A Place for Everything
‘She would constantly berate herself for being stupid, then spend hours locked away, reading and ignoring everyone. And she was convinced she was fat, even when she was stick-thin and model-pretty. Grandma told me once that Mum would wash the skin off sausages before allowing them to be cooked. And when we were small she would go on diets of hard-boiled eggs and black coffee.’
Dad says nothing, either to elaborate or to contradict me. Now that I’ve started, I can’t stop. The nurse writes everything down. I tell her about the time Mum threw herself into the sea as a child. It’s a story that used to be repeated as though it were nothing, a snippet, a mere memory of something that couldn’t be helped. Funny, even. But then one day I asked John what that day was really like, and he told me.
‘Mum was about twelve,’ I tell the nurse. ‘Her mum – my grandmother – had taken her and her younger brother John to visit their aunt by the sea in north Kent. One afternoon they went for a walk along the pier. John says Mum was in one of her moods and that Grandma had thought some fresh air would help to calm her down.’
I glance at Dad, but he’s still staring at the floor. Is he angry with me for saying all this? Too bad; I have to. It’s not the funny story we had all been led to believe for so long. And it’s urgent that everyone hears it now, knows it for what it is.
‘John says that the three of them sat down on a bench,’ I say, ‘then suddenly, for no reason, Mum had an outburst about something and just ran off. John says the next thing he remembers was hearing her crying for help. Her voice was coming from over the edge of the pier. John was only eight, but he says he remembers that he was the one that got up and tried to find his sister. He can’t remember what Grandma did. He says he could see there was a flight of stone steps to the beach and that Mum’s voice was becoming more and more distressed. He ran to the top of the steps, looked down and saw his sister, by some rocks. He reckoned she must have fallen from these because she was struggling in the water, slipping and sliding, losing her footing, and grabbing helplessly at the rocks. John ran down the steps, and got close enough to hold out a hand. Grandma had followed him and she grabbed his other arm while John pulled at Mum. They hauled her out, crying. I remember John said to me that the weirdest thing was that Mum never seemed sorry for what she had put everyone through. When John asked her why she had done it, she said it wouldn’t have happened if their mother had been nicer to her that day.’
As I tell the story I hear myself saying the words. This familiar story now reveals itself for what it really was. And it’s because of the way the nurse is looking at me. She has stopped writing for a moment. She’s doing her best to keep her face blank, but I’ve already clocked the shock in a flex of her shoulders, a tightening of her mouth.
It’s nuts, isn’t it? To do that? To throw yourself, wilfully, into a raging sea? In front of your kid brother?
Still Dad says nothing.
The nurse finishes writing it all down. Methodical. Solemn.
‘What about postnatal depression?’ she asks next.
Hell, yeah. I am on a roll now. Bring it on. Ask me more. I can do this. I can’t stop Mum going mad, but I can do this. At last someone is listening. Someone is taking all this seriously. We’re getting somewhere.
Yet, at the same time as I feel elated, I feel hollow. Where is this ‘somewhere’? Where am I leading Mum to next? Will we have to leave her here? Will Dad ever forgive me for saying all this about Mum? To a stranger who is writing it all down?
‘Yes, she did have postnatal depression,’ I say.
Dad doesn’t disagree, although he has never ever referred to Mum’s behaviour after I was born as ‘postnatal depression’. It wasn’t ever called that. Just another anecdote, that’s all. Never examined or explained.
‘Mum told me, “When you were born, I didn’t know what to do with you.” She told me she was terrified.’
She had told me this after Lucy was born. My first baby. She told me as though to reassure me, ‘It’s OK. We all feel scared witless after giving birth.’ I know now that many of my friends didn’t feel that at all. They felt ecstatic. Overjoyed.
I was none of these things. I was terrified, just as Mum had been. I had been in labour for thirty-six hours, was exhausted. All I wanted was for my mum to put her arms around me and tell me it would be all right. She didn’t do anything of the sort. A few hours after Lucy was born, Mum rushed onto the ward and grabbed my baby and held her to her chest. She didn’t look at me, didn’t ask me how I was, didn’t kiss me, hug me, say ‘Congratulations’. She didn’t say a word to me. Just clutched at Lucy and said, ‘Thank God, she’s all right!’
