The Tortola Test (Part 1 - Abridged)

I am sorry, I am not a prolific writer. I have a long standing case of creative constipation where I have a good bit of work brewing and i just can't get it out. I think the polite term is writer's block but it is huge for me, I have had it for all my life, this wanting to write and not being able to, and the root of it is probably more for the psychotherapist than the blog audience. Writing about my children is relatively Easy. I intended fully to write a sunny, regular, self satisfied blog filled with recipes for low carb cakes and parenting banter about the glorious fragrance of Frangipani shared with my sun kissed children and days on boats in the endless warm breezes and indeed our life here in the British Virgin Islands naturally includes much more of this sort of thing than previous lives in Edgy London or Kidstonesque Dorset. Ofcourse every incarnation of me and every place I have called home has come with rough and smooth, good times and bad but none so extreme at Tortola. And I have sat down so many times to write about what has happened here and not been able to find the words, largely because on some days, emerging from the blue waters with a gut full of painkiller (the local cocktail) I can't write honestly about this topsy turvy place and conversely on a really shitty homesick day, it all just feels like a bitter rant. Writing about the less heart warming adult themes of my life is hard but has become kind of urgent partly because I hope it will unblock some lighter musings but more to just answer the questions with a link to the full expose as opposed to half telling the story in small hurriedly written instant messages to confused chums. This particular post is especially tricky to write because it is the opening up of the can of worms that has been my life for the last two years and I am not sure we have enough distance from the content of the past few months yet but my social silence in the UK at least has been glaring and a few cryptic posts in social media referencing relief, adversity, anxiety etc has sparked a flurry of e-mails some nosy, some just a bit agog and some properly worried for me and i think I have to give the full and frank about what has been happening here. We moved to Tortola under a cloud with a silver lining, 20 months ago. You know the story, but to recap - Family bones shaken by 2 closely consecutive babies with high drama arrivals, marriage under pressure with so much nappy business and so little sleep, husband cracking up working away from family, spell of acute mental break down (husband) followed by hugemungous therapy, me doing lady Macbeth style out damn spot insominiac kitchen pacings and baking malt loaf at 3am, Calm patch, then redundancy from stable job in reputable british company at the peak of the economic crisis and finally a total disillusionment with the UK job market inspiring James's covert mission to find a job somewhere fun. And what James found was a job in a supermarket and produce supplier in the British Virgin Islands in the West indes. There was a time when he suggested to a then pregnant me that he wanted to work in the Middle east and I laughed and said, "no way but get a job in the Caribbean and i will go with you". And so he did. And I did. Me and a 2 year old Mabel and a 1 year old Arthur. Moving was Turbulent. I was happy with my life the way it was, I love the sun and I love the sea but moving away from my network of baby friends and village crowd where I was loved, safe, involved and with a still fair proximity to the creative crowd from my pre children existence where I was understood and stood a chance of going back to my work, leaving all that was very hard to do. But I knew that my marriage depended on a willingness to go to a new place as a family unit and start something together, a fresh. The children were small, commitments were minimal, it was our time. And so we arrived with 3 suitcases full of unsuitable clothing and our hand luggage full of dreams. I will spare you the bits about the drudgery of the company provided accomodation on a fourth floor without air condition, above a dog rescue shelter and in the same building as a 1 bedroom flat housing 15 phillipinos from the island catholic worship band with nightly practices, in what seemed like the hottest place in the known universe, and the utter lack of friendliness we experienced from the first load of islanders we encountered. I was utterly expecting smiley people with pineapples on their head singing zip a de do dah. I was wrong. James Started work, I was alone in hell with my 2 children who gave up sleeping for about 2 months and I have never felt so much like I have made a mistake in my life. But James seemed happy that he could make it work in the Job and I found us a charming sea side house in the middle of nowhere but beside a picture book white sandy beach, called Smugglers Cove. We settled in there and we decorated our first caribbean christmas tree with urchin shells and star fish painted like santa and I set about the business of making friends, joining playgroup, setting up a baby music group, and sorting out the children with play dates and nursery. It is a difficult country to come and live in, everyone I met here sung out the same issues. You jump through enormous hoops of fire to get work permits and permission to have your family reside with you and it seems for the first few months like an impossible series of red tape and beuracracy. However, once