It Was 100 Years Ago Today

This was originally conceived as the story of my mother and what she called her ordinary life, to celebrate what would have been her 100th birthday, but in the writing and delving, it turned out to be a lot about me too. I’m not sure if this an apology or not.

Phyllis Lily Edwards was born 19 January 1922, the tenth child of Isaac Richard Edwards and his wife Minnie Emma, née Fryer-Kelsey. Two elder sisters, Emma and Frances, had died as babies, and a third, Doris, would die of septicaemia, aged 12, later in the 1920s.

My grandfather Isaac was born in Bermondsey, in the heart of London’s docklands, in 1876. At the time of his birth, his parents lived in Jolly Sailor Row. Both of them died when they were 27, leaving an eight-year-old Isaac and his younger sister to be brought up by relatives.  Around 1890, he lied about his age and enlisted in the army. He fought several colonial campaigns, including in South Africa, but he left active service for the reserve some time early in the 20th century, and spent the rest of his life working mainly as a demolition ganger. He was called back to the colours in The Great War, where, as a Sergeant Major, he spent two or three years training recruits to send to the front - something, according to my mother’s eldest sister, Cissie, that deeply affected  him. He was a committed nationalist and Victorian - a portrait of the late queen hung alongside family photos in the hall until he died.

He married Minnie Emma (born 1884, the fifth of nine children – two girls and seven boys) on Christmas Day 1905, and their first child, Dick, was born in October 1906. Their last, my mother’s little brother, Bill, turned up in 1928. In between came George, Cissie, Albert, Frances, Doris, Emma, Ernie, Gladys, Phyllis and Hilda. I’m going into this because her family was the biggest thing in my mother’s life. It trumped everything and everyone else. Her father was her hero, and her mother her role model -  all she ever wanted was to be a mother herself. 

She was the only one of her siblings who never fell out with any of the others: she would not hear a word against any of them, and in later life, in tandem with Cissie, became a keeper of family records and ‘papers’, rememberer of anniversaries and birthdays, and circulator of news. I sort of did the same thing with my circles of friends over the last four or five decades.

At the time Phyllis was born, the family lived in a small - tiny is not too strong a word - two-up, two-down, end-of-terrace house, 1 Milton Road, Tottenham, just opposite Ducketts Green. The boys had one bedroom and the girls the other, in both cases sleeping top-to-toe in a double bed that took up most of the room. Downstairs was a parlour with sofa bed of some kind for Minnie and Isaac (who was known by his second name, Richard, or Dick) at the front, and a sort of kitchen/dining room/sitting room about 12 feet square, with a coal-fired stove for cooking and heat. Meals were served in shifts, as there weren’t enough chairs to go round. There was also a small scullery with a cold-water sink and a copper boiler, where my grandma would do the family washing, along with other people’s that she took in to supplement her income. Out back was a WC and a cobbled yard, just big enough to zigzag in a washing line, and that was it.

 Hilda and Phyllis in the Long Gardens, late 1920s

The other side of Milton Road was not built up. There were much grander houses just around the corner in West Green Road, and their gardens ran the whole length of Milton Road. Sometimes the local kids would play in them. One of these houses was owned by the music hall star, Harry Campion. More than once he forked out to hire a charabanc so the kids from the street - and their mothers and grannies - could go on day trips to Southend or Clacton, pretty much the only holidays the family ever had.

Of course, this is all second-hand knowledge, gleaned in part from her, partly from a smattering of family pictures, but mainly from my Auntie Ciss, who was very much a second mother to me, as she had been to my mother and her two younger siblings in the ’20s and ’30s. She liked to talk about the past. In the 1950s, Cissie had a confectioner’s shop in Lawrence Road, Tottenham, literally around the corner from the house where I grew up: I would hang out with her during school holidays, and sometimes go round there for lunch in term-time. Cissie, who had worked between the wars running the canteen kitchens in Tottenham Bus Garage, was a wonderful cook, and I ate a lot better there than at home.

