A Tribute (Mom)

(from 2017)

In Britain she would be Mum, in much of America, Mom, and in Wales, Mam.  Mam also seems to turn up in a bad dose of the Al Jolson’s – down on one knee, black face, and a politically incorrect croon of Mammy…

I come from the UK, so Mum was the standard. My Mum passed away a couple of months ago aged 98, and those in the know made a few nice comments on this blog and back-channel.

So this is a brief review of her life.

She was born in 1919 to older parents. Her father was in his 40s, having risen to become company secretary for a very large Bradford concern. Her mother has nursed a sweetheart for ten years before he died of MS and was well into her 30s. They met during the First World War at a Gilbert and Sullivan choir practice in London, when he was down south on business and where she came from. He’d put on shows at the Bradford Alhambra Theater, and my grandmother came from a theatrical background and was a singer, accustomed to doing most the (cruel) older women parts in G and S. They clicked, they married, and along came a single daughter who was doted on and probably spoiled rotten.

Her world came crashing down when her father died suddenly when she was 13. Her mother got away from Bradford as soon as she could having never been truly accepted as a southerner, and finally settled back in London.  My mother grew up but then went back to the Bradford area by accident when training as nurse during the Second World War. (Nearly seventy years later we took her back again and met school friends she hadn’t seen since a child.)

My grandmother, when not singing became manageress of a large holiday hotel that put on concerts for residents. On a wartime family visit to join her, my mother met the compere and host and resident official comedian. He was a widower, in real life a company secretary like her father, also an entertainer like her father, and more than old enough to be her father.  Just the ticket. On his side he wanted to join a family he really clicked with and the easiest way was to marry the one unattached young female in the party. Remnants of that family still remember him with great affection, which is more than my mother did.

Hence my parents got married, both with totally unrealistic expectations.

As a child I regularly saw my father on the stage – “That’s my Dad” “Shuuush” – and both parents. They did a routine impersonating two well-known singers in the UK, Ann Zeigler and Webster Booth. They would announce that Ann and Webster had been booked, but weren’t able to come – so instead… My father would be in drag as Ann Zeigler and my mother would do a Vesta Tilley routine as Webster Booth. There was an old vaudeville act in the UK for about 50 years called Wilson, Keppel and Betty who did an Egyptian sand dance, and who kept going so long they used to change the girl playing “Betty” every seven years. My parents did a pared-down version of their act with just the two of them – I remember that too. I used to think my father’s act was wonderful (and my mother’s contribution not bad) – only later in time did I discover where he stole all his material from. (Towards the end I did some writing for him, which was probably even worse, but that’s another story).

Not that long after they married my mother embraced a religion that dealt in certainties. She still supported her husband in shows and an annual pantomime at a huge American air base near us, but now drew the line at supporting him in ladies’ night at the Masonic Temple, where he was Grand Master. Keeping up appearances and getting on in business were almost paranoid obsessions of his, and eventually he did a runner.

He used to say his first wife led him a dog’s life – he was a little careful about what he said about my mother to me – but his subsequent third marriage was equally unhappy for him. My mother summed him up as very funny on stage but a right misery off it. I suspect she had a certain prejudice by that time, but there was probably a kernel of truth in it.

Anyhow, this is about my mother. She worked full time for the religion she had adopted for several years and then as the sole breadwinner went back to nursing. She kept on nursing all her working life, ending up working in a nursing home where she was older than most of the residents. She loved her work and was nothing if not determined.

We moved from the suburbs back into London to care for my grandmother when she grew old, and there my mother met her second husband, E. I left home to do voluntary work as soon as I could in my late teens and I think that was an arrangement that suited all of us.

My abiding memory of my mother over the years was the performing. The meetings she attended gave a certain limited scope for theatricals, which she embraced with a gusto that meant you never knew what you were going to get. Quite often it wasn’t even what she’d planned – she had the let’s-drop-the-props-and-bump-into-the-scenery quality about her – but could improvise. When it was her turn on the platform we would settle down and wait for it.

There’s an anecdote I’ve told before on this blog a year or so ago, but it sort of fits here again. One of the religious meetings I attended with her was called a school. People rehearsed before an audience how they might approach different sorts of people with their message in such a way that they might get a hearing ear.

My mother was never contents with just doing it straight. She would dress up for the part. As a little lad I remember she had one special friend who we shall call Eve. They were often put on together. The audience loved it. You never knew what you were going to get. The intent may have been serious, but the results were often Laurel and Hardy.

We had one Hall on the outskirts of London that had formerly been a welfare institute for Railway workers. Using what was already at hand, it had quite a high raised platform at one end, and the backdrop was three large panels. The middle one was brought forward about three feet. It meant that you could enter from the rear, either stage left or stage right, walking around the middle panel.

So picture the scene. My mother appears from rear stage left and sits at a table with her props. She is shelling peas or something similar from that era, wearing an apron and humming a nameless ditty. Everything is lined up for the Oscars. Move over Marlon Brando, this is method acting for all it’s worth.

Eve is supposed to mime knocking on a door so that my mother can rise and greet her, invite her inside to then be disarmed by Eve’s presentation. Perhaps they had some illustration lined up that would fit the scene. Who knows?

So my mother sits there, humming away while fiddling with the vegetables, but starts looking less than pleased as long seconds go by. There are appreciative titters from the audience. They’ve no idea what this is about, but it looks like it will be a lot more interesting than the previous part of the program. My mother frowns, and in the loudest of stage whispers known to the hard of hearing mutters out of the side of her mouth - “Eve....Eve... Come on, come on...”

Nothing happens. My mother scowls. Now she could stop a naughty boy in his tracks at a hundred paces with just a glance. Next, she gets up from her table and with a look like thunder goes to investigate rear stage left.

The split second she disappears rear stage left, Eve bounds into sight from rear stage right, to be faced with a totally empty platform – no partner, and an audience now in hysterics. The look of first surprise and then panic that covered her face has stayed with me down through the years. The presentation never recovered.

The years went by and she and her husband left London and came to live near us. From this era, her granddaughter has a memory of being teamed with her – most unwillingly – in a sketch where an older person helps a young person to reason on certain matters. My mother made a big production of presenting my daughter with a notebook and pen, instructing her to write down the litany then presented. My daughter was of an age where she pretended to write and allowed her mind to wander elsewhere, only to be brought up horribly short by her grandmother demanding she read back what she had written… They used to time these playlets and ring a bell when your time was up. If ever “saved by the bell” was apt, this was it.

The group regularly put on social gatherings where different ones did their party pieces. (Some would be dire, some would be quite good, and as I became older and respectable I generally escaped by being behind a camera.) Well into her mid-80s, now widowed, my mother would recite Stanley Holloway and Moore Marriot monologues that Brits of a certain age would remember. I would be out there in worry-mode, mouthing the lines along with her in case it all went pear-shaped, but she remained word perfect and had the Yorkshire accent off to a T.

Her last years were sad. She lost her mobility, then her sight, then her hearing to a large degree. We fought and won battles with officials who can only tick boxes and watch their own backs to keep her in her own home as she wished as she went from using a motorized wheelchair in supermarkets (running down other shoppers) to a wheelchair we propelled, to permanent bed and carers around the clock, waking up only to be fed.

Everyone in the area knew her. Her very direct old-school proselytizing was well known, and even though neighbours didn’t share her views they would never turn her away and had a huge affection for her, and some attended her memorial service along with the carers.

For me, a history and a lot of memories.