Whatever happened to Baby Jen?

I pick up the phone and Jennifer’s in hysterics but between the recriminations and outrage, the shrieks and the staccato sobs that ‘I - could - do – this - to - her’ (when did all our lives start revolving around her!) I get the gist that she wants the grave for herself. She tells me she often goes alone to the grave – we should give her some violets and a shawl. Why has she always got to be the centre of a Victorian melodrama?

Think of Jenny as the bad part of Smeagol/Gollum. Avaricious, always feeling hard done by and hurt, she has to own whatever she sees. She is not good at sharing and perhaps it is time that I ask what she did with my knitting machine and can I have the money for it especially as Nan and Gramps helped me buy it. Or perhaps she should pay my Nan back for the money she was given when she was getting married and doing up her house. Or the cost of the wedding dress –Nan paid for it and I made it. I eventually gave Jennifer away on her wedding day in a church with only twelve people in it. We have a huge family but she had left home over a row about the bridesmaids’ dresses and none of my father’s family would attend. She wouldn’t invite my mother’s family in case that blocked any last minute change of heart my dad may have. Only then did I learn she had asked him three times to give her away after I had been asked – so I was merely a substitute that could have been replaced and of course if he was going I suppose she would have quickly rescinded my invitation. But let’s not be unkind it was her big day – even if her big head was up her big arse in a veil and tiara!

Perhaps she should pay back the price of the headstone which, probably having drunk the insurance money, was never sorted out by my father. My aunts and Nan, having at the time been left with three young children to look after on top of their own young families, picked and paid for the headstone after waiting a long time for him to get on with it.

But she won’t hear it. He is her father and nothing can be said to dissuade her. The grave belongs to him and she will be buried there. She uses the ‘my husband has left me’ ploy. I’m unimpressed. ‘My children are doing their GCSEs’. No idea how that counts but she obviously sees it as a bargaining tool. Finally: ‘I’m on antidepressants’. Newsflash to Jenny: Everyone is on anti-depressants and maybe you should get better ones because I think yours aren’t working!

The end of the tale is that she hates my threat to send my letter as an open letter to the local press to get my father to give me the grave. She decides I will be dissuaded if she travels to all three of my aunts (my mum’s sisters) and tell them her tale of woe. God help them, I have unleashed a monster.

My family are lovely. After all this time they would still forgive and forget and would like to know Jennifer’s daughters better. My aunt tells me she would like me not to proceed with writing to the paper in case Jennifer ‘does anything stupid’. A bit late, I think, you should see her wardrobe!!