Mother

by Nicholas Royle

  Nurse

  My mother was a nurse. Her being so calls for a new vocabulary of nursehood. Nursehood: a sort of cryptic condensing of my mother and a Robin Hood. Robin Hood or Rob Roy: in my unconscious – and in hers – this couple were always mixed up. She who’d be a fantastical hood. The nurse who’d be always the she you wanted her to be. Nurse who’d. And at the same time I think of my mother also as the creator of a new kind of nursery. Not something in modern steel and glass with government vouchers but ancient in the mood and blood of what it is to care to support to nurture to look after.

  A tiny newspaper clipping survives with the headline CHELSEA NURSE LEAVES FOR FULHAM:

  Chelsea’s loss is Fulham’s gain. That is what her patients are saying now that Chelsea District Nurse K.B. McAdam has been transferred to Fulham.

  Nurse McAdam is a very popular nurse with her many patients.

  One, Mr Malcolm Mackenzie, is particularly interested in her hobbies –painting and pottery.

  ‘She has great talent as a water-colourist, with a wonderful sense of colour and form,’ he observed this week.

  End of story. So minimalist yet mysterious. The desirable footballer image. A jokey idea even then: getting a transfer from Stamford Bridge to Craven Cottage. The solitary alleged testimony of a patient called Malcolm Mackenzie. The evocation of my mother as interested in pottery? A talented water-colourist? Where was this cutting from? Sporting Life? A local newspaper? A nursing gazette?

  That my mother was a nurse is the fact of the matter. A fact that in another clime Gertrude Stein might opine one must sublime and resublime again and again. I think of my mother’s patience. Her many patients. I think of the play of ‘patience’ and ‘patients’. Remembering for example days in early boyhood starting with the rattle of the milk float. The milkman in his uniform in the dark leaving bottles with silver or gold tops on the doorstep for a blue-tit to peck open if it could. Days before central heating when our house was warmed by an open fire and a gruff sooty-faced coalman lugged enormous sacks and opened and dumped them in the coalbunker. Days when breakfast was dippy egg with toast-strip soldiers or Gugga’s salty porridge with milk and butter or golden syrup. Days when a horse-drawn rag-and-bone cart came down the street to the jangling of a bell. Like the rag-and-bone man in Steptoe and Son. (When I told people we lived in Cheam they often connected it with Tony Hancock. The not-very-successful comedian from East Cheam in Hancock’s Half Hour. In reality there was a North and a West and a South but never an East Cheam.) My mother’s patience with me as I’d sketch and then sketch again a pencil drawing of the Beatles as seen on TV in December 1963. Her patience every day when I wanted to sit on the lavatory for what seemed like hours resting on my knees a cork mat with a jumper on top to provide a hillscape in which I manoeuvred one by one large groups of Air-Fix soldiers or cowboys and Indians. Meanwhile she would be downstairs tidying or in a neighbouring upstairs room making beds. Singing in full-throated ease ‘The Skye Boat Song’ or Judy Garland’s ‘Over the Rainbow’. She had such patience for everyone. And everyone her patient. With never a hint of fluster or condescension.

