One abiding memory of my mother was when she had a very dramatic nosebleed. I arrived home from school, I must have been eleven or twelve at the time, to find her in the living room with a blood-soaked towel pressed to her face. My father was at work and there was no sign of a brother or a sister to help me.
‘Can you go and fetch Mrs Rogers,’ my mother said calmly. I noticed that her hand was trembling. She must have seen the horrified look on my face and reassured me that it was just a nosebleed.
Mrs Rogers was a friend of my mother’s and lived at the bottom of the hill on Broom Valley Road with her husband (Big David) and son (Little David), the latter being twenty-one and all of six foot two. She was a good-hearted, down-to-earth woman who possessed a loud expressive laugh and a dry wit, someone my mother described as ‘the salt of the Earth’. She often called in for cup of tea and I would eavesdrop as she put the world to rights. Mrs Rogers was a woman noted for her memorable malapropisms and amazingly inventive non sequiturs. She spoke of her new ‘sanitary unit’ (sic) and the rude individual who ‘testiculated’ at her son when he was learning to drive. In any emergency she was the one to call upon. I rushed off and soon, in apron and fluffy bedroom slippers, Mrs Rogers accompanied me back to Number 19.
‘I think we had better get the doctor,’ she told me after attempting to stem the flow of blood. ‘Tell Little David to go and fetch him.’
Dr Hagen was a large, distinguished-looking man with silver-white hair, a round red face and an air of authority. I had seen him at Mass, for he attended St Bede’s with his wife and large family and always appeared to me a rather daunting figure with his serious face and penetrating eyes. That day he was good-humoured and chatty.
‘A cup of tea would be very welcome, young man,’ he said to me, as he proceeded to plug bits of lint up my mother’s nostrils.
‘I’ll get that,’ said Mrs Rogers. Before departing she whispered in the doctor’s ear. ‘I hope she’s not one of those hermaphrodiziacs.’
Dr Hagen smiled and shook his head. ‘Mmmmm,’ he hummed after a while. ‘It’s not staunching the flow. I think we shall have to take you to the hospital, Mrs Phinn.’ Then he turned to me. ‘You can keep your mother company, eh?’
‘Yes, doctor,’ I said, my eyes filling up.
He patted my head. ‘She’ll be all right.’
Dr Hagen, who had other calls to make that day, dropped us off outside the Casualty Department on Doncaster Road.
We were told by a nurse to sit and wait and my mother would be attended to soon. I watched the clock on the wall and prayed it would not be too long. The time dragged and the blood continued to flow. Then my brother Michael arrived, parking his sports car directly opposite the entrance. He was on his way out that night and was dressed, as always, impressively smartly. Thoughtfully Mrs Rogers had left a note saying where we were.
‘Why isn’t she being attended to?’ he demanded of me.
‘I don’t know,’ I told him. ‘We were told to wait.’
‘Are you all right, Mum,’ he asked my mother. She nodded but looked very pale and frightened.
‘How long have you been waiting?’ my brother asked me.
‘About ten minutes,’ I replied.
Michael strode off to the counter. I could hear his raised voice as he demanded some attention, and I saw him stabbing the air with a finger. He told me years later that words like ‘medical negligence’, ‘blatant disregard’ and ‘the NHS Code of Conduct’ had done the trick. His outburst certainly worked, for a moment later my mother was taken in a wheelchair down the long corridor and the blood vessel in her nose was cauterized.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said to my brother. I felt that I should have made more of a fuss and complained as he had done instead of just sitting there, but I’d felt afraid and helpless. ‘I didn’t know what to do,’ I told him.
‘You did all right,’ he said. Michael ordered a taxi to take us home and my mother, cheerful after her ordeal, told him to go and meet the girl with whom he had a date.
The incident had a profound effect upon me. I had never seen my mother ill before, never seen her so helpless and pale, never really contemplated that one day she would not be around. As children we expect that our parents, like the weather, will always be with us. Then they go and there is such a void in our lives.
