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.

Terror Waxes and Wanes

21/10/14

After months of negotiation, prevarication and delay I am about to exchange contracts and move from a one bedroomed flat, where I have lived since 1996, to a small house, in a small town.
 I think I am about to make the mythical 'exchange' but I am not sure as over the last three months of scanning, copying, printing, emailing,screaming, crying, packing, unpacking, cleaning, polishing, hammering, recycling, phoning and hanging on the line listening to music which sounds like someone farting with their arm-pit, I have concluded that the solicitor and estate agent are so deeply infatuated with me that they don't want me to leave London and seem to put every possible obstacle in the way of my doing it.
Perhaps in their love they are trying to protect me because as the fantasy move out of London creeps closer with impetus of a glacier, I now realise that this change of location, upping at last to a house, although it's not much bigger than my flat, will wipe out all my savings, every penny. I have just enough in funds to make the  move, but may then go into debt. I've had the savings since I left the Daily Mail in 2005 and I liked having them there, unused. At one time I wouldn't have bothered too much about this, twenty years ago I could take such things in my stride, I was earning quite a lot then, but also I viewed the whole of life as an adventure, a quest to see exactly what you can do this side of the law. Since I left full time newspaper work  I've  got settled in this cosy hole in the ground and lost the trick of rolling with it. I have to find my old view of life again, quickly, otherwise instead of starting a new chapter my future will be dulled by anxiety.

Some months ago I went to have my annual check up at the cancer clink and the doctor told me she was amazed that I'd survived thus far. She wanted to show me to students to encourage them. I asked her about the other people I'd met in the chemo clinic. She said, 'only a handful' had survived. I wanted to ask for names, in particular one woman I'd got to know well. We had been in touch by e mail for four years but now I wasn't getting any replies. I didn't dare to ask about her.
Doctor's never say the right thing to me, even when they are being optimistic and  I felt so traumatised that I visited Maggies cancer support centre at Charing Cross. They listened to my survivor's guilt and could only really say, well yes, that's the way it is.

Yesterday I was swimming and praying, which is a very good thing to do. While you are swimming, head under water, gliding along, no one can interrupt you, your thoughts can flow forwards uninterrupted. I prayed for my dead friend. When I got home there was a post-card from her waiting for me on the mat. It was posted in Hayes, not Heaven. She is still here - her cancer was worse than mine, she only had half the chemo, but she is still here!

I rang her, her e mail account is frozen, I forgot to ask her why, but we talked for over an hour. She has nearly finished her Phd. and  her life goes on. The depression I'd carried about losing her melted away.

Breaking Up The Happy Home

 

Together we look at the things she has in two glass fronted cupboards. There are a few things there which I really love and as she has now decided to sell her house, she wants me to have them. There is the black cat tea pot from the 1920s, with a badly glued crack in its red collar. ‘You broke that when you were a baby,’ she says accusingly. I look at it and wonder whether I do really want it. I haven’t been allowed to touch it since the age of two. There is a china pig I bought her from Bellick after a holiday in Ulster, while the troubles were still on.

 I slowly wrap up two tea sets, one given to her by her grandfather, real Coalport china, quite beautiful, the other a blue willow pattern doll’s tea service she and I once played with. Their fragility is very worrying and I know from past experience that when I take things from my mother’s home and put them into my own, it doesn’t work somehow. Out of context they lose their value to me. This whole business of choosing things is tricky too.

 ‘Not that. Leave me something,’ she says crossly, and I feel like a thief. Am I helping my mother or helping myself? Not sure. But I must take some of these things, they are part of my heritage, and hers. I hold in my hand a tiny chipped milk jug, a bit bigger than a bird’s egg, one of three sent as a wedding present in 1949, by her friend, Miss Mac(Donald) who she knew in Inverness during the war. This lady, who I imagine looking like Margaret Rutherford, was always called Miss Mac, as she was slightly older than my mother and her friends.

 Unfortunately Miss Mac didn’t pack the jugs well and they arrived smashed and broken. They were put in a cupboards with their cracks turned to the wall and naturally  my mother never told her friend about this.

 ‘She was a strong Macdonald,’ she says. ‘Would never speak to a Campbell.’

Her family once lived in a cottage right by the Culloden battlefield. After the battle one of her ancestors ‘baked a whole batch of meal’ for the escaping Highlanders. Another ancestor, the original 'whisky Mac' owned a still and once ran with a keg on his back for four days to escape the excise men. The cottage is now an information centre. I am probably the only person who hears Miss Mac’s stories now and I am obliged to take away these shards and chips of other people’s memories as well as my own.

