I was formed by all those years I couldn’t wait to pass. Shaped by the woman I couldn’t bear to lose or wait to get away from. And now I’m turning into her. I’ve fought it for so long but it’s happening, I’m turning into my lone, outspoken mother.
55 First thing I did when we got in was boil the kettle for a cup of tea, even though I don’t drink tea. I heard myself making the same noise Mum used to make, a click of the tongue and a loud out-breath, after the first sip. Even now all I need is a McVitie’s milk chocolate digestive and a cup of tea and I’ve conjured her back to life – we’re back in our steamed-up 1970s council-flat kitchen, Mum baking rock cakes, me drawing pictures at the Formica table. After the tea Vida and I went downstairs and climbed into my bed. We didn’t say anything but neither of us wanted to be alone. She fell asleep immediately. I lay beside her for about half an hour, then slipped out from under the quilt and went back upstairs to the kitchen. That’s where we came in, isn’t it? When I was sitting at the table writing a list of things to do, scared I wasn’t feeling anything about Mum’s death. Wondering whether I was in shock or a psychopath.
Reboot
I’ve had to rebuild myself many times during my life, after numerous shocks and failures, but Mum was always by my side, helping and advising me. Now she’s dead I can build myself into anyone I want, someone new, if I like. I could stop being that judgemental and unforgiving person I was when she was alive and we’d sit at the kitchen table dismissing people who weren’t perfect. Now I’m solvent there’s no need to try and emulate the detached male brain (as I see it) to succeed, or to act strong and untouchable all the time to please Mum. I could undo a bit of that. I could shift from being a person who trusts objects more than people, who’d rather stay single than risk being hurt, and work towards becoming a trusting and open-hearted human being. I could learn that you don’t have to hate or destroy someone or something to walk away. And do I have to keep thinking all men are idiots now Mum’s gone? Perhaps a man can be right. Sometimes. (Steady on, Viv, no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.) Is it possible I could become the kind of steady, calm and non-judgemental person I’ve always admired, someone who enjoys the grey areas? I railed against grey and beige when I was young. Now I enjoy them, subtle, soft, gentle, clouds, rain, clay, earth, mud.
Who am I kidding? I’m going to continue being that person who finds other people a strain, is a bit of a recluse, unforgiving, reads a lot, is secretly shy, says the wrong thing at parties, sleeps too much and is mistrustful and solitary.
One of the last things Mum said to me was, ‘You can forgive people, you know.’ I knew what she meant: now that she was on her way out, I should forgive her. I was shocked when she said it. That’s a joke coming from you, I thought. You’ve never forgiven anyone in your life and you’ve taught me to be the same. Never forgive, never forget – that was our family motto. As she mellowed, Mum grudgingly amended it to Forgive, but never forget. So her saying to me, ‘You can forgive people’ – with an irritable tone in her voice as if I was a bit stupid for not getting it – was like she’d suddenly changed her religion after ninety-five years. (She did start saying she believed in God towards the end, even though she’d always been agnostic.) I remember sitting in our doctor’s surgery in the 1960s and him quietly explaining to Mum across his desk, ‘Not everyone’s out to persecute the Albertines.’ That was our default stance: everyone’s against us, out to use us, do us wrong, take things from us, bleed us dry, discard us and then laugh and point at us lying in the gutter. The odd thing about our paranoia is that we didn’t have anything for anyone to take, no money, no home, no clothes, no toys and no contacts (all of which I still find difficult to share). All we had was our pride, our privacy and our bodies (which for most of my life I haven’t minded sharing at all).
