Little brown jug...
When I close my eyes I can hear her voice again. Dark
melodious tones, unspoilt by any training. She sings as she stirs the gravy,
and its aroma makes my mouth water.
‘Come and lay the table!’ she calls between phrases.
I hate this chore. Laying the table is boring. But then I
would have to wait even longer for the roast beef and two vegetables, the raspberry
tart, and the skin off the rice-pudding. I slide off the piano-stool and do as
I am told.
‘I quite like what you were playing just now,’ she says, as
if to compensate me for having to stop. ‘Beethoven, wasn't it?’
‘Für Eliza,’ I pronounce rather cumbersomely, for my mouth
is already stuffed with bits of raw pastry left over from the tart.
Mum doesn't approve of my eating raw things. I can make a feast of raw potatoes, or squeezes off the pork sausages. Her face takes on a grim look as she warns me about the effects of baking powder on the system.
‘I was going to make a bun with that,’ she scolds.
‘Why didn't you, then?’ I retort.
‘None of your lip, my girl. Who was that Eliza in the tune?’
That's how I remember her. A sharp mind flitting from topic
to topic, changing tack when you were least expecting it. She caught me
unawares many a time. A kind of poor man's third degree, I suppose. I wonder
why she ended up in the kitchen? The FBI would have done her more justice.
‘When I die, I want you to have me cremated,’ she is saying.
‘None of your holes in the ground. Just a tidy little service and no fuss.’
‘You're not going to die, Mum!’
No ten year old wants to talk about death. At least, not
when there's raspberry tart for dinner. But the Sunday service on the wireless
has made Mum think of all the funerals she's been to in recent years.
‘We all have to die,’ she goes on. ‘I remember my mother
dying. You must have been about three. She went to bed one night, and never got
up again. And that's how I want to go.’
‘I think Eliza was Beethoven's niece,’ I make up, beating my
mother at her own game.
‘The meat's done to a turn,’ she says, stabbing it with a
nasty-looking skewer kept specially for the purpose, and smiling grimly. Mum
has a cruel streak. In my imagination she becomes a musketeer, a throwback from
some long gone swash-buckling epoch.
‘Call your father, Miss Dolittle!’
Mum’s sarcasm breaks through my day-dream in stentorian
style.
‘The carrots want to be chopped.’
Dad always chopped the carrots, with two knives, until they
were squashed and bore no resemblance to the original article, apart from the
bright orange colour. Baking-fat dripping off the joint as it dangles
precariously in mid-air from the prongs of the carving-fork, salt and a heavy-handed
shake of powdery white pepper that gets up your nose if you’re too curious, and
Bob's your uncle. Every Sunday.
The hymns crackling into our kitchen for kareoke-style
participation used to be in minor keys and dripping with pathos. Rhymes, like
tears and fears, oozed through the ether, forcing me to bang out Beethoven as
hard and fast as my childish fIngers could get round the jumps.
Mum was rather prone to morbidity. No wonder. When you've
laid out nearly all your nearest and dearest, I suppose you can’t help
conjecturing about your own mortality. Looking back, those lugubrious dirges
must have been her Greek tragedy, her catharsis, something to dip into when the
going was tough. The roast lamb, the carrots, even the rice-pudding were
peace-offerings to whatever merciful spirit gave her the strength to cope.
But the Sunday Service wasn’t her only source of
inspiration. Our town library shelves were chock-a-block with countless tales
of fame and fortune, and Mum, indubitably one of the library’s most loyal
subscribers, had first refusal of whatever put in an appearance on the
‘recommended’ shelf.
She never doubted the verity of these often quite
reprehensible literary offerings, revelling as she did in the doings of the
high and mighty, especially after if they were dead. Those books pandered to
her sense of history and adventure, cheering her waking hours, and colouring
her dreams. She led a double life in a fantastic world full of royalty,
adventurers, philosophers, philanderers and crooks, all of whom she professed
to know intimately.
