8.7 My Mother

This is an extract from an autobiographical series. For more information and a list of instalments so far, see right.

Meanwhile my mother was managing well without my father, as far as I could tell. She moved to a small modern house next to the river in the village where we’d all been brought up.
    ‘It’s the sort of house I’ve always dreamed of having,’ she said.
    It was certainly different from the large Victorian farmhouse of my childhood.
    She had a busy social life and plenty of interests, and my sister Amelia lived only a few minutes’ walk away.
    Then she had a small car accident which scared her. She decided her reactions were no longer good enough and made the brave decision to stop driving. She engaged Amelia and her partner to drive her around, do her shopping and generally take care of her.

Eight years after my father’s death, when my mother was in her late eighties, she contracted pneumonia and was not expected to live. But she did, although her strength had vanished and she needed full-time care. We tried to share this out between the five of us children but we were pretty bad at it and decided that my mother would much rather have a professional than us. As would we. So Jo and my sisters (the three who lived closest) arranged live-in carers.
    My mother said she’d had a dream in which she saw God and God had said to her ‘We nearly got you that time, didn’t we.’ It made me wonder why God had let her live as her quality of life had plummeted. Modern medicine, it seemed, kept people alive at the expense of their spiritual wellbeing. Death was inevitable and we needed to be prepared for that, not patched up and sent off to limp into the future unaided. Or perhaps I was thinking of what I would want. Perhaps my mother preferred it the way it was.
    I tried to do my bit, travelling up from Devon to stay a couple of nights every month or so but I struggled. The only way I could deal with my mother was to cut off completely from her, to divorce myself from all my own feelings and pretend she was a child. It was exhausting.
    My main feeling, I think, was fear. She knew just how to hurt and didn’t hold back from doing so. I wanted to protect myself from that.
    One morning, however, as I was on my knees cleaning out her wood-burning stove while she sat on a nearby chair keeping up a running commentary on everything I was doing wrong, I could bear it no longer and exploded.
    ‘For goodness sake,’ I shouted. ‘Just let me get on with things in my own way.’
    My mother crumpled.
    ‘Oh I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I know I’m terribly bossy.’
    It was the first time in my whole life that she’d ever apologised to me about anything. I leapt up and gave her a big hug.

Her health deteriorated and she was in and out of hospital. The brunt of the worry landed on Amelia, as well as my brother Jo and sister Cass both of whom lived in London but often stayed at my mother’s. I was desperate to help, so after my mother had been stuck in a large Kent hospital for weeks, I travelled up from Devon to visit her there.
    The place was manic and the staff so overworked they could hardly acknowledge me let alone answer any of my questions. My mother was surviving in her usual no-nonsense way, but to me she looked like a lonely child, and her brain was wandering for the first time.
    I’d gathered from my sisters – or thought I had - that they wanted to bring her home so, after a long mobile-phone conversation with Cass in a hospital corridor, I set about trying to make that happen. Perhaps I could do something helpful at last.
    During my earlier visits to Kent I’d struggled to do the right thing but either my mother or Amelia or the carer had wanted me to do things differently from what I was doing and from what the other two said. It was horribly confusing and I’d felt utterly useless.
    The staff at the hospital said that so long as my mother could sit unaided (or some such, I can’t remember exactly) and had appropriate care at home (which of course she did have) she could go. I explained this to my mother and with what I could see was a feat of unimaginable determination she managed to do whatever she had to. The hospital said they would send her home in an ambulance the next day. They gave my mother a 6-page form to fill out about her 'hospital experience'. As neither she nor I was capable of filling it out, I left it behind.

    Amelia was not at all pleased with the turn of events and, even though I could see it was because the stress was too much for her, I took it personally and felt that yet again I’d got things wrong.
    I went back to Devon the next day, knowing that my siblings had arranged two live-in carers for my mother and thinking that everything was more or less under control.

    Less than a week later however I was called back. My mother was now very poorly indeed.

To be continued

8.6 Penny

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. For more information and a list of instalments so far, see right.

Penny, our rescue lurcher, had now been with us for nine years.

    She no longer ran off to look for us whenever we left her alone, but even so both Frog and I had acquired the habit of taking her with us in the car when we went out. She was quite happy to wait in carparks while we shopped, and Frog took her to work with him whenever he could. The students at the university radio adored her and had made her an Honorary Life Member of the station.