Virtually as soon as she could walk and talk, Phyllis took over from Cissie - who by then had a job of her own - as her mother’s main helpmeet: as well as dusting and sweeping and scrubbing down, she helped with the laundry, shone her brothers’ and father’s shoes, and made the beds. She was always tall for her age, long-legged, gawky even. Shy, and wholly lacking in the more assertive, outgoing qualities of her sisters - Gladys was very much the rumbustious tomboy and young Hilda was full of mischief - she embraced the role of Dutiful Good Girl at school as well as at home. Her younger sister, Hilda, once told me that when she started at the same school three years later, her teacher asked if she was related to Phyllis Edwards: hearing that she was, the teacher immediately appointed Hilda class monitor, a position in which she lasted hours, rather than the whole year, like my mother. 

 

 Classmates, about 1932. Middle of the back row

As a teenager, she was never particularly interested in the radio (then cutting edge media) or socialising - as far as I can tell she had few, if any, friends, or indeed playmates she was not related to - but she absolutely loved the cinema. That’s where the few pennies she could lay her hands on went. Her particular crush was Robert Taylor, but she pretty much loved ever single star in Hollywood who wasn’t involved in musicals, which she couldn’t stand - my mother was never particularly into music, or dancing.

When she got a little money of her own, she would go to the cinema several times a week. The movie-going habit was so strong that when I was born in 1948, and she was looking at Not Going Out for a few years, my dad bought her a TV set, rather than waiting five more years to the Coronation, like everybody else.

Cissie with L-R Glad, Hilda,
and Phyllis about 1930

She left school at 14 and got herself a job in the Oakwood laundry in Harringay, where she worked alongside the woman who would marry her brother Ernie and become my Aunt Eva. I never did find out whether Eva introduced her to the laundry, or my mother introduced a co-worker to her brother. Another consequence of her getting a job was that she started to have her hair, which was lank and mousey if left to its own devices, done. Most of her wages continued to go to her mother, though.

Not long after she started work, her Mum and Dad and the unmarried children - Ernie, Gladys, Phyllis, Hilda and Billy by my best guess - moved to a larger rented house at 186 Clyde Road. It wasn’t exactly palatial, but there were three bedrooms, two reception rooms, a kitchen and a scullery, as well as a ‘conservatory’ - a roofed-over side return. My grandmother’s sister, Annie, lived just a few doors down. Phyllis got on really well with Annie’s daughter, who rejoiced in the name of Nellie Pratt. 

 

 On holiday 1938, Phyllis, Minnie, Bill and Hilda and someone else's car

And then, in 1939, things started to go wrong for her.  In the summer, her Dad fell ill, and in September, he died, aged 63, of degenerative heart disease. My mother, who was 17, was devastated, and Billy, just 11, inconsolable.

And then Hitler started trying to kill her, and her family started to dissolve. Her three oldest brothers, Dick, Albert and George, all worked on the railways, which was a reserved occupation – as was working in a laundry, as it happens, not that Mum would have joined up, anyway. Billy was evacuated to Hertfordshire, and, as the war went on, Ernie, Gladys and Hilda all enlisted: none of them actually fought, although Gladys, who joined the WAAF, was badly affected by a bombing raid on the aerodrome where she was stationed. Her barracks took a direct hit while Gladys was on guard duty, and she was the first one on the scene after the raid, having to dig out her mates from the rubble. She never got over that. 

 1942 - Dad carried this picture in his wallet until the day he died

And then, of course, there were the air raids, miserable nights in Anderson shelters in the backyard at 186, then a fairly long walk (she never learned to ride a bike or drive, but my mother was a ferocious walker, with a long, swift, stride and endless stamina, even into her seventies) to work through streets filled with rubble and overnight change. I only know this from conversations with Cissie. My mother refused to talk about the War, except in most general terms.

Some time in 1941 or early 1942, though, she somehow got into conversation with an equally shy and awkward - and shorter - young man in a queue at a Post Office. Neither of them had ever been on a date before, but somehow one happened, and on 3 July 1943 they had a wartime wedding, with a rationing-style cake (two of the tiers were made of cardboard), and she too moved out of the family home, to an upstairs flat at 73 Chesterfield Gardens, off Green Lanes in Harringay. It was there she had her closest brush with World War II, when a nearby blast took out all of the front bedroom windows when she was in the shelter with my dad. She had kept her job at the Oakwood laundry all through the war, but gave it up in the summer of  1948, when she was pregnant with me.