  Thirty years later no different. I was writing a short story called ‘Light Lunch’ and talked about it with her at the white Formica-top table in the kitchen and read it aloud to her in a quiet corner of the Tucker Arms at Dalwood. It began: ‘Rosemary and Kenneth lived in a house that was rather too large for them.’ Then I drove us home and we established ourselves in the kitchen. She made a coffee and filled a hot-water bottle. I poured myself a Glenmorangie. And we returned to the subject of the final paragraph. Vexing to me but to her it seemed nothing but pleasure. The story is about a wealthy childless couple in their late forties who develop an all-consuming desire for food. Their consumption becomes an enormity in every sense. The final paragraph presented the crucial dilemma. I was divided. Should it be a story that concluded with cannibalism and if so how? Or should it be a story that in a more literal way consumed itself? A story in the vein of Maurice Blanchot’s ‘The Madness of the Day’. About how the light goes mad. Or about how you might go mad for the light. The male protagonist would not only devour his wife but eat the streets the Houses of Parliament the entirety of London and at last swallow up the light. I don’t know how long my mother spent listening to my prevarications and contemplating variant possibilities with me. An hour? Two hours? Two coffees? Three drams of whisky (plus a splash in her instant)? She favoured the simpler ending. Nothing hifalutin’. But also not too explicit. We ended up with Kenneth telling his wife he has a surprise for her. After asking what it is: ‘Rosemary noticed that he was still strangely absorbed by the table-top, or perhaps by her plump arms resting on it. Then she caught the light in his eyes.’ In the story the table is dark mahogany but in reality it was the white Formica-top kitchen table. I can still remember the thrilled light in my mother’s eyes as we settled on that final sentence.

  She had extraordinary presence of mind. The sort of attentiveness and calm required to hold a kestrel on your fist as my brother does in a photo taken outside St Kenelm’s in the early 1970s. It is a classic amateur shot. The main subject almost edged out of the picture. But the field in which Simon is standing as it slopes down behind him into Dingle Wood was the scene of a dramatic event close to the time of this photograph. My uncle Pete was a collector of all kinds of objects – from eighteenth-century oil paintings to vintage cars. There was an old pale green Vauxhall Victor Estate among the various automobiles on the large forecourt (or area of mud) above the house. Did the car work? Could it be made to run? My cousin Heather (just a year older than me) recalls sitting with my mother under the chestnut trees below the garden. (The area away to the right of where – in the photo – my brother is standing with his kestrel.) Talking as they looked out across the field. My mother inviting her teenage niece to ‘give voice to her thoughts and feelings’. My mother ‘made everyone feel that what they were saying was worth listening to’. Then they became aware of ‘some commotion and frantic shouting’ up the hill to their left. Followed by the ‘surreal vision’ of Simon tearing alongside the green Vauxhall. Hanging on as if for dear life to the door handle as the vehicle freewheeled downhill out of control. Breaking off from the tranquil conversation she was having with her niece my mother yelled at her son: Let go! Let go! At which Simon disengaged himself and stood stockstill in shock. The car crashed in Dingle Wood. A complete write-off. Heather recalls how my mother ‘as usual took calm control of the situation’.

  Calm and control came to the fore on another life-threatening occasion. Also in the early 1970s. She took me and my brother on holiday to Welcombe Bay in Devon with the mother and son and daughter of a family called the Breens. A holiday without fathers. The Breen father was an alcoholic who beat and abused his wife. My brother and her son Tom were friends. My mother felt compassion for all of them but to Sally she was a special strength. It was a great relief for Sally Breen to have some time away from the husband. (He died a year or so later. Discovered on the stairs at night. Asphyxiated by his own vomit.) One day we were down on the beach. Simon and Tom were playing on the sand. My mother and Sally were relaxing in the sunshine. I was swimming in the sea. As was Sally’s daughter Amelia. (She was a year or two younger than me.) I didn’t feel as if I had swum out too far but then in an uncanny shock I felt below me the sudden and immense shifting of a powerful cold body of water and I was swimming to the shore – I knew straight away – for my life. I’d never felt anything like it. A monstrous undercurrent out of nowhere. I managed to get back to the beach but I was gasping for breath. Only then did I realise that the real event was taking place behind me. Millie was being dragged out to sea. Sally was beside herself. My mother took control in her own way. She shouted and shouted at the men on the beach to do something get help phone the coastguard. And to demonstrate the seriousness of the situation she walked firm and steady with all her clothes on into the sea. It was the spectacle of this seeming madness that aroused ef
fective notice. Someone or other must have run or driven to find a phone and dial 999. A helicopter was scrambled. Millie had been washed away. Dashed on some distant rocks. She had bad cuts and bruises but was winched to safety.