    She was a skinny little thing when she first came to live with us and hardly ate, but she’d put on a couple of kilos since then and usually managed to finish her meals. But she certainly wasn’t a gutso (as Frog would say) like dear Brindle. She did however have two vices. (All dogs have at least one in my opinion, but each has their own particular brand.)

Firstly, she loved rolling in anything smelly, which necessitated frequent baths and showers. Luckily this was something Frog was good at giving her.

 

 Frog bathing Penny

Secondly she was a chaser, which was not surprising given her greyhound ancestry. If she spotted a deer – of which there were many around – she would be off, leaping over hedges, across roads, through fields and rivers.

    If I managed to call her before she fixed into chase mode, she was obedient, but if not she became blind and deaf to everything but her quarry and I had to resign myself to two or three frantic hours at home, waiting for her to return of her own accord. Which she always did thank goodness, footsore, dusty and breathless. And deer-less.

     I didn’t worry too much about what could happen to her when she vanished as she could look after herself. It was the damage she might cause while out that concerned me.

But perhaps I should have been stricter. Perhaps I should have thought ahead more, and not given her the chance to go off on her own. Perhaps she couldn’t look after herself quite as well as I thought.

    One day as she and I walked the lane that went up the hill behind the house she vanished to the far corner of an adjacent field and returned dragging the filthy remains of some long-dead animal. This was so unlike her that I began to feel slightly alarmed.

    Frog was full of stories of how farmers laced meat with poison and left it out to kill foxes and badgers. Many of the dead animals by the side of the road, he said, had been killed and thrown there by said farmers.

    How barbaric, I thought, trying not to believe him. And what about the buzzards and crows that then fed on the poisoned animals?

    Soon Penny was bored by the carcass and left it lying in the road, but a few hours after we arrived home she became restless, which again was unusual.

    Brenda had sold the bookshop and I was back at home editing, having written two (awful) novels and an autobiography on the strength of several inspiring weekends away, a monthly course in Exeter and an online course, all with an extraordinary creative-writing teacher called Roselle. Roselle reached deep inside you by giving deeply of herself, and this – for me at least – had led to writing pouring out of me.

    I’d paused writing for the moment however and gone back to the work I knew so well and felt safe with. I needed a rest from intensity, and to earn some money.

    Even from my eyrie, carved out of the loft when we built the extension sixteen years earlier, I could hear Penny in the bedroom crashing around. So I abandoned my proofreading and went down to check on her.

    By now she looked terrible – panting and almost foaming at the mouth. Something was obviously very wrong. It was time for the vet again.

    I heaved Penny into the car and drove as fast as I could through the twisty lanes, while she fidgeted in the back.

     As we pushed through the door of the waiting-room, she opened her mouth and delivered on to the floor a vast pile of vomit sprinkled with small blue bits, which looked suspiciously like slug pellets. Where had she picked those up? I never ever used them myself as I thought they were disgusting. There were many humane ways to reduce slug damage. And if they'd been in that carcass, why?

    ‘It’s poison,’ said the vet. ‘I’ve seen several cases recently.’

    Penny spent two days and nights at the vet's, while they emptied her stomach (I think) and fed her charcoal, before we could fetch her.

    But she was never the same again.

She never ran for joy any more. She never went chasing. She never wanted to leap into the car with us. She never slid into view with a shy grin on her face when Frog arrived home.

    Then one evening six months later, she started having fits. It was another dash to the vet’s, Frog driving this time and us rendezvousing at the clinic with the out-of-hours medic.

    ‘There’s nothing I can do, I’m afraid,’ she said.

    As we settled Penny on her bed, she fell still and calm, as if she knew what was going to happen.

Frog carried Penny’s limp body to the car, and back home began digging again, using his sleeve to mop from his face a mixture of sweat and tears. We’d chosen a spot one paving slab away from Brindle.

    I stood by, offering silent moral support and watching the clear night sky. Suddenly over the western horizon a shooting star flared into life and vanished.

    It felt like a sign of hope. Penny was all right. She would manage without us.

The next morning I went out to look at the grave. Penny’s sweetness filled the air.

Frog and Penny on Glastonbury Tor

To be continued

8.5.Money

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. For more information and a full list of instalments so far, see right.

We had a small cremation service for my father attended by close family only, and afterwards lunch in the garden under two awnings as it was a sweltering July day. My mother had bought in quiches, French bread and mounds of strawberries which I had carelessly prepared simply by pulling the green bits out. I didn’t dehull them properly and for once my mother made no comment.

