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First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Doubleday

an imprint of Transworld Publishers

Copyright © Susannah Walker 2018

Cover design by R. Shailer/TW

Susannah Walker has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

All photographs courtesy the author except for Eaglesham House, which is reproduced courtesy of Historic Scotland. Line illustrations © Viv Mullett, the Flying Fish Studios

Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781473552784

ISBN 9780857525406

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BY THE TIME my mother died, her unhappiness had taken on solid form in the state of her home. The once-pristine Georgian cottage, as neat and regular as a doll’s house, was now swamped in papers and rubbish. Pipes had burst and the roof had leaked, but the holes where the water had poured through were never fixed. Rot and mould were spreading across carpets and walls; spiders’ webs draped down from the ceiling; the furniture had been ruined by damp and mice. Regardless of what she had – or had not – done for us when she was alive, it still fell to me and my brother to sort the mess out.

I took this on as the necessary duty of a daughter, but at the same time raged at her selfishness. Above all, I felt devastated that the intelligent and acute woman that I’d known, and sometimes loved, could have tolerated living in such wretched misery. As I cleared her house, the questions kept rising. How had this happened? Why couldn’t I have helped her? One thought haunted me above all others. Who had my mother really been? I had no idea, in part because of her depression but also because she was my mother and so I was always standing too close to see. I was never going to turn her into an ideal mother, that I knew for sure. But nor did I want to tear her apart for failing me. I wanted to find out what kind of person she had been, and what parts of herself she had passed on in turn, but I was afraid that I had left this far too late.

Slowly, as I sifted through the heaps of rubbish and treasures, I began to realize that she might have left me the answer after all. I could find my mother at last in the things she had left behind.

prologue: red glass bird

THE RED GLASS bird sits on the bookshelves behind me, where it lives as a reminder of my mother. For many years it sat on the side table in her sitting room, and now she is dead it has passed to me. It’s not a sentimental heirloom, as I don’t know how she came to own it in the first place. A decorative paperweight, the kind that was produced in tens of thousands during the fifties and sixties when she was setting up home with my father, it might have been a Christmas present or a souvenir from someone’s Italian trip. It might even have been a gift from my father himself.

Pieces like this turn up at car-boot sales and in kitschy antique shops all the time; it’s nothing special. The ruby-red core is enclosed in a thick layer of clear glass, which has been stretched out in points to form the bird’s wingtips and tail, each as sharp as the day it was made. It’s heavy too, and when I hold it in my hand I can’t help thinking that it would make an excellent weapon if I ever find myself cornered. The elongated wings remind me of a swallow, except being a paperweight isn’t much of a job for such a flighty species. Perhaps it’s just a bird in general: an ornament, nothing more.

I have no other associations or memories that go with the bird. All I can tell you is that it used to belong to my mother, and now it’s mine. But that’s why I like it so much. Most of the things my mother left behind were far more complicated.

For most of my life I’ve been worried about what I might inherit from my mother. A complex and unhappy woman, she’d had a childhood of losses and sadness. She married hoping for a new start but her first child, a daughter, died at a day old. After my birth, two years later, she had deep postnatal depression, then again when my brother was born, followed by several years during which I refused to sleep and my brother was repeatedly and seriously ill. My parents split up and my mother had a breakdown, although I don’t know what order this happened in, which cause and which effect. The unhappiness was the same regardless. I was eight years old and never lived with my mother again.

Instead, I was looked after by my father and his second, Belgian, wife, a reconstituted household which included not only my brother but also a new stepbrother. My father had decided that this was all for the best, and under this new regime any mention of unhappiness or the past was taboo. I was left to draw my own conclusions about what I had seen.

This wasn’t too difficult to do, because my mother and I were mostly apart. For a few years after the divorce, my brother and I did see her every second weekend and in the holidays, but this was disrupted when she moved across the country to East Anglia for a while, and then even more when I was eleven and my father got a job in Denmark. Then we flew over to see her at Easter, in the summer holidays and at one half-term. By the time we returned three years later, the pattern had been set. I was a teenager, more interested in friends and parties than either of my parents, so I got the train to see her once or twice a term.