She had been convinced that I would die in childbirth or lose Lucy because the labour was so long and complicated and Lucy was already two weeks late. I know now that Mum’s behaviour was about fear, but I realised that much too late to be able to empathise. At the time I took her aggressive phone calls when I was in labour as an unwanted intrusion. I told her to leave me alone. And when she wouldn’t look at me when she came to the hospital – I hated her.
But seeing me, pale, worn out, fearful; I suppose it must have brought back all the horrors of what it had been like, giving birth to me.
‘She was so terrified when she had me,’ I tell the nurse, ‘that the doctor had to sedate her and I was handed straight to my grandmother.’
The nurse flinches. Dad says nothing, stares at the floor. I have betrayed Mum, telling this story. I shiver. A small voice whispers: She handed you over, the minute you were born. What does that mean?
I push the voice away and force myself to listen to more of the nurse’s questions.
‘And was she anxious with you and your sister when you were young children?’
The nurse has given up on getting answers from Dad. She is looking at me with a very level gaze.
I nod. I answer, I hear myself talk as though someone else is speaking. I feel suddenly so weary. It’s too much, this vomiting up of the past. I had wanted this, I know; to be heard, to be validated. To be believed. But do I really have to go through every detail? Haven’t I said enough? There are too many stories. Too many ways to betray my mum. To upset my dad. Too many rules from childhood and too many mantras to relate and explain.
Don’t go to bed with your hair wet. Always wear a vest. Don’t eat eggs unless they are cooked all the way through. Call me when you get there. Call me when you are about to leave. Sit still. Be quiet. Tidy up. No wet towels. No marks on the wall. Go to your room.
Mum in a heap at the bottom of the stairs, her ankle swollen from falling. You’ll be a good girl and look after Mummy, won’t you? You’re naughty. I’m taking you to Grandma’s. I can’t cope. Bloody kids, bloody kids, bloody, bloody, bloody kids. And that poem she would quote at me when I had been naughty – about the girl with the curl who ‘when she was good she was very, very good, and when she was bad, she was horrid’. You are being bad right now, Anna. Bad and horrid. A horrid little girl.
I want to leave. I want to go home and pull the duvet over my head and sleep and sleep and never have to answer another question or have anything to do with Mum ever again.
‘Would you say that anything had precipitated this recent change in Gillian’s behaviour?’ the nurse is asking now.
I glance at Dad. No? OK …
‘I think it started with her mother – my grandmother – dying,’ I say. ‘That was about five years ago. Two thousand and eight. Grandma was her support system. Mum’s behaviour became very aggressive when Grandma was dying. Then her sister-in-law died unexpectedly, very soon after Grandma. And then shortly after that Mum became fixated on the idea that she might have prolapse.’
The nurse is not saying anything any more. She is writing, writing, writing. I plough on.
‘Mum was advised not to have the operation for prolapse, but she went ahead anyway. Her anxiety levels definitely increased after that operation.’
Can we go now? Please? I have gone over this so many times with Dad and Carrie already. We tried to get Dad to talk Mum out of that operation when it was clear that the consultant didn’t want her to have it and when my cousin Gemma had advised her against it as well. Dad had resolutely taken Mum’s side. Afterwards, when Mum’s anxieties escalated over non-existent infections and then problems with sleep, both Carrie and I tried to tell Dad that Mum was sliding down. He did then take her to the private psychiatrist, admittedly, but even then he would not use the words ‘mental health’ or ‘depression’ or ‘anxiety’. Three elephants clogging up every room we walked into.
The woman stops writing at last and looks up. ‘Has she ever been violent?’
The question bolts through me. A crack of blue light. I don’t dare glance at Dad. I stare down at my hands. I see the red and white marks left around my wrists after Mum has stopped shaking me. I see the bruise of blue ink on the bedroom carpet. Please no. Not the carpet. Don’t make me talk about that now. Not in front of Dad.
‘Well,’ Dad says slowly. ‘There was that time with the carving knife.’
I snap upright and look at him, then at the nurse. He’s not going to tell her about that? Now? But he always thought it was funny. Didn’t he?