    After the aunts and uncles departed we stayed chatting in the garden. Frog and I planned to drive home overnight as travelling up we’d been caught in a jam on the M25 in Mediterranean heat and it had been almost unbearable.

    A small rainbow appeared in the sky near the sun and we all looked at it in awe.

    ‘It’s called a sundog,’ said Frog, the expert on all things celestial.

    ‘How extraordinary,’ said Amelia. ‘It seems significant, somehow.’

    It did.

A few weeks later, there was a memorial service in the village church for which Frog and I drove up again. My parents had been very sociable and the church was packed with their friends, as well as relatives from far and wide. It was an emotional occasion with music and speeches, laughter and tears. I sat stony faced.

    Afterwards I said to Frog, ‘That was confusing, wasn’t it. I didn’t recognise the person they were all talking about. How come I see him so differently?’

    ‘I know exactly what you mean,’ said Frog. ‘I felt the same.’

I didn’t shed a tear for my father then, but I had shed lots fourteen years earlier when we were seeing Pat. I’d mourned the father I’d loved and admired so much when I was a child.

    The father who read Jo and me extracts from a book called The Witches’ Kitchen. I think it was one from his childhood as it had a drab hard cover like many of the other old books – some dating to Victorian times - that lived on the shelves at home. He read it with relish, and Jo and I would squeal with delighted terror.

    The father who would come up and see us children in bed when he got back from work, and when we asked him excitedly how much he’d earned today, would pull the change from his pocket and count it. That was what fathers did, we knew that. They earned money.

    The father who protected me from crocodiles under the bed.

    The father who loved practical jokes, who had a mustard pot that wasn't a mustard pot, that a green snake would jump out of when you took the lid off.

    The father who taught us what he called the Siamese War Cry:

    'Oh wah, tah nah, Siam.'

    [Try saying that.]

    The father who wore a pale green v-necked jumper for years and years, even when it was full of holes. It made him look so handsome.

    The father who helped me with my maths homework, who was so patient and explained it so simply and clearly.

    The father who’d found me in the dining-room one evening in my early teens crying over my school books because I had so much revision to do before my exams and who’d been both sympathetic and encouraging, probably bringing out the family motto he’d created: ‘All the Fishers are tough’. He would ask us to repeat it and we would chant it back to him. We thought it was a huge joke.

    The father with whom I’d had a special relationship because I was his oldest child, and a girl.

Now my father was the bogeyman, the one who scared me. The one who hadn’t wanted me to go to Australia. The one who’d tried to come between me and Frog, who’d written such long intricate letters which had appeared so reasonable but had cut me to the core. The one who was always so critical. The one I no longer trusted. He still meant money to me, but the love was gone.

    Money had been a problem, I could see that now. Not only had I been terrified of losing my family if I stood my ground, but I hadn’t wanted to be cast adrift in a ruthless world with only the money that Frog and I could earn between us. I needed and wanted his financial help. And my father had perhaps tried to keep it that way.

At one time, probably when I was in my thirties, I’d asked him if I needed to be paying into a pension.

    ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘You’ll be fine.’

    What I took that to mean was that I would be provided for when he and my mother died, but when I discussed the subject with my sister Cass she had a different take.

    ‘What he meant’, she said in her usual confident way, ‘was that women didn’t need to concern themselves with money.’

    Little did he know, I thought, that I was the financial brains of my marriage. Frog was such a spendthrift that he had to run all purchases by me. We had joint accounts and I checked the statements. I gave him the cash he needed. I paid the bills (as he simply tucked them down the back of the sofa). I filled out the tax forms. I did all the financial planning.

    Even though my father wouldn’t have dreamt of inducting me – or any of his daughters - in the ways of handling money, of acquiring capital, of providing for old age, I’d imbibed financial acumen from him. I was proud of that, and proud that I was doing it without him knowing. It was a small victory.

But I hadn’t stood up to him when he gave me the money to buy a house on condition that it was in my name only, that Frog was left out of it. And I hadn’t taken out a private pension. I was still relying on an inheritance.

    Money had come between me and the truth, me and independence, me and an adult relationship with my father.

    I wasn’t proud of that.

    And now it was too late to do anything about it.

    

To be continued

8.4 My Father

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. For more information and a full list of instalments, see right.

My father was now 82 and he wasn’t well. His kidneys were failing. I was surprised about that. Given the number of cigarettes he’d once smoked and the amount of whisky he’d drunk all his adult life, I’d have expected his lungs and liver to go first.

