From Brilliant Programmer to Bad Waitress

Starting from scratch after escaping coercive control

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In the ashes of my life, I started again. It’s bitter to start from zero in your mid-thirties. Less than zero, really. As you discover when you become one, society, and most men on the dating scene, have a low regard for single mothers.

I’d gone into marriage a high-earning self-employed freelance programmer, earning £750 a week. I came out with three small, troubled boys, and a gap on my CV the size of Alaska. In career terms, deskilled. Rusty coding languages weren’t going to help me now.

I had one tiny form of income, which D had tried to eliminate as soon as I landed it the year before I left him: two hours a week, in term time, teaching creative writing at the local university. He’d noticed the confidence it gave me. He started talking about us moving to Chesterfield, where he had worked since our firstborn was five months old, away all week, leaving me to raise our son (then two more) all alone.

He brought home the Chesterfield property pages, showed me four-bedroom houses with neat fenced gardens. Chesterfield, five hours North up the motorway, was a re-isolation attempt. It would remove me from the few “mum friends” I’d made in the village, and the brand new part-time job that gave me joy, and £60 a week of my own. This one thing that gave me a scrap of self-worth, because it made me feel like a writer? Of course he wanted to destroy it. But by this time, we were arguing constantly. Despite stress-induced illness, I was beginning to hold my ground. I had suggested splitting up; he had threatened to kill me. So no, I wasn’t moving to Chesterfield.

A 4-bedder in Chesterfield. One woman’s dream home is another woman’s prison.

Writing had been important to me since childhood. I’d written over three thousand poems from the ages of 13 to 18, and won prizes. Just before I met him in my early twenties, I had a poem Highly Commended in the National Poetry Competition, and was featured in a Faber & Faber anthology of young British Poets.

All of this promise had been silenced, dammed up, for the length of our relationship. He had successfully crushed my writing. “Poetry,” he declared, was “self-pitying crap”. He made sure I had no room for it in my life, physically or mentally, unexpectedly filling my womb, and then my writing room, with a baby, and soon two more.

When I was pregnant with our second, he persuaded me to move out to the country; “a better life for the kids.” I’d had some ludicrous rural idyll in my mind, which involved writing in the attic room of a rose-covered cottage, then coming down at lunchtime to feed the chickens and ducks. I hadn’t factored in my never being without a pre-nursery school kid for several years. Nor the house he chose, an ugly house without an attic on a busy road without pavements, outside the village, meaning I needed a car to even see another human being or buy a pint of milk.

As an isolation move, that was perfect. Three-quarters of an acre, three kids and no support meant I spent any time that wasn’t childcare or housework on smallholding management. Honestly? Not the future I’d planned, and not a good use of my talents. I don’t come from farming stock. Instead of writing poems, stories and novels, I now had to focus on keeping the brambles from swallowing the path at the boundary, keeping the weeds, pests and blight from destroying the veg, keeping the foxes from slaughtering the chickens and ducks.

The marital home: as far from a pretty cottage with roses round the door as Chesterfield is from Sussex

There was only one kind of writing he could respect: writing that made money. Money was his only measure of worth. He said if I wanted to prove the value of my writing, I must write an airport bestseller, a Bonkbuster, and sell it for a massive advance. So in the pursuit of earning some writing time, I wrote a terrible piece of trash. A historical romance called The Wychwood Foal. Thirty-eight thousand painful words was as much of it as I could bear. Before torturing myself any further, I needed to know if the project was worthwhile. If you’re going to sell your soul, you should at least get a good price for it.

I sent a sample and synopsis to an agent who specialised in Romance. Kindly, she gave me the info I needed. “It’s well-written,” she said, “but I can tell that your heart isn’t in it.” She knew, I knew. With relief, I stopped. It was the only thing I wrote in eight years.

In the early days, I thought we could be happy if I just tried harder. But as the years went by, I understood nothing would be enough for him. No matter how hard I bent myself out of shape to please him, he always wanted more, until I was so pretzelled up that I bore no resemblance to myself. As my misery increased, I stopped complying. I’d begun to understand that what he displayed in the “good” times wasn’t real.

In late October 1994, we were watching a new show called The Bookworm with Griff Rhys Jones. The show offered a statistic: 97% per cent of the population want to write a book, but only 1% have written one. D laughed savagely. “You’re one of the 97%!” Only my left eye reacted, the one he couldn’t see. Tears welled up and silently trickled down the left side of my face. A face that is still, to this day, lopsided from my decade in that marriage, where he sat always in the armchair to the right of me. My smile, strong on the left, is muted on the right, so as not to provoke him. I watched to the end of the programme (it was about books, after all). Then, without a word, I went upstairs, turned on the computer, and started, for the fourth time in my life, to write a novel.

