Mother

by Nicholas Royle

  To catch a mouse

  There were so many non-human animals around the house as we were growing up. That is to say besides mice woodlice spiders flies daddy-long-legs silverfish butterflies moths bees wasps. The brief recollection of a mouse must stand in for all these other gentle intruders or cohabitants. We had a multivolume Children’s Encyclopaedia with gilt tooling and bright red bindings. But the ordering was strange. In addition to running from one to twenty-four there was a baffling alphabetic alternation. Volume 4A or 10B and so on. I’d look something up and get lost in the other volume of the same number. That must somewhat explain why the set remained so little delved into. But there was also awe for its thick-paged newness. Its solidity and voluminousness and heavy smell. There were Things to Do as well as information about nature, ‘great lives’ and famous books. There were fairytales alongside scientific inventions. There were diagrams and line drawings and black and white plates and even a few in colour. Of the Things to Do I remember only two. One was instructions on how to cut glass underwater. If you took a small pane of glass and filled a bucket of water and immersed the pane you could cut it with an ordinary pair of scissors. It didn’t sound plausible. I tried and it worked. It felt like a miracle. The magic of Ali Baba.

  The other was instructions on how to catch a mouse without hurting it. My mother was against any kind of cruelty to animals. As was my father. Even at the end of his life he would go to great lengths not to kill a wasp or a fly that was being a nuisance in the house. How did I come to put into effect the directions for catching a mouse? What kind of collusion with my mother made it happen? For me aged ten or eleven the very existence of mice in the kitchen seemed fabulous. I had seen no such creature but my parents must have been aware of ‘activity’ (in the nice euphemism of rodent pest-control). They must have talked about what to do. I suppose a mousetrap was on the agenda. I happened upon the alternative measures in an odd or even volume of the Children’s Encyclopaedia. My role was as proprietorial and pleased as a child could be. Like cutting glass with scissors it was not rocket science. One had to prop up a wastepaper basket with a matchstick and place a tiny cube of cheese on the floor next to the match-head. I can still picture the light metal bin with its swirling brown and red floral decorations on the outside and its white interior. Next morning it was as if the tooth fairy had been captured alive. We hadn’t looked yet she was in the bucket. I recall the glimpse of that otherworld quivering quick creature before releasing her at the bottom of the garden. I imagine she found her way back to the kitchen by nightfall. She or he.

  Giftie

  I doubt that was the first time my mother recited to us from Robert Burns: Wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie. More than any other poet he was hers and in the air. Because I heard Burns long before seeing it on the page there were no boundaries between one poem and another. As far as I was concerned the cowering timorous little mouse came from the same poem as O wad some Power the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us! These latter lines might sound at any time. With them my mother could paralyse in a flash.

  There was an Irishman called Pat O’Grady who did occasional painting and decorating for us. He liked a glass of whisky. At least this is what my mother provided and he always seemed happy to drink it. He would linger at the end of the afternoon talking to her twinkling his eye at me and my brother and saying he must be off but never turning up his nose at another Bell’s ‘afore ye go’. I have little sense of the dynamic between Pat and my mother. Her father had been partial to a Bell’s at the end of the evening. Pat was no father-figure but it is possible she enjoyed remembering Gugga through him. Pat liked to talk and tell stories himself but he was as vulnerable as anyone to the sharp and unpredictable turns of my mother’s tongue. One time he’d been regaling the company for quite a while about something or other that had happened and my mother cut in to observe: O wad some Power the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us! I don’t think she realised what she’d done. Blind to her own strange power of speech. Pat went pale as a waxwork. I could see him thinking: What did the woman say? Was she talking about me? What did I say now? O wad some Power the giftie gie us… !

  These words of Burns seemed always in the wings. Sometimes she would invoke them and the target would be clear. At other times her interlocutor might be quite at a loss to understand. This rhyming couplet punctuated life. It was a dart from a blow-pipe distilling all of Freud and more. Delicious delirious poison of the maternal unknown. We can never do it. Narcissus is blind. Self-observation impossible. And yet it was my mother who said this and who therefore to me was the seer. She could see me myself as I never could and she said so. She stood in for all the ithers. The ither of the mither. My mother in the mire of the beholder.

