Wish You Were Here by Nick Webb Page A

the boot was open and there were suitcases in it. [He was] a big chap, dark, bearded. Anyway, hello, hello, who’s this? We went down to the cottage, and she sat on my bed and she said, guess what we’ve done. And I just knew, and said, you’ve got married. And that was it. We hadn’t known about it. So that was quite devastating really, absolutely devastating. It’s relatively recently—I suppose in the last fifteen years or so—that I’ve actually looked at it and dealt with it.
     
    Certainly Rosemary Stewart believes that her mother was dominated by Christopher: “Mum was Christopher’s doormat.” Via their mother’s second marriage the girls found themselves inherited by this huge, complicated, overpowering man. As with many stepfather/stepdaughter relationships, it had its difficulties.
    Karena, on the other hand, who was born after the death of her own father, was not quite so shocked at her mother’s remarriage. She recalls that her head was in the clouds for most of her teens. She had suffered badly from anorexia, a condition that predated the appearance of Christopher in her mother’s life. Her memory of her stepfather is that when she was very low he would sit and talk to her for hours on end. Of course, there can be an ambivalence about altruism (a means of control? fuel for your own self-esteem?), but it would be ungenerous not to recognize that Christopher helped Karena through her illness.*  33 It was another example of his talent for sorting out other people’s lives while being unable to sort out his own. However, Judith’s daughters found the relationship with their stepfather tricky, and it is perhaps no coincidence that they both married young and left home.
    After their marriage, Judith and Christopher moved to “Derry,” a beautiful house in Stondon Massey. This pretty Essex village—more of a hamlet—is only ten miles up the road from Brentwood, where Sue and Douglas still lived with Mum and Granny. Their nearest railway station was in Brentwood itself and a car was essential. Christopher wanted a sports car, so Judith bought him a Sunbeam Alpine. This was not exciting enough, however, since what he really yearned for was an Aston Martin. Also at Judith’s expense, he was to have several in turn.*  34
    J.G. Ballard said that we all inhabit an immense novel. In Christopher’s version, which he inhabited almost certainly as the only probation officer in the country with an Aston Martin, ownership of a fast car was undoubtedly part of a character he thought of as roguishly charismatic.
    Christopher Adams was proud of his driving and intolerant of other drivers. Followed on one occasion along a narrow road by a motorist he considered too close, he stopped and opened the boot and suggested to the man behind that he might like to get in it. Apparently he was quite unambiguous about it. Christopher had passed a high-performance driving course which allowed him to display an HPC badge on the windscreen, and he was keen to point this out to lesser motorists. His cousin, Shirley, remembers how his car was once scraped in an irritating but minor prang in a supermarket car park. Christopher was beside himself with a disproportionate and frightening anger. Once, as a child, Sue Adams recalls falling asleep in the Aston when her father was driving, and waking up to find the landscape was whizzing by at a feverish lick. A glance at the speedometer revealed the truth: 145 mph. (It was partly for drivers like Christopher that Barbara Castle, when Minister of Transport in Harold Wilson’s Labour government, introduced the 70 mph limit on motorways—thus interfering with the individual’s inalienable right to be hosed away by nauseated firemen.) Sue Adams’s memory of the 145 mph moment is that she willed herself to fall asleep again.
    All Christopher’s children and stepchildren found themselves somewhat displaced when, in 1962, Judith and Christopher produced their own child, Heather Adams.