There are also two pretty tea sets in the cupboard, which belonged to aunts. They’ve never been used since they came to us and I will never have room for everything so they’ll  have to go to strangers, although that seems so disloyal. Then there is something I  must have, a stout blue Delft vase with a silver screw top lid, given to my grandmother by the Dutch family who sheltered my father and other British soldiers in their house in Oosterbeek, after the Battle of Arnhem. They set up a field hospital in their cellar, and my father was among the men who tried to look after the wounded there, with hardly any medical supplies. They visited my grandmother in the 1960s and gave her the vase and a spoon, but I only heard about what happened to  my father when he was with them at his funeral. After he died we lost contact with the family.

‘Only the older generation were involved,’ says my mother, ‘the younger people wouldn’t be interested.’

It seems a pity that the contact was let slip as I often visit Holland, but it’s too late now, and I can’t even be sure of the correct spelling of their name. We move from china to cutlery. The drawers below  reveal treasures now almost as redundant as a quill pens; varnished oak canteens, lined with satin, holding  twelve fish eaters with bone handles. They used to dine large in those days, even in ordinary homes like ours. There are also six solid silver tea-spoons given as a wedding present. They are an exception as everything else is EPNS, silver plate, the ignominious metal of the lower middle classes. We have  boxes of shining knives with serrated edges, some of the blades turning blue from use and cleaning, by people long dead. There is also a box of beautiful round dessert spoons just right for eating tinned peaches at Christmas. ‘They all have to be cleaned,’ says my mother with mock horror.

We haven’t even got around to looking at her brass candlesticks yet. Who has time to spend tending silver plated sugar bowls and tongs, and who takes that much interest in sugar? Who wants to use delicate tea cups rather than mugs, or needs heavy glass ashtrays. Everything speaks of smart Sunday meals and distant dinner parties for large groups of relations in a much more elegant age, when even quite humble people demonstrated their respectability with what now seems extraordinary refinement.

While we are sorting through these things I have a slight but definite queasiness, a feeling of what is the point? My mother now has ovarian cancer, the same cancer which hit me in 2010, and we are probably both going to be dead soon. This greatly reduces the charm of any domestic objects. I try to squash it down as we move outside to her bin store and  hecatombs of terracotta pots, jam jars and a life time of flower vases and that green stuff that goes in the bottom of arrangements.

 I remember her skill at flower arranging, making any tatty bunch suddenly look good. There are also her hyacinth vases and bowls for planting bulbs in the dark in October, to bring out in full bloom near  Christmas. When I was a child all the mothers and grandmother I knew took part in this ritual. In the 1970s I tried to buy a hyacinth vase in Woolworths and was really shocked that the sales girl had never heard of them.

The family china which has passed through the hands of so many worthy women, is now parcelled up and stored in two large green bins. When I return this Christmas, if she is still alive, if I am, who knows, we’ll start on the photo albums with their tiny black and white snaps inside large black pages, the jewellery boxes containing garnet collar studs and cuff links and elaborate opal necklaces handed down by distant Edwardian aunts, the cookery books dating back to the 1940s, giving advice on cooking in an air-raid, and the pans, circa 1950, when things were still built to last.

My mother was built for long service too. I would like to take her a cup of tea in the mornings, but I cannot sleep well in the uncomfortable narrow bed in the hot room, so I fall asleep in the early hours and don’t wake up until nearly 8am. By then she is down in the kitchen making breakfast, always ahead of me.

On Sunday, the last day of my visit, I sit for awhile in the garden on the old rotting seat, thinking about my own forthcoming move out of London after living there for thirty five years. Rather than all these things from my mother’s house which I am taking with me, there are things about myself, pointless emotions, old patterns of thought and useless anxieties that I really want to leave behind.

 

Another Home Holiday

10th October 2014

Driving up the M6 towards Wolverhampton in the rain, I thought how things would be changed when I got home. After over fifty years of things being exactly the same, in that house, with my mother, there would be a change; although until recently she was fit and fully able,  now she has cancer. I think of it, lying there somewhere inside her, and it makes a difference, somehow separates her off from our shared past. It almost gives her some kind of new status, the way a sick person is somehow enhanced, given special attention and returns that new affection graciously.
I know it is also a step nearer to her death, the end of it all. As a child I was rather morbidly afraid of her dying, I'd look at the skin around her eyes, at the extending crow's feet to see if they were any deeper. After I left home I began to feel the same way about our village. I had willingly left it behind, but her death will end my link with the place.

