Someone phoned the undertakers. I suppose I did. I who denied he could have died till he did. Everyone else in the house withdrawn by then howling or silent into locked or other blank places. Was the GP still present as well? I don’t remember. He skulked away. It was the middle of the night. Two undertakers. Furtive as thieves. Doing their best to be polite and show dignity but after they’d huffed and struggled with carrying my brother out the younger couldn’t refrain from remarking to me it must be a blessed relief the state that body was in.
Perspectives
In Shakespeare’s Richard II the Queen expresses her fear that ‘Some unborn sorrow, ripe in fortune’s womb, / Is coming towards me.’ The King’s counsellor Bushy replies:
Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows
Which shows like grief itself but is not so;
For sorrow’s eye, glazed with blinding tears,
Divides one thing entire to many objects,
Like perspectives, which rightly gazed upon
Show nothing but confusion – eyed awry,
Distinguish form.
Shakespeare is referring to figures or pictures that look fragmented or confused except when viewed from a certain angle. In this reflection tears themselves become optical instruments. Like the ‘quaint mirrors and perspectives’ in Chaucer’s The Squire’s Tale. Bushy’s words project a strange perspective of their own. They turn things back to front. ‘Rightly’ gazing meets only with confusion whereas eyeing ‘awry’ brings lucidity and coherence.
None of us has the gift to see ourselves as others see us. Yet do we even have the gift to see others as they are? I can distinguish the form of my mother as sharp as ever in my mind. Her words. Her voice. Her body and ways of moving. Her face and hands. The play of different smiles and lights in her eyes. But how memories of my mother come to form in words are also thanks to her. She traces and colours every word and feeling. And as I find myself recalling some detail about her I am shaken by the memory into some new perspective. Reminiscing collides with unexpected things and words that collide with other memories. I used to think that ‘colliding’ was the source of ‘kaleidoscope’. In the late 1980s I discovered the novels of Elizabeth Bowen. I fell in love with them. Bowen’s intelligence and humour and ‘powers of observation’ were a revelation to me. I encouraged my mother to read The House in Paris where the feeling of being shaken like a kaleidoscope is a key to the lives of the characters but also to how the novel is written.
I don’t know which came first but around this time a cheap and cheerful kaleidoscope took up long-term residence in the kitchen by the radio and my mother’s cigarettes and lighter and ashtray. (‘Cheap and cheerful’ was another gentle but fraught item in my mother’s lexicon. It might be a phrase of withering contempt or quiet delight. Another of her life-crossing undecidables.) She had acquired it for her beloved young grandson Sam. But like the best toys it seemed of more enduring interest to the adult than to the child. Resting up there on the white Formica counter-top it was not within sight or grasp of my young nephew. My mother used to enjoy Desert Island Discs. Was she one of the listeners six months before my birth when Bowen told Roy Plomley she’d like to take to the island as her ‘one luxury item’ a kaleidoscope?
The future is as much an abyss as the past. Obstetrics has moved on since Shakespeare’s day. Ultrasound can make life in the womb seem as ordinary as watching TV. Certain physical defects can be detected before birth. Sex can be determined. The fears of monstrosity attendant on childbirth have diminished. Still we can be haunted by the Queen’s image of ‘unborn sorrow’. It’s the pressure of the time. The ripeness that is all. The sense of imminence and what is coming but cannot be seen: ‘Some unborn sorrow, ripe in fortune’s womb, / Is coming towards me.’
My nephew Sam was such a wonder for my mother. A beautiful little creature who gave new purpose to her and to my father’s existence. They looked after him as often as they could. He lit up their days. The beatific impossible replacement.
Beyond recognition
Early 2003. There is the care-home mixture of electric and winter daylight in the corridor. Fusty carpet. Chintzy decor. My father a few steps away in conversation with a senior staff member. The bodies of strangers flickering fussing faltering at different distances around me. Then the isolation of my mother. As if the camera crew could relax now homing in on the most transporting face in the world and she is not a guinea pig or polar bear or cowering mouse it is my living magical mother. We’ve been told she had a fall. She took a knock a few days earlier and has a cut on the back of her head. That is why the film crew has come. You are on location the failed film director at last coming to the home homing in on the face that launched your lives.
