My Daughter, My Mother

by Annie Murray

  Joanne gripped her hand, feeling tears rising in her own eyes. All these years her mom – her strange, kind at times, but predictably unpredictable mother – had been suffering all this.

  ‘So they’ve put me back on it again,’ Margaret said bitterly.

  ‘They can help you: you can come off it more slowly, like you would with any drug.’

  Margaret crumpled, sinking further down into the bed again. ‘I don’t know if I can do it.’

  ‘Course you can,’ Joanne was saying. She sensed movement behind her and turned to see her dad and Karen approaching.

  She watched her parents’ eyes meet.

  In a small defeated voice Margaret said, ‘Hello, Fred.’

  Fred looked down at her, his face lined with sorrow. ‘Hello, love.’

  He was about to sit down beside the bed, reaching out to take her hand, but Margaret turned her head away from him.

  ‘Oh, go away, Fred,’ she said. Her voice was full of weary contempt. ‘Just leave me.’

  Six

  Joanne was perched uncomfortably on a miniature chair by the painting table, watching Amy, when she heard the soft voice again.

  ‘She’s really enjoying herself, isn’t she?’

  She’d been in such a daze that she hadn’t seen Sooky come in, and turned to see her, dressed this time in a sunflower-yellow salwar kameez suit and smiling as she bent to put an apron over Priya’s head.

  ‘I can’t seem to get her to do anything else,’ Joanne said. ‘She’d spend all day here, if I let her.’

  There wasn’t another chair, so Sooky knelt down.

  ‘How’re you?’ she asked. She had a nice way of speaking, looking into your eyes as if she really wanted to know.

  Joanne was relieved to see her, happy that someone – anyone – would come over specially to talk to her.

  ‘I’m all right,’ she said. She’d been miles away, her head full of all that was happening with Mom. ‘What about you?’

  ‘Oh,’ Sooky said lightly, ‘not too bad.’

  There was a silence. Priya, with vigorous enthusiasm, was getting stuck into a pot of sky-blue paint. Joanne desperately wanted to talk, just to have a normal everyday chat, but it was hard to know what to say. The silence grew so long that she suddenly demanded, ‘How old are you then?’

  ‘Me? I’m twenty.’

  ‘Oh, I thought you were younger.’

  Sooky laughed, a sound that again Joanne found very cheering. ‘Why – how old’re you?’

  ‘I’m twenty-two.’

  ‘I thought you were older.’

  ‘Thanks very much!’ Joanne said. ‘Mind you, I feel it some days.’

  They were off after that, nattering away, finding out about each other. Sooky said she had been to school in Handsworth Wood, had two brothers and a sister, and her elder brother was already married with two children and another on the way. Joanne told her about Karen, about growing up in Kings Heath, then found herself blurting out, ‘My mom’s been poorly, you see . . . I’ve been back and forth to the hospital all weekend. She’s back at home now, but it’s been really hard, with Amy and everything.’

  ‘Was it serious?’ Sooky’s voice was sympathetic.

  ‘She just had a bit of a turn.’ Joanne had no intention of explaining, so she made light of it. ‘They think she’ll be all right. Oh!’ she smiled, pointing. ‘Look at them!’

  The two little girls were bent over the same sheet of sugar paper, making big strokes with their brushes and giggling, faces lit up with delight. Priya did a thick daub of blue, then Amy added bright yellow and they roared with laughter, as if this was the funniest thing in the world. They sloshed more and more colours on, both swirling their brushes round until there was a sludgy brown mess all over the soaked paper and they were cackling with joy in a way that made their mothers join in too.

  ‘They’re friends!’ Sooky said. She sounded pleased.

  ‘I’ll give them some more paper,’ Mavis the helper said, laughing too. ‘They’re thick as thieves, aren’t they? If you want to go and get a drink . . . ?’

  ‘She always seems to be trying to get rid of us, doesn’t she?’ Joanne whispered as they crossed the obstacle course of toys to the kitchen.

  ‘Who’s complaining?’ Sooky said, and they got the giggles too.

  ‘So d’you live near?’ Joanne asked hopefully, as they made cups of tea.

  ‘Somerset Road,’ Sooky said.

  ‘Up in Handsworth Wood?’