What I'm trying to say is that it's impossible to know what
a biographer would decide is relevant in your life or mine. Does what I say
about somebody tell my listener more
about my subject or about me? Let me confess now, that I'm groping in the
darkest corners of my consciousness for guidance as to what I can say with
impunity about this resolute little woman who gave me my life, albeit despite
herself.
Only about a dozen have come to her cremation. She always hated
being made conspicuous, and couldn't abide crowds, so I don't think she would
have cared if no one had been there at all. If she'd had her way, there would
have been no ceremony at all. The music in her soul belonged to the good old
days of Welsh hymns accompanied on the grand piano, intermingled with the organ
accompaniment of the silent films which had mesmerized her. But she had tussled
with Beethoven, too, and I still play from her battered old piano scores,
trying to exude her thoughts from the silent paper. At the end, her
piano-playing was restricted to strumming out a Welsh hymn or two on Sunday
evenings, to compensate for not going to chapel, and even in old age her voice
still held more than just a vestige of beauty.
I can remember crouching under the piano and working the
loud pedal, making all the chords stick together like musical jam, an activity
she can only have endured because it was the only occupation which claimed my
undivided attention for more than a minute or two. So I must have been very
small when I first really listened to the velvety sound of her singing and
strumming ‘Cherry Ripe’ out of the Daily
Mail Song Book.
Then, at the ripe old age of five, it was my turn to sit on
the old piano-stool, my slippers dangling in mid-air because my legs still
couldn’t reach the pedals in a sitting position.
I can still see the blind piano-tuner tapping his way into
front room, which he probably identified by the musty smell which pervaded
everyone's front rooms in those days, a fire only being lit on Sundays, and
front rooms usually being on the north side and hermetically sealed for six
days in the week.
After I took over the old piano, its days were numbered. The
piano-tuner would prop his white stick up against the wall, and spend hours
knocking it into some sort of shape, with my mother standing over him making
sure he got it right. She would dust away at invisible blemishes and bring in
cups of over-sugared tea, until the man tap, tap, tapped his way out again. He
would hardly be out of earshot before I set about banging the tuning back out
again.
‘You're heavy-handed and no mistake,’ Mum would scold me
while I plodded away at some etude or other.
The piano tuner had noticed that, too. Just before my eighth
birthday he gave her a hot tip as to where she could buy a brand new
instrument, and my love for that most perfect of all birthday presents has
transcended all other loves.
My mother's mother came from quite a grand family, which
unfortunately mismanaged its tin-mining fortunes once too often. My mother was
bright, but her education was brought to an abrupt halt by the selfish demands
of a closely-knit brood of peasants my grandmother had been careless enough to
pick up as in-laws. The only explanation I can give for my mother's compliance
is some kind of irrational love of the nest she was born into, coupled with an
insane loyalty which wasn't reciprocated, but which affected her whole being.
One of the questions which comes relentlessly and
unanswerably to mind when I think of her earthly journey, is whether she was
really aware of the time between childhood and old age, which belonged to us,
her children. In her scheme of things we must have been the most awful misfits,
since we did not fulfil any of the hopes and demands she thrust upon us.
Mum never condemned her own mother for depriving her of her
natural right to be free of the shackles of duty. Mum was a slave to the wants
of others, resentful maybe, rebellious, never. Maybe they were her halcyon
days, on reflection.
Mum played on her conviction that her own mother had known
best when she had tried to prevent her eloping at an age when most of her
contemporaries were almost grandparents. Her persistence, that I must do as she
wanted me to, became a frenetic pursuit, in which she engaged right up to the
end.
But I always had a mind of my own, and a gift for picking on
the crux of a theme. How could my mother’s mother have known that my father
would contract tuberculosis and become an invalid. Sixth sight? Witchcraft? Our
relationship was doomed to failure. Though I dearly I wanted to meet with her
approval, never, to her dying day, did she give me the satisfaction of thinking
that I had. What power of one over the other!