The nurse is holding Dad’s gaze.
Dad gives a small sigh. ‘It was Christmas. I gave Gilly two unusually shaped presents …’ he begins.
I can see it now. His little-boy excitement as he handed them over. Mum’s beaming face. Dad was notoriously ‘bad at presents’, but this time it looked as though he had come up trumps.
Mum was giddy as she took the gifts. ‘Oooh, this one looks like a bottle of liqueur,’ she had said, examining a long-necked parcel with the bulbous end. ‘And this one – I have no idea …’ She ran her hand along a long, thin, carefully wrapped package.
Dad had looked so pleased with himself. ‘I think you’ll find them both very useful,’ he’d said, as Mum had unwrapped first a sink plunger and then an electric carving knife.
Even before Mum’s expression had changed, Carrie and I were concentrating on doing our invisible act. We were both very young, but we both knew that these were not good presents. Not good at all. And when things were not good, Mum got angry.
For a beat Mum stood there, holding the knife and staring at it.
Her face hardened into the glinting mask of fury we knew so well. Her green eyes flashed, she bared her teeth, she snarled, ‘A sink plunger?’ Then she roared, ‘And a CARVING KNIFE?’
She rushed him. An implement in each hand.
Did we scream?
Did we jump up to try to stop her?
I don’t think so. I can’t remember. All I can remember is that face and the knife and Dad looking shocked.
Probably we shrank back and stayed
very
very
still.
We were good at that.
Dad was strong. He must have moved fast, grabbing Mum’s wrists as she often did mine. He got the knife off her, I do know that. I can’t remember what happened next. I can’t remember what happened to the plunger either.
The knife was used to carve meat at family get-togethers for years after, and often the story would be told with laughter and jokes and ‘do you remember’s?
Dad isn’t laughing now. He is telling the story slowly and deliberately. He gets to the part where Mum is wielding the knife, then he sees the look on the nurse’s face and stops. She clears her throat and looks down at her clipboard and resumes writing.
At last the questions are finished. We leave the room in silence and go to meet up with Mum. As we close the door behind us, Dad turns to me and says quietly, ‘I think maybe we will have to find a private home for Mum.’
I have never seen anyone look so defeated.
Twelve
‘A girl with Asperger’s syndrome is … more likely than boys to develop a close friendship with someone who demonstrates a maternal attachment to this socially naïve but “safe” girl.’ 12
‘What’s wrong with Mum?’
In early adulthood I would call my grandmother to ask her this. So many times. After fights. After tears. After shouting and recrimination and frustration and arguments repeated word for word for word. On a loop.
Exhausting.
‘I don’t know.’ Grandma would sigh, exhausted herself. ‘She’s always been like this. You just have to forgive her.’
For ‘like this’ read: ‘anxious’, ‘nagging’, ‘demanding’, ‘impulsive’ – and, yes, sometimes violent too.
But that was the thing – she hadn’t ‘always’ been like that to me. If you’d have asked the child me what I thought, I might have been able to articulate that she had been unpredictable and that, yes, I was a little frightened of her, but only to the extent that I knew I wanted to please her. And so many adults were frightening anyway – my head teacher, my piano teacher, the vicar at Sunday school. They existed in another realm. They were Authority. They were not to be crossed. Mum was just another one of Them.
I never once, as a child, thought of asking, ‘Why is Mum like this?’ Was it that I only noticed more now that I had left home and knew other mothers with whom to compare her? Or was it that I was the problem; that now I was an adult and less predictable – less controllable myself – that Mum found me difficult?
Yet Grandma would describe Mum as ‘difficult’ to the adult me. And I began to notice how she had her ways of containing her eldest child, and that mostly they were successful. Sometimes she would deliver a low ‘Gillian’, almost as a growl. Even as a young adult I would be impressed by the immediate effect this would have. Mum would stop, in mid-rant, when Grandma did this. A reflex from childhood, presumably; she would stop and make a little grumbling noise, flick her shoulders irritably and settle again.
Other times when Mum’s mood was low, rather than volatile, Grandma would resort to treats – days out, new clothes, a trip to a café (deemed as extravagant, but worth it to appease Mum). Grandma had years and years of experience in managing Mum. I didn’t appreciate it when I was younger.
