I had intended to write about the perils of parenting. About how it is a) very hard and b) that as a parent you will always fail but, having been told quite smartly that ‘that will take you down the road of self pity,’ I drifted for a while in the sunshine and as I did my thoughts turned to my mother, our relationship, my mother as a person.
We had a difficult relationship. She being not the mother of my dreams, nor I the daughter of hers (she having always wanted a son) but she was my mother.
What kind of a woman was she I pondered? That question now too late fascinates me. How I wish I had entered into long taped conversations with this woman and captured her essence in an oral history. What did I really know about the frail body locked in a world of dementia that I watched slowly decline and become more and more frustrated as her memory failed and eventually die.
Very little.
She was born in 1926 to my grandparents, who divorced at a time one didn’t.
They were a working class couple living in Preston or Blackburn (you see how little I know). My grandmother’s family laid claim to a grander heritage involving textiles and bleach; my grandfather, I know even less about. I believe he was a gambler and a womaniser but asides from an unwelcome visit to my mother on the way to Newbury racecourse some decades later, I have no evidence to support this.
For whatever reasons, they divorced. He disappeared and in those days there was no such thing as child support.
The shame of divorce and the feelings rejection must have left an indelible mark on this small girl, their only child.
My grandmother, one of 8 siblings, took on various jobs to support them both and was, according to my mother, ‘a great favourite with the gentlemen’.
How far this ‘favouritism’ was explored or exploited I know not but I do know that among her various jobs she worked as a seamstress and in the local public house, either as bar maid or cleaner or – whatever.
I only met my grandmother once. I was five. We were supposed to be going on a family holiday to Devon when I came down with the chickenpox. My parents decided they could not forgo the holiday and could certainly not take a pox infested child with them, so I was duly dispensed to the two up to down, straight onto the cobbled street, house in Preston/Blackburn.
I adored my grandmother. She was warm and ample like a duvet you could snuggle into.
She took me to see the Blackpool illuminations and I marvelled at the neon twinkly lights and thrilled at the roller coaster and its occupants shrieking overhead although after our ride on the monster my imagined passion for all things thrilling died a certain death, never to be reignited.
“I have a gentleman friend who will buy us tea” she informed me – and he did, her in her best hat and me – scratching.
She let me scratch.
My mother had given her bottles of Calamine lotion and strict instructions that my hands must be glove covered and allowed nowhere near my face.
My grandmother seeing the torment the itching was causing, took off the gloves and said
“Eh love give ’em a good scratch…can’t hurt”.
Even today when I run my fingers over my cheek and feel the indent left from the scratching, I remember that glorious week and her warmth and rebellious kindness.
At some point my grandmother decided that this was no life for her daughter and sent her to live with her sister’s family. Whether this was to allow herself more freedom or in recognition of her own failings as a single parent, I know not.
I do know she adored my mother. She may have been a 20th century Moll Flanders but my mother recalls fondly that she was always beautifully dressed, always wore hats and made all my mother’s clothes. She also remembers her laugher; a laughter too intense to be heard. My grandmother it seems would shake and shake with this laughter until tears were streaming down her face, begging my mother to “Stop making me laugh”, but not a sound would come out until finally she exploded with mirth and the house would shake.
About the time my mother was sent to live with her aunt and Jenny came on the scene. Jenny had also been abandoned by her husband and my grandmother, whether lonely or in need of the few extra pennies that Jenny would provide, took her in and they lived together until my grandmother died in 1962 – I believe an awful lot of ‘gentlemen’ , including the mayor, attended her funeral.
My mother allowed Jenny to stay in the house, rent free, until she died some 20 years later. Whether this gesture was to assuage the guilt she felt at leaving home at sixteen and never really returning or compassion, or just because she didn’t want to deal with selling the house, I shall never know, but I believe it was compassion.
She hero worshipped her uncle, her only male role model and told me in one of our infrequent ‘tell me about yourself’ conversations, that she based her search for a husband on him. A kind, quiet, well read man, who was of reasonable importance in the colliery; important enough to have a grace and favour house with a garden. He was also a union man I believe.
Despite having three daughters of his own, he treated her exactly the same as his own children. Her aunt was less charitable (her own daughters testify to this). A small bird like creature who ruled the household with a rod of iron and who, for whatever reasons, was mean spirited.
My mother would spend hours in the library (I suspect it was a small room with a few books) with her uncle, and came to love literature and song. My great uncle had a gramophone and my mother loved to listen to the opera he played. She had a wonderful voice and he would thrill to her singing along.
School was a three mile walk for the four girls, in a Lancastrian winter, nothing short of torture. My mother being the youngest, and the one with the weakest bladder, was often left trailing behind the others and many a time would arrive at school with with wet knickers and have to suffer the embarrassment of being hauled to the front of the class and told to go to the office where a clean pair would be handed out.
One of her cousins, Ethel, became sickly. First scarlet fever then St Vitus dance. My mother as the ‘Cinderella’ was taken out of school and given the task of tending to Ethel, which she did with gentleness and love. Ethel recovered (she was later to die from tuberculosis) and my mother’s cousins give all credit for her recovery to my mother’s patient care.
The rest of this time in her childhood memories is devoted to long summers and jumping over haystacks in the fields and learning how to cartwheel and, on a far sadder note, awaiting the arrival of her mother.
Her Aunt would tell her that her mother was coming to visit on a certain day and my mother would dress with extra care and await her arrival on the bottom step. She would wait and wait and wait – her mother never arrived. I wonder if this expected ‘visit’ was just a fabrication and yet another example of her aunt’s mean spirit, or whether her mother just forgot, or couldn’t cope. Whichever, it must have been a heart rending disappointment to this small girl.
At some point she returned to the house on the cobbled street. She went to grammar school, not because she was clever but because ‘One of the boys in class was clever, so everyone in the class went to grammar school’.
At school she would look at the world Atlas and promise herself she would one day see all the exotic places marked in empire red. The rubber plantations in Ceylon, the spices in India, the sand dunes of the Sahara; this was the world she promised herself.
Her flaming red hair was never to go unnoticed. By the time she was burgeoning into womanhood, she had several admirers and “I never carried my satchel home from school”.
She also never tired of telling me “ I had eight proposals you know, eight!” She especially liked to point this out when I was well into a pregnancy and barely in possession of any husband.
War broke out when she was working in a bakery. I cannot imagine my mother ever working in a bakery. She must have been an unmitigated disaster. My mother had no domestic skills,( although she insisted she studied domestic science at school). She could neither cook nor sew. Her mealtime offerings more often than not being presented in hard foil tins taken straight from the freezer, deposited into a cooker and from thence, partially thawed, onto a plate. By the time I arrived she had no need of culinary skills, having risen in the world and being in the possession of ‘staff’. She did attempt dinner parties in later years and like her daughter managed to perfect at least two ‘signature dishes’.
As far as sewing goes, I do remember sewing name tags into my school uniform with her on the eve of my banishment to boarding school, but I also remember my father being present and him sewing at least two name tags to our combined one.
I digress.
The war was for some a window of opportunity, certainly in my mother’s case. She was never going to be an opera star spite her talent, there was no money for that. So she was going to war.
It was her escape, her way out of flour soaked drudgery or an unhappy marriage to one of eight men (lest we forget) who, to her mind, all came with two big drawbacks. Firstly they had no soul, (being northern and through upbringing, lacking in artistic imagination) and secondly, they had ‘mothers’. As an only child, the product of a broken home, brought up by a mean spirited aunt, she had no intention of entering into the ring of competition with any other female, particularly a ‘mother’.
She begged her mother to sign the enlistment papers when she was seventeen, and her new life began.