I based my autobiography on the formal constraint of ‘three score and ten’. This Biblical summation of life was another of my mother’s favoured idioms. (I was also conscious of some distant great uncle called Bindon Blood who had written a book of ‘reminiscences’ entitled Four Score Years and Ten.) The text would not exceed seventy pages. I would write by hand. I had more or less given up handwriting in the wake of acquiring my first computer (an Amstrad 8256) in the late 1980s. It was strange to return to handwriting. On some days it was bigger than on others. But as I drew nearer to page seventy it grew smaller and smaller. The Faustian pact of the packed page. I finished in early September 2004. I recall only three things about the whole manuscript. It ends with me running ecstatic down a street in Chicago with the love of my life. It is called ‘Unhinged’. And despite all my great as well as small expectations it makes next to no reference to my mother.
When is a mother ‘missing’? How much is the lag of years in writing about my mother related to her dementia? Wasn’t she already a missing mother years before she died? Is it possible to separate the delay from what brought on the dementia in the first place? Had she not become a missing mother the night her younger son died in the early autumn of 1986?
Worlds not realised
Life speeds up as you get older. My forties flew by. My fifties went in a twinkling. Clichés help to describe what happens and encourage you to believe you can prepare for what is coming towards you. But I was not prepared for what has been happening over the three years since I started working on this book. In quite unexpected ways I have begun to see how much I missed. How much I hadn’t thought. Or thought to feel. To adopt Wordsworth’s words describing childhood: I am moving about in worlds not realised. The green chasms. The welling perspectives. The blind precipices. The gaping upside-down skies. The missing mother of my past.
I once remarked to a girlfriend that smells cannot be recalled. She started to remonstrate then halted. Oh wow! You’re right. That’s so weird. It’s as if God forgot. We cannot remember smells but we can recognise them with ease. And they can be powerful triggers and encrypters of memory. When I smell wallflowers I remember my mother. When I smell sweet peas. When I smell honeysuckle. When I smell sandalwood. When I smell tarmacadam burning.
My mother’s voice has been preserved nowhere. No stories no laughter no song. How can that be? No one can ever hear. When I think about this it seems as implausible as smells eluding recollection.
Yet a single recollected word or phrase can release new vistas. For instance her ‘spending a penny’. Few people today any longer use this idiom. Call it colloquial or euphemistic. Think of it as humorous. Classify and categorise as wished. Take whimsical pleasure in knowing and informing others of its origin. None of that clarifies the singularity of my mother’s speech. A question once again of her dazzling twilight irony. When we were children there were still pennies. Big round brown flat things. The older darker ones still had Queen Victoria’s head on. To think of my mother saying spend a penny is to become enveloped in the sweet funniness of her voice. ‘Spend a penny’: it’s priceless. My mother’s priceless intonation. (Likewise with her playful fondness for referring to the urinary system as ‘waterworks’ or to the mechanics of one’s ‘undercarriage’.) And it makes the penny drop in quite other memory slots. She took us one washed-out winter’s day to Chessington Zoo. It was wet and cold. There was a penny-slot machine of ‘What the Butler Saw’. My brother and cousin Mike and I were given penny after penny to spend on this. And pennies now make pounds and pounds of the huge flesh of a prehistoric creature called an Indricotherium. One of the largest mammals that ever existed. In my memory it was taller than a giraffe. Gray-skinned and benign. A hornless herbivorous rhinoceros standing five metres tall. Down this memorial vista I can still picture this marvellous extinct gigantic giraffe-cum-horse. My mother and I saw it. We saw it together in one of the enclosures that rainy and windswept day at the zoo.
