by Mary Portas
‘Anti-depressants,’ said Michael. ‘I’ve got the box.’
The doctor looked at the ambulance men pushing the trolley.
‘Get her into the examination room. NOW.’
And then she was gone.
A hospital room
We were sure that Mum would recover. She was in hospital and the doctors would make her well again. Even when they diagnosed her with meningitis, we didn’t really understand what it meant. No one explained. No one sat us down to tell us how serious it could be. We’d never even heard of meningitis and were so convinced Mum would soon be fine that Michael left for a holiday he’d previously booked with friends a couple of days after she went into hospital.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said to him. ‘We’re all here and Tish is home soon. Mum will be wondering what all the fuss was about by the time you get home.’
When Tish got back from Spain, she, too, returned to normal life. After leaving St Joan’s and working as a dispenser at Boots for two years, she’d got a place on a nursing course at University College Hospital and was due to start within a couple of days. She was told she’d lose her place if she didn’t. She had no choice. We were on the phone every day to the hospital. Joe, Dad and I went in to see Mum daily and all of us went at weekends. But even as she lay still and silent on her bed, it seemed that no one could answer our questions.
When a doctor told us that Mum had encephalitis as well as meningitis and might be brain-damaged, if she recovered consciousness, I watched my father’s spirit ebb away with each word. When she contracted pneumonia and was moved into intensive care, he sat by her bed for hour after hour and waited for her to wake up. We never stopped believing that she would because any other possibility was unimaginable.
No one explained just how misplaced our hope might be. The doctors had told us that Mum was seriously ill but also said that some people recovered from meningitis. These words were the only ones we clung to. We had no true understanding of what was happening and it was a time when patients and their families didn’t question those in authority and medical information was scarce. Doctors walked away hurriedly from Mum’s bedside before we got a chance to talk to them; nurses washed her and changed her sheets but didn’t answer questions. Families were seen but not heard. Dad didn’t ask too many questions and we didn’t either.
For eighteen days, we sat waiting for Mum to open her eyes as we prayed using the rosary we’d tied to the end of her bed. The slippers Tish had bought Mum as a present from Spain sat underneath her bed waiting for the day when she would be up again to wear them. It was as if we’d entered another world. Everything was grey, unfocused. We didn’t know where we were or which direction we were heading in.
Robertson’s raspberry jam
Mum looks thin. Like a tiny doll lying on the bed beside me. Even her hair looks different. Less red. The fire gone. I take her hand in mine. Her wedding ring is loose now. I should tell Dad. We don’t want it to fall off.
I wonder what she’ll want to eat when she wakes up. We’ll have to make sure that she has exactly what she asks for. Maybe I can bake her a cake. A Victoria sponge. She likes those.
‘Gentle, Mary!’ she’d told me, the first time I’d made one with her. ‘You’ve got to keep the air in the mixture so it will be light as a feather.’
She was standing beside me in the kitchen, patiently watching me cream together the butter and sugar in preparation for the flour and eggs.
‘That’s it,’ she’d said, as she watched. ‘You’re doing well. Not too much, though.’
‘But how do you know when it’s enough?’
‘You just know if you do it enough times,’ she told me, with a smile. ‘You’ll learn. Now, what jam do you want to put in the middle?’
I looked at her.
‘Well, I don’t need to ask that, now, do I?’ she said, as she reached into the cupboard and pulled out the raspberry jam.
I think of all the things that Mum knows how to do as I gently stroke her hand: how to get blackcurrant stains out of white shirts; how to knit a striped jumper; how to make lemon curd; how to sew the hem on a skirt. I’ve never asked her to teach me any of them because she is always there. I will, though, when she wakes up. Mum will show me. She always does.
Head tennis racquet
The phone rang early one evening soon after we got home from the hospital. I thought it would be Geraldine calling to ask if I wanted to play tennis. We hadn’t told most people about Mum’s illness, and as I looked at my racquet lying on the hall floor, I knew I didn’t want to speak to Geraldine. What was happening felt so private that I couldn’t find the words. I didn’t want to speak them out loud.
