My New Shell is Too Big!

Even the birds are slower here in Oxford than they were in London. Their bread and meal-worms lie scattered on the path for  much longer. There seems to be no avian voraciousness and crowding here. They are in less of a rush and so am I.

My reduced pace is partly down to confusion, like an old person I creep about inside my new home with uncertainty. I know that I do  live here, but it seems odd.  I have just mastered the problem of two bathrooms; instead of having two sets of towels and guest towels hanging about, I have only one set which I carry from the bath downstairs to the shower upstairs, when I remember to do it. I have also got the heating system 'balanced' as my boiler-man puts it, so that if I forget the towels I do not get hit with a blast of Arctic air when I get out of the shower. The bathroom remains cold, one outside wall running with condensation but I haven't any idea how to tackle that. This feeling of being a hermit crab whose borrowed the wrong sized shell goes on. Perhaps I should have stayed in a flat, on one level, but I wanted to upgrade and now I have to get used to it.

I now know something of what it must be like to live in a mansion or even a palace. This should come naturally to me as when I was three I was told that I had been adopted, from London. This made a big impact, particularly the London bit and for some reason I decided that when I was 'in London,' I had lived with the Queen. I never thought she was my mother, just that I had lived with her. It seemed obvious to me. My brother would make me furious by trying to disabuse me of this notion.  Eventually it fell away somewhere, although I had the residue of  it by thinking of myself as some kind of princess for years. My brother was also confused though, as for a long time he believed that all babies came by car, from London.

Happy Holidays!

In the novel, The Count of Monte Cristo, the hero Edmond, imprisoned in the Chateau d’If  finds himself sentenced to be flogged every year on the date of his arrival. Naturally this lingers on his mind, and time passes both slowly within the confines of those terrible damp walls, but also with sickening rapidity as every day draws him nearer to inevitable torture.

I picture him sitting in his cell, worrying about his fate, long before it happens. Who ever gave him that sentence obviously knew the agonies endured by a certain type of mind with a vivid, apprehensive imagination. As an adult preparing for Christmas I empathise with him because the festival which I used to love with an almighty passion which made it the high point of my whole year, which I probably loved too much, now seems to stalk me all year round, promising pain.

 More specifically I have a dread of being alone at Christmas. Even  the thought of this,  even though it’s only  one short winter day, is almost too much to consider. It has never happened, I am never alone for the festival, but because I fear the idea so much, I seem to be drawing it closer, like a terrible inevitability.

Although I still start preparing for December 25th in early October, my Christmasses haven’t been that good for years. I spent at least twenty of them visiting family members by marriage, who disgusted me and I think the feeling was mutual. In those years I could have gone abroad, I had plenty of money to do it, could have gritted my teeth, gone to the airport alone and escaped to a beach, the Indian Ocean might have wiped Xmas out of my head  but I never did. I once loved Christmas with such intensity that I clung to the memory and tried and tried to recreate it every year.

The first part would be OK; seeing my home and the tree decorated as it always was I could nearly get the heady old feeling back. There was the midnight service with my mother followed by her massive lunch. She only stopped producing that this year at the age of ninety two. But things had changed in our family. My brother had married, I had not and after my father died she and I had to go off  and spend most of the day with relations, in strange rooms, watching their choice of TV, for hours, and hours. I hated every minute as Christmas ticked away.

Now time has forced change on me. The marriage ended, my mother is giving up her home and going into residential care. She came to me for the season this year and hopefully will do so again next year. I am not sure whether she will of course. The thought of her absence hangs over me. But as long as she lives we are both spare parts again though, unmarried women  pleased to get invitations from others.

This year in the house of a friend I felt very welcome but I saw a girl of about eleven staring at me coldly as I entered full of cheer and bonhomie. I offered her a present and she took it  without a word. Over lunch she scowled at me. Secure in the bosom of her family I could see how she might resent strangers breaking into her magical Christmas cocoon.

I hope her Christmasses aren’t too good, or she may end up clinging to a distant dream, distorting present reality to hold onto something long gone, stalked all year round by the past carrying a cruel whip in its hands, unable to run away to something entirely new.

The Shock of the Old

 

 

Dec 9^th 2014. My past life seems to be fading from my memory, like the light grey vapour I saw hanging over Christchurch meadows this morning. Perhaps the shock of the new, or rather the old, the astounding buttery yellow beauty of my new built environment in Oxford has wiped it clear.  Then again I do keep getting short flicks from my childhood and the more recent time in London, but they come from glancing briefly into the boxes and files of black and white photos I have just received from my mother’s home, a catalogue of sepia family faces many of them people I never knew, and of course going through my Christmas card list, sending off my new address to many old friends. Writing out my new phone number again and again, hoping the simple numbers will stick in the right order in my disordered head.

