Dot (Araminta Hall)

nearly two. He has almost reached the moment when I last saw you and now every day is torture as I wonder if you are the same as him.
If Silver has a girl this time I might jump off a bridge.
5, Drovers Place,
Kelsey KT2 6RJ
6th August 1996
Dear Dot,
I wanted to write and say Happy Birthday. I think of you all the time, especially at this time of year and I look at little girls of your age when I’m on the bus and wonder if you are the same. 9 years old, I can’t believe it. I have two sons now with Silver and we live only an hour and a half from you in Kelsey. They’re your half-brothers, Adam who’s nearly 5 and Jake who’s 3. I’ve put my address at the top of this letter and I would so love you to write back to me.
I can’t explain properly why I left and didn’t contact you. I didn’t plan it and I never thought I’d be the sort of person who would behave like that. In fact, I’m not that sort of person. If you met me now you wouldn’t think I was capable of anything like that. My partner Silver goes out to work and I keep the house. I’ve got a little part-time job, but really I look after everyone and do all the cooking and cleaning. I think I’m what’s known as a ‘new man’. My friends from home take the mick a bit, but I hardly ever see them and, anyway, I don’t care what anyone else thinks.
I hope your life is going well and I hope your mother and grandmother are well.
Please show this letter to your mother and then write to me and I could come and see you.
Love Dad xx
5, Drovers Place,
Kelsey KT2 6RJ
31st December 1999
Dear Dot,
I am going to contact you this year. I am going to send this letter and fulfil the only New Year’s resolution I’ve ever made. I can’t believe that you are 12 and I haven’t seen you for 10 years. Although that’s not entirely true, I do sometimes sit outside your school and watch you come and go. It was hard to do that unnoticed when you were at Druith Primary, but now you’re at Cartertown Secondary it’s easy. I was waiting there after your first day in September last year and I couldn’t see you in that sea of uniformed bodies and my heart felt like it had dropped out of my body. I sat there shaking and sweating, imagining that Clarice had got her way and sent you to some posh private school, maybe even a boarding school, and I wouldn’t have any way of seeing you again. But I waited again the next day and there you were, hard to miss with your bright hair, which I am so glad to see hasn’t faded over the years. Please don’t ever dye it, Dot.
You have two half-brothers, Adam who is 8 and Jake who is 6. They both go to the local primary in Kelsey. Adam loves it, but Jake can’t see the point. Sometimes I can’t see the point. It feels unbearably cruel to make him go in there every day when all he wants is to come home with me and potter about at home. I end up telling him that I’ll get into trouble if he doesn’t go in, which sounds so pathetic, and he still has far too many days on the sofa with a stomach ache. Do you like school? Have you always or did you go through a time when it made you unhappy? And if you did who kissed you better and held your hand? I hope Alice has been a good mother. She is a kind and loving person, but I always found her very closed off, as if she lived behind a brick wall. Sometimes I used to imagine that she was Sleeping Beauty, trapped behind all that overgrown ivy and all I had to do was fight really hard to find a way in. But maybe I didn’t try hard enough or maybe she was still asleep, I don’t know.
I know she’ll have told you about Silver; we’re still together and I love her very much. But that doesn’t mean I’m proud of what I did or wish I hadn’t handled things better. I think about what I did to you all the time; on most days it crowds everything else out of my brain so that I find it hard to concentrate on the small daily tasks that face me.
I’m so sorry, Dot. So, so sorry. I hope that is enough. Please write to me or call me (07700 900961) anytime and perhaps we could arrange to meet?
Happy New Millennium.
Love, your Dad xxx
5, Drovers Place,
Kelsey KT2 6RJ
6th August 2000
Dear Dot,
I am a coward and I probably won’t send this letter. I have just sat in my car at the end of your road for two hours, waiting for you to come out. I was the man in the red Volvo talking on his phone as you walked past. Although you probably don’t remember seeing me and even if you knew who I was you