Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Merlin Unwin Books
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
This powerful and beautifully-written account is the memoir of Patricia Nolan who lived in a tiny community in Cumbria and it captures the end of an era in the 1950s. 'When the first organ-transplant was taking place, when computers were starting to revolutionise our lives and television was arriving in the sitting-rooms of Britain, in my house we were still dipping buckets into a stream to make a cup of tea and going to bed by candlelight,' she writes. The tale covers three years of the author's life, made particularly vivid by a traumatic event which opens the book, but which goes on to depict a poor but close rural community with its village school, its annual country show, its Christmas celebrations and its local characters - all set against the dramatic back-drop of Scafell and the surrounding hills and moors on which she and her friends ran free.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 147
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
For my Mother
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
Dark Days, Silver Threads
ON THE day I heard the news, I left my lunch untouched on the plate and wandered back down the dusty road to school, framed by the fell which lay under a lazy autumn haze. From the playground the sound of the girls playing a skipping game floated over the wall of the tiny playground. ‘Salt, mustard, vinegar, pepper,’ they chanted, squealing if someone was careless enough to catch a foot in the rope.
I went inside and sat at my desk. Our teacher asked us to write a story about being granted three wishes; I wrote one word, ‘If…’ but pressed down so hard that the lead in my pencil snapped. I did not sharpen it, but sat staring at the blue lines and red margins of my English book. Two girls asked if they could read out what they had written, but their words meant as little to me as the drone of bees over moorland heather, and I laid down an arm to cover the blank page in front of me. Some of the infants at the other end of the room listened, while others hummed and murmured to themselves in their own private language and drew mysterious shapes on their small slates.
At afternoon break we ran across the road to the stile, up some steps, through a small gap in the stone wall and into to a rocky field we called The Howe. I joined in a game of tag but wandered off after a few minutes to find my friend who was lying on her back counting the stream of small fluffy clouds overhead. I shook her arm.
‘Barbara, listen, if I tell you something will you promise to keep it a secret?’
‘Sixteen, seventeen…’ She stopped counting and turned to look at me, her eyes wide, a trail of summer freckles sprinkled over her nose and the blue ribbon of one of her bunches trailing on the grass.
‘Is it important?’
I nodded.
‘Aw right. I promise.’
She looked serious enough to be entrusted with my secret so I bent to whisper in her ear.
She must have kept her word as school went on as usual until, on the Thursday, our teacher made herself a cup of tea at morning break and picked up The Whitehaven News.
‘Good heavens!’ she spluttered, looking at me over the top of the newspaper. ‘But, Pat, why didn’t you tell me your father had died?’
Her mouth fell open and she stared at me without speaking. With a collective gasp the children followed suit, though many had heard by now.
‘Blinkin’ ’eck!!’ one of the boys said. A silence followed.
‘Who knew about this?’
A few people sheepishly raised a hand.
‘Well,’ she puffed, and then added, ‘Oh dear!’It was as though my blood was turning to ice. I felt a great ache in my chest, and, laying my arms on the desk wept days of suppressed tears onto my reading book.
It was just not fair. For a start I did not live on a farm, help with the milking, look t’yows (check the ewes), pick taties or any other mysterious occupations. I was the only person in the school whose father voted Labour and now this had happened. I do not remember how the day evolved, only that I was treated carefully, which I hated.
Tragedies do not always happen without warning; sometimes they creep up with long shadows, deepening by the week, by the month, until one day the sun never comes out. My father had suffered from ill-health for as long as I could remember, sitting by the fire after his supper, eyes closed, in obvious pain from his duodenal ulcer, which today could no doubt be zapped by a course of antibiotics. He had to make do with milky drinks and cream crackers. I had to be quiet after he had eaten his supper, which he digested with closed eyes and hands resting on his stomach.
One day in mid-September I returned home from school and burst through the front door to find two neighbours sitting in our best chairs, sipping tea.
‘Where’s Mum?’
‘Upstairs with your dad. He’s not so well.’
At that point my mother called me up.
Nervously I entered the bedroom. There was a fire flickering in the small grate by the bed, a sure sign someone was poorly. A strong smell of Dettol pervaded the room, a frightening, serious sort of smell. My father was lying propped up by two pillows; he looked pale and thin in his blue striped pyjamas, but he was smiling.
‘Come over here.’ He took hold of my hand.
‘Now, I want you to be a good girl for Mummy. Do you promise?’
‘Yes,’ I whispered.
He squeezed my hand.
‘And you must say your prayers every night.’ He was a devout Catholic.
I did not reply, sensing finality in his words, and stepped back from the bed.
