Who are you?

I’ve started going to bereavement counselling at the North London Hospice in Woodside Park. I don’t know how much help it can be – they can’t bring Mum back, after all – but I figured that it can’t do any harm to talk, especially to someone who isn’t emotionally involved with me or grieving for Mum in their own way, as all the members of my immediate family are.

Most days I muddle along but I am acutely aware that if things don’t go according to plan then my reactions (read overreactions) are often completely inappropriate and it's poor, wonderful Dave who has to bear the brunt of them. I’m trying so hard not to be angry about Mum’s death but the ease with which I’m losing my temper at the moment indicates that I must be seething with rage within. I’m also finding it difficult to socialise outside of my immediate circle of friends – smalltalk and chitchat in group gatherings seem utterly pointless at the moment. I recently went to a reunion of the first subtitling company I worked for. It was a pleasant enough do, but whilst I enjoyed catching up with all these people I hadn’t seen for three years, I felt that the only answer I had to the question, “So what have you been up to?” was “Grieving.” Really sometimes I’m struggling to find any joy in life at all.

One of the first things the counsellor said to me yesterday was simply, “Tell me about your Mum.” And I realised that these musings have focused almost too much on how I’m feeling and dealing with her loss. They also need to serve the purpose of recording who Mum was, what she achieved, what she didn’t achieve, what she believed, what she loved, what she hated. If Dave and I are to have children, then they need to learn about their grandmother and feel as though they know her, even though they can never meet her.

The first thing that occurs to me is that Mum was wise. Growing up, I perhaps didn’t always appreciate this wisdom but in retrospect, at least as a character judge, she was flawless. Her psychology training meant that she could sum up the personality of anybody she met in five minutes flat, accurately and profoundly. She still had some irrational dislikes – Welshmen, Arabs and her fellow Yorkshiremen first and foremost – but normally, if I wanted to know why I found someone either attractive, difficult or abhorrent, she could pin down the reasons almost instantly.

She was also neurotic. In the death announcement that Dad put in the local newspaper, he described her as a “loving wife, devoted mother, outstanding teacher and inveterate worrier”. If she didn’t have something to worry about, she’d worry about having nothing to worry about. She hated being late and feared missing buses, trains and planes so would insist on setting off hours before she needed to just to cover all eventualities that may occur on the way. Her imagination was incredibly vivid in that respect. Likewise, she’d always leap on the negative sides of any suggestion you made, panicking about all the things that might possibly go wrong. If you were unsure of a decision, she'd certainly save you the bother of having to come up with any cons yourself. Ultimately, though, once she’d worried her way through all the downsides, she’d inevitably be very supportive of whatever conclusion you reached.

Her stress levels were always through the roof and in latter years her blood pressure too. I always feared she would die young, of a stroke or a heart attack – I never expected it would be of cancer. Mum was a total hypochondriac so it was with a cruel sense of irony that her worst fears were realised with her diagnosis. She said herself, “Why did I waste all those years worrying about stupid trivial things, now that this has happened and I’ve got something really important to worry about?” She was always extremely cautious about her health and performed all the right checks and did nearly all the right things, bar perhaps eating too many biscuits at work and enjoying a couple of large (and I mean large) sherries before dinner every night. She had been reasonably fit in her youth – a fanatical tennis player (even working at Wimbledon a couple of summers, serving strawberries and cream) and walker (she met Dad in her university hiking club) – but she let it all lapse after having children, and gradually the weight piled on and her energy levels decreased, eventually ending up with a slipped disc in her back which caused a couple of such horrific bouts of sciatica that it pretty much put her off exercise for life. The menopause further debilitated her, eventually being forced to have a hysterectomy as she kept haemorrhaging.

Though her energy levels decreased, I always think of Mum as an extremely lively person. She always used the language of speed. Even when her hysterectomy left her doubled up and unable to move faster than a decrepit shuffle, she’d still say she was just going to “dash to the loo,” or “rush down to the shops”. She wore brightly coloured clothes and was incredibly noisy. Simple household tasks involved huge amounts of crashing and clattering, shouting and swearing. Part of it was simply her attention-seeking side and need to be at the centre of everything. If she was doing a domestic chore, we all needed to know about it – chances are we were sitting in the lounge in front of the television or reading the paper, activities which required a serious guilt trip. She could never suppress a fart or burp and had the loudest sneeze, always triggered by a glass of red wine, and most of her minor illnesses were at an equal volume, with several layers of hyperbole on top. “Ooh, I’m dying!” she’d wail. Alas, when she really did start dying, we were so used to this pattern of behaviour that it took a few weeks before any of us took her seriously.

