We lived with my grandmother, whom my mother idolised. I would describe their relationship as uncomfortably close. Granny was the light of her world. Mum was an only child herself and went everywhere with Granny – a dynamic, feisty woman with whom I had a wonderful relationship. She liked a laugh and took an interest in me without moaning endlessly.
It struck me as odd that my mother and my grandmother constantly nagged my father, though. It was relentless. Granny even went on my mother and father’s honeymoon with them. That’s what I mean by uncomfortably close.
I felt sorry for my dad. And while I preferred his company to my mother’s, he was remote and distant; lost in thought mostly. I could never get close to him. Before he married my mother he had a wild sort of peripatetic life; wherever he laid his hat was his home. He was a traveller in every sense of the word. He didn’t seem suited to the settled, domestic life. He was a wanderer pinned down to a mundane routine. My mum would slag him off constantly until it would get too much for him and he’d go down the pub. When she got in a rage she would boil with frustration at her lot in life. And yet they stayed together – her cooking and cleaning and complaining; him just asking for peace and, when it didn’t come, escaping to a place where he found more comfort. ‘Don’t ever get married,’ she’d scream at me when the slam of the door signalled my dad was off down the White Horse. ‘Don’t get trapped. Don’t have a baby.’ And I never did. Funny, that.
I knew from about the age of seven that I would leave home as early as I could. The first time I went abroad was on a school trip to Belgium and Holland and I remember sitting in a dining hall with the nuns – it was a convent school – and seeing bottled water for the first time. And we were given horsemeat. I remember thinking, ‘This is amazing’, while most of my classmates were miming being sick. It was 1968. On that school trip I went wandering off. I found a free festival. Everyone was tripping their nuts off (although, of course, I didn’t know that at the age of seven) and I was befriended by some hippies.
They gave me some coins to put in a machine that dispensed extremely bouncy Superballs. All the hippies were tripping, bouncing these balls around and laughing and I was happy with them. Then the nuns came. It was over. But I knew then that I was going to leave home as soon as I could and travel for the rest of my life. There was a whole other world out there, and it looked as if adults could have as much fun as children.
In the early-1970s, if you were a white working-class teenage girl in London you went one of two ways. You either became a teeny bopper, who worshipped the Bay City Rollers, read Jackie magazine from cover to cover every week and dreamt of getting married. Or, well, you explored the ‘alternative’ culture. For me, that meant reading Karl Marx, The Little Red Schoolbook, going on the children’s school strike, getting into French existentialism and radical film culture and punk. I wasn’t a Jackie kind of teenager.
I’d been having a close friendship with a teacher who was only a few years older than me. He was in the Worker’s Revolutionary Party. We would go to parties with other teachers of a left-wing persuasion and sit around, smoke dope and talk about existentialism. If this sounds like the worst kind of 1970s radical chic cliché, it was. I used to wear a beret and smoke a pipe. My teacher opened my eyes, opened me up to learning, to revolutionary thinking, to Marxism – although our friendship would certainly be viewed very suspiciously by today’s standards.
He was the first person to suggest I might go and do a degree. He encouraged me to take A levels and then study Art History. I never got any sort of guidance about school or study from my parents. They never had high expectations of me. My world at home was so narrow. I felt as though I lived with this really old couple. I had nothing in common with them.
They seemed impossibly out of touch. They read rubbish newspapers and watched crap game shows. They didn’t know about Albert Camus or the Left Bank or any of the French intellectuals! I couldn’t talk to them about surrealism and modernism and radical lifestyles. So, in my impetuous teenage way, I wrote them off.
And outside of the house I soaked up all this stuff wherever I could find it. I was becoming the person I felt I was meant to be. If my mother had taught me one thing by default, it was that you had to create your own life. Grasp it. She hadn’t done that for herself and she was unfulfilled and miserable. She never went on foreign holidays. She’d never learnt to swim or ride a bike or drive. She never became proficient at anything that would have given her freedom or adventure. She had shied away from life and this was like a warning flag to me. I wasn’t going to repeat her mistakes. I was off. And I wasn’t going to look back.