A lot of the time I feel like a student who has just left home for the first time, excited but mildly scared. Everyone I meet is unfamiliar and I am starting the first term where you have to madly join everything on offer. I just applied for a ticket to a lecture at the Natural History Museum which  I thought was about dinosaurs, but it turns out, from talking to the lady with the hyphenated name who is organising it, that it’s about the cases containing the great bones.

 She said, ‘there will be a discussion about the glass roof.’ Oh dear, and now I’ve talked to her I can’t not send her my cheque. I need to slow down and read the small print, stop losing receipts for things like the new loo seat which can't be fitted, and return bus tickets. I really miss my Oyster card. All this fiddling about for small change makes me feel like a pensioner.

What will emerge from all this mist, fog and confusion? Nothing from the past has been resolved but this new start has blotted out old anguish. I am strangely cut off from all that I was, or so it feels at the moment. I am freshly aware though, and it’s sometimes  like a sharp pain, that I am still looking into the dim, distance, across endless watery wastes, for the companion, the other half, I have so far always failed to find.

The Future is Tea and Trifle

 

I had a message from a friend saying that she and her brother are selling the family home. She’s sad about this but intends to take from the division of the spoils, only an antique biscuit jar and one of her father’s favourite books. She is a person of rare grace and part of that grace is her integrity. I thought about her as I travelled up to see my mother this week, on November 11^th 2014, as she continues to pack up her house for sale and divide up the contents.

I decided that I would try to be as much like my friend as possible and not allow myself to take away things I didn’t really need or like, just because they were familiar, or attached to old memories. It was a battle with myself  as my mother showed me the remaining tea sets; strange blue Wedgewood, which she said pointedly had been left to me by a favourite Aunt. The lid is not the right one, gold leaf has worn off and the spout is chipped, but she urged, ‘do you still want it?’ Not really but then I do like the strange Arabic pattern on the china, I did like my aunt,  and would I want anyone else to have it?

Then there is the 1930s set, belonging to another well loved aunt. Very pretty but a bit cracked, the cups not the aunt. I could manage to let that go. Below, foursquare and fat sits the brown 1970s teapot, which looks to me more suitable for coffee, and matching plates. We used those all through my turbulent teenage years. It’s surprising that there are any left considering the scale of family fights at that time. I think I will take it, then my mother points out that the plates are, ‘the wrong size, as no one has High Tea anymore.’

I decided to take them anyway, for very old and bitter time’s sake.  We moved onto my other grandmother’s grand silver plated tea-set, from the 1950s. She used it all the time, with sugar tongues.  I can’t imagine ever doing that, so I decline it. With all the other sets I have accepted I am facing a future of serious, dedicated tea drinking. In the cupboard below we find the glass bowl my mother used for making strawberry mousse, every Sunday tea, high or low. Strangely it’s much smaller than I remembered and a lot less fancy. We both view it with disappointment.

‘Not much good,’ says my mother, and mores suspiciously, ‘not cut glass.’

Further back from the darkness of  a cupboard, she produces an astonishingly beautiful bowl, modern crystal engraved with daffodils. It would like wonderful containing a lemon gin jelly.

‘Don’t put boiling water into it,’ she says in alarm.

This came from an old lady she used to visit as part of a befriending the elderly scheme. At the time I thought she was nearly as old as the people she supported,  in fact they were quite a lot older. This lady had once been married to a wealthy man.

 ‘She knew a good thing when she saw it,’ said my mother, I think referring to the glass bowl. When I knew her she was tiny, frail and rough as guts. She once showed me a photo of her father standing outside his butcher’s shop in Dudley, proudly wearing a blood stained apron, his Jack Russell beside him.

‘He had a dog whip to thrash the dog,’ she told me, ‘especially if he went after bitches.’

I shuddered at the sight of her after that, her words having given me a clear glimpse of the horrors of the workaday English past. I was not keen on visiting her but after she had a stroke  my mother invited her  for Christmas lunch. She couldn’t speak well but I remember her reedy Black Country voice suddenly ringing out, ‘Can I have some more of that custard?’ referring to my brandy sauce. I liked her again after that.

 Not a very precious memory perhaps, I am not sure.  My memories are all over the place, too many of them, I remember a lot from a very early age and don’t want to discount anything. As Soren Kierkegaard said, ‘Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.’ I am still a long way from understanding mine. I think I am trying to resolve things through the prism of these glass objects. I can’t be separated from them, and other things that once belonged to people now dead.