    Because of his kidneys, he ended up in the critical care unit of a London hospital and, after a panicked phone call from my mother, I took a train. I got lost on the way from the tube station to the hospital and was wearing new (pink) sandals which rubbed my feet. I was carrying my overnight bag in case I needed to stay and it was heavy. It was a hot day. Once in the hospital, I got lost again, until a harassed doctor stumbled over me crying in a deserted corridor and directed me to the right place.

    I found my father alone and asleep in the unit. Bodies lay around in beds, attached to a plethora of machines. as was my father. Nurses swathed in plastic protective gear attended to them. No one spoke.

    I didn’t know what to do so I sat and waited, watching the hands on the wall clock above the nurses’ station. They didn’t move. I’d never known time pass so slowly.

    Eventually my mother arrived, looking as glamorous as ever in white trousers and a navy-blue and white t-shirt. The anger towards my parents, which was always there inside me, now fought with a mixture of other emotions, mostly pity. I kissed her hello.

    A meal arrived and my father woke. He looked at his watch which he was wearing upside-down. He must have liked what he saw there however as he asked my mother to pour him a whisky, alcohol intake in my family being regulated not by quantity but by time - by pub opening hours as they were then. My mother reached for a bottle and glass on the windowsill. I was shocked.

    ‘You’re in hospital,’ I said. You can’t have alcohol.’

    My father looked puzzled. Whyever not, I could see him thinking. Whisky was as essential to his life as sleep and food.

    My mother poured him a tot and then cut up his food for him. Her hands were shaking.

    After an hour or so of polite conversation with the two of them, I couldn’t bear it any longer. My stomach was knotted with the stress of pretending to be normal.

    ‘I think I’ll go home,’ I said, grabbing my monstrous overnight bag.

    My mother looked surprised and maybe hurt.

    ‘I’ll be back,’ I said, kissing them both goodbye and fleeing.

 A few days later my brother Jo rang.

    ‘Dad’s decided he wants to come home. He doesn’t want to stay hooked up to a machine in London for the rest of his life,’ he explained.

    ‘So that means . . .’ I said.

    ‘Yes,’ said Jo. ‘They’re transferring him to a small cottage hospital near Mum and Dad’s where they can keep him comfortable.’

    I was impressed by my father’s courage. He’d always had a spiritual streak, helping with services in the village church, and spending hours staring into the bonfires he sometimes built at the weekend. His elder sister Susan, my godmother and beloved aunt, was deeply religious and told me how she’d once had a profound experience of God’s presence which had saved her after their mother died (of pneumonia when Aunt Susan was eight and my father six). She’d still suffered from bouts of depression all her life however.

    A day or two later, my mother rang. 

    ‘You have to come now,’ she said.

    Frog, Penny and I leapt into the car.

We were all there, all my brothers and sisters, staying at my parents’ house, and my mother was still organising meals for all of us, putting on a bright cheerful face. I wished she’d stop and be herself for a change.

    Frog and I drove to the hospital. My father was conscious but only just and he kept talking about the Mini Metro that he’d passed on to us after my mother acquired a new car.

    We nodded, enthusiastically, not quite sure where he was going with this.

    Like our animals, our cars came and went, and at one stage Frog had built a six-wheeled Mini kit car which looked like a giant greenhouse on wheels and had no seats in the back. Even though its top speed was only 40mph, it was perfect for carrying DIY materials as well as nieces, nephews and dogs who could all sprawl together. One day the roof had blown off in a storm on Salisbury Plain as we drove back to Devon from Kent, and we travelled the rest of the way (another two hours) with me clutching a wire to hold it back on again till we got home and Frog could do a proper repair. The Metro therefore had been something of a godsend.

    ‘It’s still going,’ we said. ‘We use it all the time. We’ve got it with us now.’

    That didn’t seem to be the right answer.

    I wondered if he was reassuring himself that he'd been a good father, that he'd always attended to our material needs. I wished he'd said that, instead of talking in code. (I wished later that I'd said something.)

It turned out that Frog and I were the last people to talk to my father. Later that evening the hospital rang.

    ‘You need to come now,’ they said.

    We all piled into cars and then sat round my father’s bed, talking desultorily and holding glasses of sherry, while the nurses fed him morphine. He was unconscious.

    Eventually the nurses ushered us children out.

    ‘You need to leave your mother alone with your father,’ they said.

