05. The Real Sue

A woman who spent a lifetime being shaped by what others needed her to be — and who, in the very last pages of a book written for her daughter, finally said who she actually was.

This story was crafted from a handwritten book called Dear Mum, From You to Me — Journal of a Lifetime, completed by Sue Mitchell in December 2009 as a gift for her daughter Kimberley.

It is shared here with Kimberley’s full blessing, in the hope that Sue’s truth

might reach the women who needed to hear it and never got the chance.

••••••••••••••

She wrote it near the end.

Not the end of the book — though it was near that too. The end of the question about what she would do differently. What she would change. What hindsight had taught her about the life she had lived.

She wrote: I would have just been me. The real Sue. Because whoever or whatever I am, I’m still capable of giving love and support to anyone if needed.

Whoever or whatever I am.

That phrase. Sixty-five years of a woman not being allowed — or not allowing herself — to simply exist as she was. And at the end, in the pages of a book she was writing for her daughter, she put it down. Quietly. Without fanfare. Almost as an aside.

This is the story of who the real Sue was. And what it cost her to take so long to say it.

*

Oxford, 1944

She was born two days after New Year in a house in Oxford, delivered by a midwife who had fallen off her bike three times in the snow and arrived covered in it. There was no NHS yet. Everything had to be paid for. The world Sue arrived into was practical, resourceful, and didn’t have much patience for softness.

She was a tomboy from the start. Wouldn’t wear pretty dresses. Crawled through neighbours’ gardens into chicken coops for reasons she couldn’t explain. Played football and cross country and netball. Wore trousers. Found her way to herself very early — and was told, just as early, that something about that needed correcting.

Her mother took her to the doctor. The doctor said she was perfectly healthy but could have problems later in life. Sue was a child. She didn’t know what he meant. But the message had landed: who you are is something to be worried about.

She filed that away. She would spend decades returning to it.

Her father played the piano in pubs and clubs across Oxford most nights. Her mother stayed home, quietly lonely, often unwell. Sue knew from a young age that she was needed there. Her own dreams — she had them — would have to wait.

She wanted to be a nurse. It was the only dream she ever had for herself. Her great-aunt was a matron at a hospital in Bath — a woman who had never married, who had devoted her entire life to nursing, whose front room looked like a library. Sue stayed with her sometimes. She wanted that life. She asked for it.

Her father said no. Girls didn’t have careers. They stayed home, got married, and looked after the family.

So she did.

*

What the Women Before Her Knew

Her grandmother’s story ran beneath Sue’s like a current she couldn’t see but always felt.

Before she met Sue’s grandfather, there had been a man called Christopher. He loved her completely. He had bought all the bedroom furniture for the home they were going to share. He had given her an ultimatum in the end because she wouldn’t leave her own mother to be with him. She chose her mother. He let her keep the furniture. She had it until she died.

She spoke of real love for the rest of her life. She said if you found it, you must grab it with both hands. She never said this with bitterness. She said it like a woman who knew exactly what she had given up and had made her peace with it and was passing the lesson forward so someone else might not have to.

Sue heard her. She understood the lesson. She just never found a way to live it.

Because Sue knew, from a very early age, that she was different. She knew before she had words for it. She had been engaged to a local boy and felt nothing she was supposed to feel. She told him honestly. He was sweet about it. They drifted apart.

Then her father decided she would accompany him to his piano engagements — every Saturday, without choice, while her mother stayed home. She hated it. From Sunday to the following Saturday, she felt sick with dread. Once her father was on the stage, she sat alone.

A man named Peter always went with her father wherever he played. He started sitting with her. He was kind. He looked after her. She was grateful for the company. He thought they were dating. She thought they were just keeping each other company.

She wrote about it honestly: I knew I was different. I was frightened to say anything in case everyone stopped loving me.

The night before the wedding, she tried to tell him. He told her not to worry. He said he would teach her to love him.

It wasn’t about that. She did love him. Just not in the way he thought.

They married. They had two children. They were, she wrote with a clarity that could break your heart, a couple but very single also.

*

Kimberley Angela

She had longed, secretly, for a girl. She didn’t say it out loud in case she got a boy. But she had longed for it.

When Kimberley was born, the nurses kept coming in to tell Sue she looked more like a doll. There wasn’t a mark or blemish on her. Her skin was perfect. Her lips were what Sue’s grandmother would have called rosebud lips. Sue kept touching her to make sure she was real.

She wrote: I just kept telling you how special you were and how much I loved you. And how much I hoped that feeling that day would never go away. And so far, it never has. In fact, I think its increased.

The best feeling Sue ever had — she said this clearly, without hesitation, in a book that covered sixty-five years of living — was the evening feed. The half hour when she would bathe Kimberley and use the talc and then hold her while she drank her bottle. Kimberley would look up at her. They both knew, Sue wrote, just how precious they were to each other.

“I hated sharing that time with anyone. It was a special little half an hour that was yours. That was ours.”

In a life where so much had been taken or withheld or stopped, this was hers. Completely, unhesitatingly hers. Nobody could touch it.