Back down the frazzled tunnel twistings of the years I can only picture it with the help of this flip-flop phantom film crew. My brother of course among them.
Not to be recognised by your mother. Since that day it’s centuries. But the moment has stayed. Long-stay eye park. Hers settles. A whorl fixing on my face. There is contact between our looks but nothing identified. Words like ‘spark’ or ‘glimmer’ all out. Tennyson recalls in the long elegy for his friend Hallam how All the wheels of being slow and catches the reader up in the time of seeing that that ‘slow’ is not an adjective it is the end. I am looking into this blue swirl – my mother’s eyes – but she fails to register that it is I. In trying to register her failure to register all the words slow. Slow down. Right down. The first poem I ever wrote down (I was eleven) began: ‘Down, down, down, / Down to the depths of the sea.’ Ah! My mother’s delight at reading it. And now? Two ‘I’s parked in dateless dark. It’s a lot. Each a slot. I see you. You see no son. The day is done. I am in translation. Into the nothing you see. We park apart. Under the hill. All the dancers. It’s too much of a lot and no lot at all. Richard III carried a car park on his back. Five hundred and forty years later his lot acquires scheduled monument status. What is my mother’s lot? How is it to be borne? All lots are lost. The odds is gone.
In Richmond Park as a child the trees were taller than my eyes could track. [My mother with her parents and sister Marion, Richmond Park, 1940.] At the base of the massive bole moss and acorn cups and rivulets. Kneeling in suspense. Watched by mother. The morning sun a glitter in the cobweb of this tiny velvet soft diorama. Life of the little folk between roots. All asunder. No haven under the hill.
Water
Public wells were once ubiquitous. The only other connection we had to the village containing my mother’s ‘specialist memory care home’ was water that gushed from a wall in the street. Constant free drinking water from an ancient Devon spring for all comers. Just bring your canisters and fill up.
In and around my parents’ cottage water was always a topic. A key attraction when buying the place was the stream running down the garden visible from the kitchen window. And the house itself was fed by a spring in the field just above. After heavy rain the lane at the top of the drive was a wild intoxicating gush and gurgling. Snowdrops primroses daffodils flourished in the banks. ‘Enfolding sunny spots of greenery…’ There was a watery affinity in the thought of the author of ‘Kubla Khan’ having his own ‘sweet birthplace’ just four miles away on the banks of the River Otter. And it was easy to think too of how autobiography might arise in response to flowing water. Hadn’t Wordsworth begun The Prelude questioning the River Derwent about the meaning of his life: ‘Was it for this…?’ When I was living in Finland letters from my father would detail the state of the stream as well as the supply of spring water for the house. By chance I had a colleague called Ralf Norrman who was writing a book about Swedish hydronyms. Ralf was passionate about the relationship between water and place-names. He died of a brain tumour at fifty-three. I loved him because he wasn’t my father but resembled him: somewhat mad but very gentle. They never met but shared a serene eccentricity. I picture the placidity and pleasure in which they might have passed an afternoon together. Speaking of wa
ter and names.
When my parents first moved to Devon my father compiled meticulous records of the activities of stream and spring. Stream almost dried up. Steady flow in the stream. Stream overflowing and water running down the hill all over the garden. Spring most satisfactory. Spring rather low. Spring a trickle. No water at all coming through to the house from the spring. My father’s love of digging met up with his love of streams. If the boyhood search for the priest hole and subterranean passageway to the church had led to water filling up the pantry at Perivale the search in Devon focused on the garden. He made divining rods from coat-hangers. Then he made some from copper. Then he splashed out (forgive me) on brass-tipped hazel rods by mail order. The nagging absurdity of all these maxwellian implements lay in the sense that there was water water everywhere. But the rationale for digging knew no bounds. Over a number of years he excavated deep holes all over the property. Such was the origin of the Green Pond [overleaf]. And the Black. And the Small. The largest was at the bottom of the garden. Lined with plastic. Home for the geese. From the kitchen window we could watch them gliding about like beautiful gray and white sails. But they soon punctured the lining with their webbed feet. The pond turned marsh. The green hydronym. Or was it the Green Pond because that was the colour of the lining?
