CHAPTER 4

MUM

It pisses me off that we’ve discovered the simple, sneaky, bastard virus that could, in many women, lead to cervical cancer. It pisses me off even more that we now have a procedure that could potentially make this brutal illness a thing of the past.

Yes, you read that right. I’m pissed off. Pissed off that, had the researchers really pulled their fingers out and figured all this out much earlier, cervical cancer would not have destroyed my mother – all too quickly and all too slowly.

I’m pissed off that this initially invisible intruder didn’t choose to take someone else’s mum. Not mine. I was still using her, thank you very much. Then I would still have had someone to hide behind on the sofa with when we were watching the Hammer House of Horrors, someone to tell me what a big strong boy I was, and someone who loved me unconditionally. Someone else could suffer the absolute black hole of despair of watching their mother die instead of me.

I was nine or ten when we first found out that Mum had cancer. I later found out that they had attacked it aggressively, using a combination of radiotherapy and surgery to remove anything that wasn’t completely welcome. Her symptoms, I remember, were general fatigue and a bit of a limp. She came out of hospital with cotton wool and gauze aplenty. She’d been an auxiliary nurse for a while, so she’d easily convinced the ward that she was more than able to tend to herself. And I’m sure she was.

1976 was the hottest summer I can remember. We went on a caravan holiday to Lowestoft. We turned up – me, Mum, Dad, and Jim – and gazed upon the splendour of all the beautiful shiny caravans there. In among these homes of beauty were two tired-looking chocolate brown and cream six-berth behemoths. Jim and I laughed at the thought of which poor sod was going to be holidaying in these less than deluxe lovelies.

The short answer was us. We had our week in a shit-coloured caravan. As soon as we took one step inside, Mum set about it with every cleaning utensil known to humanity. By the time she’d finished on that first day it was damn nearly habitable.

It was a great holiday, and seriously hot. I remember my shoulders actually becoming crunchy. Jumping and cavorting in the sea proved somewhat problematic as the salt invaded every sun-scoured lesion on my back. Mum put butter on these wounds – I think she was probably planning to eat me later.

We didn’t know about that sort of stuff in 1976. Crunchy skin leading to cancer? Ridiculous! Perish the thought. Put some butter on it and everything will be lovely. Global warming hadn’t been invented yet. How could the lovely, warm sun cause anything really bad?

So far, I have had no repercussions.

It was a holiday we felt we deserved. The stress of Mum’s cancer scare was put to one side as we all had that typical British seaside holiday. Lovely. Great. Pity about what was waiting for us on our return home though.

‘It’s great that Mum’s going back into hospital,’ Dad appealed to me as I cried into my pears and custard. ‘That means they’re going to make her better.’ I was sitting miserably at our little blue Formica kitchen table, glaring at him miserably.

No, sorry, I just wasn’t buying that. I had already been told she was better – why on earth would she need to go back into hospital to make her even more better?

Mum went into Wellingborough Hospital at first. Things continued as normal. Jim and I carried on going to school. Dad went to work and visited her regularly. At this time, Stuart and Carol had gone to live in South Africa. We didn’t have a phone, so Dad kept Stuart up to date with all that was going on using the phone in Mr and Mrs Miller’s house across the street.

Nothing much was said about Mum’s illness / road to recovery until she was transferred to Northampton Hospital. Suddenly Dad wasn’t going to work anymore. Suddenly (and altogether more exciting) Jim and I weren’t going to school any more either. We all trooped into Northampton most days. Jim and I chatted to Mum for a bit during each visit, bestowing her with kisses and cuddles.

Cuddling and kissing were all very well, but with us not going to school and Mum being confined to her own room in hospital, conversation was a bit limited. Dad invariably chucked some money at us, and so Jim and I wandered around Northampton town centre. I had Subbuteo – the international edition – and it was obviously essential that I got the Luton away team so they could clash with the mighty Brazil when I got home.

These didn’t feel like scary times. It just felt like more of the same from last time. Mum would come home with a wide range of pharmaceuticals and life would go on.

One day though, that all changed. Jim and I were playing the sacred Subbuteo at the back of the living room, just under the window. This gave us sufficient light to ascertain exactly who had knelt on Pele and what should be done about it. He had now been glued back onto his base so many times he just had a couple of translucent blobs sticking out the bottom of his shorts where his legs used to be.

Dad came in. He was wearing his denim jacket and looked tired and pale. Looking back on it, he’d obviously been rehearsing what to say in the car on the way home.

‘We’ve always been honest with each other,’ he said. There then came an outpouring of words that included, ‘Your mum’s coming home. There’s nothing more they can do for her. We can look after her here. Stuart’s coming back from South Africa.’

The wonderful thing about denial is that it kicks in automatically without you having to do anything. Sure, I heard all of the words, but the ones I chose to attend to were, ‘Your mum’s coming home,’ and ‘Stuart’s coming back from South Africa.’

