The End? For Now...

The last of my family history blogs focussing on my Mum, this one, unsurprisingly centring on her death in 1991. But the photo at the head of this is one of the happier ones I have of her in her latter days, taken two years previously at my wedding to Sally in front of the Brig o' Doon in Alloway, Ayrshire, with all her men, my Dad and her sons (from left to right) William, Sam, myself and Robert.


Not only did my Mum not teach me to cook, I also never did my own washing or ironing when I lived at home before going to university. In my Mum’s mind those were not things that a man did. And when it came to doing the washing this was not a matter of loading an automatic machine. No. My Mum resisted such new fangled devices until her dying day, and every Monday, after her job cleaning at the offices around the corner, instead of going to the VG, she got out her faithful twin tub and set about doing all the laundry for the week, retrieving dirty clothes from the various wash baskets and scattered across her sons' bedroom floors, as well  stripping and remaking all of the beds. The only exception to the Monday washday routine was my manky midweek rugby kit which inevitably needed washed before my Saturday morning game. After washing, the process of drying the clothes began, and again my Mum wouldn’t let a tumble dryer into the house. Summer and winter they were hung out to dry in the back garden, and later on various clothes horses around the house, or toasting off in the hot press and draped over the hot water tank... This was fine until one time the immersion heater went on fire incinerating my rugby shirt among other things.

During winter it would take so long to get everything dried that my Mum would still be doing ironing on a Saturday afternoon when the rest of the family had all departed after the customary Saturday soup lunch... all domestic chores had to be finished before Sunday began (to this day I feel a little guilty if I have to even clean my shoes on a Sunday) and there was many a Saturday I remember watching the then 5 Nations rugby at one end of our lounge-dining room while my Mum ironed at the other end. Psychologists tell us that because of the proximity of the cerebral cortex to the olfactory centres of the brain scent and memory are intimately connected. With me that means that any time I smell clothes being ironed that domestic picture of Mum ironing and me shouting impotently at Ireland is conjured up in my mind, almost from a third party perspective.

Which made it somewhat appropriate, if a little macabre that I also associate my Mum’s death with me shouting at an Ireland rugby match on TV. She died on 19th October 1991, and the next day, as the family and others gathered at my oldest brother’s house, Ireland were playing Australia in the quarterfinals of the Rugby World Cup. A number of us moved into the back room of the house to watch the match, and whilst it had largely been a subdued watch we approached the last few minutes of the game a few points behind. Suddenly Gordon Hamilton drove towards the line on the left corner. If he scored we would be in the lead with only a short time to go, so a number of us let out an “encouraging” roar. However, my sister in law, who was in the hallway was less than impressed, and she opened the door to the room demanding that we turn the TV off. No-one was feeling brave enough to disagree, so it went off immediately without us being certain whether he had scored or what had happened next. In those pre-internet and 24 hour news days, it was only the next day when I picked up a newspaper that I discovered that Australia had won with another score immediately after the try.

My Mum had died of the complications of emphysema, being unable to recover from the effects of a chest infection/flu that had also floored me the previous week, meaning that I missed the first full week of my ministerial training at Edgehill. Indeed I had only just recovered enough to go visit her with Sally on her birthday two days previously when we did some cleaning and ironing for her. But she was admitted to the Ulster Hospital the next day being almost incapable of breathing. She had recovered enough the following day that when I visited her that afternoon she was joking about the fact that having been unable to eat for almost a week, the first thing that she had been offered was wholemeal toast – she was a white bread woman. Her appetite had been poor for a long time. Over the previous couple of years she would have produced heaped platefuls of food for others but sat at the table with barely a saucer of food for herself, claiming that she had been nibbling away at stuff while she had been cooking, but that was a lie, one among many about her health, and at the time I was too naive to challenge her.

My last memory of her is her sitting in the corner of the ward waving a triangle of the offending wholemeal toast at me as we left. Because she had improved we agreed with my brothers that we would take it in turn visiting. I wouldn’t return that evening as I had to prepare some stuff for going back to college on the Monday, but would come up the following afternoon. However at 7.30 my 2 older brothers arrived at my door to tell me that she had taken a turn for the worse and died.