If ever I tried to talk to Dad about Mum’s moods, he used to say affectionately, ‘She is like a cat.’ Her moods were certainly feline in their unpredictability. One minute she would be still, content, smiling, affectionate, stretching and basking in a ray of sunlight; the next she could lash out, and you weren’t always sure what you had done to deserve it. Sometimes there were warning signs: a change of expression as quick as the twitch of a cat’s tail. Sometimes there was nothing, not a hair’s breadth, between the smile and the snarl.
Mum would occasionally refer to herself as a cat. She would say, ‘I have green, jealous eyes – cat’s eyes.’ A cat – Ink – was the only pet of ours that Mum gave her blessing to. ‘She’s my familiar,’ Mum would joke. Now that Mum is resisting taking her numerous drugs in pill form, Dad says, ‘It’s like when I had to give Ink her medication – I swear Mum hides the pills in her cheek just as Ink used to do.’
Mum was a loner, like a cat too. She preferred one-to-one conversations, shunning big groups unless Dad or Grandma were by her side. She was at home with family, but often prickly outside the nest. She was a house cat who liked the security of her own four walls and the people who inhabited them. She would say, ‘Family comes first. Friends will always let you down, but family will always be there.’ She increasingly clung to Dad in social situations as she got older. ‘People like your father,’ she used to say, with a hint of sadness. ‘He’s the funny one, the one who tells jokes and stories.’ And, ‘He looks after me, your dad.’
And she and Dad made one another very happy. They had met during their first year at university and had quickly become, in the words of more than one friend, ‘a golden couple’. Their relationship was one my sister and I came to revere, as – I discovered in later life – did many of their friends. It was not uncommon to find Mum and Dad locked in a tender embrace. Mum would frequently say, ‘I don’t know what I would do without your dad.’ Dad would gaze into Mum’s eyes and call her his ‘Gillyflower’. For years I believed every marriage was this intense and self-reflecting. A match made in heaven. Fairy-tale perfection. Happily ever after.
When I was expecting Lucy, I had a glimpse of the early days of their romance. I had gone back to my childhood home – ‘for a rest’– but Mum didn’t know how to look after a pregnant daughter, other than to worry and displace her fears surrounding pregnancy by obsessing over other things. One rainy day, she would not stop fretting over the fact that there were still piles of my belongings in my childhood home.
‘You need to decide what to do with them,’ she said. ‘You’ve got your own home now. I can’t keep that stuff for ever. I want you to take everything back with you or throw it away.’
This was how I found myself on a dark, blustery December afternoon in 1998, crouched, eight months pregnant, in the loft of my parents’ house, sifting through boxes and bags and old suitcases.
I had always hated the loft space, mainly because of Mum telling me and Carrie as children that, if we went up there, we would fall through the floorboards, onto the soft insulation, through the ceiling of the room below and die. I hated the ladder – the rattling metallic announcement it made as it came catapulting down from the hatch. I hated the way that every noise was distorted up there, so that voices from the road outside could sound as though they were somewhere much nearer, lurking in the rafters with me. I hated the smell: the fusty, dusty, mildewed smell of old cloth and paper. I hated the dark and the piles and piles of stuff, thrown up there, willy-nilly – a graveyard of possessions.
This time, though, the graveyard revealed itself to be a treasure trove. The things up here were not only mine: here, in old trunks and cases and files, were remnants of my mother’s experience of being an excited and fearful first-time parent too. I pulled out a tiny, moth-eaten, hand-knitted cardigan, a smocked Viyella dress, a teething ring and a plastic bag full of cards congratulating my parents on my birth. I thought of the items I was now amassing in preparation for my own daughter’s arrival. Would I be hoarding them in twenty, thirty years’ time? I marvelled at Mum’s decision to keep these things; for they were things she, not I, had decided to keep. I had never had her down as a sentimental woman – emotional, yes, but not soppy about objects, certainly not objects connected with me. After all, hadn’t she just spent the past couple of days telling me to get rid of all my childhood possessions?
