Mother

by Nicholas Royle

  In my mind’s ear she is air. In the air. Of the air. Every poem goes back to her. All tune and melody. All music and all atmosphere. In front of my mother Simon and Mike and I danced dizzy with delight non-stop round the dining table in the winter of 1962 singing along to the forty-five revolutions per minute of The Beatles’ ‘Love Me Do’. To her I introduced my passion for songs by Dylan and Bowie. With her I’d listen to Lennon and then hear her love of his voice in it. Already dreaming of the past. Only much later catching that I couldn’t have loved it without her ear for it in the first place. The heights of Joni Mitchell were in imitation of my mother’s song. To come into the house unnoticed and hear her singing upstairs alone ‘Love is a Many-Splendoured Thing’ or ‘My Way’. Or to find her sitting at the white Formica-top table in the corner of the kitchen singing along to some Haydn or Elgar or Dvorak or Vaughan Williams on the radio. Humming was next to impossible for her. Her joy in life broke through. To Bach’s ‘Air on the G String’ or Barber’s ‘Adagio’ she sang. Even with Brahms she sang. She never went or expressed any desire to go to a concert hall or to the opera. She was content to have it on the radio as and when it played. Stunned by Maria Callas my mother’s listening penetrated me more sharply than the voice. The day cancer killed my brother the music died. No music from that day on. End of all airs and graces.

  Ghosts

  My mother loved Walter de la Mare’s ‘The Listeners’:

  ‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,

  Knocking on the moonlit door;

  And his horse in the silence champed the grasses

  Of the forest’s ferny floor.

  My sense of listening comes out of that poem. Listen with Mother. Are you sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin.

  My father liked to tell ghost stories. How he squared that with his Buddhism is not clear to me. For he loved squares and symmetry and ‘noble reason’. I suppose it was linked to his predilection for fixed forms. Stories that were neat and firm. All boxed up. His fondness for ghost stories seemed bound up with his attachment to particular houses. His attachment to our cottage in Devon was matched only by his love for the Elizabethan manor house in which he grew up. Perivale Grange was a fire-victim. Even its ‘demolition’ ghostly. Filmed burning down in around 1961 as part of a Hammer horror. But never caught on camera was the secret panelling in the dining-room. That ancient trickery of woodwork is one of my earliest memories. I must have been just three at the time. It slid back to give on to an encrypted oak-panelled sitting room. My father liked to recount the occasion when his own father Tony sat there one evening by the fire with a friend and both became aware that someone was standing – equidistant between them – looking into the flames. An Elizabethan gentleman complete with ruff and pike.

  My father also liked to reminisce about the secret passageway that led from somewhere under the house to Perivale village church some hundreds of yards away. This priest hole and getaway retained special spookiness as it never got beyond hearsay. And this despite my father being granted permission by his parents to dig various experimental holes along the border of the garden and then (the following summer) to excavate below the floor of the pantry – till it filled up with water and mosquitoes.

  For someone of such taciturn bent he also relished to a surprising degree regaling us with tales of the occult powers of our great-grandmother. Kathleen May Blood had received the gift from an ancient man in India when her father was working on the railways there in the early 1880s. She befriended him and brought him gruel for breakfast at the end of the garden each morning. He was so old his limbs had turned to jelly and could be tied in knots. Which to solicit charity is what his friends did with him every day in the local marketplace. My father liked to recall visiting her in her old age – a white witch as he described her – living alone in the heart of a wood in Middlesex. Under the pen-name Irma Blood she was author of a curious Lombrosian spiritualist book called Faces and How to Read Them. As witch she had asked my father one summer holidays was there anyone he hated and he named a teacher at his school. The man’s death was announced in assembly on the first day of autumn term. My father also enjoyed recounting the occasion of visiting his grandmother just before she died. (All of this must have been very painful. She died in December 1952. She had already outlived by some ten months her own daughter Lola. My father was embroiled in a double mother mourning.) And how with a squeeze of her hand she transmitted the gift to him.

