Hidden Lives

by Margaret Forster

  We didn’t push the trolley very far, just did a circuit of the Out-patients department. I poured the tea and added milk and sugar if required and handed the cups out while my companion took the money and offered biscuits. We were a popular service. People were desperate for tea and weren’t always able to go to the actual cafeteria (which wasn’t always open anyway). Such gratitude there was, such pleasure and comfort the tea brought. It was easy to understand why doing this made my mother happy, why she found it rewarding. She’d be so compassionate too. I could imagine her helping those with slings or plasters to manage the tea, I could see her eager to hold howling babies for distracted mothers while they gulped their tea. The time flew. Round and round we went, making sure no one had been missed, constantly searching for the perpetual influx of new patients. At the end of our stint we went into a little sluice room and washed the cups – ours were real cups, no plastic or polystyrene – and dried them and stacked them and cleaned the trolley. We’d brought our own tea-towels, two each (my mother equipped me before I set off), and they were sopping wet when we finished. What a good job we’d done.

  My mother was avid for every detail. Had there been a float to start with? Yes, there had been five pounds’ worth of small change. Good. She smiled with satisfaction. When she began doing the job there was never any change and she’d insisted there should be and had often provided it herself. Had there been a variety of biscuits on offer? No, only digestives. She was exasperated. How many times had she pointed out a choice made patients so much happier and heaven knew it was easy enough to provide with Carr’s Biscuits almost next door. But at least the only choice hadn’t been chocolate biscuits, Carr’s Sports, beloved by children but expensive and messy for them to eat when mothers were trying to keep them clean for the doctor. Was it busy? Yes, very. Hordes of people the whole three hours. My mother sighed with longing and regret. She loved it to be busy. Had I managed all right? Perfectly. I wasn’t bored? No, I wasn’t bored. I’d do it again, any time. But I never did. My mother’s name had to be taken off the rota because she was clearly never going to be able to do the tea-trolley rounds again. I never volunteered to do similar work at my own local hospital. Thought about it, but never volunteered. I suspected my own motives, that was the trouble. My mother’s had been pure – she wanted to give help because giving it made her feel useful and being useful made her happy. I’d have been volunteering out of a feeling of cold duty, thinking I ought to offer my services but not really wanting to.

  My mother didn’t like to go out of the house after her second, much more serious, stroke. She didn’t want people staring. Nobody did stare; there was nothing to stare at. The useless left arm was not disfiguring and, though her left foot dragged just a little bit, her walking was not particularly ungainly for a woman in her late seventies. But she felt an object of pity. She felt she didn’t ‘look nice’, so she wouldn’t go anywhere except to church. My father thought going to church was bad for her. He was quite definite about it, all that standing and kneeling, all that up and down. It was just what she shouldn’t do. And she couldn’t go on her own, that was out of the question. So for a while he took and collected her, like taking a child to and from school, until a fellow parishioner began picking her up in her car. Eventually even that proved too difficult, then the vicar came and gave her Holy Communion at home. Much better, my father thought, but my mother missed church. Without being in the actual church she didn’t feel the holiness she’d always loved.

  She missed the shops more than the church, though. Just being able to go ‘up street’ on the bus and potter about on her own, looking not buying most of the time, and meeting Ruby Gillespie in Binn’s. Shopping was a ceremony to her. She loved getting ready for it and then following her own invented rituals. But she loved the shops themselves, the atmosphere of them, the new goods, the very bustle of that kind of commerce. She had always regretted my lack of interest in shopping. Whenever I went with her as an adult it was obvious I had no idea how to enjoy shopping – with me, it was all speed, in, out. I never savoured shops, never lingered lovingly over the displays. But now that my mother couldn’t go shopping any more and missed it so desperately, it was up to me to take her. I took her at least once every school holiday we were up there (staying now in a cottage we’d bought at Caldbeck, up on the fells but only half an hour from Carlisle). Hunter would take my father and our three children off to Silloth and I would guide my mother round the shops. A delicate task. She still liked Binn’s best but regretted all the changes – Binn’s wasn’t so smart any more; the clothes were too crowded together. She now couldn’t handle the racks, so I had to pull the hanger slowly along while endless garments were scrutinized. Inevitably, she would decide none appealed to her and that what she had would ‘see me out’.

