getting to grips with the rules of dating. I’m not saying she would have done anything wrong, but when you come from a single-sex school, boys are going to seem like this exotic new thing. It would have been like a kid tasting sugar for the first time. I’m sure she learned the truth about them soon enough!
    Most girls soon realize that boys their own age tend to be a bit on the immature side and Mum was no different. Unfortunately, at fourteen or fifteen, there wasn’t anyone quite old enough still at school. Luckily, there were friends’ older brothers, dance halls and parties. It was at one of these that she met an older boy who whisked her off to the 1968 Isle of Wight Festival on the back of his motorbike – an absolute nightmare for her parents, who had read all about these ‘mods and rockers’ in the Telegraph .
    It was also at one of these parties that Jenny was introduced to my father, five years her senior and just about the most sophisticated person she’d ever met.
    I’m sure Mum wasn’t the only girl of her age fooling around with older boys at the time. But, whichever way you look at it, she