I have on occasion encountered my mother as an eerie apparition through others. Once when I was living in Scotland I happened to meet Doris Lessing. She knew nothing about me. Nothing about the importance of her books in my mother’s life. It was a large-scale drinks reception just after Lessing had received an honorary degree. Someone introduced us and she gave me an intense look that lasted for several seconds. Then she said: I’ve seen you before. And she paused. I imagined some embarrassment was in the offing. She was mistaking me. Misremembering some other occasion. I would have to point out that we had in fact never met. Then she declared with a serious and knowing face: In one of those pictures of Jacobean gentlemen hanging in the National Portrait Gallery. I had no answer to this. The word fizzog sprang to mind and a desire to tell her about my mother’s immersion one summer in all her books. I said nothing. But I felt something spook. Redolent of what Angela Carter somewhere calls maternal telepathy.
On another occasion I had a distant tête-à-tête with Edward Said in Cambridge. It was just inside the entrance to King’s College. He was due to give a seminar later that afternoon. I planned to go along. I had never met him or heard him speak but his face was well-known to me. He was coming into the college and I was about to wander out across the road to spend a while at Heffers bookshop. There was no reason he should have stopped to look at me. But there was a strange suspended moment in which we both gazed at one another. Too far away to speak. I knew he was close to death. (His leukaemia was a matter of public knowledge.) He didn’t know me from Adam. But in that exchange of looks something took place. It had to do with my mother. And – I supposed – with his.
And then a couple of years ago I sent an email to Hilary Mantel. Relating to a book or giving a talk. I’d read her Giving Up the Ghost by then. We’ve never met. I didn’t expect a response. But she wrote back within moments. With disarming warmth and generosity. In the line of address at the head of her message she left off the final ‘s’ of my forename. She wrote back a few minutes later to apologise but the lovely smile-inducing error had been made. It has kept me company in the writing of this book.
If I had been born a girl I would have been called Nicola. My mother took great pleasure in recalling this fact. The small handful of letters she wrote me are all addressed to ‘Nic’. I think of that as preserving the Nicola. Bringing in the unborn feminine. While she wrote few letters she left many notes. Such as ‘Gone shopping’ or ‘Choc ice in the freezer’ or ‘Over at Minnie-ha-ha’s [i.e. Marion’s]’. Even such terse messages (signed ‘M x’ or ‘Me x’) were often addressed ‘Darlin’ Nic’. She also used to call me Sidney. Her little Sidney. Or Sydney. Spoken not written. The spelling as always neither here nor there. Creatures in a twilight zone.
Neither of us in those days was aware of the girl called Sydney in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Hotel but it didn’t seem to me insignificant that my mother liked to call me by an androgynous or at least gender-ambiguous name. I loved the idea of being a girl and imagined this was with my mother’s full blessing. On the last day of primary school one girl in the class was allowed to dress up as a boy and one boy as a girl. I cannot remember if I was competing with other boys but I ended up being chosen. Boy-girl: the special one. My mother made me a little navy-blue dress for the occasion. I loved wearing it. I returned home from that final day of primary school and at last slipped it off and threw it on the bed in a transport of grief. Tears idle tears. Tears sidling up to tears for a life that was no more.
Machine
Like every other mother we knew at that time ours had an old hand-operated Singer sewing machine. An ordinary standard-size version of the surreal trundler in the dream of Peter Townend. Memories waft and turn in the anonymous sounds of machines as much as in the rhapsodies of Maria Callas on the radio or a blackbird in the park. In the evenings my mother would sew name-labels into our school clothes and mend socks and make this and that for herself. I loved being in the room when she was using the sewing machine. The feeling of quietness and night. The energy and
tranquillity. The unfurling of movement then tiny jog and pause. I also associate my mother at the sewing machine with the rhythms of the carriages of the old railway train streaming north across England into Scotland in high summer.
And then we never had a washing machine or dryer at home. My mother drove to the launderette once a week. Sunday was best. And in my teens and twenties I loved to go with her. Sitting with her in the warmth facing the soft churning of soapy clothing in the long row of washing machines made for a kind of suspended animation somewhere between womb and poem. Being immersed with my mother warm and comfortable in the gentle dredgery of a deserted launderette on an otherwise eventless Sunday afternoon or evening was a magical interlude I never wanted to cease.