After I had taken my O levels Mum and Mrs Gill took me for a weekend to Paris as a reward for working hard. My excitement was palpable. It was the first time I had been abroad and the first time I had been on an aeroplane. The tour group consisted of largely elderly people who made a great fuss of the only youngster, pressing sweets and small amounts of money into my hand.
We spent three days in the Bon Accord, a cramped little hotel down a dark and rather smelly backstreet, but to me, who had never stayed in a hotel in my life, it was such an adventure. I loved the breakfast of sweet hot chocolate served in huge white cups, the crusty rolls with soft warm insides and the flaky croissants served with creamy butter and apricot jam. We saw the sights and I marvelled at the Sacré Coeur, the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, but my favourite place was Notre Dame. This was not like St Bede’s, the church I attended in Rotherham. The cathedral was vast, atmospheric and stunningly beautiful, with huge arches and magnificent stained-glass windows. On the Sunday morning we attended High Mass in Notre Dame, crowded with worshippers. I breathed in the incense-filled air and the heavy aroma of lilies, stared spellbound at the procession of the bishop and the attendant priests dressed in great embroidered gold cloaks (copes), listened to the overwhelmingly beautiful music, and joined in with the chanting of the Latin responses, which I knew by heart. I felt part of some very special coterie. I had seen the black and white film based on the Victor Hugo classic Notre Dame de Paris, starring Charles Laughton, and, as I stared heavenwards to the huge arched roof and heard the great tolling of the bells, I could almost imagine somewhere beyond, high in the tower, the hunched figure of Quasimodo swinging madly on the ropes.
During our visit we had our photographs taken on the banks of the Seine. The photographer was a con-man, a friendly, attentive, well-dressed individual. He pretended to take photographs, telling us they could be collected from the kiosk, which he pointed out, the following day. Mum paid him but when we went to collect the photographs they were, of course, not there and neither was the photographer.
My mother’s poor opinion of the French didn’t improve when we went for dinner that evening. Mrs Gill took us to a smart restaurant in Montmartre. It was a sumptuous place with white tablecloths, shining silver cutlery and great glittering chandeliers. I suppose we looked an odd trio: Mrs Gill in her elegant suit with the fur collar, my mother in her far-from-fashionable outfit, accompanied by a gawky long-haired youth in baggy flannels and a shapeless jumper.
A rather snooty waiter, attired in a black apron which very nearly touched the ground, presented us with the menus – huge, square, fancy-looking folders with all the dishes written inside in French. None of us could speak a word of the language and we stared for an inordinate amount of time until Mrs Gill, taking the initiative, called the waiter over and, pointing to the set menu, placed the order. The waiter returned to the table some time later carrying a bowl of cut lemons in small glass dishes, a large bottle containing a liquid which looked a lot like vinegar and a huge plate of oysters, open and sparkling in the bright lights and resting on a bed of brown shiny seaweed. Then the snails arrived on a special china plate with small hollows to accommodate the little shelled creatures. I stared in horror as the waiter placed the small fork before me to enable me to extract the garlic-smelling gastropods and said, smirking, ‘Bon appétit!’
We were cautious eaters in our house back in Rotherham and tended to look with great suspicion on the rare occasions when we were faced with food with which we were unfamiliar. We never ate spaghetti (unless from a tin soaked in tomato sauce), any cheese (other than Cheddar); we never touched garlic, mayonnaise (we ate salad cream), veal, shrimps, yogh
urt, noodles, brown bread, sweet potatoes, pâté, any spices other than salt and pepper or anything else deemed ‘foreign’. Fish was invariably cod and came perfectly rectangular in shape and smothered in bright orange breadcrumbs. When the fish arrived that evening, head, skin, tail, fins, eyes and all, I lost my appetite. The third course, cubes of white meat suspended in a pale yellow jelly, made me feel sick.