  My mother never told such tales. Life itself was the ghost story. And de la Mare’s poem epitomised it. The anonymous traveller and the knock at the door. The lone house and the commitment to keeping one’s word. The quiet moonlight. The starred and leafy sky. The strangeness of the other’s heart and one’s own. The plunging hoofs of the horse. The silence that surged softly backward. And the host of phantom listeners.

  I have no recording of her voice. Some phrases from her lips have the quality of psychic fossils. Auditory coelacanths. That’s not like you she said one day with reference to a can of shaving foam I was taking to the bathroom. She thought I had bought a chlorofluorocarbon canister. Whereas I had been careful to choose an environmentally friendly product. Containing no CFCs. This was back in the days when saving or destroying the planet was a personal consumer choice.

  The pain of false accusation. Still the line can ring like iron on stone. That’s not like you. The words might jump out at me at any moment anywhere. Listen with Mother.

  And then watch. In my mind’s eye the pitiful etiolated fragility of the post-war world of imminent atomic catastrophe (what Jonathan Schell years later would call The Fate of the Earth) is best caught in children’s television. Bill and Ben the Flower Pot Men. The Woodentops. Tales of the Riverbank. Watch with Mother. As if this wasn’t her one chance to do something else.

  But like reading poems the memory of watching television is inseparable from her. My other own heart. The Magic Roundabout. Blue Peter. Captain Pugwash. Popeye. Tom and Jerry. The Flintstones. Bewitched. Flipper. Animal Magic. The test card. If we weren’t watching with mother we weren’t aware of it. The vast trompe-l’oeil of the history of the goggle-box. Our being together before the irradiating screen. My father liked wrestling and boxing and football. The Invaders. Diana Rigg in The Avengers. My mother liked Upstairs, Downstairs. The Forsyte Saga. Anthony Hopkins in War and Peace. I was young but watched Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation and Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man with them. TV as edifying. And what eddies it made. Gary Glitter on Top of the Pops. Jimmy Savile everywhere – from the savvy evil tours of children’s hospital wards to the lock-you-in mock-safety advert: Clunk click every trip. The eerie retrospect of having watched paedophiles and other gruesome abusers entertain us.

  For years after this we had no television in the house at all. Like processed sugar its absence soon went unnoticed. But in the final years my parents came to depend on Coronation Street and EastEnders like heroin. Every evening the volume bumped up and the sound crashing out. As if they were making up for all the rock concerts they never went to. A screen covering life in absentia. As the soap operas boomed out back to back from the other end of the cottage I crouched in my mother’s former crossword seat in the corner of the kitchen.

  Wit

  My mother’s love life. An aerial photo of forest fires. Without acridity. Still too far away to see anything in detail. This ancient cedar. That stretch of dusty meadow. She told me of suitors who preceded my father. She was not a virgin when she met him. But my brother and I were content to suppose that our parents only twice had intercourse. My mother once quipped that my father would come to bed at night with a condom in the breast-pocket of his pyjamas. The same condom. Was she joking? Even during their marriage a question mark hung over her relationship with a local solicitor. His wife was close to my father. Their sons were close to me and my brother. I caught my father and the solicitor’s wife in a clinch one evening in his study. But I never saw anything between my mother and the o
ther man.

  Still she always attracted men. She was Nursehood. The embodiment of comforter. She was warm and funny and compassionate. She talked and listened with wit. As if Wit were the lover. When we lived in Surrey she would recount some aspect of her day working as BP factory nurse. A man with a minor injury with whom she spent a full couple of hours chatting. Any inference of the man’s sexual interest in her left dangling. He was not alone. Numerous factory workers came to see her with no specific injury or ailment. She gave them a chance to talk. Like a brilliant new kind of psychotherapist: without appropriate qualifications or known aim or recognised vocabulary.

