This is a weekend of much public sorrow, and time to remember the many dead in Indonesia, New York, Washington DC. Pennsylvania, Beslan, N Ireland, Palestine, Madrid, Iraq and countless other places, but for me it is more personally marked as the 5th anniversary of my mother's death.
She had been ill for many years, and ill health precipitated by her own poor health habits. Ours was a smoking household. My mother started smoking at 16 and despite a weak pretence of having given up, would still smoke at the bathroom window and then go back on the portable oxygen. She'd seen her own father racked by emphysema but still puffed away not quite believing that this was the principal cause of her health problems. There were many scares in the last few years of her life. In January of 1999 I was in Baltimore and received a call in the early hours of the morning from my friend, Claire, in Australia who was looking after my children. My father had called and my mother was fading. I rushed to the airport to get a connection to NYC to fly back to London to see her. The plane was delayed and I missed the flight. I would have to wait 8 hours for the next flight. I burst into tears at the BA lounge and they allowed me to spend the day sniffling in the corner desperately phoning each of my sisters to check the prognosis. I eventually got back to discover she had rallied enough to berate my niece for getting her tongue pierced. She seemed to make progress and that northern summer I visited with my children and had a glorious time. My sisters and I climbed to the top of
Glastonbury Tor and were sad that our mother would never see that patchwork of fields again. We made a visit to
Longleat with my children. My father gets sea-sick and wouldn't risk the short trip on the paddle boat on the artificial lake, but my mother was game and delighted in the
ancient gorillas in retirement on the island, ensconced in a palladian folly with cartoon network on satellite tv. Six weeks later she was gone. Thankfully, in her own bed, at home but suddenly no longer there.
I always felt she was so hard on me. The youngest of five, an accident, when she probably thought she might have a chance to draw breath and have some time to herself. And a time when my father began to wander, she probably loved and resented me in equal measure. At 7 I dislocated my hip, and as my father was nowhere to be found, she borrowed a neighbour's pushchair and pushed me 2 miles to the doctor. She'd been brought up in west London. My grandparents house in Notting Hill was bulldozed to build the Westway but I have a few recollections of life in West Kensington in the early 60s, then resolutely working class and home to West Indian immigrants. She'd won a scholarship to Godolphin and Latimer grammar school, a great achievement for the daughter of a laundress and a bricklayer, but the war had seen her evacuated to a country town and married at 18. By the age of 23 she had 3 children under 5 and a pattern of life established for her. She was always ambivalent about my academic achievements, worried that going to university would make me stuck-up. She loved Eamon best of all my boyfriends - she was always a sucker for charming Irishmen. My husband intimidated her. But to her credit, she let me make my own mistakes.
And she loved children with a consuming passion. An old neighbour of ours from Scotland had visited her in Somerset. His wife, then 28 weeks pregnant went into an early labour, and delivered a very premature and sick child. With other young children, the family returned to Scotland, but the baby stayed in intensive care, his mother only able to visit weekly. For 6 weeks, my mother went every day to sit by his crib and hold his little hand in her fingers.
There are still days when I think about picking up the phone to tell her something that has crossed my mind. And, although, I think I spent much of my life hoping she might approve of me and resenting like mad that she never did, I miss her terribly.
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