Some say that memories, even the most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly with time. Well, the recollection of my mother’s face when she saw the oysters, the snails and the fish with the popping eyes will never fade. Her mouth dropped open.
I watched the other customers, who were downing their own oysters with gusto, holding each shell between finger and thumb, tipping the contents into their open mouths and smacking their lips. I stared in fascination as they poked away at the snail shells with the little forks and cracked open the claws of bright pink lobsters.
We sat upright and motionless, staring at the untouched food with expressions of distaste. Mrs Gill called for the bill, which she paid hurriedly, and we left, I am sure much to the amusement of the waiter and the other diners. The whole meal had remained untouched. Leaving the restaurant my mother observed, ‘I’d rather drink a phial of prussic acid than face that again.’
A couple of weeks after our Parisian adventure Mrs Gill persuaded my rather reluctant mother to accompany her to Harrogate for the day and I went along too. It was an altogether grander place than Rotherham – elegant, genteel, rather full-of-its-own-importance. There were wide tree-lined streets, impressive Georgian mansions, opulent hotels, majestic churches, expensive antique shops, fields and parks and the famous Royal Baths and Pump Room. The discovery of a chalybeate in the sixteenth century changed this small insignificant town into a spa to rival Bath, Cheltenham and Tunbridge Wells. The fame of its healing waters spread and soon the rich and fashionable were flocking to Harrogate to ‘take the waters’.
We had afternoon tea at Bettys Tea Room on Parliament Street. It was the most elegant place I had ever been to. Everything was bright and clean and stylish. We waited in a queue until we were shown to a corner table covered in a spotless and stiff white cloth and set out with delicate china cups, saucers and plates and heavy silver cutlery. In the centre was a single flower in a small glass vase.
A man sat at a grand piano playing classical music, smiling waitresses in pristine white blouses, starched aprons and dainty caps moved serenely from table to table, and refined people drank from their china cups and dabbed the corners of their mouths with pure white napkins. Tea was dispensed from a heavy silver teapot, and a tiered set of sparkling white plates arranged with delicate wafer-thin cucumber and salmon finger sandwiches, tiny iced cakes, butterfly buns, squares of heavy fruit cake, meringues and custard tarts was placed before us.
‘This is more like it, Madge,’ said my mother, looking around approvingly. ‘When I caught sight of those winking oysters and fish with their heads still on and their eyes. Oh, their eyes –’
‘Don’t, Pat,’ interrupted her friend, reaching for a sandwich, ‘Least said.’
I returned to Bettys Tea Room some twenty years later and I was delighted to see that it had changed little. On this occasion I was accompanied by an American professor who wished to visit ‘the best teashop in the country’. As we walked through the grand entrance to the restaurant, Quentin looked as overawed as I had done as an adolescent all those years before. ‘This is truly British,’ he said, before heading for a table by the window already occupied by two elegantly dressed, elderly ladies who were taking afternoon tea.
‘May we join you?’ Quentin asked one of the ladies pleasantly.
If looks could maim, my American colleague would have ended up on crutches, for the face that stared up at him was that of a latter-day Medusa. ‘Certainly not!’ snapped one of the women. ‘You hev your own table at Bettys. Furthermore you should queue.’ She indicated a discreet little brass plaque on a stand which instructed customers to ‘Please wait to be seated.’
We were shown to a table next to the one where the two women were sitting. I could tell as I commented on the surroundings that Quentin was clearly more interested in the conversation on the adjacent table than he was in listening to me.
‘Tell me, Gervase,’ he whispered, nodding his head in the direction of the two women, ‘is this rehearsed? It’s like an Alan Bennett monologue.’
I eavesdropped too.
