CHAPTER ONE

Mother

I wish you had known my mother. I remember, as clearly as if it were yesterday, toiling up the hill at the end of the school day, towards the group of mothers who stood at the crest of the rise, waiting to collect their children from the county primary school where my little sisters went.

The mothers chatted together, plump and comfortable, wearing modest, flowery dresses, pretty low-heeled sandals, their hair curled and tinted, and just that little bit of make-up to face the world in. Some had pushchairs with wriggling toddlers. Together, they smiled and nodded and gossipped and giggled, young and friendly and kind…. But there at the top of the hill, at a little distance from all the rest, stood my mother, as tall and straight and composed as a prophet, her great blue skirt flapping in the breeze, her thick brown hair tumbling down her back. By her side stood my littlest sister, her hand nestling confidingly in my mother’s hand, her world still sheltered in the folds of that blue skirt from the raw and bewildering society of the playground.

My mother. She was not a pretty woman, and never thought to try and make herself so. She had an uncompromising chin, firm lips, a nose like a hawk’s beak and unnerving grey eyes. Eyes that went straight past the outside of you and into the middle, which meant that you could relax about the torn jersey, the undone shoe laces, the tangled hair and the unwashed hands at the dinner table, but you had to feel very uncomfortable indeed about the stolen sweets, the broken promise, and the unkind way you ran away from a little sister striving to follow you on her short legs. My mother. Often, after tea, she would stand at the sink, having cleared away the tea things, just looking out of the windows at the seagulls riding the air-currents on the evening sky; her hands still, her work forgotten, a faraway expression in her eyes.

Therese and I would do our homework after tea, sitting at the tea-table in the kitchen. The three little ones would play out of doors until the light was failing, and then Mother would call them in, littlest first, and bath them in the lean-to bathroom at the back of the kitchen, brush their hair and clean their teeth, help them on with their nightgowns, and tuck them in to bed.

This was the moment of decision for Therese and me. Ours was a little house in a terrace of shabby houses that clung to a hillside by the sea, and we had only two bedrooms, so all five of us sisters slept in the same room on mattresses side by side on the floor. Mother hated electric light—she said it assaulted the sleepy soul and drove the sandman away, and when the little ones were ready for bed, she would tuck in Mary and Beth, and light the candle and sit down with Cecily, the littlest one, in the low comfortable chair in the corner of the room. If she put them to bed and left them, there would be pandemonium. Cecily would not stay in bed at all and romped gaily about the room, and Beth and Mary would begin to argue, starting with a simple remark like ‘Beth, I can’t get to sleep with you sniffing,’ and finishing with a general commotion of crying and quarrelling.

So Mother resigned herself to stay with them as they fell asleep, and she sat, with the littlest one snuggled on her lap, in the room dimly glowing with candle-light, softly astir with the breathing and sighing and turning over of children settling for the night.

Therese and I, at sixteen and fourteen years old, had to choose between staying alone downstairs to read a book or paint or gaze into the fire; and creeping upstairs with the little ones, to sit with Mother in the candlelight, and listen to her lullabies.

Most often, Therese stayed down, but I crept upstairs to Mother and lay on my bed, gazing at the candle as the flame dipped and rose with the draught, watching the shadows as they trembled and moved about the ceiling. After a while, as we kept our quiet, shadowy vigil, I would whisper, ‘Mother, tell me a story.’

I was just beginning to ask questions, to search for a way of looking at things that would make sense. The easy gaiety and simple sorrows of childhood had been swallowed up and lost in a hungry emptiness, a search for meaning that nothing seemed to satisfy. At school, I was only a number, a non-person. They could answer my questions about the theory of relativity and whether it was permissible in modern English to split an infinitive: but when it came to the great, lonely yearning that was opening up inside me, they didn’t seem even to want to hear the question, let alone try to answer it. I went to church every Sunday, and I listened to what they said about Jesus, and I believed it all, I really did; but was there anyone anywhere who cared about it enough to behave as if it were true? I felt disenchanted.

I began to wonder, as spring wore on to summer in that my fifteenth year, if I would ever meet anyone who could look me in the eye, who could say sorry without making a joke of it, who could cry without embarrassment, have a row and still stay friends. As for mentioning the word ‘love’, well… it provoked sniggers, not much else. The hunger of it all ached inside me. Maybe Mother knew. Maybe she could guess what I never told her, could not even tell myself; that I was desperate for something more than smiles and jokes and surfaces; that I was beginning to wonder if it was possible to stretch out your hand in the darkness and find it grasped by another hand, not evaded, rejected, or ignored.

So I wish you had known my mother. I wish you could hear the stories she told in her quiet, thoughtful voice. I wish I could take you into the magic of that breathing, candlelit room, which she filled with people and strange ways from long ago. I wish I could remember all of them to tell you, but years have gone by now, and I am not sure of everything she said. But for the times you, too, have a quiet moment, and need to unhook your mind from the burden of the day, here are some of the stories my mother told me. They are the stories she told me the year I turned fifteen.

Mother said these stories were true, and I never knew her to tell a lie… but then you could never be quite sure what she meant by ‘truth’; fact didn’t always come into it.