For those who don’t speak the Queen’s English, Mum mean the same as Mom. And here is her picture – she’s the one hundred year old wrinkled one in the wheelchair with the big smile. The photo was taken by a local newspaper for her birthday.
My Mum, aged 100 years.
She is smiling and happy for all to see, but inside she is as mad as a hatter because the chap had turned up before she got into her birthday finery. Great self control.
Like lots of old people, she spent the last years of her life in a care home. She could just about manage to get washed by herself but stiffening arthritic shoulders obliged her to depend on others to riffle through her two vast wardrobes for her to choose the matching outfit of the day and help her into it, together with matching junk jewellery and/or scarf.
Apart from the two hips replacements – the product of osteoporosis and general lack of calcium in the years following the last war – she was as fit as a flea. She played golf twice a week until she was over 75, and only gave it up when she broke both wrists. Several times in her life, she got a hole in one much to my father’s disgruntlement.
Mum had been trained as a tailoress, but she got married too young to practise. She made all our clothes and some magical ball gowns for my sister and me. She covered the furniture, made the curtains, and she recycled clothes (I had a much admired Harris tweed suit made from my father’s golfing plus fours).
She spent all Saturday baking for the week, and cleaned, polished and vacuumed (those were the days before the Hoover). She did mountains of washing on Mondays in an old tub boiler with a mangle and hung all the big white sheets on the line in the winter sun. If it rained, she piled them on the clothes horse in front of the fire – our only source of heat.
She didn’t seem to be a brilliant cook until I went to friends for tea and realised that their Mums never made cakes and that there were only a couple of biscuits for tea. Mum’s Christmas cooking has never been surpassed by anyone. I am not talking turkey here because it was just a British traditional Christmas dinner, although a fresh farm turkey would have been sent over from Ireland by relatives who knew we couldn’t get much meat.
Mum’s greatest triumphs were her Christmas cake and her Christmas pudding which she started making at the end of September, having saved up all the currants, sultanas and raisins throughout the summer from the ration coupons. As neither of my aunts could bake or cook, they relied on my mother.
She made at least three huge Christmas cakes (there was always one for my birthday in January) and maybe six puddings. The puddings were all boiled up in the washing machine boiler and, when they had cooled, were put to drain on the wooden draining board next to the sink. We didn’t keep them in the pantry because we often had mice, so we put them in the cupboard at the bottom of the dresser. Our cake was often stored, well wrapped, in a suitcase under the bed. It was hawked out every so often to have rum poured into it. I never tasted a cake as good as my mother’s. In those days, too, you had to make your own marzipan. Sooooo tasty! My Mum wasn’t any great shakes at icing so the little model Santa and reindeers had to battle through Canadian style snow-drifts on the top of the cake.
She had a great sense of humour – which she needed in our family as we were always teasing her. The telephone was a bit of a mystery to her at first and she would hold it at arms length and bellow into the speaker. She couldn’t get to grips with those new-fangled automatic identity photo machines either, and the varied views of the top of her head as she adjusted her hat, not knowing the identity photo was being taken, were passed around the family for years amidst gales of laughter.
Mum aged four with her parents, circa 1905
Like many women of her generation, she was exceptionally innocent and frowned at “dirty” jokes, even though she didn’t quite understand them. She was disgusted at bad language. One evening not long after my father died, all the family was gathered around the telly watching some intensely educational scientific programme. At some point, it dawned on us that the programme was about treating sterility in the male.
As sperm wriggled feverishly across the screen (fortunately in black and white), we all shifted uncomfortably in our seats, waiting for our mother to march across the room and turn the telly off, as she had been know to do. She must have remembered as she gazed at the screen that my father had been passionately interested in entomology and had spent years making his own slides to view under the microscope. That’s where I saw my first bee’s knees and fly eyes. Mum exclaimed, obviously ignorant of what was actually on the screen, “Oh! That’s what your Dad used to show me under the microscope.” While my brother and brother-in-law and I snorted into our cups of cocoa and tried to stop convulsing with laughter, my sister rose to her full height and proclaimed, “Mother, don’t be so ridiculous, and don’t ever say that again.” Mum was quite bemused but ever after she used to get shirty if we said. “Hey, Ma! Tell us what Dad showed you under the microscope!” because she knew she had said something wrong but didn’t know what.
