says she’s a snob, and she is!
Mum looked after my dad’s mum and then her mum, which makes her an almighty mum in my book.
Mum pretends she doesn’t have opinions but I know she does, very strong ones. She says when she is Queen she will ban Starbucks and leisure clothing.
Mum is from a generation that was engendered with extraordinary stoicism. She never complains, not even in the height of grief.
She is so brave. She just gets on with it. She is so brave.
Mum is a great beauty.
Mum is great fun to drink with. Eat with. Be with. Drink with.
My boys adore my mum; she is their ‘Fifi’.
Mum looks most herself in Scotland amongst the hills of her home. She looks like a piece of the hillside that’s fallen off in a high wind and loves wearing the same clothes until they stand up on their own.
Mum says she is a martyr to her wind.
Mum can’t ever say she is proud of my sister and me because she feels that’s a bit big-headed on her behalf.
Well, I can say I’m proud of her cos she’s my mum.
Oh, I am proud of her.
Rattlingly proud.
Emma
It’s rather difficult to write about one’s mother while she’s still alive. There could be consequences. But the first thing that pops into my head is that she’s a tough act to follow. Long ago I remember deciding that I could never be as good, kind, wise, loving and generally brilliant and gorgeous as her. It’s taken me over half a century to stop trying.
Stepping back, I see her more clearly. I remember her giving me a birthday tea when I was about five or six – she baked scones and fairy cakes, dressed up as a waitress and served us as if we were in a Lyon’s Corner House. I think her hat was made from a doily.
When we were ill or hurt she always soothed us in Gaelic. She sang us lullabies and rubbed hot oil on our chests in winter.
The only time she has ever evinced pride in something I’ve done was when I told her, backstage at a Footlights gig, that I had received a good result in my degree. She screeched for joy and I felt ten miles high. She expresses pride in her grandchildren, though, which prompted my sister to suggest, with benevolent tartness, that perhaps it (pride) skipped a generation.
We’ve worked together many times, and I once wrote a very long monologue for a TV programme back in the day when autocue didn’t exist. I’d learnt it but it was full of repetition and proved rather difficult. Mum, who was in the show as well, watched every take and when I got it wrong for the umpteenth time, she marched over the stage with her skirts pulled up over her bum to cheer me up. She’d forgotten that she wasn’t wearing knickers under her tights though. It got me through, I can tell you. And the crew.
She’s a stoic but her stoicism is rooted in humour. I have never witnessed her grieving in a life dotted with rich opportunities for grief. But I have seen her laughing a lot.
I have profound respect for her brain and as we have, one way or the other, been very much together since my father died, I credit her with the development of my own writing. I used to do a bit of stand-up and I would rehearse every set in front of her, cold, in the kitchen, and she was startlingly accurate about what worked and what didn’t.
It’s difficult for people who know her now to imagine but, like her mother before her, she could be fierce. Once, when I was seven or so, I picked a bluebell from a garden as we were walking down the road. Mum marched me, sobbing with fear (me, not her), to the door of the house and made me confess and give it back. Guilt’s big in our family.
Dad once said to me, ‘You’re a taker, Em, and I’m a taker, but your mother is a giver.’ That wasn’t much of a help, I have to tell you. When we moved from our flat into a house which was only round the corner she did a lot of the removals herself. I can see her walking up the hill wearing a lot of khaki and a saucepan on her head. When we were little she was always stripping something made of old pine.
I did witness her, on occasion, sacrificing her own pleasure for the sake of my grandmothers or her ailing brother or her sick husband or her two demanding daughters and, as she says, it could be construed as a fine way to avoid living your own life. But it doesn’t quite wash. She has always worked, with hiatuses of course, but she has always gone back to work – as an actor and now as an author. I do concede, however, that it may have helped her to avoid another relationship. Some years ago she went on a date with a friend’s father. I think he tried to kiss her in the cab. She’s never recovered.
Maybe the qualities in her writing describe her better than I can: it’s spare, full of curious and telling detail and mysterious ellipses, very funny, touching without trying to be, connected to every little action of every little day, and in character quite unlike anything else I have ever read. Except perhaps Montaigne, who was equally intrigued by the quotidian business of being human.
The best bit of the day is around about 6pm when one of us rings her, says, ‘The bar’s open,’ and hangs up. By the time I’ve poured a slug of decent red wine, she’s putting her key in the door. I’ll hand over the glass and she will invariably say, ‘Ooh. I’ve been looking forward to that all day.’ Then we share the news.
For my daughters
PROLOGUE
Annie, my mother-in-law, lived with us for seventeen years and was picture-book perfect.
She washed on Monday, ironed on Tuesday. Wednesday was bedrooms, Thursday baking, Friday fish and floors, Saturday polishing, particularly the brass if it was ‘looking red’ at her. Sunday was God and sewing. She had a framed print of The Light of the World on her bedroom wall and her drawers were full of crochet hooks and knitting needles. She could turn the heel of a sock and the collar of a shirt. She made rock cakes, bread pudding and breast of lamb with barley, and she would open a tin of condensed milk and hide it at the back of the fridge with a spoon in it if things were going badly in our world. She came to us when things had stopped going well in hers.
The rented cottage she left had the rose ‘New Dawn’ curling over and around a front door she never used. All of life flowed towards the back door and led into the kitchen and her cupboards full of jams and bottled fruit. Her little parlour was all table and dresser, with a fireplace full of wild flowers in a cracked china soup tureen. She wall-papered the front room every spring. Three walls with one pattern and the fourth to contrast. But what she loved most was her wood pile and her long, narrow garden where the hedges were full of old toys and rusty tricycles. Here, my children used to hide on fine summer nights, sitting straight-backed in their flannel pyjamas between rows of beans to eat furry red and gold gooseberries, rasps that weren’t ripe and rhubarb dipped into an egg cup of sugar.
All she managed to bring with her to London were two white china oven dishes, half a dozen pocket editions of Shakespeare, her button box, her silver thimble, a wooden darning mushroom, a large bundle of knitting