But I’ve tried so hard, all my life, to make things better for her, to steer her gently towards making good decisions. The only time she ever left the country was when I arranged a holiday and took her and Dad to Turkey for two weeks in 1984. The only photo I have of her looking truly happy is from that holiday. There’s something so melancholy about this person who never really adjusted to modern life, or even adulthood.
Something unknowable lurks in her history and I’ve never got to the bottom of it. Instead I have these faint memories of flaming, violent rows. A terrifying anger directed at Dad and at me. At Dad for going down the pub and being free, as working-class men were in the 1960s. At me for being helpless and noisy and messy. Working-class sulking. Dinners thrown at walls. Awful atmospheres and slamming doors. Was there post-natal depression? Undoubtedly. But no one even had a word for it then. It was one of the many things you just didn’t talk about. Her parents were living with them, and my mother’s close, cloying relationship with her own mother, plus a new baby, was a recipe for tension.
It was resentment built on poverty. A literal financial poverty, but also an emotional poverty – of not talking about feelings. Each person scurrying off into their corner and brooding or storming out and going down the pub. What did my mother do in those first couple of years after my birth when my dad was ostracised and badgered and driven to drink? There was no TV at home in 1961. There were no books in the house. There was just the kitchen, the wireless and the radiogram to break the silence. A person could go crazy with a small baby . . . That milieu, reflected so accurately in British films like Billy Liar or Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, and even sitcoms like Till Death Us Do Part – horrible suffocating décor, dark, heavy, wooden furniture, doilies and linen, and the older generation’s foreboding that everything they had fought for fifteen years earlier in the Second World War was going to be dismantled by a force more alien than Hitler’s war machine: make way for the youthquake of the 1960s and ’70s.
Since I was old enough to write my name, I felt part of a very different tribe to that of my parents. Singing along to the piano was never going to hold any interest for a child whose ears were alerted to psychedelia, the Kinks, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, Andy Warhol, and the explosion of the ‘permissive society’.
I was aware I’d been born into an era of great change. By the age of seven I was glued to Top of the Pops and thrilled by Hammer horror movies. My mother hated it all. To think she was only in her early forties, yet to her even The Beatles were a sign that everything was going to pot. That reactionary thread of Fear of the New ran from right to left, top to bottom. Never has a generation of parents been as appalled as those of the late 1950s/early 1960s. Didn’t matter if you were going down the pit for your living or looking after clients at a private bank – the youth were hairy, scary and had a radical agenda; they talked about revolution and got naked in Hyde Park. They had all the opportunities their parents had never been afforded because of the war. Resentments brewed but the old guard couldn’t stop the tide.
They couldn’t stop me. At the age of fourteen I had become a cuckoo in the nest, a swaggering arty-farty anomaly in this traditional East End home. I wasn’t interested in going to catering school like my mum had expected. I was reading Kafka, studying photography and European cinema. There was absolutely no common ground between us. The gap inc
reased until one day, age fifteen, I just left home. That’s when I consider my real life started. I gave up school – I only had one O level at that point but I couldn’t be bothered staying there. The revolution was coming and I was going to be prepared.
My dad sat there with a face like a lemon. He wasn’t happy but he couldn’t stop me. My mother wanted to know how I was going to look after myself and was full of dire warnings about how I would come ‘crawling back’, but I knew I was going to be OK and that I’d never live in her house again. There were no hugs at the door, but not really any rows either. I think they kind of expected it and they made no real attempts to stop me. I packed a rucksack and hitch-hiked to Devon with my best friend and her older brother. They had older siblings in the West Country who lived in a kind of commune – a tumbledown rural hippie haven where I could have conversations about metaphysics and creativity and God and art and feminism. I had visited them the previous summer and they’d taught me a lot. They were my kind of people. Vegetarian. Practising yoga. Living off the grid. And if that all sounds very worthy, it was tempered by dressing-up days, song writing and playing guitar and laughter and love and sharing and joy. Oh, to be surrounded by joy!