She loved her food — and my fancy French cooking reminded her of her mother’s cooking, I think only because my mother’s family had always had goose for Christmas because they raised it in their back yard. She came over several times to see my French penfriend’s family and ate everything with great gusto. She particularly loved the French bread and cruzos which was her best rendition of croissants. Languages were not her strong point.
When my penfriend’s family came over to Wales to visit, she made one of her copious lunches and we all managed, with my French, to keep the Entente Cordiale going. As we were having coffee after lunch, we were startled to hear from the kitchen the two mothers speaking the same language.
“Vous voulez que je lave ou que j’essuie?”
“No, no, dear, it’s all right. I’ll wash and you wipe.”
“Ou est-ce que je mets ca?”
“Just put it in the cupboard up there, dear.”
“Celui-ci?”
“No, dear, the next one.”
Talk about Entente Cordiale!
She’d had two hips replacements, one of which went wrong because she was too frightened of the nurse to ask for help. So she fell trying to get out of bed herself to go to the loo, entailing a displacement of the new hip joint. The result was that one leg was shorter than the other and walking was painful.
She lasted quite a long time in her flat with the help of Social Services and family visits. She had to sleep downstairs and have a chemical toilet installed under the stairs. We insisted that she have one of those alarms around her neck, in case she fell again.
One time when we went to see her, she recounted, amid giggles, what had happened when she went to the toilet. Like a lot of older women, she wore a corset with suspenders, surmounted by a vest and a petticoat. Because the corset arrangement left a gap between its end and her stocking tops (two pairs – one elastic and one other), she felt obliged to wear two pairs of drawers. One pair was ordinary panties and the other was long-John-type bloomers.
Imagine the hassle in going to the loo. You have to heave up the tweed skirt, ditto the petticoat, ditto the long vest, and tuck them under you chin. Then as you crouch, you ease down the bloomers and finally the panties. Just as she was about to perch her prodigious posterior on the chemical loo, she heard a voice booming, “Are you all right, Tess?” She was momentarily terrified as she thought God was calling her until she realised that, with all the stuff trapped under her chin, she had inadvertently pressed the alarm and it was the fire brigade to the rescue! We cackled over that for quite some time.
She went into the old people’s home when she was about 94 and made quite a few friends there. She really didn’t want to go on suffering and asked me several times to help her die. I said I couldn’t because it was illegal and jollied her along to her 100th birthday by saying she would get a card from the Queen. She did and was very proud of it. We had a huge family party, organised by my sister, and friends came from all over. She had hundreds of birthday cards and was amazed, seeing some people who had come from so far to greet her on her birthday, some she hadn’t seen for 20 years or more.
About two months later, I had a call from the residential home. Mum was refusing to get out of bed. I went over to see her and she asked me again to help her depart in peace. I had to refuse, but I said that if she stopped eating, she would surely die. This is what she did, plus stopped taking her medication. It took her over a month.
She deserved better. She was a good and faithful Mum.
Photo Credits
“Mum on her 100th birthday” © Stratford on Avon Herald
“Mum aged four with her parents, circa 1905”
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Thank you for this article, Julia, I found it very touching. Aspects reminded me of my own mother and grandmother. My grandmother corsetted until she was in her late 70s. Always proper, she wouldn’t speak to anyone unless she had been introduced.
She was living in a retirement home on Fairfield Road in Victoria, when I was around 6. On her way home one day her bloomers fell down as she was crossing Cook St. and she didn’t miss a beat. She just kicked them up into her hand, popped them into her bag and kept on walking. My mother, who witnessed the incident, was both mortified and proud.
I very much enjoy your articles.
Margaret