The crematorium chapel is cool, the midday sunshine diffused
through a rose-shaped stained-glass window. I am tense and wishing fervently
for the ordeal to be over. The preacher's voice holds just the right note of
sympathy, and the finality of it all makes me weep copiously. Had she been
sitting next to me instead of lying up there in that small, off-the-peg box,
she would have nudged me not to be childish. She was economic of gesture, and
embarrassed by unnecessary demonstrations of emotion.
I think the preacher's hardly audible little sobs would have
induced a wry smile on Mum’s wrinkled old face. He doesn't take his eyes of us
all the way through the first hymn. Surely he doesn't expect us to sing along?
The pitch of his voice becomes even more reverent as he
recites the routine obsequies. Is it really my own mother we are praying for? I
remember her wriggling out of the chore of dressing up for chapel, saying that
she had enough to do with the Sunday cooking and baking, which always filled up
her Sunday morning. By evening she was too exhausted to bother, or so she would
have us believe.
She called me a heathen from time to time, so there must
have been something spiritual she felt she had and I hadn't. Why has she never
revealed to me the name of her personal God? I'm not sure she believed in the
one to whom we are muttering now.
The organist squeezes a few excruciating chords out of the
inferior instrument. He is sitting bolt upright on the bench, looking over the
top of his harmonium at the coffin, his grey bony face devoid of expression. I
think of all the years Mum forced me to practice arpeggios. There, but for the
grace.........
On her piano lies a well-thumbed copy of ‘When you walk
through a storm...’ I shall never know how often she recited those lines in
times of darkness, for she bore her tempests alone. I put the music into her
one good suitcase, along with a few other relics. How little there is. A
powder-puff in a chiffon kerchief, a worn down cherry-red lipstick, a few
broaches and chains, a balding hairbrush, a cracked hand-mirror..... So little
personal vanity. There is plenty of room to spare.
Accompanied by the plaintive strains of a hymn promising
eternal life and a place in paradise, her small coffin glides away behind the
dark purple velvet curtain. I feel this last separation as physically as the
one which separated us at my birth, and want to scream now, as then. Instead I
hold my breath and let my salty tears run unchecked down my neck. I know I look
a mess, but she's not here to tell me.
Her last, dignified journey has been in a Mercedes Benz
funeral limousine belonging to the long-past age of gentility and china
tea-sets, before poverty set in and meanness followed poverty. Fancy having to
wait until you're dead to get a ride in such a posh car!
The bouquet of white and yellow flowers on top of the
carriage reminds me how she loved her garden.
Mum collected seed catalogues, spending many tranquil hours
browsing through them, reciting the names of new roses, memorising their
beauty. Yellow tea-roses were her favourite. We weren't allowed to pick them.
She could resuscitate a plant just by talking to it. She had the green fingers
of a talented gardener.
‘Flowers should be left to grow in the sun and wind, not
choked in a vase and sentenced to premature death.’
There it is again, that word, death. It pervaded her life.
From her childhood days close to nature on the family farm, where her most
vivid memory was of a pet parrot allowed to perish of neglect, through
interminable years nursing her sick husband, laying out her own generation, and
now cold and peaceful at last, her waiting over, her own dying complete.
‘I don't think anyone comes back. All that business about
reincarnation is rubbish. Anyway, it would be just my luck to have to go
through another eighty odd years of purgatory.’
That's how she felt about life. Labours in vain, endless
chores, herself always at the end of the queue for the good things.
‘My generation didn't have your opportunities,’ was one of
her pet theories.
Some did. But my mother was not really a fighter. She was
always one of life's victims. Her one and only attempt to defy the hierarchy
within the farming tradition she was nurtured in was nipped in the bud, when
her grandfather dragged her back by her long chestnut plaits from the hospital
where she had secretly enrolled to become a nurse. After that she bowed to her
fate. She became bitter, stoical, and fatalistic.
‘I was really the runt of the litter,’ was how she liked to
describe herself. This idea was nested so deep in her breast that it was an
obsession. Even the freedom of her last years could not change the inbred
structures of her mind. Milton's stoic pilgrims in her well-thumbed edition of
their progress have a lot to answer for.
‘I wish I could go off abroad, like you. Not a care in the
world. Now in my youth....’
I didn't pay much attention to these strictures. If I had, I
don't think I would have attempted any of the things I wanted to do.
When I reached my teens, and started to look at the world
through the eyes of my generation, I discovered to my horror that I, too, was
tied by a taut umbilical cord to the puritanical views which had kept my mother
imprisoned.
‘You don't want to go to the pictures now,’ she would say. ‘You
haven't practised the piano.’
But I did want to go. I wanted to see how Doris Day did her
hair and led a charmed life. My father, tied to his sick-bed, financed my
secret vice, and so even I, daughter of my mother, started to have a good time.
Nothing dramatic, but enough to make me want something other than that to which
my mother had resigned herself. According to her, having a good time was
something we didn't do in our family. That was for other people. You couldn't reason
with her. Having a good time was being on the road to hell.
My father must have understood her. I still can't believe
that they had been forced to elope, because my father was not good enough, nor
rich enough, nor even healthy enough to suit my mother's family. What tongues
of angels he must have used to prise her from that monstrous brood.
Later Mum became a martyr to the illness my father bore with
patience and fortitude. She was convinced that she had brought it on herself,
through disobedience, forgetting that it was not she who was the victim.
Poor Mum. She never got it right. And we suffered, too,
because she ever ceased to point out the folly of not doing what one was told.
Her childhood was right there with her, to her dying day she expressed gratitude
for it, gratitude for the cruelty, the beatings, the neglect.
When Dad died, the soul of our small family unit died with
him. Mum couldn't have taken his place, even if she had been able to look
beyond her own grief, because so much of her energy had been used up already.
She never shed a tear to ease our pain. That would have been an unforgivable
breakdown of the barriers surrounding her. She was too proud to show what she
thought of as weakness.
She did mourn though, secretly, when nobody was looking. As
if her own life had been terminated, she cut herself off from almost everything
and everybody. She inhabited a kind of padded cell, far removed from the pains
of reality. She kept nothing which reminded her of the kind, gentle man who had
once borne her away from her fatally elongated childhood.
She bought a house with ten rooms and filled them all with
her things, adding to them by attending house-auctions and picking up other
people’s rejects. I never knew what I might find next, or what might go missing
while I was away. I never remember her asking whether I liked something. It all
belonged to her. She could do what she liked with it. Come to think of it,
that’s how she treated us, too.
I was never given even a small corner to call my own in these
new surroundings, where nobody except Mum had any rights. That's how she wanted
it. It was her home, not mine. My brother left as soon as he could, leaving her
enshrined in a fantasy world of voices and memories, never happy, never sad,
never lonely.
‘I need space to walk about in,’ she would explain from time
to time, and especially if she thought I had outstayed my welcome. ‘My family
always had big rooms.’
She wouldn’t ask me when I was leaving. Her sense of duty
prevented her from reclaiming her space. But her words and gestures revealed
her discomfiture, and deepened my overall feeling of being a trespasser, an
intruder.
Balancing precariously on an old wooden step-ladder, she
painted the ceilings pink and blue, and carpeted the stairs and sitting-room
wall to wall with a nervously flowered
Axminster, covering it with non-matching runners wherever anyone could
conceivably want to walk. The effect was bizarre, but that’s how she wanted it
and that’s how it had to be.
She bought five old doors from somewhere and had a fitted
cupboard made in the largest bedroom. There were three fully-fitted bedrooms,
but never enough space for all her ever-growing household. She filled up spaces
with inanimate objects, as if to ensure that no animated soul encroached upon
it.
Some days, a kind of melancholy would overcome her, and she
would break off from her crossword to announce: ‘When I'm seventy I'm going to
put an end to it all. Don't be sad, because I shall be heartily glad to see the
back of this terrible world.’
I never really believed her, and it never happened.
As years went by, loss of coherence in her memories meant
that the past came nearer and nearer, returning to her the people nearest to
her heart, those who could never be usurped by the living, who were more
realistic than they, more congenial, more agreeable.
