Bittersweet: Lessons from My Mother's Kitchen

by Matt McAllester

  Only one line I came across in my reading seemed addressed to me. The author had borrowed it from J. William Worden, an influential grief therapist: For many, two years is not too long.

  When I thought of my mother in those moments of wishing her back, I did not often picture the graying, false-teeth-wearing, puffy-faced woman of sixty-two who had recently died. I longed for a woman who had not really existed for twenty-five years. I mourned for a young, beautiful, happy woman I could remember only in fragments. That just made my yearning all the more absurd, but it was nonetheless insistent. How to get back a woman who had not breathed for a quarter of a century?

  7

  My mother holds a pin in her right hand. Her eyes are closed. She is standing in front of a map of the West Coast of Scotland spread out on a table. She and my father, having left their home in London for a short vacation, are in the basement of her parents' house in Edinburgh. Her hand moves through the air, and the pin pierces the paper of the map. My parents bend down to look where it has landed. The pin is in the sea near a village called Kilchoan on a peninsula named Ardnamurchan. The landmass sticks out from the ragged coastline, pointing directly to the west. Its tip is the westernmost point of mainland Britain.

  It is the summer of 1969 and I am a few months away from being born. I'm a bulge in my mother's belly. My grandmother has agreed to look after my sister, Jane, who is not quite two years old, for a week while my parents visit friends on the West Coast. Before they go to visit their friends, they want a little time on their own, and the pin-in-the-map game is their way of choosing where to go. They pack up their car and head north, past the ancient castle on the hill at Stirling, across the water-soaked plateau of Rannoch Moor, and through the glacier-scooped valley of Glencoe, until they are driving along a single-lane road hugging the shore of the fjord that is Loch Sunart. They're proceeding toward the point where the pin landed, toward the tiny Kilchoan Hotel. Along the way they meet cars head-on and are forced to reverse into the intermittent bulges in the narrow road that have been designed to allow cars to pass each other. My father quickly learns the local ways, raising a hand or a finger or nodding his head or smiling in thanks when other cars reverse for him. For one stretch, the road passes through a mass of rhododenron bushes, purpling the dark, dense green of the trees on the southern coast of this peninsula. And then up through one final shady glade and suddenly they're driving in a landscape almost completely without trees, as the road veers north across the land, through the peat and the heather and the volcanic rocks warming in the sunshine. Below them in a bay named Camas nan Geall is a sandy beach and fields that are home to a Bronze Age burial chamber and a standing stone engraved with a cross; it is said the early Christian missionaries St. Columba and St. Ciaran came to the bay as they spread Christianity to this part of Scotland. The burial chamber is where St. Ciaran is believed to be buried. Above my mother and father as they drive around the rim of the bay are the dark-green slopes of a peak that falls away into the sea. They pass a loch on their right, and at the same time the view opens up ahead of them and there is the northern side of the peninsula and the blue-gray Atlantic and the overlapping islands of Eigg, Muck, Rum, Canna, Skye. Canna is so flat that it appears as a shelf just above the horizon. Skye's high mountains form a crocodile's spine in the clouds.

  My mother and Jane

  My parents have come from their home in London for a few days of this empty, beautiful place. At the Kilchoan Hotel, the landlord cares about food and wine, and my parents are surprised to eat so well.

  When they go out to explore the countryside around them, they drive along the roads of the peninsula, pulling their car over whenever something catches their eye. Leaving the car behind, they walk into the hills or they meander along the sands at Sanna, where the waves come straight in from the Atlantic and crash onto the beach in white spray, catching the sun. Even in mid summer, the whole peninsula of Ardnamurchan is almost deserted.

  One day they are on the road to a place signposted Fascadale, its name a poem in itself, and they pull onto a patch of grass alongside the road. There is a rising hill behind them, covered in heather and bracken and spindly oak trees that can never become fully grown because of the north wind and the salt it carries with it. The sea stretches in front of them, blue and gray, cresting with white. The air is not just clean and fresh but it seems to open up parts of them that the city has kept closed. They lie down on a patch of grass and stare at the blue sky, and my father thinks that this is the most magical place he has ever been to. It is not an easy place, not lush, not sun-smoothed. The coastline squares up, ragged and dark, to confront the furious Atlantic. My mother's belly forms a hillock on my father's horizon. They return to the same spot the next day and lie down again and look at the sky again and the feeling is the same. Perhaps, they say to each other, we should move here.

  The sixties are almost over by the summer of their first visit to Ardnamurchan. My parents have watched the decade rather than participated in it. They are a bit scared of drugs. They own one Beatles LP, one Joplin record, and nothing by Hendrix, the Who, the Rolling Stones, the Doors, or Cream. They see films and plays but not rock concerts. My mother does like the clothes of the era, shopping at Mary Quant's first store just south of Kensington High Street.

