Mother

by Nicholas Royle

  My father and I were like hooded birds. Seeling our own fates.

  Until then I’d never been shot through by dementia. In my late teens I had done some voluntary work at a local mental hospital. I spent afternoons in the company of the raving and sedated. Watched them watching the test card on the television screen from one hour to the next. Listened in fear to their anguished moans and cries. I played chess with madmen. I sang songs on request to old women. And in later years I visited friends who had undergone breakdowns and been sectioned. But I had never felt overtaken – submerged – rooted out by the reality of another’s madness. Mad judgment of the judge of madness. Trial of lunacy by lunacy. All the time headlong down a slide with no ground in sight.

  If you can’t remember

  A little boy’s prime concern is to be alone in the presence of his mother. Alone. All one. In later years there was the quiet joy of sitting at home or in the pub reading aloud to her. I see that in reading I have never grown up. Whenever I love what I am reading I am in her presence. And then everything is in the voice in which I would read for her. Alone. I sit and read a book with my mother. I read back over these words with her now.

  I’m losing my marbles. She never before or again talked of her madness. As if the words had announced her own death-sentence. But when will she have died? This question affects anybody who has lost a loved one to dementia. My mother carried on living. And I was far away dealing with children of my own. It was left to my father to look after her. He was such a brick. So my aunt Marion called him. It wore the life out of him. He survived my mother by just a couple of years. She became a phantom-like puppet. The battered shell of a self still harbouring a body. She passed away – passed off – passed through – day after day. She could no longer drive – not after being discovered miles from home with the car slumped in the hedgerow. It seemed a miracle she’d emerged in one piece. The police found her still sitting at the wheel of the 1973 yellow-ochre Opel Kadett. Smoke pouring out of the engine. Flames flickering up from under the bonnet. She seemed not to realise what had happened. She was unhurt. But she would never drive again.

  My mother’s ability to speak and interact with others withered away. If she had believed in a God and could articulate such a question she might have asked how He could have come up with dementia. Not just invented it as a personal exit strategy for a human being but designed it in such a way that the suffering it produced could linger and deepen and extend – month after month – year after year. Some Gawd that. What is the purpose of an elderly woman mad and sad as locked-up monkeys?

  In my mind’s eye she is surrounded by fire. A roaring fire. The conflagration of the world. And other images are at work. Like a perpetual flame she is weaving in my words.

  Pyromaniac I joked one day. A terrible moment. I realised that she no longer had any idea what the word meant. She continued to smoke cigarettes and my father had a constant fear of her setting the house alight. This was foreshadowed by memories of ten years earlier when an electric blanket caught fire in the night. I was living abroad at the time. I was not informed. But next time I was home it was hard not to notice the new carpets and repainted walls. And that was foreshadowed again by the time in my early adolescence when my mother forked out all of her hard-earned savings on a cream-coloured leather three-piece suite and no sooner turned her back than my father chose to light a fire in the fireplace without first checking on the state of the chimney. When she came home from work that evening her brand-new sofa and chairs were covered in a film of soot that resisted all attempts at making good again. Shadow to shadow. In her latter days the possibility of a cigarette setting fire to herself – or to the house – meant that my father had to shadow her from one room to another. Never a moment’s peace.

  In my mind’s eye she is surrounded by water. I see my mother in the sea in streams and rivers weirs and waterfalls. I see her when I am taking a shower or in the bath. When it rains. When I turn on a tap to fill the kettle. When I fill a hot-water bottle. In the 1960s and early 1970s she and her younger sister Marion used to take me and Simon and Cousin Michael up to North Berwick in Scotland to visit their eldest sister Peggy. Peggy was married to her first cousin Jim. They had no children. On our earlier trips we would stay with them on their farm just outside the town. In later years we shared their bungalow by the sea. For weeks we would inhabit this marine-edged existence unlike any other. We would walk early in the morning or in the long summer evenings along the great pale gold stretches of sand looking out to Bass Rock in the far distance and Craig Leith and Fidra and the Lamb closer to shore. We would wander for miles along the sands searching for the little cowrie shells that washed up every day. Sometimes we might each find as many as fifty. We called them buddies. Tiny shells given up by the sea. Looking for buddies was another way of reading with her.

  My mother could be ruthless. And despite her claims to lack of education or knowledge of books her reading was voracious. The cottage in Devon had a large garden that needed plentiful attention. Which she gave it when the weather allowed or she wasn’t sitting at the kitchen table cruciverbalising or reading a novel or daydreaming or making a shopping list. She must have spent at least six hours every day at that white Formica-top table. She would smoke at least one packet of fags and drink up to nine cups of milky instant coffee a day. Even late in the evening she would drink coffee. And every day she would do the crossword. The Daily Telegraph or The Times. Neither of these newspapers was appealing to her. My mother’s politics were to the left of the left. The paper was just for the crossword. Sometimes I would read to her from the Telegraph letters page and we would laugh aloud together. The Telegraph letters were funnier than the ones in The Times but both could produce a hilarity that stayed with us for hours. The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan once said that if you want to know how the unconscious works – do crosswords. Often my mother would finish the puzzle by mid-morning. Then the rest of the day could be given over to novel-reading. Interspersed with gardening or a trip out to the local shops or housework or having a natter and a coffee or two with Marion or someone else who had dropped by.