But then I realized it might be the hospital. Mum might have woken up. Running to the phone, I snatched it up.
‘Hello?’
‘Is Mr Newton there, please?’ a voice asked.
‘No. This is his daughter.’
‘Can you contact him?’
‘Yes. But why?’
‘This is Peace Memorial Hospital. We will need you to come down as soon as you can.’
I phoned Dad and Joe to ask them to meet us at the hospital before getting into the car with Michael and Lawrence. Tish’s boyfriend, Phil, had gone to pick her up from the train and together we gathered in a room at the hospital. My heart clenched inside me as the doctor walked in. Not more bad news. Please don’t tell us that she has got worse.
‘I’m so sorry,’ the doctor said, in a low voice, as he looked at us.
I stared at him, confused. What did he mean? I didn’t understand.
‘Mrs Newton passed away peacefully an hour ago,’ the doctor said. ‘Would you like to see her?’
My head feels light, as if I’m at the highest point on a swing, suspended in the moment when you feel weightless for a second before plunging downwards. I stare at the doctor. Mum can’t have died. It isn’t possible.
But then we walk into the room where she is lying still on a bed. My mother looks like one of the statues she’s spent a lifetime praying to. As we wordlessly watch, Dad sits down on a chair beside her, stretches his body across hers and starts to sob.
Mushroom vol au vents
Mushroom vol au vents, egg sandwiches and Victoria sponge; pork pies, cheese on sticks and coffee cake; sausages, salmon rolls and iced buns. Don’t forget three sugars for Aunty Peggy. Mustn’t forget. Mum wouldn’t want me to forget.
‘Will you butter the bread, Tish?’ I ask.
She looks like a wounded animal. So does Dad. When he put his arm around me at the funeral earlier, he felt smaller somehow. It’s as if we’ve all been sent spinning in different directions and he’s the furthest one away. When we got into the car a few days ago to go to the funeral director’s, he had sat behind the wheel for a moment before his face crumpled and tears started to run down it.
‘Please don’t cry, Dad,’ I said. ‘Please don’t.’
‘But you’ve got all your lives ahead of you and I’ve got nothing,’ he sobbed. ‘She’s gone. I’ve got nothing now.’
He wiped furiously at his face before starting the car, and we didn’t say another word. But I knew in that moment that Dad couldn’t be the one to keep us all going now. He was lost in his own grief. Michael was driving us forward but soon he’d be leaving because his job took him away a lot to places like Scotland and even Saudi Arabia. Tish was at college in London during the week and would only be back at weekends. It would be Joe, Lawrence, Dad and me from Monday to Friday, and Dad could hardly do a thing for himself, let alone us. A chasm had opened up in our family and I knew instinctively that I must stop everyone disappearing inside it. Mum would never have wanted us to fall apart without her.
‘Has the kettle boiled?’ Michael says, as he walks into the kitchen.
The house is full – people chatting, laughing as they remember Mum, crying sometimes too. Peggy, Betty and Agnes have come over from Ireland. Uncle Jim and Aunty Mary are putting some of them up in Camden and othe
rs are staying with us. Dick Froome is here. Bill Green too. Cathy, Jean and Ruth and their husbands. Irish Catholic friends from St Helen’s, English ones from Watford, Father Bussey and Father John. I never knew Mum had so many friends until I walked into the church and saw that it was packed.
I’m relieved that the house is filled with people and chatter. There are people in and out all the time now, friends and relatives who bring us food and reminisce about Mum: talk about her, shed a tear or laugh as they remember. The house hums to the sound of Irish voices, the glug of the teapot being filled and women who gather me up in their arms. It’s as if Mum is still here with us somehow. The presence of all these people distracts me from looking at her empty chair and the books beside it. These guests fill the house and paper over the gaping silence that I know will soon come.