I lived between Devon and various squats in London, enjoying the punk rock explosion. I kept in touch with my parents but only the bare minimum. When I’d visit her, my mum would say, ‘When are you going to get a proper job? When are you going to knuckle down?’ My dear dad would give me money on the sly, but I was supporting myself by then – working in cafes and shops, getting an education. By the time I travelled around Europe in my late teens with a gang of travelling minstrels, I would write airmail letters home and Mum and Dad could see I was going to be OK. They knew I wasn’t going to become a heroin addict or get pregnant or wind up in a gutter somewhere. They knew the path I was following was one of art and learning and adventure. And so their minds were put at rest.
I lived in a cave in Greece for a while and had all sorts of jobs. I was even a shepherdess at one point. I was in love with ‘outsider poets’ and musicians such as Leonard Cohen and Syd Barrett. I was a young, wild, romantic in a beret, smoking Gauloises. Mum and Dad would send packages of tea and tobacco out to me. When I’d phone home my mother told me they loved the letters I’d sent. They’d read them again and again. There was, finally, some acceptance of my unconventional life.
When I moved back to London in the 1980s, I got a degree and a job in the public sector, and I began to have what might be seen as a more regulated relationship with my parents. I would go round there once a month, on a Sunday, especially when my dad was still alive. And it was totally amicable. We’d have Sunday dinner. I’d talk about what I’d been doing; and, as a young firebrand revolutionary, there would still be political arguments. I would carry on my diatribe about the fact they read the bloody Daily Mail. I would rant and rave about Thatcherism. I would talk about the riots, about how society was all going to come tumbling down. I was a bit of a political bore, really. I mean, in my 20s, when I should have been going to discos and having a wild time, I was going to Socialist Workers Party meetings and building barricades.
I have a friend, Jenny, who has worked hard on her relationship with her mother. She’s been a big influence on me in trying to become more compassionate with mine. Now that my mother needs more help, I’ve started to work a four-day week. I spend my Fridays with her – making her meals for the week, sorting out her medication and hospital visits. Five years ago I started talking to her about moving to sheltered housing. Where she is now, the only bathroom is upstairs. It’s not suitable. But she won’t have it; she wouldn’t even entertain a conversation. ‘You are not going to put me in a ’ome,’ she’ll shout at me and anyone else who tries to bring up the prospect of her moving. She would only consider leaving when things have become an absolute emergency.
I am trying to do the right thing. But it’s out of a sense of duty rather than anything else. I care about her. I do. I want her to be comfortable. I want her to be happy. But just as when I was growing up, no matter what anyone does or says, she will never be happy. She doesn’t know how.
In April I bought her a special padded wheelchair, as she hadn’t left the house since December because she can’t walk unaided any more. I pushed her two miles down to the High Street. I took her to the pub for her favourite whisky and ginger, and I showed her the sunlight on the water of the local pond. There was no thanks. No ‘What a lovely day; this is great.’ No, instead, it was just, ‘It ain’t half cold.’ Do you know what she reminds me of? Steptoe and Son. Steptoe and Daughter. That’s us.
‘It ain’t half cold.’ She repeated that twenty times over the next half an hour.
If she dies tomorrow, of course I will feel bad. Mostly because I couldn’t ever get her to help herself or enjoy things more. It’s as though she’s spent her whole life with a cloud of negativity hanging over her. A yoke of gloom. I sensed it as a child. And I wanted to get as far away from that cloud as possible and try and be as positive and pioneering as I could. I did that. I got away. And so, I don’t want to waste any of my emotional time on hypothetical regret. I realised a while back that I’ve just got to write it off.