  She had an admirer in a diminutive cook called Bill. He worked for Shell and had known her and her sisters when she was growing up in Putney. He went on living there all his life. In a tiny coal-fire-smoky flat with his tiny decrepit parents on Lacy Road. (Until his old folks passed away and he was moved on to a brand new council flat not far away.) He drove a Triumph Herald and would take me and my brother and cousin to football matches at Craven Cottage. He would buy us hamburgers and hotdogs at half-time. At Easter he would make each of us a beautiful individualised chocolate egg filled with more chocolates and encased in a floral green decorated cardboard box almost big enough for a pair of shoes. He would take us to play lawn tennis at the Shell employees’ club at Teddington. The Lensbury. My mother and Marion and me and Simon and Mike. My mother was very good at tennis. We would have drinks in the palatial bar at the end of the afternoon. Bill loved my mother. She was his one flame. He was older. Very short. Balding with wisps of reddish hair. Blubbery mouth and oversized nose. Long-suffering watery blue eyes. Not a body to jump into bed with. But a sweet and generous man besotted with her all his adult life. My mother flirted. That was her relationship with Wit. With Wit she dallied. She dillied. She danced. She delivered.

  But did she know what she delivered?

  When she died it was Marion who wrote to Bill with the news. I suppose he and my mother had not been in touch for some time. He replied in a shaky hand from his council flat in Upper Richmond Road. The letter is dated 5 April 2003:

  It was with every sadness that I received the news of Kate this morning. I’m so sorry. Life doesn’t seem fair. I’m so much older than Kate I can’t believe it.

  I’ve had some experience with Alziemher [sic]. Both my parents had it, but they were older than Kate. We had some happy moments together for which I’m profoundly grateful. She will be in my thoughts for as long as I live.

  I’m enclosing a cheque for £80.00. Perhaps you can donate it to whatever charity she was interested in.

  So [the next word is illegible], I will write again in a more cheerful way so for now

  My Deepest Sympathies,

  Yours ever…

  A week or so later Marion received a letter from Bill’s brother’s wife – a woman she had never known or met. It began: ‘“Marion” – I found a letter from you whilst going through Bill’s belongings and I thought you would like to know that he passed away on Saturday, April 5th 2003. He had not been ill but had a slight stroke so he didn’t suffer…’ Why the writer felt compelled to specify ‘2003’ who knows? She wouldn’t have read Bill’s letter to Marion: she was quite unaware of the heart-stopping coincidence of the date.

  Earth

  In my mind’s eye she is earth. Even in the abysmal depths of the sea there is the ground out of which enormous ancient sponges swell. A place to lie down or be lain. To dive into. Surrounded by mysterious grots and hidden cells. She is in the earth in the village churchyard alongside her husband. Less than half a mile along the lane from where they lived. Her younger son had to be earthed alone in the churchyard at the top of the nearby town of Honiton because she could not bear to walk or drive past his final resting-place every day. She did not even attend his funeral.

  She was not a religious woman. She believed in the principles of a socialism that might in due course lead to world government. She wasn’t an idealist but still – like John Lennon – she liked to imagine. She embodied compassion and an extraordinary force for justice. There was nothing ostentatious about her. As boys we sang in the school choir. Once after a carol service she complained to me about another mother wearing make-up. Disgusting. You could see where the tears had streaked! Church was a place for thoughtful solitude or the sublime song of choirboys. Not for Jesus Christ the Lord or women showing off their emotions.

  Still she had to go somewhere and the ground seemed the place. She loved the little village church. No bigger than George Herbert’s Bemerton. I must have acquired my love of graveyards from her. We would drive to churches all over the place. She is in the earth. On her gravestone beside her name and beloved wife and mother is the date of her death (25 March 2003) but no mention of when she was born. An oversight I cannot explain. The funeral director never raised any query. A monumental omission. And so there she lies to this day. As if she had not yet been born.

  A dream

  My mother is in everything. And she is not here. The straggle of hair at the end of the Bible. What am I to do with it?

