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...