Images of Mum

This is an image of the Duke of Wellington, not my mother, in case anyone was in any doubt. But I happened to see it the day before my mother’s funeral a few weeks ago, and the latter event was naturally at the forefront of my mind. The depiction of Arthur Wellesley at 84 years, in the room in which he died in 1852, struck a chord with me. I think the point of the picture, its piquancy, lies in a great man made small with age. I suspect anyone with a very aged relative (my mother was 94) will recognise how the horizons narrow, the world becomes a room, the room a chair or a bed, and even the chair or bed can start to look too big, too big even for the Duke of Wellington.

I have my memories of my mother at the end of her life, and Wellington in his armchair puts me in mind of them. They aren’t the images, very tiny in an armchair, that I want to be left with, but there isn’t much one can do about how one remembers somebody. However, what makes this a cheerful blog, contrary (I know) to all appearances thus far, is that another image of my mother has come along that is so arresting and unexpected — and so her, somehow — that it has done a lot to supplant the ones I’m less keen on.

I walked away from my mother’s house on the day of her funeral with two albums of photographs that I’d never set eyes on before, with a vague commitment to other members of the family that I’d digitize the contents. They cover a period from 1941 or so until my grandfather’s death in 1952, during which time my mother (born 1930) was at school and then at Liverpool University. We see in the albums, all neatly identified with captions, her elder brothers and sister, her father, and her father’s unofficial wife Alice, who was my mother’s real mother, her biological mother having become tragically addicted to painkillers and alcohol.

Oh, and images of the family dog Sam:

Suddenly, though, amid snaps at home or the seaside, I turned a page to see four obviously professional photographs of a dramatic performance. The caption is charmingly pompous:

“ALCESTIS”

DONE AT “VARNDEAN” SUMMER 1948

All the main actors are named under their image: “PAMELA FEARNHEAD” (Admetus), “JUNE JOHNSTON” (Alcestis), “PAT WICKS” (Thanatos), “MARIE JOAN GARTLETT” (Apollo), “DOROTHY BROOMFIELD” (Pheres), while “ME”, my mother, unmistakable despite the lionskin, took the role of Heracles.

It’s proving a bit of a mystery how my mother, at age 17, found herself playing Heracles in a production of Euripides in Brighton. Varndean was a girls’ grammar school in 1948, converted in 1975 into a coeducational comprehensive. My mother had been at a school in Southend, Essex, which was evacuated at the beginning of the War to Sidbury in Devon, neither of them anywhere near Brighton. We are wondering if she moved to Varndean to take her Highers, but the archivist at Varndean, Judith Johnson, hasn’t yet managed to find any reference to her, and there are other suggestions she was still at school in Sidbury at the end of 1948. The camera doesn’t lie, however, and Judith has found a report on the production in the school magazine, illustrated by one of the same photographs as my mother had put in her album. There is praise for “the robust cheerfulness of Heracles,” which is pretty spot-on as a characterization of the actor, too.

There is, as I’ve said, no way of controlling what memories of a loved one stick with you. But an image of Mum as Heracles from nearly 80 years ago has taken up residence in my head, and that’s absolutely fine.