Having subsequently spent years serving in the Ulster Hospital as a chaplain, going in and out of the ward where she died, I realise now that things could have been handled better at the time. My older brothers didn’t offer me or my younger brother the chance to go up to the hospital – they thought they were protecting us, but I can see in retrospect that it contributed to a floating  cloud of anger that made my grieving more difficult. An unexpressed anger at them for treating me like a child. A fury at our family doctor who had refused to do a house call expecting my Mum to come to the surgery in Templemore Avenue 3 miles away. Anger at my Dad for not taking time off work to take her. Anger at the minister who conducted her cremation for getting her name wrong.

And anger at my Mum.

She had been a smoker from her teens, and smoke had been an ever present aroma in our house throughout my childhood, so much so that I wasn’t aware of it – my friends must have smelled me coming, although smoking was so prevalent, especially in working class communities at the time perhaps that was one of the markers of my background. The mother of one girlfriend literally turned up her nose at me when I was around. At the time I thought it was snobbery, but perhaps it was the smell of the smoke... or perhaps both. While the smell of ironing conjures up happy (if unusual) memories, the smell of cigarette smoke triggers that old anger from the time of my Mum’s death. She had been diagnosed with emphysema 2 years before, while I was still in Edinburgh, but not only had she not stopped smoking she didn’t actually fully comply with her treatment regime or tell any of us the full story of her diagnosis and prognosis. She had witnessed the treatment, decline and death of my Uncle Walter after his diagnosis of emphysema and she was determined that she wouldn’t be confined to bed with oxygen (mobile tanks were unheard of then). She didn’t tell us the full story because she knew we would have fought her tooth and nail to get her the right treatment. Did she think she was doing the best thing for us? I like to think she was. But it didn’t alleviate the anger at the time.

She was cremated at Roselawn on the 22nd October, 1991, little more than 4 months after my Uncle Walter. It was the day of his cremation that Sally and I got the keys to the first (and to date only) home we have ever owned. We had been living with my Mum and Dad since the previous October and, as I have written previously, my Dad was so keen to get us moved out that we went straight from the crematorium to load his car and trailer and move us in to our new abode. We were only supposed to be staying with them for a couple of weeks while our house purchase was finalised, but two houses fell through at the last minute and I think my Dad thought he was never going to get rid of us. It’s never ideal for an adult son to move back in with his parents after what had effectively been 6 years away (Owain take note) especially when he returns with a “foreign” wife in tow. But despite the times of tension in those 8 months we lived with my Mum and Dad, I was glad for the opportunity that it gave Sally and Mum to get to know each other. 

Mum and Dad with their first grandchild,
Heather Elizabeth in 1971.

That was not an opportunity that either of our boys had. I often comment on the conspiracy I often witness between grandparents and their grandchildren teaming up against the intervening generation, and my Mum's previous 4 grandchildren Heather (the first, and only girl), Paul, Gareth and Stuart all got to know her to one degree or other. She looked after them all at one time or other. But that isn’t an experience Owain and Ciaran have had however. Both our boys have a good relationship with their only living grandparent, Sally’s Mum Kathleen, but her distance in Prestwick precluded any day to day involvement in their lives. So as I have written before, these blogs, of which this is (I think) the final one, are in many ways a gift to them. I doubt that they have been reading them as I have posted them... I’m not so deluded as to think that they are in any way interested at present in my ramblings. But maybe in the dim and distant future, when, God willing they are middle aged men wistfully thinking about the future they might discover this in what then passes for the interweb and learn a little of where they came from. Neither my Mum nor Dad were interred in a grave nor were their ashes scattered anywhere after their respective cremations so in some ways these blogs are their electronic resting places.

And maybe they might prompt others to share other stories of generations gone by that continue to have an influence on us in the present. We are all, directly and indirectly products of our past, not only inheriting our genes from our parents, whether or not we knew them, but also picking up all sorts of learned behaviours, conscious or unconscious, that can manifest themselves long after the people and events that have caused them have almost passed out of memory, like my Mum metaphorically jabbing her bony knuckles into my ribs from time to time from beyond her non existent grave.

This is the last photo I have of my Mum, with my Dad the December before her death ready to go out to one of the occasional Dinner Dances she enjoyed so much.

Selah