The Beginning

I was born on July 22, 1945, in Birkenhead, a suburb of Liverpool, England.  My mother was Shirley Primrose Hislop Doyle.  My father was Donald Allen Doyle, a San Francisco-born, New Yorker.  A career military man, he was a Captain in the United States Air Force and stationed in England during World War II.  He had interrupted his studies at Columbia and signed up after Pearl Harbor.  

They both had other boyfriends and girlfriends when they were introduced at a USO dance.  They were very taken with each other immediately and shortly after my mother found herself pregnant with me.  My father did the honorable thing and married her but my mother’s family disowned her and they would not help them financially.  He and my mother had been married a short time when I arrived.

My mother’s father was a self-made man who had earned a fortune in import and export: pigs trotters, hams, and the like.  He married my grandmother as a “favor.”  She was born in India and was reaching the ripe old age of 28 without a suitor in sight.  So they sent her to England to find a husband.  Her father was a Colonel in a British Army regiment in Calcutta and was 6’ 4” tall.  He had to have special polo ponies sent in for him to ride.  My grandmother told of her nanny putting her out for a nap under a banyan tree and the monkeys coming down and undressing her and taking all her baby clothes.  

My grandmother Catherine had been in love with someone else. There is a rumor of an illegitimate child but she was 28 when her parents sent her back to the UK and she met Jack Hislop.  She had a sizeable dowry and some polish that he did not.  He was a stout, short, man who was making a lot of money.  She needed to marry.  They married and shortly thereafter she produced many children starting with Philip, then Frank, sister Jo, John, my mother Shirley, and her youngest, my uncle Clive.  There were many miscarriages in between.  They had nannies and a chauffeur, a gardener, and a cook.  They all went off to private boarding schools and hoped to marry well.

Then World War II came.  My uncle Frank was captured at Dunkirk and was a German POW for five years. My grandfather had a mistress and spent all his time playing golf.  He drank a lot.  He was abusive to my grandmother, beating her over the head with a coat hanger to sign checks debiting her small fund of money.  This apparently was due to the war ruining his business as ships could not get through owing to German torpedoes.

My grandfather tells of reading in the library and hearing bombing in the area and in particular, a high whistle that would indicate a “doodlebug” bomb.  He went to the front door to look out and “boom” the bomb landed in the library just where he had been sitting.

When war broke out all able-bodied people were expected to take some role in the war effort.  My mother joined the WRNS at age 17 and was sent to Greenwich Naval College in London.  Her best friend, Brownie, also joined the WRNS.  It was there that my mother learned Pittman’s shorthand and typing.  Brownie drove a supply truck.  

At the end of the war, my father was then sent to San Antonio, TX.  I remember the Alamo and how unhappy my English mother was in hot, stifling San Antonio.  At some point, we were in New York City during 1947 where my sister Penelope Jane was born.  We then returned to England.

***

My father and mother had a very good life in post-war England.  We had a lovely ivy-covered brick house in Hoylake in the Wirral.  We had a Nanny then so I have virtually no memories of my mother and father from that time.  They were distant and Nanny was kind.  One day Nanny went off and got married and that was the last I would ever see of her.

I do have three distinct memories.  One of my parents brass bed collapsing on their bedroom floor with them in it in a compromising situation; second my sister being shaken upside down by my mother in a pink nylon nightgown because my sister was choking on a ha’penny (about the size of a quarter) and waking up at the bottom of the bed screaming because I could not get out and was all turned around.  To this day I am claustrophobic.

These were the days of Beatrix Potter and Wind in the Willows, slow lazy walks in the park with Nanny, admiring the bluebells, collecting horse chestnuts (‘conkers’ as they were known).  When she left my pleasant little world, I became miserable.  My mother was a disciplinarian and as I grew, I realized she was also a bully and physically abusive.  She never said that she loved us.  She never gave a hug.  The back of her hand, a wooden spoon, or a riding crop were the only physical contact one would have with her.  One night, I sat and stared at a congealing bowl of rice pudding till I fell asleep tied into my highchair with dog leashes.  I have never touched rice pudding since.  That is the real reason that Nanny left.  She found me like that at 7 AM when she started her workday caring for us.

We had a lovely home in Chester.  It was at that house that I ran into a cluster of empty milk bottles which all broke and I cut up my toes.  I also found our Siamese cat, Ming, dead of rat poisoning.  It was about this time that my mother’s violence became more and more apparent and frequent.

My father had agreed to convert to the Church of England and was being confirmed and I refused to go to his confirmation.  I have no idea why I didn’t want to go but I didn’t and she kicked me viciously between two beds.  I was four years old.  She was forever locking me in my room without dinner at six at night when it was still light out.  

In Hunstanton, our house was very modern.  The living room was on the top floor and the bedrooms below.  The picture window in the living room would get covered in salt ice blowing in from the ocean as we lived right on the exposed and rugged beach.

However, while at Hunstanton and during my mother’s third pregnancy with my brother, Steven DeBont, my father got in some trouble at work.  He had borrowed the base payroll for a poker game and one of his subordinates reported it.  One day, very important and sinister-looking black cars drove up and men in uniforms with MP on their helmets took my father away.  My father took an honorable discharge and resigned his commission.  It was a shame as he was up for promotion to Major and it would be the end to our cushy, middle-class way of life.

