Scrabble in the Afternoon E-Book

Biddy Wells

• Herausgeber: Parthian Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 156

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

When Biddy Wells's elderly mother is suddenly struck down with a mysterious illness, Biddy moves her into the spare bedroom, little knowing how long the period of convalescence will last. Through the months that follow, the two women have to re-inhabit the close domestic proximity that they'd abandoned decades before and learn how to co-exist within a tangled web of emotional need, resentment and dependence. Eventually, Biddy manages to find a supported flat that's ideal for her mother. She settles quickly and, abandoning her morbidly stoic outlook on life, falls passionately in love with another resident. Biddy can only watch from the sideline as her mother embarks on an unlikely romance. Told with humour, wry insight, and refreshing honesty, Scrabble in the Afternoon examines the complicated, frustrating and ultimately rewarding story of how a daughter can come to terms with caring wholeheartedly for a mother. It also shows how a mother and daughter relationship can change and develop as life continues to offer fresh challenges and joys.

Leseprobe

Contents

About Biddy Wells

Title Page

Dedication

Part One

Part Two

Epilogue

My mum, aged about 2

Acknowledgments

Also by Biddy Wells

Also from Parthian

Copyright

Biddy Wells lives in west Wales. She is passionate about her writing. She walks daily and loves nature, especially the Pembrokeshire coast and hills. She has two grown-up children and adores her relatively new role of grandmother. She enjoys travelling, particularly overland around Europe, and she always loves to come home to Wales. Her first memoir,A Van of One’s Own, was a best-seller and continues to strike a chord with readers.

Scrabble in the Afternoon

Biddy Wells

For my mother

Part One

It was the first of January. I followed the ambulance for an hour. I wouldn’t let anyone get between me and the speeding vehicle, even at roundabouts I drove so close that I imagined anyone could see an umbilical cord connected us, and I was not to be trifled with. Slightly hysterical sacred music boomed out of the speakers, an extraordinary jazz/funk mass I’d recently bought on CD. Altos chanted and sopranos soared. I picked out words: Sanctus; Angus Dei; Gloria; Kyrie Eleison. It was a little surreal but entirely appropriate.

Though I was swimming with adrenaline, I felt completely calm. Only a short while before I had been holding my mother’s head up to keep her airways open. All signs of life had gone. She was slumped in a chair, her arms dangling and twitching, her skin clammy. She was deathly pale and had no pulse that I could detect. Her eyes were wide open, senselessly staring at nothing. Could she hear me? I didn’t think so. Just before she lost consciousness she’d said, ‘It’s as though you’re far, far away…’

I knew I had to get her into a horizontal position, but it was impossible. A substantial woman, she’d lost the strength in her legs some years before and now she was a dead weight. Moving her would have been highly risky. I held her head up with one hand; in the other was the phone. A woman I will never meet coached me, telling me I was doing really well. She stayed on the line for half an hour or so while we waited for the ambulance.

All this time, Mum was unconscious but still breathing – just. I saw how the body looks when life leaves it. The expression in her eyes – the absence of it. These were not Mum’s eyes. I’d thought she might be dead, or in the process of dying peacefully right in front of me. I spoke softly and comfortingly to her and listened to the kindly, nameless woman who stayed on the phone supporting me.

It occurred to me that this was perfect. This was exactly how she would have wanted to go: I was by her side, holding her and witnessing her tranquil passing from this long life to the next.

Time slowed down and became meaningless. After a while, astonishingly, Mum came round to find herself lying on her bed surrounded by two paramedics and two ambulance men in bright orange uniforms. Alarmed, she tried to speak but her words came out as a stream of scrambled, incomprehensible syllables.

It took a while to calm her and it was a struggle to get her down the stairs strapped to a chair. I remember thinking that if she survived this she would have no speech or movement. For her that would be a fate worse than death.

