My grandson Walter, whilst at school, did a picture of a lighthouse which his teacher took to be quite another thing. She was not amused. Such a pity. A good laugh with a teacher on this difficult subject would be very valuable. I think she missed a trick.
Love – that over-used four-letter word – was another stumbler. My ma always said your heart had to be broken ten times before it was any use to you as a heart. I think that’s a bit severe. Five times?
Sophie was once ditched by her beloved in a letter sent to her on holiday. Her grief was terrible to behold. He wrote that it was impossible to continue with their relationship as she was far too young. She was eleven. He was fourteen. I thought she would never recover.
Emma, in hopeless love, drank a whole bottle of sherry and took a flight to New York. I must say the sherry was a bit of a surprise. It became an emotional telephone exchange, and ‘children’ just go, with little or no warning, and the house is left silent and littered with ‘unconsidered trifles’.
And then, of course, people die. They will do it. In clumps sometimes. I don’t think I ever managed my daughters’ grief when their father died very well at all. I was too busy with mine, keeping it to myself. Trying not to impose it on others. I must have seemed cold and distant.
And my past has been rather a disappointment. I’ve never had an affair. I probably thought about it, but I failed.
I made the girls promise not to tell me if their father ever admitted to any such thing. I have an uneasy feeling that I am quite boring. I think that’s why I took to acting. I enjoy being somebody else. I remember an unexpected visit from the Canadian branch of my husband’s family. We all sat down to a large, hastily assembled afternoon tea. The visitors questioned me closely about my hobbies. They were anxious to know, reasonably enough, what sort of girl their relative had acquired. Did I play bridge? Chess? Golf? Did I watch any sport?
No. No. And no.
My husband finally asked, ‘What are your interests, Phylli?’
I threw a meringue at him.
And another thing. I can’t make choices. It’s very irritating. My husband used to say it. The girls now say it. ‘Do what you want, Ma.’ I have no idea what that is. I have simply forgotten how to access it, if I ever knew. I think I can source the problem to my adored elder brother. I just wanted to be where he was, do what he did. So did my daughters, who shared his last hours with him in intensive care. I was on stage.
Their dad died young too, of course. There was no growing old with either of them. I feel to blame. Like Orpheus. I must have turned to look back. They are not there. Just having your life’s love sitting at peace in the same room is the best of life. I’d even let him do the Times crossword.
But I can’t forgive him for leaving before his grandchildren arrived. I find that particularly painful. Like four knives in the heart. He was such great casting for a granddad. He would have taught them all fishing and how to skin a rabbit. They would learn how to make bacon and tomato ‘sclunge’ and fry cheese on a tin plate. They’d learn long words like obdurate and antimacassar. Monty Python would be required viewing and they’d know where he hid the chocolate.
He had an original mind and he looked for it in other people, especially his daughters. I envied them, as I improvised my form of motherhood. I seemed to have very little to go on. I only hope it was enough. I’ll ask …
Sophie
The lady said, ‘Write something about your mum. A couple of “funny anecdotes”…’ Oh dear, I thought, where do I begin? A mum is a whole world if you’re lucky, not just a single landmass. How many words? How rude can they be?
It was becoming a mum that made me begin to see that Mum hadn’t been born a mum. She was just like me – a woman who had brought two curious creatures into this world, literally squeezed them out shrieking and groaning after having sexual relations with that fellow who was my dad … Let’s not go there.
There she is. There we all are, us mums, making it up as we go along, responding as wisely as we can to these individuals who have struggled out of our bodies just slightly less alarmingly than the alien in that film.
So what is she like, my spaceship woman, who landed me here like a wet fish on the shore? Well. My mum was a very steady girl. Golly. Well done, Mum. How did you do that? She was never shouty. Except twice, I remember, and crikey was I scared.
Mum set the scene with visuals and smells. She’d wrap our presents in brown paper and paint beautiful pictures on them. She’d always make sure there was a cooking smell when we came in from school. She’d leave on all the lights on purpose. Our god- father Ron would say the house looked like a boat in a dark sea when you walked up the road at night.
She was a working mum and she was a wonderful mess. I liked to be in her dressing room at nights with the play feeding in on the tannoy, hearing her out there. I’d clear her chaotic make-up space, line up her lipsticks and blow the sweet face powder about. So she was very there and then sometimes she wasn’t. But you knew she was somewhere doing her thing. And she’d leave little presents if she was away on tour or something. My favourite was a tiny jar of Pond’s Cold Cream. It was like having a little piece of her.
Mum wasn’t very physical and then out of the blue she would grab you and squidge you sooo hard, chanting ‘Passion! Passion!’ through gritted teeth like a lunatic. You could feel her tight with love.
I don’t remember ever really clashing with Mum. She didn’t like confrontation, I learnt later. I think I sensed her tiller in the water doing its mum thing, shifting kindly in all the currents that make a family. Keeping things steady for Dad, we found out later too.
Sometimes I struggled to explain myself to Mum and worried I was an utter loon. And sometimes I think I scared her when I wanted to show her my feelings. It felt like an oblique challenge to her own very hidden depths.
She was an evacuee. Now I see all those feelings packed tightly in her gas-mask bag, or deep in the pockets that went with her to strange ‘aunties’ and then boarding school. I wish I could have been that little girl’s friend.
Mum’s a great laugher. That’s her way through. She flings her head back and just laughs.
Mum walked me down the aisle when I got married, her head so high and laughing.
Mum loves to lower the tone and will always find her way through the really sore bits by finding the absurd.
Mum pretends she doesn’t like lots of things – like Shakespeare, just because it’s anarchic to say that in our profession. (I know she likes him a little bit.)
Mum 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