Instead, much of our relationship took place by letter. I still have a big bundle, but they don’t tell me very much about what my mother thought and felt. They mostly date from my teenage years and she’s busy at this time, teaching English to Vietnamese refugee women and helping out in local politics, while I am writing home about school productions and my mock exams.

This back and forth seems painfully remote, but to my mother it probably felt normal. Much of her childhood from the age of seven had been spent at boarding school, seeing her mother only in the holidays, and even then not always, any communication otherwise in the shape of a formal letter. To her, this was what mothering looked like, and she passed this distance on to me.

My mother was an enigma or an idea rather than a real person. To fill in the gaps, I told myself many different stories about her as I grew up. When I was unhappy, I knew that I would have been better off with her; when I was sad, she would have comforted me; but these were fantasies, not the truth. Looking back at the letters now, what leaps out at me is how often she apologizes for missing my birthday. Her card had been written but got lost in the mess on the hall table, she forgot, she is so very sorry. Sometimes she is writing this six weeks later. My eleventh, thirteenth and fourteenth birthdays went entirely unmarked by her on the day. Other people might have found her omissions shocking, but I don’t remember being upset; by then I was used to the kind of mother I had.

I comprehended some of her troubles, even as a child. The most important lesson I understood was that ending up like my mother was a fate to be avoided. Long-legged and elegant, with big eyes and a slightly wary manner, my mother had the air of a deer watching you from afar. She was not just beautiful; being fragile and in need of a rescuer made her even more attractive to men. I learned from her life that this appeal led to marriage and children, which inevitably resulted in catastrophe. Much more sensible, I concluded, not to take the risk. Instead, I tried to become tough and independent, as little like her as I could manage.

I couldn’t entirely separate myself from my mother, however hard I tried. Some likenesses were impossible to ignore. Given my father’s complete lack of interest in how anything except a car looked, my love of art must have been her gift. My handwriting, when I wasn’t paying attention, was an exact facsimile of hers. Above all, we shared the same fascination for stuff. Visiting her as an adult, I discovered that we liked museums, car-boot sales and collections; we both arranged interesting objects on our shelves, bought quirky ornaments from junk shops and auctions. Most of all, our eyes remembered every single thing we saw and where it had come from. Once when I came to stay, we visited a 1940s prefab house that had been restored and refurnished nearby. I was the one studying design history, but it was she who could name and date every object in the place. We were clearly kin.

This particular visit took place during one of her good patches, a time when it felt safe for me to acknowledge our likenesses. During these times, she held down jobs, volunteered, became a councillor in her home city of Worcester. She laughed and was interested in what was happening in my life. I wasn’t so scared of becoming her.

As my mother got older, the good times became less frequent, and I acquired a new list of things I didn’t want to inherit. The first was a dependence on alcohol. Both this and possibly the love for whisky in particular had been passed down in turn from her Scottish father, whose drinking, she told me, had caused her own parents to divorce back in the 1940s. I also didn’t want to share her intense depressions. And in the last years of her life I definitely didn’t want to acquire her messiness, hoarding and squalor.

For the last twenty years of her life, my mother battled against the chaos which threatened to take over her home. She didn’t succeed, and over time the untidiness turned into hoarding. I would come to see her and find the remnants of my last visit still on the kitchen worktops, uncleaned and unmoved; her life slowly sinking into inertia.

My brother and I tried every technique we could think of to help with both the house and the drinking. I took her on holiday; my brother invited her over to stay in China, where he was working. We found her therapists, encouraged her to go to the doctor, then we played hardball and refused to speak to her when she was drunk. Time and again we came up to visit and tidied her house. Nothing we did made a difference. The mess crept back, and my mother bought more whisky, determined to live her life drinking, in a heap of papers, books and junk. We could not make her believe that she deserved better.

In the end I had a baby and refused to bring her into the house. My mother and I spoke on the phone and, sometimes, she would drive down to visit me. After a while, she stopped letting my brother through the door. Both of us knew why, and what state the house was probably in, but by that point we also knew my mother wasn’t going to change.