  O, what a panic’s in thy breastie! How much of the agitation of my mother I shared without knowing. And where could the transfer of such unknowledge end? There is no point at which to conclude a reflection on memories of my mother. That is her uncanny gift. With every instant another depth. Another angle. Another resonance. How for example could the bad dreams she had – even when she was in her sixties – about being back at school taking her exams be separable from the trauma of living in wartime London and the death of her own mother? And how could her agitation be unrelated to my own – not just as regards my own experience of ‘taking exams’ but as regards an anguish of writing in general? For each sentence is deadly in so far as it threatens to fix or arrest the otherness of my mother flowing through – over and under – the world of my thoughts and feelings at every instant.

  Little creatures

  For so many tiny creatures there are webs and burrows and burials of memory over which my mother watches. I’m truly sorry man’s dominion / Has broken Nature’s social union. Her conception of social union didn’t stop at the human. She marvelled at the silverfish flashing behind the kitchen sink as much as the Red Admiral to be rescued from a cobweb in the shed. When we were wanton boys in full sadistic flower with magnifying glasses setting fire to ants and flies in the summer sunshine of the garden we knew without exchanging a word that she was looking on from the kitchen window aghast. But there were so many other animals in the forests of our youth. Forests doubtless nurtured and encouraged by the menagerie-minded madness of our beloved Cotswold cousins. In earlier years we had hamsters and rabbits and gerbils and guinea pigs and goldfish and tortoises and Mexican jumping beans. Then as a teenager – alongside his aviaries for the kestrels and barn owl and gyrfalcon – my brother had aquariums with angelfish and neon tetras and catfish and Siamese fighters and piranhas and vivariums with terrapins and a chameleon and a North American garter snake which – within twenty-four hours of joining our household – gave birth to thirteen tiny squirming snakelings. The lid of the vivarium had not been designed to contain such an event. So the influx became outflux and that Sunday evening by torchlight in the upstairs rooms in wardrobes and under beds we were all obliged to play Find the Snakes. And then accompanying us through so many years was the beautiful half-Persian white and tortoiseshell Tatty Too (who lived to be almost eighteen) and a sweet-natured miniature long-haired dachshund we named Glimpy.

  We understood that a dog was for life not just Christmas. But it was my mother who dealt with the many end-of-life scenarios and what must down the years have amounted to a veritable hillock of poop and vomit. Of smaller mammals the guinea pigs were the last and worst. My brother’s was white and ginger and mine tortoiseshell. They lived in a raised hutch in the garage. We were supposed to clean out their run but of course it was our mother who did this. They developed some kind of scurvy. They had sores in their fur. Pet you wouldn’t. Pet no more. They became unpleasant to look at or think about. So we didn’t. My mother continued to nurse and clean and look after these creatures we were quite old enough to realise and disavow. That she would also have dealt with the end of their lives – along with those of all the other domestic creatures who shared our roof from one month or ye
ar to the next – we never considered.

  When my father was no longer able to look after her and she was in a nursing home and I had young children of my own and was unable to visit as often as I should she was the white and ginger and the tortoiseshell guinea pig. I didn’t do right. I didn’t do my duty. I wasn’t there. And when I went that time just before she died and she didn’t recognise me I became the guinea pig in turn.

  Bombs away

  Here is an extraordinary photograph. It reminds me of the surprise of seeing Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror in Vienna: it is so small that its very miniaturism brings moisture to the eye. There is an eerie sense also of mannerism and surreality. It has something of a convexing swirl. In the receding darkness of the garden-fencing. In the roundness of the mound on which the figures are sitting. My mother is on the right. Marion is second from the left. The girl beside Marion is called June. The boys are Ray (in the middle) and Don (next to my mother). They are in the back garden of the house in which my mother was born: 19 Hotham Road in Putney. The earthwork is the family air-raid shelter. It is summer 1940. War fills the air and ground. Such strange incongruity. The formality of the boys’ shirts and ties. The posing of youth on a tumulus-like barrow. What does this smiling picture say? What do these happy-looking children see in us?