My third son was three weeks old. Much of the novel was typed with one hand, the other arm cradling him as he breastfed. I finished it — the first novel I had finished — in six months. Looking for validation, I sent a chunk to Arts Council England, applying for a grant to support me in my writing. A few weeks later, I got a call at my mother’s, saying they were awarding me £1,500. It was the first significant money I had ever earned from writing.

The person making the call, bizarrely, knew me. I met Celia Hunt, now the region’s Literature Officer, in my early twenties. At the time, I was being stalked by an unstable man at a poetry group full of people more in need of therapy than feedback on their line breaks. The Montpelier Literature Society’s writing groups were vetted, and I felt the need for safety. When I applied to join their poetry group, it was Celia Hunt who — seeing my publication record — asked me to become its convenor.

We made a loose promise to meet for coffee. It took me almost a year to follow it up. Abusive marriage, three small children, a fox chowing down on my ducklings; I’m sure you get me. When I rang, she was no longer working there. She’d moved to the University of Sussex, my alma mater. I rang the switchboard. Left a message on her answerphone. When she rang me back, she said, “Actually, there’s a job going, teaching poetry on the Creative Writing Certificate. Are you interested?”

And that is how I got my escape ladder. Writing built back my confidence when it won me a grant, then a job, a weekly two hours in a room where between ten and eighteen adults looked to me – me! – to help them improve their writing.

But once I’d escaped – and that’s a whole other story – £1,800 a year could not sustain me and three kids.

He was paying maintenance at first, while fighting me through the courts to get custody of the kids so that he wouldn’t have to. But the maintenance still left me on the poverty line. I had to find more work that would fit around the children. I moved back to town and got a waitressing job. I’d take shifts when he had the kids.

Waitressing, how hard could it be? Actually pretty hard, when you’re breaking away from being subservient. It was a new restaurant, not yet opened, conveniently at the bottom of my street. For a couple of weeks before they opened, I helped them get ready, without pay, cleaning the ovens and setting up the bar. I figured it was good to show willing, and get to know my new colleagues.

Christmas was coming, and I couldn’t afford it. I had no decorations. It made no sense to go into debt to buy a tree, or the high-priced presents the TV was programming the kids to demand. So when D pressed me to let him have them for the whole of the holidays, I agreed. I figured they wouldn’t have a very festive time in our flat, sans decos. I signed up to waitress for the whole of the holidays. Waitressing through Christmas would take my mind off missing out on their Christmas. Plus, those prime shifts at double pay, tips boosted by Festive-feeling punters, would put me back in the black.

But opening night, 21st December, went badly wrong. We put the orders into the electronic ordering system. Half an hour passed, and nothing came up on the dumb waiter from the basement kitchen. Customers started getting angry. I flagged it up to the manager, who eventually went down to discover the system wasn’t work. The orders had not gone through. So all the food ordered was horribly, embarrassingly late. The next day, management called us in for a post mortem. We waitresses waited together and went in to the office one by one. “Where do you think things went wrong?” the manager asked me. I told him. I told him like someone who used to have a management-grade job. I used my skills as a systems analyst.

They didn’t like that. Apparently, we were supposed to take the blame. They sacked me. They kept the waitress who routinely put the knives on the left and the forks on the right, which I had routinely corrected. I ended up without work, alone in my flat through Christmas, crying at all the cheerful family scenes on the telly and drinking gallons of cheap mulled wine. (A bottle of red was £2.50; half and half with orange juice, and you’re laughing). Drinking was getting a little out of hand.

My touch-typing was the one employable skill that stay-at-home motherhood hadn’t destroyed. In the new year, I started temping for Office Angels, asking for employment in the hours 9 to 3, so I could make the school pick-up. I got an admin job, £6 an hour, at a Brighton nightclub. And that is where I met a warrior.

You’ll meet her next week, but this is a good place to pause. Consider the spark that fired up my engine. How I randomly landed on a TV show whose single statistic made D mock me one time too many, rubbing on the soreness of my longest-held dream. How I took his contempt and used it as fuel to do what had previously been impossible.

Consider the extraordinary — let’s call it for now, coincidence — that a woman who knew and loved my writing a decade before had moved into a position to grant me a wish, like Cinderella’s fairy godmother, and show me, in real terms, that my writing had value.

Consider that by the time I found space in my mind to arrange a coffee with her, she had moved to academia and could grant me an even bigger wish: the semi-permanent pumpkin carriage and horses that transported me to the rest of my life. No dashing prince. No rescue. Just the means by which I could learn that I did have value.

Ask anyone their story; they have moments like this. Everyday magic. Cosmic cogs clicking into place. When you’ve suffered enough. When you say enough. When you set your eyes on a different horizon and ask the winds to blow.

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