  My father is an advertising photographer. He goes to a couple of scenester parties, one hosted by a well-known fashion photographer named Hans Feurer, with whom he shares an agent, but he feels out of place. He walks through Hyde Park on the day of the Rolling Stones concert, July 5, 1969, stopping only to film some of the crowd and the rear of the stage with his movie camera. By coincidence, he is given a job in the summer of 1969, shortly before they go to Scotland, to photograph the cover of the new Rolling Stones record, Let It Bleed. His studio, usually his own domain, is taken over by the heroin-addicted designer Robert Brownjohn, best known for his title sequences for Goldfinger and From Russia with Love. Brownjohn, who will die a year later of a heart attack at the age of forty-four, bullies the cook my father has hired to bake the cake that will be featured on the cover. Her name is Delia Smith. Later she will become Britain's most successful TV chef, but on this day she is being ordered, unhappily, to produce ugly violet and green icing. There are a lot of people doing not very much in the studio other than getting in the way. For lunch, Brownjohn, Keith Richards, assorted hangers-on, and my father head over to the fashionable Mario and Franco restaurant on Chancery Lane. The staff is highly suspicious of this gaggle until someone realizes that the man in the British Rail dining-car attendant's uniform is Keith Richards. The staff begin to fawn. Over lunch my father persuades the excitable Brownjohn not to take a hammer to the cake when they get back to the studio but to allow him to mess it up a little more artfully for the back cover of the album. My father hates it all.

  The only enjoyment he takes from that long day is when he and Richards realize they are both about to become fathers, Richards for the first time, my father for the second. My father finds Richards to be the only vaguely normal person at the table. It is the worst day of his working life thus far.

  My parents go back to Ardnamurchan. After their initial visit in the summer of 1969, they spend months and then, on intermittent visits, years scouring the region for places to live, businesses to buy, routes out of urban living. Their friend Dominic is a partner in these escape plans. They consider buying the hotel where they first stayed. My mother would become a local teacher. They would harvest seaweed. They would buy a ruined crofting village, and my sister and I would grow up there amid the ghosts of the crofters pushed out during the Clearances. Dominic and my father would make a living from the sea—from a trawler, from lobster creels, from diving for scallops. One day, Dominic even persuades some local scallop divers to take him with them. When he reaches the floor of the sea loch and begins breathing ice-cold water into his lungs, he realizes that unless he kicks like hell he will die. Despite what he'd been told about the bends, he erupts like a submarine'
s missile from the surface of the sea loch. That is the end of that particular fantasy. Each plan blossoms over whisky and food and dies with time and testing.

  So my parents scale back. They have already started looking for a piece of land on which to build a house where we can spend occasional long weekends and vacations. One day in late 1972, my father and Dominic, on one of the scouting missions that have taken them all over the West Coast, are shown an isolated bay that is for sale by the local farmer. It is about four miles from where my parents first lay on their backs by the side of the road looking at the blue sky and wondering why they shouldn't live up there. The farmer tells them the land is five acres and it is fine if my parents want to blast a half-mile-long track—it will take dynamite and some heavy machinery, he says—across his land to get down to the bay. There is no electricity, no telephone, and the only source of freshwater is a spring that sits downhill from the obvious spot to build a house. The bay is entirely sheltered by hills of heather, bracken, foxgloves, and primroses and, closer to the sea, small cliffs and black rock, where sea pinks nestle in the furrows of the stone and flutter in the wind. It is a hidden place but broad and open and light. The land sweeps down to the sea. The islands, eight miles away, fill the horizon.

  My father and the farmer agree on a price immediately.

  In 1973, my parents leave London for quieter, cheaper Edinburgh. In the land registry in Edinburgh, my mother finds out the bay's ancient Gaelic name: Port an Droighionn. It means port of the hawthorn or blackthorn. The only tree on the whole property is a stubborn, brave hawthorn that improbably stands on the edge of a small overhang in one of the most exposed corners of the bay. Perhaps it is a descendant of the old tree.

  My father buys a used trailer and, because the track hasn't yet been laid, has the trailer dragged the half mile from the road, across the peat bogs and the hills.

  My parents at Ardnamurchan

  In these days before the track, everything has to be carried that half mile, including me. My father crouches down and leans forward, and I climb onto his back in my Wellington boots and pull myself onto his shoulders, using his forehead as leverage. I think it is funny to put my hands over his eyes and pull his sideburns as he lumbers through the peat bog and bracken, my own personal St. Christopher.

  My father buys a hand pump and some pipe and a large plastic water tank. He digs a hole next to the spring and sinks the tank into the earth. Then he lays a pipe that leads from the spot where the water bubbles out of the hill. The gray tank fills up with icy, clear, delicious water. With a lot of pulling and pushing of the pump's handle, the water creeps up the hill and into jerry cans. We wash in the open air, naked as we are all day long whenever the sun shines.

  We spend all our vacation time in Ardnamurchan, up to eight weeks at a stretch, the four of us (and sometimes our guests) living in that trailer. A man named Andrew blasts our track through the hills in May of 1974, and in November of that year men come and build a Norwegian-designed log house. By the time we spend our first night in the house, in April 1975, Port an Droighionn has become more than home to us all.

