Travels Around My Mother

Off to England to see my mum so I went into town to try and get my phone fixed. It hasn't worked properly for a week, since I went to visit my aunt Rita over the border in Cavan. I let fly an enraged howl on social media about roaming charges only to find out that there are, in fact, no longer any roaming charges and that that's not the problem. My phone no longer connects to 4G. Given that until a week ago I thought the terms "data" and "WiFi" were interchangeable, I'm willing accept that the problem might be mine. Well I wasn't having a week away from Susan without soppy phone exchanges so I stormed into my local telephone shop with a head of steam, fully prepared to be told I was an idiot by a man half my age. In fact he was slightly under half my age.

"Hi. My phone doesn't work."

"Okay."

"it was fine till I went south of the border but now it wont connect to its "data". I deployed this last word as though it were sensitive scientific information, or a baffling communique shared between spies.  

"Did you buy the sim in the UK?"

"No. I bought it here. YES. I bought it here."

Its too late. I have betrayed myself as an ignorant Brexit loving middle-Englander who thinks of the "UK" as "England" and where I actually live as "Ireland". 

"I bought it in Belfast."

He thumbs the phone for three seconds. 

"Yeah. I see the problem." he says. How much is this going to cost me, I think. 

"You've turned your data off."

"I see."

"I'll just turn that on for you."

"Thank you."

"Yeah, that's working for you now."

"Thank you."

"Can I help with anything else?"

"Thank you."

"You might be due an upgrade. Do you want me to check."

"Thank you."

And Susan and I scurry off in our matching anoraks to swing by the Garden Centre in time for the early bird dinner.

Its seven twenty in the morning and I'm on a plane enjoying a breakfast wine. You know what they say: when in Rome, decline and fall. 

They play pretty good music in airports. "It's a love thing" is on. Its like the entire place has been curated by Ken Bruce. 

The plane is a bit up itself. "Emergency Floor Guidance System" is a bit much for two strips of luminous plastic. 

Hardy Perennial
 #1

I'm off to Basingstoke to see my mum or, as she styles herself after two years spent in America in the early sixties, mom. I'm going over to record her talking about her life, to find out about her time in London and America in the sixties, and about her childhood. Most importantly I don't want the truth. I have no need for objective, researchable truth. I want her version. The truth I can find out any time. I want what my mum experienced through the prism of being Annie Higgins. My mum is old. I don't have a similar record of my Dad. I don't have one for Kelly. I'd like to get something permanent. And what is more permanent than a human voice? What is more human? 

I was listening to a DVD commentary on The Wicker Man last night. The contributors were Christopher Lee (gruff, entitled, mildly paranoid, gushingly sentimental) director Robin Hardy (guarded, sneering, anxious to impress) and Edward Woodward (charming, avuncular, a jobbing actor surprised to get a hit). Halfway through it struck me that all three of them were dead. I was at a seance. And yet they weren't dead - you could hear them coughing, the breaths they were no longer taking were preserved as in amber: the DNA of their personalities. Lee's need to dominate the room, Hardy's desire to set the record straight, Woodward's baffled amusement at it all. They were alive again in that instant; I was listening to a photograph of a conversation, the past pushing into the present: three little ghosts. There is something grand about it, something transcendent. I don't know if fame has many perks - it looks pretty rotten in the main. These men are immortal in the sense that their films exist and will always exist. But this is different - this is a record of their personalities, their thoughts and opinions, their dramatic pauses, their interruptions and their bitching. Unvarnished human beings dropping the act because they're being asked to talk for two hours and no one can keep it up that long. The men behind the public personae poke through (though with Lee you sense its always bubbling away just below the surface: the ignominy at being over-looked, the horror of being typecast, the disgust at his best role being butchered - you sort of know that he was just as prickly and patrician picking up his Telegraph from his local shop, trying to talk to the shopkeeper about colonialism: "What you have to remember, Asif, is...")   

Hardy Perennial #2

I interrogate my mother on the nature of Irish Voodoo. My mother has "The Cure of the Foul Mouth" she says. She is vague about how she has it, she believes it is something that she has inherited it through the specific circumstances of her birth but isn't sure what those circumstances are. She's not entirely sure what the "foul mouth" is either - the best guess is gingivitis. "I think I have to give someone a sweet or something." she says. A sweet to fend off the foul mouth. 