  She got through far more books than I did. Considering I was at that time ‘reading English’ at university I ought to have been embarrassed. But just as I never thought of reading without her so I never thought of her reading without me. When she’d read a book I felt I’d somehow done so too. A mobile library folie à deux. She worked her way through Trollope with a sense of purpose I found staggering. Alexander Solzhenitsyn Doris Lessing Thomas Hardy George Eliot Virginia Woolf – nothing seemed to deter her. She would always begin by reading the last page. At the time I found this incomprehensible. A poor final page would not prevent her from turning back to the beginning. She read with a dogged loyalty. But she was never afraid to be outspoken in her judgement. I remember a period when she was reading Iris Murdoch. She’d already swept like one of the ten plagues of Egypt through several of her books. And now she was on The Sea, The Sea. One afternoon I asked her what she thought of it. She was very close to finishing it. Drivel she said. Just that one word.

  It is an irony that Murdoch and my mother succumbed to the same form of insanity. I met her a couple of times. She was married to my PhD supervisor John Bayley. I remember phoning him on occasion at their home in Steeple Aston in Oxfordshire. I never went there but as I write I realise I imagined it as a version of the Devon cottage to which my parents had retreated. Sometimes Iris picked up and sometimes John but it was always a case of staying on the phone for several minutes before one of them answered. I pictured the simple but marvellous lethargy preventing anyone from journeying to the phone. It was the same when I was telephoning home. Even when my father was in his study with the machine ringing right next to him on his desk he would not answer if he thought his wife was in the house. And my mother would never rush – even if she was expecting a call or knew her husband was not at home. The phone was not an object of integrated pseudo-urgency and command as it is
today. If the reason for the call were pressing the caller would try again later. My mother liked to recall something her father used to say. If you can’t remember it can’t have been important. This saying was important enough to remember. A way of organising her economy of forgetfulness. Of dedicating her forgetting and not forgetting to the memory of her father.

  Surface

  I’m losing my marbles.

  What resources are called upon when you rise up from the maelstrom of madness to report on it?

  Below the thunders of the upper deep;

  Far far beneath in the abysmal sea,

  His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep

  The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee

  About his shadowy sides; above him swell

  Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;

  And far away into the sickly light,

  From many a wondrous grot and secret cell

  Unnumber’d and enormous polypi

  Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.

  There hath he lain for ages, and will lie

  Battening upon huge sea-worms in his sleep,

  Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;

  Then once by man and angels to be seen,

  In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

  Tennyson was just out of his teens when he wrote that poem. When I was young I was envious. I was awed by its imaginative power. He had siphoned the spirit of Shakespeare’s song ‘Full fathom five thy father lies’ and changed it into something monstrous and surprising. It wasn’t necessary to know anything about the Kraken’s origins in the Norwegian word for twisted or about its links with the English crank and crook. Or about the creature’s earliest appearance in English in Berthelson’s translation of Erik Pontoppidan’s Natural History of Norway in 1755. ‘Amongst the many great things which are in the ocean…is the Kraken. This creature is the largest and most surprizing of all the animal creation…’

  All you needed to know was that the latter fire referred to the Day of Judgement. At the end of the world everything goes up in flames. As foretold in the Book of Revelation:

  And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works.

  And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death.

  And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.

  Tennyson had lifted that immortal opening: ‘And the sea gave up the dead which were in it.’ The sea giveth. Gives out. Gives up.

  My King James Bible is among my most precious books. I love the black covers and india-paper thinness. The hundreds and hundreds of pages with gilt edging. The frayed red silk bookmarker. The tiny chunky Gothic black print of the words. Inside I have inscribed my ten-year-old name and the date ‘Christmas 1967’ in blue biro. At the back of the book is a strand of my mother’s hair. A single gray straggle. Stuck in with Sellotape. The strand matters more than the book. She took so much notice of people’s hair. She used to say of her sons that they had such beautiful hair. As a boy this meant nothing to me. I have hair: what’s special about that? If she came back from the hairdresser and we noticed – she was so pleased. She’d got a perm. She’d had her hair done. And her husband or one of her sons had said it looked nice! But more often alas we failed to remark upon it. I remember the way she had of biting her lip. And how upset she could become if no one said anything.

  I love the Bible but there are very few mothers in it. The most famous (the Virgin Mary and Isaac’s mother Sarah) must puzzle over what made them mothers at all. Otherwise it’s all fathers. Begetting this begetting that. But my Bible is also full of my mother. She always has the last word. She is in the last place and never stops speaking.

