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Re-reading some former Blog entries yesterday, I realised how completely out-of-date they sounded.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