The Girl from Station X (5 page)

I had a dreadful cold and my mother was very attentive, offering me sweets. On Saturday afternoon we watched the Grand National on TV, and in the evening a programme about women in the armed
forces about which my mother made intelligent remarks. On Sunday afternoon, I drove back to London, in time for the party. But I was overcome with depression, a dead weight I couldn’t lift
off. At the party, I chatted to a former school mate. She had married a close friend of Andrew’s who’d done well in the City. Her new baby was having fits and she’d employed an
old-fashioned nanny to help. She was pleased about this, remarking: ‘It’s like having your mother waiting up for you after a party.’

I realised what different experiences we’d had in regard to our mothers. I would have dreaded my mother waiting up, as she would almost certainly have been plastered.

Even now, while trying to enjoy myself, I was half-waiting for another accident to happen. Sure enough, the next day I heard that my mother had fallen, a few hours after I left her, and
fractured her leg. This was her second, or even third, break since my father died in 1974; I had lost count. She was in hospital and had already undergone another operation. Her drinking had at
last been brought into the open and the doctors had advised her to get dried out. However, she had refused to go to the place they suggested – very near Knowle – as my brother Nicky had
been in a psychiatric unit there.

I went by train to visit my mother in the hospital. She looked better than I expected; her hair was tidy and she did not seem as unhinged as she sometimes did. When I entered her room she gave
me a defiant look as if to say: ‘Don’t you dare tell me
why
I fell . . .!’ When a nurse brought her lunch, she said she’d been told to offer my mother whisky with it
– presumably because without it she would suffer from withdrawal symptoms. My mother said grandly: ‘No thank you, I don’t drink spirits. They don’t agree with me.’
When the nurse had gone, my mother did mention her drinking to me, but in a veiled way, saying that one of the young hospital doctors belonged to Alcoholics Anonymous. She told me she’d been
suffering from hallucinations and wondered if this was what having DTs was like. She thought a young black doctor had visited her in the night and asked: ‘Are you afraid of me?’ She
imagined that she heard another doctor tell her: ‘You are going to be committed to a mental hospital as you tried to commit suicide twice.’

Perhaps I should have taken the opportunity then to discuss her drinking, since she had given me that opening. But I had been schooled for years not to mention it and the whole subject of my
mother’s drunkenness filled me with fear and shame.

Sitting beside her, I watched different patients go past her door. Each one called out to her. My mother, so charming to strangers, had already made friends. Two were in wheelchairs. One was an
old man who loved gardening; another was an old lady from Yorkshire who told us that most of her life she had lived in a house with ‘a tortuous staircase’; then, when she finally moved
south to a bungalow in Seaford, she fell and broke her leg.

Friends had sent my mother flowers. I was wary; I couldn’t allow myself to feel sympathetic. I was constantly wondering what further disaster would occur.

In January 1981, Andrew and I married. My mother seemed pleased but, particularly when my children were little, I would have liked to have had a mother who helped me. When my
Aunt Rosemary visited me in London, she did ordinary things, like going with me when I collected my children from school. She came to my son’s swimming gala. My mother never did anything like
this. Even my friend J’s mother, who, like mine, was well off, had come from her home abroad when he and his wife had their first baby. I had just had my daughter and my mother was still on
holiday in Majorca – J was shocked by this – and when the baby was four days old it was Molly who came to the West London Hospital and then escorted us and our new baby to our house in
Sussex, as my husband had not yet learned to drive.

J’s mother, I saw, had even made apple sauce. My own mother couldn’t cook. She had once attended a Women’s Institute cookery class, but when the instructor began with
‘I’m sure you all know how to make a white sauce . . .’ she was so terrified that she never went again.

Most women of her generation, even those brought up to be waited on, learned to cook during or after the war. Why was my mother treated like a queen?

The day after her eightieth birthday, 1 July 1994, Nicholas and I went to see her. My son had made her a pavlova, as a birthday cake. She complimented me, all of a sudden, for
being ‘straightforward and honest’. Mr Mainwaring said: ‘You’re pleased to see Elisa, aren’t you?’