  ‘Yes, but the thing is . . .’ Sooky hesitated, stirring sugar into her tea. ‘I live back with my family. I’m divorced – well, nearly anyway.’

  Joanne looked up from pouring milk. ‘Divorced? What about your religion? I thought you weren’t allowed that sort of thing?’

  Sooky shrugged gently. ‘Well, no. But I am. I was married at seventeen, you see . . .’

  ‘God, that’s young.’

  ‘Not according to my mom and dad. But we made a deal that I’d be allowed to finish my A-levels. He was from Derby, so I was living there until six months ago and then . . . I came back to Birmingham.’

  ‘Oh.’ Joanne didn’t know what to say. ‘Did you do your A-levels then?’

  ‘Yeah. English, politics and sociology.’ She sounded proud. ‘I got married, and I was expecting her towards the end, but I finished them. But I had to leave: my marriage, I mean.’ Sooky stared ahead sadly as she talked. ‘I was worried for – my daughter.’

  Joanne had even less idea what to say now. What exactly did that mean?

  ‘That’s awful,’ she ventured.

  ‘Oh, it’s not too bad. I didn’t like him anyway.’

  She looked at Joanne, and for some reason her frankness set them both off laughing again, even though Joanne found that it made her chest tight and she suddenly had to swallow down tears. She never seemed to know what her emotions might do, from minute to minute.

  Tess appeared at the kitchen door and grinned at them both. ‘It’s all very jolly in here I see,’ she said.

  Joanne pushed Amy’s buggy along the Soho Road, with plastic bags dangling on each side. She liked shopping in the Soho Road. Instead of going into one big shiny supermarket she could go into lots of little shops, though she wasn’t sure about the whole halal thing or what to ask for, so usually she went to the one remaining old-fashioned English butcher right up near the top. But she liked buying bread and fruit and veg from all the small shops.

  ‘I don’t know how you can stand living over there,’ her mother sometimes said. ‘You might as well be living in India. All those people – none of them speak English. It’s not right. I remember when Handsworth used to be a nice area.’ And ‘Ooh, no,’ she’d say with a shudder if Joanne suggested her visiting them. ‘I’m not going over there.’

  So she’d only ever been once, just so that she could set eyes on their house. Dad had been a few more times, was more ‘live and let live’ about people who were different. And, Joanne knew, he missed her and was glad to get out of the home. She and Dad had always got along all right.

  Joanne and Dave had moved there because of his job. The garage had been his dad’s business, on the borders of Hockley. She found she liked Handsworth: the old Victorian buildings, the park with its boating lake, and the sari shops displaying bright-coloured garments shot through with gold thread and scattered with sequins. And she liked the grocers crammed with oranges and mangoes, tomatoes and coriander and things she’d never heard of before, all spilling out over the pavement in their boxes, and music blaring out and the general bustle of things.

  She also relished the fact that although the road was teeming with people, they would leave her alone, were not interested in her. In Kings Heath she was always bumping into people who’d known her since she was knee-high and seemed to have an opinion about anything she was doing. She felt freer living on the other side of town.

  With difficulty she pushed the buggy through the narrow entrance to a grocer’s.

  ‘Leave he
re,’ the shop owner, a neat middle-aged Muslim man in a little white hat, pointed to a space by the till. Joanne was a regular customer and there was no room to push the buggy round the shop. His wife, who could just see out above the counter’s piled slope of confectionery, looked benignly at Amy.

  ‘Hello, pretty girl,’ she said.

  Joanne already had bananas and spinach in her basket. Going to the back of the shop with its spicy smells, she added milk, a tin of baked beans and fish fingers from the little freezer cabinet, before going to pay.

  ‘Lovely weather,’ the woman said, adding, ‘See you!’ cheerfully as Joanne left.

  Sooky had told her that she was not Muslim, as Joanne had assumed, but Sikh. She thought about Sooky as she ambled back along the Soho Road, with Amy busy with half a banana and looking round at all the sights. There had not been much more time for chat, but after Tess left the kitchen, Joanne had asked Sooky what it was like living back at home again.

  ‘Oh, not too bad,’ she had said. ‘It’s quite nice for Priya. My sister-in-law’s not very easy . . .’ The side of her mouth twisted down for a second. ‘I’m in disgrace, you see.’