We moved into the kitchen drawers, where I took an old thing for making mint sauce which I can remember my mother using on Sundays, my granny’s whisk, bought some time in the early 50’s, and my mother’s best fridge magnates; a couple of fishermen and a tiny Cornish pasty made of real pastry I gave her after a holiday in St. Ives, and a tiny picture of a child painting at a giant easel, bought from  a tile museum in Holland.

On the worktop we scattered metal spouts for ancient icing bags, used for numerous children’s parties and Christmas cakes which largely went uneaten. I took some birthday cake candles, but having no children, nulliparous as one doctor coldly put it, I will have to use them for my own rather twee, camp birthday cakes, at parties where aging people half  ironically bring back the pleasures of childhood again for a few silly hours. I also took wooden spoons used over the years for brandy sauce, savoury sauces and general roux, worn down and parched with age like bits of flotsam thrown up by the sea. But no, no, at last I could say a real no, to any more mugs!

As well as the daffodil bowl I also said yes to another large cut glass dish which my mother said would be idea for Christmas trifle. This bowl commits me to inviting a lot of people around at Christmas to eat a lot of trifle. Perhaps I will even have a trifle party. My future is going to be largely about tea, made with leaves properly, drunk from strangely small, delicate cups, and splendid glass bowls full of trifle and jelly.  I left with a pin cushion embroidered by an aunt I never knew, to celebrate the coronation of Edward VIII, which never took place, a pair of gardening shoes and a potato masher, even though I already have them at home.

On the train I thought about my childhood and my grandparents, dissimilar families living on different sides of the river Mersey, and my rather unlovable grandmother always using her grand tea service. So I decided to have it after all, paying tribute to her standards whenever I used it. Then I thought of the other granny, poorer but so much loved, and felt deeply sad that there is no one to whom I can one day leave her whisk.

 

Bibelots of Doom

An echo of nothingness coming.

Why does crowding oneself with precious bibelots lead to a feeling of nothing doing, death? This moving process, I mean the process of moving in some ways reminds me dying, or the preparation which goes into it.

When I was told I had cancer in 2010 someone suggested that I should, ‘put my things in order,’ and there was a certain satisfaction in that, although I didn’t take the advice.  I remember a woman who looked like Glenys Kinnock appearing on my ward and talking to me about managing, 'chronic illness.' All the time she was talking I was thinking, she's got the wrong person, this doesn't apply to me at all. I utterly refused to accept the idea that any of it was really happening to me. Later

I imagined myself rewriting my will and giving things out to friends, rather sentimental scenes which I enjoyed.  As I pack the past, wrapping ceramic and silver plated things, I'm walking in the shadow of that time again, getting the echo of something which I  thought was over.

I have to do this to help my mother, now that she has cancer, but I also want to claim and hold onto all this stuff. Quietly without discussion we start ploughing up the past, trying to keep our lines straight and tidy, resolute tidying of our life together which we know is almost done with. It was when she said on the phone, 'Do you want those old table mats?' that there was a sudden clutching inside. The orange and yellow M & S mats, my brother and I bought together one Christmas in about 1983, used for every Sunday lunch since, should I take them and with them something of all those Sunday afternoons when she, after about an hour of rest after lunch, would start preparing the tea. I'd hear her Kenwood chef going, she'd be making the pink mousse we always had before reluctantly switching off the TV and trotting off to Evensong. Although it was only us it was always served in the elegant dimpled glass bowl I am now holding. As I look at the shiny, brightly coloured mats with their red and orange flowers I cannot really believe that it is really over. No more Sundays at home. No home.

I am moving from one bedroom to three so I tell myself I need all this stuff,  plus the 1970’s sideboard in which to display the spoils,  and the 980s sofa. It’s almost messianic, longing for a new place I will call my own, even though I have never had a home in that place before. It has to work for me in this ‘promised land’  because when my mother does ‘go,’ when she moves to this old folks home she’s set on, the future will see me  doing what gay men and single women all have to do – make a new family out of friends who come and go with varying levels of intimacy, only rarely with any long shared memory or deep affection. I will be cooking the Christmas lunch from now on, at last. Alas.

 

The Rabbit with Silver Plated Eyes

 

My mother’s talk on the phone is all about moving; she to an Abbey Field home, where she tells me they have no guest rooms, me out of London. When I visit her in this new place, I won’t be able to stay, unless I share her room. There will be no more holidays in what I still call my home, with leisurely walks around the village. That’s going. But I will have all the memories  attached to inheriting her precious objects. It will be like the Hare With Amber Eyes for the suburbs of Wolverhampton; The Spode Rabbit with silver plated paws. Each object does mean something so it cannot be easily discarded.

