Open Writing

It has been almost three years since I saw my mother. She lives alone in her old folks’ bungalow in Dalton, Huddersfield, except when she goes into a nursing home for respite care.

In May Two-thousand-and-five she will be ninety years old. Although it is a remarkable achievement, it is more a tribute to her fighting spirit than to her desire, which is to die to be with her husband, Ernest Knowles.

My earliest memories of Ma were when I was about two years old. She seemed enormous, towering above me almost as big as a house. As I grew and took more notice of my surroundings, she still seemed huge, and I wondered if I would ever be as tall as she was.

I didn’t know how unhappy she was, being married to my father, George Frederick Bray, until a series of events occurred that ended the marriage and sent Ma, René, and me back to live with Nanny and Granddad in Nanny’s lodging house at the top of Fitzwilliam Street. Nor did I know then how unhappy Nanny and Granddad were with each other.

There was always a gloomy air pervading the house, its people, and their relationships. Laughter was rare, as were kind words, except when Archie Medley clip-clopped down our cellar steps in his highshine brown shoes to gleam in the living room every Friday, collecting premiums for the Prudential Insurance Company and handing out sweets to eager young expectants.

I do remember that Mother was always moving around the house, either fetching, carrying, skipping to the Co-op with the round brown basket, making beds, helping with the cooking, plating meals, possing laundry in the dolly tub, rub-a-dub-dubbing on the galvanised rubbing board in the steamfilled scullery, ironing mountains of sheets and shirts on the scullery end of the living room table with a woollen blanket for a pad, and swift of foot she scurried from room to room, and floor to floor in the many-roomed four-storied house, except on the infrequent occasions when, afront a blazing fire, on whose iron grate she hefted buxom cast-iron pans of vegetables that spat and hissed at the live coals next to them, she sat and talked with Nanny, mostly in whispers, mouthings, and spellings, so that our young ears would not be corrupted by learning about grown-ups and their secrets.

I was surrounded, it seemed, by people of giant size, and of their number was my mother. I do not remember her smiling or laughing: life was far too serious and intense for such evidence of enjoyment, and Nanny was a hard and exacting taskmaster, who demanded unquestioning obedience to her imperious decrees.

Ma seemed to be happy when she married Tommy Scott, although the relationship was not openly affectionate, but a lodging house is a very public place and this was the forties and early fifties. Tommy died when I was in my twenty-second year, and my brother Arthur, his son, was barely eleven.

At this time, mother seemed to be about of equal size to me. At my tallest, I was five feet seven and a half inches, and that has to be accurate because Her Majesty’s Army wielded the tape measure and announced another fit for service.

For many years, in and among my comings and goings, Mother and I could look each other in the eyes without one of us having to stoop. Long before I emigrated to the USA in the year Two-thousand and nothing, she had begun to shrink from top to bottom.

When I visited her in the May of Two-thousand-and-two, she had shrunk even more, until I am sure I can remember having babies bigger than she was. Arthritis has had her in its clutches for several years, making it impossible for her to rise, stand, walk, bend at the waist, or turnover in bed, and the shrinking continues.

The last time I saw her she was barely larger than the ten by seven photograph of her I have on my wall.

When I see her in a few weeks, I know that she will be no bigger than a bar of soap after a hard day’s washing, and I will wonder where the woman who used to be my mother has gone.

And yet for all the diminishing of stature and mass that she has undergone, and in spite of her automatic memory fade function, she remembers all those she has loved, and those who have loved her, although time plays its tricks with their names.

Her capacity for the fierce love that has characterised her life and relationships seems not to have abated with the rest of her endowments. At times, it was difficult to understand the source and direction of her love because it was distant and unexpressed. It was something you just had to know without being told, and it was not always easy to get the signals.

Yet, I am confidant that she gave all that was in her to give, and was sometimes more generous. I have to remember all this when next I hug her. Besides which, I shall have to remember not to squeeze too hard lest I break this fragile little lady with the pellucid skin of a China doll.

We shall sit together one last time, eat a plate of tripe with salt and vinegar in every hole, and look similarly vacant as we try to resurrect particulars of when we were younger, when, tugging my chubby hand, she carried the big round shopping basket to the Co-op at the bottom of Greenhead Road, and we shuffled through the sawdust on the floor of the Busy ‘B’ butcher’s shop on Shambles Lane, and she will not remember anything about my "Bloody Father!" except how to swear at him.

We will suck the vinegar off our fingers and then sit in a prolonged silence, knowing that this will be our last moment together before one of us is claimed by death, but not daring to say aloud what we both know to be true.

It will be a time for tears and wrenching from each other. That might be the only thing that is not changed from those days when I was smaller, and she was bigger: in the days before Life with its swift wings and heavy chains had carried us far, borne us down, and worn us out, and was close to being finished with both of us.

Finally, face to face, one final time I fear, "Goodbye, Ma. I love you. God bless you."

Ma will say "And I love you, too."

Then with counterfeit smile I will not turn from her but will look at her breaking but smiling face, reach the door, then one last gaze as tears fall to her lap, a last wave, and I slip outside. Behind me, I close the door as though it was a coffin lid separating the living from the dead. Yet we still live, but feel the pain of separation as if the other was not.

A few shaking steps to the car. A last glance at her window. The sure and certain knowledge that my tears outside her home are mirrored by hers inside, and thereafter only silence, and none to say, "Hush, my child!"

And then I am gone to fly forever from these shores, and from she who gave me life those many years ago, and the two of us will not stand face-to-face until we stand on the golden pavement of that city whose light is the Son, who will dry all our tears, ease all our pain, and restore what the great adventure of mortality, and the insults of advancing years have stolen from us.

Copyright © 2005
Ronnie Bray
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED