My Mother My Mirror Read online

  By then Judy had progressed from walking her way round the furniture, to taking a few brave steps across the room from one pair of arms to another, and finally to toddling around on her own. I still sometimes carried her in a sling, but more often we explored the village with the push-chair, always especially enjoying the cats and dogs that we met. She was developing her own wonderful way of describing a lot of the things with which she was most familiar, such as ‘lurdlelurdlelurdle’ for music or guitar, ‘ooayeooayeooaye’ said with grave tedium in imitation of our, “Rain, rain, rain!”, ‘rowrow’ for rubbish, carrot, flannel, lorry or anything that went round and round... and many, many more.

  Sam had found a new way to make money. He still did some work for the finance company, but he also got involved with a group of people in the area who were excited about multilevel marketing, or what used to be known as pyramid selling. One of these, as I mentioned before, was my ex-husband Mark, who had set up a small business selling water filters in this way. Then there was the owner of the Totnes wholefood shop who sold blue-green algae superfood, and others with distribution networks for videos, nutritional supplements and miraculous barrier cream, all of which we had a go at.

  The only one I remember possibly bringing back more than we put into it was some complicated system in which you sent a fiver to a few friends and then waited for fivers to come slipping back through the letterbox over the following weeks. It was a lovely surprise to find five pounds on the doormat on a morning when I was worrying about how to buy food for the day.

  It wasn’t that some people didn’t make money from these schemes, it was just that Sam was disorganized and emotional, easily fell out with people and had a basic distrust of materialism... So he would get really high on the idea of the wealth he could bring to his family using a system that defied the usual capitalist model, then apply himself with intense enthusiasm but flounder over all the practical details, and in the end become disappointed, and often blame everyone else when it went wrong... For him it was all an enormous struggle.

  However, back in the biological world things were going well. There was some question about which way up the baby was towards the end, but by mid July, which ever way he was facing, he was preparing for exit. Sam drove me to the hospital in the early evening, then took Judy home because nothing much was happening. But soon after midnight the telephone rang, Judy was woken, and they raced back to be by my side, with “Don’t worry ‘bout a thing, every little thing’s gonna be alright...” playing loudly and appropriately on the car radio.

  For a week or so afterwards I was able to tell the story to Judy: “You remember when you got woken in the middle of the night, and the music was playing in the car?” (singing a bit of the song) “... And then you got to the hospital and mummy was going...” (panting noise) “And then the baby came out and went ‘Wair!’” And I could tell by the way her eyes lit up that she remembered the whole adventure.

  Kristin turned up soon after Sam, and kindly kept Judy amused by wheeling her up and down the corridors in her push-chair. I’m not sure if she was there at 3am for the birth, but certainly she was in the room soon afterwards. It was of course utterly agonising, but it was all over a little sooner than the time before, he did come out head first, and everything went well. For the remainder of the night the four of us were put in a little room of our own to sleep, before some final checks were made prior to our discharge the next morning. We settled down fine, being pretty exhausted by now, but I will always remember poor Judy’s shocked and bewildered face when, a couple of hours later, we were woken by the piercing cry of her new brother wanting some milk.

  We called him Simon, because we had a good friend called Simon and because we liked the name: Simon John. He was two weeks early, and for those first two weeks there was a way in which he wasn’t quite with us, as if he still had one foot in another world... either the world of spirit or possibly Tibet, for his eyes looked mysteriously Tibetan. His earliness also caused him to have a slightly weak valve at the top of his stomach, which meant he often sicked up some of his milk.

  If I had ever thought that babies were all the same, I now knew this was far from true, because Simon was quite different from Judy. He cried more than she did; I think perhaps birth had not been so easy for him. He certainly pushed my coccyx out of place, and he had a little ridge of bone across his skull which remained for a few weeks until his head had grown some more. But apart from his upsets, he was a much more self-contained sort of character, happy in his own company. In those first weeks he would often be smiling, or even laughing, at some internal joke that we knew nothing about, which was rather extraordinary since he had not at this time made enough connections with the outside world to be able to laugh about it.

  To start with I felt protective towards Judy: there was a stranger in our midst, waking up my angel when she was contentedly sleeping, distracting my attention from her. It took me a while to love him: he looked a bit funny, with his lack of hair and boyish features, and I’m afraid I can be terribly superficial when it comes to looks. To tell you the truth it was probably about three months before I really began to feel bonded, and it did worry me a bit; but the closeness we shared for the rest of his childhood more than made up for it.

  I have been told that Simon for me was not only my little boy but my own inner child, which made him doubly precious. He was similar to me in a way – still is, for that matter: a naturally quiet, gentle soul; creative, responsive, a good listener and teacher. I gave him all the love that I never received, and it was deeply healing.

  Of course I loved Judy enormously too, with that fundamental, unshakeable mother love. But when it came to personalities, what I loved about Judy was how different she was from me rather than how similar. She brought me out of myself and showed me the person that I wanted to become. She was extroverted, demonstrative, always wanted company, excitable, exciting, colourful and fun. I loved her spirit, her determination (though it could be difficult!) her defiance and sheer spunk. And a lot of the time we all got on really well, but along with the tender moments in which she cared for ‘Saisai’ there was always a jealousy of Simon, expressed in bites and kicks and extreme bossiness, and this made things difficult because the more Judy behaved ‘badly’ the more I had to protect Simon, and even worse, her crossness caused her to push me away...

