When I was a child Mum seemed a fountain for making stuff. There wasn’t much she didn’t turn her hand to – good solid jumpers and tank tops, Cindy wedding dresses and Tiny Tears Layettes ( OK she got an old lady down the road to make that but she wrapped it very well) She made me a horse out of a saw bench, an old coat and a giant felt horse head – it really moved and everything – and on it I rode miles in my head – she even repaired the ancient saddle donated by our riding school. And she chiselled a Purbeck stone head and bust that is still part of that house.
It is true that other people had patterns on their jumpers and delicately coloured iced Birthday cakes – but mine were good solid greens and purples and had ‘detachable icing’ to the chagrin of such icing Queens and Mum also made fish paste sandwiches from chequerboard bread… We picked stuff in the wild in season – when it was still legal to pick things and I made up stories as we went – I became adept at ‘stickable’ icing and flipable pancakes anyway and my father built one of her loaves of bread into the wall of our shrubbery – but her tumbling planting soon swamped that with effortless colour, shapes and forms – if she plants it then it will grow and flower – I grow vegetables like Dad. She cooked and cleaned like everyone’s mums did and used a big twin tub washing machine once a week for our clothes and the rest of the week spent her evenings ironing before she wrote in a big journal every night. She can sing and play the piano and had ballroom danced as a young woman and I was not taught any of these things – I was left to get on with what ever I could do – sometimes – like the pancakes I just filled a gap here and there and I went out and rode and ran wild with my dog and pony on Purbeck’s soft hillsides and became a farmer and grew food and cooked it and wanted to be a writer – a Creative. Like my Mum – except my mum had wanted to be a Vet.
Born to a family of grafters and just before the war – by the time she left school there were hard times and as her brother couldn’t be spared to go to Uni then neither could she – the Draft saved him and liberated him for a few years but Mum got the family business – taught to drive a Taxi and to ‘man’ the petrol pumps at their garage and then to do the books till she married my Dad many years later. Like many women her age she became a housewife – they built the house from stone Dad wrestled from the ground in Purbeck and shaped with his hands and they set up home in it when I was a toddler – out of town and away from work. Not a Vet. A Mum.
My mum had me late in life at 29; Dad was about 48 and poor Mum got the ‘baby blues’ after a Hospital Christmas cesarean in 1964 – ‘Call The Midwife’ seasonal special I was not. Mummie’s Little Helpers were prescribed. A dose rate to ‘knock out an elephant’ her new GP said when I was 15 and ‘addiction’ was starting to be talked about in hushed tones as a whole generation of Zombie women rose up as the remains of their lives were laid bare. I came home from school one day to discover ‘cold turkey’ was something you didn’t just get in sandwiches on Boxing Day.
She survived and so did we – and I was a teenager anyway so it was never going to be a walk in a park. Picking over those old bones just won’t do. When Dad died when I was 22 Mum worked hard to stay put – and she took up spinning and weaving and making rugs with a talent that belied the hard work it was. When she moved to Well Cottage it became an artistic heaven in an idyllic garden and then when she moved down here she bought ‘the shed’ which we populated with her looms and wheel. Her Studio.
Today Mum walked down to the shed for the first time in over 18 months since her ill-health began when The Beast From The East attacked us – and she considered that she might like to make a rug on the big loom soon. Creativity is being alive to the possibilities in every situation no matter what we want or where we are Mum may not have gotten to be a Vet – but she made sure I became a Farmer my own way – and she made something of her life – as they used to say – and she still is.