My father carried on digging. He shifted as far away as he could. Into the hidden area of pine trees he called the Spinney. His younger son was being as all the wheels slow rutted by cancer. My father withdrew into the Spinney and dug. He dowsed and made numerous trial excavations. To visitors braving that steep and shady section of the garden the resemblance to hasty ineffective graves dug by a serial killer was inescapable. In the end he succeeded in constructing a large and for the casual walker dangerous pit in the heart of the Spinney with an elevated length of black plastic guttering from which in triumph flowed a tiny but constant trickle of spring water. If you stood at the lower end of the Spinney and gazed up at this earthwork amid the pines it was hard not to see it as some arcane shrine.
But there was a period when the flow of water from the spring above the house became so feeble that a couple of times a week we would drive the five miles with empty five-litre bottles and other containers to this village with its well-in-the-wall. Collecting water with my mother was simple and lovely. With my father there was always a modicum of pressure. (‘Modicum’ was a word of which he was fond.) As if the operation were military and precision paramount. The need to fill each canister as far as possible to the brim. With my mother there was ease. Here is beautiful spring water gushing out of a wall. It was gushing out before we arrived and will go on gushing after we’ve driven away. Abundance of life. Ceaseless cascade. It had something of the fairytale or magic of film. Like detached hands reaching out of walls in Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête. But it also had the power of miniature. Like a snowglobe containing the Colossus at Rhodes the rush from this humble village spout seemed in little the perilous onslaught of the Falls of Dochart she and I confronted in deafened awe one winter’s day at Killin.
In the crumbling of the director’s expression to which she was ever blind was the thought of whorl in all its crazed circling: the well and the wall and the whirl of the end of the whorled. Poetry was the meaning of my mother’s face. But it was stopped. As if the spring rushing up out of the earth falling in joyous spasms from the wall for centuries was in this wheeling reeling impossible instant plugged forever. Spring out of bounds. I experienced damage to my retina in a shower making love in the intense tumbling of hot water pressing my mouth in to my lover’s expression of love as one speaks of making love but love is never made I caressed her in the falling water and suckled and entered licking every orifice and others I hadn’t seen in the water swirling about my face kissing her mouth and all her mouths suddenly an extreme spike of pain in my eye and the retina injured as if unable to retain. That was the sensation now made flesh in a new and inconceivable manner. My mother was looking at me without seeing who I was and this tore off my sight. It was necessary to summon up the film crew around me as onlookers and witnesses: Wheel the camera round! Quick quick! Move in! Too late. Never a time. Witless witness. No one but the son no longer son in the trembling crazy corridor. How was it to be borne? As by a specialist memory tsunami the phantom team dispersed. Thrown back. Away. All wards off. Distribution company destroyed. Transfers metaphors translations all borne away in this brave new whorl. Off! In the spiralling maelstrom of my mother’s un-look.
Bravery was the battle cry within. I was forty-five years old. I had to be brave. But who was I? As boys we were always braves. We were the native Americans standing for imagination justice truth. The desire to be brave came from her. Put on a brave face. But there was none. Nothing like this had ever happened before.
Fizzog
I don’t associate my mother with the word face. She used to say fizzog. Hers by the end had something of the walnut intricacy of an Auden. Fizzog is at the edge of language. Off-centre off-stage. It lives and loves somewhere fuzzy. It is not concerned about spelling. Fizzog phisog physog phizog. It belongs to the air. The pleasure of sound. It’s an onomatopizztake. It is fizz and sog. Vivacity and mire. The ghost of a vanishing phiz. ‘Physiognomy’ is reanimated. The dictionary calls fizzog ‘humorous colloquialism’. It is not sufficient to bracket the word off from the domain of proper discourse. Take care: ‘colloquialism’! The word must also be marked as if it were damaged goods (‘humorous’). To be taken with a pinch of salt.