  My mother and Marion were due to be evacuated to Bristol on 25 November 1940. The day before this the Bristol Blitz began. Gugga and Emily changed plans and sent them to Edinburgh instead to live with their eldest sister Peggy. They returned south the following year and continued their schooling at Queen Anne’s Caversham near Reading. What a bonding experience all of that must have been for my mother and her little sister. What a war. What life exams. They both recalled being enthralled by the flashing lights and shadows from falling bombs on gravestones in Brompton Cemetery in the blackout. My mother also gave a vivid account of listening to doodlebugs overhead. The sound of an engine. Loud and very fast. Then gone.

  There is next to nothing documented from this period. Just three or four short letters written by Emily Gibbs to Marion or to Marion and my mother. (The sisters were at Queen Anne’s at this time.) One indicates that they were all going to travel up to Drymen for a holiday in July 1943. Another urges her daughters to remember to go to see the dentist. And a third (headed 24 Ongar Rd., S.W.6, Sunday) starts: Dear Marion, I was pleased dear that you sent that P.card. I heard it afterwards from nurse & then Mrs Jones that bombs had been dropped in Reading – now if you had not sent that card I would have been so worried about you both… Nurse? Emily has a nurse? Then just a few months later the bare fact: on 2 January 1944 the death – of heart failure – in her sleep – at the age of 54 – of my mother’s mother. O, what a panic’s in thy breastie?

  Woman reader

  For a long time I didn’t read Virginia Woolf. She said that to become a woman writer you have to kill the angel in the house. My mother was the angel but she also changed with the years. She never became a ‘woman writer’. She never killed the angel. But she became a unique kind of ‘woman reader’. Her older sisters Peggy and Nettie read Georgette Heyer and Jean Plaidy. My mother had no time for such stuff. I remember when it was Doris Lessing. Various novels lay one at a time by the radio and Silk Cut and lighter and ashtray in the kitchen. In my mind they all merged. Was it just one summer or did it last longer? My mother sat in the corner of the kitchen in Devon reading The Grass Is Singing The Golden Notebook Briefing for a Descent Into Hell The Summer Before the Dark Memoirs of a Survivor. I suspect they did something to her. One day she pushed The Golden Notebook across the table and said I’d be interested. My mother never pushed books. I took it away and tried but couldn’t get on with it. I was busy with other things. I was teaching a lot and supposed to be writing a PhD about Wallace Stevens. I vaguely apprehended something underway but we didn’t speak of it.

  ‘Consciousness-raising’ was no more relevant to my mother than ‘Alzheimer’s’. Like ‘stream of consciousness’ the phrase seems miles off-target. She was unconscious embodiment. A dreaming range of liquid volcanoes and airy interruptors. If wit evokes her better than any other word it is with a will-o’-the-wispishness. Endless veers and vanishings of humour and knowledge. Awash in the un- or under-said. One evening I presented her with a photocopy of Woolf’s ‘The Mark on the Wall’. In contrast to her slapdash dilatory son she read it straight away. ‘Contrived’ was the acid verdict. My mother’s critical judgments were like no one else’s. They were off the wall. Off Woolf’s wall and everyone else’s. But while she seemed to resist all the grids and classifications of culture and history certain shifts occurred. Submarine seismic passivities. Seething fires in the dark.

  Meat

  In earlier years she had indeed lived up to Woolf’s angel. If there was a draught she sat in it. If there was chicken she would have the leg. But against draughts more and more she wrapped herself up. The purple-padded chrome-legged chair she sat on at the white Formica-top table was tucked in beside a radiator. The snuggest corner of the house. And then that chicken leg. Or the whole chicken. Along with the Sunday ‘family roast’ of lamb and potatoes with Brussels sprouts and swede and Yorkshire pudding and gravy and mint sauce. Along with the obligation to get up at the crack of dawn every Christmas Day long before anyone else to prepare the turkey for the oven. Our family was ‘animal-loving’ yet year after year seemed to have no qualms about meat-eating. The lambs massacred for the day of rest across the British Isles had no apparent connection with the sheep in the fields or with our cat and dog or with the bunny rabbits Snowy and Samantha in their hutch in the garden.