we were through all that, we started in the new year to reap the benefits of a job within easy commuting range of the family and weekends spent playing in warm sea water a walk from our lovely house and suddenly life looked pretty sweet. In February 2012, James arranged to meet our friend Rob for some sushi and a drink in Road Town. He drank a fair bit of Gin, more than I could, and then attempted to find a taxi which would travel to the sticks where we lived. He failed and made a very silly decision to drive home in a Land Rover we had purchased less than a week earlier. The punchline is clear, with delayed reactions, he ploughed into the rear end of a reversing car coming out of a blind corner. Astoundingly, and I have seen the pictures of both cars which were destroyed, no one was hurt. Now the drink driving laws on Tortola are unclear. Ex pats wax on about how you can do whatever you like in this lawless territory and it is highly unusual for anyone to be dragged over the coals, they don't even breathalize people here and it is common for people to leave a bar with a couple of roadies to drink on the way home. On this night however, James had hit the wrong bloke to be getting off lightly. Not much I can get away with telling about this chap but it is safe to say that he was sufficiently influential locally to have a hand in all that transpired following the crash. James was blood tested hours after the accident and returned to me in a police car at 4am, very confused and pretty sorry for himself. I can openly say that the ensuing few hours on the receiving end of my wrath may very well in his version of events be the worst part of the entire ordeal but this is off point. THe next morning and for the following weeks and months I drove him to work daily in our other car, A brigh blue and silver Mazda twin cab pickup (which has recently been destroyed in another accident with an unlicensed speeding teeneger in his mother's car!!), and I yelled at Jim daily for having made our lives so logistically difficult but the water seemed to pass under the bridge. The other party sent a few legal letters asking for compensation and we thought for a while that we would be able to reach an agreement with the chap. James gave an honest statement and it seemed like the worst damage was to His ego and our marital harmony even if it was going to cost us alot of cash to pay it off it looked briefly like we would be able to fix it all sensibly. And the months wore on and nothing much developed. James carried on doing his job. In June I took the Children to England for the summer compounding our home sickness but we came back in August with the plan to put the accident behind us and get stuck in to the second year. I started work, mabel started Pre school and things started to tick along. And then in October a series of catachlysmic things happened. My Dear Nana died and I had to go home for the family stuff. I went for a week, leaving the children on island with James with a full schedule of nursery and help. And then right before I left, James was summoned to appear in court on 4 criminal charges relating to his driving offences. Again we though it would be a simple thing with a wrist smack and a fine and potentially the revoking of his BVI licence but the case was adjourned, James's passport was ceased and he was put out on bail and his employer had to appear and in court in support of his bail. I was in England, I heard about it all over skype, it was hideous. But not as hideous as the following week when I was back at work and James called me to say that he had been called into the Managing directors office and handed a letter which said Dear James, Following your recent prossecution and negative media attention brought upon the company by you, we hereby hand you 5 weeks notice of termination. Or words to that effect. Notice for the end of his first work permit. Put it all together, he had no passport, no job, no legal right to work and it was a very unfunny set of circumstances. By this time Christmas was coming again. I had my first melt down about the whole sorry state of affairs on the steps of the H Lavity Stoutt College after a choir rehearsal for the christmas concert and into the arms of my dear singing friends. It was really a very frightening time. We had to move house which was massively complicated by the precarious nature of our situation, we had to move to a smaller (although very lovely), cheaper place and a week before christmas it was almost my friend Nellie's spare room with 2 children and the dog. It was Nellie who identified the illegality in the nature of the dismissal from the Job. She encouraged us to sue the employer. We had no choice, James was cut off without a penny and we had mounting costs by now in defense of the criminal palava. Nellie is my dear dear friend, but I shit you not she is a pitbull in a law suit. It seemed like an eternity but a few weeks of agressive letters and tooing and froing and James had won an unfair dismissal claim. So we breathed, we opened champagne at Christmas and although the future was unclear we were able to face it. I imagined we'd sort it all out and leave in the early new year. The criminal case went to court 6 times with adjournments and farting about. Our friend Richard sat through every one when i didn't quite have the nerve. At Christmas we talked about me and the children heading for England leaving James to fight out the criminal end alone and unencumbered by our emotional family