Nicholas went to the kitchen with a very nice Greek girl to put candles on his pavlova. My mother wanted to walk with me up and down the hall, into the kitchen, upstairs to her bedroom, then
down again. When Nicholas brought in the pavlova with its candles, she seemed genuinely delighted. Nicholas kept feeding his grandmother strawberries and bits of meringue from his pavlova. This
seemed to be the right instinct, because her mouth kept opening obediently, and she would eat each morsel.

Nicholas and I then went with her into her garden where, earlier, she hadn’t wanted to go. We went past the fishponds, whose netting had been removed years ago, then by her border full of
pink and blue flowers, and urns full of lavender.

I thought that it would seem to most people a beautiful English garden. Was I ever happy there as a child? There was always that undercurrent of fear, of something bad waiting for us, and this
must have emanated from my mother. I thought of her poorer friends, such as Russian Olga, who used to visit us from London, often in summer, with their young children; to them, our home must have
seemed like paradise.

My mother kept hitching up her trousers, saying that the waist was too loose, and Mr Mainwaring told me that she didn’t like to eat. Once, she clasped my own hand, then put it to her
breast, which seemed to have shrunk, and I noticed that she no longer wore a bra. We passed the little tower; she had once sunbathed on its roof with her friend Audrey, and I recalled how my father
had informed me, aged nine, that the two women were naked. I thought to myself now that there was something humiliating in being married to a woman who preferred her own sex.

M
y first book was published in April 1995 and was received favourably. But concern about my mother marred the pleasure I should have felt and a few
weeks after publication, despite it being summer, I developed bronchitis verging on pneumonia, and was ill for six weeks.

My immune system had been weakened by chemotherapy, but my illness may have been exacerbated by anxiety about my mother. At first I had been relieved that her Alzheimer’s meant that she
could no longer get alcohol, but now her condition gave rise to other worries: should she be moved to an old people’s home and, if so, what should happen to her house and her possessions? Was
she on the right medication, and should I try to get Power of Attorney? Indeed, it seemed to me that I would always be eaten up with worry about her – unless I went first, of a recurrence of
breast cancer! I asked advice and sought medical opinion, and, just before falling ill, I visited with a kind friend an old people’s home in Sussex, run by nuns especially for those with
Alzheimer’s. It had been recommended by various friends who had had, or still had, close relatives in there.

The ‘home’ was actually two sister homes. In the first one, near a road, we waited in the hall. Coming downstairs was a woman who looked distressed. She had a red
mark on the bridge of her nose. We said hello and she glanced nervously at us. She started to speak hesitantly, murmuring about it being ‘embarrassing’ not being in her own house. The
nun who then appeared did not seem particularly sympathetic to her plight, and when I asked her how she could be prevented from walking out on to the road and being hit by a car, she looked
troubled and did not answer. I asked how long that woman had been there and the nun said two months. Normally, she explained, it took a few weeks for a new patient to settle down.

We chatted to the nun on our tour of the building. She showed us the residents’ rooms – dormitories, doubles and singles. We followed her into sitting rooms, common rooms and
bathrooms. All was impeccably clean and tidy and there was an atmosphere of peace.

In one common room I found Peggy Langley, who as a young woman, as Peggy van Lier, was a member of the Second World War’s most famous escape route, the ‘Comet line’, which had
rescued Allied servicemen from occupied Belgium, Peggy’s country. I was friends with her daughter at boarding school, and used to stay in their house in Suffolk. Peggy became a good friend of
my mother, who admired her bravery – she had been awarded the Belgian Croix de Guerre, an MBE and the Resistance Cross. My mother also liked the romance of Peggy having met her husband
– a British Guards officer who had lost his arm at Dunkirk and then become an important member of MI19 – during that time.