  When I looked up the word ‘memoir’ I discovered a rare and obsolete meaning: a memento or something kept in memory of someone. The dictionary gives just one instance. From an English poet I’d never read. I can hear my mother’s playful pronunciation: Thomas Ken. She is recalling her Scottish father William McAdam. D’ye ken? In a poem dating from 1711 Ken wrote: ‘Of Friends whom Death lays fast asleep / They Memoirs keep.’ I love the fact that the dictionary can in two lines give an unknown poet a new vocation. Something is missing. The ‘they’ of the second line are not the ‘Friends’ of the first. Those who are living are unidentified. The dead friends are identified through memoirs. The preceding couplet runs: ‘Terrestrial Lovers Pictures wear / Of those who their Beloved are.’ My memoir of my mother is that single gray hair at the end of my 1967 terrestrial Bible.

  The Kraken sleeps. He sleeps a sleep that once invaded kills. A sleep betrayed. Sleep is the word thrice crowed. The Kraken sleeps his ancient dreamless uninvaded sleep. For millennia he has been feeding on sea-worms in it. Sleep is more cryptic than any wondrous grot or secret cell. It has no content. It is a world of its own. A law unto itself.

  Epistolary

  I read ‘The Kraken’ aloud to my mother one winter evening by the fire in Devon. She must have already come across the poem but she didn’t say. She always maintained that she had read nothing. Your father was the educated one. He had a study full of books. He had read so much. But I have no memory of ever seeing my father read anything besides magazines and newspapers. Like her he never went to university. He must have read a lot when he was young. He knew about all sorts of things. He had an extraordinary vocabulary and always knew how to spell things. He loved the English language and had a compulsive interest in grammatical correctness. My mother was pre-word. My father was word. Or at least that is how I understood them and how they appeared to want to be understood.

  My mother also wrote very little. I have many letters from my parents but her contribution tends to be minimal. A ‘me too!’ and a kiss at the end. Sometimes a couple of sentences or a brief paragraph supplementing what my father had written. There are very few letters composed by her alone. When clearing out what had been the family home in the months after my father died in 2005 I went through the traumatic business of deciding what to keep and what not to keep. Of giving away or taking to the local tip what couldn’t be kept even though the parting seemed sorrowful beyond words. Among the smaller items impossible to discard was my father’s wallet. I’ve never used a wallet and wasn’t going to start now. I put it in a drawer. I would just look at it from time to time. Register with fondness its continuing presence in the desk beside me. But then a couple of years ago I took it out and examined it. A sort of pickled object I didn’t know what to do with. And only then did I notice a small inner pocket sealed with a zip.

  Inside I discovered a cache of faded letters. They are little more than scraps. Yet each stirs and moves me every time I read it.

  One is a much-folded worn and torn sheet on which my mother has written: ‘M, I do love you. K.’ Just that. Without date. Without location. Without reference. The ‘do’ seems heartbreaking to me.

  Another is dated 11.50pm 30 June 1954. It’s a Wednesday.

  Why are you so far away?

  Darling

  Third attempt? The first, a page and almost a half and the second only a half. But somehow neither read intelligently and I am afraid that if I ponder any longer you may not hear from me at all before our meeting on Saturday.

  Thank you so very much for your letter, thoughts and love. This week is passing so slowly and I am finding it so very difficult to settle down to routine of district again. Each morning I have been awake long before my usual hour, feeling to see if any water might be creeping in and wondering when last I had something to eat.

  Did we really have two long weeks together? I miss you dreadfully, especially as I write. Have you found my little fern and given it some water? It was left in the pocket on my side of your car. My chestnut tree has several new leaves, but perhaps you saw them last Saturday evening?

  Darling.

  goodnight and I love y
ou K.

  Would any lover today declare in a text or email: ‘I miss you dreadfully, especially as I write’? The core matter of the epistolary – the singular act of committing heart and pen to paper – has gone the way of the passenger pigeon. My mother and father married on 15 November 1956: these are the heady early days. They are just back from a fortnight’s holiday. Coinciding with my mother’s twenty-seventh birthday (17 June). The ‘routine’ refers to her job as a district nurse. Early days intimated too in the precarious survivals of the little fern and the chestnut tree.

  The third letter is on headed paper from the Chest Clinic at Hammersmith Hospital in Ducane Road W12. She writes:

  Monday afternoon.

  Darling M

  Sitting in the gorgious [sic] sun during lunch break and thinking how lovely it is that I shall be seeing you tonight instead of wondering if I shall have a letter from you in the morning. I hope you have a safe & pleasant journey back to Slaughter and find Kathy & Pete well.

  It won’t be long till we meet again anyway will it?

  Thank you Dear for such a lovely week-end and making me happy.

  I do think we ought to get married SOON I’m tired of going to everyone elses’ [sic] weddings and just looking on!

  Must get back to work.

  I love you.

  God Bless.

  K.

  There is no date on this third document in my father’s wallet zip-pocket. The last may be first and the first may be last. The second might come after the last. The third must have been written after Kathy and Pete married. Pete was my father’s brother. A couple of years younger. He had a petrol station (or rather a single petrol pump) at Lower Slaughter in the Cotswolds. One day he attached a note to the gate of the neighbouring field: ‘Gone to London to find a wife.’ He returned two weeks later with Kathleen Elizabeth Green. They married on 2 January 1954 at Ealing. The tenth anniversary of the death of my mother’s mother. In the following months Pete built their first house (Fosseway Garage) where they lived till around 1960.