baggage. This has become an informational blog rather than a confessional and so the ins and outs of the strain we were under are too lengthy to include but we were shall we say, struggling in the extreme as a family to cope, to support each other and to be united. I would love to say that I threw my hat into the ring and fully supported my Man but that would be a lie. I was angry, I screamed alot, the childrem have witnessed it and it took ages and ages to play out. All the while I was working with the children by my side and my Husband was watching vampire movies and eating ice cream at home in his pants. It was a dark time and it was very easy to utterly forget that we are living in one of the world's premiere holiday destinations and we completely avoided communication with the friends and family in the UK who literally imagine us dancing down a beach at all times in a grass skirt. But I feel like we can share it now because suddenly, quietly, one day, just a few weeks ago in June, it was finally over. James was found guilty of Reckless driving and fined. He was found not guilty of all the other charges pertaining to drinking, driving without insurance etc and so it is over. We are still bobbing about in the wake of it all a bit. Coming down from the stress.Re grouping. We are doing alot better. We are free to go. James has his passport back and the school year is over. We have a one way ticket to England next month but at the final hour we think we will stick it out without even a holiday and husband our resources in order to make it the hell work. And then every other day we teeter on the brink of throwing in the towel, for example today I have had a day of trying to recover my children's confiscated passports from immigration, confiscated because I had not declared myself as the breadwinner for my family and in trying to re enter the territory after a daytrip to the USVI we were informed that my children are not permitted to reside legally here with me until I open a new bank account and declare my ability to support my children here single handedly. This is one of many reasons there are so many other islanders, female particularly, living here in a scrambled land of plenty with their children stuck in Haiti/Jamaiaca/Dominica etc, it is debilitating and it sucks. I thought for a moment the authorities were going to confiscate my children and post them to my Mother but they took one look at a tired Mabel and thought better of it. The powers that be make it very difficult to be positive about the system and the people who enforce it. However the flipside of life on Tortola is a massive reason to come back from the edge deciding not to jump off just yet. There is something intrinsically wonderful about being part of this ex pat community, we have really great friends and we do really lovely things together. There are all the obvious things, beaches and pools and pineapple/coconut cocktails but there are also people here who make me feel less isolated than I have often felt living in other places. I sing with ladies whom I adore here, I share children's meal times and the shitty bits of my mothering day with some extraordinary women of multiple nationalities, French, South African, Canadian all of whom are giving my kids that "raised by a village" childhood I so want for them. I have women who care for my children while I work whose spirit I could not replicate and whose influence in my children's lives is cherished. When you miss your family you build a family in a place like this and leaving here now would be as hard as leaving the Piddles 2 years ago. When I look at my children and the relationships they have formed here and the life they have here that involves Dolphins and Rainbows and White sand and constant vigorous health (Mabel is literlly eczema free here and not a wheeze from her premmie lungs), and I acknowledge that they really don't know anything much about Blighty beyond the faces on Skype, it is very hard to imagine boarding a plane for the last time. And so, it is an unfinished chapter of our lives, I genuinely cannot see the future beyond the coming weekend. There are some plans in the pipeline for work for the Husband, he is at least no longer idling (more on this next time)and as far as I am concerned we are here for now. Mabel will start school here and Arthur will pursue the development of his Dominican Dialect and ability to strip a chicken wing in under 5 seconds. We will sit out the hurricane season and see if one last puff of Tortolan wind will blow us off the rock.........or not. TBC

A few things about Arthur

Arthur is my Son. I still can’t believe he is mine even though he is now 2 and a half years old. Moreover, I can’t believe how little of him has been committed to celluloid, digital or the written word. You see he is a second child and the younger brother of a force of nature type sister, photographed, talked about, Miracle Mabel. Arthur was a bit of a surprise baby, skidding sideways into the world only 18 months after his sister's dramatic arrival and while his struggling parents were only just learning about life with 1 child never mind 2. Forget about finding time to record his coming, we only just found time to attend to his basic needs. The last weeks of my Pregnancy with Arthur were fraught with emotion. Scans had picked up an inexplicable anomaly in his heart which demanded a fair bit of scrutiny in a specialised cardiac unit and there was, until a fortnight before he was born, (when the