When anyone she didn't want to see called at her house, she
would hide until they went away, no matter how far they might have come, and
she knew that the relatives would have had a long drive. They liked her and
accepted her idiosyncrasies, but they did not interest her in the slightest,
except as objects of cruel but humoristic ridicule. And phoning her first to
say you were coming was no guarantee of her being there. She might drop everything,
put on her coat and hat, and wander off into town on mysterious errands, which
would last until she was quite sure that whoever had promised to come would
have gone away again. To be fair, she didn’t do that to me, but I could never
be sure that she wouldn’t, one day.
In grotesque contrast, she was enthusiastic and approving of
complete strangers, especially if they rented the small flat she separated from
the rest of the house. But she told them from the start that they must not
intrude, and she had gone to extraordinary architectural lengths so that they
would not have to use the same front door.
‘I can't share my front door with anyone,’ she would say.
She was a strange mixture of pride and excessive humility, and had an unshaking
belief in her own infallibility.
‘That's too good for you,’ she would say, when I spent money
on clothes. She wanted me to be as thrifty as she was, but I reacted by
throwing caution to the winds, antagonising her beyond belief. One day I
started telling lies about how much things cost, to avoid the fuss. She
rejoiced over my bargains, and I felt wise and cunning. How childish we both
were.
‘I don't want to hear any more bad news,’ she announced one
day, long after she had settled into the emotional security of widowhood, from
which, for her, there was no release.
I should keep out of harm's way, for her sake, I read
between the lines. In her mind this was my duty, designed to protect me for my
own good. I should stay out of danger, for my sake, but mostly for hers!
‘Don't tell me anything you think would bother me,’ she
would say, if she thought I was worried about something. She found it hard to
cope with the world outside her own imagination.
‘You don't want children’, she would quite frequently inform
me. She hadn’t wanted them, especially
defiant and self-willed ones like me, and, even more, considering how they
happened. You exercised discipline so as to avoid the pains of untoward incidents, which for her included
pregnancy.
Mum actively feared loss of control over her environment,
and, even more, she dreaded and despised loss of self-control, especially on a
physical level. It was something to be blocked out, forgotten, suffocated into
oblivion. Whatever she had experienced, the molestations, the beatings, the
cruelty, remained untold but indelibly marked upon her personality. It
frightens me to think that her genes have become mine. Even half of what she
suffered is too much to bear thinking about.
For I, naive as I was, just accepted her convictions at face
value, and they worked their own insidious way into my personality, where they
still do battle with the gypsy I inherited from the other side.
My sister-in-law had disgraced her by actually going out of
the house in the later stages of pregnancy, even though the royal family had
gone into interminable hibernation during theirs. Mum's patriotism was at its
most fervent when it provided her with that kind of argument. While I was in
the same state we had an unforgettable screaming match because I refused to
wear a coat over my tell-tale bulge during a heat-wave. Pregnancy embarrassed
her because of what had preceded it, and my pregnancy infuriated her beyond
belief because it made her realize that I was no longer answerable to her.
Poor Mum. If she had a hard time being a grandmother, it
certainly threw light on her understanding of motherhood. She hadn't lied when
she said she hadn't wanted it. It was thrust upon her. My father's sister had
taken me over for several months while she recovered from the effects of having
me. I'm told she was reluctant to take me back, for fear of dropping me. Surely
a baby senses rejection. I must have felt it then, why else would I work so
hard to please her, and fail so miserably?
For most of her life Mum kept a low profile to avoid making
mistakes. This caring aunt, a tower of strength in voluntary work, was an
awesome figure during her active years, and even through twenty years of
painful illness never stopped caring about all and sundry. My mother said she
was a busybody, pushing her nose into things which were no concern of hers. But
that wasn't really what she thought. My mother, timid and afraid, was jealous
of my aunt's busy, outgoing personality, without ever admitting it to herself,
let alone trying to emulate her.