After she died, I wanted nothing more than to get rid of the whole despairing mess for good, but I also needed to find out how it had come to be in the first place, and that meant understanding my mother. The obvious way to do this was through her things.

This wasn’t the most surprising idea I’ve ever had. My whole life has been spent in the company of physical objects. I observe them, collect them in my home and consider them. I’ve worked with collections in museums and made television programmes about buildings, homes and things, and now I write about the history and hidden meanings that can be found in them. I don’t only think about stuff but also with it, unable to settle unless I have arranged it properly around me. In short, objects occupy far too much of my mental space. I can stand in any room of my house and tell you the biography of every item there – where it came from, who it has belonged to before, where it has stood in other houses and quite often what I have thought and felt about it at other times in my life. Often they have become carriers for intense emotions as well.

I don’t feel bad about my relationship with stuff in the slightest. To me, it’s like having an incidental extra form of perception, like synaesthesia or perfect pitch. Objects can speak to me, and I like hearing what they have to say. By the end of my mother’s life, her world had been taken over by things. They occupied her home, stacking and piling and strewing until she could hardly live in a place that had up to then been her sanctuary; they formed barricades and blockages that separated her from other people, including her children. But things were what bound us together as well as what pushed us apart. If a trace of my mother remained anywhere after she died, it would naturally be in the great unsorted heap of stuff she’d left behind.

We all believe that some part of a person resides in their possessions and can remain there after death. Why have family heirlooms otherwise? In my mother’s case it’s particularly appropriate, since this obsession came from her in the first place. She knew very well that objects have biographies and personalities and presence. Some of her most unhappy emotions and experiences had ended up embodied in things she owned. Above all, the terrible dereliction of her house was a way of expressing herself through stuff. The undifferentiated stacks of rubbish represented the deep despair which haunted my mother for her entire life. One of the ironies of hoarding is that people only make such a mess with things because they care about them very deeply indeed.

Hoarders are not alone in this. Barring a few ascetics, almost every single person alive today lives with, amongst and through stuff. In countries like Britain where consumerism prevails, we own more than ever before and our possessions form an inescapable part of not only our outer lives but our inner landscapes as well. Many people have collections; far more of us have family photographs and childhood mementos. We hide things in cupboards and never use them, rent increasing amounts of storage space for the stuff we can’t fit into our houses, and we almost all believe that it is not only right but important for the government to keep vast stores of unused objects on our behalf in museums where they will never be thrown away.

Most of all we see our possessions as anything but inert. They are capable of magic − able to lend us powers or change our lives. We believe that objects can contain the essence of human personalities or freeze time. From earliest childhood, our belongings can help us feel safe, or act as repositories for emotions that we can’t deal with any other way. We live so intertwined with our possessions that they end up incorporated into our selves. Deep down we all think like hoarders.

Even so, when I dare to describe how my mother’s house ended up, I imagine most people would react as they would to seeing a television documentary about hoarders and their homes: a guilty voyeurism combined with deep relief that, in comparison, their house is clean and tidy, so this could not happen to them nor anyone they know. I’m not immune to this feeling either; one of the things I wanted to understand was what made my mother flout the normal rules of society so completely by the end of her life. Yet the more I look at who she was and what she did, the more I realize that my mother wasn’t so different to the rest of us. The only distinction was the intensity with which she operated. We are all in the same boat, every single one of us, and this vessel is loaded to the brim with things. My mother’s house can act as a mirror for how each one of us lives, as long as we choose to look closely at the objects that surround us rather than turning away.

1

the house: first arrival

FOR ONCE I’VE managed to get a parking space right outside my mother’s house. Except I don’t want to go in. Now that I’ve drained the last flavourless drops of a takeaway coffee, I’m texting my husband, T, staring at the flat grey January sky and looking for any excuse to prolong these last few minutes. Anything but walk across the pavement and open her front door. Even that isn’t going to be straightforward. My eye keeps being caught by the rough metal hasp that’s been screwed into the door and frame, held shut by a big silver padlock. Not everything about my mother’s house is as regular as it appears at first sight.

