Highgate, 1988–91
‘Mam?’ says Lynda. ‘Are those stinging nettles?’
‘Yes,’ replies Winnie. ‘What do they look like?’
‘Right,’ says Lynda. ‘And why are you sitting with your tights rolled down?’
It is an autumn Saturday in 1988. Lynda has found her mam seated in a chair with her skirt hitched to her knees, tights rolled down to her ankles, and a bunch of dark green nettles in her right hand. The skin on Winnie’s knees is mottled red and puckered with sting-blisters. Winnie explains that Mike down the street, who is a physiotherapist at a non-league football club, has told her that thrashing your joints with nettles holds off arthritis. Muv used to say the same. As her doctor has just diagnosed arthritis in her knees, she is giving it a go.
‘But, Mam, even if it works, you don’t need to do things like that any more. There are creams you can get that do t’ same thing.’
‘Get away with you,’ says Winnie, who uses Fiery Jack on her back and complains she barely feels it. ‘They don’t put t’ strong stuff in creams you can buy, you have to find other ways.’ As if to demonstrate her point, she picks up the nettle stalks, wrapped in a tea towel, and recommences the beating.
This is how Winnie approaches the infirmities of old age, driving them off with punishment as she once drove off the women who interfered with her husband and the schoolteachers who slapped her children. She chases off pain with pain and, so far, it has worked. She might have grown nostalgic and yearn to be fetched by Harry, but outwardly she has aged little since her hair whitened ten years ago. Her house, always an extension of her, retains its sweet tidiness: the various cleaning cloths are wrung and hung about the kitchen, the Hoover lead still immaculately and tightly wound, the rolls of toilet tissue still concealed under the crocheted skirts of a plastic doll.
The nettle treatment seems extreme, but, in being herbal, is typical of Winnie’s taste in healthcare – bruises physicked with mustard poultices, barely wrinkled skin preserved with cucumber scraps and homespun face packs of witch hazel and oats. She seems self-sufficient, inventive and durable, and, to her family at least, as invulnerable as she appeared to be at forty.
This is why when Winnie’s neighbour Nancy calls Lynda at work and says, ‘It’s about your mam, love,’ Lynda assumes it to be a trivial matter – a request for some groceries to be bought on her drive home from work, perhaps, or a leaking kitchen tap.
‘I found her on t’ kitchen floor,’ says Nancy. ‘It looks as if she’s had a fall. She isn’t really talking.’
What Winnie has had, a doctor tells Lynda at the hospital in Barnsley later that evening in January 1989, is a stroke – probably after falling and hitting her head. Not unusual for a lady of her age, he says.
‘No,’ says Lynda, ‘it’s just that my mam, she . . . I suppose no one ever expects it, do they?’
The doctor says they will have to wait and see how she recovers. As it turns out, they do not have to wait long. Watched over by the little gypsy girl, who tells her it isn’t her time to go and Harry isn’t here yet, Winnie is walking about the ward in a couple of days, and talking about the housework two days after that. She is discharged within the week, showing no apparent ill-effects.
In the early autumn, back in her usual routines, Winnie is in Goldthorpe, crossing the road from the Co-op to the baker’s, when an Austin Montego whips around a corner and clips her with its wing. Winnie goes up into the air like a cork, flips over, and lands on her back on the pavement, shaken but fully conscious. She tells the policemen that come running from the station that she was crossing too slowly, but when they come to the house later, they will blame the driver. Apart from the scratches and bruises that she sees off with her poultices, she has no injuries. The only legacy is her veneration of the coat she was wearing at the time of the accident – a fashionable calf-length padded and hooded overcoat that Pauline had bought for her from a street market. Winnie had already been impressed by the warmth of the padding, and she now decides its cushioning, protective qualities have helped to save her. That winter she wears it like armour every time she leaves the house.
‘I don’t know about her needing a coat,’ says John. ‘That woman is a Sherman tank.’
*
But while her body forges on like a tank in a pinny, Winnie’s short-term memory flickers and fails. Sometimes Lynda sees her pause, floorcloth in hand, in the kitchen, as if her mind has slipped its moorings and is floating free like a pilotless hot-air balloon in a blank blue sky. ‘Are you okay, Mam?’ Lynda asks.
‘Aye, I just . . . can’t think . . . what I was . . . hmm . . .’
At other times she forgets where she was five minutes ago, and on some mornings she will get up at half-past four, ready to make Harry’s snap for him.
When Lynda calls one day in the summer of 1990 to find her mam out and the gas burning after being left on all morning, she decides she needs to act. Lynda and John rent their home to one of John’s sons, and help Winnie to buy her house from the council, and at the age of eighty she becomes a homeowner. Lynda, John and Karl move in with her, and John makes the alterations to allow her to get around the house, and then redecorates and refurbishes. They install a new kitchen, but leave the sitting room, where she used to sit with Harry, as it was.
A few weeks after they move in, Lynda is cooking the tea when she sees Winnie bringing her best china from the front room to the sitting-room table where they eat. It is the Royal Albert tea service that John McNeill bought for her when Roy brought him to stay at Highgate Lane in the summer of 1953. Having used the china for perhaps a dozen special birthdays and anniversaries since, Winnie now begins to carefully lay it out on a nondescript weekday evening in September.
She lays five place settings, one of them for Harry. A spoon is placed beside the flowery cup and saucer, as if he might make an encore with the tapped-out tinkling of ‘Tiger Rag’.
Lynda comes in and frowns. ‘Are you expecting somebody, Mam?’
‘You what?’ Winnie looks at her as if woken from a dream, struggling to recall where, and possibly who, she is.
‘I was wondering what you’d got t’ best china out for. You’ve laid an extra place.’
Winnie absorbs the information, and laughs weakly as if not understanding a joke. She starts to gather up the dishes.
‘It’s alright,’ says Lynda. ‘Keep them now you’ve laid them out, but let’s just move these extra ones, eh?’
Winnie nods meekly, but when she sits down to the meal, she says, ‘I do miss him, your dad. I do wish he would come for me.’
Winnie restates this almost daily, the sentiment a throwback to the old days of grand funerals, drawn curtains and ‘Abide With Me’, when death was dramatised. She is uninterested in the modern practices of holding the mystery at bay by celebrating the deceased person’s life, and refusing to be sad because that’s what they would have wanted; rather than push death aside, she likes to dwell on it. She thinks of it being administrated both by God and the spirits of the once-beloved dead with whom she will be reunited in peace. In a way, it is as if Winnie is now rehearsing for her own death, reordering her feelings and history as it ought to have been, ensuring a dignified, meaningful end to the tale.
But Lynda finds it hard to hear her mam talking of being carried away by Harry. She does not like to think about it, and in any case it seems quite impossible to imagine her mother ever dying.
‘Don’t be daft, Mam,’ says Lynda. ‘If my dad was here, he’d tell you to stop talking rubbish.’
‘He wouldn’t.’
‘Mam . . .’
‘He wouldn’t.’
Lynda relents. In the silence that follows, she reaches across the tablecloth and strokes one of her mother’s thin, mottled hands, and its wedding ring catches the light among the tea set’s pale lilac roses.