Sarah, with previous careers in social work and business psychology, is now developing her passion for writing. She has a particular interest in life writing and is currently working on a memoir centred around her volatile mother. She has a second project reflecting on her time as a children’s home worker in the 1980s. Sarah’s previous publications include four psychology books and numerous articles. Sarah keenly anticipates adopting writing as her third age career.

Sarah obtained her first-class honours English degree from the Open University in 2016. She can be contacted at sarahlewis1@mac.com. Details of previous publications available on request.

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Opening extracts from Jenny (working title) 

Pandora’s box

 

Looking back, the shift to calling her Jenny began the same time I stopped kissing her and my father goodnight, in the early years of secondary school. One unremarked evening, as they both sat in the living room silently reading, tolerating each other’s presence like two repelling magnets, I bent awkwardly into first one, then the other, wing-backed armchair to kiss them good-night, lip to puckered lip; the next evening, I didn’t.

A little while after this when I called her Mum, as I always did, she said, ‘Oh ‘’Mum”, it’s such an ugly word. Why don’t you call me Jenny now? I’ve never liked Mum, it’s just, it sounds common I suppose. And Mama sounds too posh. You’re old enough, just call me Jenny. It is my name after all.’ It was true Mum didn’t suit her very well, too soft and rounded for her sharp angles. It was hard at first and strange, and for a while I would slip and slide between them, but over time she became Jenny.

Later, once I was the mother of two young children myself, I found her keenness for me to call her Jenny strange.  I loved to hear the honey-laced ‘mum’ drop from my own children’s lips, melting my insides with its warmth. I wanted to be their mum forever. Back then though, when she said, ‘call me Jenny.’ I was flattered. I thought first names meant we could be more like friends, not realising it lessened my childish claim on her.

My friends’ mothers were different, more like mums I suppose. I would watch as if observing some exotic foreign custom as they made round after round of hot buttered toast for us when we pitched up, horse-pungent and hungry, from the local riding stables. I marvelled at their attentiveness as we shared the morning’s tales of horsey misbehaviour, not needing to be getting on with something else, their faces suffused with love. I felt I’d been given a gift when they shooed us off with, ‘Don’t worry about the washing up, I’ll do that, you get back to those horses, they’ll be missing you!’

My mother was not happy with people cluttering up her kitchen, warming their winter-cold bodies against the Aga, making crumbs and leaving unwashed plates.

‘Are you planning on being in here much longer? Only I need to get on.’  She stood at the kitchen door, wearing her housecleaning glower, the effort of holding the heavy laundry basket bracing her arms. The pulley-haulie clothes rack ran the length of the kitchen, when it was in the lowered position for loading it took up the whole space.

‘Sorry, Mum, it’s just that we couldn’t go to Coral’s today. I said you wouldn’t mind? Just for once?’ I pleaded.

‘You’ve helped yourselves I see.’ She looked around at the scene of her disturbed kitchen, ‘Oh for goodness sake Sarah you’ve used all the bread, that means I’ll have to go to the village again today!’

’No, no you don’t, I can get some. I’ll go to Kennel Lane before I come home. I promise.’

‘Thank you but you won’t be home ’til teatime and that’s too late. Other people like toast you know. Never mind, I’ll just have to squeeze it in I suppose.’ She shifts the basket to rest on her hip, under one arm. ‘Are you going to polish off the marmalade as well?’

‘No, look, there’s half a jar left. We’ll be gone in a minute; we’re just finishing our toast.’ My friends were watching this exchange with big eyes, toast suspended, unsure whether to continue eating.

‘Wipe down the Aga before you go, it’s covered in crumbs, I’m not here just to clear up after you, you know.’ She pointedly put the laundry basket full of wet clothes on the floor by the door, ‘I’m going to clean the toilet, I’ll be back in five minutes and I want to be able to get into my kitchen.’

She left and we jumped to rinse plates under taps, hands nervous, not doing it right, pouring away half-drunk cups of tea, bundling out into the cold, on to our bikes. At times like that I would rather have had one of their mums for a mother. But; I could talk to Jenny about things that mattered, like boyfriends and the facts of life, her thoughts on my father, and the state of her marriage, woman to woman. I didn’t think they had grown up conversations like that with their mums.

