When my mother came to stay, we played a game of who could
predict the initial conversation. Before mum greeted us or said hello she would
complain about dad’s driving – mainly that he didn’t want to stop so she could
go to the loo. Then she would say she had a terrible headache and could she
have some paracetamol? We got in the habit of having the painkillers ready in
the kitchen and being ready to steer mum out of the doorway so dad could come
in out of the cold and/or rain and bring in the luggage. We would have to
interrupt the monologue to give them a welcoming hug. (My mother never hugged
or kissed us. Although sometimes she might offer us a cheek to kiss).
Almost before she took her coat off, mum would want to
change or rearrange our house. “Why don’t you put that there?” “Why don’t you
get different curtains?” etc. Before they arrived, we would guess which room
mum would criticise first. Shortly before our daughter, Kate’s wedding, mum decided
that they would to arrive a week early so that dad could paint the dining room.
They felt it needed doing. As we were
rather busy with wedding arrangements and didn’t want them in the house for a
whole week before the wedding, we declined the offer, with the usual results.
When Jan was cooking, mum would come into the kitchen and offer
to “help”. This would take various forms: a monologue criticising someone or
other, asking why Jan was doing whatever she was doing or making suggestions
such as adding bicarbonate of soda into the water when cooking greens to make
them a brighter colour. (This practice has been shown to destroy the vitamin C
but who would dare tell mum that?) It was a great relief, once our children
were born, to say that it would be so helpful if mum could play with her
grandchildren.
Mum’s monologues could continue for hours on end. Dad would fall
asleep and snore loudly. Our eyes would keep closing and our heads lolled but
she ploughed on regardless. One Christmas she sat at the dining table from
Christmas dinner all the way through to Christmas tea without repeating herself
once. (Or stopping to watch the Queen’s Speech.) Needless to say we were
exhausted.
Of course, we’ve had our fair share of being taken over. We
once made the mistake of asking them to look after the house whilst we were on
holiday. Our oldest daughter in
particular was very dubious about her grandparents having a key to the house
whilst we weren’t there. She was convinced that nanny would rummage through the
bedrooms in our absence. Before leaving,
she attached cotton threads from the door to the frame, almost invisible to the
naked eye. When we got back, we discovered the threads had been broken. We
didn’t say a word but mum complained bitterly that we hadn’t trusted her. She
had found the thread as she’d open the bedroom door! There was another
discovery on our return; to my horror, mum had dug up the beautiful forsythia
hedge I had been cultivating and replaced it with a lalandi! (At a metre a year
it would have soon overrun the garden and blocked out all light.) By this time they
were living 10 miles from us in a small bungalow. I used to dig up a lalandi a
few at a time, pot them up, and take them over to them for their garden!
Eventually I was able to replant the forsythia hedge.
When my dad was admitted to James Paget Hospital, we offered
to collect mum from sheltered housing in Stalham (home number 40) so she could stay with us to be
convenient for the hospital.
During the evening, a call came from the hospital to say
that dad was so ill he was not expected to last the night. We rushed to be at
his side. He was unconscious and lying quite still in bed away from the other
patients and near the Ward Sister. It was an extremely emotional and
distressing time. My sisters phoned from the four corners of the world. I held
the phone to his to his ear so that they could say their tearful goodbyes. Mum
and I sat beside him throughout the night holding his hand. At about 7am, he
opened his eyes and said, “What are you doing here?” And so began his slow
journey to recovery. (He was to live another 6 years, sustained on his usual
diet of cigarettes, chips and donuts.)
After a few days of staying with us, Jan, my wife, asked if
it would be helpful if we put a grab rail on the wall above the bath to make it
easier for mum to get in and out. This was a red rag to a bull. Mum took this
as an insult and replied “How dare you say I’m smelly and need a bath!” All of
Jan’s counselling and peace-making skills were of no avail. When mum complained
to me, I stood up for Jan and said that she was kind and caring and didn’t go
round insulting people. The upshot was mum walked out. We had no idea of where
she was, until she phoned later that night asking for a lift back from the
hospital. We endured an “Ice-age” for the rest of her time with us.
Throughout her stay with us Mum kept “feeling ill” with
unspecified symptoms. We ended up taking her to our doctor to discover that despite
our offers of help, she’d insisted in putting her week’s medication in her pill
box herself. Two of the pills were very similar and she’d managed to double
dose on one and not have any of the other!