Stuart did indeed come back from South Africa. He arrived at Louise’s house while we were there. I can still see him coming through the garden gate in my mind’s eye, with Louise rushing up the path to greet him, shouting, ‘Stuart!’ She did that laugh / cry thing that only grown-ups can. He ran straight past her and threw his arms around her husband, Keith. He gave him a big kiss, laughed at his own comedy genius and then demanded a Scotch pie. ‘The greasier, the better!’

He stayed with us while preparations were made for Mum’s return home. I felt young and a bit excluded as Jim showed great interest in his incredibly interesting older brother, who had tales of black servants and car crashes. Stuart was some manner of technician out in South Africa. Doing manly stuff on a day-to-day basis carried with it a level of risk that being an author, as I was going to be, just didn’t have. A colleague of his had had an accident in the work place. My youthful mind slotted it under ‘Manly Accident’ in the memory-storage part of my brain, so it could have been anything from an electrocution to a shark attack. Stuart, being the man’s friend, colleague, boss, or just a plain old nosy parker, was chosen to accompany him to the hospital in an ambulance.

It turned out that the man’s injuries were pretty superficial. He was back at work almost immediately. Unlike Stuart, who suffered a shattered collar bone when the ambulance crashed due to driver error. It turned out that the ambulance driver had been banned from driving tractors because of his erratic style. Someone somewhere obviously thought he’d be better suited to transporting sick people in a far faster vehicle, rather than maize.

Stuart particularly enjoyed showing us his scars and the place where the metal pins had gone in. He also enjoyed telling us about the black servants he had. I must have said something along the lines of, ‘Isn’t that a symbol of white man’s oppression in a country that has already been raped and plundered?’ but in 11-year-old speak. He told us it was okay, because everyone had servants in South Africa. It suited everyone.

Lovely.

Stuart went to visit Mum in Northampton General. She was delighted to see him. The nurses were delighted to see him. He looked like one of the Beatles and he knew it. The main thing he spotted was that Mum was without a television in this horrible hospital. So, he set about remedying that. A black-and-white portable TV was duly delivered. In the eyes of the world, this made him an irresistible mix of Paul McCartney and Mother Theresa.

Please take time to pause with me as we fully appreciate that image.

Stuart was distressed when he saw her. He came home and declared, ‘That’s not my mum.’ We had obviously grown accustomed to Mum’s appearance as she gradually deteriorated, losing a third of her body weight over a few months. For Stuart, it was altogether a bigger shock.

Stuart said that if Mum came home, he’d move out. I remember thinking how bizarre this was, given the fact that he’d travelled half way around the world to be with her. Mum did, in fact, come home. Stuart did, in fact, move out and lived with his mother-in-law for the rest of his time in England. As I sit here now, with the benefit of 20 / 20 hindsight, I realise that his move was a sensible one – to make more space for Mum’s return home. But in my confused, 11-year-old mind, I convinced myself that he was abandoning us.

So, Mum was delivered home to her newly bought orthopaedic bed in her new vibrant blue dressing gown with the sacred portable TV. She didn’t look that ill. She actually looked really happy. I was puzzled at the time. Had they made some kind of mistake? Was some other poor sod waiting to die? Then I asked myself the question that no 11-year-old boy should have to ask himself: ‘Does she know she’s dying?’

It all felt terribly normal. She seemed fine. It was the same old Mum back home.

After Stuart moved out I moved back into sleeping in a double bed with Jim. This was right next to Mum and Dad’s room. Being 11 and 12-year-old brothers, Jim and I had a hobby that is shared by siblings around the world. We would merrily batter shit out of each other and then go to sleep. Mum’s tolerance for such behaviour was low – being terminally ill and all. She had always been the administrator of corporal punishment in the Young household and this was to continue now she was home. Still thumping each other, we’d hear as the bedroom door opened. We’d have some awareness of her making her way downstairs to the kitchen. We could even vaguely hear as the drawer where she kept her whippy sticks was angrily pulled open and slammed shut. We didn’t stop fighting even when we heard her coming back up the stairs with the whippy sticks. But we did stop trying to kill each other once we had received a few stingy whips.

One day, I decided that I was a bit fed up of the stingy whip. I decided that no more would I suffer the sudden appearance of red stripes on my legs in the name of discipline. Knowing that she kept the whippy sticks in one of the kitchen drawers, I set about remedying the matter once and for all. For which, dear Jim, I can only apologise. I opened the drawer, took out the whippy sticks, and broke them into uniform, one-inch pieces. Then I put them back. A stroke of genius. My membership of MENSA was assured.

One night, soon afterwards, Jim and I were tenderly beating each other to sleep. The bedroom door opened, and there were sounds of footsteps downstairs … still I didn’t register. Then there was the rattling of the kitchen drawer. Was there a flicker of realisation? No, probably not just yet. Then came the almighty slam of that same drawer and the thundering of feet upstairs. She moved bloody quickly for someone who was supposed to be dying. Finally, it dawned on me. I disengaged from the superficial thumping of Jim and gazed at the door silently. Jim carried on, obviously wondering why the fight had taken such a one-sided appearance.