#

When she died, in 2014, aged eighty-four, it fell to me and my husband Stewart to sort through her things. I wanted to clear the house with my siblings Liz, younger by four and a half years, and David, sandwiched between us. I knew it was traditional for the bereaved to come together to take solace in touching the dear departed’s belongings while sharing fond reminiscences. That’s what I wanted to do. Although not quite like that: the conversations we had had about Jenny since we all left home tended towards picking over the resentment, hurt and frustration of our youth. Finding good memories might be like trying to bag pike lurking deep and still in the shadows: rumour has it they’re there, but they aren’t landed with ease.

Even if we couldn’t catch pike, I thought, we could have a nice time together drinking wine, enjoying each other’s company and rehashing our favourite conversation: dissecting our childhood and analysing our parents. The three of us were so rarely in the same place these days with our lives full of work and responsibilities; surely the death of our mother would be enough to bring us together? I phoned Liz, who had not set foot in the house since her last catastrophic phone call with Jenny fourteen years before.

‘Come over,’ I said, ‘it’s just me and Stewart here. There’s so much to sort. We could do with some help.’

Liz’s voice is agitated. ‘I can’t. I can’t bear the thought of going near that house. I’m sorry Sarah, I’ll do what I can to help, but I’m not coming to the house.’

‘But look, there are things here you might want, what about that mirror you gave her?’ I was looking at the big silver or pewter framed mirror that hung behind the sofa in the living room.

‘I’d forgotten that. I think it was a birthday present. Of course she didn’t like it.’

‘Really? I’m looking at it now. She hung it.’

‘Yes, but not where you look into it. It wasn’t flattering enough for her.’

‘It’s beautiful, don’t you want it back?’

‘No, I don’t. You have it.’ I wasn’t sure I wanted it either, I didn’t know where I would put it.

‘Thanks, I… so you won’t come, even though she’s not here?’

‘I can’t Sarah, It’s full of horrible memories. I never want to set foot in that house again. I’m sorry. Can’t David help?’

David, though, was very busy as he always was with work. He was also somehow scrabbling together enough corners and fag-ends of time to conduct an affair; his every spare thought consumed with guilt and indecision. He had nothing left over to give to sorting a house full of a finished life.

‘Just pay someone to do it.’ He says over his mobile, queuing to board at an airport somewhere.

‘What?’

‘Get house clearing in. Like we did with Auntie Alice.’

‘Yeh, but at least we all went round and had a look first.’ It was a dismal occasion, a life adding up to so little it seemed in the end. But this is different, it’s our mother.

‘Sorry Sarah, I just don’t have time to help with this.’

But I did want to touch her things. I wanted to handle the jewellery, the colourful assortment of beads and wood, something to match every outfit. I wanted to rescue the gold necklace pendant I had given her for her eightieth, the most expensive piece she had ever owned, that I had ever bought. I wanted to handle the carefully collected green plates that added decoration in every room, and the white jugs placed along the landing border to the stairs. I wanted to sort the artfully hung paintings and prints, many the work of her friends. The colour shaded lamps, the ethnic rugs, the Simplicity-patterned self-machined clothes, I wanted to find good homes for everything. It felt like something I was doing for her though I, like her, had no belief that she was still around in some spirit form to know this. I believed that was it, she was dead, end of story. And yet…and yet I wanted her body handled with care, as if she could still feel, could still bruise. Some part of my brain watched my own reactions with interest: this makes no sense. The receptionist at the funeral home had seen all this before, her kindness made me cry. I wasn’t the first staunch atheist haunted by unexpected ghostly lingerings.

Released from the threat that some momentary misstep in our daughter-mother dance might break through the thin crust of her self-control and release a scalding blast of the anger that roiled beneath, I could let my defences down.  I felt tender and wanted to do her kindnesses. I organised for the daughter of Celia, her oldest friend, to collect the Lazy-boy armchair we had got Jenny just too late: her dementia-ravaged Swiss cheese brain never able to learn how to operate it no matter how many times we showed her. It would help Celia with her husband, who was also slowly dying of dementia. I imagined Jenny’s pleasure that she had been able to pass this on to her friend.

I lined the hall with boxes and boxes of books and shoes, bags of scarves, gloves, and outdoor coats for my husband Stewart to ferry to the local charity shop. Back and forth he went, until he and the shop called a halt and he just took it all to the dump. I sent photos to my sons and four nephews of handmade curtains and luxury towels, single beds, stylish sofas and chairs going begging. But they all lived in shoebox rooms in shared flats and couldn’t accommodate the generous dimensions of Habitat and Liberty.  I contacted the hospital to offer back the garage full of walking aids. But they wouldn’t take them. Stewart and I were ruthless: everything had to be cleared as the house was to be rented out while probate was sorted.