She comes to the door and I look for a moment when our eyes will meet, a moment of focus, really looking at each other for the first time, instead we have our usual wide, hollow, arching wrap around of arms, hardly touching.

I lug my case upstairs, unpack the cat in her basket from the car, and get the cat litter from the utility room. 'What's this?' she says pointing at a plastic bag now lying stranded on the concrete floor.
 'I don't know,' I say, although I must have moved it. She is annoyed. In the kitchen she suddenly says, 'You seem to have thrown out my favourite book, Alan Titchmarsh's Christmas book.'
I don't know what she's on about, but I did take a lot of her old paper-backs to a charity shop the last time I was home.
'I am broken hearted,' she says. I turn away and retreat up stairs, something I have been doing since I was a teenager. When I come down again she says, 'That soap you gave me for my birthday. It has no perfume at all. It must be very old. Did it come from a church sale?'
In fact and she probably knows, I got it from a Crabtree & Evelyn shop, as expensive and empty as one of those ghastly boutiques on Sloane Street. They gave me a 'loyalty card' which with my income would take about twenty years to use.
She is getting deaf, I have to repeat everything twice and she says this is because I speak too quickly. Whatever I say she disagrees, or misunderstands, which makes me angry. I abandon all metaphor and rhetorical questions, as that always causes trouble. We watch 'Pointless' on TV in silence. The cat, claiming her usual chair and stretching out, is the only thing that brings us any shared pleasure. Nothing has changed between us, and it seems we are going to go on in the same rotten way, down in rat's alley.
Then for lunch she produces a spicy chicken curry, with wild rice, made from scratch, and you have to admire her so much. There is no conversation but I  keep saying how very delicious it is. It's like having lunch with a great but now semi-retired general, with me in the role of rather unwelcome reporter  attempting an interview. I know I won't get very far, might as well shut up and eat. Perhaps that's why I took to journalism, with its lowly, pariah status, I was used to it. 
In the afternoon, mainly because of the heat in the downstairs rooms, I retreated to my bedroom again and picked through some of the old remaining books; an Official Guide to Tenby, The Pennine Way Companion, a Teach Yourself French Phrase Book, published by the English University Press in 1947/1965. 'At long last,' said the bright yellow blurb, 'here is a phrase book of which I can really enthuse. The phrases given are extremely well chosen and up to date.'
They told me how to say: 'Six stiff collars, please,' 'I want half a pound of cooking fat,' 'Can you recommend a gargle?' and more interestingly, ' I am a stateless person.' 'I do not wish to speculate in industrial shares.' 'Can I borrow a pound until tomorrow?' There was even a bit of a novel hidden in there; 'He was a war profiteer who made his money on the black market.' 'Do you do physical jerks in the morning?' 'I must dress your wounds.' 'I was a private in an armoured division.'
And sadly: 'J'ai ete prisonnier de guerre.'
 I didn't give up on the books, like someone driven mad by boredom in a strange boarding house, and by chance just before I went to sleep I opened one right on a poem by DH Lawrence called,
'End of Another Home Holiday,' in which he mourns his mother, although she was still alive, and the village where he grew up.

'The light has gone out, from under my mother's door.
That she should love me so! -
She, so lonely, greying now!
And I leaving her,
Bent on my own pursuits!

Forever, ever by my shoulder pitiful love will linger...

October 9th 2014

# Today my mother aged 92,  had her first chemotherapy, for ovarian cancer.

 Can't quite describe how I feel, something like distress at the sheer ugliness of it all,  but I keep this repressed as she is so relentlessly cheerful and optimistic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Cold Feet

COLD FEET

 

Thursday 2^nd. Just had one of those days which are much worse than you ever expected, even lying awake at night. I went to the estate agent in the morning to discuss the finance for my proposed move to Oxford. I think I have enough, but I am already £10k down on my original offer. My mother has offered to fill any shortfall. I went in full of confidence but  received the news that I have had a bad survey on my flat.

An odd little man with wiry hair came round to have a look for the buyer’s mortgage company weeks ago and this is the result. He was very edgy and made rather astringent remarks about my painting, not good not bad, but rather grudging. Now he has valued my flat at £20k below  my price, shafted me in fact.

 His survey was strangely negative, saying for instance that London W3  is only ‘average’ for renting. I have been a landlady since 2000 with no problem getting tenants.  Most property around here is rented. Also he wrote that I only have one living room, completely ignoring my large conservatory, where I do the painting.  

