Mother

by Nicholas Royle

  Demonic

  ‘Then she caught the light in his eyes.’ My mother loved her middle name (Beatrice) and associated it as much with Dante as with her aunt Beattie. The name means ‘she who makes happy or brings joy’ and insofar as any word becomes her ‘Beatrice’ does well. But my mother was no softie. The light in her eyes could also suggest something of the demonic. It’s there in the ‘She Wins Two Prizes’ photograph. As my cousin Mike recalls: ‘She would literally roll up her sleeves.’ She set about things with a vigour and intensity that could be alarming. As if something had taken over.

  She also took cryptic pleasure in murder mysteries and horror films. She used to remark from time to time: ‘All’s fair in love and war.’ This was a saying of hers that I never felt I understood. On one occasion I remonstrated: But that can’t be so. You don’t murder your husband. There has to be a concept of war crimes… But like everything else she said she had thrown a strange mantle over it in advance. There was always the matter of context. She never said ‘All’s fair…’ in response to news of a particular disastrous military event. And there was always an ironic or hyperbolic lilt to the aphorism. Along with a sort of detached projection that suggested she understood all too well why for example a woman might do away with her spouse.

  She was fascinated by Bette Davis and all the characters she played. I don’t know when I first saw What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? I imagine it wasn’t until I was in my teens. But I remember I watched it knowing that my mother was already an admirer. When The Nanny came out in 1965 she and Marion went to see it in Sutton. At the flicks. I was still awake when my mother came home. I wanted to know how it was. What happened? It was scary. But what happened? It was for grown-ups. But what happened? I insisted on knowing. And my mother told me something about a child drowning in the bath. It was about that and about a nanny. Whatever it was my mother said it was enough to silence me. And I remember the light in her eyes. Mischievous without malice. Murderous but vicarious. With a glint of demonic pleasure. In my memory I associate it with the twinkle of admiration she had for Alec Guinness in Kind Hearts and Coronets – a delight in black comedy that messed about with the supposed distinctions between social classes. For that in the end is what the demonic in my mother seemed to be about. A possessed dedication to something like the common. Something belonging to everyone. The common touch. The common good. And therefore a devotion to the destruction of class differences and sexual and material and educational and all other forms of inequality. In laughter and in spirit. In her furious dream of a common world.

  Polar bear

  Drivel said she of The Sea, The Sea. My mother’s withering verdict on numerous books. Recalling the irony of Murdoch’s madness about which Bayley wrote in the final decade of his life I also see as if never till now the resemblance between him and my father. Both almost comical in their mildness and benignity. The idea of John and Iris as versions of my parents – thanks at first to the figure of the umbilical cord of the telephone back in the day when I would wait and wait for a response – seems at first absurd. The eerie effects of identifications we pretend to tame by calling unconscious or unforeseen. They show up as if by chance in dreams or writing.

  But in truth Unconscious and Unforeseen have no telephone number. They are ex-directory. Unavailable. No knowing if they are even living together.

  The death of my father on 30 July 2005 broke the World Bank. All symbols of authority were dissolved. Language died in deference. But his death had strange positives. It seemed quick. He was in hospital for a single night and died in it. And then it was a way for him to enter into a sort of ethereal second adulthood. He had reached the point of wanting to be dead and in a surreal mysterious abrupt manner he was granted his desire. On the eve of his going he spoke to me of the attractions of euthanasia. Being dead his influence on my life never stopped. In many ways he became more present. It fell to me to listen to him in different and more reflective ways. The mildness and benignity became more powerful. It has led me to wonder how far the point of a father is to be dead. In the last years of his life it was on Sunday evenings we most often spoke. I can still catch myself on a Sunday night on the way to thinking I must phone him.