There were another couple of visits to the GP with her
“feeling ill” with unspecified symptoms. She called for an ambulance twice
while we were out at work but they couldn’t find anything wrong and wouldn’t
take her to hospital – much to her annoyance. One Sunday afternoon, she felt
unwell while visiting dad. Jan took her down to A & E and much to her
delight she was kept in overnight. I sometimes think that mum would have liked written
on her tombstone, “See, I told you I was ill”.
Dad was so seriously ill that mum wanted to keep herself busy
to blot out the worry. We tried giving her safe things to do like the ironing
and mending. But that wasn’t enough – when we came home from work one day, we
were horrified to find that she had found the step ladder and had been cleaning
windows despite her tendency to have “dizzy spells”. Another day, when Jan
started to cook the evening meal, she noticed an awful smell and that the
numbers had disappeared from the dials on the cooker. Mother had cleaned the
cooker using toilet bleach!
One day we received an early morning phone call from Jan’s
dad to say her mother had been rushed into hospital. My mother assumed Jan
would be going to Devon and that she would be in charge whilst Jan was away. Jan
came downstairs to find mum had already taken over and had taken out the
contents of a large cupboard and put them all over the kitchen floor ready to
re-arrange them. Jan decided not to go to Devon but to stay and to keep an eye
on mum and help keep me sane. Through
prayer, trying to see the funny side of things and hiding the bleach, we
survived the 7 weeks of mum’s visit until dad came out of hospital.
The day he was due to be discharged I went over to their
flat to check things were OK and ready for his return. When I opened the front
door I was greeted with the most awful smell I have ever experienced in my
life. With a handkerchief over my nose I made my way to the freezer. I opened
it and a mass of decomposing rotting flesh slithered onto the carpet. For some reason, the last thing my mother did
as she followed my dad out to the ambulance to be taken to hospital was to turn
off the freezer! I spent a good two
hours suppressing the urge to vomit as I cleared up the remains of her bulk
buying of meat and then washed the carpet.
Very rarely did my parents stay to
the end of a holiday when they came to visit. There was always a reason why
they had to go home early. One Christmas they arrived on Christmas Eve to stay
with us. We had bought in all the food, goodies etc. And then on Christmas Day
evening my mother announced that they wouldn’t be staying. They left after breakfast next
day leaving us with a mound of uneaten food. We packed up and took ourselves
and everything else off to Jan’s parents in Devon.
2003 in Scotland (at home 37),
they were feeling unhappy. So we arranged that we would fly up to Scotland and
collect them and bring them back to Suffolk for a holiday. We bought them
return tickets. The day before we were all due to fly back, they announced that
they’d changed their mind and weren’t coming after all, leaving us with the
unused airline tickets. In the end, this proved a blessing, because even though
they weren’t coming with us they gave us two large suitcases of things they
didn’t want. (An iron, pots and pans, bottles of liquor, chocolates, etc.) When we got to check-in, we discovered that
we were way over Ryanair baggage limit and that they were going to charge us
the earth to take it all on board. I discovered that it was
cheaper to have the baggage allowance than to have a refund for their seats. It
was either let me use mum & dad’s unused
baggage allowance or I would unpack the entire contents of the suitcases at
check in. Strangely, my sister Pauline did exactly this at Gatwick airport,
once.
As hostess herself, my mother would want to cook us special
treats – all of which were totally unhealthy and laden with high cholesterol
and artery blocking ingredients like butter, fat, white sugar, lard and
suet. (The fact that my father survived
65 years of this sort of diet was a testament to his constitution.
Saying that you liked something she’d cooked was a risky
business because she would then keep on cooking it. If you dared to say, “no
thank you”, or “no more” her self-esteem would nose dive and she would go into
a deep and long lasting silent sulk.
Big hearty cooked breakfasts would be produced and as she
placed it before me she would whisper in my ear, “I know Jan doesn’t cook for
you at home”. Among my mother’s other
recipes my wife didn’t cook at home were:
- Bread puddings that had been mixed in the washing up bowl.
- Spotted Dicks that had been boiled in a tea towel used for drying dishes, and then served with lashing of golden syrup.
- Greens that had been boiled until all the flavour had been removed. (My mother would then drink the “Greens Water” as a health drink.)
- Apple turnovers: 90% puff pastry and 10% apple
- Potato turnovers: 90% potato and 10% puff pastry.
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