The reason I am here, instead of at my desk ninety miles away, is that my mother was taken to hospital yesterday after a fall in her bedroom. In itself, this is not as shocking as it might be: my mother is seventy-seven and getting frail, with lungs that scarcely work after an adult life dedicated to smoking forty or more a day. A part of me has been expecting this crisis for a while, so there’s been a certain inevitability about my two-hour journey up the motorway this morning. It’s only what any good daughter would do.

The problem is, I’m not sure I am a good daughter, or have ever been. This is my big chance. I can inhabit the role with a bit of conviction for a change. The situation does at least play to my strengths. Much of my working life has been spent being calm and organized in the face of high stress, so I spent yesterday afternoon on the internet researching respite care and home helps, while working out how many times I might be able to make the journey in a week. Underneath all the practicalities, though, I could trace a fine thread of resentment. Why should I be looking after my mother now, was the thought I kept coming back to, when she’d never been any good at caring for me?

My mother has many qualities, being an interesting, intelligent and often funny woman. In her youth she was elegant and attractive, her high cheekbones and slim waist suiting the 1950s fashions. In later life she read widely, had a range of jobs and volunteered for many causes, but the one thing she was never any good at was being a mother. All of which explains why I am here now, hiding in the car rather than heading for her front door. I know what’s waiting for me in there, and I’ve had quite enough to deal with this morning as it is.

By yesterday evening, I’d finally managed to speak to the nurses on the ward, who reassured me that there was nothing seriously wrong and that my mother seemed positive and entirely lucid. Nonetheless, I hadn’t slept well and drove up the M5 wired on coffee, hands tight on the wheel, trying to concentrate on the radio without success as my brain worked through logistics while at the same time filling with a mix of rising panic and extreme focus. By the time I reached Worcester, panic had won the battle.

Given its name, I expected the Royal Infirmary to have been housed in Victorian red brick somewhere near the city centre, but no longer. Now it had been relocated somewhere off the ring road, and I couldn’t find the right roundabout. After getting lost for the third time, I pulled up by a field gate and almost cried. But this was all the fault of the road signs, which weren’t doing their job properly. Nothing to do with my mother at all.

When I finally arrived, I found a university-like sprawl of modern buildings in brown brick and glass, interspersed with footpaths and acres of car park. I walked for what felt like hours past new cancer units, bike sheds, a building site, two atriums and a woodland area before I came to the right place.

My mother was in the Medical Assessment Unit, an afterthought squeezed in next to A&E. This arrangement reflected the ward’s rather provisional nature. The MAU had been created as a kind of holding bay for patients who had come into Casualty and needed to be in hospital, yet didn’t have an obvious place in their hierarchy of wards and diseases. My mother clearly was not well, possibly in several different ways, but nobody seemed able to pinpoint exactly what these might be. Until someone decided what the problem was, the assessment unit was the only place for her.

Not that the staff were at all worried. Yes, my mother had had a fall, but she didn’t seem to have injured herself beyond a few bruises. She was a bit dehydrated and still on oxygen, but there was no reason at all why she shouldn’t be going home in a few days’ time. Really, she was doing very well. There did seem to be a bit of a problem with her dentures, but the dentist would come down, perhaps tomorrow, to see if this could be sorted out. This last was said as I trailed behind the nurse, who was leading me through the close-packed ward in search of my mother’s bed. If the nurses said so, of course everything was fine.

Except when I got there, it wasn’t. For a split second I wasn’t even sure this was my mother, because the old woman sitting in the armchair, clad only in a hospital gown, didn’t look anything like the person I knew, the one who’d driven up to my house just a few weeks ago, smartly dressed and precise as ever; the one whom I recognized as my mother, if a bit older each time. This woman’s skin was deeply creased and hanging loose on her face, her eyes were shrunk and sunken, and one was surrounded with a lilac bruise that spread on to her cheekbone as well. Her gown had ridden up, showing more bruises, yellow, brown and blue, across her legs. Those few seconds of falling had aged her by twenty years. More than that, she had been tumbled over and beaten by life. This was my mother, but looking like a photograph from Crimewatch, the record of a brutal mugging on a frail, elderly victim.

In that brief second, I caught a glimpse of panic in her eyes too, as though she’d seen her own image reflected in my gaze and was as horrified as me. Then she collected herself, disappearing behind the facade I recognized as her.

