Snapshots of My Story: Mum

I ring my mother:

“Hello Mum, it’s David.”

“Hello! Where are you?”

“I am home, in Canada.”

“In Canada! How long have you been there?”

“Twenty  years mum, you’ve been to visit”

This is one of our better   calls. More often, these days, she does not   remember who I am. She has learnt, like many with dementia, to confabulate. She still has her pride, which will never diminish, unlike her memory. Sometimes she asks me  why I have called, asking if there is bad news. I assure her no; I just like to speak to her.

Always, even now, hyper alert for disaster,  the next  crushing   life crisis.

She assures me, whenever I call, that she is fine, that I have nothing to worry about. Still caring for me enough that I need not worry about her.

Mother was born in 1927 in Rochdale,  Lancashire. You can still hear that Lancashire accent even though she has not lived there for eighty  years.

When I think of my mother it is hard not to dwell on tragedy. My earliest memory of her is her telling me sadly   of the death of her brothers in the Second World War. She told me they died at Dunkirk. She also told me while I was  very young (4 or 5) that one day when she was 7 a car took her parents away. She was placed in an orphanage, then attended a convent school, run by strict nuns. She never saw her parents again.

One of  her  brothers  William, for  sure  died in  1940, he  can  be  found  in the War Graves Commission  website. His  burial place  is  Belgium. Brother  George is nowhere  to be  found in  the War  Graves  Commission record  of those  who fell in  World War Two.  I  now believe  he  did  not die in  the  War  at  all, and through  Ancestry  I believe he  likely  lived until  1974. The  first of many  mysteries  and possible  myths  surrounding  my  mother.

Composite image Rochdale 1927, and the Battle Of Belgium, May 1940

When I was four, she told me   I would have a brother and sister, she was  expecting  twins. This meant having three children who were five and under. As an adult I can appreciate now what a struggle this must have been for her. There were no family members to help her, and as a man in his   late fifties   born in 1907, my father was   virtually uninvolved in bringing us up. Supporting new mothers then was nothing like it is now. I can now appreciate the stress she must have been under working with three   children, and no support.

Many years later I discovered my  father  slapped her face, the only time ,when she told  him she  was expecting twins.

I was expected to be out of the house for long periods once the twins were born. One day I came home in the afternoon and knocked on the front   door. I could hear these strange sounds from inside, like a moaning. Eventually the door opened a little way. My brother   was standing on a chair and opened the door. Behind him  my mother was crawling on the floor making these awful sounds that I had never encountered before. Within seconds my neighbours were rushing in, we were all whisked away to their house. Someone said, “open all the windows.”  My mother was taken to hospital. This incident was never mentioned in the family again, but I knew enough at that age to know it had something to do with the gas oven. Now as an adult I wonder if this was an accident, or if things had just got too much.

There are happy memories of course, before the twins, me and mum lying together on the sofa   in front of the fire listening to ‘Listen with Mother’ on the radio, followed by a cup of tea and Peak Frean biscuits, and trips to the park.

My mother    had trained firstly as a nanny and had been a nanny to the DeHoughton family in Lancashire. She told me they had wanted her to marry their son Robin, but she refused and was   helped to go to Belgium to take a nannying course in Belgium. It was only when I was an adult I began to  question if this could really be the case, given the class system that was so in place in   1940’s England. Later she trained as a nurse in Folkestone, Kent where she met my father, 20 years her senior, where he worked as a hospital porter.

 Her nursing skills came in handy when a female friend of hers deliberately placed  a hot    clothes iron on my finger taking the skin off. Thankfully, we never saw her again.

It is fair to say Mum was extremely varied with her moods and temper. Never cruel, she  would be quick to verbally lash out in exasperation  and the back of the hair brush was a constant threat. Something she had learned  from the nuns possibly.

 Once she sent me out of the house at 9 am because I had gone to my piggy bank behind her back to take out money to secretly buy a record I had heard on the radio. When  there was a carnival procession she   became so swept up in it that we ended up    following it for miles until she realised how far from home we were!

By the time, the twins were seven or so she went back to work, firstly to Grove Park Hospital, then to a nearby junior school. In those days nurses were low paid, nothing like the pay   today.

We moved a lot in my early years partly I am sure to provide better housing for us, but also, I suspect due to constantly falling out with neighbours, with whom she always seemed to have a love/hate relationship. I do recall moving very soon after the incident with the gas oven.

