Gift: A Son's Story (extract) - Photographs

I'm going through a final reading of 'Gift' - my memoir about caring for my mother in her final months.  I thought I'd post this short section.  It's an episode from early on, during mum's stay in hospital, just before I took over as her carer at home.  She hadn't been expected to survive because she was so ill.  But within a few days of admission, she rallied - something she'd done so often before.  From being at death's door, she quickly got to the stage of being impatient to be out of the tiny isolation room they were keeping her in...

It was the same every day I visited.  The same questions.  The same impatience.  I hated leaving, and usually waited until she dozed.  I brought other things to keep her occupied.  One afternoon, I collected some of her photo albums from the bungalow and took them, and we spent an enjoyable couple of hours looking through them all.  Photos of her, Phyllis and Reg as children – mum the middle one, but always looking the youngest and skinniest.

            “I wasn’t always a well child.  I always seemed to get everything.  I was a bit anaemic.  I always have been.  I had lobar pneumonia, too, when I was in my teens.  I nearly died then.”

            She’d had pneumonia a couple of times since – the last time in 1983.  She'd packed up smoking after that.

            “I think you must have nine lives.”

            She chuckled.  It was good to see that smile again.

            "Ninety, more like."

            Other photos.  Her parents and grandparents.  Some of her in her teens.  Then the wedding ones, when she’d married dad.  1950.  She was 21, him 22.  He had his dress uniform on from the Household Cavalry.  He’d been based at Knightsbridge Barracks, had trooped several Colour ceremonies and later served on the Queen’s wedding.  The photo showed a tall, handsome, upright man with an elaborate quiff and a winning smile.  She was looking up at him in wide-eyed adoration.  It was easy to see what had drawn her to him – and him to her.  Their whole life was stretching out before them at that frozen moment.  Who knew what it held in store?

            “Little did I know,” mum said.  “His mum had always said to me ‘If you marry Stan, you’ll be taking something on.’  She was right there.”

            The year after that photograph was taken, Russell had been born.  I had some photos, too, of him as a young boy.  There was a jokey Christmas one of him, about three-years-old, standing by the tree with a grin on his face, pouring a bottle of beer into a glass.  Dad must have thought that was hilarious.  Start ‘em early!  Like father, like son!

            I had one photo of me and Russell together, when I was still a baby.  It was taken in our sitting room at Putney.  I was cradled in his arms and he was looking down proudly at this tiny me, like I was one of his prized Airfix models he'd just finished.  I, on the other hand, looked baffled.  The photo seems to show brotherly affection.  Little did we know, too. We'd rarely seen eye-to-eye as children.  The age gap probably didn't help - though I know I'd been spiteful towards him as a child.  We didn't speak to one another for many years, until my late teens.  Then we became friends again, when he was married to his first wife, Carol.  Carol quickly became part of the family and we were all very close.  They had two children, Carl and Joanne, who were still quite young when Russell and Carol divorced.  That was a tough time for him, and we got closer still - for a while.  We went out to pubs and clubs at the weekends - things he needed to lift his spirits and keep himself going.  I even went with him to a couple of singles dances, though it was never really my scene.  He had a few on-off girlfriends during that time.  And then he met Lynn, and was swept up.  We remained close - I was even Best Man at their wedding - but as the years passed, the 'distance' crept in.  Russell's attention shifted more towards Lynn's family and their activities, and we did little together any more.  Then, much later, we had those rows - usually triggered around Lynn.  We remained civil to one another.  We exchanged cards and presents at the appropriate times.  We got together for family occasions - usually Christmas or mum's birthday.  We spoke now and then on the phone, or texted.  But our 'friendliness' became more like you might have with a work colleague or someone like that: someone who you didn't need to see again once the day was over - and never at all if you left the job.  We had separate lives and interests now.  In real life, outside of a family setting, it's doubtful our paths would ever have crossed.  He told me once, after one of our reconciliations, that he'd been jealous of me as a child.  I got all the attention.  Second-child syndrome.  I don't remember it that way, but then I probably wouldn't.  When I got my Asperger's diagnosis, I sent him the report.  It had everything in it.  My life laid bare: the bullying at school, the mental health issues, the emotional disturbance, the difficulties with people.  Even the suicide attempts (something that mum knew nothing about - though maybe she did, with her instincts).  I wanted to try to justify myself to him - to them - in some way.  I thought it would help.  But he - they - never commented on it.  If anything, it distanced us further.  But we kept things going.  For mum, at least.  She was our centre of gravity. 

