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.