They tried to remain in England.  We moved to Wales, to Anglesey.  We lived in a gypsy caravan complete with a tarpaper roof and little tin smokestack connected to a kerosene stove which they rented from Farmer Roberts who had a working farm and thirteen children.  We peered through a little eisenglass window above our bed to watch my parents walking along the beach still light in the summertime.  We had four dogs.  Shelties: Jill (Ch. Rona of Helensdale) had given birth to three puppies Jamie, Rigsy, and Chloe.  Jamie and Rigsy found good homes but Chloe would stay with us as she was too big and her ears did not flop over.  She was not suitable for breeding or showing.

We had a little fenced-in run underneath the caravan for them. My father would go out in the fields every night to shoot a rabbit for their dinner.  In England at that time, rabbits were epidemic.  But one night while cleaning a rabbit he showed me six little baby rabbits inside their dead mother.  I was so shocked I burst into tears.

I went to a Welsh school and learned quite a bit of Welsh. But I didn’t like it, it was cold, wet and miserable.  The farm, however, I loved.  There were so many animals: an enormous sow, with, it seemed, twenty squealing little piglets and a huge shire horse who must have been eighteen hands or more.  There were chickens and ducks, a cow or two for milking and a few other horses and sheep.  

I liked spending time with the animals: collecting eggs, feeding the chickens.  The barn was an old Welsh stone barn and very dark.  Lots of hay everywhere but it was terribly cold in the winter and there were great chinks between the stones with the damp Welsh air blowing in unheeded.

One spring there were about ten young roosters bullying everyone in the farm yard.  I was coming home from school and they started chasing me, pecking at my ankles.  Frantic, I ran for our gated enclosure, screaming for my father.  I could not get the gate open and these roosters were as tall as me and relentlessly pecked at my ankles and bloodied my socks.  Finally my father arrived and lifted me over the fence.  He picked up a large rock and bashed one of the roosters in the head.  They all scattered away.  Next day Farmer Roberts asked him to kill them all so he could bring them to market.

My father worked as a bartender in a local hotel and my mother as a waitress in a tea room.  Obviously, these were unhappy times for them.  They had given up my brother Steven for adoption at birth.  We were told he was stillborn.  They had no money and four of us living in this tiny caravan would not be suitable for the long term.  

Eventually, my father talked my mother’s mother into loaning him the airfare to return to New York.  He did this behind my mother’s back and one day, poof, he was gone.  I think my mother’s family thought that would be the end of it.  But no, she decided we would go after him.  She got us a ride on a terrible old plane with a lot of other military people to La Guardia, NY via Reykjavik, Iceland.

We were stopped in Iceland for quite a few days during a raging snowstorm.  I made friends with a little boy my age and he gave me a little Hungarian violin brooch which I kept for many years.

Prior to arrival at La Guardia, a man on the plane gave us girls each an orange.  The first one we had ever seen.  We ate it with delight and then threw up all over our clean dresses.  When we landed, it was 102F degrees outside.  It was a New York kind of August.  We played around the old LaGuardia airport while my mother seemed to take forever to get through customs and locate my grandparents and my father.

Eventually, we were ensconced at my grandparents’ apartment on East Riverside Drive overlooking the Hudson River.  I used to call it “The Thin Man Apartment” because it was so 30’s and so elegant to my eyes being used to the shortages due to war and the spartan lives we had known in England.  She had a white Mix Master on the kitchen counter and a silver Formica kitchen table with matching chairs.  The tiniest of televisions, screen ensconced in a huge cherry wood cabinet in her large American living room, was the first television we had ever seen.  Rose-tinted mirrors and voluminous sofas were fashionable highlights throughout the apartment.  It seemed like a palace to me.

My father’s father, Joe Doyle, was a recovering alcoholic.  He had had the DT’s in the foyer of the Plaza Hotel and my father had had to go and get him at age 17 before he went into the Army.  Grandpa always wanted to kiss us on the lips goodnight and he had wet, slobbery lips and was touching us in inappropriate places while we were wearing these sheer little nighties prior to bed that my mother had whipped up on the sewing machine.  I complained.  Result: “Oh he doesn’t mean anything by it.”

***

My sister and I went to a Catholic school even though we were not Catholic because PS 81 or whatever it would have been was too dangerous for two little innocent English girls.  However, the Catholic school selected for our attendance recalled the days of orphanages and little charges under the total control of the cruel and wicked nuns.  Mother Superior would have me read Ladies Home Journal for hours listening to my English accent while all the other kids would snicker and giggle behind my back.  My sister told outrageous stories to the nuns about owning two great white Arab stallions, taking them for gallops around Central Park.

We had to line up outside our school on the sidewalk and sloping postures were greeted with a great thwack of a yardstick on the back of bare knees.  Girls wore patent leather shoes and they were scuffed on the curb of the sidewalk by the nuns so that little boys couldn’t look up your dress.  Milk was served in little cartons and was always lukewarm and half sour.

But the final denouement of our relationship with the Bishop of Rome came one day when Mother Superior called us in to her office.  She wondered if we were aware that our parents, not being Catholic, were not legally married in the eyes of the Lord and therefore would burn in eternal hellfire and damnation and we would be orphans and would become wards of the Church.  I don’t think she realized that I would report this right back to my parents.

I came home from school and went into my mother’s bedroom and asked if I could tell her something.  With trembling chin I told her the story and by now my sister was crying.  Just then my father walked in and my mother said “Don, get a load of this.”  I repeated my little tale.  We were never to return to that particular school.