  Once, I went to Carlisle specially to take my mother Christmas shopping. Her excitement was terrible. Her face was flushed even before we began and my father admonished her sternly – ‘Settle yourself or you’ll have another stroke.’ We took a taxi to town, a five-minute ride but itself an adventure, and started in Binn’s, where else. Cards first, then slippers for my father. Slippers were looked at in comfort, sitting down, and it brought her great pleasure. She was quite relaxed looking at twelve pairs of men’s slippers, comparing colours and linings and the relative values of different kinds of soles. Finally a pair was purchased and then we went for lunch but not to Binn’s café, now déclassé for lunch in my mother’s opinion, but to Bullough’s. We had a table overlooking the cathedral, in full view of Paternoster Row where Margaret Ann had served the Stephensons, and a mere five hundred yards from where Annie Jordan had lived. We ate plaice, grilled. I had a glass of white wine with mine. I was in need of it. I’d have happily drunk a whole bottle, but it would have upset my mother. I sipped my miserable one small glass carefully, trying to make not just it but the whole lunch last as long as possible. ‘I’ve been looking forward to this so much,’ my mother suddenly blurted out, ‘you’ve no idea how much.’ This was said so emotionally I was startled. ‘I could stay here for ever,’ she went on. ‘Nice view, nice table, nice food. It’s all so nice.’ I couldn’t help smiling but that was a mistake. ‘Of course,’ she said quickly, quite fiercely, ‘it’s nothing to you. You have lunches out all the time in London.’ ‘I don’t,’ I said. ‘You could if you wanted to,’ my mother said. ‘Yes,’ I admitted, ‘I could. But I don’t want to, so I don’t.’ ‘It’s wasted on you,’ my mother sighed. ‘All the opportunities you have that I never had and you don’t take them. I wish I’d had your life.’

  It was painful, somehow, hearing her say that. I didn’t want her to want my life. I wanted her to have enjoyed her own. And what she was concentrating on, in her desire, were only the superficial things in my life. Given my income, my mother would have been a spender. Given the chance, it would have been on with the designer clothes, out Nan-ing Nan. She would have been a lady who lunched, at the Savoy Grill, at the Ritz. She didn’t know anything about my real life, the part that was enviable, the hours spent writing and reading which put being a wife and mother into a different context. She was right, life had changed for women and I’d benefited from the changes, but the greatest change of all was not one she either saw or appreciated. I was having a career as well as everything else and that was what, if anything, she should have yearned for.

  Over the pudding – my mother loved puddings, so she was at her most content, it was a good time to choose – I thought I should try to enlighten her a little, straighten out a few of her fantasies. ‘A lot of my life,’ I said, ‘is the same as yours was at my age.’ She gave a little snort of disbelief but her mouth was full of apple pie and cream. ‘No, really,’ I said, ‘my day-to-day life is looking after the children, just as you did, and being a housewife, cleaning and tidying and cooking and shopping. It’s all easy for me. It isn’t the hard slog it was for you, and money makes it all even easier. But the feeling is the same, I get just as tired as you did.’ ‘You
should get help,’ my mother said, ‘you’re silly. You should have someone to clean, and a nanny. You’re wearing yourself out in that big house of yours and you’ve got the money to afford servants.’ ‘Servants?’ I echoed. ‘You think I should have servants?’ ‘Certainly,’ my mother said. ‘I’d have had servants, if you can call them that these days. Nothing wrong with servants. You can’t do everything, you know. You can’t do this writing business and everything else, it’s daft. Women weren’t meant to do everything, I’m sure they weren’t.’