I remembered Peggy as just a wife and mother, limping round her Suffolk kitchen – I suppose she had rheumatism – cooking for her husband and four sons. Only her daughter was expected
to help. I remembered how Peggy loved music, and that she had seemed not to fit in among her English menfolk, who liked shooting, and I remembered also how sweet she was. Now, I saw that she was
almost bald, a tiny frail woman with a plaintive, slightly hurt expression. I bent down and introduced myself, using just my Christian name, and I reminded her that I was a friend of her daughter.
Recognition, sadness, then a flicker of hope crossed her face. Perhaps it was fanciful, but at that moment I felt that her soul was going out to me. Then, a few moments later, she realised that I
was leaving and her face closed off. I, like her daughter, was not staying with her and she would be alone again with all the other women who had lost their minds.

I did not like to think of my mother, who might not have recognised Peggy now, coming down the staircase here, bewildered like that woman we had seen earlier, wishing to be back in her own
house.

Nearby was the sister home, which was more secure. The patients could not walk out of the building. At first it seemed grander and there was more Catholic paraphernalia – statues of the
Virgin Mary and Jesus with his Sacred Heart exposed. (I was used to this from my own upbringing, instigated by my Catholic father, but my mother, after collecting me from a catechism class he had
arranged in our local Sussex town, told me that she was revolted by the picture in the hall of Jesus with his exposed bleeding Sacred Heart – ‘like something at the
butcher’s’.)

Out of the window was a formal garden with wallflowers and great sweeping lawns. A busy little red-haired Irish nun with alert grey-green eyes, whom I liked at once – she told us merrily
that she was born in the Chinese Year of the Rat, and she did seem busy and alert like a rat – came to meet us. She led us upstairs and introduced us to another, older, nun in charge of the
unit.

I couldn’t help noticing a patient walking up the corridor very fast, her whole body tilting sideways. With a shock I recognised her – it was Veronica, the wife of the former vicar
of the village near Knowle. Although I had seen Veronica many times since – her husband was vicar there for over fifteen years – and I recalled my father’s irritation at her
skittishness, my very first memory of her came back to me, the evening after Raymond was drowned, when she came to my bedroom at Knowle to kiss me good night. I felt grateful to her now, for having
realised that I, a small child, needed comfort.

I could see that Veronica was in a similar state of anxiety to my mother, who often walked up and down repeating: ‘I want to go home!’, although my mother was still in her own house.
The nun in charge said that Veronica walked so much that she feared for her heart. I approached her, saying my grandmother’s name, then my own. She did not seem to understand, though she was
very polite.

The nun informed me that Veronica’s only child was a deaconess. She suggested that Veronica take me into her room and show me a photograph of her daughter, who as I recalled was the same
age as my brother Nicky. In her bedroom, Veronica handed me a framed photograph from her dressing table of a young woman getting married.

I exclaimed: ‘She looks just like you!’

I then realised that she had shown me her own wedding photograph.

Shortly after that, I took our cousin Dita, American Peggie’s daughter, to see my mother. My mother did not recognise Dita, whom she had known since she was a child, and
raised her walking stick as though to attack her. Dita looked shocked. My mother then tried to hand her a pink teddy bear, to apologise. Dita said later that she had not known how bad my mother had
got. She added that she felt very sorry for both of us.

Just as Dita and I were leaving, my mother, who did not know that I had visited the homes, suddenly remarked: ‘I hate nuns!’ I found this disconcerting, all the more so considering
her unhinged mental state.

This was not the only time I experienced telepathy with my mother, which generally occurred without my wanting it to.

My mother did not go into the home in 1995. I was made to feel by Molly that it would be cruel. Indeed, taking on more responsibilities than just secretarial work, Molly, who
was usually so helpful, completely opposed it, despite putting her own mother-in-law into a home. My mother’s doctor, who would soon retire, was also stubborn about her moving, although by
that summer of ’95 she had not been downstairs for a whole year as she had become terrified of negotiating her own staircase, even with help.

Despite my belief that she should now be looked after by those who specialised in Alzheimer’s, in a place where she would be less isolated, I did not ultimately have the confidence to make
that decision on my own.

I was also having more problems with my son, who was now at another special school. He had never played with toys, had only one friend and was quick-tempered and obsessive. A year later, on his
thirteenth birthday, he would be diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome – a condition on the autistic spectrum, the main symptoms of which are lack of social skills, overriding obsessions
and intense anxiety and frustration.