I can’t believe it’s seven years since my mother died.
It never gets any easier.
I dreamt about both my parents this week (Dad died in 1990) but they are never nice dreams – always lots of arguing and disagreements going on.
It’s bizarre, because my dad wasn’t that kind of person. Mum had a temper and, especially towards the end of her life, was always worked up about something. Dad was methodical, calm, and I rarely heard him raise his voice. If and when he did, it was always in response to Mum.
While the adage ‘Time is a great healer’ is true, I prefer to think of time as a great changer. I don’t think pain is ever healed; it just shifts its focus.
When Mum was at her most fractious, railing against the care home and hospital she was forced to spend so much time in, not to mention the carers visiting her at home, I thought I would never be able to forgive the nastiness that came out quite viciously. When that venom was transferred to me, who was flying back and for from the USA constantly for her (as I had done since 2008), I thought it was a wound incapable of healing.
But love transcends life’s black spots. It’s the rain that disperses clouds and brings the sun into view once more.
Mum was kind, giving, loyal and, as she often told me, her greatest dread was something happening to my brother Nigel or me.
We were kept warm, well fed, and enjoyed many family treats that had nothing to do with money.
Mum’s decision, hours after dinner, to make toffee . . . oh, the smell of bubbling caramel that heralded that most joyous of things, a late night and an extra hour in front of the TV.
Another rare (very rare) late night treat was when Mum and Dad decided to have a Chinese takeaway. It was always the same: sweet and sour pork, chicken and pineapple, and rice (just one portion, which they insisted was enough).
Always hating to leave us out of anything, they used to bring my brother and me a small portion on a Fleur de Lys saucer with a teaspoon, our tiny expectant mouths like hungry little birds in the half-light.
I loved our holidays that, despite their simplicity, were so glamorous to me.
The smell of hot batter moving through the doughnut machine at Butlin’s Pwllheli, our evening treat to go with our hot milk.
And Cornwall – so many delights. The jars of pebble sweets, scones and clotted cream, freshly baked Cornish pasties, the soothing smell of pink calamine lotion on my shoulders, Dad brushing the gritty sand from my feet after a day at the beach.
I remember money always being tight – how I dreaded the Friday night budget round-up on paper – but I never felt deprived. Back then, you just accepted what you could and could not have and of course we didn’t have social media to compare what others might have that we didn’t.
When the Corona pop man came once a week, it was either two orangeade or one dandelion and burdock and one plain lemonade (dandelion and burdock was the more expensive, so two was a complete no-no).
Biscuits were one plain and one chocolate, the latter being more expensive and therefore rationed.
There were occasional foodstuffs I craved but was always denied – Farley’s rusks (which I love to this day), a hot dog at the van in the car park after a hot day at the beach – but Mum had a surefire way of keeping my nagging at bay.
Rusks, fried onions from a stranger . . . ‘They’ll give you worms.’ It was years before I realised that ‘worms’ was a euphemism for ‘We can’t afford it.’
I am currently reading the extraordinary novel Time Shelter by the Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov. In 2023, he (with his translator) won the Booker International Prize, and it’s a moving and brilliant insight into the nature of time, historically, politically and personally. It’s also often very, very funny – and not in a Carry On Matron kind of way.
It’s had me thinking about time for weeks – and today, especially.
I fear how quickly years go by (seven? I was in Mum’s hospital ward only yesterday, surely) and, by contrast, dread months that seem to last for decades. I thought March 2026 would never end, and don’t get me started on January and February that I swear lasted a decade this year.
I’m currently writing a book that features a lot of my relationships with men. The pain of past emotion erupts with a raw intensity I find difficult when recalling that particular aspect of my past. There are some wounds that never heal; you just learn to navigate your way around them.
Gospodinov explores the nature of memory in Time Shelter and especially the correlation between the past and the future and I can’t think of one novel that has touched me so deeply or made me think about the thing we all have – until we don’t. Time.
At this point in time (what I have left of it), there are memories I want to cling on to and others that are too painful to hold, which is possibly why the convenience of forgetting has suppressed the less savoury aspects of my relationship with Mum.
I loved and was loved in return.
So today I’m thinking not only about life and death, but everything I cherish in between.
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