  I didn’t even attempt to answer her. It was the most serious conversation we had ever had, but I couldn’t bear to spoil the lunch by arguing. Anyway, the meal was over. We couldn’t go on sitting in Bullough’s window for ever. The restaurant had emptied and there were other presents to buy. ‘That was lovely,’ my mother repeated as I paid the bill. Then, ‘I don’t know when I’ll get out to have lunch again. Never, probably.’ She looked out of the window, her eyes unable to avoid Paternoster Row. ‘But I shouldn’t complain,’ she went on, ‘my poor mother never had lunch in a shop in her life. Nobody did, though, not ordinary women, not then.’ We made our slow way through Bullough’s, my mother often stopping to finger things she liked the look of. ‘Lovely things,’ she murmured, ‘they have some lovely things here. I wish I’d had lovely things.’ It really was unbearable, the tone of her voice. ‘What would you have liked exactly?’ I asked, quite sharply. ‘Come on, what lovely things in particular?’ She gazed about vaguely. We were passing through the linen department at that point. ‘Towels,’ she said, ‘you see them in films, great big fluffy towels in beautiful colours.’ ‘Mum,’ I said, almost shouted, ‘for God’s sake, you can have any towel you want.’ ‘Not now,’ she protested, ‘I didn’t mean now. It’s too late now.’ But it wasn’t too late. I’d already stopped and told an assistant to give me the biggest, the fluffiest, the most beautiful blue towel in the shop and to wrap it up for my mother. ‘There,’ I said, distressed but somehow also furious, ‘at least you’ve got a towel.’

  XIX

  Right up to the end of her life my mother cared about her appearance – she never, ever, became an untidy, dishevelled old woman long past caring about looks. In particular, she cared about her hair, such beautiful hair, still thick and healthy while the rest of her was sick. She liked it ‘kept nice’ and the only way it could, for her, reach the right level of niceness was to have a perm regularly. Nothing else was acceptable. For this she was prepared to go to a hairdresser (though if she was very weak the hairdresser came to her) and risk being, as she imagined, stared at and pitied. My father marched her there, stood sentry outside, and marched her back. Once permed, her lovely white hair would look tortured, rigidly tight, but then within a week or so it would begin to soften and after a month the loose, gentle waves were just what she liked.

  She went to the hairdresser a month before she died as though in preparation for the greater appointment with death that she didn’t know about. Shortly afterwards, just as we arrived in Caldbeck for the summer holidays, she contracted shingles. I came in to find her face covered in scabs and the greatest concentration of them near her eyes. I called the doctor who said she needed hospital treatment, and I took her to the Infirmary at once. She was so glad I was the one taking her, having this firm belief that I knew how to talk to doctors, or anyone in authority, and it would make a difference, she would be respected. ‘How long has she had this?’ the hospital doctor asked when finally our turn came. ‘Why don’t you ask my mother herself?’ I said. ‘Her name is Mrs Forster. She may have shingles but this doesn’t mean she is deaf or stupid.’ I hope I said this quietly, without anger, but maybe I didn’t. The doctor blushed. My mother squeezed my hand. He asked her the same question and she replied, clearly and with great dignity, and visibly chastened he mumbled, ‘Sorry about that.’ He told my mother he thought she should be admitted just for a couple of days because when shingles spread to the eyes, and hers already had, it could be very serious and was best dealt with in hospital conditions. My mother didn’t seem to mind having to stay as long as she wasn’t going to be in the geriatric ward. I took her up to the wards and when she found she was in the women’s surgical in the new wing she was relieved. Then I went back to fetch her things.

