with the music and the readings, and the eulogies are beautiful and funny and right, but, for me, none of the melodic or lyrical grenades
hit their target: ‘Soave Sia II Vento’, the lovely quartet from
Cosi Fan Tutte
, Don Marquis’s ‘Song of Mehitabel’ from
Archy and Mehitabel
(‘wotthehell, archy, wotthehell’, her favourite rallying cry), not even Harry, one of her university friends, a brilliant sweet-voiced tenor singing an unaccompanied Scottish folk song
in the whitewashed silence of the Methodist chapel. It’s partly because there are too many people, there are hundreds of them, then the taxi driver refuses to turn down his soundtrack of
ultra-sexy R ’n’ B on the way to the cemetery, which just makes us laugh, and as we stand there in the rain and some men put my mother in a hole this is it, really it, but the feeling
is elusive. I want this moment to mean something, but I just feel angry and embarrassed at how public it all is; there are still too many people, too many distractions. I can’t find my mum in
all this. I want to, but I can’t: I have to think of her in private.
My mum was very little, barely 5' 2", but she fought and laughed and danced and loved like a giant.
Born in a poor ex-steel town in the west of Scotland, one of seven children, she was the first in her family to go to university, leaving with a first in English, a wild eye for beauty and a
lovely, gay husband, Jack. Her parents both died when she was in her early twenties and their deaths and the early experience of caring for them shaped her perception of life and family. She lived
bigger, brighter and louder than I would ever dare to: moving to Ghent without a word of Dutch, moving in with my then-disreputable father and his menagerie in the Scottish Borders and stalking a
pianist who had broken her heart round the concert halls of London.
She knew things you would never expect: how to get a table under the art nouveau
coupole
in the lovely Bofinger brasserie in Paris, the best churches for a quiet sit-down in most
European capitals and any number of excellent cafés, and she had an anecdote for each. ‘I had my bag blown up by the Bow Street police here,’ she would say, tucking my arm into
hers as we walked through the back streets of Covent Garden or, studying the flyers at the Wigmore Hall, ‘When I was stalking that pianist, I sat in the front row during a recital here and
glared at him the whole way through.’ Her wardrobe was full of evidence of an intensely lived life: a daring crocheted Biba mini dress, lace-up platform boots, a psychedelic floral babydoll
nightie. Jack fell in love, initially, with her red shoes, glimpsed across the university library.
In her professional life as a research fellow and subsequently as a professor of social policy, she was instrumental in effecting seismic shifts in the way that child and other unpaid carers
were treated. She knew, personally, what it meant to care for someone when there is no option and no support and she spent long hours listening to, recording and bearing witness to the lives of
people caring for the profoundly disabled.
But she was also wickedly funny: she was a woman who stole chips from strangers and danced on tables and coloured in the holes in her tights with a ballpoint pen. She loved the opera and her
tiny garden, other people’s terriers, schmaltzy country music, nice bedlinen and Guerlain potions.
We were close, perhaps too close, bound together by love and dependency and a decade of physical proximity when it was just the two of us. My childhood memories are mainly of her: long train
journeys to Glasgow, sitting with a pen and a packet of Smarties in the corner of her meetings, riding on the back of her bike and weekend mornings in Bettys tearoom in York with a round of granary
toast and a hot chocolate, her reading the paper and me the
Beano.
Our closeness worried her sometimes: she thought she hadn’t given me enough structure
hit their target: ‘Soave Sia II Vento’, the lovely quartet from
Cosi Fan Tutte
, Don Marquis’s ‘Song of Mehitabel’ from
Archy and Mehitabel
(‘wotthehell, archy, wotthehell’, her favourite rallying cry), not even Harry, one of her university friends, a brilliant sweet-voiced tenor singing an unaccompanied Scottish folk song
in the whitewashed silence of the Methodist chapel. It’s partly because there are too many people, there are hundreds of them, then the taxi driver refuses to turn down his soundtrack of
ultra-sexy R ’n’ B on the way to the cemetery, which just makes us laugh, and as we stand there in the rain and some men put my mother in a hole this is it, really it, but the feeling
is elusive. I want this moment to mean something, but I just feel angry and embarrassed at how public it all is; there are still too many people, too many distractions. I can’t find my mum in
all this. I want to, but I can’t: I have to think of her in private.
My mum was very little, barely 5' 2", but she fought and laughed and danced and loved like a giant.
Born in a poor ex-steel town in the west of Scotland, one of seven children, she was the first in her family to go to university, leaving with a first in English, a wild eye for beauty and a
lovely, gay husband, Jack. Her parents both died when she was in her early twenties and their deaths and the early experience of caring for them shaped her perception of life and family. She lived
bigger, brighter and louder than I would ever dare to: moving to Ghent without a word of Dutch, moving in with my then-disreputable father and his menagerie in the Scottish Borders and stalking a
pianist who had broken her heart round the concert halls of London.
She knew things you would never expect: how to get a table under the art nouveau
coupole
in the lovely Bofinger brasserie in Paris, the best churches for a quiet sit-down in most
European capitals and any number of excellent cafés, and she had an anecdote for each. ‘I had my bag blown up by the Bow Street police here,’ she would say, tucking my arm into
hers as we walked through the back streets of Covent Garden or, studying the flyers at the Wigmore Hall, ‘When I was stalking that pianist, I sat in the front row during a recital here and
glared at him the whole way through.’ Her wardrobe was full of evidence of an intensely lived life: a daring crocheted Biba mini dress, lace-up platform boots, a psychedelic floral babydoll
nightie. Jack fell in love, initially, with her red shoes, glimpsed across the university library.
In her professional life as a research fellow and subsequently as a professor of social policy, she was instrumental in effecting seismic shifts in the way that child and other unpaid carers
were treated. She knew, personally, what it meant to care for someone when there is no option and no support and she spent long hours listening to, recording and bearing witness to the lives of
people caring for the profoundly disabled.
But she was also wickedly funny: she was a woman who stole chips from strangers and danced on tables and coloured in the holes in her tights with a ballpoint pen. She loved the opera and her
tiny garden, other people’s terriers, schmaltzy country music, nice bedlinen and Guerlain potions.
We were close, perhaps too close, bound together by love and dependency and a decade of physical proximity when it was just the two of us. My childhood memories are mainly of her: long train
journeys to Glasgow, sitting with a pen and a packet of Smarties in the corner of her meetings, riding on the back of her bike and weekend mornings in Bettys tearoom in York with a round of granary
toast and a hot chocolate, her reading the paper and me the
Beano.
Our closeness worried her sometimes: she thought she hadn’t given me enough structure
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