  ‘What about your mom?’ Joanne asked.

  Sooky hesitated. ‘She doesn’t speak to me.’

  ‘What – never?’

  Sooky lowered her head, and for just a moment there was something other than the tough, mischievous young woman.

  ‘Not once. Not since I first came home.’ She swallowed hard, then looked up again. ‘It’s upset her badly. But I expect she’ll get over it, eventually.’

  When she reached home, Joanne realized that for the first time in months she had not spent the walk home thinking about Dave, and getting more and more uptight with each step she took closer to the door.

  Margaret had been allowed home from hospital on the Sunday. Until then they’d been back and forth visiting. Joanne had been once with her dad, pleased that Karen couldn’t make it. Dad spoke more when no one else was there. Then on Saturday they’d all gone together.

  ‘It’s hard to get any sense out of anyone about what’s going on,’ Fred complained as they drove to Selly Oak.

  ‘No, it’s not – they told you,’ Karen said. She picked a fleck of something off her smart navy trousers. ‘They’ve put her back on the Valium again. She’s to come off it slowly, instead of rushing it.’

  ‘Have they told her how to do it?’ Joanne asked. She’d left Amy with Dave. It would be all right, surely it would? For a moment she thought of Sooky: that she had been frightened for her daughter. But Dave never seemed to get angry with Amy – only her. And things were better now, weren’t they? She tried not to think about it.

  ‘They said to go to the doctor when she gets out,’ Fred said. ‘But what I want to know is, if it’s the same doctor who has been giving her the stuff all this time, what bloody use is he going to be?’

  ‘They know what they’re doing, Dad,’ Karen said. She took out a compact and peered at her face. Joanne looked down at the ripped knees of her jeans. Should she have dressed up for a hospital visit? Too late now anyway.

  There was a quiet ‘Huh!’ from Fred Tolley.

  Margaret didn’t seem especially pleased to see them. Once again they took turns to be with her, but she seemed odd and distracted. Her hair needed a comb and she kept moving her head restlessly from side to side on the pillow on which she was propped, which didn’t make it look any better. She had on her own flower-patterned nightie now.

  ‘I don’t know why there’s had to be all this fuss,’ she said ungraciously when they arrived. ‘You don’t need to keep traipsing over here like this. I just want to go home.’

  They’d brought flowers and cake.

  ‘We thought we’d have your birthday party,’ Karen said chirpily. Her eyes were immaculately made up in shades of mauve, and the gold chain of her little bag gleamed against her navy jacket. ‘You can have another one later, but we thought it’d be nice—’

  ‘Oh, don’t be so ridiculous!’ Margaret erupted, with such force that they never dared get out the cake – a nice chocolate one that Karen had bought from Marks and Spencer – to cut up.

  When Joanne was left alone with her, her mother lay looking across the ward as if there was no one there with her. Joanne felt very uncomfortable. Margaret’s silence was not a calm one. She seemed to be lying there seething with emotion. Joanne didn’t know how to talk to her, didn’t know what it was all about, other than being in hospital, which she hated.

  ‘How’re you feeling now, Mom?’ she asked gently, trying to break the spell that her mother seemed to be caught in.

  ‘Terrible.’ It was said in barely a whisper and her eyes filled. Joanne felt panic. This closed, emotionless mother she had known all her life seemed suddenly broken open, as if she couldn’t stop the tears coming.

  ‘D’you feel . . . ill?’ she ventured to ask.

  ‘I feel terrible,’ she repeated. Terrible in every way, she seemed to be saying. Sick in my body, my head, my soul . . . I can’t bear being in my own skin. She moved her head again as if to shake something out of it. Her perm was already coming loose and her face had changed, seemed slacker somehow.

  ‘I can’t seem to stop it. Can’t stop my head. Everything’s rushing by. I just can’t . . .’ And she dissolved into tears like a helpless little girl.

  Seven

  Worcestershire, September 1939

  ‘Margaret? Well, that’s a mouthful of a name. While you’re in my house you’ll be known as Meg, and that’s that.’

  It was the evening of Saturday 2nd September 1939, and her first sight and sound of Mrs Nora Paige at the door of her Worcestershire cottage: aged forty-something, with thick limbs, staring eyes and lank black hair strung up in a net day and night.