‘Say goodbye to Daddy,’ Mum said, gently propelling me forward, and he held out his arms to hug and kiss me, his skin cool and dry against my burning cheek. Bursting into tears I buried my face into the gold and black satin eiderdown, then was taken downstairs.
‘Joe’s had a haemorrhage,’ said one of the tea drinkers in a low voice, as another neighbour arrived. Whatever that was, it must be something serious. Auntie Doris was a good friend and had been given the task of looking after me while my mother accompanied my father to the infirmary in Carlisle, sixty miles away. An ambulance must have arrived, but I never saw it; clutching my stuffed toy and a few books I went off to her cottage at the end of the row, where I was to spend the next three weeks.
At first I was miserable and terrified at the thought of bad news. No one around had a telephone but there was one at the local grocer’s shop, where they kindly delivered messages if urgent. Then gradually I moved to a state of faint optimism; my father had been ill before and recovered. Why not this time? And so the days passed; soft early autumn days of hazy blue mornings and evening skies echoing with the sound of roosting crows in the nearby wood. I looked forward to my parents returning and picking up the thread of our lives again.
That is, till lunchtime on the 26th September. I left school as usual at midday and half ran, half skipped back to Auntie Doris’s for something to eat. I was hungry and thought of the slice of luncheon meat with salad and a piece of bread and butter in store, not to mention the spoonful of condensed milk I could pinch while she was in the pantry.
‘Hello dear,’ she said. ‘I’ll get your dinner.’ But I noticed that her voice was flat and subdued. She sat down beside me.
‘I got some news this morning,’ she said. ‘About your father.’ She paused and took my hand. ‘He’s gone to heaven, to be with Jesus.’
She was looking out of the window as she spoke, towards the sky, so I looked too, for a split second wondering if she had caught a glimpse of him, but knew immediately that was silly; heaven was invisible. She hugged me and then we cried a little, and she explained that it was good he was in no more pain, and that my mother would be returning soon. Only two months ago my father and I had celebrated our birthdays together, he his fortieth and I my eighth.
A few days later I stood on the steps of our cottage watching my mother walk slowly up the lane towards me carrying her suitcase. As she drew near she stopped and stretched out her arms, and with the accumulated longing and misery of those weeks without her, I ran down the steps and hurtled into her arms; nothing could ever be as bad again, now that she was home.
But later that evening the neighbours came round to pay their respects clutching cake and homemade biscuits while my mother brewed some tea. At first the atmosphere was subdued, but gradually people began to chat, firstly about what had happened and then relaxed into more general talk. I refused to join them even after my mother called me over.
‘I’m tidying my drawer,’ I said, straightening the boxes of games again for the third time. I glowered at my dolls and threw the yoyo into a corner with a pile of puzzles. It was chilly away from the fire but I refused to budge.
Finally, after everyone had left, Mum put her arms around me and said, ‘Now, tell me what’s wrong?’
‘You don’t care that Daddy died!’ my cheeks were burning. ‘You were smiling and talking like you didn’t care!’ And I sobbed for a long time while she stroked my back and cuddled me.
At last she said, ‘Now look, darling, of course I care, and we’re both going to miss him a lot. But we have to act normally, even if we don’t feel like it. Daddy wouldn’t like us to cry all the time, now would he?’
‘No,’ I snuffled, though I wasn’t sure.
And so began the long process of digging deep and burying my grief. The funeral was held at a Catholic church in his home town, but I did not go. It was thought it would upset me further, and that a funeral was no place for a child.
The following months were hard, both of us coping with our loss. I constantly scrutinised my mother’s face for signs of suffering but she seemed to be behaving quite normally. Then one day I rushed home from school to be in time for Mrs Dale’s Diary on the wireless at 3.45pm.
‘Hello Mum!’ I called, and then I saw her, sitting at the sewing machine by the window stitching a tartan skirt for me, catching the last of the November light. I noticed her face and stopped in my tracks; her eyes were red and puffy and I could see teardrops on her cheek. The idea that my mother should cry was appalling to me.
‘Oh,’ I said.
‘Hello darling.’ She went to make us a drink, but I could not speak. Then, as usual, I went to find a book and took myself off to a land of make-believe where there was always a happy ending.
The weather was drizzly and bleak during those months before Christmas, with little daylight as the days shortened. One afternoon I discovered a copy of Little Women, put aside for when I was older. Pleased to find something I had not read, I began, and, skipping a few words here and there, managed to follow the chronicle of the March family. When I reached Chapter 18, where Beth becomes ill and death seems to be a distinct possibility, I noticed the chapter was entitled ‘Dark Days’, and I thought: that’s us, we are living through dark days.
