Eulogy for Mum

Aged 18, The Photo Says on the Back

I don't know if Mum made a plan for life, with all her targets laid out ahead of time and the means of achieving them fully considered. Whether she did or did not, I imagine now that she was ultimately content with how things turned out; for the important stuff at the very least.

So what would her aims have been? Well, firstly, to succeed at her education, which by getting to the grammar school at Okehampton she surely did. She passed her O-levels, albeit vexed that her O-level at maths had eluded her. Then she embarked on A-levels, though she never got to finish them because of the more pressing need to earn an income.

Objective Two, I’m guessing, was to find herself a handsome young man, one who would remain a steadfast companion through the good times and the bad. And despite fishing in a modest-sized pool in rural Devon, she absolutely smashed that one. Aged 15 she met Dad sometime after a church service; then after 5-years of nurturing their relationship, they were married. That’s 1959, when they moved into a flat in Moorfield Grove, part of suburban Bournemouth.

Five years on from that, after setting up a comfortable home at Parley Road, the first of her 4 children came along (that’s me), a set completed three years later with Morris. Whether we all fulfilled her expectations, who can say. One minor disappointment was that neither of the two academic kids got into Oxford (Cambridge, for some reason, was always a cut below in her estimation) and we didn’t study medicine, either. Yes, all four of us in our different ways justified her faith in us.

Of course, life is more than just our life's work. There are interesting and fun things to be up to as well. A keen tennis fan back in the day, and a big fan of Virginia Wade, she even took me once down to the courts at Moordown park for a hit. We used the same wooden rackets she and Dad had used just a few years before. Unfortunately her gammy hip was already a brake on a repeat encounter, so it was a one-time only trip.

Allied to an interest in the social history of Devon, Mum’s overriding interest was researching and writing up our family tree, an endeavour which in those days was a long and arduous labour of love. Many, many hours scouring hefty tomes in local registries and squinting at microfiches. One of the first things she asked me when I moved to London was to spend an afternoon at the registrar of births, deaths and marriages in Holborn searching for this one and that one. Then, 25-years later, when I moved to Reading, I was asked to comb the gravestones at the main cemetery looking for the last resting place of a long gone relative (we found it, too!). 

Her final years weren't easy, the arthritis creeping up on her, each year a little worse. I don't think she made much time for doctors, who seemed unable to make much of a difference to her illness. And she certainly didn’t want to expire in a hospital bed in an anonymous ward somewhere. She achieved her last ambition to end her days in the same house that she had, with Dad, invested so much of herself over the past 63 years. Thank you, mum, for everything.