  That morning had been the last time Margaret ever saw her mother.

  The memories kept rushing in on her, scrambled and intense like dreams, except that she was awake and still couldn’t stop them, any more than she could prevent the endless dryness of her mouth or her sleepless nights when she lay trapped by recollection, aching for sleep so that she could escape.

  The morning of Saturday 2nd September 1939: each time it replayed, it was the same. Margaret was downstairs. The Old Man was up there, sleeping it off as usual. Her half-brothers, so far as she recalled, had not been there. Elsie, her half-sister, who was nineteen then, had already left for the factory. Margaret had been sitting on the bottom step of the stairs (‘You’ll get splinters in your bum,’ Tommy kept telling her, but she always sat there anyway), picking at the scab on her knee. She’d tripped over on the way back from the wharf, when she and Tommy had been sent out for the coal. Tommy was her only full brother, two years older. She adored Tommy: he was her hero. She loved going to the wharf with him – or anywhere that he would let her tag along.

  She must have been hungry, though she wasn’t thinking about that until the door slowly opened and there was Mom, bent over, clinging to the door, a loaf under her arm. Catching a whiff of the fresh bread made the saliva gather in her mouth. Mom had her coat on, even though the morning was quite warm, and it hung on her, far too loose now.

  Mom was scarcely more than a skeleton. Before she fell ill she had appeared careworn, older than her years. Now, at forty-two, Alice Winters looked like an old woman. She had been left a widow with three children, Margaret’s half-sister and half-brothers, Elsie, Edwin and Cyril, and had worked her fingers to the bone in factories, cleaning, taking in washing, anything to keep them out of the clutches of the parish. Those years had drained away her youthful looks.

  Alice had never moved far, either. Born in Cregoe Street – an old district packed with factories and jerry-built houses, edged by wharves and railway tracks, and a stone’s throw from the middle of Birmingham – she’d ended up just round the corner in Upper Ridley Street. After those years struggling alone, Ted Winters, dark-eyed and stocky, had come along and wooed her. Ted was a widower with a son killed in the Great W
ar, or so he said. Alice had had two more children with him in the 1930s: Tommy and Margaret. Hoping for rescue, for someone to share the load, Alice had found herself a man who looked sturdy and competent, who could turn on the charm all right, but who was in fact an idle boozer. He was out of work as much as in, and never lifted a finger to help her, even in her dying weeks.

  ‘Alice?’ Margaret heard a concerned voice from the yard. ‘Oh, bab, you shouldn’t be up and about like this! Oh my Lord, just look at the state of yer.’

  It was Mrs Jennings from next door, a soft, rounded woman, swathed in a stained pinner, her pale-brown hair plaited and caught up roughly at the back and secured with kirby grips. She took Alice’s arm.

  ‘What on earth’ve you been doing? Have you been down the shops?’ Dora Jennings sounded appalled. ‘Come on – let’s get you in and looked after.’

  Margaret watched. Mom seemed unable to move. She was bent over, air passing in and out of her in shallow gasps, the skin stretched over her knuckles as she clung to the door. She didn’t look the same any more. Her face was so pinched that her eyes and nose seemed to have grown and her cheekbones jutted, while the rest of her face had sunken in.

  ‘I can’t.’ Alice’s voice had gone high and reedy and it was almost a sob. ‘Give us a minute. Just leave me . . .’

  ‘Give me the bread – come on, take my arm.’ In a moment Dora Jennings managed to steer the sick woman inside. The downstairs of these houses, which opened onto a yard and backed onto another row of dwellings facing the street, consisted of only one room and a minute scullery. The range and the table took up most of the space, so it was only a couple of steps to get the poor woman, now a bag of bones, onto a chair. Alice sank down with a moan, her head in her hands, having to give all her strength to drawing breath.

  ‘I’ll make yer a cuppa tea: you need summat inside yer.’ Dora Jennings sounded severe because she was in a panic. ‘My goodness me, look at yer – and where’s that husband of yours? He wants stringing up, that he does!’ The sight of Alice Winters was a disturbing one. Her neighbour hurried out to the tap with the kettle and came back to stoke the range. ‘Where’ve you been, Alice, in heaven’s name?’