Romany and Tom (22 page)

Forced to choose, my mum of course stood by my dad; she’d endured so much to secure him. Yet no one likes to be the pig in the middle. The upshot was a fifteen-year running battle in which Eunice was regularly banned from the flat. Of course she retaliated in kind: children were banned from hers. I remember being told to ring the bell before collecting a bicycle pump from the tool cupboard. ‘Never forget’, she wrote to my mum icily, ‘that you alone are responsible for our living in the same house, that you told the [estate] agent you’d buy the house without even asking me or letting me see it. I was very happy in my cosy small house [in East Sheen] and hated the flat on sight.’ It was typical of many of her comments: if it contained some truth, it also contained a good measure of psychological manipulation. She had been peppery and opinionated all her life, wherever she had lived.

In August 1970 I went on holiday with my mum and dad to Sussex, and Eunice was astonished to find herself locked out of the upstairs flat. I overheard my dad say in the car on the way down that he was fed up with her ‘snooping around’. With my half-brothers and half-sister away too, Eunice wrote two letters to my mum at the cottage where we were staying – holiday or no holiday – itemising her indignation. She pointed out sniffily that the cat had been cruelly locked
in
, that her
sole
loaf of bread was unretrievable from the upstairs fridge, that she’d had to walk to the shops
before breakfast
to replace it, that the window cleaner had been forced to leave the upper glazing dirty, that the family carpets would have to remain un-vacuumed, and that the stain in the sitting room would have to remain untouched. Now it seems comical, a textbook version of guilt-inducement, half fact, half fiction. The stain was something neither of my parents could picture. The flat had only just been hoovered the day before they left. And the cat had been quickly released by Roly on a mercy mission – although he was told to carefully lock up again afterwards. But it was all symptomatic of Eunice’s dogmatic staying power and compulsive reluctance to let anyone enjoy themselves. She ends the second letter in a melodramatic flourish that could have been written by my own mum at any stage in her later years. ‘Even now,’ she writes, ‘as I’ve no stamp, I doubt if you’ll get this. Love, Mother. P.S. The weather this weekend has been ghastly. Cold. And gales.’

‘A born martyr,’ my mum has scribbled on the envelope of one letter among the several she kept, and Eunice allowed little room for others’ sympathy. Even approaching the end, she snuffed out any chance of a sentimental reconciliation. She wrote in her unsteady handwriting shortly before her death:

I want the quietest, quickest, cheapest funeral possible. No mourners, no flowers, no cars. With recollections of the hundreds of funerals conducted by your father and the way the funeral directors took advantage of emotionally upset relatives to persuade them to have expensive coffins with
brass
handles, I want the
cheapest
. I recall being embarrassed by piles of wreaths lying outside the crematorium when your father was cremated so simply; these I discovered afterwards remained there from one funeral to another. And no urn. I want my ashes left at the crematorium.

Under my dad’s influence, I grew up learning to mock and disparage her, and yet, with hindsight, it is of course impossible not to feel sorry for her, in spite of her sourness and pugnacity. It shouldn’t be forgotten that her husband died suddenly at fifty-nine, taking with him not only their companionship but her small cherished role in the limelight too, and that she left Cheshire for London to live in a city where she had barely any friends. As she confessed to my mum in one letter: ‘I often go up to your flat because I feel I shall scream if, having been deprived of the interests I used to have I can’t talk to someone.’ In another: ‘There have been times when life seemed so empty and living on so pointless that I could have committed suicide. But suicide is a cowardly business and you may have to tolerate me for some time.’ More manipulative melodrama maybe, but it makes for uneasy reading.

Fourteen years after her death, my mum must have reread them all and come to the same conclusion, as she has inserted a sheet with a few words:

1990: Looking at these distressing letters and notes I really don’t know why I have kept them. They show the fearful stresses we all lived under at Woodlands Road. I feel terribly sorry for Mother . . . but what other course was open to me? Poor, poor Mother.

It would be wrong, however, not to remember Eunice’s eccentricities in her old age too, and how they lent an absurdist edge to the cantankerous drama that was being played out – stories that made us all laugh, and carried her legend long into family folklore. As my mum wrote in her 1976 portrait of her after her death:

Age did not deter her in the very least. I found her (at eighty) one morning balanced on top of a chair on a table painting her kitchen ceiling. The following year, when we came back from a holiday, she had just painted half her sitting-room walls bright green because she could not reach any higher.

At eighty-four, she was still mowing the lawn regularly, burning mattresses in the two-foot incinerator, and wreaking her will on our garden. She transplanted bushes while in full bloom, and woe betide any poor plant that failed to flower within its first six months of life. She just whipped it out. Our compost heap was a picture all year round, but you could usually count the blooms in the beds on one hand.

She repegged all my washing on the line each week ‘so that it would dry better’. She aired brand new football boots, best jerseys and plastic gloves on top of her electric fire. She stowed away ashtrays and dinner plates ‘because we did not need so many’.

She cut all my king-size bath towels in half ‘because they are too big for normal people’, sliced a third off a hand-knitted scarf belonging to my son ‘because it was too long’ and once sent a perfectly good suit of my husband’s to the jumble ‘because he never wore it’.