  But what of my mother? I’m losing my marbles. The words rose up like a Kraken. The effort behind them! She manifested in her life a madness that no one should receive. In time it was diagnosed as Alzheimer’s. But that word was never spoken. Either to her or between my father and me. It was taboo. I don’t know if my father used it in conversation with others. For instance with Marion who would come to think him such a brick. Or with his own brothers to whom he spoke on the phone every three or four weeks. But he and I never used the word. I refused to contemplate my mother as the member of a kind of sub-society designated by the word ‘Alzheimer’s’. In part because it seemed to deny the life of my brother. My brother was not called Alzheimer. In those days rapid search facilities on a handheld device did not exist. Still I could have gone to the local library and tracked down Aloysius Alzheimer. But I had no desire to do so. I dismissed the idea that the life of my mother could be encapsulated by a proper noun that had nothing to do with her. She carried on. She carried the death of her son. She bore on where only she could go. Into the valley of a moon half the size of the sky. The desperate minutes hours and days every one of them without remedy in those sinking years of maternal oblivion.

  Some sufferers from so-called Alzheimer’s can lead lives with a degree of happiness. They can find things funny. They can be moved in moving ways. A friend’s mother for instance loved the music of Neil Diamond. The daughters fixed up for her to go to a concert. They accompanied her to the event. There were many thousands of people in the audience and the words ‘NEIL DIAMOND’ blazed in bright lights high above the enormous stage. Their mother loved it. So many songs she had loved since her youth. And at one point she leaned over to one of her daughters and shouted in order to be heard. She shouted with joy: I don’t know who this guy is but he sure can sing!

  My mother was not like this. She veered between black and blank. There were no diamonds for her. All the time every day. She was like the great white polar bear we’d once seen at Edinburgh zoo. Compulsive circumnavigation. To this corner of the enclosure. Along this stretch of the glass frontage. Under the water and back up to this corner of the enclosure. Along this stretch of the glass frontage. Under the water and back up. For all to gawp at. My mother would walk from one end of the house to the other in fretful unknowing. Agitation without respite. She would walk to the kitchen to fetch herself a cigarette and light up without remembering she already had one smouldering in the ashtray in the room she had just vacated. In a kitchen cupboard she kept a substantial stock of chocolate bars and assorted nuts. She ate these with the energy of a famished squirrel. She became overweight as she had never been in her lucid days.

  Snap

  For all the speed and sharpness of modern teletechnology we remain in a state of arrested development when it comes to photographs. They give us phantasmagoria on a plate. Here is my mother at the age of three and a half (in January 1931). Not so much younger than Barthes’ mother Henriette Berger in the unreproducible image in his Camera Lucida. I call this person my mother but the appellation is crazy. She inhabits an impossible world that is nonetheless real. I could never have known my mother at the age in which she appears in this picture. Kathleen Beatrice looks thoughtful but also a little in disbelief. As if to implore the viewer to indulge some incredulity in turn. Why have you given me this pudding-basin haircut and dressed me in this gruesome stiff pinny and tight socks and shoes and placed me on this idiotic little table and requested I keep as still as a stone? As in other pictures of my mother as a young girl she looks plump. Like the baby that Sylvia Plath talks about in her poem ‘Morning Song’: she resembles ‘a fat gold watch’. And in her face and form I recognise myself and my own beloved daughter.

  Photographs can be sites of strange defamiliarisation and disiden
tification. I gaze at the picture of my mother [see Frontispiece] taken (I suppose) in the early 1950s. It’s a posed ‘art studio’ photograph: she looks like a film star. With a bit of that demonic allure in her eyes. Was my mother ever like this? Or was she ever not – at least a bit – like this? There is another picture in which she appears to be on holiday. There is a date (1949) pencilled on the back. And then in the frame directly below her is a young man in jacket and tie. Smiling but macabre. Who is he? A snapshot of my nemesis. Exposure of a father I could never have had. Radical phantasmagoric dissociation. Another photo features my mother in what looks like a caravan. Leaning out of a narrow window with a bespectacled smiling toothy stranger so close you cannot be quite sure at first whose arm is whose. Inked on the back: ‘Devon 1956’. A year before I was born. Or – who knows? – just nine months.