Her capacity to talk never diminished. Mum didn’t necessarily take turns in conversations - if she asked you a question, she’d usually be giving her own answer to it before you’d even had time to draw breath. One of her many common expressions was “I’m a teacher – you don’t expect me to listen, do you?” If you were talking on the phone to her, she didn’t usually understand the phrase, “I really have to go now, Mum” even if punctuated with explanatory sub-clauses such as “because we’re about to eat dinner”, “because my train leaves in five minutes” or “because my house is on fire”. She inevitably had to hide the phone bill from Dad. She also loved writing letters and wrote to friends all over the country – though for some reason she seldom visited any of them. In later years she regained contact with others through e-mail. Typing wasn’t her strong point and her text-messaging was even poorer – “DR SINGER DIDNT RING WICH IS ANOYIN. HOPE UGOT HOME W POTS OK XX” is one of the last messages I ever received from her.

The biscuits made her round. She loved food and thankfully had a husband who made it an art form, even if she did destroy his creations with her haphasard dishing-up technique. "Do you want some more slop?" she'd enquire, gravy boat in hand. She would always happily help herself to other people’s sweets and chocolate too, once being most indignant when she found I’d left a note saying “Piss off, Mum” in the top of a box of rather fine Italian pralines a boyfriend had given me for Valentine's Day. She was also addicted to Liquorice Allsorts. But cancer destroyed her appetite and the weight fell off her. Chemotherapy and radiotherapy made everything taste of cardboard and so most of Dad’s labours of love went uneaten, and food became yet another thing for them to bicker about.

She and Dad could argue for England, although things improved when Mum’s hormones calmed down in her mid-fifties. Mum would throw dinner plates on the floor, hit Dad or drive off for a couple of hours in a huff. The classic arguments were always when we were on holiday, usually either trying to cook dinner in a tent after a wearying day out or trying to navigate our way round a French town with signs pointing “Toutes Directions” one way and “Autres Directions” the other. Dad would shout, “Left or right?” whilst Mum rummaged around in her handbag to find the right pair of glasses for map-reading, and he would eventually give up waiting and set off to a sharp right just as Mum finally found her place on the map and said, “You need to go left.” I couldn’t bear their rows. Mum could drive us all to distraction and often felt that we picked on her. Dad’s total refusal to give into her neediness made her even worse. I often wonder how she’d have been if she’d had a husband who was a little more comforting. But my God, they loved each other. Dad’s utter devotion to her during her illness and the tears he shed when she died broke my heart.

Mum was easy to tease. But you could also make her laugh. She didn’t tell jokes because she’d usually forget the punchline, but she had numerous amusing anecdotes to relate. I’m going to write as many of her stories down as I can over the next few weeks, particularly about the children she taught. She had such a wonderful smile, and it made her eyes sparkle. However, she didn’t really watch comedy on television or read funny books: for some reason she preferred murder mysteries and, in written form, the weightier the better. She’d read in bed every night, and often would nearly knock herself out when she dropped one of her heavy library tomes on her head. When I knew Mum was dying, I asked her what her favourite book and film were because I couldn’t bear the thought of not knowing. She couldn’t name a film (but then neither could I) but she said straightaway that Pride And Prejudice was her most-loved book.

Elizabeth Bennet in Pride And Prejudice is a fairly plain-talking girl, and the character trait in Mum that I most admired was her ability to call a spade a spade. She had no airs, no sense of vanity or hypocrisy and was always down to earth and straightforward. Her openness meant I could talk to her about anything, though her frankness and rejection of the sentimental meant that I never really got the chance to tell her how much I loved her until after she’d died.

REBECCA

All in a day's work?

Or is it? I don’t know if it’s just my bad luck or if I’m just being hypersensitive, but every programme I work on at the moment seems to be connected with death. In the month after Mum died, I had to work on the entire first series of Poltergeist The Legacy, with virtually every episode full of coffins, ghosts and ghouls, and when this had finished, Six Feet Under came my way. Six Feet Under is one of my absolute all-time favourite television series, but of course any show that is about a family who lives and works in a funeral home is going to grate a little close to the bone on occasions. Last week, I had to review the subtitles for Death In Gaza, an extremely disturbing, saddening and horrific documentary about the martyrdom of suicide bombers and the murder of a British cameraman by Israeli troops, which contained numerous scenes of parents hysterical over the corpses of their massacred sons and daughters and children picking up rotting and burnt-out flesh in the streets.