    Cass and Danny elected to stay at the hospital, sleeping on the padded bench outside my father’s room, while Jo, Amelia, Frog and I went back to the house.

    In the morning it was all over. We four returned to the hospital and I was allowed into my father’s room to take a last look at him. I’d never seen a dead human before. I was uncomfortable seeing him so vulnerable. It felt voyeuristic. But then it wasn’t really him. It was like a waxwork.

    Back home, we all went upstairs for a lie down. My mother and I stood on the landing together and suddenly she reached out and kissed me. She’d never ever done anything like that before. Affection was always shown at specific times, like bedtime or hellos and goodbyes. It was never spontaneous. I had no idea what she meant by it.

To be continued

8.3 Migraine

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. For more information and a list of instalments so far, see right. 

This was a bad one. Pain drilled into my right forehead. I couldn’t move because I knew that if I did I would be sick and, if there was one thing I hated more than anything, it was being sick. Paracetamol didn’t touch the pain but at least it sometimes put me to sleep, and sleep was the only respite. Or death.

The migraines had started in my mid-twenties – around the same time that Frog and I got together and I started taking the (contraceptive) pill and everything blew up with my parents. So it was hard to know which of those events had brought them on. And I firmly believed that there was a link between illness and what was happening in our lives. Or at least I did by then, after all my therapy.
    To start with the attacks coincided with my period so I didn’t recognise them for what they were. Frog and I went to the pub two or three evenings a week where I would happily down several glasses of wine so I thought it was simply a case of me being more sensitive to alcohol at that time of the month.
    I would spend a morning being sick and overdosing on paracetamol and by lunchtime, if I managed to keep down a banana, I would be feeling more or less OK.
    As time went on however and the attacks became more random in their timing, I began to recognise them for what they were. And because they were lasting longer and I was taking longer to recover from them, I decided I had to try and do something about them.

    I explored both conventional and complementary medicine and modified my behaviour according to what seemed to cause migraines. I went easy on alcohol, cheese and chocolate and tried to avoid extremes like too much or too little sleep or food, too much heat or cold, and strong smells. But nothing made any difference.
    My focus shifted and I started to compare myself to the knight in The Silver Chair, one of C S Lewis’s Narnia books. He had to be tied up at night because he went mad at that time. But it turned out that he didn’t go mad then. That was the time he went sane, when he realised that the Queen was keeping him prisoner. My migraines were the true reflection of what was happening in my life. The rest was pretence, a fool’s paradise.

The pain and the nausea began to recede and crying took over. It was a small step from saying that illness has its root in our behaviour and that we can do something about it, to saying that illness is our fault, and I of course took that step.
   I sat up in bed with my notebook, choking back sobs, and tried as usual to work out what I could do to redeem the situation. I felt as if I’d tried everything.
    On the few occasions when I did say anything, my father called me ‘touchy’ and my mother suggested I wrote a novel in order to ‘get it all out of my system’. Neither of those comments helped. In fact, they made me feel worse. Perhaps I needed something from them, some acknowledgement that they had mishandled the situation, that their letters were unfair, their reaction to Frog uncalled for. I couldn’t sort this on my own.

    How could I convey that to them?

To start with I asked them not to telephone me. It was bad enough visiting them and trying to pretend that everything was OK. It was even worse being caught unawares at home.
    Then I thought that perhaps I could direct them, show them in black and white how they could help me – and themselves. I drew up a contract in which we all apologised for our actions, signed it and sent it to them for their signature.
    There was zero response from them but my sister Amelia wrote, severely chastising me for expecting them to sign a contract that they hadn’t had a hand in drawing up. I was only trying to help them, I thought.
    My father's 80th birthday approached and my mother arranged a party. But that was a step too far, even for me. How could I go to his party when he didn’t come to my wedding?
    I said as much to my parents but there was no response from them. Amelia wrote and chastised me again. My mother was crying, she said.
    I was crushed, torpedoed. In some ways I felt worse than I ever had. I couldn’t bear to hurt anybody. I felt as if I was losing my family and that was like losing part of me. I was nauseous with sorrow.

‘Belinda!’ said Brenda the bookshop owner when I arrived at work. ‘What on earth’s the matter? You look terrible.’
    ‘Oh . . . family troubles,’ I managed to say.
    The full truth was impossible. Impossible to tell anyone. It was such a long story and I was so ashamed of my part in it.
    Frog was the only person who knew the full truth, but he was part of it too. The two of us were tied together with a Gordian knot.
    Isolated.

To be continued