In later years - not that much later - she described my first five years as the best of her life. She doted on me. I already knew in childhood that my birth had been difficult (three weeks overdue, weighed 5 kilos, induced, forceps, double pneumonia and straight into an incubator), but Aunt Hilda informed me in much later life, apropos of nothing in particular, that my mother had also had ‘a few’ miscarriages, and could not have any more children after me. 

So Mum made the most of me: when I wasn’t sleeping the days away in my pram in the front yard in Chesterfield Gardens, I was being given tours of the parks and streets of North-East London, or taken to see my aunts, uncles and a small but growing band of cousins. Hilda had married the year I was born and went to live in Avonmouth, in a house she and her husband rented for almost half a century, and Uncle Dick and Aunt Alice had been settled in Nottingham since the 1930s, but my mother’s six other siblings, and her mum - not to mention dad’s parents and sister - all lived within a brisk twenty minute walk or short bus ride.

I saw very little of my dad in the first few years - he worked a lot of overtime to make up for the lost income. It occurs to me now for the first time that the financial pinch of one more mouth and one fewer wage may have been the reason that, sometime in 1951, I think, my parents gave up their flat and moved back into 186 Clyde Road with Grandma and Bill. Uncle Bill married in 1953 - I was a page boy, in a ghastly blue itchy thing, at his wedding, and I remember standing on the table being fitted for it while the Coronation was on TV - and moved out, letting me have a room of my own, rather than a cot in my parents’ bedroom. Later that year, I went to school, and my mother decided to go back to work. 

Just across from where her in-laws lived, in Glenwood Road, Tottenham, was the Paris Laundry. Dad’s sister, Aunt Min (the third in my family - my grandma and Cissie were also christened Minnie) worked there, and not long after I started nursery school, Mum did too. After a couple of years of being typically conscientious, uncomplaining and competent in the steamy atmosphere of the laundry and pressing rooms, she was asked to manage the laundry’s shop in West Green Road, and she worked there until 1964.

One late afternoon in January 1955, my gran collapsed in the front room at 186 Clyde Road while she was talking to Albert, who had popped in to visit. Albert got back on his bike and raced off to get help. I was in the back room watching TV, and at just that moment it went on the fritz. I wandered into the front room to get help. Grandma was sitting upright in her high-backed chair, hands gripping the arms, as if she were about to spring up, her eyes and mouth wide open. I spoke to her, but she did not reply. I don’t know how long I was there before some adults turned up, probably not long, but I was ushered off to Cissie’s. Everyone did their best to shelter me from what had happened, and their own distress, but I remember feeling perfectly serene, spooning down some of Cissie’s mince stew.

Sheltering me from bad news and unpleasantness was something my mother did as a default setting, to the extent that I never really knew what was going on throughout my childhood. Some time in the 1950s, for example, my grandfather was sent to prison for six months. It was kept from me then, despite regular visits to see gran, and I still don’t know any of the details. There were strains in some of mum's siblings’ marriages, as well as the usual complement of illness, financial hardship, conflict, and minor criminality, but I never got to hear about them, except later from Cissie when I was a grown man.

There was just one exception to this rule that I remember: a tearful Albert turned up one day with my father’s watch and one or two other trinkets he had found in the possession of his eldest son, Richard, who said he had ‘found’ them. What he had actually done was to purloin a front door key on a family visit, then come in and help himself when the house was empty. A little while later, Richard came round, maybe to apologise, I don’t know, but my mother tore into him to the extent that I was frightened listening from the next room. It was the angriest I had ever seen, or heard, her. She never really forgave her nephew. Tellingly, it wasn’t the thieving, or the lying, that she found unforgiveable, so much as that he had humiliated his father and made him cry. She was fiercely loyal to all her siblings, as I’ve said, but she had a particular soft spot for Albert, who was a lovely, gentle, sweet-natured man.