‘Hello, dear,’ she said, waving one hand. The voice was hers, but the words only just recognizable. The nurses had rather understated the problems with her dentures, which were flapping loosely in her mouth, making it hard for her to speak. She put her hand up to stop them falling out.

I tried to look elsewhere, but the nurse had disappeared, leaving just me and my mother. I needed to seem normal and jolly for her benefit, and in the presence of the many other visitors in the ward, but I wasn’t sure I was going to manage the performance.

‘Sorry about the dentures.’ At least I thought that’s what she was saying. My mother was waving her hand around again, as though this would make up for the loss of her normal articulacy, while trying to tell me something about the air in the ward drying her mouth out.

My brain was so flooded with thoughts that I couldn’t find any words either. How had this happened? If this was fine, what did not fine look like? Since when had my mother worn full dentures, and why the fuck didn’t they fit? It looked as though she had borrowed someone else’s, but I didn’t think even my mother would do that.

Driving up, I’d been convinced that I would sit with her and be kind; I would listen to her talk and exchange confidences, have the kind of open conversation that we’d not managed for years, if ever. Even in the best of circumstances, this would have been a delusion; the ward was hot and noisy, the beds packed too close. There was no place here for any sort of intimacy.

Worse, though, the horror of the situation was eating me up. I didn’t want to stay in this arid, claustrophobic room for a second longer than I had to, unable to bear sitting with this strange bruised old lady who had taken the place of my mother. Especially when every battered word reminded me of the state she was in. I’d entered the hospital wanting to be compassionate, but instead I was desperate to run out, gulp fresh air, drive straight back down the motorway and pretend that none of this had ever happened.

So I did what I always do in the face of stress and upset, and took refuge in organization. My mother needed fresh nightclothes instead of the papery hospital gown, some toiletries and a pocket radio, so that Radio 4 could continue to be the accompaniment to her every waking hour, just as it was at home. She also wanted some treats, because the hospital food was awful. I made a list to her instructions. Of course I would sort this out.

‘Right, I’ll head off to the supermarket and get all of that.’ I heard my own voice, too loud and harsh, hoping that my mother couldn’t sense the stress in it.

‘And denture fixative.’ She said something else, but I couldn’t make it out. I hoped it wasn’t important.

‘Then I’ll come back for a bit before I have to go home.’ My brain was already making the calculations. Soon after that I’d have the excuse of needing to pick my daughter up from school. I wouldn’t have to stay here for very long at all.

The list was why I was now sitting outside her house. I’d got lost, again, on the way to Tesco, which had been concealed at the heart of a housing estate whose streets and cul-de-sacs spiralled around it as though the supermarket was a secret temple of the suburbs. There I’d bought new nightgowns, a small radio and expensive biscuits, sweet and savoury. Nothing refrigerated would survive the heat of the ward. My mother had given me her key, so all I needed to do was pop into the house and pick up her sponge bag.

This simple task was the reason I was still sitting in the car, because it was the one thing in the world that I didn’t want to do. I knew what was waiting for me behind that door, because the policeman had told me.

He’d rung yesterday, a blank January morning where nothing much was happening except that I was drinking a cup of coffee at my desk instead of working. I picked up the phone to find PC Harford, calling from Worcester and asking for me by name. He had apologized for interrupting my day.

The events were outlined with a brief but precise description, as was his professional duty. My mother had fallen and rung 999 for an ambulance. He’d been called to break down the door so the paramedics could get in. My mother was in hospital, but not seeming to have any serious health problems.

On one level the phone call was shocking, but at the same time it wasn’t unexpected. My aunt Maggie − my mother’s efficient and energetic youngest sister − and I had been talking on the phone just a few weeks beforehand, wondering what on earth we were going to do about my mother. Mags thought that she was looking thin and was worried about her health, while I was pretty sure she might have started drinking more seriously again. Ours wasn’t a difficult conversation, nor even the first. We found solace in sharing our fears with each other because we both knew that nothing could be done. Each of us had tried to confront my mother in the past, to offer help, suggest she needed to see the doctor. Each time, she pushed us away. In our last call we’d agreed that the situation was only ever going to change when a crisis came. And now here it was, much sooner than expected.