  And then there are pictures in which I do recognise as my father the man accompanying her. The picture of them together as engaged or just married. A formal but beautiful photograph. He is sporting his Old Merchant Taylors’ School tie. They are looking into one another’s faces with love. My father with one arm around her and the other holding an umbrella. Or the picture of them together in the sea. Awash in foam. Somewhere in Devon. My father with a moustache very similar to his own father’s and a dark hairy chest as if poised to rise out of the water. Only the head of my mother visible in the foam. Laughing. And her laughing in this wildness of foam and the crests of white waves beyond her recalls a holiday in Sidmouth (the town where my mother once told me I was conceived) when my brother and I were around ten and twelve and we couldn’t get out of the sea. The waves were breaking and throwing us up on to the beach and dragging us back in again and my brother and I were laughing like sea drains. We had never found anything so funny in our lives. We were incapacitated by the churning white horses of the waves horsing about trying to get out only to be pulled back in. But my mother became frightened. Get them out Max! Get them out! But my father would do nothing besides try to pacify her. He could see that we were not in distress. This was something that I know my mother prized in my father. Even if his slowness could be maddening – still she found in him an unflappable calm.

  Like the photograph of him from around the same time. Standing rugged and at ease in a Norwegian-looking heavy cream-coloured jumper. One hand in his pocket. The other holding a cigarette. The white foam of the sea washing up close behind him on the Devon shore.

  Never in my life did I see my father snap. Whereas my mother could. She had a spontaneity and impulsiveness quite contrary to my father’s nature. She didn’t dilly-dally over anything. She was always in what she was doing. And then it was time to be in something else. So that this capacity to snap never seemed at odds with my sense of her patience and control. I suppose this is just a way of saying I never imagined my mother could lose her mind.

  In the Christmas holidays at the end of 1966 she took me and my brother to the cinema in Sutton to see One Million Years B.C. For my birthday a couple of months earlier my father had bought me (for the then gob-smacking sum of thirty shillings) a huge hardback volume called Prehistoric Animals by Josef Augusta with full-page colour plates by Zdenek Burian. My interest in dinosaurs at that time went along with a passion for drawing or painting volcanic explosions. This film with Raquel Welch and John Richardson appeared to offer the perfect cocktail. The cinema was crowded and stuffy. I recall the embarrassment of squeezing our way to three empty seats. But far more acute was the embarrassment of leaving. We watched the film for about five minutes. It wasn’t the crashing loudness of the explosions of volcanoes and earthquakes and screams of prehistoric people being propelled into ravines or the bellowing and intimidating ferocity of the dinosaurs filling the screen. It was the almost naked Raquel Welch and the attention she was receiving not just from the cavemen on the screen but from those in the audience. This was not (my mother decided) a film for her nine- and six-year-old sons. She pulled us to our feet and we were dragooned down a row of goggle-eyed viewers who resented having to stand to let us pass. Out we went. Blinking in the afternoon light we’d left just a few minutes before. Something wrong had happened but my brother and I had only a vague stirring of what.

  My mother’s snaps: lifelong unfurlings.

  Emily’s analyses

  I always wanted to be a poet. Publishing one slender volume after another until one day there would be a single chunky tome called The Collected Poems. Poetry is about immersing oneself in what Wallace Stevens calls ‘maternal sounds’. Every poem is a work of love launched by the mother’s face. I wrote none while she was losing her marbles or after she’d lost them. But I used to write and read poems aloud to her. And although I stopped writing in lines with rhythms and rhymes I have never stopped trying to write in her spirit.

  Isn’t there a risk of diminishing her by speaking of ‘spirit’? Of setting her aside from the physical and real? Allotting her some significance that corresponds to the religious? There is more to be ventured about ghosts – anon (as she liked to say). But the spirit of my mother is spit and polish. It is trip and spright. Irony and dream. Spirit unlike any other. With a mercurial cape of laughter thrown over it.