But there was one mechanical sound I loathed. The noise of the vacuum cleaner did something to my insides unlike anything else. Even in late adolescence its raring up anywhere in the house unleashed rage and nausea in me. It was always my mother at the helm. My father never raised a finger to clean anything in the house and nor (at least until their early twenties) did his sons. The noise of the hoover seemed always to be in dire excess of any hygienic benefits it could bestow. It mimicked a damaged and dangerous warplane. Forever unable to take off. Cut off from any runway. The filthy noise approached. Legs must be raised. Bodies must eject themselves from the scene. It was our mother and it was not our mother. She too seemed possessed as she pushed or let it sweep her on. She had no fondness for this heavy hot ill-designed contraption. It must have enraged and nauseated her even more than it did us. But I never considered this. I more or less held my breath for the moment of its surging away into another room.
We always had a dining room and the same mahogany dining table and six high-back chairs with upholstered bumpy velvet floral-patterned seats. When we lived in Surrey we ate lunch there every Sunday but in Devon the table and chairs already seemed ghosts of themselves. You passed through the cottage dining room to get to the kitchen. One of my clearest memories of that transitional space is coming home to see that my mother had been hoovering. The chairs were strewn about as if in the wake of a Mafia meeting. How I hated her hoovering. Was my childhood antipathy to the vacuum cleaner to do with separation anxiety? After all didn’t it separate stuff off wherever it went? Make things disappear? Take our mother away from us? Indeed separate our mother from herself?
She had a fundamental wariness about the language of psychology. As well as about its professional representatives. She would unravel ‘separation anxiety’ as a delighted kitten might a ball of wool. ‘Separation anxiety’ has nothing to do with what she called the common touch. It is a miserable machine-like phrase. It martyrs and murders the mother. It serves to stifle the affirmation of an inseparableness of the mother from anything and everything in life. She’d put the kibosh on such clinical claptrap without a second’s hesitation.
She loved to say kibosh. She always pronounced the first syllable long: ‘ki’. Rhyming with ‘tie’ and ‘my’. It also sounded like a playful mispronunciation of the first letter of her name. K for Kate or Kathleen. And at the same time she invited you to hear in this word both nonsense (bosh!) and ancient surrealism (Hieronymus Bosch). Kibosh was part of her amorous armoury of humorous colloquialism. Of words’ attire and word-satire. ‘Claptrap’ was another. ‘Caboodle’ another. Each an additional tiny piece to be maintained in the war of the worlds of language. Whether in tennis against Margaret Thatcher or in the sketching of a new language of psychotherapy.
The loops of sound in memory. Eight years after my mother’s death my wife and I were visiting her grave and thought to see if the church itself was open. By a happy chance it was. We walked in to the most unexpected sound: the violence and incongruity of someone unseen hoovering. Out of the vestry emerged a woman as surprised to see us as I was to see her. An old neighbour from up the lane who looked as cheerful and ageless as ever. She turned off the vacuum cleaner and greeted us with great warmth and affection. Within seconds she was remembering my mother. What a lovely woman she was – your mother. So kind. So good to talk to. Could have talked all day. The years since her death giving way. Massive and irreversible as a landslip.
Mother tongue
We talk of a mother tongue as if this were an obvious and familiar possession. Everyone is supposed to have one. But it is never simple. It is the language of dream and flux. No one can own or master it. ‘Cat got your tongue?’ my mother liked to say. It never occurring to her that she was the cat. The pleasure of having words in our mouths is inseparable from the maternal. What we call the mother tongue is a licking loving tongue. To love the mother tongue is to know that this mother is a cat or an owl as well as human. It is to be exposed to the wet soft dry hard caresses of its flames. One evening at the white Formicatop table I read aloud to her an essay by E. M. Forster called ‘Anonymity’. Forster suggests that literature is something that comes from letting down buckets into the underworld. A place of imagination. A place foreign to names and naming. I have called my mother mother in these pages. I have also recalled her so-called ‘birth names’. And I have tried to query this language of the obvious and familiar. For it is not my mother’s tongue. I continue to think of her as sheer creature of the imaginative underworld. Names have a deadly character. I associate my mother with life. With an implacable eluding of what fixes and freezes. With the unsettling and loosening of all death-driven convictions – from proper names to national identities. With what in words slips the lips and laughs and shows up again mole-like where you couldn’t have envisaged.