•

A week before, I had been excited because for the first time in years we were all going to be together – almost my whole family. I was delighted that things seemed to be falling into place. My brother would collect Mum on his way and bring her to my house which was newly vacant. Normally I rented it out as I no longer lived there. We would all be able to stay for a couple of days and enjoy the log fire.

But then Mum rang me and said she didn’t feel up to it. She couldn’t face the journey and not having all the things she needed: the stair-lift; the bath-hoist; the grab-handles; the wheeled trolleys; the raised seats and bed. I understood. It would have been hard for her. We made a plan B: my brother would stay with her on Christmas Eve and drive over in time for our family lunch next day. Mum really didn’t mind missing Christmas she said. She preferred it this way.

My partner, David, and I had been looking forward to a rest. It had been a tough autumn. It had rained for approximately eighty days consecutively and there had been gales. We’d got used to the weather, battened down the hatches and given up hoping for blue sky. Both of us had been ill with a variety of bugs that had been doing the rounds. We’d recovered, but both longed for a break – which would fit neatly into the week between Christmas and New Year – when we could do nothing, and please no-one but ourselves. On the horizon was our planned three-month trip to Portugal. I could hardly wait.

In the run up to Christmas Mum had been stressed. This was not unusual; she often talked of her ‘anxiety complex’ whilst insisting that she was doing well, living alone with her disability which meant she could get around only with the help of her wheelie-walker, and other mobility aids. She liked her own company and immersed herself in writing, crosswords, and afternoons on the sofa watching snooker on TV. She had always been a stoic who wouldn’t consider calling the doctor.

We rang Mum on Christmas day and she admitted she felt unwell but insisted we stay away and enjoy our lunch. The next morning she was worse, so I drove an hour east to her house to take care of her.

Boxing Day is not a good time to get hold of a doctor and it was days before her own GP came to see her. It turned out she had a very severe case of shingles, and it might take at least six weeks before she would recover her strength. She was extremely weak, in a lot of pain, and had no appetite. I stayed with her, waving goodbye to the restful week I’d longed for, and abandoning David who remained alone at my house and kept the place warm.

Mum rested in her bed, took anti-viral medication and painkillers, and ate the chicken broth I made her, along with tiny morsels of fruit. It soon became obvious that she would have to come home with me, so that I could care for her until the shingles subsided. She agreed to my plan and resolved to muster enough strength to make the journey at the turn of the year.

By New Year’s Day she was packed and ready to come down in the stair-lift for the first time in a week. As I entered her room she was sitting on her chair saying she felt faint. That was when she collapsed and my voice no longer reached her. That was when I dialled 999 and tried to steady myself as I spoke.

By the time the ambulance got her into A&E she was talking a little more coherently. They did all their tests but couldn’t tell us anything. They kept her in for a night, then rang me to say that they were discharging her. ‘Is there someone to look after her at home?’ they asked. I gave them my address and waited.

Several hours passed. I rang the hospital, just over an hour’s drive from my house, and they told me my mother had left in an ambulance hours earlier. I didn’t know where she had got to and I started to feel more than a little anxious. It was a cold January day and my poor vulnerable mum was out there somewhere without a coat. The cord between us was tugging.

At last, Mum was carried up my front steps and gently bundled onto the spare bed that David had raised using four moss-covered breeze blocks he’d found in the garden. She smiled weakly and fell asleep. The ambulance, it transpired, had been on a scenic tour of west Wales so that an elderly gentleman could be taken home en route to my village. Unfortunately, he had forgotten where he lived.

I had imagined a state-of-the-art vehicle in which my mother would be wrapped up on a bed with a nurse holding her hand. In reality, the hospital had sent Mum home, wearing a nightie, on a draughty old hospital bus.

•

‘And how areyou doing?’ asked Dr Thomas. We had been discussing my mother and what might have happened to her. I was touched and a little thrown by his question about me. Howwas I doing? I was okay, I thought. It was hard to tell.