And then there was the day she found Michael, Kimberley’s older brother, standing by the pram. He didn’t know Sue was in the room. She watched him hold his sister’s hand and say: Kim, I love you, and I will look after you forever.

She wrote: There was my perfect family.

Five words. The whole of a life’s longing, met in that moment.

*

The Hiding

Sue spent decades hiding. Not dramatically. Not in a way anyone would necessarily have noticed. Just the daily, exhausting work of being someone slightly other than yourself. Going to places she didn’t want to go. Wearing clothes she didn’t want to wear. Being what was expected, always, because the alternative was too frightening to imagine.

She wrote about it in the only part of the book where her voice changed — became slower, more careful, more deliberate:

“The thing I have found most difficult in my life is not being myself. I knew from a very early age that I was different, but I was very frightened to tell Nan and Grandad that I thought I might be gay. I was frightened of rejection, and I still am today.”

She wrote: if a tablet was invented that could make me normal, then I would take it immediately.

That sentence. Written in 2009, by a woman in her mid-sixties, in a book for her daughter. The internalised weight of a lifetime of being told — by a doctor at age seven, by a culture, by silence — that who she was needed to be fixed.

She had found Christine by then. She had found Tracey. She had, she wrote, met people who shocked her by telling her they were the same. She had seen, for the first time, that she was not alone in what she was.

Tracey told her: if people don’t like me as I am, then they wouldn’t like me anyway.

Sue wrote: that’s how I get through my life.

It took sixty-five years and one person’s consistent, uncomplicated acceptance to get her there.

*

Sorry

She did not spare herself.

The drinking. She named it directly. She knew what it had cost Kimberley — the fear, the loneliness, being treated as though it was her fault. She wrote: I know you must have gone to hell and back many times.

She called it an illness and then immediately said: I know that’s no consolation.

She apologised for her mother’s last words. She had written a letter instead of going to Oxford when her mother was ill, and her mother had gone mad at her on the phone, and then Mary had answered when Sue finally called, and her mother’s last words to her had been hello, Sue. Warm and ordinary and unknowingly final.

She wrote: those words still ring in my head. And I don’t think I’ll ever forget them.

She apologised for the moves. For the years she was not able to be the mother she wanted to be. For Nan’s handbag that she never got to look in. For all of it.

And then — at the end of the apologies, after all of it — she wrote simply: thank you for listening to me, Kim. I hope I haven’t upset you too much. But I am truly sorry. Love you, my angel. Kiss, kiss.

Kiss, kiss.

After everything she had just said. After sixty-five years of everything. Still ending on love. Still ending on her daughter.

*

What She Wanted for Kimberley

She wanted Kimberley to believe in herself more. To stop letting people use her. To understand that no one is better or worse than you — and that once you know that it is much easier to fight your own corner and not feel bad about it.

She wrote: you are what is known as a real person. And I think you will stay like that all your life.

She chose music that told you everything about who she was: Dolly Parton’s I Will Always Love You, The Righteous Brothers Unchained Melody, Freddie Mercury I Want to Break Free.

She dreamed of Norway. She had seen it at age seven through a View Master — a round card with negatives on it, everything suddenly three-dimensional, a whole world she hadn’t known existed. Norway was the first card she was ever given. She never got there.

She dreamed of a cottage by the sea. Of travelling. Of being in better health. Of seeing Kimberley and the grandchildren do well.

And lastly, she wrote: I dream that your dad will learn to understand who I am and is able to accept it and finds it possible to be friends.

Not rage. Not blame. Just a quiet, dignified hope that the man she had shared her life with might one day be able to see her.

*

The Half Hour That Was Ours

If you were an animal, what would you be?

She chose an elephant.

Because they are strong and have a good memory. Because they are close to their families and especially their young. Because they plod along slowly but are very determined. Because they will walk for days to find food and water for their young. Because they know how to provide for their families, of which they are fiercely protective and very proud.

Just like I am of you.

Sue Mitchell was born on the 2nd of January 1944, in a house in Oxford, in the snow, without an NHS. She was a tomboy who loved walking and cycling and embroidery and cross stitch and the dawn breaking from a window at 3 in the morning. She wanted to be a nurse. She never got there. She wanted to go to Norway. She never got there either.

What she got instead — what she built from what was given to her, shaped by what was expected, limited by what was allowed — was a daughter she adored completely. Grandchildren whose first words she wrote down so they would last forever. A woman called Tracey who told her she was enough as she was. And at the very end, in the pages of a book she made by hand for the person she loved most:

I would have just been me. The real Sue. Because whoever or whatever I am, I’m still capable of giving love and support to anyone if needed.

She wrote this book in December 2009. She addressed it to her daughter. She told the truth in it — all of it, as much as she could bear, with apologies and love and the occasional joke and sixty-five years of a life fully, honestly accounted for.

At the very end of the book, the printed page reads:

Dear Mum, I will treasure this book, your memories, and your advice forever. I hope you enjoyed answering my questions. Thank you so much for doing it and writing your own book about you and me. From you to me.

Sue is gone now. But the book is still here.

And somewhere, Sue is still holding Kimberley while she drinks her bottle. The talc. The looking up. The knowing.

That half hour. That was theirs.

It always will be.

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