anomaly was proclaimed low risk after all) a question mark over the wisdom of having him delivered in my local hospital becuse if a potential need for extreme Neo natal intensive care and such. During all of this, although I was very keen that he should be well on arrival, I was pretty detatched from the baby within and was instead obsessed with making the transition from only child to sibling easy on my first born. I spent nights beating my breast worrying that introducing another person to the family could only detract from my time with her and I was quite sickeningly convinced that it was all huge mistake and would destroy our family unit and turn the lovely first child place of completion and unity into a warzone littered with yet more shitty nappies and crying infants. Mabel was clingy, I cried a lot about it, internalised it and decided it was Arthur’s fault even before he was born. My midwife told me quite bluntly that I ought to try and address the clinginess before the birth and having to go into hospital if only because my tiny baby would need to be able to get near me if I intended to feed him and a limpet toddler was going to make it tricky. I tried to argue that I wouldn’t go into hospital but rather give birth like a cat in the cupboard under the stairs and not tell anyone, so I could just pop the baby by the fire in a basket and go about my business in the aftermath and the toddler would not notice any change. This was met with a stony tumbleweed silence followed by the sigh that told me that was absolutely not going to happen with my weak uterus and that resistance to medical intervention in my particular case would be a grotesquely selfish risk. And in the end sense and Linda the Midwife prevailed. On November 15th 2011, I left my toddler for the first ever time in the care of my sister Liberty and, Arthur was delivered by C section in a very calm operating theatre with Daddy and the afore mentioned diligent midwife in attendance. I watched the delivery, I chose to have no screens shielding me from the procedure, I wanted to witness his birth having been so removed from my first birth by the state of emergency, and since he was in good condition when they pulled him from me, he was handed directly to me, slime and blood and all and it was completely wonderful. I remember just saying over and over again, “He’s huge, He’s huge” he was 7lb 4oz. During his first hours I fed him and fed him and fed him, he barely came up for air, and they put us in a room together and kept leaving me alone with him and I couldn’t quite believe it. The first time I had a baby it was days until I was able to touch her without help. And so this was extraordinary to me. And yet Arthur was a stranger in my life. An alien. In my first pregnancy, I had named my daughter at 20 weeks and I saw her all the time in my minds eye, pictured her in her little outfits, and invested in her the personality I imagined she would have and although she arrived in a scramble, this imagined character was what I focused on to manage the separation from her that came with her prematurity. I at least had ownership of her imagined personality even if only in my mind and I felt I knew her and was bonded immediately. But none of this with Arthur, we had known him by another name during the pregnancy and then when he was born it just wasn’t his name, I had to call him Arthur, it was the only name that fit him. And then following the early feeding frenzy, he dozed off, sated and demanded almost nothing from me for the first 3 days of his life which were spent in a room in the hospital sometimes receiving visitors but often just we two. I remember pacing around his little Perspex crib looking at him and wondering if I had imagined him coming from me, he didn’t look like anyone I knew and he didn’t seem all that needy. And then on the fourth day I took him home and as I had said I would do, I parked him by candle light in the corner or the fire lit room and every 3 hours I fed him and other than that in the main he was pretty easy to manage. I reveled in this time being undocumented and unencumbered by medicine, it turned out the heart anomaly was present but super minor and so we just got on with the business of having a normal and very lovely baby boy to get to know gradually. And I did bond with him, more as he became more wakeful week by week and he was sunny and smiley and biddable and tolerant of toddler fingers up his nose and the sharing of her blueberry oatcakes with him at only a few weeks old. Honestly though, not having documented it all, there is so little I can really remember about this time in my life. There is sharp focus on his arrival in my mind and the early days were heady and full of wonder as well as sheer terror at having bitten off more than was chewable and time when first left alone with both my children when whole days were spent sitting on the living room floor crying and just trying to contain the mess while waiting for help to come but, as is often the way when managing multiple small people, a vacum crept up on me and gobbled about a year of my life in one hungry mouthful. And suddenly, somehow he was sitting up, chuckling, eating lumps of cheese, growing teeth ( a full set of 20 between 6 months and a year), pulling, up on furniture, crawling, making friends and stealing hearts and I felt like he was self motivated and self taught, and then we were presented with a chance to move to the British Virgin Islands and we took it. Before moving we decided