  But I am jumping ahead here: it was a long time before it became too much of a problem. After all it’s only what so many siblings go through, and there’s nothing wrong with having other people around to knock off our sharp corners and bring us down to earth. It was probably good for Simon to have to face the challenge of his sister, rather than being lost in his own little world; and were it not for Simon Judy may well have become spoilt. But whatever my ideas about the situation, the fact is that we were all in it together.

  Kristin stayed for a few days after Simon was born, cooking us tasty meals and keeping the house tidy; then she went back to her farm cottage a few miles up the road. By this time Sam and I were beginning to think about moving again. The house we were in was very small, with two tiny bedrooms, and the neighbours through one wall had a lot of noisy fights. Kristin mentioned that she may be moving soon, but I had dismissed the idea of taking over her house because she also only had two bedrooms. However, when I went to visit her I discovered where she lived was quite spacious: though a two-up-two-down, one of the downstairs rooms could easily serve as a bedroom, with ample space remaining for the living area. For her it was more than adequate: she used one room for her painting studio and another as a bedroom, leaving two large day rooms for herself and her old cat Tiger.

  Once Kristin had found somewhere else to live, we managed to put our name forward before it had been advertised, and were soon preparing to move into Bramble Cottage. It had a large, sloping garden for the children to play in, from which you could just see the farm where the landlord and his wife lived, down beyond their own substantial vegetable patch.

  The
main thing that sticks in my mind about that move is that I was powerless to do anything: Simon couldn’t walk yet, and he was always either needing feeding or changing or was balanced on my hip, giving me one hand at the most with which to do anything useful. I couldn’t even take the clothes out of my wardrobe and make sure they didn’t get crushed... But Sam employed the help of a friend of his from Plymouth, and within a few days all our belongings had been packed up and moved to the new place.

  Bramble Cottage was not as scruffy as Reynolds Park, but it did require a fair amount of improvisation and imagination to make it into a comfortable home. To begin with we all slept in the same bedroom, so Sam used the other upstairs room for his office and model aeroplane workshop, and the two downstairs rooms were free for general family life. It was certainly more cluttered than when Kristin lived there, but I was getting good at this sort of thing, and it was fun to see what could be made of it.

  Particularly challenging was the kitchen/bathroom/toilet lean-to that had been stuck on the back of the house as an afterthought, as was often the case in these old country cottages. The bathroom opened into the kitchen, which wasn’t a problem, but the kitchen was so tiny that the best we could do was to find a small table as a work surface opposite the sink and stand a set of shelves at the back of it for storage. There was absolutely no room for a washing-machine, despite a tempting gap beside the cooker which extended uselessly into a dark corner next to the toilet wall; so we ended up jamming the washing-machine in with the toilet and having to always sit slightly sideways on the seat.

  There was also an area of dead space under the stairs, where I put a small chest-of-drawers for tea towels, plastic boxes and so forth, then topped it with a large sheet of Formica where the the toaster and spreads lived, as there was so little room in the kitchen; and for some odd reason there was a power point under the stairs. Meanwhile the fridge/freezer lived far away at the end of a funny little tunnel lined with shelves that must have been the original back of the house. So having a piece of toast and a cup of tea involved a fair amount of scurrying from place to place! But it’s amazing what you get used to, and once the basics were in place it was time to do what I most enjoyed: making it all look pretty with a paintbrush, some pictures and ornaments, curtains and rugs... and keeping it clean and tidy as best I could.

  28

  Bramble Cottage

  So I had it all: one handsome husband, two gorgeous children (one girl, one boy), and a country cottage to live in. We tried our best to live the dream. Strangely, after Judy’s birth I went off cats; and I have never been able to rekindle my affection for them, or certainly not the passionate sort of affection that I used to have. I was also getting fed-up with Buckles’ out-of-control behaviour: he always seemed to be either humping things or people, or begging for tit-bits or running away, all of which annoyed me intensely. I guess I’m just not a doggy person, when it comes down to it. So what with the risk of a cat sitting on babies’ faces, and the fact that Buckles had knocked children over a few times, and all the trouble of looking after pets when I already had my hands full: just before we moved we found a new home for Buckles and Schaum. Snooks had already passed away, while we were still at Reynolds Park.

  I was beginning to realize that I couldn’t rely on Sam when it came to chores, whether it be looking after pets or anything else. He did things sometimes, when he felt like it, but for consistency and on-going strength I had to rely on myself. This wasn’t altogether a bad thing. The plus side of doing all the work was that I had all the power, domestically-speaking; and for a while it felt good to prove to myself that I could do it all.

  He never did any more cooking after those idyllic early days in the Miami hotel room, and if he ever did the washing-up there was a great deal of attention drawn to the fact, and a great deal of ‘soaking things’ and ‘having a little break’ seemed to go on. We had fierce rows about it for months, maybe years; and then I gave up. After a while I became grateful if he was just civil to me, let alone helpful.