  The night after writing ‘she is not here’ I had a dream. I was on a long blank residential street in a town in the north. Small terraced houses as far as the eye could see. No cars. No pedestrians. A hot afternoon. My mother was at the house. Somewhere down the street. I was also aware that Peter Townend was due. He was expected to announce his arrival by sending an unmanned perambulator along the street. It looked more like a carrycot but large enough for an adult squeezed knees-up into it. It was motorised and had been programmed to stop when it saw me. I was to drive it back to the house for Townend’s arrival. I was nearing the house when I first heard the perambulator. Trundling mechanical like a horror film prop. An oversized old Singer sewing machine on wheels. Faded rose-coloured bedding and cushion. It was coming down the uneven cobbled pavement towards me. A feeling at once comical and terrible. It didn’t stop but slowed down. As if uncertain. Then it rattled to a halt and I retrieved it. But when I got to the house it was another house altogether.

  On awakening I was convinced that it was a dream about my mother. She was not there. She is not here. But as permissive poet and voice of free association she is everywhere. My Singer. No dreaming without her. It is in dreams that I feel most in touch with her. Even when she doesn’t appear.

  In conscious daily life I can go for weeks without ever thinking of Peter Townend (1921–2001). But here he was – coming from the other end of town. Before petering out. Peter Townend was social editor of the Tatler back in the days when it featured non-salacious accounts and pictures of aristocratic young ladies. When ‘coming out’ meant something quite different from being gay. Debutantes ceased being presented at court in 1958. The Daily Telegraph obituary describes Townend as having more or less off his own bat kept the ‘deb season’ going for a further forty years. He was a strange celebrity in his own right. He knew every upper-class family in the land. He was the closest thing England had to a national organiser of arranged marriages. My parents had nothing to do with ‘high society’ and yet he was their own matchmaker. He introduced them to one another at a party in London not long after the death of Lola Onslow. He and my father were colleagues at Burke’s Peerage. [Burke’s Peerage editorial office, Fetter Lane: my father, pipe in mouth, seated towards the back on the left; Peter Townend seated furthest away, in the middle, with L.G. Pine to his left.] But I have no idea how he knew my mother.

  My father in mourning for his mother was the man with whom my mother fell in love. My mother who had been mourning the death of her own since she was a teenager. In one of the lucid moments of her final decade she remarked how much she’d come to see that love is pity. As with other memorable remarks this took on the character of cryptic graffiti. At the time I supposed she was referring to her own marriage. But might she not have been referring to her love for me or her imagining of mine for her? If love is real – as Lennon sings – it is also pity.

  My m
other must once have held Townend in affectionate regard. If only out of gratitude for having introduced her to the father of her adored sons.

  When we lived in Cheam he would come for Sunday lunch a couple of times a year. For all his gregarious matchmaking Peter’s private life was a matter of well-guarded silence. My mother said he had a young man in Chelsea but we never met him. Certain things about Peter Townend’s Sunday visits came to infuriate her. If there were no gravy or no pudding he would cavil. ‘The cook’ wasn’t doing her duty. And she wearied also of the extent to which he and my father presumed that they could talk together throughout the afternoon without accommodating anyone else. Peter was a brilliant mimic. He recounted anecdotes about the Royal family and other hifalutin’ folk. My father would puff on his pipe with pleasure but say very little. I was fascinated by the relish Peter took in storytelling. There was a stagey delight not a thousand miles from my mother’s. Tina Brown described him as having a face like a dolphin. He had extraordinary skin. The pale creamy softness of hands suggestive of someone who has never-done-a-day’s-work-in-his-life. A larger than life head but small eyes. Lank sweep of gray-black hair. Breaking the surface of the sea.

  I can count on one hand the number of occasions in my life I’ve been in London and seen by chance an old friend or acquaintance or family member. I last saw Peter Townend that way. Each of us was looking for someone else among the restaurant chairs sprawled out in the late summer afternoon sunshine beside the Thames at the Southbank Centre. He didn’t see me and I chose not to see him.