I have been ploughing through my own stuff too of course, mounds of it, photographs from the 1970s which seem to have faded into weird synthetic jelly colours, black and white photos from when I lived in communist Poland, pictures taken at parties in my first privately owned flat, in the 1980s; beautiful black dresses, lots of décolletage and expensive hairstyles. Also photos from before that, taken when I was first born, before I was adopted. In those days families giving a child up for adoption used to have it photographed in a smart layette, as if it was dead. There are also larger photos of my birth mother posing fetchingly in Capri pants, tight blouse and sunglasses.

From what she told me, my infant clothes were probably damp from her mother’s tears. Apparently she used to visit them (us) at the Church Army home for fallen women, in Wimbledon, but wouldn’t look at or touch me, and cried all the time. Years later, when I heard my grandmother was dying in a hospice in east London, I phoned her. As I said I was her granddaughter a nurse put me straight through. We had a nice, gentle conversation. I had met her once and she seemed amiable and kind. She told me, ‘Your birth was the worst thing that ever happened to our family.’

A bit tactless perhaps, but it was probably the only thing that ever happened, and that is how they liked it.  I understood exactly what she meant. She was trying to explain to me why they’d behaved as they had. All the photos they took of me before I was despatched to a new owner are stamped, ‘Proof.’ No one went back to buy the finished originals.

On one of the three occasions that I met her, my mother told me that my father was an Australian dentist, working at Guy’s Hospital. She said he’d wanted to marry her, but she’d refused. Rather brave considering he was a well paid professional and the stigma she faced at the time. It’s unsettling and exciting to think that if she’d just said yes to him, we would have sailed to Australia together, as a family, and my whole life would have unimaginably different. They were ten years younger than the people who adopted me, only children during the war, not defined by it. He belonged to a different culture, she was remarkably malleable, classless, a real 60s wild child - both free from the  austere old morality of my background.

I grew up not really knowing who I was, lacking a deeply rooted identity. When I fell in love I’d try to merge myself into the other person, take on their identity, or try out an identity as their partner without knowing who I was. Sometimes I turned into my adoptive mother, which was truly scary. Later, later after I’d met her when I was twenty one, I felt as if I was her shadow, a pale imitation. Looking in the mirror I saw her. As  she was not interested in forming any lasting bond with me that was uncomfortable. I longed to be part of something, to belong. Trying to merge yourself into your partner is acceptable after ten years of marriage, perhaps, but not after ten minutes in a bar.

If we’d taken that journey to Australia together I would have grown up as part of my father’s family, who are just a blank to me, somewhere in the sunshine far away. I’m not saying that it would have been good, or that she would have been a loving, attentive mother, but I think she too would have been a better person if she’d kept me, living without the embittering, destabilising trauma of relinquishing what turned out to be her only baby. As a mother with her child, rather than not knowing where it was, she would have had a more certain identity too.

Waiting & Reflecting

 

23^rd October 2014. Despite being 92 my mother is game for her hospital visits. Today she has to visit the oncologist between sessions of chemotherapy. She uses NHS  transport and has to be ready by 8.30am for collection. It is now 11.33 and she is sitting in a corridor, still waiting. Fortunately she cooked herself scrambled eggs before she set out and is not feeling hungry, just bored and anxious.

I am also bored and anxious because I am still waiting to exchange contracts so that I can move. This has been dragging on for three months. No word from the solicitor this morning so to be useful, to do something, turn out all the cupboards in the conservatory, a very scary job for me involving 35 years of theatre programmes, some show photos of a young Judi Dench, a youthful Ian McKellen and John Hurt. Then there is the mound of photos, all mixed up, covering my travels to distant lands, friends some cherished some well lost, and my mother at different ages, as she travelled through her life.

There she is digging in my garden, setting my dinner table, nursing my cats. She doesn’t vary  much in each photo and always looks happy even though I am pretty sure she wasn’t, the atmosphere was at best edgy. I seem to have changed a lot though. I was much prettier in my twenties  than I ever thought I was. If only I’d had the confidence to raise my eyes, look life in the eye and enjoy things. I  looked like the real me, the skin was good, the hair was right. Entering middle age, suddenly the hair  starts appearing in different colours, red, ginger, blonde, and myriad styles all of them bad. Somehow the person I was in my 20s, quite depressed about my looks  but with no great urge to change them, has disappeared beneath the face of a woman entirely dissatisfied with herself, struggling for some look that never happens.

The photos show that after thirty five I looked best at dinner parties and in the Groucho Club in Soho, in evening clothes. Long ago I was as nocturnal as a vampire, travelling by taxi from office to club to  home in the early hours.  It was my Sally Bowles identity  and I  wore it  for twenty five years, but not now as I am never out of jeans now and go to bed at 10pm. But I wonder if I would go back to being Sally if I had the money? Now and then it would be nice.