  Something Oscar Wilde grasped and writing this book has enabled me to appreciate anew: the perverse and marvellous importance of being cousins. Vanessa was the only child of my father’s youngest brother Jeff and his Anglo-Irish wife Joan. She was a beautiful young woman who in a sense never stopped being young because she developed multiple sclerosis in her early twenties and spent the rest of her life in a wheelchair – in what was at once gruesome prison and Snow White suspension. She died in 2018 at the age of 51. She outlived her parents by just a year or two. Vanessa and I were close in ways that required no speech. Even when her face was half-paralysed we could read one another without a word. I was ten when she was born. I had no idea what was going on. But one day my mother had a baby. A sister? How did that happen? The term ‘postnatal depression’ was never used but I suppose Joan suffered it. She was unable to cope. Another mother must be found. Vanessa lived with us for six weeks or so. My mother loved her as if she were her own baby. No one had any sense as to how long the newcomer might be staying. It was wonderful. I was allowed to bottle-feed her. Did her mother’s condition or my cousin’s sojourn away from home have some connection with the much later development of MS? That question has haunted me. And I never knew if Vanessa knew that she had spent those weeks with us in her early infancy. If my mother was anything other to her than the unknown nurse.

  Some of the most moving photographs of my mother are related to her life and work as a nurse. There is the picture of the State Registered Nurse award ceremony. At first glance stationary – but in truth an action-shot. My mother second from the left in the front row. The one with the book (Textbook of Medicine) and diploma secure in her lap. The one in the instant of clapping. With her white gloves and the fullest most embracing smile. And visible in the dimness of the right side of the picture in the second row are her father with her sisters Nettie and Marion. My mother didn’t support the National Health Service – she didn’t believe in it: she was it. To me and many others she was its simple extraordinary embodiment. As a district nurse who worked at Hampstead General Hospital and later at Hammersmith General (where she gave birth to me) she treated private as well as NHS patients. All received alike her devoted attention and what people today call empathy.

  But her primary passion was for the spirit of free universal healthcare. There is a newspaper clipping that shows her proud and glad at twenty-five years old when she was employed at Hampstead General and North West London Hospital: ‘she won two prizes’. The photo says this. The caption seems to mimic it. In another photograph she has paused on her bicycle. I imagine she has just arrived for work and come in through the main entrance at Hammersmith. There is pleasure in her face. Pride along with wry self-effacement. A disposition to amusement akin to her father’s in the 1905 Drymen picture. But above all something solitary and single. Quiet but indomitable. The nurse alone.

  Even in the photograph where she is standing in the sunshine of the back garden at 19 Carlisle Road in Cheam in around 1967 she holds our lovely cat Tatty Too with the care and poise of a nurse. My mother nursed everything and everyone. She adored children. She might be down in Honiton on market day and fall into talking with a child who’d tripped and fallen on the pavement until the parent or carer was drawn in and the conversation would become the most lively and significant event that morning on the high street. She’d remember the child and they’d speak again on future occasions. Her attentiveness to children was part of her pre-word world. It was an aspect of the unspoken invention of a new kind of nursery.

  She loved to listen – but how she also loved to talk! She nursed conversations. She nursed thinking and feeling. She nursed my brother’s pictures. She nursed my poems and stories. She nursed her flowerbeds. Her cup of coffee. Her crossword. She nursed whatever she looked on.

  Chote

  My uncle John called her Nurse Chote. I don’t know where this name came from. It sounds demeaning or at best ambivalent. It acknowledges her importance as a nurse while also reducing her to that function. And the ‘Chote’ conveyed no sense to my ear besides rhyming with goat and stoat. I suspect it said more about my uncle’s jealousy of Marion’s attachment to my mother than about my mother. In this family portrait he is in full regalia as RAF wing commander alongside his much shorter and younger wife. Holding both of Marion’s hands is my cousin Michael. And in the foreground on the right is their poodle Boodles. My abiding memory of Boodles: standing on his hind legs in the Morgans’ Mini sticking his head out of the open window to enjoy the streaming breeze.