Everyone will have to leave. They will go back to their own lives, their own families. I cannot imagine how we are ever going to learn to be six instead of seven.
Jonelle wash bag
I stare at the wash bag sitting on my bedside table. Mum gave it to me for my seventeenth birthday a couple of months ago.
‘It’s for when you travel,’ she’d said, with a smile.
She knew I wanted to go abroad and see life, understood that I was ready to start spreading my wings just a little beyond the world she’d made for me. But now it’s as if the guy ropes that have always tethered me to the earth have been cut and I’m floating.
I do not want to try to fly alone. Not yet. I don’t feel safe.
Lamb with leeks
We sit silently at the kitchen table. We can’t use the one in the living room yet. Not without her. We move around the house almost apologetically, not knowing how to fill it properly.
‘Come on, everyone,’ Michael says, as he puts plates in front of us. ‘Eat up now!’
Everyone looks silently at their food. Mum would never have made lamb with leeks. Nor would she have bought potted shrimps and pâté. Michael is doing his best to look after us all but Lawrence and Joe seem lost and Tish cannot stop crying. I want to scream at her.
‘Why don’t we go up to see Mum today?’ I ask her sometimes, because I like to go to the grave and sit beside it, talking to Mum.
I tell her how I feel and how much I love her. Then I close my eyes as tight as I can and wait until I hear her voice inside my head and feel her with me. Nothing is real now except the grave and the fear in my stomach that sinks into place each morning in the first split seconds after I wake and the silence settles heavily on me. It is like a lead weight as I lie in bed willing myself to get up and go downstairs to the empty kitchen. No smell of toast or sound of the teapot being filled. No radio playing. Just emptiness. Our home is hollow. And however hard I try to fill it, I cannot.
Sometimes I find myself saying the words in my head.
‘Mum is gone. Mum is gone. Mum is gone.’
But, try as I might, it feels as if someone else is speaking a language inside me that I do not understand.
Tish always shakes her head when I suggest going to see Mum.
‘I just can’t, Mary,’ she whispers, and anger fills me.
We limp on through the summer, clinging together, turning in on ourselves as we shut out the world. Each night we sit in the Front Room talking about Mum, remembering her, not daring to stop talking for fear of losing her presence. The television doesn’t go on. It would seem too normal to watch it. We cannot use the living room because Mum’s chair is still there. By September, Tish and Michael have started work again. Six becomes four and I am left with Dad, Joe and Lawrence.
Condolences
‘Ach, she was a saint your mother and no doubt about it,’ the elderly Irish woman says, as we stand in the street. ‘To think that she was right as rain one day and then gone. It’s past thinking about. A woman like that. Five children too. She was a saint so she was.’
I stare at the woman, trying to get away, but she won’t stop talking.
‘I just couldn’t believe it when I heard the news. “Not Theresa Newton,” I said. It’s a terrible thing. And her only a young woman. Tragic. Just tragic.’
Death, like birth, is a universal truth. But where one is celebrated, it felt to me that the other was often met with either too much talking or painful silence. I understood why my classmates didn’t say much when I got back to school after the summer holidays. They simply gathered me up, carried me with them and I was thankful that they were there each day. School was something to cling to.
The only person at St Joan’s who really talked to me about what had happened was Sister St James, who still came back occasionally and called me in to see her when the autumn term of my final A-level year started.
‘I’m so terribly sorry about your mother, Mary,’ she said gently. ‘When you’re a nun, people often think that you have made the greatest sacrifice by giving your life to God. But the most important thing anyone can do is to bring children into the world and raise a family. Your mother brought up five so that means she did the biggest job anyone can.’
A tear had slipped down Sister St James’s face as she looked at me and I’d stared wordlessly back at her.
