Good causes
Mum and Dad had spent two years in India in the 60s. Dad worked for an Indian newspaper. Mum made friends with a lot of poets and writers. They must have been a trendy bunch, when we went to visit in 1990 ish, I remember us going for drinks with one family and at the end of the night the guy saying “You can crash here, of course.” Crash. An unheard-of word. She said no, though… when you get older, the barriers go up, rightly or wrongly. Wrongly, because it cuts you off; rightly, because there’s no point pretending that you are still young and that avenues once open have not now shut, making your life what it is, with all its losses.
Her neighbour in Bombay as a young mother became her closest friend for the rest of her life. Mum wrote to her regularly, on paper-thin blue airmail envelopes that cost less than an ordinary letter. She had a nice, gruff husband, they were part of the old Westernised elite that wrote poetry in English and might eat beef, who would never vote BJP, but who would also never make India rich.
That was a terrible trip in 1990. At least Mum said it was terrible. We visited another friend of hers in Dehra Dun, who was still very Bohemian and who got drunk on Toddy with the servants and played loud pop music, which echoed over the valley and its hill farms, until early in the morning. I had a stomach bug, and the friend wanted to stay up late like old times, and Mum wanted to take care of me. And then on our way to the airport she realised she lost her passport and we had to rush to the consulate and get a temporary replacement, and we only just made our flight, and at the other end we almost missed the once-a-day bus back to Leominster, and I remember her running down Victoria Street after Primrose Motors, shouting “Primrose! Primrose!” as if she were a mad person, otherwise we would have been stuck in London without anywhere to stay and would have had to throw ourselves on the mercy of some kind friend at short notice, turning up in those days before mobile phones… more of the humiliation of poverty. “It was a disaster,” Mum said, though I thought it hadn’t been that bad, and had been interesting in parts. But the label stuck.
Mum had always had good causes. Now she did MIND, which ran a weekly drop-in café in Leominster for the mentally ill. People would turn up and sit around not very happily. Some were schizophrenic and some were depressed. This was before SSRIs. All were shabby and local and beaten down. My mother was extremely practical and unpretentious but there was a boundary between her and them, an invisible plate glass wall that was not made any thinner by her old clothes or always-breaking-down car. It was embodied by her Oxford accent. Accent mattered much more then; Mum could terrify almost anyone by putting on her most clipped tone and her curtest manner.
Still, there she was, doing the dishes, making the tea and organizing bingo games and other mildly pleasurable activities to take the mind of Leominster’s mentally ill off their lives.
KATS, the Kingsland Amateur Theatrical Society, put on a pantomime every year. Mum would help in various ways, painting backdrops or taking a bit part, maybe a talking animal. She loved to do dialogues and plays, and she wrote them too. Once for my birthday party she had written Simple Simon and the Ghost, and got my middle brother to act in it. Mum was the ghost, covered in a sheet, and my brother was Simple Simon. He changed the words and made it funnier… he fell off the stool and clowned around… at the end I was so pleased that I shouted “encore!”, which must have been a word I had just learned.
She tried to write plays for KATS too. Her typewriter, later computer, was in my room so I would find printouts when I came home, as well as fragments of songs on manuscript paper on the piano, which was squished awkwardly into my room by the bed. One time I found a scrap of dialogue, a scene where the cast was meant to sing:
Love and Marriage
Love and Marriage
Go together like a horse and carriage…
But in the dialogue, they kept having to change the words because of it not being modern enough, and getting muddled and not knowing what to sing or how to sing it.