What followed is best described as shock and awe. Stories are still told, and songs still sung, of that rain of arse-reddening slaps that fell upon Jim and I that night. Jim’s small mind must have been searching for the answer to two simple questions:

1. Why is my terminally ill mother mashing me into a pulp, and

2. Where did those sticks go?

Jim, dear brother, now you know.

The above battering acted as a kind of nuclear deterrent for the rest of Mum’s time on earth. Jim’s behaviour altered incredibly. In a matter of days Jim stopped beating me senseless and started telling me bedtime stories. False memory syndrome – possibly.

Mum gradually began to deteriorate. The cancer spread to her brain. Her mind played tricks on her and, to some extent, on us.

March 6th, 1977. My 12th birthday. Mum had got it into her head that she had arranged for a surprise present for me. Only she couldn’t remember where she’d put it. She and I spent a wonderful afternoon shifting the sideboard – nope, nothing there. Shifting the sofa – nope. The dining room table and chairs – no, nothing. Just to make sure, we looked all over again.

I’d been driven by a desire for Mum to be right. She’d been a bit forgetful recently. I so wanted her to be right. To be fair, I also wanted a bloody birthday present. Dad had been a bit preoccupied with other stuff. We were both a bit upset – that said, we still managed to laugh about it.

A week or so later, Jim and I were slapped in the face with the reality of Mum’s illness. We’d come careering into the house. I’d obviously done something sneaky and horrible to Jim and I was running away from the consequences. We were both laughing as he promised my immediate demise.

Mum laughed too. ‘Who’s your friend, Jim?’

We both stopped dead in our tracks. I gasped for air like a recently landed halibut (other brands of fish are available). I was her favourite blue-eyed boy. I wasn’t Jim’s friend. I don’t think I cried. I was too shocked.

Fade out …

Fade back to a woman writhing in agony on a bed in the living room. The bed came down when she could no longer climb the stairs. She groaned and moaned incoherently. She didn’t seem to know where she was. She used a bedpan now. Dad would sensitively usher us out to change her pad and pants.

Only once did he fail. I was looking at her groaning and writhing and she pushed the duvet off. There was a pervasive smell of shit and, before I could look away, I saw her vagina. It’s funny, the shit didn’t seem to bother me. It was the fact that she’d always been a very private woman who didn’t want other people knowing, never mind seeing, her business. The views and opinions of other folk mattered to her. Dad rushed in and pulled the duvet over her, cooing gently that she really should cover herself up. He spoke to her in the same way that parents speak to their newly born babies. He didn’t expect a response – he just wanted her to know that she was loved and that he was there.

The period of totally caring for Mum was mercifully short for Dad. He only had to wash, dress, change, and monitor her, 24 hours a day, for about two weeks. April 6th 1977 – exactly one month after the birthday present fiasco – I came downstairs to find Dad sitting next to her bed with his head in his hands. He was 54 and he looked like he’d aged 20 years overnight. He wasn’t crying – he just sounded desperately sad.

‘Your mum died at about six this morning,’ he said so quietly and so gently. I remembered the talk the previous night about the “death rattle” and how it wouldn’t be long now. I hadn’t heard the rattle – it was more of a deathly wheeze. It was like the very act of clinging on was becoming impossible. Clearly it was.

‘Can you go upstairs and tell your brother?’ The effort of telling me had obviously been huge.

I duly went back upstairs. Jim was awake. I uttered two simple and devastating words that no 13-year-old should have to hear. ‘Mum’s dead.’

His response was unexpected. ‘You’re joking!’

What? Yes, I know I have always had a wayward and occasionally questionable sense of humour, but surely … He came downstairs, saw Dad’s devastated form, and told him, ‘I thought he was joking!’ What a laugh, eh?

The rest of the day was hardly a blur of activity. We may have had breakfast, we may have had dinner – who knows?

Mrs Murie came round. She was a workmate of Mum’s at Golden Wonder. We hadn’t seen her for a while. To be fair, we hadn’t seen anyone for a while. She had been Mum’s best friend at the mighty crisp factory. This had been the year that her daughter, Sandra, and I had gone to the same senior school. All Mum wanted was for me to do better at school than her. Mrs Murie said that she’d been ‘drawn’ to the house. She felt that something had happened. The drawn curtains at three in the afternoon would have given her a clue … She mumbled some platitudes and left.

Dad didn’t really do socialising at the best of times. I imagine he wasn’t at his most talkative. I can’t imagine what was going through his head that day. I’m sure that somewhere he was thinking that his dream of marrying his girl, having a little white fence, and laughing had all turned to shit.

The funeral was a strange old affair. A whole bunch of folk who’d been conspicuous by their absence all piled into our living room to hear the beginning of the vague platitudes from a minister I’d never seen in my life. They all looked suitably sad, listening attentively to what the man of the cloth had to say.

‘You don’t have to come to the funeral,’ Dad had said.

So I didn’t. Jim did – I didn’t. Instead, I lay on my bed, wrestling with a black tie, really thinking about very little.