56 When Vida woke up she said she wanted to stay in bed, so I said if she was OK with being on her own for twenty minutes I’d walk to Wilton Way and buy us a cake each for breakfast. On the way to the cake shop I kept stopping to shake the wet leaves off the soles of my brown suede Whistles boots. I bought them at Sue Ryder, the charity shop in Camden Town. Camden’s great for charity shops, the golden mile down the high street from Mornington Crescent station to the public toilets on the crossroads, then turn left up Parkway to Sue Ryder to finish off. I know how to find good clothes in those places. First scan the rails for an awkward colour, anything that jumps out as being a bit ugly, like dirty mustard, salmon pink or olive green with a bit too much brown in it. A print with an unusual combination of colours – dark green and pink, bright orange and ultramarine – is also worth checking out. If the quality of the fabric is good, pull the garment out and check the label. Well-cut clothes can look misshapen on a hanger because they’re cut to look good on the body. I’ll buy a good piece if it fits, even if it doesn’t sometimes. Even if it’s not my style or has short sleeves, or I don’t like the shape or the buttons. I learn to love it. I never tire of clothes I’ve bought that I’ve had to adjust to. It’s the compromise, the awkward gap that has to be bridged that makes something, someone, lovable.
Unfit Mother
You don’t know worry until you’ve had a child.
Mum
In the care home, with just a few days left to live, Mum gave me a half-hearted smile, sighed and said, ‘I suppose I’ve quite enjoyed my life.’ The game was up, she couldn’t pretend any more. Her pale-grey eyes were heartbroken. I knew then that my storytelling and escapades were not enough to keep back the tide of guilt and pain any longer. She must have seen my face fall because she added, ‘You’ve been a good daughter, Vivvy,’ in a gentle voice and patted my hand. ‘Really, Mum?’ I asked, searching her face for the truth. I didn’t believe her. I don’t think I was a good daughter and now it’s too late to be one. Right up until the end I was hopeless. Just a few weeks before she died Mum asked me to cut her fingernails, which was an honour as she hated people doing things for her. I accidentally snipped the tip of one of her fingers off. Blood gushed out. I jammed some tissues into her hand and ran off to find someone. I was still saying sorry as the nurse bandaged up her finger, but Mum just laughed and said it didn’t matter. Six heart attacks, arms and legs red and black from pooled blood and bruising, cancer in one eye, emphysema, incontinence and the tip of her finger missing, never once did Mum cry out or mention pain. Old school.
Mum admitting she’d only ‘quite enjoyed’ her life makes so much more sense to me now I’ve read her diary. It’s not that Pascale and I weren’t enough to make her happy, or that we were bad children, as I always suspected we were. Mum said those words, whether she knew it or not, because of events that happened before we were born, the consequences of which were too distressing for her to live peaceably alongside. If she’d been born even fifteen years later, the difficult situations she found herself in might have been redeemable or not have happened at all.
No one comes through life clean, Mum. You did your best, you hung on in there for ninety-five years and you fought when women weren’t supposed to fight. If you hadn’t made those mistakes with David, you wouldn’t have tried so hard with us, and if you hadn’t tried so hard with us, I’m not sure we would have survived.
Love
I never came across that everlasting, romantic, mythic love with a man that I read and dreamed about as a young woman. I get the same lurching thrill now when I’m about to sit down to an egg mayonnaise sandwich and a packet of plain crisps as I used to get when I fancied someone. I’ve had plenty of adventures – bit fed up with adventures, to be honest, knackered – and two great loves: my mother and my daughter. My mother and I knew each other for fifty-nine years, and although our relationship was volatile, complicated and sometimes painful, it survived – and anyway, isn’t all love difficult? I’m proud that we adapted to each other and stuck it out. ‘Did I see Grandma enough?’ I asked Vida two days after Mum’s death. I knew I should keep these thoughts to myself but I didn’t have anyone else to ask. �
�Yes,’ she replied. ‘You physically couldn’t have seen her any more than you did.’
Vida is so emotionally intelligent and kind, I’m going to miss her so much when she leaves home. I dread it, been dreading it since she was born. I remember when she started getting too heavy for me to carry and I had to keep putting her down – like I had to keep putting Mum down in my dream. Year by year Vida has grown further away from me. First I carried her, then we held hands. At three years old she started doing half-days at nursery and I didn’t see her all day like I used to and no longer knew everything about her life. Then she didn’t want to hold hands any more and confided in her friends instead of me. Now I get to wave goodbye from the front door as she strides confidently out of my sight.