‘Do you know, Joyce,’ one of the women was saying, ‘I was up and down those steps like a shuttlecock.’ I imagined she meant a yo-yo. ‘If I vomited once, I vomited five times. Mountainous, that was what the sea was like. Up and down like a fiddler’s elbow. I was stuck in the ladies’ lavatory with my head down a toilet bowl, heaving and splashing and the sea was outside heaving and splashing.’ She paused for effect. ‘And where was Sidney?’ I assumed that the Sidney in question was the woman’s long-suffering husband. ‘I’ll tell you where he was. He was in the restaurant with a French bap, a wedge of Camembert cheese and half a bottle of red wine.’ Her companion nodded and grunted encouragingly. ‘I’ll tell you this, Joyce, if he’d have been on the Titanic he would be all on to raise himself up. Then he appears on deck asking me if I was all right and patting me on the back. I won’t repeat what I said. I can’t tell you how relieved I was to get my feet back on terra cotta.’
I recall chuckling and thinking that some time in the future that conversation would appear in one of my books. And indeed it did.
After my father died, my mother would be a regular visitor to our house on Sunday and would stay for lunch. I would ensconce her in a comfortable chair and give her a large sherry and the Sunday newspapers. One Sunday my third son, Dominic, had not done as he had been told – to tidy his bedroom. I was wagging my finger and playing the stern father when he started to smile, then laugh, and finally he collapsed on the floor in paroxysms of laughter. I ballooned with anger and was ready to smack his bottom for laughing at his daddy. As I looked up I caught sight of my mother in the mirror. She was in her chair behind me, pulling the most ridiculous face and waggling her fingers in front of her nose.
‘Mother!’ I exclaimed, no doubt rather pompously. ‘I am endeavouring to instil some discipline here. You are not being very helpful at all.’
‘Oh, do be quiet,’ she sighed. ‘You’re not talking to teachers now.’
‘Mother!’
‘Don’t “Mother!” me. Dominic’s a lovely little boy. He’s kind, considerate, well-behaved. You should thank God you’ve got such a child. My goodness me – an untidy room. Big deal! As I recall, your room was a tip when you were a child and I never went off alarmingly as you are doing now.’
‘Mum –’ I began.
‘You will find that there are far more important things in life than an untidy room, I can tell you.’
‘If I could –’
‘I’ve come round for my Sunday lunch and a bit of peace and quiet and all I get is you sounding off like Hitler on a soapbox.’ I didn’t say anything. Dominic stared at his grandma with his mouth wide open. Christine, my wife, tried to suppress a smile. ‘I don’t suppose I should be telling your daddy off in front of you, Dominic,’ my mother continued, ‘but he’s wrong.’ Then with a twinkle in her eye she added, ‘And he sometimes forgets that he’s my little boy.’
Following a massive stroke my mother was nursed for several months by my sister Christine. It was a tragic sight to see the suffering of such a strong-minded, generous and loving woman, paralysed and unable to speak and feed herself. She died one cold November afternoon like her mother, clutching her rosary beads. Her funeral was a quiet affair at St Mary’s Church, Maltby, near Rotherham. We knew what hymns she would have wanted: ‘O Sacred Heart of Jesus’, ‘O Bread of Heaven’ and ‘Star of the Sea’. They were the traditional hymns she’d grown up with and ones that are now rarely sung or even remembered. My sister read Psalm 121 from the Bible and I read a favourite prayer by Cardinal Henry Ne
wman:
O Lord, support us all the day long, of this troubled life,
Until the shadows lengthen,
And the evening comes,
And the busy world is hushed,
And the fever of life is over,
And our work is done.
Then in your mercy,
Grant us safe lodging and a holy rest
And peace at last.
My brother Alec read at the graveside an American First Nation prayer:
Do not stand at my grave and weep;
I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning’s hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there. I did not die.
8
My mother’s grandmother, Mary Touhy (née Brothers), a native of Portumna, County Galway, and her new husband arrived from rural Ireland to seek a better life across the water shortly after the Great Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s. She used to tell the story of how as a girl she would wade into the River Shannon and catch salmon between her knees. Her husband, Michael, hailed from Clonmel, County Tipperary, and came from a family of carpenters who supplied the coffins for the poorhouse in Nenagh.
Road to the Dales Page 7