  What of the mother of the mother? Emily Esther Gibbs (born 25 July 1889 [shown here, with my mother as a child]) is a ghost figure in the story. This goes back to the née and nay-saying. The subordinated and precarious ‘maternal name’ and ‘maternal lineage’. Together with the fact that she died when my mother was only sixteen years old. She is a phantom grandmother to me. (I never knew any other kind.) But in dying so early she deprived my mother of so much – life unlived and memories unshareable. A memoir is about what survives. But it is also about what is enigmatic and irretrievable. Cryptic and unknown. Starting in this case with the mother in the mother: a pre-word lineage. Even ‘lineage’ is inept. It is more flux or emanation. There is no document of civilisation that is not also a doing-down of the mother. A memoir of the mother would be a study in maternity – from ma to eternity. Would be. Should be. Dreams of being.

  Emily was one of six sisters. There was also a brother called George. Here they are in around 1926. [Clockwise from top left: Ettie, Beattie, Minnie, Emily, Mabel, Lilith, and George (centre)] They grew up in Little Dunmow in Essex. The closest town was Braintree. The nearest ‘big’ place Chelmsford. Today Little Dunmow is almost part of Stansted Airport. Little is known of Emily. Still less of her mother. Her father was a butcher in Maldon. With his field behind the shop. Several of Emily’s sisters were primary school teachers. Emily worked as a seamstress. Ettie became Mrs Hazelwood. Beattie became Mrs Green. Mabel became Mrs Gozzett. Minnie became Mrs Brown. All the names swallowed up.

  At some point in the early 1980s I explored the idea of writing as my mother. A maternal ventriloquy. I imagined her mother speaking through my mother speaking through me and wrote a story called ‘Emily’s Analysis’. It was a sort of explosive political Molly Blooming of a woman in a therapy session taking psychoanalysis and every other psycho-social structure to pieces. It was an attempt to write in the land of pre-word. A torrid failure. No writing in that land. One can only write about or towards or in its wake.

  About ten years later – not long after she told me she was losing her marbles – I returned to this thought of maternal ventriloquy. My mother had always had terrible dreams about school exams. Even in her old age – for as long as she continued to be able to tell me her dreams – she had nightmares of being back at Putney High School for Girls sitting her School Certs. As a schoolboy and university student I experienced a good deal of anxiety around exams as well. But I had also had an early taste of their comic and absurd dimensions. Throughout her life my mother was wont to declare British secondary education – with its division into public and state schools – nauseating. Vile. Egregious. The inequity and the iniquity. My parents could not afford to send me to a private school. But like any mindful socialist of the day she wanted her children to have the best education possibl
e. She and my father arranged for me to sit a scholarship entrance exam for a place at a local public school.

  I can close my eyes and be there now. The solemnity of the cavernous exam hall. The stomach-churning hush. Surrounded by desks at which dozens of unrecognisable strange boys were sitting as stiff and nervous as myself. We were ordered to turn over our exam paper. There were ten essay topics. We were supposed to choose a topic and write about it in the allotted time of one hour. I was so keen to please my parents and win the scholarship to the posh private school that I attempted to write answers to all ten questions. Recalling my crazy zeal and catastrophic performance that day was a recurrent source of shared laughter with her.

  In any case – following the dismal failure of my first ‘Emily’s Analysis’ – I decided to try to write another. About taking an exam. A short text in the voice of my mother. My mother’s voice in me. The narrator is studying at university in Scotland. I based it on Glasgow. (I happened to be teaching at Stirling at the time.) I wanted to articulate my mother’s anxiety about exams while querying the assumptions of knowledge and authority that underlay it. To transform her anxiety into the playfulness and satirical incisiveness with which I most identified her. To mess about with the idea of memorising quotations and the mechanics of learning by rote but at the same time to drive on with the sort of speed that she and I loved in another Emily (the author of Wuthering Heights). The narrator has certain attributes identifiable with my mother. A fondness for listening to classical music on BBC Radio 3. For coffee and the occasional banana. And for using a hairbrush every day. But at the same time I wanted to leave the sexual identity of this ‘I’ up in the air. Like the car they are in.