Carrying The Memories

 

My parents on their wedding day, 80 years ago. September 9th, 1942

As we age, memories are often in solitude. Those that share them are gone, or as the eldest of six, I carry some of the better memories of my parents alone as all their siblings and friends have passed on and my siblings knew different parents once we moved to the city and five more children entered the picture. My mother died in her fifties, having been sick for five years with her youngest only just turned fourteen.

I first knew my parents as a young couple and I was the only child for well over three years. I do have an astonishing memory, both in detail, location and events. And I often recall whole conversations. They were avid cyclists and my dad had built a special seat for me on the crossbar of his bike. And I remember the picnics and excursions so very well and going fast down hills with dad making fierce noises. Their joy was to make me laugh and I delighted in their antics.

They also were part of a choral society and often held rehearsals in our flat we had in a small town in East Cork. I would hear them at night singing wonderful songs of old as they both had fine voices.

They were both avid readers and instilled in me a life long love of books.

The years were post war(called The Emergency in neutral Ireland) and rationing of just about everything was the norm.

Relatives would drop in regularly, my mother’s parents and three of her sisters and two of my father’s sisters who lived in the town and they loved to show me off in the various homes they would drop in on. That was done then. No calling ahead, everyone just dropped in in that phone-less era. And everyone always had treats for visitors, hard as they were to come by in the post war years.

Dad was very well known as he was the town clerk then and we couldn’t walk down the street without someone greeting him and arranging to go to various football and hurling matches on the weekend.

I continue to be astonished at the complex music they would sing together, sometimes just for me, sometimes when a crowd was in and music was the accompaniment to the evening’s socialization.

And I can recall the lyrics and melodies of their repertoire so easily and hear their voices as if it was yesterday and not 75 years ago.

Here's one they would sing together:

My father was a great fan of Richard Tauber who sings it here.

Inheritance

From my mother I inherited thick hair and good skin.

I also inherited her love of music, live theatre and reading along with a passion for needlework: sewing, knitting, crochet and embroidery. She was skilled in all 4 of these disciplines, I in but 2 but she would tell you that I exceeded her ability in those two: knitting and sewing as I took them further into designing.

She was a woman of her time, born in rural Ireland in 1914, traumatized by the explosion of her village barracks ("it shook the ground I was playing on") in 1920 when she was 6 resulting in her becoming a life long Irish republican. She was self-educated and was managing a large grocery store when she married at 28, thus thwarting any further ambition of her own {"he wore me down"). It didn't kill her thirst for learning and she could converse readily on the novels of Charles Dickens. She took advanced cooking classes and singing lessons when she was in her forties.

She found it easy to make friendships, her outgoing personality and overall petite prettiness and "style" attracted even strangers drawn to share their confidences with her.

She knew quality from a mile away and would advocate owning only a little quality versus a lot of cheap trash. She loved roses and hydrangeas and field mushrooms and blackberries and the sea. No matter the temperature of the water, she'd take one sight of the sea and before we could blink, her ever-ready swimsuit was on her and she'd be diving in, breathless, waving her arms telling her shivering children: "it's lovely, you'll warm up in no time!"

She was a true gameball as we Irish say.

From my father I inherited bright blue eyes and one of those faces that shows visible displeasure when things are "not going our way."

I also inherited his love of words, new ones, old ones, complicated ones, words with multiple meanings and interpretations, words of obscure etymologies.

He gave me my first library card when I was 4 (he taught me to read) and our routine, every night after tea till I was at least 14, was that I'd sit on the arm of his easy chair and we'd complete the Evening Echo crossword together. I learned about newts and tors and bitterns. Later we played Scrabble and when we traveled together in later years we packed the Scrabble board for our after dinner game. Once, he bought a beautiful hand crafted turntable in a prison workshop in Maine which I still use for Scrabble.

He taught me knitting - he had 5 older sisters and had observed them. I remember his patience one time in a wool shop in Camden when I took hours poring over obscure old knitting patterns talking to him about Guernseys (ganseys) and Jersey fishermen sweaters and Aran patterns and Shetland wedding ring shawls and convent lacework.

I asked him once what he would have done with his life if he had the resources. He answered without hesitation: "I'd have created new varieties of roses."

I was gobsmacked.

And then I realized, for the very first time, how he and my mother were drawn to each other.

Post Mortem Explosions

Eye catching title, yeah?

But, big but, this is exactly what happens in families after the death of the last parent.

Two friends, within a very short space of time, have lost their surviving parent. Both parents had lived full and interesting and long (90+) lives.

So fine and dandy, lovely services, eulogies, songs from the grandkids, flowers, both were smiley kinds of funerals and even involved simultaneous broadcasting to the far-flungs in America and Australia. Oh, the wonders of the e-world. Long may it continue.

So there you go and the dust settles and the earthly bits and pieces and bank accounts and all things: built, gilded, diamonded and chinaed of the dearly beloveds are divided up and tied with a ribbon and dispensed.

Oh, not so fast there.

In the first case, the sole heirs, a brother and sister, are joint executors. But it turns out Bro had had his father sign a power-of-attorney and had been pillaging the estate for years prior to the death. So there wasn't much left. Sis had suspected some financial shenanigans but when the spoils were finally divided she (an accountant by trade)finally confirmed the mountainous level of the embezzlement. So what does one do? Sue your only sibling through a welter of legal costs she couldn't afford? Call the police? No, she took her measly cheque, pondered the options, and let it go along with the resolution to never, ever speak to her brother again.

In the second case, the mother had willed that her estate be divided evenly between her six children. But a sibling had been living in the family home and now refuses to leave. My friend, single, getting on in years herself and with very little in the way of financial reserves, needs her share of the money that the sale of the family home will give her. Sibling has emptied the bank accounts as co-signer of the deceased mother's bank accounts ("for ongoing household expenses"). One of the other siblings, a solicitor and the executor (conflict much?), sides with the squatter. The other three don't want to "get involved" and as privileged males "don't need the money."

My friend is reasonable, has told squatter-sibling that they can remain in the house for a reasonable length of time (a year or two) or buy her, my friend's, share out either solo or along with the other siblings. Squatter has managed to save a substantial sum by living rent-free with mum for the past 10 years - claiming government subsidies for mother care along with a monthly cheque out of mum's account and working part time for another sibling.

Squatter-sibling has now severed all contact with my friend and has threatened suicide if "tortured" by these demands any further.

Neither of my two friends have the financial resources for lawsuits.

All this is par for the course. My own family of origin had its own Hiroshima after the death of my father. And there are still occasional reverberations all these years later.

Much as we try, nothing is ever clear cut and amiable in the brutal finalization of death.

My Rules of Life---Part Three

Photograph of Philip Larkin by Jane Bown



DO NOT BLAME MY PARENTS

I used to. With my handy hatchet in hand, I'd scream to the skies I wasn't loved enough, was abused, wasn't encouraged, was laughed at for my aspirations. Wasn't good enough, was too tall, didn't look like them, was a bad example to the younger sibs. And on and on and on and on. I even bored myself with it all. Until it dawned. The only dysfunction around was the face staring back from the mirror. I could remain a perennial victim or I would take full responsibility for my life.

And that was a process in itself, a long process, still ongoing. And now and again a cloud of blame settles over me and the finger starts to point outward and I am reminded that when that index finger points out, lo and behold, there are three fingers pointing back at me.

And I read, and re-read, this powerful poem by Philip Larkin, I am a major fan of his work.

This be the Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

— Philip Larkin (1922 - 85)