Lament for My Mother, Florence

‘When I was a child, I spake as a child. …. My mother was angry when  I came home from secondary school with a grade D in maths class. Raging with frustration and fear, she railed, ‘You’ll never go to university. You’ll be just a secretary. What will you do with your life?” Good question. I had no idea what I’d do with my life. All I knew was wanting a life unlike hers, constricted as it was by not enough money and too many tasks. Along with working as a bookkeeper and rearing me and my sister., she tended her sick parents and kept my labourer-father from totally giving in to recurring despair.   It was a dismal time, that long-ago childhood. Would those long-ago turbulent memories would leave me. But childhood memories  don’t go away. My internalized mother doesn’t depart. Sometimes it’s as though I never left our drab living room with its large black and white television set, red bound copies of  Encyclopedia Brittanica and Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, the green plush sofa with scratched wooden armrests, lamps that never fully lightened the yellow-beige interior. Hot Florida days when I had to water the lawn, trudging in the humidity in my schoolgirl shorts and badly cut hair. 5 o’clock meals of frozen peas and overcooked beef. The sight of medical paraphenalia in my grandmother’s back bedroom. What did I learn from my mother? That  I was smart though not pretty; my curiosity was a trial and my uneven temperament was cause for dismissal—but that something better was out there and I had to look for it. My mother gave me life but she couldn’t give me succor. My mother gave me goals but she had no balm for sadness. My mother wanted love but  knew I wouldn’t give it. My mother bade me go. I released her hand and left home. What can I give her now? Of course, I’m asking what to give myself as forgiveness for the hateful indifference I felt towards her. There’s a notion that the child can redeem the parent, his or her life making up deficiencies that came before. I don’t know that I’ve redeemed my mother’s life. When I knew her, whatever dreams she had were squashed by circumstance. But though she had so little, she asked for even less. As if to atone for her shortcomings as a parent, she was oddly self-sufficient and sought little from me or my sister. It came across as selfishness and disinterest in us. It still feels that way. She was never one to praise or delight in her daughters’ triumphs or soothe them in their pains.  As I reflect now, trying to understand what a child could not, perhaps her withholding was a way of protecting herself and us. Perhaps her mind whispered ‘don’t ask anything of Rose or her sister Maxine, nor of anyone else. Get on with it. Do it alone.’ What’s the point I want to make? Primarily it’s to acknowledge what I think is a truism: we never completely leave our mothers ,no matter how educated nor accomplished we are. If childhood is remembered positively, those memories are filled with pleasant longing, a desire to re-visit the past, . If childhood was fraught, we seek to obliterate it or at least  loosen its hold on how we see ourselves. The desire to soften the harshness of a bad childhood, to run from it, can smudge the adult as she struggles to grow up. Whether we wish to return to childhood figments or rub them out, our mothers remain until they vanish with our final leavetaking. Perhaps that’s why I want to atone for not loving my mother, whose name was Florence. I fear not being loved by those who may, at least for a little while, remember me.

Rose Levinson, Autumn 2018

Crossing Borders

Twenty-four hours on deck, under a scorching sun through the day and a warm starry sky at night. Waving goodbye to Marseille and anticipating an unknown land across the Mediterranean. Cheeks burned by the sun and the strong wind off the sea. Hard deck, lack of sleep, picking a way gingerly in the dark through mute heaps of sleeping people. Going below deck to find an overflowing toilet, an ordeal that had to be endured. Morning broken, the sun returned, the first signs of human habitation coming into view. The ancient ruins of Carthage stretched up the bank on one side of the ship as it nosed its way down a long narrow waterway towards the dock at La Goulette, the port of Tunis.

Fifty-five years ago, I was a student, little travelled, finding my way with a clutch of fellow students, across France and the sea beyond to Africa, heading for Tunisia to attend an Arabic language course at the Institut Bourguiba des Langues Vivantes. In port, we disembarked, part of a heaving crowd glad to be liberated from the smell, the crush and the flies. Dragging bags down the ramps and stumbling as we went, we made our way along the quayside, through dilapidated marine warehouses, towards a line of customs officials standing behind a rough assemblage of trestle tables ready to receive and inspect our baggage.

One signalled me to place my suitcase in front of him. He opened it and then closed it perfunctorily. With a few words in French, he pulled it off the table and ordered me to go with him. I followed meekly, looking round for my companions at the same time. But amidst the jostling crowd they were nowhere to be seen. The customs officer took my arm and led me away, right out of the docks, going through a big gate in the middle of an impregnable fence of iron railings. He hailed a taxi. Fear began to take hold and in halting French I asked him to let me go back. He shook his head, with a peremptory “Non, venez avec moi ”. Holding insistently onto my elbow, he pressed me into the tiny cab. We drove off.

Eventually the driver stopped outside a modern block of flats. I followed my captor out of the car. He took my case. I thought, this is the moment I disappear from public view for ever. We went into the building and took a lift to a flat on the third floor. He opened a door and took me in. A young woman, casual in European clothes, greeted my captor in Arabic. They offered me sweet mint tea. Later we left the flat, taking another taxi across the city. Finally, the taxi stopped and we alighted, going into another building, older and more traditional. Marble floors, cooling the air and masking the heat of the day. They knocked on a door, a woman in a long, flowing dress, her hair bundled up in a scarf, greeted us and ushered us in. Another young woman peered round an open door nearby, smiling and inviting. It must be, I feared, a brothel.

Again I was offered sweet mint tea, accompanied by a small plate of dates. Several other women and now young children appeared. Smiles, stares and tentative pats from them all. Food later that evening, then a mat on the floor by shuttered windows, sleeping alongside the females of the house in a long, airy withdrawing room. Next day, the customs officer left for work and, later, two other males of the family proudly showed me Tunis. And the day after that, they took me to the hostel where my fellow students greeted me with relief. Six weeks later I gained my certificate in Arabic – no problem. But I never knew the reason why all this had happened.

Gillian Dalley, Autumn 2018

Out with the Old and in with the New?

Gillian Dalley, Summer 2018

We’re told that it’s good to move on, don’t live in the past and keep up with the times and I’ve been trying to observe that maxim. To that end, I started on the cupboard in my study this morning – planning to clear shedloads of files dating back some 20 years and more. But it turned out to be less a salutary and invigorating exercise and more a bittersweet angst-laden encounter between past and present. It made me sit down and think hard.

I’d forgotten how experienced – and even competent – I had been in my earlier life. The realisation came as a surprise. Although I’ve written my CV many times, rehearsing the catalogue of posts I’ve held, the lists of articles, reports and books I’ve written, and organisations I’ve worked for, I’ve never really dwelt on their significance as a record of a ‘career’. But coming across the written record of those times now made me see things rather differently. The hard evidence – the research papers and other publications, the minutes of countless meetings chaired or attended, all types of other work-related ephemera – sat there in sealed boxes waiting to be shredded. While I had remembered much of it in the abstract, the detail surprised me. Reading some of it now, 20 years on, I confess I was impressed. What – me? I asked.

But that led to greater reflection. I realised it’s been a part of me that I’d consigned to the back of my memory – perhaps associated with the growing public invisibility that most women in their seventies experience (and writing those words now alerts me to this absence of a presence). Those younger than us are unaware of our past, our experience, our views, our value. We are started on the slope to oblivion, unable or unwilling to knock sharply on the table and say – hang on! stop! listen to us – our lives may have something to tell you and our knowledge and insight may be useful! Scientific progress may be built by standing on the shoulders of giants according to Newton – but, who knows, at a less exalted level, even on the bent backs of old women.