  I was very fond of John. I called him Nuncle. At the time of this photograph he was commanding officer of the Joint Services School for Linguists based at RAF Tangmere. Service personnel were taught Mandarin and Polish and Czech in addition to Russian. In our early years I most associated him with a solitary short phrase: ‘Defend yourself!’ He would exclaim Defend yourself! then start tickling you. My cousin had to endure this on a daily basis. I came to feel there was something troubling and cryptic about it. The irony of crying ‘Defend yourself!’ while attacking. The vigour of the tickling (for it was never altogether gentle: you often came away with aching ribs). It was only years later that I discovered that John had been married once before and had older children in California. And it is only in recent years that a fuller sense of him has emerged as a spy. After a ‘good war’ in the RAF he was commissioned to study Russian at Cambridge. Thereafter he had a close involvement with Donald Maclean. John never forgave his perfidy. While based on the Czech border in Germany my uncle gathered thirteen months’ information from behind the Iron Curtain into a single folder. He was flown by armed escort in an RAF plane to the Ministry of Defence. He knocked on Maclean’s door and passed over the folder. Thank you John. After Maclean’s defection he came to discover that all his various contacts had disappeared without trace. But my uncle himself was some years dead before we learned that he’d once smuggled himself into the USSR and dressed and talked as a local peasant as part of an elaborate but successful operation to help a defecting Russian scientist escape from Moscow.

  When we were growing up Nuncle was often travelling. He had a job with Marconi. In his spare time he read books of history and biography with a studiousness that impressed and inspired me. I was also captivated by his habit of inserting memorabilia in the pages of a book: a newspaper cutting or letter or concert ticket or photo or dried flower. It was like the private elaboration of a mysterious other story – the memoir of another life – within the book. And then there was his more or less diurnal habit of going off on long solitary walks and cycle rides. He was also on a regular basis ‘gone fishing’. Sometimes for several days at a time. Mounted on the wall of the Morgans’ dining room was a glass case containing the preserved rainbow trout he had caught in 1959 at Chew Valley Lake in Somerset. About the same age as me and Simon and Michael: our embalmed unspeaking contemporary.

  In 1973 my mother wrote him a poem. She inscribed it in a card on his fifty-seventh birthday (21 March):

  The winds of March are fiendish strong

  On certain Downs they swirl along

  Be warned! For they are on the search

  ’Twixt bracken, scrub and Common Birch

  To bare the one that’s doing his Thing

  (While skylarks soar and sweetly sing)

  Come ding-a-ling-ding. Ding-a-ling.

  Rheumatic pains in limb and joint

  Brings Chote to make her vital point

  And her advice free – not unwise

  (Though draped in this poetic guise)

  ‘Oh! Keep it from the cold wind’s spite!

  Warmly clad and out of sight

  Till warmer days in later Spring!’

  Come Ding-a-ling-Ding. Ding-a-ling.

  The poem is signed ‘Anon�
�� and accompanied by a cartoon pencil drawing of a fish by my father. It seems at once tender and barbed. Suggesting a knowledge or understanding of her brother-in-law with a ‘ding-a-ling’ all of its own. I suspect ‘Nurse Chote’ was my uncle’s equivalent of ‘Defend yourself!’ He showed affection but he kept himself at a distance. He shared with my father a quiet deference to the power that was the bond between Marion and ‘saucy Kate’ (as another birthday inscription has it). The sisters were in together deeper than secret intelligence.

  Over my cousin Mike my mother has had a lifelong influence. He remembers her as the reason he decided to study medicine and become a GP. She passed on to him a love of the NHS. And the spirit of that passion lives on: two of his own children are also now doctors.