And not only was my mother grieving, she was desperately worried about our finances; my father had left nothing due to bouts of illness, and the small legacy from my grandmother was drying up. There was no work in the valley out of the tourist season, which then was more low-key, and we had to live off a very meagre widow’s pension, much of which disappeared in rent.
The worst days were Sundays, when my mother refused to leave her bed till midday.
‘No,’ she would say, ‘get dressed and go and play,’ and she would close her eyes and bury her face in the pillow.
But it was too cold without the fire lit, so I searched the house for reading matter, anything bearing print was acceptable, and like a squirrel, I took my hoard back to bed. Having read my books several times, I found old magazines of my mother’s, and puzzled over short stories and serials of a romantic nature.
‘Stewart laid a steady hand on her shoulder. ‘I’ll always be here for you Melanie, you know that,’ he said softly…’
I perused Woman’s Weekly from cover to cover, read the feeble Children’s section with Dr. Owl’s anecdote of the week, (Der Owl, I called him), inspected the knitting patterns for the boy and girl dolls, who must have had more outfits than Hollywood stars. Then finally, Mum would heave herself out of bed and our Sunday would begin.
But after Christmas, each day was blessed with a few extra rays of light – a cock-stride a day, the old folks said – and so it was with our lives. My mother, naturally resourceful, sent off to Exchange and Mart for leather skivers and a tool-kit, teaching herself to make purses, handbags, belts and children’s slippers edged with rabbit fur, which were sold to relations and people in the valley. She helped two aged aunts and an uncle to spring-clean, pick fruit in their orchard, collect vegetables and bake bread; they enjoyed her lively company and were generous with us. I would arrive home from school to find a note on the table:
Dear Patsy. Gone to Esk Bank. Follow on your bike. Love Mum.
And we would return laden with vegetables, tomatoes, soft fruit, and in this first spring, cheerful bunches of daffs and forsythia, and a dripping, golden honey-comb. And at the approach of summer, the small café opened at the miniature railway station, offering employment for my mother through the season. Not full-time, but enough.
And then, an offer came, which I noticed with alarm that my mother was seriously considering. Our family doctor, still upset he had failed to notice my father was dying of lung cancer, mentioned that his parents were looking for someone to keep house for them; it was a large place with plenty of room for us all. And it was in a town called Newcastle-under-Lyme.
‘It sounds a horrid place,’ I said, with the benefit of absolutely no knowledge at all.
But the offer hung over our heads like a swarm of bees, dangerous and threatening.
One evening I leant out of my bedroom window, and looked over to the mountains opposite, the heather turning them purple in the sunset. My mother was below dead-heading the flowers and I caught the scent of our deep pink, old-fashioned rose.
‘Mum,’ I called, ‘we’ll never leave here, will we?’
She smiled up at me. ‘No darling,’ she said, ‘we won’t.’
And she kept her word.
In under a year’s time our lives would change irrevocably, but that summer our recovery was underway. Relations came to visit; we went for long walks past hay fields shimmering with cow parsley and marguerites, down lanes crammed with dog-roses, honeysuckle and willow herb. And I returned to extreme acts of daring with my cronies, hollering from tree-tops, dangling off branches, leaping into green rock-pools, and best of all, flying down the fell, arms outstretched, racing the wind.
CHAPTER TWO
Guided by the Moon
APALE light had crept into the room, making me think morning had arrived at last. Keeping an eye on my mother who was snoring gently into her pillow, I slipped out of bed and tiptoed over the icy lino to the window and pulled back the curtain. On the inside of every pane were patterns of stars magically etched.
When I breathed on a small patch of glass and rubbed it, I saw a world with all colour removed; snowy fell tops, black rocks and crags with a white sprinkling, grey fields, and below me, our garden of dormant plants and frosty tussocks of grass. The earth was frozen, with no movement of birds, animals or people, as if time had stopped.
It was clearly still very early on this, the last day of 1950.
I shivered, crept back into bed and snuggled up to my mother’s back, but was unable to sleep, my whole head being covered in white knots. The previous night my hair had been washed, my long, very straight locks divided into sections and wound round strips of cloth, which were then tied firmly to resist any nocturnal turbulence.
Later that morning, the rags would be carefully removed to reveal, miraculously, a headful of corkscrew ringlets, a glamorous replacement of my usual plaits. It was all in aid of the annual Fancy Dress Party in the school, starting at two o’clock; and today, for the first time since my father had died in September, I felt a small bubble of excitement which refused to budge, even when a heavy cloud seemed to have settled permanently over our house.