The rest of the 1950s were pretty serene from my point of vew. My father bought the house from the landlord for a pittance as the whole street was scheduled for development in the near future (the houses dated to the 1840s). In 1960 (I think) it was compulsorily purchased by the council and Dad used the money (my parents split household responsibly on traditional gender lines - my mother was responsible for housework, shopping for food and clothes, Dad for paying the bills, home improvements and so on) as a deposit on a larger terrace house a few hundred yards away in Arnold Road, one with three bedrooms AND an actual bathroom, as well as an inside toilet. It was also literally a minute's walk from the County School, where I had started secondary education a year before.

Talking of education…I was a very precocious child, could already read fairly well when I started at nursery school when I was four, and reading became my first grand passion - I read the entire kiddies' section of my local lending library in double-quick time, and started in on the teenage section. Fiction or non-fiction, made no difference. Mum was a little nonplussed about what for her was abnormal behaviour for a child of 7 or 8 - ‘He’s always got his head stuck in a book’ - but my Dad was always quietly proud, I felt, of how well I was doing at school, and he actively encouraged my curiosity about the world and everything in it. He thought Public Libraries were one of humanity’s finest inventions, and he started buying me reference books like encyclopaedias and atlases, as well as books and magazines about things I took a deep interest in for a while - palaeontology, astronomy, zoology - getting me to stretch, never trying to rein in any of my enthusiasms.

 3 July 1943

When I asked Dad what he would like me to be when I grew up, he first off said it was up to me,  and that I would find out what I wanted to be, then that he thought a physicist might be the way to go. When I asked Mum the same thing, she said that all she wanted was for me to get married and settle down and have a family - with the unspoken subtext of a life of duty, of carrying on, not pushing too hard.

My mother’s focus on her families continued in the new house. Aunt Gladys, who had lived with her husband Charlie Nash just three doors down from us in Clyde Road, split with Charlie and came to live with us in the back bedroom. Cissie was still nearby, while Albert, his wife and his six children had a council flat in North Tottenham: she would usually pop in there when she went on her fortnightly visit to tend her parents’ grave in Tottenham cemetery. Three more pairs were a bus ride away: George and May in Southgate, Ernie and Eva at the other end of the local 41 route in Crouch End, and Bill and Mary in Wood Green. She visited all of them, usually with me in tow, on a regular basis. Dick and Alice we rarely saw, but my mother wrote to Hilda once a week, and we would go as a family to stay with her and her husband Edwin. Dad and edwin got on well, and we got into the habit of spending Christmas with them at one or another’s houses and going on an annual weekly holiday with them, at first to a caravan site on the Isle of Wight, then to various (non-Butlins) holiday camps around the south and east coasts.

 On Holiday, mid-1960s

Some time in 1964, Dad was contacted by some guys he had worked with years before who had set up a new business in Ware, a semi-rural Hertfordshire market town about twenty miles due north of Tottenham. They asked him if he would work for them. Looking back, I wasn’t aware what discussions went on with my mother, or indeed Gladys, but just before Christmas 1964 all four of us moved out of Tottenham and went to live in a year-old house in a cul-de-sac called Nursery Gardens. Within weeks, Gladys moved back to a council flat in Tottenham, which was a relief. It was a smaller house than the one we’d left behind, and there was tension between Glad and Dad.

As I was coming up to A-levels, I continued to go to school in Tottenham. It was a forty minute commute, but the council paid for my season ticket - which I could, and did, use to go up at weekends and hang out with my mates or go to the Spurs. Mum also went up regularly at weekends, to see some sibs and tend to the grave. 

Dad’s original plan was that, with a lower mortgage and a better wage, she no longer needed to work. She tried, but about four weeks into the New Year, the house pristine, and a dozen cups of tea a day no real consolation, she walked into town and got the first job she applied for, at the local firm Allen & Hanburys, which was later taken over by Glaxo. In the autumn of 1966 I went off to University, and my parents were alone together in their own home for the first time since Chesterfield Gardens.

Last family photo 1966

As I’ve written about before (in this blog), at the end of my first year at University, Dad met me from the train at Ware, and died in the street about ten minutes later of a heart attack. When I told Mum, she crumpled inside. It destroyed her. It was a horrible thing to see.