to have a huge Baptism for Arthur in September, and on a surprisingly sunny day we had him dunked in a river in a Dorset field in the shadow of a 16th century thatched chapel and we roasted a whole sheep for lunch and sang Jerusalem on the riverbank with the entire parish and our family and I made a very hazy speech about how Arthur’s arrival in our little family was like the arrival of a sunny morning after a long night. And it was. And he was and is like the very sun. I meant it at the time but I mean it more as he gets bigger and sunnier. His first birthday was spent moving out of our beloved cottage in Dorset and saying goodbye to our many supportive and loving friends in the November drizzle. I cried more that day than the day he was born, as much as I love change, it makes me a bit hysterical but I also remember feeling guilty for allowing his birthday to be consumed by the chaos. Thank god for my amazing friend Lucy who invited all our friends over for lunch and made Arthur his own cake with his name on it and we did celebrate him, even though he threw up his lunch all over me and his friends. And we departed Dorset upon a wave of nausea and Arthur vomited for 3 days all the way to Antigua. And he just had to cope, we didn’t have time for fussing about it too much and he was so good about the whole thing. And so it was we arrived in BVI with a Toddling Mabel and a crawling, busy 1 year old Arthur and again I was thrust into a tailspin of sorting shit out with the little people in tow. I suppose the point of all this ramble is to articulate that I recognise that Arthur was a boy who happened while I was busy doing stuff. But like a potato vine he has prospered with very little help and Arthur has come into bloom in the BVI. He loves the sunshine and his ginger bread hair is bleached blonde. He is a sucker for a boat, it was his first word, and we often just pass time watching boats on the Francis Drake Chanel from our Balcony. He is frighteningly verbose and has a vocabulary to rival children twice his age. He has lovely manners and a way with all people, and chats happily with interested adults and children alike . He has a team of colourful Caribbean women who care for him at his nursery, he came home at Christmas singing the calypso version of away in a manger in a big, gravelly, copied from somebody very West Indian voice and when he is cross with me these days he will shake his head and tell me “Oh Jesus Mummy” in his broadest Dominican accent with a totally straight face. There is something about Arthur that makes strangers want to stop and watch him. He’s very engaging and is very engaged with the world around him. When you speak to him he responds with unnerving sharpness. He has gone through many standard boy phases of obsession including Tractors, Diggers, Aeroplanes, Dinosaurs. At the time of writing, the thing is Fire Men and all things Fire Man related. He is constantly looking for an imaginary pole to slide down, a door frame, a table umbrella, a leg of a passing stranger (yes he has done this) all the while proclaiming “Fireman Arthur to the Rescue, Make Way, Here I am, Nee Naw” It’s adorable. And he sings all the time. His whole life is narrated in song, he likes to sing what he is doing while he is doing it to the tune of the farmer in the dell. “I am going to the loo, I want to have a poo, ee eye adio, I did it in my pants” And now I have managed to dedicate an entire paragraph to Arthur alone without intrusion of his sister but it is impossible to talk about Arthur for long without talking about Mabel because they are as essential to each other as night is to day. Following all my anxiety about his coming equalling the apocalypse of her happiness, the very opposite has been the case. He has enhanced every part of her life. From the first moment she stumbled across the hospital bed to meet him almost smothering him with her sticky kisses, to the time she announced that she wanted to move into his room with him. Then into the present where they love sharing a bedroom and indeed they share everything with almost no jealousy beyond the obvious minor spats about who gets to use the spoon with the giraffe handle today and similar, they are yin and yang, very different and yet unable to do without each other. Recently the two of them had some sort of animalistic angry set to, and I pulled them apart and set about discussing the rules of handling one another with them and I told them, “You are brother and sister, you don’t hurt each other, you are what each other has when there is nothing else and you will love each other and treat each other well” and although moments later they were cuffing and biting each other again and I was rolling my eyes, I was glad to have said this aloud for my own benefit. They did not need me to say it because it is a giventhing, but it thrills me to feel the enveloping certainty that as long as they have each other they have someone who loves them implicitly and in the most real and raw way. This alone is the greatest gift I have ever given myself and I know that each other is the best gift I will ever give either of them. And So Arthur is essential to the family picture. I can’t imagine how we managed before we had him and I want to freeze in time his last bit of babyhood and drink it in so I can’t ever forget it but equally then to see into the future and know what an awesome Son and Brother and Friend and Partner he will become. Watch out world, I've got a good feeling about this boy.