‘Too late she cries!’ My mother was fond of this exclamation. It was never written and so never clear how far the ‘too late’ was to be lapped in quotation marks: ‘“Too late!” she cries.’ Or where the lapping began or ended. ‘She cries too late.’ There is a saying of uncertain origin that dates from the nineteenth century: ‘Too late! she cried, as she waved her wooden leg.’ But my mother never mentioned any prosthetic limb. And the cry for her was always in the present: it was cries not cried. With regard to some misfortune already happened or happening: ‘Too late she cries!’ It encapsulates her quickness. Too quick for words. She is and is not the she who cries. She has already given words the slip: too late she cries!
Another little pellet or earthwork she sometimes cast up: ouijamiflip. This was her quirky version of ‘what’s-it-called’ or ‘thingamajig’. I never saw the word transcribed. It wasn’t a word in writing. It was still to be spelled. It was another instance of her inhabiting a language and a world beneath the surface. At once more spontaneous and more dreamy. A pre-word at odds with any proper. With Man. Authority. Stasis and rigidity.
An old friend from school and university days resolved at some point in the late 1980s to start calling my mother Gwendolen because (he said) she had ‘a genial countenance’ and ‘a lovely complexion’ with ‘bright, blue eyes, a pretty face’. ‘Gwendolen’ is a nineteenth-century Welsh name from gwen (fair pure blessed white) and dolen (loop or bow or link in a chain). A lovely loopiness. My father on the other hand seemed to understand that she called for a name beyond names. In birthday and wedding anniversary cards he always referred to her as Mlalao. A word composed out of his love for her. A childlike hypocoristic that incorporated the letters of his own mother’s first name: Lola. As teenagers my brother and I regarded Mlalao as risible. Later I came to think of it as almost unbearable in its poignancy. My father was not an expressive person – but there were moments when he tried to be.
Over a series of baking hot days one summer in Devon I read Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable aloud to my mother in the garden. Beyond names. Not capable of being named. Or in the original: L’innomable. In eccentric accord with the fizzles and fizzing up of memory this recalls another French word: limonade. The many glasses of home-made stuff she and I drank in accompaniment. Innumerable unnamable unquenchable. With clumps of ice and shreds of mint picked from where the plant was running riot all around the greenhouse on the other side of the str
eam. The back of the house had a wonderful view over the valley below. But we sat on the bench at the front. In a suntrap facing my mother’s beloved flowerbeds. A great thronging of hot colours and scents and a small lawn that retained moisture even in the driest summers. Above that a mossy grass bank and hedgerow. Behind which the lane ran unseen. When the sun became too intense we put up a parasol. Reading The Unnamable aloud is the best route to experiencing its hilarity. And the unflagging purity of its rhythms. Smoking cigarettes and drinking lemonade I read and my mother listened and I listened to my mother listening as we leapt and limped with laughter through all its goings-on. Happy days tempered by the unspeakable. For this was in the great eerie interval. One summer in the middle of the period when my brother’s cancer was in remission and we were all in abeyance waiting hoping despairing wondering would he come through seven years and be pronounced cured.
B-r-ring!
It’s the same thing. That was the innocuous phrase some three years later that my mother enunciated over the phone when I was living in a run-down bedsit in south Oxford trying to survive in the deepening dark of the Thatcher years. I’d completed a PhD and had some teaching experience but university lecturing jobs were more or less non-existent. I was getting by on whatever I could find. A-level and Oxbridge entrance. Teaching English as a Foreign Language. Plus a solitary undergraduate. A sweet young man who came to my nasty little bedsit once a week for a tutorial in his chosen special subject: satire.
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