‘Did you know what kind of state the house was in?’ the policeman asked me.

He took my uncertain silence as an opportunity to explain. The back door was broken down, didn’t close. There were brambles growing through the gap. Electric radiators were standing in puddles; lumps of plaster were hanging from the ceiling in the hall. The roof had been leaking for he didn’t know how long and the entire top floor was sodden. ‘And when I went up there to look, my foot went right through one of the floorboards.’

The indignity clearly hadn’t helped his mood. ‘My mother told me that she’d had the roof fixed,’ I said.

‘But did you know how she was living?’

‘No,’ I said. Clearly not. In my head the house was messy, and there was a lot of unopened post, and maybe some damp furniture – my mother had mentioned the leak in the roof and that she’d had to get it mended. I had not known how much else she had left out, how badly things had deteriorated.

PC Harford took this as a sign that he should reiterate the details all over again. The back door, the damp, the chaos. And the hole in the floor upstairs. His foot. What’s more, he’d put a flag on the file for social services, to make sure that she wasn’t allowed to go back there while it was in this state. He’d be referring her to the Vulnerable Adults Unit.

‘She wouldn’t let me in,’ I said. Not that I’d tried for a long time. Perhaps the Vulnerable Adults Unit would be phoning up to tell me how neglectful I had been as well.

‘But did you know what it was like?’

I was starting to hate this man. He obviously came from the normal world, a place where families cared about each other and showed it. Where mothers had looked after their daughters, and daughters then took care of their mothers in turn. In his eyes I had failed entirely in the most basic duties of a person. He was a policeman, so he must know right from wrong.

‘I’d better call the hospital and see how she is doing,’ I said, wanting to bring the interrogation to a close.

He gave me the ward name, as well as his own contact details in case I wanted to follow anything up. I couldn’t think that I would.

After putting the phone down, I could only sit there. PC Harford had left me feeling guilty and ashamed but also furious almost to the point of tears. Of course I’d been aware that the house was in a state, even if I hadn’t known all the details that he had very insistently and repeatedly wanted to impress on me. For the last fifteen years at least, I’d been trying to clear up, to make her happier, stop her drinking. I’d used any means I could to persuade my mother to lead a straightforward life, but not one of them had worked. Whatever I did, my mother refused to be reformed. Even if I had already known every single detail PC Harford had spelt out to me on the phone, had been aware of all of my deficiencies as a daughter, I still wouldn’t have had the slightest ability to do anything about what had happened to my mother, to the house and to his foot as it went through the floor. Nothing and no one could have altered what he found in there.

Had I known then what I’ve subsequently learned, I would have had a thing or three to tell him in return, but at the time all I could do was sit and stare at my darkened computer screen in acquiescent shock.

Having finally got the padlock off the hasp, I push at the door slowly. On the striped wallpaper, my mother’s framed engravings of Worcester are hanging just as they always have done, and for one long second I almost believe that I will be able to deal with this. I can see heaps of papers, but they’re not blocking the entrance. My mother’s house is still here. But as the door opens, a heavy smell of must and damp paper and unstirred dust rises up to meet me. And her hallway is dark, so dark, as though every window has been boarded up. I look through to the kitchen, where a thick tangle of dark-green branches and brambles are pressed against the glass. This is not so much a home now as a bunker.

I need to lean my shoulder against the wood of the door to open it wider, as something has wedged behind, resisting. Right in front of me, the ceiling has caved in, great scrolls of lining paper and plaster dangling down around a dark hole where water has burst through; a matching dark stain on the carpet below. I need to get past the accident quickly in case something falls on my head, but that means going in further, which I don’t want to do.