  He did some things outside: making level areas in the sloping garden, cutting the lawn, sometimes digging the patch where we grew vegetables. It was just that it was all rather erratic... and most of all there were arguments about everything, which slowly wore me down. He enjoyed being a teacher to me, but was not good at explaining things. I did learn in the end to skilfully reverse the car, to do things on the computer, to turn the fridge up when I wanted it colder and down when it was too cold... (Why didn’t he just explain that more numbers made it fridgier?!) But every lesson was hammered in so painfully, and so many things that he thought I needed to learn, such as not to criticize him, I actually didn’t. I was falling over myself not to antagonize him in any way, to be the endlessly patient, compassionate goddess I believed I should be, but it seemed I could never get it right. And then from time to time I couldn’t stand it any longer so I shouted at him, even hit him, which for me felt refreshingly healthy but drove him even further into his cold, intellectual shell.

  But as our relationship crumbled, our children were growing into the most delightful little people either of us had ever been lucky enough to know. By the time Simon reached a year old he was a very handsome, golden-haired boy with a gorgeous smile and a gentle, easy-going nature. Judy was a sweetheart, lively and affectionate, and though when push came to shove she liked to be in charge (or else push really would become shove!), most of the time they played happily together, with teddies and dolls, building bricks and Duplo, toy cars and lorries, and all the other piles of things that had been passed down from other families or we had bought them for birthdays or Christmas.

  I will always remember the first time they had Christmas stockings. It was such a pleasure to do what had been done for me: to spend time secretly finding all those thoughtful little gifts for each of them, then wrap them up and sneak them into the bedroom on Christmas night. And the absolute innocent delight on their faces when they discovered in the morning that Father Christmas had actually come!! Then taking down the balloon, and dragging the presents onto the bed with Mummy and Daddy, and the ecstatic excitement of unwrapping, amazed as each item was just perfect for them and yet had appeared magically in the middle of the night. I remember their first bags of chocolate pennies: they recognized that they were precious and carried them around for hours, until the chocolate began to leak onto their hands, and I had to explain that not only were they golden and shiny, but they were also edible!

  I’ve been searching in my memory for key events when the children were small, but have come to the conclusion that there really weren’t any in the way there would be when they were older; because at that age even the smallest things are major achievements, and most days are full to the brim with getting up, getting dressed, eating and drinking, falling over, standing up, learning words, using the potty, playing, shouting, washing, undressing, going to bed... It’s hard to find the time for anything else! But amidst all that there was a great deal of growing and learning and satisfaction all round.

  Most wonderful of all, there were lots and lots of cuddles, especially at bedtime. As soon as they were old enough, I would get them ready every night in their pyjamas then tuck them on either side of me in the big bed and tell them stories. Often we would enjoy books with big colourful pictures, but sometimes I would make things up myself, or sometimes we would just talk about what had happened during the day, or what it was like in Africa, or what happened to Mummy when she was a little girl, or how far away the stars are... It was a precious bonding time when everyone was close and relaxed. I think Sam joined in or else took a turn from time to time. Often we all fell asleep together, and I had to get up a little later, gently pick them up and take them to their own beds.

  In the summer there was plenty of room outside to play. There was a Wendy House already in the garden, as well as the reconstructed Bantham summerhouse, and sometimes we put up a small tent on the lawn, or they played with the hose or in the paddling pool; or we went for walk
s up the lane or through the farm. Simon loved it when I went, “Weee !!” and thrust the pram away from me in a surge of speed, then ran to catch it again. One time I failed to catch it; it crashed into a gate and he was surprised to find himself dangling upside-down from a tipped-up pram; but happily he was wearing a harness so no harm was done.

  In the winter we would make ourselves snug around the Rayburn, or the log-burner that we had brought with us from Reynolds Park and installed in the sitting-room. I remember one winter when we all had the flu at the same time and decided to camp out on mattresses downstairs, staggering to the bathroom every now and then, or to the kitchen for supplies. Other times the children would share a sick bug, and no sooner had I scraped and changed the bedding from one than the other would be throwing up all over the pillows, until everywhere was covered with towels ready for the next onslaught. And of course there were sneezes and runny noses, and all the snotty cold-weather symptoms.

  When Simon became ill it tended to be more intense for him, but for a shorter time than Judy, so sometimes I was quite alarmed by his high fever and the way he struggled with his lungs. But when he was four years old he developed a cough that went on and on and wouldn’t go away, so in the end we took him to a healer we had been recommended, and she said, “He’s got asthma: take him to a doctor!”

  I had an innate distrust of doctors, but this seemed to be a situation where medical intervention was necessary, so I took him along to a kind man at the Ashburton Surgery, and we were given a week’s supply of oral steroids. When the week was up, Simon’s cough had more or less gone away. I took him back for a check-up, and it was confirmed that his lungs were much better, but listening with his stethoscope, the doctor told me his heart was beating twice as fast as it should, and I should take him immediately to Torbay Hospital.