And even if I’m allocated a programme which seems outwardly not to contain any morbid subject matter, you can guarantee I’ll get the episode with a funeral, a joke about a cancer sufferer, or the fall-out after a grisly murder. Peepshow? Jez’s uncle dies in a hospice. Martin Chuzzlewit? Mr Chuffey is inconsolable after his master’s sudden demise, whilst Mr Mould the undertaker rubs his hands in delight at the extravagant burial he has been asked to prepare. Drop The Dead Donkey? Newsreader Sally’s granny dies. The Smoking Room? An off-screen character has a stroke in the frozen food section in Asda. Between The Lines? An eighteen-year-old schoolboy hangs himself in a police cell.

I wonder if other people who are grieving find that going to work helps them to get on with their lives, to busy themselves with the mundane in order to make them forget their pain. I suppose everyone is likely to be vulnerable to insensitive comments or jokes in poor taste from callous or unthinking colleagues and people who work in the emergency services will of course face the tragedies of others on a daily basis. But I suppose I must be fairly unique in that what seems like a harmless occupation can actually turn out to be quite so personal and raw. Others who are bereaved can simply change channel or turn the television off when scenes which upset them appear: I can’t, because they are my livelihood. I work to live – I certainly don’t live to work – and now it seems I have to work to watch yet more people die.
REBECCA

The Smoking Room

It was in the press today that according to a survey conducted by ASH (Action on Smoking and Health), 73% of people in this country are for a complete ban of smoking in the workplace. This indicates that the majority of us are for the changes proposed by the Government in this autumn’s Health Improvement and Protection Bill. People may dispute these statistics but I certainly have no objections – indeed I can hardly wait for the day when I can go to a restaurant and not have the taste of my meal ruined by the table next to me’s stinging smoke billowing over my food, and it’ll be great to go for a quiet drink after work and not return home with my clothes drenched in stale swathes of Eau d’Ashtray.

However, right now my current workplace couldn’t be further removed from New Labour directives. The building where ECI resides has objected to the vast number of smokers in our office standing outside on the street with a fag in their mouths as it looks unseemly and degrading, contrasting starkly with the image that Holborn Towers wishes to portray. So instead the smokers huddle in an internal fire escape stairwell directly next to the office itself, beside a door which is opened frequently by people going to and from the staff toilets in the same area. Therefore the office stinks like a pub and smoke wafts in across my screen and keyboard throughout the day. As I am a freelancer, I am in no position to complain, and as the manager of the company is a chain-smoking Greek, any protestations would fall on deaf ears.

What’s worse is that now I can’t even escape from the haze of nicotine in my home environment. A flat in the house next door has a roof terrace situated directly outside our bedroom window and its latest residents, an ever-changing crew of indeterminate origin (but possibly North African) and unknown number that I have nicknamed the Hornsey Terrorist Cell, sit outside late at night, wheeling and dealing on mobile phones and smoking heavily. I don’t mind the noise - ear plugs can block that out - but there is nothing we can do to shut out the smoke, as it will creep through our sash windows even when they are firmly closed, which on hot summer evenings isn’t usually the case. Once again it’s not within my rights to tell these people to stop or modify what they’re doing. From the pidgin I’ve heard them shout on their phones, I doubt their English would be good enough to understand my complaint in the first place, but the fact remains that it’s their roof terrace and their space, however close to and invasive of my own it may be. In London, unless you’re very rich, you unfortunately have to put up with the consequences of living on top of other people. There’s nothing the government can do to help me, but the fact remains that my own health is being put at risk through no fault of my own.

Ironically, I spent today reviewing subtitles for the BBC Three series The Smoking Room. At least sometimes, smokers can be bloody funny too. Just not at the expense of my own lungs, thank you very much. Cancer is nothing to laugh at.

REBECCA

Ee, it's bloody awful

Re-reading some former Blog entries yesterday, I realised how completely out-of-date they sounded. Since the two minute silence there have been of course, though “unsuccessful”, more terrorist attacks on London, and one poor innocent Brazilian guy shot in the head at Stockwell station, a place I used to walk through harmlessly nearly every day when I lived in Clapham. And all of this has made the atmosphere in London change. Suddenly people really don’t like being on the Tube any more, and not just because of the 60 degree Celsius temperatures below. Eyes flicker in nervous sideways glances and people move edgily away from each other. Racist shit though it made me feel, I found myself walking off a tube train at Arsenal because there was a young, naïve-looking Middle Eastern lad sitting opposite me looking furtively at a large black rucksack on his lap, rocking slightly to and fro. He was, of course, just an ordinary bloke on his way to work, probably feeling as hot and uncomfortable as the rest of us.