One of the first things she said to me afterwards was that I would have to give up university, come home and get a job, but I said no. I explained later that Dad’s life insurance would pay off the mortgage, and that I would be abe to get a better job with a degree, but admitted to myself that my primary thought was that I did not want to settle down, and least of all as the only child of a doting mother: if I was going to become the person I was just getting an inkling that I wanted to be, I had to keep looking outwards, I must not retreat. At the time, the family rallied round: Cissie came up on the train as soon as I phoned her with the news and started organising things, and most of the others came to suppor her - but they couldn’t stay, and in October I went back to Uni. She was on her own.

I never did go ‘back home to live’, spending four more years posing as a student at the university, a couple of years fretting and largely unemployed in Kent, then finally a move to London in 1974 and five years of full-time salaried work. We didn’t see much of each other in the 1970s. I was lost and adrift and felt terribly guilty. I knew it was hurting her, but there wasn’t any way I could make the pain of her widowhood go away.

Around 1969, she saw a notice at work looking for people who could put up graduate trainees who had come to work there, several from abroad. And she started taking them in, half a dozen or so, in total, full board, share the sitting room, their own bedroom, laundry done. She mothered them, basically, and they all seemed to love it - several of them remained friends years after they moved on, sending her letters full of news and Christmas cards.

 Ware, 1970s

The Seventies weren’t good to her family. Dick died in Nottingham not long after he retired, and his wife, Alice, had a heart attack the day after and also died. When Dick’s brothers and sisters, including Mum, went to Nottingham for the double funeral, there was an unseemly brouhaha in which Alice’s family insisted that everything in the house was theirs: the Edwards were lucky to escape the East Midlands with the clock Dick had been given to mark his service on the railways. Albert, worn out and not yet 60, followed soon after, then George. Ernie died in 1981, and Gladys in 1983 or 1984.

When she turned 60 and was forced to retire as second in command of her department (small world diversion/anecdote: her immediate boss, a Welshman, grew up in a small village outside Aberystwyth, a couple of doors down from the house in which my school friend Clive was living at the time), she carried on being a landady, and also acquired a clutch of cleaning jobs, in offices and old people’s homes in the town. This still left her with plenty of time to herself, and she started going to an over-60s club; she made some friends - the first friends I’d ever known her to have - and went on long couch tours and outings with the club. She went walking every day, and, although she had been frightened of the water all her life, decided to learn to swim: she proudly framed and hung the stiffy-cats, as she always pronounced ‘certificates’, for swimming various distances in the upstairs hall.

I had quit my full-time jobs in 1979 in pursuit of becoming what I had decided I wanted to be, a writer, and did a lot of part-time occasoinal work of the sort that look good on in the author bio on the end-papers of a novel. Again, this was something my mother obviously found difficut to comprehend, but she wrote me a sweet letter saying that she would support me, whatever I did, and more than once she gave me money when I needed it, financing the printing of my only completed novel, donating the deposit so I could buy the flat from my landlord, or digging me out of the odd hole.

She also took to visiting me in my flat in Cricklewood (she had never been to any of my residences in Kent or Putney) on her various trips to London to see Cissie and Billy. Cissie’s husband, Charlie Mart, had had a severe stroke in the late 1960s or early 1970s, and spent the last decade or so of his life in a nursing home, while Bill’s wife, Mary, had left him for another man, and now the two of them shared a flat in Bounds Green, a development where several people displaced from Clyde Road and Lawrence Road ended up.

After she retired, Mum took to coming to see me every week or so: as I had a temporary job and couldn’t guarantee being there to let her in, I gave her a key. Which gave her licence to clean. I tried to persuade her not to, partly because I was independent-minded enough to want control over my own environment, but mainly because I wanted her to relax. One time, the day before she was due to visit, I made the place immaculate - not just dusted, tidied and hoovered, but beds made, all furniture polished to within an inch of its life, all pots and pans and crockery and cutlery washed, buffed and put away. When I got home on the following day, I found her up a step-ladder cleaning down the sitting room walls above the picture rail (it was an Edwardian mansion block with nine or ten foot high ceilings) because she had been ‘bored’ and ‘thought she saw a cobweb’.