  How does disavowal subsist so long? And then how does it come to such an abrupt end?

  When the cancer first hit my brother it was with a lump in his upper arm. He was twenty years old. The size of an Adam’s apple it bit into him and planted itself hurtful as the best-aimed punch. He would recover and endure almost to the magical point of all-molecule-changing seven years. And then a ten-ton applecart would be dumped on his head lungs back brain overall all over in a monstrous refused fused forever fifteen months. But when the bump first arose tender as a button mushroom in his right arm he became vegetarian overnight. My mother and I did likewise. Meat-eating was no longer possible. The encounter with the cancer in the house was translated into a hundred languages most of which were in silence or tears but another was a new five-word commandment: Thou shalt not eat meat.

  The abstention from meat-eating was not just in solidarity with my brother but went to the heart of the cruelty of human life. My mother had never enjoyed consuming the flesh of other animals. Nor had I. My father did not feel this way. He ate what was put in front of him. He never cooked. A part of him considered that food itself was a superfluity. He claimed never to feel hungry. This did not preclude him from having a sweet tooth: he took obvious pleasure in consuming apple-pie and Devon double cream or toffees or cake or choc-ices. Anything in fact enriched with milk or cream. When my brother and I were not yet teenagers our parents took us on holiday to a bed and breakfast farmhouse in Dorset. More or less on arrival we had tea and scones with strawberry jam and clotted cream in the rather formal dining room. Other families sat somewhat awkward and subdued at adjacent tables. We remonstrated with my father when he – having waited his turn like the gentleman he was – shovelled a huge quantity of clotted cream on to his plate. He explained without demur: Seemliness does not apply to cream. After my brother fell ill my father gave up meat more by default than by design. But for my mother and myself the renunciation came with an overwhelming sense that we should have done so years before.

  Mourning has to do with taking the lost loved one inside oneself. He or she is no longer to be found in the outside world. The loved one must now survive within others. In memory. Psychoanalysis talks of the danger of a kind of magical cannibalistic incorporation in which the dead loved one is buried alive. Gobbled up like a shot but concealed within. The mourner deals with the impossibility
of accepting the loss by an act of swallowing whole. Even by denying that the beloved once existed in the external world. But however mourning happens there is the trauma of taking the beloved within. To be faithful is to keep him or her alive in memory. Living on in oneself. Other to oneself.

  One thinks if. As if. As if if that time were today we would have gone about everything in a different way. I knew that my father would never be able to speak. But my mother and I could have talked about what was befalling our family. In fact we just descended into an unspoken abyss. Nothing to be said. Either at the outset or at any point in its sometimes hopeful long-drawn-out death-carving aftermath. We never articulated our feelings before or after Simon’s death. Not a word. Nor did he himself speak about it. If he talked with my mother I’ll never know but I doubt he did. The family way of dealing with the enormity was to say nothing. Except regarding matter-of-fact issues. How he had slept. How he was eating. What discomfort he was in. What other painkillers might be tried. The date of the next doctor’s appointment. The next chemo or radiotherapy. What was there to be said?

  A couple of years before his death Simon and Cris moved into a tiny terraced cottage in the centre of Honiton. It bore the simple name ‘Mousehole’. One evening about a year later he and I were alone together in his former bedroom at our parents’ home. Out of nowhere he said: You are everything to me. He always had a piercing stare but now he was on the last straight the stony force of his look was insupportable. He knew he was going to die whereas I refused to accept it. Even on the night it happened. I could have told him that he was everything to me and also to our mother and father. I could have said we were all vegetarian cannibals. I could have eaten him up like honey. But I don’t believe I said anything. I was too moved by his words. He came back to the family home for the last few weeks of his life. As he lay dying in the ebb and emaciation of consciousness and morphine on the final day I sat beside him reading Chaucer’s Wyf of Bath’s Tale. I was supposed to be teaching it in Oxford the following week. You have a little book and along with the sweetness in your mouth there is bitterness the rest of your life.