Letter 25

11^th September 2014

Dear Catherine,

You must be back into the swing of your final year at school.  I wonder what A level subjects you are taking, maybe Maths, Science, Art or a language as I see you got an A* in Spanish.  And I would be really interested to know what you are going to study at university, not to mention which one you are going to attend. You might not decide to go to university, but I’d imagine you will and that you will enjoy it a lot.  But the subject you choose and the friends you make will have a big impact on the success of your university life.  The choice of subject is down to you.  The people you meet and befriend is partly down to chance and partly down to you, but I pray that in both counts you make wise choices.  If it ever proves possible, I would offer to take you or collect you from your place of study at any time.  I personally loved university life and I really hope you do too.

I had another one of my dreams in which you appeared this morning.  That’s probably why I am writing today.  Our office is in Warren St at the moment, temporarily and we are to move again within a month.  Anyway it is lunchtime and I am thinking of you with half a thought on that dream.  I was travelling somewhere, as if I had to make a flight somewhere, but the setting was not an airport!  I was walking briskly in summer wear with my documents at the ready including a security fob which I was holding in my hand.  As I was moving intently towards this access point at which I used the fob, leading into a wide open area with a lot of people standing and moving around.  You were ahead of me with a dog, probably Wanda and I was trying to catch you up, but people kept getting in my way and you were moving further away from me.  I was getting a little anxious as we were in what should have been a secure area, but I was losing sight of you.  And then you were gone, I couldn’t see you anywhere.  I was asking people nearby if they had seen you; “I have lost my daughter!!”  And I woke up, still fretting that something may have happened to you.  That is not a nice feeling as I don’t want anything bad to happen to you, ever.

I am not able to help you these days as we are not in touch anyway.  But that feeling of caring about will never leave me.  I remember once in a resort in Majorca, which I may have mentioned before when we lost sight of you and I frantically looked for you in case you had wandered into trouble, worse that someone had taken you as you were only about 2 or 3.  I ran up the stairs of a 6 storey block to an apartment we had just been in, then down again and in all the shops and rooms around, until I found you, innocently looking at something in one of the shops and I was so relieved, I can still almost feel it.  But that was then, now is different.  I try so hard to understand your thoughts and feelings and only recently have I seemed to be able to understand.  I will always regret my stupidity in letting you part from me.  I never wanted to control you, only to let you have a happy childhood, the same as I did, for which I will always be thankful to my parents.  But you were caught up in a situation not of your own making.  There was conflict between your parents that you found unbearable.  You heard and experienced things that you shouldn’t have at age 8 to 11, progressively negative towards me.  And I just continued to love and care for you as if things were as they had been previously, in our happy existence.  So when the crunch came, you had to take sides and leave me out of your team.  Was I so stupid that I couldn’t have realised it was happening.  In retrospect it is easy to see that I was very unwise, but really I can only imagine this would still have happened whatever I did, or maybe even something which would just have continued the conflict presented to you.  I don’t blame you one little bit for the decision you made and I would really like to be able to tell you this first hand.  And I do want to see you whenever you feel the time is right and that conflict is not bearing on you – the sooner the better.

My lunch hour is up and I must start work again.  I will write soon.

With all my love for now,

dad  xxx                                                                           at work