As a boy I have strong memories of the notes she left on the hall table. I passed them on my way to and from school, or in and out of the garden. The serious ones to my mum were in small brown sealed manila envelopes with
Private: June
written ominously on them. The rest were scribbled out on whatever came to hand – the inside of a fag packet, a torn-out page from the
Radio Times
. A few have been kept. Some were just shopping lists:

40 Players

40 Silk Cut

4 Wombles Milk Choc Bars

2 large Rowntree Fruit Pastilles

6 Fish fingers

½ Cheddar Cheese

2 qrtrs Typhoo

Others were simply designed to make everyone feel bad:
Roly and Toby, Could each of you deny yourself a night’s pay at the pub to play badminton with Ben .
. . or:
I’ve taken my last codeine.
(‘If only,’ my dad is reported to have said.) Some were unintentionally comic. Preparing to make soup she warned those who might be using the garden:
I’ve hung my old bones on the line.
A favourite was the day she placed a handwritten note under the windscreen wiper of a builder’s van parked across our drive:
Please don’t block our entrance again. We have had to park down the road. You evidently don’t know the rules of the road. Perhaps you are a beginner.
I came home from school to find the van gone and the note posted back through our letterbox. On the bottom, in pencil, was scrawled
Bollox.

For me, she has also been immortalised in the song my dad wrote the evening after she thought she had lost her dentures in bed one night, only to find them forty-eight hours later inside her spare slippers under the bed. He jumped on to the piano stool, and to a perfectly wrought twelve-bar blues – that I can still recite – sang:

‘Nunu has swallowed her teeth

Nunu has swallowed her teeth

Nunu has swallowed them, don’t try and follow them

They have slipped right down beneath

Nunu has swallowed her pegs

They’re probably down by her legs

Will she get rid of them, don’t bet a quid on them

Better call up the police

Oh, poor old Nunu’s lost her ’ampstead ’eath.’

Chapter 22

The hot summer months of 2003 wrapped my mum and dad’s flat in a somnolence that slowed the days down to a near standstill. Flies zigzagged between the rooms. I notched the fridge thermostat up a digit or two. The sports commentators on the television chugged away, filling the background to the afternoons with a soft and comforting burble of statistics and truisms, while the dazzling blue skies beyond the wraparound windows of their second-floor St John’s Wood sitting room were marked only by occasional thin silvery plane trails, high up, like long deliberate key scratches along the side of an expensive shining car.

Care workers and link workers occasionally looked in but my dad was too proud or low-spirited to talk to them, retiring to his room at the first sound of them in the hall, leaving my mum to make small talk for ten minutes and then send them away. They were much more interested in the little visits from Luis, the porter, who would pop out to the corner shop for a half-bottle of emergency Scotch or brandy; they had had him in their pocket pretty quickly.

And then one day in September, not long after the heatwave, following a routine check-up at the local health centre, and less than twelve months since having her womb removed, my mum was told she had a lump in her breast. Immediate surgery was recommended, and this time the procedure was to take place on the NHS. My dad would have to go back to the care home.

I took her to St Mary’s Hospital behind Paddington Station for a preparatory meeting. We went up in a black London taxi.

‘This is nice, dear,’ she said, as we passed through Baker Street.

‘You
know
where we’re going, Mum?’ I said. Had she grasped how important this was?

‘Yes, yes,’ she said irritatedly. ‘Message received.’

At the meeting a female doctor patiently went over the planned lumpectomy: right-hand side; small incision; less than two centimetres; take tissue from the lymph gland; check the left side at the same time; out of action for four to five days if lucky, possibly seven to ten; radiotherapy starts after two months; side effects include fatigue, sunburn. I kept glancing at my mum. She was nodding but her eyes were roving. She looked like a distracted child being lectured by a primary school teacher.

We left. She looked exhausted.

It wasn’t long before I had the bed manager’s direct line and the name of the ward. It was all going to happen.

She went into the hospital the night before the operation. She was quiet on the way, but then, as I was leaving, she was momentarily galvanised and asked if I could bring her in a couple of shawls, and post a letter she had left in the kitchen, and give Luis ten pounds she owed him.

It’s often struck me that people who have endured something serious in hospital have a unique look about them. In contrast to outpatients – who see themselves in a permanent state of passing through, who perch and fidget and sigh, look at their watches, return to the front desk to check on the delays to their busy day, stop a nurse in the corridor, worry they might be catching something off the vinyl upholstery – the proper inpatient seems to have sensed their immobility and the seriousness of an unexpected procedure in one heavy blow, knocking out any idea that they might be somehow able to influence or effect change on their bad luck. And with it, they quickly become a part of the actual fabric of the hospital. A component part. Attached to it. A parked-up vehicle to be worked on. A service that is due. And so it was with my mum when I visited her after the operation.

She was on a big recovery ward up on the second floor. As I approached the bed, I knew something unforeseen had happened. It seemed her whole body had melted on to her bedclothes. She was propped up, her ashen hair streaked across the pale pillow behind her, but the muscle-tone seemed absent in her arms, her shoulders forming one long continuous contour on a relief map of creased sheets and crumpled blanket. Her face was gaunt and waxy, but for the gentle woozy softness to her pearly blue-grey eyes brought on by synthetic opiates.

On the operating table the lumpectomy
had
got more serious. By the time they moved her back down on to the ward, she’d had both breasts removed in a double mastectomy.

‘We had little choice,’ the doctor told me straightforwardly. ‘It was worse than we’d been led to believe. But the good news is we feel it was quite contained. She won’t need radiotherapy. Not unless anything shows up in the check-ups. Unfortunate, yes, but hopefully all over in one fell swoop.’

Another car successfully serviced, I thought.

I looked at her, ragged and serene on the pillow, and wondered how much she knew. First her womb. Then her breasts. I told myself it was just terrible bad luck and perhaps not even that uncommon in women of her age, and I thought of Eunice her mother, who battled her way to the very end – still on her hands and knees reseeding the bald patch on the lawn just before she died – and I thought about the belief in forbearance and endurance that was part of my mum’s Methodist upbringing, and wondered if it was any solace to her now, or whether it was just bloody awful.