 I wonder if he is a Marxist, or a follower of Pierre Proudhon, and decided to eat away at the property owning class by becoming a mortgage surveyor?  If so he is doing an excellent job and the rest of my day unravelled.

I sat there staring at my fat faced estate agent wondering, was the surveyor honest or in the pay of the buyer?

‘They have to be honest or they can be prosecuted,’ said my estate agent. Is the agent himself a man of probity I wondered.  How do I know whether these people are working for me or themselves, and on top of that I have no idea now what my property is really worth.It will take two weeks for another survey, and the agent says they always agree with each other anyway.

The Asian property developer buying the flat says he hasn’t got the money I asked, but he plans to rip the flat apart and redevelop it, so he must have money somewhere. I said the price was not going down any further and left. As I walked along the Chiswick High Road, I gradually succumbed to feelings  of shock. That slightly elevated, almost euphoric feeling.

In the evening sitting by myself I became quite shaky and called my mother. The only person I can be sure is on my side in a situation like this. Even at 92 she is good on practical matters. Then I got the rather wild idea of offering to rent the house in Oxford, until the market picks up again here. Although it was past working hours, this elicited a furious phone call from the hot shit woman estate agent in Oxford.

She upbraided me with so many failings on the part of my agent and my solicitor I could hardly follow. ‘Renting is not going to happen,’ she spat. ‘We are putting the house back on the market tomorrow.’

She said she hadn’t heard from my people in London although she’d been trying to contact them. My agent says he hasn’t heard from her. I rang my solicitor who says they are waiting on unanswered queries from the Oxford end. Who is telling the truth? Whatever it is, her acid call has galvanised me, and had an effect on my mother, who now says that she is going to sell her house, where she’s lived since 1963 and move into a small warden controlled rented flat in the village.

This will be easier for her to manage and release some money. She is of course looking at the end of her life, but we don’t speak about that, and  one of the main drivers for her doing this is the fulfilment of her lifelong quest for warm feet. She says that the  flats are ‘very cosy.’

When I visit her now we usually watch ‘Pointless’ and ‘Eggheads,’  in soaring temperatures, so I imagine I will be staying nearby in a B & B.  So now she is moving as well, everything is in flux, which is terrifying and unpleasant in the extreme.

Nature not so kind

Sunday 28th Sept 2014


My mother is falling off her twig, as she likes to put it. I must stand and watch her slow descent to earth. This struggle for people to be born, which kills so many babies, then these death throes which few escape, the never ending battle with nature makes me doubt the existence of God.

The Last Of That Life There

In Codsall Village, Staffs, my mother is at the centre of a network of elderly women, connected by church, luncheon club, Theatre Group and Towns Women's Guild. They are always out and about, with enough pension money and mobility for continuous conviviality and constant excursions. Cheerful, friendly, resolute, the ladies who all remember the last war, are like a small army themselves, continually replenishing their numbers as another one falls.

When my mother dies she will be one of the last who can remember Codsall when it was a village, before its farm land was sold off, and it became just a suburb of Wolverhampton, with traffic lights, metal fences, heavy signs for every well  known location, traffic calming, and all the rest.

Trapped in a concrete sea, I wonder if any  newcomers will ever hear the ghostly voices of these old women, whispering in the wind about a greener place where people knew everyone around them?

He's Returned, but not for me

27th September 2014

First the coincidences, showers of them making me tingle. I was even looking in a mirror holding my nose when a voice from the radio started talking about Cyrano. There was a strong sense of time speeding up, and then as usual after these experiences, the news of change coming, loping towards me.
Last Tuesday, 23rd, my mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. The same disease which hit me in 2010. A bit of a coincidence there too, as we are not related, I was adopted. Hers has spread further than mine, and I was a dreaded Stage Four. So there will be no straightforward operation as we hoped. Instead she is just having chemotherapy.

It is grim to picture that tiny woman aged 92, making her way to the hospital six times, and she has to visit between sessions, so that will be twelve visits at least. I picture her sitting there dwarfed in the high-backed chair, her thin arm laced and looped with bright plastic canulae, as the vile stuff goes in.
But it has to be done. There is no good, easy way to end this precious life, unless you are very late and very lucky.

At the same time I am planning, trying, despite the efforts of lazy solicitors and dodgy estate agents, to leave London after 35 years, to start a new kind of life in Oxford. In those small, exaggerated matters such as marriage and money my London adventure has been a flop. But in the greater sense, of allowing me to lead a free, creative life, it has been just right.