Memory

 

I find myself thinking about childhood and those iconic bottles and packages that are printed on the memory, probably until the day I die.   It was just after the war and rationing was still in force and I was one of the first generation of National Health babies.

So this concentrated National Health orange juice, recently issued to families with young children, would have been ground-breaking.  Likewise the thick, viscous cod liver oil which my mother was convinced I would refuse but which - perversely - I used to love.  The morning ritual was this: as soon as I was old enough I would clamber up to stand on one of  the wooden kitchen chairs while my mother measured out a spoonful of the stuff.  I was now at her level, she didn't have to bend down and the oil didn't get spilled.   A special spoon.  Mouth open and in it went.

Then I remember the green gingham dress with parallel ruffles on the bodice.  The old wireless which we hung onto for years afterwards with all those names on the dial (Luxembourg, Cork, Hilversum. Moscow). Listen With Mother.  The flowering cherry just the other side of the back fence, bordering the gravel pit. One day in spring, maybe another sun-filled May day like today, the sight of the cloud of pink blossom against the bluest of blue skies is my first recollection of being awed by beauty.  I think my heart turned over.  

We moved from this house when I was five years old.  

Generations

I never knew my mother’s mother. She died of cancer during World War II. I’ve heard a lot about her though.

She was a primary school teacher in the Cardiff dockyard before she married. It was the tail end of the nineteenth century - the women in our family had their children late and the generations are long - and South Wales was a hotbed of industrial production. Vast quanitites of coal and iron were sent out from the docks and ships disgorged their incoming cargoes from all over the world. Riches and extreme poverty rubbed shoulders with each other and my grandmother taught at the poorest end of the Victorian spectrum. Children would arrive at school without shoes.

She was a true internationalist apparently, fascinated by what she read and heard of the United States, this promised land of brotherhood and equality. Her favourite hymn - she was deeply religious - was The Battle Hymn of the Republic. She idolised Abraham Lincoln. They were, after all, almost contemporaries. She was born in 1874, just seven years after his assassination.

Her idealism was passed to my mother. Another American, Eleanor Roosevelt, was one of her heroines and she often spoke about her. My mother abhored prejudice of any kind, racial or sexual or religious, and to the end was open-minded towards other people’s beliefs. In her bedroom she had a statue of the Buddha on the window ledge and a picture of Jesus on the wall.

Both of them would be so pleased at the outcome of the US election. They would have been as moved as I was by the TV pictures of the people of all ages and races waiting to vote. For hours. To see such a candidate elected.

I think of myself as more jaded, more self-absorbed probably, than either of them. I don’t underestimate what lies ahead and I know that the gloss may wear a little thin after a while. That’s just the way of things.

This morning though I’m happy too. It has been an astonishing night. I wish they were both here.

Talisman

I have a photograph of my mother in her early eighties taken when she was still quite mobile. On a sunny spring day she faces the camera with the shoreline of the local harbour as a backdrop. She wears an old favourite, a rumpled, light mauve raincoat. A couple of swans can be seen immediately behind her - probably scouting for titbits. I'm glad they are in the shot, she was always happy to see them. Part of her face is in shadow, but her grey eyes are sharp and alert and she smiles tentatively, almost shyly, at me, the photographer.

My real name, the one I don't use on the blog, is all hard consonants. You bite into it, there's no syllabic softness, no flow. It labels me unmistakeably as a child of my time - I've yet to come across a girl born in the last twenty years, say, bearing the same first name.

The business of deciding what to call her daughters was my mother's domain, my father having no particular opinion on the matter. Or maybe it was easier just to let her have her way. When I had learned to read, at around six or seven, she showed me my entry in her book of Babies' Names and Their Meanings.

... From the Greek: Child of light, a pearl.

Over the years she would talk to me about it.

"That's what you are", she would say, pronouncing the definition with relish. "A child of light." She had a clear, resonant speaking voice and had dabbled in amateur dramatics.

The name's meaning clearly mattered a lot to her: it represented perhaps her hopes for herself as a mother and for me, and it symbolised something indefinable in our relationship that would remain immune from the conflict to come. She had such high aspirations, living as she did in a world of sometimes unfocussed ideals, and often found unpalatable aspects of reality too painful to tolerate or accept and this would make her very, very angry. She could be charming but she definitely wasn't easy.

Yet by the end of her life she had found a way through. She came up with resilience, courage and a somewhat lavatorial sense of humour. With the onset of a slow, terminal cancer, this last probably saved her as her body gave out, but she had always possessed an appreciation of the ridiculous and a sanity-saving (hers and mine both) ability to laugh at herself. In her sixties she had finally found an outlet for that intense idealism and this had stabilised her. She became a talkative, stubborn, cheerful old lady.

Maybe the choice of that name - with its meaning - was about other things as well. Her parents' marriage was difficult, though this was never mentioned, and her own was stressful. The month I was born purple lilac and flowering cherry were in blossom but there would also have been the moaning of the weekly air-raid siren tests (something I can remember being terrified of as a toddler), the Cold War and rationing.

Perhaps it was an attempt to protect her first child. A talisman.