Every flat surface and the floor is stacked with paper and bags and boxes, and I can’t see and don’t want to imagine what else as well, but underneath I can still see the lines of the place I knew, the house that my mother used to live in. In the corner by the door, under plastic bin liners, old fixings and a broken mixer, stands my grandmother’s old freezer, which my mother has been going to get sorted out for the last sixteen years, while in the middle of the floor is her own fridge, bought when the one in the kitchen broke down. She never quite got round to installing the new one, so the faulty one sat useless in the kitchen, while her milk and yoghurt and ready meals lived in the new fridge in the hall. As her hallway was as wide as a normal room, this wasn’t in her way, so the set-up never seemed to bother her, however much my brother and I tried to persuade her to get the two fridges swapped over.

With one last shove I am in, but I leave the front door ajar behind me as I step inside. I need to keep an easy escape route; this seething mass of rubbish could so easily rise up and imprison me as well. Two more paces in and now I can see the dining room. This is worse. Her lovely mahogany dining table is on the floor in pieces, all the matching chairs invisible under more and more paper. In fact the far end of the room has disappeared into what looks like a midden or a tip, the accumulated stuff rising up against the wall until it almost reaches my full height. I can see food packets and rubbish amongst the post and Telegraphs too. God alone knows what is nesting in there.

Ahead of me, at the back of the house, is the kitchen. Here I can see that the policeman was right. The plywood panel of the back door has rotted, or been stoved in, and it’s been like that for some time, because brambles are snaking their way inside. What he said about the rest of the room was true as well. The whole floor is awash with a thick black silt, and in the deepest part of the puddle sits an electric radiator, only buffered from the muck and water by a small stack of newspapers. I can’t see much more in the darkness, and I don’t want to either. No one should be living like this, he had said, and he was right. Except I have no idea how to tell my mother this. She wants to come home. This chaos is what home looks like for her, however much I hate what I see, however much PC Harford can’t believe it.

Her toilet bag is in the bathroom, which means stepping gingerly upstairs past the stacks of books that almost cover every single tread. The twisty irregular staircase must have been difficult enough on its own for an old woman with broken lungs, but like this I can only think that it’s a miracle she hasn’t fallen before now.

At the top of the stairs, I can see the whole first floor. While there’s no muck or water up here, no rotting food or damp newspaper, somehow it feels sadder, because there is light and so every detail of what has not been done is visible. The window is filthy, its sill stacked with useless bits of plastic, old lightbulbs, a broken blind fitting. Her study is a sea of paper, while in the bedroom I can see clothes and tights and pants, newspapers and packaging spilling right out of the door. The bed is unmade, and even from here I know that the sheets haven’t been changed for months, if not longer.

Worst of all is the landing in front of me: a dumping ground for things she didn’t want or like but couldn’t be bothered to move. Faded towels, a laundry bin that’s full but covered in more junk. I think again of the kitchen and realize that I have no idea how she’s even been washing her clothes. There are single pop socks, stained tops, more books. Most upsetting of all is the old cat bed, still against the radiator, brown fur rubbed into its fleece. My mother’s old Burmese cat died ten, maybe twelve years ago, and this relic hasn’t moved since then.

Unable to bear this any longer, I step into the bathroom to grab her sponge bag, refusing to look at the dirty bath, the peeling wallpaper, the ivy creeping in through the window. Then I flee the house as quickly as I can manage. Overloaded with squalor and sadness, I want to forget as soon as possible.

Except the house doesn’t want me to leave. The temporary lock has been screwed on askew, and when I close the door, it’s almost impossible to fix the padlock back into the hasp. I struggle on the doorstep for what feels like ages but is probably only a few minutes, breaking my fingernail, swearing, wondering if I can just leave the door wedged shut but not locked, because surely no one will steal anything from a place that already looks like a dump. Eventually, I secure it and can step back into the safety of my car. I’ve left the house behind, but the smell of damp and mould stays in my nostrils for the rest of the day.

2

black teapot: better times

MY MOTHER’S HOUSE hadn’t always been in a bad way, far from it. When she first moved into Rose Terrace, more than thirty years ago, the building had been a wreck, and it had been her who’d rescued it from dinginess and neglect. Not only had she sorted out subsidence and installed central heating and a new kitchen, my mother had tackled the painting and wallpapering in every room herself. She was most proud of the dining room with Harrods-green striped paper on the walls, smoked-glass shelves in the alcove and dark Georgian table and chairs. This became her favourite room, where she not only ate but sat and read the newspaper, a cigarette burning away to ash alongside her. Rose Terrace was her sanctuary after a dark part of her life, and she was very happy to have arrived there.