He was mystified: the cause of Mum’s collapse remained unclear, though he suggested it could have been a mini stroke. I hadn’t answered his question. Not out loud anyway. My life had changed overnight. One day I had been free of responsibility, about to go off travelling; the next I’d had to cancel everything, move back into the house I hadn’t lived in for several years, and take in my mum so that I could give her round-the-clock care. This was a world I had heard about but never really entered, and though I’d known this day might eventually come, it was always far off in some distant future. After a while I told the doctor: ‘I am fine, just fine.’

•

After her second husband died, though she missed him, Mum excelled at living alone. I had often marvelled at her ability to exist – and even thrive – in her own small world. She was happy and independent. Though becoming increasingly disabled, she carried on alone having witnessed the departure of many loved ones, including her second son and most of her friends. ‘I’m the last one standing,’ she’d say without self-pity or even any observable emotion. Loss had been a major theme in her life and she seemed resilient almost to the point of indifference. Perhaps her stoicism was a shield that protected her from the fear and sadness that might have destroyed a more fragile personality.

Over the previous few years I’d started to notice that things were getting tougher for her, and my brother and I had talked about how the situation might have to change. It’s hard to know when to intervene in someone else’s life. We agreed that threatening Mum’s independence would be a difficult and sad task. Would she agree to live in some kind of sheltered accommodation, or a care home? Whatever happened, it was going to be a one-way street; the end of an era and the beginning of a steeper decline, perhaps.

Life took care of it all. Suddenly decisions had to be made extremely quickly, and I was the obvious choice: the one who would scoop her up and take care of her. My brother lives several hours away and travels the world with his work, and he’s not the type of person who could give things up to look after a parent. Was I that sort of person? I wondered. And did I have a choice?

My mother has always been pragmatic about her life – and about death. She would say ‘Just stick me in a home’, or ‘I’ve had my life, you must have yours.’ And she was being straight. She truly meant it. She would talk of death as something she positively welcomed. Not because she was suffering, or morbidly depressed, but because she had no fear of it. She believed that when she died she would enter another realm, experiencing things through a new, expanded perception. It would be pretty cosmic. There, she would be at one with her loved ones who had already made the mysterious transition into the Great Unknown.

But she hadn’t died. She had gone somewhere and returned. She was profoundly weakened, ill, and sure that death would follow soon. She surrendered. All anxiety vanished and she allowed herself to be helpless.

After the first few days David had gone back to his own place in Pembrokeshire where we’d been living together for the previous few years. He said he’d come and see me the following weekend. For a week or so, while Mum spent most of the time sleeping, I spent hours each day on the phone waiting in queues and talking with nurses, social workers and the Department for Work and Pensions. I had to learn to understand their language and systems very quickly. I needed help and advice. Amongst other things we needed a wheelchair and a ramp to enable Mum to get out if there was a fire, or to get her into the car for the medical appointments that were sure to follow – though any ideas of her going beyond the threshold of her room any time soon seemed entirely unrealistic.

•

Social Services promised to sort out a care package. Help was on its way, apparently. My brother visited and brought some more of Mum’s things from her house. For short periods she sat up in bed propped up by a mound of pillows, but mostly she slept. Sometimes I would sit at my desk staring out over the valley, trying to think. A blue woollen blanket was always wrapped around me as I couldn’t get the house warm enough. Mum’s room was a cosy boudoir with an electric radiator on all the time. When I went in to sit with her, I could feel myself thaw a little.

I couldn’t help thinking about the future. What about getting out and doing things? What about the life I had assumed would continue? I was missing Pembrokeshire and my life with David. I wondered how he felt about my sudden departure, and what effect it might have on our relationship. I considered our forthcoming trip abroad. What if we couldn’t go?

A mild rush of fear coursed through me daily. I stopped thinking and tried to stay right in the present moment. I made soup, and juiced a load of vegetables. I talked gently with Mum. Miraculously, her brain had survived and here she was: physically incapable, dependent on me for just about everything, but mentally, quite bright.

