Reading My Mother during Lockdown
The day before my mother died, she warned me that I would find my father’s love letters, and hers, in the old bureau in the sitting room.
‘They’re not very exciting,’ she said, with a smile that seemed almost regretful, as she leaned back against the pillows of the bed she’d shared with my father. She was as thin as a bird and her skin was almost transparent. ‘We didn’t write about passion.’
I suspected that, if the letters had contained anything very intimate, she might have already destroyed them. But perhaps I was doing her a disservice. I discovered, after she died, that I didn’t know my mother as well as I thought I did.
Later that evening, when she’d slipped into a morphine-induced sleep, from which, I’d been warned, she might never wake, I opened the bureau to look for the certificates and other documents I would shortly need. Overwhelmed by sadness, feeling guilty, a trespasser on a very private life, I opened the crocheted war-time clutch bag where she kept important things. It was a peculiar shade of khaki wool and it was hideous. I cringed to think that my mother might once have carried it, but wartime fashion wasn’t exactly about beauty or style. Inside the hand-sewn cotton lining, together with war-time ration books and identity cards, were about forty small Basildon Bond envelopes. I recognised my father’s looped scrawl and my mother’s neat copperplate, in faded blue ink, on fawn-coloured paper that might once have been cream or white. The ink had smudged in places. I didn’t open the letters; it would have seemed obscene to read such private communications with my mother sleeping in the next room.
As I sorted through birth certificates and insurance policies, I realised that the bag also contained a collection of little notebooks – most no bigger than a small envelope. One or two were a horrible khaki colour like the clutch bag, with a government logo in the right-hand corner, a legacy of post war austerity. Others had pretty floral covers. Curious, but also half reluctant in case I’d stumbled on something not meant for my eyes, I opened one of them. A date was written at the top of the first page, January 1964, the year I left home for a more exciting life in London, the year my mother had what was then called a ‘nervous breakdown’. But it wasn’t a diary. Down the page, neatly divided under monthly headings was a series of book titles and their authors, each one given a star rating from one to five with the occasional comment from my mother. These were her reading diaries, and they ran from 1948 – two years after she married my father – to the present day; almost sixty years of reading history.
I can’t remember my mother without a book in her hand. She read with her morning coffee and her afternoon tea. In the evenings in remote farmhouses beyond the reach of electricity she and my father sat in front of the fire and read by oil lamp or flickering candle light.
Sometimes it was a guilty pleasure – busy farmer’s wives weren’t supposed to bury their heads in books when they could have been doing something useful. I remember her jumping up to hide her book under a cushion when a neighbour knocked on the door and the lunch dishes were still in the sink. She put her finger to her lips to warn me not to say anything. My mother’s cheeks were flushed with shame.
As a small child, bedtime stories (and sometimes daytime stories) were a regular feature of my life. The works of Beatrix Potter were my favourites, but I loved poetry even when I didn’t understand what it meant. My mother could recite huge chunks of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and almost the whole of Omar Khayyam. Her rendering of Longfellow’s Hiawatha was often requested and the tragic saga of the Forsaken Merman always reduced me to tears as she reached the mournful conclusion: ‘Come away, children, come away’. The idea of a mother leaving her children was beyond my comprehension. Jabberwocky and the Walrus and the Carpenter were also in her repertoire. It didn’t matter how often I heard them, they gave pleasure – and still do, because I can hear my mother’s voice when I read the words. She had a way of reading poetry aloud that caught the imagination. When she recited Omar Khayyam –
‘They say the Lion and the Lizard keep
The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep:
And Bahram, that great Hunter – the Wild Ass
Stamps o’er his Head and he lies fast asleep.’
– the words took me straight to the Persian palaces of Persepolis and I became part of a fairy tale, watching the Sultan’s tower ‘noosed with light’ and the stars outside my bedroom window flung into ‘the bowl of night’.
I knew all about Persepolis. On my mother’s bookshelves, next to the poetry books and the medical encyclopedia, was a large, rather boring looking tome in a plain binding called The Wonders of the World. The photographs and drawings were in black and white, but the splendours of the world’s most famous antiquities were bright with colour in the mind of the small girl who turned the pages. It was too heavy for me to carry very far, so I read it on the floor.
Persepolis, the book told me, had once had gates of gold and ivory before it was sacked by Alexander the Great. I looked at it so often that its carved staircases and pillared porticos were as familiar to me as pictures of my local village. And when one day, only a decade and a half later, I walked through the ransacked palaces of Persepolis, a young mother with a small child in her arms, I thought of my own mother and the book that had instigated so many dreams of travel. The words in my head were the ones she used to recite; an enigma the child had not understood, but had loved the music of. Now, almost alone in the abandoned city, in the middle of the Iranian desert, the words made perfect sense.
‘One Moment in Annihilation’s Waste,
One Moment, of the Well of Life to taste –
The Stars are setting and the Caravan
Starts for the Dawn of Nothing – Oh, make haste!’
‘Books,’ Anthony Powell wrote, ‘have odd effects on different people’. And so, with the exception of Omar Khayam, there was a big difference between me and my mother. I didn’t get on terribly well with her when I was young. I was my father’s favourite, a tomboy, closer to him in temperament than to her. Her favourite was the brother who arrived about five years after I was born, a gentle, quiet baby who loved being cuddled and wasn’t always getting into mischief. ‘You were such a handful,’ she once told me, ‘I waited until you were at school before I had another.’
Our tastes were fundamentally different. I despised the tacky sentiments of Patience Strong and the morally uplifting epigrams in the Friendship Books of Francis Gay. My mother was also very fond of a column called ‘the Man Who Sees’ in Woman’s Weekly. It was a series of thoughtful ruminations on various subjects while ‘the man’ went rambling around outdoors in a trilby hat with a pipe in his mouth. My mother loved his cosy philosophies and so, for a while, did I – there were truths there that I could relate to. ‘Go into the woods in company and you come back empty – go alone and you come back with more than you can hold’, meant something to a girl who roamed the wild countryside on her own. But, by the time I was thirteen or fourteen I’d outgrown it and was restless for something more questioning – things that went deeper and further into the wild hinterland of the mind. I gave my mother a hard time – once, in an argument, I called her gullible. I suspect that there were times when I made her cry after I had ridiculed some precious belief of hers.
After she died, numb with the loss of someone whose value I still hadn’t fully appreciated, I took the things she’d left me back home and, for the first time, sat down to look at her reading diaries. The pages were covered with the titles of books I’d never read by authors I’d never heard of. Some of these unknown books had been given five stars and underlined. I realised how little I had known this woman who had given me my love of literature – perhaps even the compulsion to become a writer myself.
Copyright Kathleen Jones
‘They’re not very exciting,’ she said, with a smile that seemed almost regretful, as she leaned back against the pillows of the bed she’d shared with my father. She was as thin as a bird and her skin was almost transparent. ‘We didn’t write about passion.’
I suspected that, if the letters had contained anything very intimate, she might have already destroyed them. But perhaps I was doing her a disservice. I discovered, after she died, that I didn’t know my mother as well as I thought I did.
Later that evening, when she’d slipped into a morphine-induced sleep, from which, I’d been warned, she might never wake, I opened the bureau to look for the certificates and other documents I would shortly need. Overwhelmed by sadness, feeling guilty, a trespasser on a very private life, I opened the crocheted war-time clutch bag where she kept important things. It was a peculiar shade of khaki wool and it was hideous. I cringed to think that my mother might once have carried it, but wartime fashion wasn’t exactly about beauty or style. Inside the hand-sewn cotton lining, together with war-time ration books and identity cards, were about forty small Basildon Bond envelopes. I recognised my father’s looped scrawl and my mother’s neat copperplate, in faded blue ink, on fawn-coloured paper that might once have been cream or white. The ink had smudged in places. I didn’t open the letters; it would have seemed obscene to read such private communications with my mother sleeping in the next room.
As I sorted through birth certificates and insurance policies, I realised that the bag also contained a collection of little notebooks – most no bigger than a small envelope. One or two were a horrible khaki colour like the clutch bag, with a government logo in the right-hand corner, a legacy of post war austerity. Others had pretty floral covers. Curious, but also half reluctant in case I’d stumbled on something not meant for my eyes, I opened one of them. A date was written at the top of the first page, January 1964, the year I left home for a more exciting life in London, the year my mother had what was then called a ‘nervous breakdown’. But it wasn’t a diary. Down the page, neatly divided under monthly headings was a series of book titles and their authors, each one given a star rating from one to five with the occasional comment from my mother. These were her reading diaries, and they ran from 1948 – two years after she married my father – to the present day; almost sixty years of reading history.
 |
| Ella Sutherland in 1945 |
I can’t remember my mother without a book in her hand. She read with her morning coffee and her afternoon tea. In the evenings in remote farmhouses beyond the reach of electricity she and my father sat in front of the fire and read by oil lamp or flickering candle light.