While I was sorting through my old toys and clothes and school books, I began to get leg cramps and sat down heavily on a grey metal-framed suitcase. There was a crunching sound, and I looked down to find that I had crushed the case under the weight of my advancing pregnancy. Paper was spewing from its sides, like jam oozing from a doughnut. I pushed myself up, tried to shove the contents back inside – then stopped.
The paper was in fact envelopes: hundreds of them. I shone the torch I had with me on to my dad’s immediately recognisable italic hand. Mum’s equally inimitable scrawl was on the rest. I knew what these envelopes were, of course. Knew I shouldn’t open them. I couldn’t do it, could I? Read those words while my parents were, at that moment, downstairs watching TV, drinking coffee, waiting for me. And yet here I was, at my mother’s command, holding in my hands her and Dad’s youthful promises of love and devotion. It would have been wrong, to start sifting through their intimate words, written under the assumption that they were for their eyes only. Wouldn’t it?
In the end, the temptation was too great. I started reading. They would never know.
I have all these letters in my possession now. I have taken them from the suitcase and organised them so that I can read them in the order in which they were sent. There are letters for almost every day from May 1963 to July 1966. Almost three whole years of conversation – conversation that normally would be lost to the tides of time. Among the records are the minutiae of a life that had to be planned in pen and ink and not down a phone line or via the worldwide web or cursory texts or Snapchats with emojis and GIFs. Details of train times and plans for weekends are noted alongside tentative dips into the waters of romance. These quickly develop into full-blown love letters when Mum asks Dad to write to her in Latin. Soon he is calling her ‘O lux et vita mea’: Oh, my light and my life.
This shared knowledge of the Classics was a deep bond, undoubtedly one of the reasons they fell in love. They met while performing in a Greek play. As kids, Carrie and I found the whole thing embarrassing, especially when Latin and Greek would be regularly quoted. We felt barred too, kept out of these private, coded conversations. It was weird, wasn’t it? Having parents who spoke dead languages that no one else understood?
Our only entrance into this mysterious world was through Dad’s bedtime retellings of Greek myths. Whether the story was of Persephone, trapped in the Underworld with wicked Hades after giving in to the temptation of six pomegranate seeds, or strong, courageous Heracles, forced to perform twelve impossible labours, or Odysseus, hiding his men inside a giant wooden horse to trick the Trojans, or poor, chatterbox Echo who fell in love with the beautiful Narcissus but was doomed only to repeat the words he called out and so never met him – all these stories found their way into our DNA, despite our resistance.
Those letters, though: they offer me more than an insight into a shared obsession. They show me just how deeply Dad understood Mum and how much they had in common: this unlikely coupling of the serious, anxious young woman with the funny, calm and kind young man. They adored one another. Still do. Oh, my light and my life.
Until very recently they were still taking holidays in their beloved Italy. They were taking conversation classes too, so that they could embarrass us in Italian as well as Latin and Greek. They had set their satnav to Italian, programming it for even the shortest, well-known journey just so that they could hear ‘Giovanni’ advising them, ‘Girare a destra’ in his dulcet tones.
Dad got Mum from the start. The letters prove it. Mum asks for Dad’s ‘adoration’ very early on. She tells him, ‘I need to be cherished’. So perhaps there had been warnings of what he was getting into. She is open and honest in her letters about how terrified she is of losing him, this young man who is everything she’s not: steady, in control, confident. She tells him, ‘I feel safe in your arms’, and when she writes a scrawled, high-octane letter, full of panic about exams or travel arrangements or not knowing what to wear to a party, Dad always replies in a measured, loving way. ‘I am here for you’, he tells her, over and over. ‘I am yours. I will never let you down.’
Mum could be anxious and ‘difficult’, yes. But that is not the whole story; she could also be beautiful and funny and intelligent and loving, and Dad saw all that. He was her rock, just as much as Grandma was. Her close friend and companion. Her other half. These are important things for me and the rest of the family to hold on to, now that Mum is so – so other – so hard to reach. And so frightening.
These are not the things, however, that a mental health nurse notes down when taking a person’s medical history. Not the things that count when trying to find a diagnosis – a label to peel back and stick firmly in place so that everyone knows, once and for all, what is ‘wrong’ with you.
Oh, my light and my life. What would Mum be without Dad?