One thing I should make clear is she wasn’t a neat freak, or in any way obsessive about cleaniness or tidiness: it was just that she had grown up in a happy household with a mother who had coped with the swirling chaos by being conscientious and diligent, just keeping on top of things, or at least abreast with them. And young Phyllis had found her niche at a young age. She liked to be useful, to be appreciated, to be a part, and this role suited her character. The year she retired was also the year I got together with Chip. She was appalled at first that my mother was coming to clean for me at my age - and, for heaven’s sake, taking my washing home with her and bringing it back laundered and pressed the following week (in my defence, there was nowhere to do laundry in the flat, and the local laundromats were full of pissing drunks), but eventually relented, accepting Mum as ‘a force of nature’, simply unstoppable.

 

 The Two Mrs Granger, 1990

 

Chip and Mum got on OK, pretty well in fact, and Mum was absolutely thrilled when we got married in Bristol in 1988. Bill couldn’t make it because he was working (it was a Thursday) but Cissie and my Mum went to stay with Hilda and both came to the wedding, and she was smiling throughout. She was a bit less happy when, two years later, I moved to Bristol to live with Chip, but I would still come back to London to work a couple of days most weeks, and sometimes stay overnight in Ware. The last lodger had left by this point, and a very good friend she had made at the Club died in the early 1990s, so she was effectively alone again, although she kept up her cleaning jobs, and served, as she had done since the 1970s, as unpaid baby-sitter to two lads across the street, as well as a friend and companion to a youngish woman who moved in next door. Mum encouraged Joan, whose parents had largely rejected her, to read, and they spent a lot of time together.

Then, early in 1994, Cissie died, aged 84, leaving my mother as de facto head of that family. She organized the funeral, on a frozen Valentine’s Day. Hilda and Edwin came from Bristol, and various of Albert’s children turned out, but it was not a large gathering. At Cissie’s request, the priest was side-lined - Ciss was a comitted atheist - and I wrote and gave the eulogy, as well as taking her ashes and burying them in a pot in our garden to feed the flowers; Ciss and I had talked about this and I knew that was what she wanted. Cissie’s death left Billy adrift, and he died that summer. There was no-one left in London, although Mum still made occasional trips to that gravesite by the Moselle.

She finally gave up the last of her cleaning jobs - working in some sheltered housing for what she called her ‘old ladies’, some of them the same age as she was - when she turned 80. Although she was still physically fit and full of energy, she was starting to get forgetful. Doing nothing did not suit her. Ever since I moved out, I had phoned, or tried to phone every Sunday morning at ten o’clock, and she would then phone Hilda, but apart from that, and a monthly visit from me when I was in London for work, she was alone, and often unhappy. Things she had enjoyed doing, she could no longer do because of the memory problems. In a letter my dad once admiredly described how she was multi-tasking, watching Corrie on the TV while knitting, chatting and ‘puting an armlock on an orange’, but short-term memory loss stopped her knitting, watching soaps and reading, three of her favourite leisure activities, because she kept losing her place. She always had a jigsaw on the go, and took to buying puzzle magazines, but lots of simple things became difficult for her.

In her mid-80s she was officially diagnosed with what she insisted on referring to as ‘dimension’, with a short ‘i’, and she started to get helpers calling in on a regular basis to check on her. In 2011, Chip was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and I saw little or nothing of my mother for a while, although we did have several painful weekly phone calls, where I would have to explain about Chip’s illness every time we spoke.

Chip died on 8 September 2012. A few months later, I got a call from one of my mother’s visitors. She had made her regular call, and found Mum at the top of the stairs, on the landing, barely conscious and with a broken arm. I visited her in the hospital and found that taking her out of her normal environment and routines had a devastating effect on her. As a test, the nurses asked her to make herself a cup of tea, something she had been doing successfully several times a day since she was a child, and she couldn’t manage it. A decision was taken (by someone - I had nothing to do with it) that she could no longer live by herself, and she was found a place in a nursing home in Hatfield.

 

Ninety-second birthday at the nursing home

Thankfully, Joan and her husband, Dave, made the drive out to see her on a regular basis, as did several others from Ware who had reasons to be grateful to her. And I went, too, albeit not that often: it involved booking Scrap into a kennels, a bus into Exeter, train to Paddington, tube to King’s Cross, train to Hatfield, bus to the home. The first bus I could catch out of Sandford dictated that I wouldn’t get there until about 4pm, and I usually had to leave around six or seven at the latest to get into London to see whoever I was staying with for the night, before I did the journey in reverse the following morning.