Mother had a great sense of humour. She also  a battler for her rights. She  took  on the Health Authority over her pension, and with her union won a landmark decision that improved   pensions for other nurses. I have never met anyone with a will of iron such as hers.

She made it clear she loved me, but sometimes her behaviours   confused me. After a few years of the twins being born, she began to disappear. Initially for  a night, then whole weekends. We had no clue where she was. My father did the bare minimum to  feed us, providing me with porridge all  day.  One Monday morning, the first time she had not returned on Sunday night he told me before going to school that if she did not return by the time school was finished, we would all be placed in an orphanage. Shocked,  I  told a schoolteacher, who rang home to discover she was back. I had always assumed her disappearance was to force my dad to look after us, to let him know how much she was struggling. I was  well into my adulthood when any other motive for going away at the weekends consciously occurred to me. Another secret never discussed. These absences stopped after a while.

It was clear that my mother found the relationship with my father   challenging. My father was a   very affable, kind man, but incredibly insular. My mother  was volatile, changeable, and an extravert. The family unit was always on “alert” for mother, and her moods. She  would  often  take  her  to  bed  all  day  at  weekends,  forcing  Dad  to  pay  attention  to us. She  needed  the  rest.

As the years wore on, and we were in our teens, my father retired and suddenly became the home maker. Who knew he could cook! My mother, famously unable to boil an egg when first married, could now work and Dad made the best meals of our lives, delicious main meals, cakes and puddings!

Mother loved reading and watching TV and it was best not to interrupt either pastime. As time went on, Mum and Dad settled into a quiet companionship. As Dad became unwell, she devotedly cared for him. She rarely treated herself to anything but was generous to us and others.

After he   died   Mother decided to come to Devon to   where I   had moved. She bought a small place and eventually met a lovely man, Ken. It was Mom who went to the council office, and in her indomitable manner argued that the council  should house them both. Which of course they did .  Making friends in a small Devon coastal town was difficult. Most people had lived there all their lives, and outsiders were tolerated at best. Ken and she lived very happily, until;  he  too  died, I suspect this was the best time in her life, the storms had passed, my  sister  and  I were grown.

By  1982  I  was  21,  still living  at  home. the  family  were  under  great stress.  My  Dad  not  well, and  my  brother  Anthony  appeared  to  have  extreme anxiety. I  had  no  idea  how   bad  his  mental  health  was until  he  was  admitted  to the Bethlem  Adolescent Unit  in  West  Wycombe. One  Sunday  my  mother  was   going  on at  my  sister  and  I  told her  to  stop. 5  minutes  later,  my  clothes  were  flying from   bedroom  window  through the  air to  the  front  garden.  She  told  me  to  get out. I got on  my  motorbike,  and  went  to  London,  where I  worked. Mother took  her  to  bed for a few days ,  her  long standing way  of  dealing  with distress  and  anger.

I realise  now  she  was  instinctively   pushing me out to  learn  to  fly, and  with the  family  under such  stress, it  was  probably needed. It’s the  most obvious  example[le of  Mom doing  the  right  thing  but  in a  traumatic way for all.

When my wife and I decided to move to Canada initially she took it well. Eventually she came to visit, there were no issues, and all was good. I should have known better. On her  second visit, inexplicably she became very angry. The old venom not seen for years was back, and without a word one early  morning  before  we  were  all  up,  she disappeared. It brought back memories of the childhood disappearances. My wife drove to a town a few miles away and saw her. While looking for somewhere to park she lost her. Somehow mother turned up at my home again, despite by then being in her eighties and in an unfamiliar environment. She then locked herself in the bedroom she was using, eventually coming out at a time of her choosing.

At that moment I finally found myself giving myself permission to emotionally disengage. It was a shock this could happen again after so many years.

Once she was back in the U.K I left it a few weeks before contacting her. It was as if she had completely   erased the  visit from her mind. She talked about what a lovely trip she had. Was this  the beginning of dementia? It was extraordinary.

She is in a care home now in Dawlish, Devon. She has always said she will live to be   a hundred. She is ninety-eight this year, and I fully expect to be cutting a birthday cake with her when she reaches her century.

Image  Acknowledgments :

Rochdale  1927  https://www.britainfromabove.org.uk/image/epw019424  

Battle of  Belgium Pic https://warhistory.org/@msw/article/bef-in-retreat-1940   Battle of Belgium  May 1940