But what’s a pinch of salt? Whenever my mother took salt to add to something at the stove she’d throw any excess over her left shoulder. She must have learned this from her mother. The mire of the mother of the mother. When I’m cooking and take too big a pinch of salt the impulse to do the same is the arc of a narrative in my body. Silhouette of the grandmother I never knew. I don’t think of the bedevilments of Christian spillage at the Last Supper or acting out the evil eye but of my mother’s and mother’s mother’s body in me. What’s a pinch? It is all I’m trying to do. To remember the pinches. In pinches. To evoke my mother at a pinch. To pinch time. Sleight without slight. The squeezes and caresses of bringing back memories of my mother’s hands. The deftness of my mother’s thumb and forefinger pinching salt before arthritic seniority withered them.
My mother the cook: this was something about which she remained diffident all the compos mentis days of her life. At certain things she excelled: mashed potato and pancakes and apple pie and sponges and rice puddings. But she never seemed very comfortable cooking dinner. She preferred washing up afterwards. And better than washing up was drying up. Making all the cutlery and plates and pans disappear dried by hand with a fresh linen tea-towel back into the cupboard out of sight. She liked it when I made dinner. It might be chickpea curry or ratatouille or lentil stew or chilli sans carne or spaghetti with tomato sauce. Whatever it happened to be she always called it by the same name: splodge.
To class as ‘humorous colloquialism’ is a belittlement. An attempt to render peripheral. But my memory of my mother is inseparable from such locutions. Humorous colloquialisms are her very spirit and wit. Fizzog opens up another thinking of culture and society. Philosophers ponder the face. They hum and haw over the idea that it is the basis of ethics. They reflect on whether other creatures such as cat or snake or dog can be said to have a face or if the face is something unique to the human. In the World According to Humorous Colloquialism the word ‘face’ is replaced with ‘fizzog’. No social or political exchange could take place without a sense of laughter and benign absurdity. All violence would become impossible. No defacement could be entertained. Facebook would be a laughable blast from the past.
Still I’m left with that horror. I do not wish to remember the instant but can never be done with it. With hindsight it was her dying look at me. A fortnight later she left the world. George Eliot speaks of a ‘maternal transference of self’ when a dying mother looks on her beloved son. How did we miss? Impossible first l
ast time in which my mother looked without seeing me. No more not seeing ourselves as others see us. Maternal transference of fizzog into thin air. She shuffled her feet and turned away.
Dreamother
Since her death I have been visited with dreams in which my mother is still alive. Even the most nightmarish are marvels to be cherished. As old age approaches it seems to me that dreams of the return of the dead – especially of those we love – are among humankind’s greatest achievements. People can travel to the moon but that seems a small matter compared with the experience of a world in which a beloved person passed away passes back. The matter of my mother. Restored to absolute liveliness without a trace of implausibility. Such dreams carry a joy that goes beyond any others. It is in the dream but it is also what the dream gives. A joy enduring. If only for a few seconds. It irrupts into the waking world and overturns it.
A single example: My mother and I are revisiting Oxford. The town I first visited with her – on a day trip from Cheam in 1975. We walked into the back quad of Exeter College to the loud unexpected starting-up of the Rolling Stones’ ‘Paint it Black’ and I knew standing beside my mother that this was where I wanted to study. (I arrived there as an undergraduate the following autumn.) In the dream the city centre is not so much dreaming spires as rows of old flat-roofed buildings with small temples on top of them. A proliferation of elevated mini-Ashmoleans and Clarendon Buildings. We are looking at properties. Not in any definite way but we are driving down residential streets thinking of a place my wife and I might buy. And then I’m by myself again at home in Sussex and thinking with passionate resolve that I could and should move the family down to the West Country to be closer to her because she’s fine now living by herself still doing the crossword in the mornings. She’s bright and quite recovered from her Alzheimer’s. Cheerful but frail. And then I come to.
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