Shadows From The Past, Part 1

First published in 1995

I was born on the 16th. February, 1938, so I am an Aquarius, whatever that means. The place was the Nightingale Maternity Home in Derby, which is now a hospice for the terminally ill. It would be rather bizarre if I finished up where I started out.

My parents married fairly late in life, in their mid-thirties. My father was from a highly respected professional middle class family of the village. His father was a bank manager and a noted amateur archaeologist. His uncle was headmaster of a local grammar school. Father, himself, was born in 1900 and served in the Merchant Navy during the first World War, later becoming a technical author at Rolls-Royce. Before he lost his leg in a motor-cycle accident, he was a keen sportsman and played a leading role in the local cricket and soccer teams.

My mother was born in 1901, a farmer's daughter from Leicestershire. Her father was also a keen cricketer. Prevented from playing for Leicester County by his father, it appears he took little interest in anything else. It would seem, according to my mother, that much of the responsibility for the farm fell onto my grandmother and the children. When she grew old enough for school, my mother went to live with her uncle, who must have become an important person in her life, for she often spoke of him. I have to assume that he was a bachelor, for she never mentioned an aunt, but he was clearly an educated man, something of a scholar.

 
Probably, at weekends and in holidays, she would go home to Charley Mill Farm, which, as far as I can tell, is now under the M1. She seemed to enjoy the work. She had a way with the farm's horse, a beast of uncertain temper and, proud of her health and strength, she often boasted that, as a girl, she could carry a hundredweight sack as well as any man.

Later, she trained as a mental nurse at Mapperley Hospital (which more recently, I am told, housed Nottingham's GIC) and then worked in London with her sister, my Aunt Nona.

 
She told me, once, with great glee, how they shared a flat with two "queer boys." As two lone women they gave protection and respectability, but as she said, "We were in no danger from them - they were only interested in each other!"

In fact, she seemed to have little time for men. Although she enjoyed their attentions, she gave me the impression that she never bothered with boyfriends. After she met my father, they married in 1936, and I was born two years later.

I recently had quite a heated argument with my psychology tutor when I suggested that the class system had almost disappeared. Nobody nowadays can really visualise how deeply society was divided - it was like three different cultures. The difference in accents of passengers boarding at the bus stops at either end of the village, where I grew up, was so marked that it became a standing joke among the bus crews.

Of his family, father only remained close to his sister, my Aunt Marjory, between whom and my mother, I gather, there was some friction. Shortly afterwards, she moved to St.Ives and lived as a artist, due to tragic events in her own life. Father also corresponded with a relative, who I knew as Auntie Margaret, in New Zealand. Every Christmas during the war, a great parcel, sewn up in hessian would arrive, containing such amazing mysteries as tinned ham, peaches, apricots and the rest. Father simply broke contact with the rest of his family, perhaps resenting their attitude to his marrying a farm girl.

At the same time, as a farmer's daughter marrying into a middle class family, I imagine my mother found it difficult to settle. Perhaps there was chitchat among the women in the old village, while she would not take kindly to patronisation from the people up the hill. Certainly, I can remember only two or three close friends. Perhaps those early years were stressful to her, for about this time, the business that my father shared with another man failed, and I have the impression that she was very critical of what she saw as his ineptitude.

I know that, over recent years, she sensed that I was going through a hard time. I couldn't explain it to her, nor could I make things easier for her. For the first time in my life, I was struggling to become 'myself,' and she felt very worried about me. I suppose I could have said I was gay, but that would have been a lie, and I had decided that there would be no more lies.

In the last couple of years, before she died, I felt we were closer than at any time in my life. She had collapsed one or two times, and began to eat less and less. Whether she had lost her sense of taste or whether she had decided it was too much trouble to eat, I don't know, but I spent a great deal of time trying to find tasty, but nourishing morsels to tempt her with. Such was the power of her will that she dissembled so well that no-one realised how she was going downhill. That is, except for the warden and home help, who saw her several times a day, when she let her guard slip. Finally, the warden contacted me and, being out of work, I was able to spend many hours sitting with her. One day, she seemed to have no short term memory and continually asked me what the time was and what the television was about. The following day, the warden called again. The doctor wanted her to go into hospital, and I still feel guilty that we lied to her. A few days later, she died, and I like to think she faced death as she faced life - on her own terms. I never got to see a doctor, but, from the death certificate, I guess she had had a series of small strokes, terminating with one final one. Even two years later, it surprises me to realise the gap that is left in my life.

Had I told her the truth, I think she would have felt very guilty, without any justification. Everyone proceeds according to their own internal schemata. I am searching my past in order to understand, not to blame. In any case, as we shall see, the significant events in my childhood were not within anyone's control.

In fact, she had given me a great deal that was valuable to me. She gave me a stable and unchanging, if not openly affectionate, home life. More importantly, perhaps, she had a quality of independence of thought and self-directedness that passed to me and enabled me to survive my childhood.