Mum gave me a new name when she got me back, as if that
could wipe out my first and only experience of motherly love. My mother's
caring was incessant, but indifferent. What small child cares whether her
clothes are ironed, if there is warmth in the good night kiss on her cheek?
I knew that warmth existed, because I saw other mothers
being affectionate to their little girls. I tried not to mind. I learnt not to
mind.
‘She doesn't want to get married. She's going to have a
career,’ Mum would announce in my presence. That's what she had really wanted
from life. Now I was to benefit from her negative experiences. The relatives,
whom she classified as peasants, were impressed, and I was flattered. How was I
to know that she was passing on to me what had been passed on to her? The fact
that her meekness had let her sacrifice herself did not stop her from demanding
obedience from me. When I eventually found a boyfriend, all hell was let loose.
She defended my virginity tooth and nail. I remember her chasing some poor
youth all the way down our road, because he'd brought me home in the dark. She
wouldn't have minded me walking in the dark by myself, however scared I might
be. But the very idea that I could interest anyone other than a potential
employer was more than she could bear. My childish fears had to subjugate
themselves to her ageless unspoken ones.
I learnt quickly. I know I stayed home very often when I
really wanted to be out enjoying myself. It wasn't worth the effort. And if I
did go somewhere, I always walked home alone, scared of the dark and the
loneliness, and ashamed of a mother who was likely to turn on my friends and
mortify me. I had learnt my lesson. Never again was I to trust her judgement, however
right she might be, and my defiance was to cause me pain and misery.
But mostly I would bury myself in my homework, the radio
blaring in my ear, somehow knowing that this was the key to my own salvation.
‘It's all for your own good. Good school reports are more
important. You'll want to get through your exams, won't you?’
Mum had been to grammar school, because her mother believed
in education for women. But that's where her taste of emancipation ended, since
the demands of a farm took precedence over the future of one shy little girl.
The eldest son went on to university and became a doctor of something. My
mother suffered painful anguish at the loss of her beloved brother, and though
she never said it, I think she would have found a way of doing something which
would have satisfied her if she had had him to fight for her at this most
crucial time of her life. But he forgot all about the little blue-eyed sister
at home, and married a girl he met at college, someone ‘not good enough to wash
his feet’, and never came back. Betrayed and desolate, Mum resigned herself to
drudgery. Sometimes I think she welcomed it with open arms.
When I was about six, it was as if an invisible hand were
making fun of her misery. She was summoned to the death-bed of this brother.
For the rest of her life she was to mourn for him, and converse audibly with
his silent spirit. It was a kind of haunting, I suppose. Among her papers I
found dozens of photos of him. She had kept them hidden in the iron safe which
held all the objects she held most dear. They were part of the secret life
reserved for loving and remembering him. But none of this tenderness spilled
over into her everyday existence. And there were no pictures of my father, and
hardly any of her children.
After the service, the few family and friends who had
bothered to come to the crematorium gathered at a nearby hotel for tea and
sandwiches. We chatted as if nothing much had happened recently. Tributes to
her business acumen, her home-making, her wit. She was to be remembered the way
she would have liked by the people who had never meant anything to her while
she lived.
One of my earliest memories is of her singing popular tunes
of the day. I would sit under the piano and listen to her playing them. Or she
would move about her daily tasks, with me tagging along, marvelling at the
transformation in her voice as she sang, and watching for the smile on her sad
face. The smile I cannot remember.
‘Ha, ha, ha, hi, hi, hi,
Little brown jug, don't I love thee........’
She told me about her father taking her on his horse and
cart to the village pub, for his 'little brown jug'. This small girl with the
startling blue eyes would sit outside on the step while he drowned his sorrows
in brown ale, and then they would ride home again, her father drunk as a lord,
the old horse treading the familiar paths without any tugging of the reins. Mum
gave up sugar so that she could save it up for the hot sweet tea her father
needed to pacify his hangovers, and signed the pledge as a kind of insurance
against this particular demon.
How many other demons my mother fought I shall never know.
She never mentioned them.
And I never thought of asking.............
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