  8

  THE DARK-GREEN PLASTIC URN FULL OF MY MOTHER'S ashes, a cheap-looking thing, sat in a back room in the funeral home for a few months until I took it home in a cardboard box, which I stuffed into a yellow shopping bag from Selfridges, the department store. I stowed it next to my sofa, where it stayed until my sister and I could settle on a time to dispose of it properly, according to our mother's wishes.

  It was about the weight of a couple of bricks.

  One day we took the train from London to Edinburgh. The urn went on the overhead baggage shelf, on its side, and I hoped the lid was on firmly or my mother would start pouring out onto us and other passengers.

  Some years earlier, my father had left Edinburgh for the countryside. But knowing that he would “go nuts” in the isolation of Ardnamurchan, he moved to nearby Perthshire with his partner. He had long since grown tired of being a photographer and was now a sculptor. Jane and I drove the forty-five minutes to their house, where we stayed the night. We kept the box in the trunk of our car.

  The next day we drove the five hours to Ardnamurchan, along the same road my parents had first taken in 1969.

  My sister and I parked next to the house and I walked straight down to the shore, over the grass to the rocks and the sea filling the circular bay. It was now early fall, but the breeze off the Atlantic was still warm.

  “Where are you?” I asked out loud. I wasn't expecting an apparition or a voice from the grave. I was hoping I might come up with an answer myself, in the way that a good idea or a clear memory sometimes arrived when I started writing, reading, focusing on a problem. None came. I picked up a large rock, lifted it over my head, and threw it down. Chips flew off it. I picked up the rock again and smashed it back onto the other rocks. It did not help. I felt silly.

  My mother had not stayed a night in the house for more than two decades. In their divorce settlement, Port an Droighionn had gone to my father. I put the box containing her ashes on the white Formica table in the kitchen where she had prepared a thousand meals.

  My sister and I made dinner and invited Dominic. He had never lost his own love of the West Coast and years earlier had built a log house about ten minutes' drive from ours. It was his full-time home. Like my father, he had not seen my mother, or talked with her, for many years. He had known her even before she met my father, when they were teenagers.

  The next morning, after breakfast, my sister and I walked down the slope, and a minute later we were standing in our Wellington boots in the sea. Our mother's will, the simplest of documents, made out on a form bought from a stationer's, explained that she wished her ashes to be scattered into the sea at Port an Droighionn. There was barely a breeze, which was helpful. I didn't want bits of her on my clothes. Together, we held the plastic urn and tipped its contents into the clear water, the small, eddying waves taking the cloud of ashes out into the ocean. I dunked the urn into the water to rinse it out, and my sister and I put our arms around each other.

  In the late afternoon I stood down by the shore for a long time, looking at the sky, which was changing every second as the sun tumbled red into the sea where the islands floated on the horizon. My mother had sat on those rocks, telling me stories of the mermaids and mermen who swam around under the waves we were looking at. We had lain on our backs nearby and pointed to the shapes we saw in the clouds.

  “I know this sounds odd,” I said to my sister when I came back up to the house before dinner, “but I've worked out where Mum is. For me, at least. She's literally in the sea and in the sky.”

  “Okay,” my sister said. “I see.”

  “I feel I can talk to her that way. I'll be able to visit her and talk to her in the sky and the sea. I feel better.”

  Only, days later, I knew I had been conning myself. My mother remained nowhere to me. She was just gone.

  I decided we needed a memorial stone to her. That would give me a focal point for my grief, some way to bring her back, somewhere to talk to her. People go to graves to talk to the dead, don't they?

  My mother swinging me on Swordle Beach in Ardnamurchan

  Weeks and months passed. I found an engraver. I went back to Port an Droighionn and looked for the right stone. I picked some up. Turned others over to see how flat they were. I left them all on the shore and walked back to the house. I was conning myself once more.

  She was nowhere. She was just gone.

  9

  I HAD, AT LEAST, SOME RELICS.

  I now kept many of my clothes in my mother's dark, antique highboy. Its drawers reeked of my mother's clothes, which reeked of the tens of thousands of cigarettes she had smoked while wearing the clothes. My clean sweaters came out smelling as if I had worked a night shift with chain-smoking mortuary workers. I loved that smell and longed for it to stay.

  I set up my parents' old kitchen table—oak, classically English, painted black but
sanded down in sections by my father thirty years earlier, a single Chiquita banana sticker pressed to its underside by me or my sister around the same time—in my study and it became my desk.

  Over the dining table loomed my severe, unsmiling, black-lace-wearing maternal great-great-grandmother, painted by her husband, a well-known Scottish painter of the nineteenth century. My mother, perhaps eighteen years old and wearing a yellow shirt and blue sweater, now smiled gently from my study wall in a portrait I had never before seen, had never known about. Prints I had gazed at for hours as a child and had entirely forgotten—William Blake's etching of Chaucer's pilgrims; country gentlemen in top hats examining a salmon just fished out of a river—emerged from my sister's attic, where so many of my itinerant mother's possessions had remained hidden for years until Jane and I began sorting through them after her death. I took her glasses and their case and found a single gray hair snagged in the nose rests; I put it carefully into a round brass box with a lid and clasp.