  At first she was a model patient. She looked so sweet in the hospital bed, lovely hair and all, blue nightgown, blue lacy bed-jacket, lying so still and obedient, propped up on her pillows. The shingles began to clear quite rapidly but then, just as we were told she could go home the next day, she had another stroke. From then on she deteriorated every day, though, after another two weeks, she was said to be ‘on the mend’. The days of ‘on the mend’ were tense. The prospect of my mother going home to be looked after by my eighty-year-old father was appalling – the ever-loving, ever-willing, ever-conscientious Arthur wouldn’t be able to manage, not now her left leg was completely useless and she couldn’t walk. He was still strong but not strong enough to lift her. She would have to go into a Home but he would never accept that until it was forced upon him by his own realization that he couldn’t manage. We were in for an agonizing period while he came to this pitiful decision. And there was my own promise to remember and rescind. All her life my mother’s greatest fear had been that she would end up in a Home. ‘Look,’ she used to say to me as we walked down Norfolk Road, passing an old people’s Home where the inmates sat, mostly in wheelchairs, in the window, ‘look. That will be me one day.’ And I’d become quite hysterical in my vehemence, vowing that never, never would it be her. She was my mother, she would be with me. Having a family was what kept you out of Homes – the family put you first as once you had put them. I should gather my poor mother up and take her to my home and lavish upon her the love and care she had lavished upon me.

  On 11 August 1981, a hot sunny day, I went in to see my mother as usual. Hunter and the children had taken my father to Port Carlisle, to the sea. There were rails up round my mother’s bed now. She was no longer a model patient. In the week since the stroke she’d turned violent. She’d taken to getting out of her bed and wandering around shouting and yelling. I found this hard to credit when the nurses told me that was why they had had to box her in – Lilian, the quiet, well-behaved Lily, shouting? In public, as it were? But the other women in the ward assured me it was true. My mother had shouted and what she had shouted was mostly abuse, about me – Where is Margaret, damn her? Why isn’t she here, the bitch? Where is she? Why doesn’t she take me home…? It was distressing even hearing this. Drugs, it must be the effect of the drugs they were giving her. My mother had never sworn in any way whatsoever. The language of swearing, the vocabulary, was alien to her. So it was not really my mother shouting. But on the other hand the resentment expressed rang true. She’d never voiced it but I could believe she felt it. Her expression, her tone of voice, her whole demeanour had for many years now told me what she had finally shouted in her drugged state. ‘She doesn’t mean it, pet,’ one of the women kindly said. ‘She doesn’t know what she’s saying.’ I knew she did.

  But she wasn’t moving now or shouting. She lay still and whispered. I did the talking, trying to entertain with anecdotes about the children. It was hard to keep going when there was little response beyond ‘really’ and ‘oh, yes’. There was the sense, too, that it was wicked to be indulging in this kind of trite chat when there was so much that was important which should be said if only I could divine what. Then, in the middle of one of my rambling sentences, my mother said, ‘I feel as if I’m in a waiting-room. It’s so tiring, waiting, waiting. I wish my turn would come. I wish I didn’t have to wait. I want to leave. I want to go somewhere nice.’

  ‘Where? Where would be nice?’

  ‘Oh, Silloth, of course. I’d like to be on the Green at Silloth. Lovely.’

  ‘Who with?’

  ‘Jean and Nan and Peggy Farish.’

  ‘What would you do? Have a picnic?’

  ‘No, no, the grass is too damp.’ />
  ‘So what will you do?’

  ‘Oh, sit on a bench for a while, then have a walk along the sea wall, watch the tide come in, have an ice-cream, watch the men fish. Plenty to do.’

  ‘What will you wear?’

  ‘My blue dress, the one with the sailor collar.’

  ‘And what…’

  ‘Oh STOP IT!’ she suddenly snapped. ‘This is silly.’ It was said so viciously, with a strength I didn’t know she still had, and yet I’d thought she was enjoying what seemed a harmless game, a soothing fantasy. I could have played it for hours. I wanted to play it for hours. She tossed and turned on her pillow and sighed. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I’ve had enough.’

  ‘What of?’ I asked, nervously, knowing I mustn’t anger her by starting another evasive dialogue.

  ‘This. I’ve had enough. I want done with it. It hasn’t amounted to much, my life.’

  ‘Mum, please…’

  ‘No, it hasn’t. It’s been all work and worry. I’ve done nothing with myself.’

  It was the old cry, the more painful for being said, as it was said now, without any desire to arouse sympathy, without the slightest hint of wishing to be contradicted and persuaded otherwise.