My brother Barry arrives and tells her that she has the cure of the whooping cough, something she has been gifted since she married someone with the same name. "Oh yeah," she says, immediately dumping the foul mouth. "So who had the cure of the foul mouth then?"

And people tell me I'm not Irish. 

I remember my mother washing my mouth out with soap and water when I was seven because I wouldn't stop effing and jeffing. Now that's a cure for a foul mouth. She had it all along. 

Hardy Perennial #3

My conversations with my mother are a qualified success. What became clear early on was that we had quite different ideas about what was important to record. I was looking for her experiences in America, after she had left a small town in Sligo and moved to Manhattan at the height of its mid-century pomp. I wanted all that Mad Men bullshit: the horn-rimmed glasses and passes in the typing pool, the laundromats and yellow cabs, the high-balls and dive bars. And after two years she moved back to Ireland following the death of her father. What was that like? That sense of decompression must have been like the bends in reverse. Then she moved to London at the height of the swinging sixties! What was that like? 

She couldn't remember. She couldn't remember any of it. What pubs did you go to? I don't know. We went dancing. Where? I can't remember. You were in Muswell Hill in the sixties - did you ever see Ray Davies? I wouldn't know him if I saw him. 

She did have one story that chilled me to the bone: she was attacked in Alexandra Park in the sixties. She tells this with the same vague sang froid that I have come to expect. 

Mum: "I was wearing a yellow coat when I was grabbed from behind. But I didn't realise I was being attacked."

John: You didn't realise you were being attacked?"

Mum: I thought somebody was messing about."

John: "Messing about?"

Mum: "Yes, there were these Welsh lads who lived opposite the flat and they were always up to stuff. One time I saw one of them walking down the street and all of a sudden he waved and started singing a song and got down on one knee and I thought "Who's this guy?"

John: "And that's the same as grabbing someone from behind and dragging them into the woods?"

Mum: "I don't know what he must have thought."

John: "Who? The attacker?"

Mum: "Yeah. I didn't struggle at all. He must have thought I was very obliging."

John: "Bloody hell."

Mum: So he was dragging me backwards and what happened was my shoe came off and I thought "This isn't fun anymore". So I said "My shoe's come off" and he didn't stop so it was then I started screaming and he ran off."

John: Bloody hell. So your life was saved by your shoe coming off."

Mum: Maybe. 

John: "Christ. Nice work, Cinderella."

Mum: "Its hardly the same."

John: "No. So what happened?"

Mum: "Nothing. I went back to the flat and (flatmate) Greta saw me - I had mud all over my yellow coat - and she said "Right we're calling the police." But they never caught him. I never saw his face. I was bloody useless."

John: !

There's so much of my mum in this: the casual story telling style, the not making a fuss, her strange bafflement at anything happening to her at all and the strange world of the sixties she hints at. That sudden wondering what the assailant thought of her and the abrupt telling off when I make a stupid joke. The hard self-reflection at the end. "I was bloody useless". I find it heart breaking in a quiet way. 

Hardy Perennial #4

What my mother was interested in passing on to me was naming all of her relatives, who they married and how many children they had. She actually produced a series of written notes that read like an Irish Book of Chronicles: "Joseph begat Eamon begat Rosemary begat Foncey". ( I have relative called Foncey. When I thought that was funny she explained that it was short for Alphonsius, as though that explained everything.)

In the end the interviews were somewhat successful. As social history they're pretty poor. I got very little in the way of detail about where she was and what she was doing and my mother's anecdotes tend to be a bit woolly and prone to petering out. But as a recording of me chatting to my mother they're very interesting indeed. But then I would think that. I've captured it all: the bickering, my frustration, my requests for detail or local colour, all ignored. The chatting, the back and forth, her sudden quizzical "Eh?". The bit when she claims she will not continue with the recording, that's all recorded for posterity. My posterity. Its mine. 

My mother claims she has lived a very happy life: She loved her parents, she loved her husband, she loves her children and grandchildren. She is happy. She wasn't always this happy but she is happy now. She has been successful and lived a full life: she has four children and five grandchildren. She has done well.       

The pitter patter of tiny feet in a jar.