Finally there was only one large item left in the living room. Stewart and I sat on the wide, soft living-room sofa so many of us had used for full-length napping.

‘Won’t the shop take it?’ he asked.

‘I can’t find a tag proving its fireproof, although I bet it is. They won’t take it.’

‘Well I couldn’t get it in the car anyway.’

‘It’s such a pity. Jordan bagsed this sofa ages ago.’ Jordan, my youngest son, had been the biggest fan of its crashing out properties, falling asleep on it every visit.

‘We’d never get it up the stairs at his place. We could put it in storage.’

‘What’s the point? When will any of us ever have a house with rooms big enough?’

‘Down the dump?’

‘We’d have to hire a van to get it there.’

In the end, we took an axe to it.

#

We, Stewart and I, stayed in her house a few days doing this.

#

In her airy bedroom was the new bed with the colour coordinated headboard. The old marital double bed that she had slept in alone since my father died forty years before, had finally got too heavy for her to shift while hoovering. This new single bed from Englishman’s Castle, the pretentiously but somehow aptly named Leatherhead furniture store, was the fruit of our last effort at going out to shop; an excursion that exhausted us both. But it was light and skidded across the floor at the slightest push making it difficult for Jenny to climb into at night, although it had proved all too easy to fall out of, and we had had to put railings up on both sides, like a cot.

My father’s old writing desk had not been replaced. Made of dark wood, with brass-knobbed drawers and a green leather padded writing surface, it had become her filing cabinet. I took out the old green file folders, relics from my father’s work, some labelled, some not, and sorted through them, braced on the sliding bed.  The folders contained the deeds to the house. They’d bought it in 1955 the year they married. There was correspondence relating to the purchase: solicitors’ letters, insurance documents. There were papers about savings accounts and other investments that may or may not have been current. There was a copy of my father’s will naming two of his brothers as executors. These were fascinating in the way of an archaeological dig. Mixed in with these I found more personal papers.

One of the folders was stuffed with loose sheets of paper. As I allowed it to fall open I could see it was a collection of poems, some typed, some handwritten. I recognised a few that she had sent me over the years; others, though, I had never seen before. Flicking through them, a handwritten poem caught my eye,

 

You should have been with me

 my dear, to share

this first fine evening

in the garden,

to breathe the silky-satin air

hung heady with the scents

of rose and juniper and cypress;

to hear the sad Beethoven spill

across the lawn and fill

the gentle night

with words unspoken.

 

You should have been with me

my dear,

to watch the ever lowering light

drop dusk upon the bright July;

to lie beneath the moth-soft sky

and taste with teasing honeyed touch

the fusion of ourselves

in joy.

 

You should have been with me

my dear. 

 

It’s signed Jenny, 1991.  As I read it, I am awed by its beauty, so alive with rhythm and rhyme. Such talent she had. So evocative her writing. I see her standing in the big, carefully tended garden on a summer evening, full of feeling. Her hair up in her French bun, wearing one of her self-sown dresses, skilfully tailored on the dummy, a perfect fit. Elegant, glamorous, glowing with love. The soft, mellow tone of wistful forgiveness in this fragment of a poem had caught me unawares, was startling even; most of Jenny’s poems are angry.

Even before I saw the date I knew this love poem wasn’t to my father. A later lover then, who wasn’t there when she wanted him to be. That must be the married professor, her one-time lodger. She had taken in lodgers after my father died to pay off the mortgage on the not-quite-completed-at-the-point-of-his-death extension. Being a landlady taxed her ability to tolerate company and she stopped the moment the debt was cleared.  She had written to me of this affair in August 1991. After sixteen years there is a man in my life again! A lovely gentle, caring, loving man who thinks I am wonderful. Of course he is married, she wrote, and you will be remembering my dire warnings about consorting with married men! I do not foresee any change in his circumstances and as you know I am totally committed to my single status…It’s going to be an affair conducted mainly in correspondence and telephone calls as a bonus. I remember how pleased I was for her when I got this letter. Thrilled that she could fall in love again, be excited by romance.

Even then though the writing was on the wall: when he had called to say that his reason for being away from home, a meeting at the National Gallery, had been cancelled and so he wouldn’t be coming to stay after all, Jenny who had hoovered the house, hoovered the garden, got everything lined up for 24 hours of wine and roses in anticipation, wrote, I did have a TANTRUM. Being a mistress is not for everyone and Jenny, it turned out, was not well suited to the role.