Sometimes it was a guilty pleasure – busy farmer’s wives weren’t supposed to bury their heads in books when they could have been doing something useful. I remember her jumping up to hide her book under a cushion when a neighbour knocked on the door and the lunch dishes were still in the sink. She put her finger to her lips to warn me not to say anything. My mother’s cheeks were flushed with shame.
As a small child, bedtime stories (and sometimes daytime stories) were a regular feature of my life. The works of Beatrix Potter were my favourites, but I loved poetry even when I didn’t understand what it meant. My mother could recite huge chunks of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and almost the whole of Omar Khayyam. Her rendering of Longfellow’s Hiawatha was often requested and the tragic saga of the Forsaken Merman always reduced me to tears as she reached the mournful conclusion: ‘Come away, children, come away’. The idea of a mother leaving her children was beyond my comprehension. Jabberwocky and the Walrus and the Carpenter were also in her repertoire. It didn’t matter how often I heard them, they gave pleasure – and still do, because I can hear my mother’s voice when I read the words. She had a way of reading poetry aloud that caught the imagination. When she recited Omar Khayyam –
‘They say the Lion and the Lizard keep
The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep:
And Bahram, that great Hunter – the Wild Ass
Stamps o’er his Head and he lies fast asleep.’
– the words took me straight to the Persian palaces of Persepolis and I became part of a fairy tale, watching the Sultan’s tower ‘noosed with light’ and the stars outside my bedroom window flung into ‘the bowl of night’.
I knew all about Persepolis. On my mother’s bookshelves, next to the poetry books and the medical encyclopedia, was a large, rather boring looking tome in a plain binding called The Wonders of the World. The photographs and drawings were in black and white, but the splendours of the world’s most famous antiquities were bright with colour in the mind of the small girl who turned the pages. It was too heavy for me to carry very far, so I read it on the floor.
Persepolis, the book told me, had once had gates of gold and ivory before it was sacked by Alexander the Great. I looked at it so often that its carved staircases and pillared porticos were as familiar to me as pictures of my local village. And when one day, only a decade and a half later, I walked through the ransacked palaces of Persepolis, a young mother with a small child in her arms, I thought of my own mother and the book that had instigated so many dreams of travel. The words in my head were the ones she used to recite; an enigma the child had not understood, but had loved the music of. Now, almost alone in the abandoned city, in the middle of the Iranian desert, the words made perfect sense.
 |
| The infant book-worm |
‘One Moment in Annihilation’s Waste,
One Moment, of the Well of Life to taste –
The Stars are setting and the Caravan
Starts for the Dawn of Nothing – Oh, make haste!’
‘Books,’ Anthony Powell wrote, ‘have odd effects on different people’. And so, with the exception of Omar Khayam, there was a big difference between me and my mother. I didn’t get on terribly well with her when I was young. I was my father’s favourite, a tomboy, closer to him in temperament than to her. Her favourite was the brother who arrived about five years after I was born, a gentle, quiet baby who loved being cuddled and wasn’t always getting into mischief. ‘You were such a handful,’ she once told me, ‘I waited until you were at school before I had another.’
Our tastes were fundamentally different. I despised the tacky sentiments of Patience Strong and the morally uplifting epigrams in the Friendship Books of Francis Gay. My mother was also very fond of a column called ‘the Man Who Sees’ in Woman’s Weekly. It was a series of thoughtful ruminations on various subjects while ‘the man’ went rambling around outdoors in a trilby hat with a pipe in his mouth. My mother loved his cosy philosophies and so, for a while, did I – there were truths there that I could relate to. ‘Go into the woods in company and you come back empty – go alone and you come back with more than you can hold’, meant something to a girl who roamed the wild countryside on her own. But, by the time I was thirteen or fourteen I’d outgrown it and was restless for something more questioning – things that went deeper and further into the wild hinterland of the mind. I gave my mother a hard time – once, in an argument, I called her gullible. I suspect that there were times when I made her cry after I had ridiculed some precious belief of hers.
After she died, numb with the loss of someone whose value I still hadn’t fully appreciated, I took the things she’d left me back home and, for the first time, sat down to look at her reading diaries. The pages were covered with the titles of books I’d never read by authors I’d never heard of. Some of these unknown books had been given five stars and underlined. I realised how little I had known this woman who had given me my love of literature – perhaps even the compulsion to become a writer myself.
Copyright Kathleen Jones
Loved reading this Kathleen.
ReplyDeleteFrom Helen (reading round group Penrith)
Thank you Helen. How are you? Hope things are going well for you!
Delete