            "Look at you both," mum said, as if reading my thoughts.  "Chalk and cheese.  Him ginger and freckly, you dark."

            I knew she meant more than physical features. 

            "You boys.  They broke the mould on each of you."

            "Probably just as well," I said.

            She grinned.

            There was another photo of me as a toddler, being held by a smiling dad in the back yard of the house in Putney.  Then a similar one, but with mum.  She looked so young - gazing at me in her arms, her smile radiant.  One of me a bit older, out on the pavement on my scooter.  And a few later ones from school. 

            Later still were some photos from Devon, when mum, dad and I had lived down there briefly in the mid-'70s.  Mum shook her head as she flicked through them.

            “Those four years down there were the best of all,” she said.  She turned her gaze to the window.  I could see it all written in her face.  "I often wonder... if that had lasted, your dad might have been alright.”

            Four years.  Out of fifty-four years married.  And I think she was right.  If we'd stayed, it would have been the making of him.  Of both of them.   But it wasn't to be.  Dad got laid off from the farm labouring job he had.  That meant we lost our tied cottage, and were evicted.  We managed to get a council flat, but dad couldn't find steady work again.  Russell, who was then living in Whitstable, found dad a job at the factory where he worked.  We got a council flat exchange, moved to Herne Bay - and our Devon dream vanished into history.

            "If 'ifs' and 'ands' were pots and pans," she said.

            I had other photos from over the years.  Holiday snaps.  Christmas snaps.  Pictures from Russell’s first wedding, then his second.  Pictures of the grandchildren and great-grandchildren.  I also had special ones of her mother and father as young people.  Portrait shots.  A few years back, I’d cleaned them up on PhotoShop, enhanced them, given them sepia tones.  Two semi-profiles in a twin frame – looking across the gap and almost towards one another.  Nan in a starched white dress with high-buttoned collar, her hair done up in a prim bun, her features aquiline and severe.  There was some Spanish ancestry on her side, and it was evident here in the darkness of her hair and the shape of her face.  Mum had some of it, too, in her youth.  Granddad, by contrast, had a softer and fuller face.  His hair was neatly parted in the centre, and the wave of it matched his moustache.  He was immaculate in suit, collar and tie - but the formality was offset by something in his eyes and mouth.  It was like he couldn't wait to break into a grin, or even a laugh. 

            "Such a shame you never knew him," mum had often said.  "He had such a sense of fun, and loved children.  He always had time for us kids."

            She’d always treasured that photo set.  I put it up on the ledge by the window, where she could see it.  I thought they’d be good company for her, if nothing else.

            It gave her a lot of comfort and enjoyment to see those photographs, and to relive the memories attached to them.  I’d always had a more ambivalent attitude towards them.  I liked seeing them, but I couldn’t help also feeling sadness.  The lives and expectations frozen in them… and then the things that had actually happened, the way it had all turned out.  The opportunities missed.  The hopes and dreams that came to nothing, or very little.  Mum probably felt some of that, too – it’s only natural.  But she didn’t say.  She was pleased I’d brought them.  Maybe she thought it was something she’d never have the chance to see again. 

She was defying all expectations, though.  Each day, she seemed to be improving and holding her own.  Finally, on the following Saturday, they moved her.  I’d not long arrived when the nurse came to tell her she was going up onto a general ward.  Mum was over the moon.

            “Thank God for that.  Just to be with people again.”

            The news itself seemed to spark her up several notches.  I’d begun to worry that she was becoming depressed.  But now she was through the first major hurdle and on the way to more of a recovery.   The consultant simply smiled at me and shook his head in a way that said ‘Yes… sometimes they can really surprise even us.’

            I collected her things together, then we sat and waited for the orderlies to come and get her.