And sometimes I get to stand in the audience and watch her play bass with her band, just like Mum used to watch me.
57 I turned left out of Eleanor Road onto Wilton Way with the image of a spelt and prune scone in my head. There are a couple of shops to pass before you reach the cake shop. First there’s J. Glinert, which has shelves sparsely dotted with odd objects that seem to have no connection to each other: a miniature brass watering can, old-fashioned bristle shaving brushes, spirit levels, paperweights with real dandelion clocks suspended inside them, a little black book to stick vintage fruit stickers in. As I walked I chanted all the fruit sticker names I could remember
from my childhood in time with my footsteps: Del Monte, Jaffa, Outspan, Sunkist, Fyffes (which I pronounced ‘Fiffees’ as a child), Cape. Del Monte, Jaffa, Outspan, Sunkist, Fyffes, Cape. Del Monte, Jaffa, Outspan, Sunkist, Fyffes, Cape. Fruit labels were important when I was a teenager; we boycotted the South African ones because of apartheid. The next shop along, Momosan, is owned by a young Japanese woman. I often catch a glimpse of her through the open door, sweeping the floor with a broom made from rushes bound together with red-and-white-striped string. Her window is peppered with tiny earthenware tea pots, cups without handles and pointy grey felt slippers that look as if they’re from a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. Next there’s a steamed-up cafe, but I find their cakes too exotic, red fruit and whipped cream oozing out from between wedges of yellow sponge. All I wanted that morning was plain brown cake. Not even chocolate cake would do. I needed penance cake. Punishment cake. Cake for someone who’d caused a scene at her mother’s deathbed.
Lonelady*
Whatever I do today has to be done right because I don’t have time to do it over again.
Betty Soskin, ninety-five-year-old park ranger, Richmond, California
I’ve felt absolutely alone – not lonely, I feel that all the time – once before: when I had cancer and it looked like I wasn’t going to make it. I feel it again now. It’s not so terrible a feeling, aloneness, or it’s so terrible it’s mind-blowing. I’ve never felt so present as I do now, every second on the brink of life and death. No sense of space or scale. I picture myself as a tiny person teetering on the rim of a glass of milk. (I don’t know why milk, I don’t like milk – a drink from childhood, perhaps, when I felt powerless.) I could go either way: lose my footing, fall in and drown, or recover my balance and survive. I’m a cell expanding and contracting, aware of my smallness and the hugeness of the universe at the same time. My world is without edges – and you know how I love edges and borders, frames, thick black outlines and enclosures. I have no cousins, aunts or uncles (they’re either dead or Mum fell out with them, and I knew she would think I was being disloyal if I contacted them, so we’ve lost touch), my sister is out of my life, my niece lives in America and Vida is on her own path. I don’t feel I belong to any country (I live in England but have no British blood). I don’t believe in romantic love, gods, art, politics or rock and roll, and I don’t understand science. I have no one and nothing to lean on.
And I think that’s exciting.
I do have my dodgy health, my cobbled-together education and my imagination; those are the things I work hard to protect and turn to when I need to entertain myself or get out of a fix. I’ve explained to Vida that I don’t want her to feel responsible for my happiness, and what a weight it was to have a mother who had no friends and no partner, staying in every night, her only social life hearing about her daughter’s antics (oh dear, that does sound like me).
I don’t fear being old and alone. I saw my mother do it, and she did it very well, lived to a ripe old age and enjoyed her independence. Also, there were lots of single older women around when I was growing up because I was born nine years after the end of the Second World War. I never got the sense from them that something was missing from their lives, or that they were weak or pathetic. They came across as strong and resilient, even intimidating.
If I wasn’t doing well in my work I’d be considered a failure in this society because I don’t have many friends and I stay home a lot. If I ever say, ‘OK. Bit lonely,’ when someone asks me how I am, they wince with embarrassment. I’m not looking for sympathy, I state it as a fact, the same way I’d say I’ve got a cold or backache. I consider my type of loneliness as on a par with those ailments – backache can be worse – and there’s no reason to hide it. It’s one of the consequences of the path I chose: to be creative in a society that didn’t support female artists (it’s still difficult). Loneliness is one of our last taboos – not many left now to have a laugh and irritate people with. I’m lonely, so what. Lonely, lonely, lonely. The more I say it the less power the word has. Although I’m not immune to the pressure to be seen to be doing things and having lots of friends. After a few quiet weeks, doubt creeps in and I think, I should be going out or having people round. And photographing it. Life in the ‘advanced economies’ is so much about acquiring and achieving, succeeding and being busy and popular, even when you’re older. And then you die.
Last year I went to the crematorium where Mum’s ashes are scattered and booked three lines for myself in the space after her entry in the Remembrance Book. ‘Called to rest after a life well-lived’ is her wording, the same as grandmother Frieda’s entry. They’re both on the same page. We’ll all be in there together one day.
Gravestones were the Facebook profiles of the old days. Never believe what’s written on a gravestone – ‘Loving wife, mother and daughter’. Except maybe the dates, but even then …
When she was a teenager, my cousin Patricia ran off down a country lane in a strop very late one night after a family row. Mum, Pascale and I were visiting at the time and I remember all the grown-ups sitting around the kitchen table talking and worrying about what would happen to Patricia if they couldn’t find her. Mostly I remember my Aunty Phyllis, Patricia’s mother, saying, ‘If anything happens to her, I’m going to write on her gravestone, “Here Lies a Bloody Silly Cow”.’ (I loved Aunty Phil, she was so funny.)
* Musician Julie Campbell, lonelady.co.uk
58 I said a little prayer as I crossed Navarino Road. The prayer wasn’t for Mum, it was for the eight-foot wall on the corner, covered in burnt sienna flakes and shards of flaking duck-egg blue and vanilla paint. Please, please let the owners never mend or repaint this beautiful wall. (It was painted over with a murky red in 2017, but one corner remains unpainted.) Pale-green letters spelling ‘Violet’ on a whitewashed wall, two small round aluminium tables and a blackboard propped open on the pavement signalled that I’d arrived at my destination. The smell of cinnamon and vanilla hit me so hard when I pushed the door open that I wanted to snatch every cake I could see and stuff it into my mouth. Music was playing. I wondered who the woman singing was, the instrumentation was so simple and the voice so high and peculiar. I hadn’t felt that intrigued by music for ages. I strained to catch the words. It was Neil Young, about 1970. I was disappointed in myself. The counter was piled high with pastries and cupcakes, chocolate, sea-salt and rye cookies, mini banana muffins, red velvet cupcakes with salted caramel icing. No spelt scone. I scanned the cakes again, anxiety mounting in my chest. I must have missed the scones, I’m not looking properly, I’m upset about Mum. No spe
lt scone would be too much to bear. Then I spotted a lumpy brown triangle at the back, ‘Buckwheat and Apple Scone’ written on a white paper flag taped to a toothpick and poked into its middle. Not spelt, but it would do. I wandered home through London Fields swinging a small white paper carrier bag containing the buckwheat scone and a large banana muffin, passing the outdoor swimming pool and the hole-in-the-wall cafe where people with straggly wet hair sat at wooden tables sipping hot chocolate.
Launch
When I began to write our story down, I thought I was writing a record of hate but somehow the hate has got mislaid and all I know is that in spite of her mistakes and her unreliability, she was better than most.
Graham Greene, The End of the Affair, 1951
I do think my mother was better than most. I think all our family were better than most. There was something so raw about us. I’m glad those three relationships are over though – sorry, Mum, even you, clever and supportive as you were. I’m also glad I read the diaries. My father’s diary showed me our family from a different perspective. I’d only ever heard my mother’s point of view before. After finishing Lucien’s account I was so moved by his sadness and confusion that I was momentarily overcome with love and compassion, and my attitude towards him and men in general softened. I can’t have close relationships with them any more though. Not long into any interaction with a man I get a whiff of the oppressor and bolt. Mum’s oft-repeated exasperated cry of ‘What on earth do you want a man for?’ makes perfect sense to me now, as does her fondness for ginger and rhubarb.
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