I feel I’m a daughter in name only. I don’t have any of the sentimental or loving feelings that daughters are supposed to have. It’s the mystery of my mother that drives me nuts. I want to know what her problem is. I want to know why she never tried to live. Really live. If there is one question I have for my mother it is: ‘why have you never taken a leap of faith? Why have you never once just thought ‘fortune favours the brave’? She never cut her own apron strings from her mother; she never made that journey as a child away from the parent. She never rebelled.
I believe something very healthy happened at the end of the 1950s, when people started rebelling against their parents. They became a powerful generation, and made real changes for good in the world. But she never individuated, to use Jung’s terminology. I don’t understand why not. I’d like to understand.
I think it’s too late, though. If I have work to do with my mother it’s getting her to accept her own mortality. She’s in denial about her mobility, her age, her oncoming dementia. I’d like to give her a good send-off, though. We’re of a similar mind when it comes to green issues. She thinks the same way I do, that we are ruining the planet. I know she wants a biodegradable coffin and she showed me a brochure with a bamboo casket being carried into a bluebell grove. ‘Isn’t that lovely,’ she said. So I suppose I could talk to her about that. I suppose that is one thing I could do.
My main preoccupation now is that I don’t want to witness the cruelty of her at 100, or 103 or 106, dribbling and incontinent. I cannot be the one looking after her while the rest of my life stops happening.
Although it sounds awful and mercenary, the truth is she’s sitting on a house worth a fair bit of money, simply because it’s in London. If she died I could sell it and go and live my dream. I don’t want to send people on singles’ holidays. I want to see more of the world myself! I have a whole other part of my life to live. Reluctant Daughter? Reluctant is one word for how I feel. Frustrated is more accurate.
Reflections on the Reluctant Daughter
The only time that I – Natasha – can remember being a full-on Reluctant Daughter was during my teens. Our house was a very busy one. We were a very active family. The front hallway was clogged up with gear bags, dirty runners, rugby boots and hurling sticks. A busy house doesn’t run itself. We all had house jobs. I had to keep the bathrooms clean during the week, and Sorcha was the best cook so she made dinner twice a week. My youngest sister Kate hoovered and Oisín cut the grass, fixed whatever needed fixing and decluttered the bulging garden shed full of bicycles, tins of old paint, rejected furniture and stuff with no name that found its home there from our already over-stuffed house. Cilian had to clear out the ashes from the fire and make sure that both the turf basket and coal scuttle were full. He was the biggest skiver. He reg
ularly tried to pay one of us off to do his jobs.
Like millions of mothers, my mother was exasperated and exhausted with all this responsibility. As the eldest daughter, a lot of this was lumped on me. I knew that as the eldest daughter I should have pulled my weight and given her the support that she needed, but for those two reluctant years, I wanted out. Instead of going straight home after school to help with the chores, I spent hours in my friend Jennifer Cunningham’s house drinking coffee, listening to CDs, analysing our lives and the lives of others. I escaped to my boyfriend’s house as often as possible, too, which seemed like a sanctuary compared to the noise and chaos of the Fennell household. I also had a part-time job in the now world-famous Druid Theatre as a member of their front-of-house team. I immersed myself night after night in the world of Tom Murphy’s Conversations on a Homecoming or Brian Friel’s Translations. I didn’t want to be my mother’s daughter and I certainly did not want to be the eldest daughter.
During that time, my mother hardly got a look in. But somehow wisdom prevailed and I snapped out of my Reluctant Daughter phase. And that’s just what it was. A phase. It never occurred to me that that reluctance might be with you your whole life.
In Anna’s case she is a reluctant only child with no siblings to share the burden of looking after an ageing mother. What’s worse? To abandon an ageing mother for the sake of your own sanity or to be in a situation where you feel you’ve no choice but to do the ‘right thing’ and look after her? They both sound like hell. Either you’re plagued by the guilt that comes with not taking care of her or you endure the miserable existence of looking after a woman you can’t stand.
The Daughterhood Page 13