The scariest thing is the concept of your average “thick copper” being given a gun to tote, shooting first and asking questions later, as if we were all living in some kind of backwards rogue state. My aunt Judy in Leeds told me a story about an Asian guy on a bus up there who was anxiously rummaging around in his bag. Instead of challenging him to say what he was doing, the driver called the police, who raced up and stun-gunned him… only to then discover that he was a diabetic frantically searching for his insulin.

In a way Leeds’s reputation as a city has been more damaged by the bombings than London’s, since the July 7th attackers turned out to be Yorkshire born and bred. The press really haven’t helped the city achieve any kind of positive image, showing film footage of rundown areas of the southern suburbs and interviewing South Leeds oik after South Leeds oik who couldn’t even string a sentence together between them. All of the council’s efforts to rebuild and revitalise the city centre have passed unnoticed and unmentioned. Leeds is without doubt a wonderful place to be, with glorious Victorian shopping arcades, the vibrant West Yorkshire Playhouse, interesting museums, beautiful countryside on its doorstep, an ever-expanding array of bars and restaurants, as well as the hospital where my grandfather introduced kidney dialysis into this country. (Bizarrely Judy ran into Sir Jimmy Saville the other day in a restaurant, and he told her that my grandfather was the greatest doctor he had ever known. When Grandpa was renal consultant at the Infirmary, Jimmy was his hospital porter.)

Leeds is also the city where my mother grew up, on Gledhow Wood Road. Somehow I don’t feel I know enough about her childhood, though I know it was happy and active. The stories I can remember in detail usually involve injury or illness of some description – of her dropping a television set on her knee on Mischief Night, of her nearly dying of appendicitis when she was four, of the hallucinations she had under anaesthetic to which she still had flashbacks, of her stuck up in a draughty attic with flu, unable to make anyone hear her cries for help, ringing a bell and banging on the floor with a stick to get attention instead. She was a tomboy who used to build dens with kids from a local council estate, much to her mother’s chagrin. She was close to her mother and less so to her father, who was away for most of her early years, firstly on his National Service and doing research into dialysis in the States thereafter. I don’t think she was too impressed when her two sisters came along – the first one, Shirley, she referred to as “Big ‘Ead”, though for the second, Judy, she chose the middle name Vivienne, which was allowed to stay. Nonetheless in later years, Mum and her friend Sue used to abandon Judy - whom they were supposed to bring home from school - outside Lewis’s department store in the City Centre, and hop on a bus back to Roundhay. Mum’s hot temper also led her to trap Judy’s head in a door when Judy disturbed her doing her homework. All three siblings went to Leeds Girls High School. Mum didn’t like it there at first as she was one of very few girls who hadn’t attended its adjoining primary school, so she arrived to find everyone already knew each other and she was the outcast stranger. Knowing Mum’s ability to talk, I doubt she remained a stranger for long, though I think she was more shy and reserved in her youth. Academically, she believed in getting by with the minimum, was crap at French and Latin (yet somehow produced a linguist daughter), loved English and History but did Maths, Physics and Geography A-Levels, before going to Manchester to study Psychology, an unusual choice of subject back then and probably one which caused the stern headmistress Miss Sikes to raise her eyebrows a good inch or two.

When Dave and I were in Leeds the other weekend, we learned of another untimely demise, that of Robin Cook, the only man who stood up in Parliament and said what the vast majority of intelligent people were thinking in the run-up to the Iraq war, and said it eloquently, movingly and passionately. Judy still has numerous photos of her election bid in her digital camera -“Here’s me with Gordon Brown,” “Here’s me outside Number Ten” - and these included several of her with Cook, who spent a day in Leeds with her on the campaign trail. She said he was the funniest man she’d ever met. There’s something uncanny about how all the great left-wing Scottish MPs who burst with honesty, decency and integrity all die too young – I’m thinking of Donald Dewar and John Smith in particular. But there’s something to be said for dying suddenly during your favourite activity - in Cook’s case, hill-climbing - in one of the most beautiful parts of the world, however traumatic it must have been for his wife and the many others he left behind. As Gordon Brown said in his eulogy to Robin Cook, “Robin climbed many mountains and he scaled great heights. When last Saturday he died suddenly in his prime he was still climbing to the mountain top.”

Cancer doesn’t allow you to die in your prime. By the end, Mum had slid down to the foot of the lowest slope, and eventually even mundane day-to-day activities struck her as tougher than a Himalayan ascent. As I’ve written before, the memories she’d like us to retain did come flooding back after she died, but as time goes on, the scenes of her illness still haunt us, particularly that parting moment in the hospice after she’d died, her mouth dropped open and slightly tortured as she’d exhaled her last, with just a small and simple bouquet of flowers lying on the chest that had destroyed her.

REBECCA