That Christmas she upset the swaying high wire on which their affair delicately balanced. He had made the mistake, while whispering his love down the phone, of protesting that he was unhappy at home, that he would rather be with her for Christmas.  ‘Why don’t you come then? What’s stopping you?’, she challenged, knowing she was calling his bluff but unable to stop herself.  ‘What’s stopping you if you want to be with me? I’m here. On my own.’ He would love to come, he said, he was dying to be with her; she must understand that he couldn’t just walk out. She didn’t, ‘If you really wanted to come you could. If you mean what you say, you’ll come.’ Her anger at being pushed away, at being made to feel invisible, at being not worthy pushed her recklessly onwards, ‘If you don’t come now, don’t ever bother coming again!’ She hung up on him and waited with hope.

He didn’t come. When the anger abated she had come down with a crash, the garden lying unhoovered. She felt used, she had said, it wasn’t real, she was only a source of free lodgings. He had said he wanted only to be with her, but it was just words. I stuffed the poem back between the others.

There was more: a letter addressed to her in my father’s handwriting; a few makeshift diaries, the jagged, furious looking entries coming to a sudden stop with pages still to spare. I found a copy of the letter Liz had sent her that led to the rift of fourteen years before, already familiar with its contents. There was an angry scrawled reply that was new to me. Was it ever sent? Was it ever read?  She had kept my letters from college and David’s from when he was in France; both of us writing to her as she was in and out of psychiatric hospital after my father died. There were cards from her grandchildren and from her friends spanning the decades. I put it all in a cardboard box, with a lid.

#

Living with my mother was like living in an unmarked minefield: the energy expended to avoid triggering a discharge; the thought and care needed at every step.

The advice given to young men contemplating marriage is to look to the mother. This is wise advice: for all my efforts to cast her off, the older I get, the more I can’t but recognise my mother in me; the welcome and unwelcome legacies of being my mother’s daughter. I fight against it of course, the impulse to behave in similarly destructive ways, I don’t always win. To forgive myself for behaving unforgivably I have to forgive my mother in me: I have to forgive my mother. To forgive I have to understand. Why was my mother the way she was? What demons boiled and roiled under that veneer of correctness obsessed with manners and presentation and never calling attention to yourself? I know she loved us, but so often what we felt was her anger. And why didn’t our father help us with her? What was his story? Why had they married? Was there once love?

My parents weren’t given to talking about the past. I have fragments: my mother was an actress for a time, in repertory theatre; my father spent seven years in the army.

These fragments: the memorabilia, the snippets of their story that were shared, my own memories, are like the bones and artefacts uncovered in historic grave exhumations when all else has turned to earth and dust. Much can be learnt from the study of bones, and the artefacts preserved with them, by those who know how to look. Do I know how to look? Can I reconstruct the story of all our lives?

#

 

Catching Pike

 

When I was young, I ran naked in the garden squealing with delight, dodging in and out of the garden sprinkler, my mother on a sun lounger, sewing, watching.

When I was young my mother helped me host dolls’ tea parties. I sat, she perched, on the child size chairs at the child height red plastic table in the playroom. We poured water from the small yellow plastic teapot, and sipped delicately, holding our saucers. I had to eat the smarties that were my dollies’ share of the party tea. She was wonderful and I loved her with all my heart.

When I was in infant school, she was there every day bringing Liz and Dave in the green estate to take me and Anna, my best friend, home. Once we had taken off our shoes and coats, we went up to the large, south-facing bedroom where she sat in the armchair drinking a cup of tea while we sat on the floor as only young children can, drinking Ribena. She let us dunk our rich tea biscuits – only two darling, we’ll be eating tea soon, that’s enough, let’s put the packet away – in her tea, the soggy crumbs floating first like icebergs then sinking to the bottom. And she read to us. Christopher Robin and Pooh Bear, nursery rhymes, Paddington Bear, My Naughty Little Sister; all the characters came alive in her mouth. She was spellbinding and I could have listened to her for ever.

When I was young and missed my step and fell down our narrow stairs, crying out with shock and fear, she was there at the bottom to catch me, cuddle me, stroke my hair.

When I fell out with Anna who wouldn’t let me stroke her new pet rabbit, she offered the wise counsel of a seductive olive branch: take round some delicious lettuce and carrots, she said, you can both feed him. And we did, lying on our stomachs pushing the food through the chicken wire of his run.

When another friend, Jane, came to stay overnight we would sleep in the twin beds in the large story-reading bedroom. In the morning we would find twists of barley sugar and small items of dolls’ house furniture under our pillows. It was magical. How could I not love her with all my heart? She was the best mum in the world.

* * *