for toast and lay the table. It is a quarter to seven by this time. When the porridge starts to simmer, I tramp back up the fifteen steps with Mary’s cup of tea. I don’t bother to bid her good morning. There is no point. She is in cloud cuckoo land, that one. All the time. I could be Godzilla coming in with a hatchet for all she knows or cares.
I go back into Mammy’s room and find she hasn’t even touched the tea. So I have to make her sit up. ‘Drink that now, Mammy,’ I say each day, as though for the first time. ‘It will wake you up. And I’ll be back in a minute or two to help you into your dressing-gown. The porridge is on.’ She’ll squeak something about it being too cold to drink. But I tell her it’s her own fault. I try to be gentle about it – and of course I take it back down the stairs to put a hot drop into it.
When I have her sitting up and drinking, it’s downstairs again. Then upstairs to check on the two of them. Then downstairs. I’m like a yo-yo. Same thing every day. Sometimes I think I should just record everything on a tape recorder. Then all I would have to do is to switch it on every morning.
It is a quarter past seven before we are all sitting at the table. I am already wrecked.
The whole day is still ahead of me, of course. Dishes, shopping, cleaning, laundry, cooking. Driving Mammy to get her pension or to have her hair done – the bit of hair she has left. All right, it is her car and I have the use of it. But she can’t drive it any more, can she?
She has the travel pass, of course, but would you let an 87-year-old out on her own to cross the city on a bus? So once a week I have to drive her to visit her pal who is so out of it she can’t talk any more. All she can do now is to smile.
The visits to that nursing home are torture to me. I know I should have more patience with her, with the two of them indeed. After all, it is not poor old Marian’s fault that she’s as feeble as she is, but I can’t help it. It is torture for me sitting there, watching Mammy whispering into her ear as if we have all the time in the world. All I can think about is that back home the washing is getting rained on.
Daddy slaved all his life and paid his insurance stamps, and for what? Because Mammy is not living alone, she is not entitled to any home help. So I’m not only her body slave, I’m a body slave to the State.
I asked Mary once if she could do something about getting Mammy some rights. After all, what is the use of being in the civil service if you don’t have even a little bit of pull. But it was no use. She said it was a different department – well I knew that much – and she had no contacts at all.
My bet is she didn’t even try.
So the result of it is that all day long, every day, I have to put up with Mammy’s long face and her constant sighing. Her telling me that I’m putting the groceries on the wrong shelf in the fridge. Her asking me over and over again what time it is. She can’t read the dial of her watch any more.
That’s the worst part. Because I know why she keeps wanting to know about the time. She wants to know when her precious Mary will be home.
3: Bananas and Other Fool Food
I’m the last of my own family. And my darling husband, Josie, died many years ago. I sometimes forget his anniversary until Martha reminds me.
The really awful thing is that I have to look at my snap albums sometimes so I can remember his face.
To be fair, life in this house is probably as hard on the girls as it is on me. Especially on Martha. She’s the eldest of the six children Josie and I had. As I’m sure she has told you by now, at length, she does everything. All the cooking, cleaning, washing, shopping and driving. She is always busy, always organising, always rushing here and there. Despite not working ‘outside the home’, as they say these days, she never has time to bless herself.
Sometimes I think she trained somewhere in some secret boot camp. She certainly runs this house as though she is an army officer. Her kitchen floor is so clean it squeaks and the carpet in the hall always smells of Shake ’N’ Vac. (She likes the vanilla kind.)
I am not saying that she is a bad person. Or that she is mean to me. At least not on purpose! Because there is so little I can do for myself. My arms are as stiff as old windscreen wipers so I do value all she does for me, I do really. There are even times when I feel sorry for her.
But what can I do about it?
She is so bossy and pushy, she is hard to love. I have to admit that right up front. Yes, she is my own flesh and blood, but that’s the way it is.
Naturally, I try to keep my lips zipped. God knows, but who could blame me if now and then I come out with what I really feel? I might be 87 but I’m still a real person.
And although she would never admit it, she does make things harder on herself than she has to. I think she enjoys being a martyr.
For instance, I wish she would not insist on driving me to visit my friend, Marian. All the rest of them are gone now and she and I are the last of the gang. She’s a sad case, thin as a whip, and so weak she doesn’t get out of bed any more. Although I find it hard to see her like this, if I didn’t keep up the visits I feel I might as well give up the ghost myself.
Isn’t it funny with friends? You always feel you have to explain yourself to your family, but never to your friends.
I could get a taxi to go to the nursing home. It is not that far, only a couple of miles, so it would not be all that expensive. After all, I do have a little bit of money from my pension. But Martha won’t hear of wasting money on those rascal drivers. They would see me coming, she says. Old ladies are fair game to them, she says.
To tell you the truth, she ruins the visit for me. By the time we get there my nerves are already in shreds because she has a hissy fit if traffic lights don’t turn quickly enough. And then, while my pal and I are talking together, she stays in the room. She pretends not to listen but jangles her car keys to let me know that time is short.
And don’t get me started on her cooking. Sometimes I feel my throat will burst if I have to eat one more plateful of mashed up vegetables ‘because they’re good for you’. The teeth aren’t great, of course – but really! Surely in this day and age there should be some solution so we don’t have to eat like babies? I do try to get the stuff down but Martha gets in a snit if I make a face. I can’t show even for one second that I am less than thrilled when she plonks this gooey, grey-looking mess in front of me each dinner-time. If I so much as sigh, she snatches the food away and throws it in the bin. She shoves a banana under my nose. ‘There – eat that!’ she says, as though I’m a monkey.
4: Bella! Bella!
I love Italy, as I’m sure my mother has already told you. I have no idea what she has been saying in general, but I am sure that at least she has told you that.
It is what we talk about in the evenings when I come home from work. I tell her about the large hot spaces around the Vatican. The bright, wide Spanish steps. The lovely wall paintings by Fra Angelico.
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