The staff at the nursing home told me that she was always talking about her family - she was convinced one of the other residents was Gladys, although they looked nothing like one another - so I made her one last gift, a photo album with all the pictures that I could find of the family, all the way back to the beginning of the 20th century. A lot of our conversations at the home took on a bizarre turn. Although she usually knew who I was, once she mistook me for my dad, and another she kept insisting that I should go and see her father. And there were several repetitions of a particular catechism, in which she asked after her brothers and sisters, one by one and I explained that they were dead, apart from Hilda, who died in a nursing home in Bristol, aged 90, in 2015. After I told Mum this, as well as confirming that the others were all still dead, she said, ’That’s it, then? I’ve got no family left?’ I replied something on the lines of what am I, chopped liver? ‘Oh, you know what I mean.’ And I did.

The last time I saw her was her 94th birthday. She didn’t know me. When I tried to talk to her, she said I was frightening her, and that I should go away. Partly out of cowardice and partly out of a sense of futility, I stayed away. Then, on Valentine’s Day 2016, I had a  call from the care home saying that my mother was obviously dying and in distress, but hanging on and fighting. They asked if I would talk to her, tell her to let go, that it was all right. They put the phone to her ear and I spoke for a couple of minutes. She died the following day.

There was no funeral, by my request. She was cremated in Hatfield. In the spring, my new partner, Emma, drove me to Hatfield to pick up the ashes, then to Ware to say goodbye to the house and the town - I don’t suppose I will ever go back there - and down to Tottenham, where I picked my way through the neglect and memories to locate my grandparent's grey stone slab, and clandestinely buried the ashes there, just as those of several of her siblings had been.

Goodbye to all that

After she moved into the nursing home permanently, I had to clear out the house in Ware - which she had signed over to me not long after I got married - to make it ready for sale. Apart from my mother’s belongings, there were books, magazines, comics, toys and other trappings of youth that I had stashed in the attic at Nursery Gardens every time my own home overflowed. At this time (2014-15) my house in Devon was already pretty crammed with the stuff I had inherited from Chip, including the pieces she inherited from her mother (who had died in 1988), but I brought back as much as I could of my stuff, plus photo albums, pictures and several of the things, trinkets and keepsakes mostly, Mum had inherited from her siblings and parents - the clock Dick had got for 50 years on the railways, her father’s tankard, a couple of trophies Bill had won for darts or cribbage - with the intention that I could sort through it and dispose of it appropriately at my leisure. Somehow, even though I had a craving for simplicity, I had become the curator of the memories of at least three people, and through them, of many more.

Two things in among the geegaws and quotidian sorrows particularly affected me. There was a battered zip-up case that contained family papers - old insurance policies and paying-in books, family birth, death and marriage stiffy-cats, mysterious old invoices, the estate agent’s details of the house from 1964, and bundles of letters. Some of them were to and from me, including ones written by my dad when I was away at uni, but the others I had never seen before. They were love letters between Mum and Dad when they were just Phyllis and George, from before their marriage. I read just one, and found a different side to both my parents - nothing scandalous or revelatory, just the emotion, the youth, the hope, the exaltation, the love. I broke down when I read it - ffs, I’m crying again now just thinking about it - and I haven’t been able to face reading any of the others, now buried deep in the attic here.

The other item was an old St Michael biscuit box secreted at the bottom of her wardrobe. In it were two ladies’ watches (one maybe hers, one Cissie’s), some military-style buttons, her mother’s Labour Party pocket diary for 1954 (the year before she died), some costume jewellery I did not recognise, Mum's engagement ring, an ancient purse/wallet (presumably her father’s as it was stuffed with his army papers), a receipt for an upright piano that I remember from the front room at Clyde Road - £43! Difficult to know how they came by that much money in 1924 - and, at the bottom, twelve grubby, chipped, coloured plastic disks threaded on a chain that I recognized as the rattle that was strung across my pram in Chesterfield Gardens.

I'm sorry, Mum.