Yesterday we visited my parents to celebrate my mother’s 82nd birthday. She never expected to live beyond 80, given that both her mother and grandmother died at that age, in both cases quite suddenly. The stroke she suffered might well have carried off anyone less strong, but here she still is, forced to live out her worst case scenario. I want so much to ask her, is it worth it? Is it still worth being alive?
My mother did not have the best start in life. She was a second world war baby, father unknown and my grandmother would never tell her who it was. However, very unwisely, she did tell her that she’d attempted everything she could to get rid of the pregnancy. This did untold damage to my mother’s psyche and her self-esteem. She used to tell me about a memory she had of being a very young child, asleep in bed at night, and Nan trying to smother her with a pillow. I find this hard to believe. My grandmother was a foolish woman, silly and melodramatic and capricious, but I never knew her to be violent. Instead, I think this was an emotional memory, a pervasive and persistent feeling dating from a time before words that gradually took on the shape of an event. I think my mother did feel as if she were perpetually struggling to emerge out from under my grandmother’s frustrations. There were an awful lot of them, and I don’t think my grandmother was very adept at seeing beyond her own limited horizons. But I do think she was adept at keeping those horizons firmly in place.
Because of course, we can trace the trouble back another generation. My mother grew up living with her grandparents, a situation that could not have been comfortable as my great-grandmother was very upright and a little stern, and she disapproved deeply of Nan’s behavior. My mother tried very hard later in life to lose the sense of victimhood that her upbringing instilled in her, and would tell me often that her early years had been fine because Gran and Grandad were very stable and reliable people, particularly compared to Nan’s flightiness. But they weren’t cuddly people, they weren’t free with praise and compliments. Their own lives had been hard. My great-grandfather was a conscientious objector and drove ambulances in France during WW1. When he returned home, it was to find his barber’s shop occupied by a different trader, and there was no recourse for unexpected injustice in those days. Born a proper Cockney within the sound of Bow Bells, he just took his wife off to a small village in Constable Country, having seen an advert in the paper for a barber’s business there. My grandmother was born and then a couple of years later, they had a baby boy, Hugh. He was born epileptic.
Epilepsy was not understood at this point in time. It was simply a terrifying, random illness that probably still had unfortunate spiritual connotations with devilry. My great-grandfather became very practiced at dealing with Hugh when he had fits, and when the boy grew up, he became a barber and worked alongside his father in the shop. When my mother speaks of this, she always uses exactly the same words. She says she doesn’t know how he could have done it. He, meaning my great-grandfather. How he could have risked letting Hugh use the cutthroat razors of the day, when he was not reliably in control of his movements. Hugh was the source of many things that were wrong in that family, though this was not his fault, no blame to be attached. My grandmother was a pretty, charming and clever child. She grew up to be a dressmaker with amazing skills, but she was constantly overlooked and brushed aside because Hugh was demanding, Hugh was delicate. Hugh sucked all the attention out of that family, and my grandmother responded to his illness by becoming abjectly afraid of it, and she passed this fear onto my mother. I think my grandmother learned a strange lesson – that attention was due to the person who was weak and suffering and wrong, not the person who was strong and talented and charming. As far as I could tell, the great motivating force behind my grandmother’s otherwise unaccountable actions, was desperate self-sabotage.
My grandmother married three times. The first infamous because she walked out of the church before her husband, who I presume she left behind signing the register. She had been thwarted in love, or so the myth goes, having fallen for an Irish chauffeur who in the finely sliced class system of that time counted as too good for her (given she was trade). I would love a proper historian’s opinion on this – were the divisions really so sharp and distinct, so impossible to cross? Anyway, the story goes that she turned around and married the first man who would have her, a much older man, a rather belligerent man. It was the start of a pattern. She stayed with him for 18 months, returning to live with her parents when she was pregnant with her first child, and never going back. Time passed. The Second World War began and troops were stationed just outside the village. My Nan came to know them well, because every time they needed new stripes sewn on their uniforms, they came to her, the village seamstress. The most persistent legend has it that my grandfather was an Australian Colonel. There were indeed Australian troops stationed nearby, but they didn’t arrive until after my mother’s birth, so if this is true, he was fighting with the British in 1940-41, living in the area perhaps before the war, which begs the question why he never stuck around. My grandmother hid her pregnancy successfully – even her best friend didn’t know until shortly before she gave birth. But there was undeniably another baby in that household in the summer of ’42, so it must eventually have been known about. If he had died in battle, then I see no reason for my grandmother not to say who he was; it would have conferred some romance, some nobility to the mess. Ah, it is all such a puzzle, and I can never make it add up in a satisfactory way.
And so my mother was born, into an atmosphere fraught with undercurrents between her mother and grandmother who argued often, and between all of them and Uncle Hugh, who my mother viewed as a kind of bogey monster not confined to the underside of her bed. My mother developed a squint when she was around five that she had to live with until she was around 11, when her mother’s friend paid for her to have it fixed, an operation that back then required many days lying with her eyes bandaged, evidently unsure whether she’d see again. None of this was good for a small girl with no father in the 1940s. These were the stories that my mother told me as I was growing up, our origin myths. They had a kind of dark fairy tale quality to them and my mother recounted them without the tiniest variation, never a word altered. In this strange time of pre-mourning for her, I feel a strong urge to go back and look at them again, the Ur-texts of my childhood that seemed wholly without subtext, perhaps because by comparison, my mother was a masterclass in it. There was so much she did not say but needed me to guess. And I have never felt as much compassion for her as I do now, so this is the moment to look. But I’ve been typing for too long already. More another day.
