Say Sorry by Ann Thompson

Author:Ann Thompson [Thompson, Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780473222857
Publisher: BookBaby

CHAPTER 11

BRIAN IS ALWAYS VERY PATIENT WITH ME, ESPECIALLY AT night when I have nightmares. If I can’t wake up he’ll shake me and talk to me until I’m all right again.

I dream about the man’s face at the window; it is as real to me now as it was when I was a child. And I have nightmares about what the big girls and the nuns did to me. I don’t go to bed until after midnight and then I can’t sleep because I know my nightmares will begin. It’s the same every night.

During the day when I get upset I go for a long walk or I play the piano. When I’m feeling angry I belt out ‘Napoleon’s Last Charge’ and I imagine the horses galloping along as I play.

‘Custer’s Last Stand’ is another piece I can feed my emotions into because it’s all thunder and lightning: boom … boom. I only know the first page, but I go back and play it again because it’s such a good release for me.

When I’m happy I listen to opera singers or the Welsh Men’s Choir. Music stops me thinking about my past and how things might have been if I had been brought up by my own family.

After I married Brian he helped me try to find any relatives I might have. All I knew was that my mother had once lived in Wakefield, near Nelson. We asked the Salvation Army and the Red Cross to help, but we never had any luck. It wasn’t until Easter 1993 that I found out that after my mother had had me she had married and had six more children.

I was fifty-two when I got this bombshell. The effect was good and bad. I had always wanted brothers and sisters, so it was wonderful to hear about them, but there was something unreal about suddenly belonging to a family.

It was my former neighbour, Ron Hackett, who found them. Ron had been in the police force for the first few years we were neighbours in Whangarei. Our sons used to crawl through the fence to play together and that’s how Ron and I first became friends.

Bit by bit I had told Ron about some of the abuse in the orphanage. He was great, but after I’d told him what had happened to me I was like that little child again, going through the punishment and abuse.

‘You weren’t in the wrong, Ann,’ he told me. ‘How could you have been? You were a child.’

I had told Ron about my past because I needed help. I was getting more depressed and more like a hermit. My life was a mess and nothing was ever right.

When Ron and his family moved to the Far North we kept in touch, but it was years later that Ron asked Brian for more information about my family in Wakefield, as he was about to sail to Nelson.

Ron told us later he was seasick all the way because the weather

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