•

Mum’s mind was remarkably busy. I took her a cup of tea one morning and she started chattering. I was sleepy, barely able to string a sentence together. I held up my hand in a gentle gesture and smiled. ‘Sacred tea ceremony,’ I mumbled through a yawn, and she laughed.

‘Ah yes, I remember now,’ she said. ‘Sorry!’ Then, with a hint of a wink, she made anamaste pose with her hands, palms together, and I left her to it. This was my time to sit for a few minutes, mug in hand, and stare into the middle distance.

There was a postcard on my bathroom wall that said:With a cup of tea in one’s hands, anything is possible. How true that was. I was relieved that Mum had understood my need for quiet at this fragile time of day.

•

January continued, cold and grey. Now my mother and I seemed to be in competition, both coughing like a pair of life-long smokers. I would hear her across the hall. She had a long-running throat problem which affected swallowing and talking. I had a bug.

One day, I feared for a second that I might actually die, there and then in the hall, when I was supposed to be the carer – the one in charge and responsible for my mother. I couldn’t catch my breath between coughing fits. I thought about the delicate thread between life and death. What would happen to my mother if I keeled over and died? I went to look for my jar of Vick’s Vaporub.

•

One Sunday Mum announced, ‘I’m going to do my space-walk now.’ It was only her second voyage to the sitting room a few metres along the hall from her bedroom which she had dubbed her ‘kennel’. She was feeling confident and looking forward to it. She managed well with her wheelie-walker, step by careful step. I followed close behind with the wheelchair in case she fell backwards.

Into my head popped: ‘It’s time to leave the capsule if you dare.’ David Bowie had died recently, Mum surviving him by fourteen years. He was young, really, and he’d seemed immortal. I had feelings about his passing that I couldn’t form into language, even if I hadn’t been too tired to think.

•

Mum was hugely relieved that she no longer had to struggle on her own: coping, rather than living. The shingles seemed to be subsiding just a little. Each day she got out of bed, but not for long. Her clothes still hung on a rail – she hadn’t got dressed since the previous year. The time we spent sitting together was generally uplifting. She was relaxed, sweet and grateful.

I had never imagined sharing a home with my mum. The idea would have filled me with a depressing dread. The image of a middle-aged woman living with her mother could have denoted some catastrophic failure on the part of the daughter. What sort of life could be blithely set aside in order to accommodate the full-time care of a parent? Certainly not a life of consequence or glamour. My life had neither to any great degree. I considered this not only convenient, but advantageous. I was able to drop everything because I had come to a point where, partly by design, I had a certain amount of freedom. And, of course, I cared about my mum because she was my mum. I loved her.

Yes, I could step into the breach – happily. I had just left my café job in order to tie up ends, pack up and go away with David. We could postpone our trip by a couple of months if necessary. It was a stroke of luck that just recently my house had been vacated so I could stay there with Mum while she recuperated. I was relieved that I didn’t have to go and live at her house where I would be completely isolated from everyone and everything I knew.

But there were other things in the frame apart from practicalities. Things had not been easy between Mum and me in the past. I knew that there were deep, old feelings that I had tucked neatly away in a vault labelled: The Past: Do Not Open. Could I really live with my mother for more than just a few weeks? What were the chances of keeping the lid on things now that we were sharing a home?

•

My parents married in the fifties and had two sons. They were switched-on thirty-somethings in the Swinging Sixties, when I was born, and they were navigating a world that was changing rapidly, even in small towns like ours in south Wales. In the seventies, reality continued to shift until the grey old, good old days slipped out of sight and out of reach. But there were remnants, customs that were cherished or that had sneaked, unexamined, into the new world. We’d all been trained to be seen and not heard. Nobody seemed to talk about anything that needed talking about. “Less said, the better” was a treasured motto.