There were other people who reached out, too. Aunty Cathy, Ruth, Jean, Don, Sadie, Harry and Sheila dropped in whenever they could, arriving with meals and cakes as they bustled around making pots of tea and asking how we were or trying to get Dad to talk. But there were times when I almost wished they wouldn’t come, moments when I saw grief etched so sharply on their faces that I wasn’t sure I could face dealing with their loss as well as ours. I didn’t want them to see us struggling, to know how hard we were finding it to cope.
My Boots supervisor, Jenny Xeri, would walk out of the shop to give me a hug when she saw me get off the bus from school, and one day her sister Bet came out with her.
‘There isn’t a God,’ she’d said, as she stood with us. ‘Because if there was, then how could He have let this happen?’
As I looked at her, I thought of Mum saying the Hail Mary as she was dying.
‘There is,’ I said, because I knew that He had been with her even as she was leaving us.
I understood why people used words like ‘tragedy’, ‘devastating’ and ‘senseless’ when they talked to me. But there was only one thing I wanted from them – hope – and no one could give it to me.
Atrixo hand cream
When I was a child, Mum would finish the washing-up and dry her hands before reaching for the tube of Atrixo she kept by the sink next to the Fairy Liquid. With a look of pleasure crossing her face, she’d rub it into skin worked hard by constant washing, cooking and cleaning. When I was sitting next to her at the kitchen table, the distinctive smell of Atrixo would fill the air as she asked me how I was getting on with my homework or what had happened that day at school.
Now I stare at the tube of cream still lying by the sink. Beside it is another one that Mum cut down to get the last bits out before throwing it away. Always careful. Always making the pennies last.
Each day I pick up the tubes and carry them to the bin. But every time I take the lid off, my hand hovers for a moment in mid-air before I turn and walk back to the sink. Then I carefully put the tubes back in the same place they’ve always been.
Glade air freshener
My heart thrums as I put my key into the lock. I still can’t get used to having one. There never was the need before because Mum was always at home. I hate this key.
Cold cigarette smoke hangs in the air as I walk into the house. Dad had a bad night last night and spent all evening alone in the Front Room listening to Josef Locke records. He does this every night now. He’s even stopped feeding the pigeons so I have to do it. Dad just works, comes home and goes into the Front Room. It’s almost beginning to feel like a relief when he does, though. At least Lawrence and I can then sit quietly together and watch television.
‘Dad’s just really sad,’ I say to him, as we sit side by side. ‘He’ll get better.’
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But I know that Lawrence won’t sleep for hours to come when he goes up to his bedroom while I stay downstairs putting off the time until I, too, will have to go to bed. Doing some vacuuming or putting a wash on, I don’t bother to think about the essays I have to write for school as the sounds of the music we once all listened to together play for my father alone in the Front Room.
It was only after my mother’s death that I started to understand why she’d stuck to such a rigid routine all her life. My father was not a lazy man. With Mum gone, he would try to iron his shirts in the mornings and change the bed sheets with me at weekends. He did what he could, and Michael, Joe and Tish helped too at weekends. But Dad had no real clue about how to run a house so I had to learn.
My life divided into two distinct parts: the weekend when we were all at home together and the weekdays when it felt as if just Lawrence and I were living in the house because Dad was either at Clements or shut in the Front Room and Joe was always working.
With the start of the new school term at St Joan’s, I quickly realized that I had to decide what jobs to do, and when, if I was going to stand a hope of keeping the house the least bit together. But I vacuumed one day only to find the carpets covered with muck the next, washed clothes but forgot to iron them in time for school and constantly ran out of bread and milk. Looking out of the window as I did the dishes, I’d see weeds growing in the garden. Our home was decaying around us.
I only realized that I had to change the sheets more regularly when they started to smell. The washing piled up and the ironing basket was constantly full. One day, as Lawrence left for school, I’d noticed that the collar of his shirt was dirty and had hardly been able to breathe when I saw it. I’d thought that heaping Omo into the washing-machine would be enough to get out the stains but it wasn’t. Mum would never have let Lawrence leave for school like that.