When my parents divorced in 1975, my mother lost not only her husband but her children too. This was my father’s decision, and he pretty much always got his own way. The fierceness of my father’s personality and determination can be measured by the fact that my brother and I lived with him and his new wife after the divorce, a situation unheard of in the early 1970s. My mother’s resistance had been worn down by eight years of child-rearing, lack of sleep and living with his intense will and opinions, so he even persuaded her that this was the right thing to do.

My father’s dominance was never accomplished by force or shouting, nor even cunning. If he were in a room, people would gravitate to him; if he were in a meeting, people would end up agreeing that his plan was the best. The result was delivered through charm underpinned by will, but it never failed. My father was always right. He liked it that way too.

After the divorce, he had a very definite view of events: the separation and this new family was the best thing that could ever have happened to us, and we were all very happy now. He would have written my mother out of history entirely if he could, but had to settle for refusing ever to discuss her or the first eight years of my life. Why remember a mistake?

The only obstacle lived in his own home. Me. I was his child, in his likeness, with his own iron will, and I chose to hold on to my opinions, memories of the past and my own version of events very tightly indeed.

Not having inherited this core of steel, my mother had little option but to be steamrollered into letting go of me and my brother. She’d learned to defer from birth, having spent an entire childhood a few paces behind her forceful sister Anne, eighteen months her senior. This could explain why she chose my father: being so used to living in the shade of someone else’s certainty, he must have felt safely familiar. That’s the only reason I can find for their marriage. Other than that, it’s not so much a surprise that my parents divorced; I find it harder to understand how they came to be with each other in the first place.

Having decided that he would keep the children, my father held on to the house too. This meant that my mother was left at the age of thirty-eight alone and with nowhere to go. At first she moved in with her own mother, Antoinette, back into her old childhood home in Worcester and the room last occupied by her youngest brother years before, the dramatic red and black textured wallpaper still unchanged from the 1960s. When we visited each fortnight, I would lie on her bed and stick my finger into the squared cells of the paper, examining their dark edges and red centres, feeling the roughness of its finish against my skin. The room smelt of cigarette smoke and Lentheric Tweed, her favourite perfume then, although at some point she moved on to Fiji, which I liked better because I’d seen the adverts in the Sunday Times Magazine. Perhaps she wanted a new scent for this new chapter in her life, as a kind of rebirth, even though at the time it must have seemed much more like a dead end, a disaster in which she had lost almost everything that mattered.

My brother and I would stay the night, sleeping next door in my grandmother’s guest room, with its high beds with veneered headboards and a matching tall brown wardrobe which held old suits and our board games on the top shelf.

This routine meant that we saw a lot more of my grandmother as well. By this point, she’d evolved into the very model of a 1970s granny: grey hair in tight curls on her head, knee-length Crimplene dresses with no discernible waist, tan stockings and sensible shoes, usually brogues. To me, she was a benevolent enigma, giving the sense that she perceived the world through a cloud. ‘That’s nice, dear,’ was her response to almost everything, leaving me never entirely sure that she’d been listening.

This vagueness didn’t arrive with deafness or age. I found the same expression in almost every photo of her I saw: present when she posed for the camera after her wedding, looking resigned to her fate; even when she was a student with her friends. Only as a very small child, tumbling through the grass and playing cricket on a camping holiday, did Antoinette seem to have been fully alive.

I can believe that some part of my grandmother was stuck for ever as an eight-year-old girl. My mother once told me that her favourite song had been ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’, while her greatest enthusiasm was soft toys. Unlike a child, she didn’t just collect them but manufactured them from scratch, becoming WI national champion at least once. The Womble she made me from just a picture my mother gave her was better than any that could be found in the shops.

Only through sewing did we make contact. On our fortnightly visits, my grandmother spent the long Saturday afternoons teaching me to make the most basic of creatures from fun fur stretched over yoghurt pots, a pastime I never tired of. That was the way things were for what seemed then to be quite a long time but was actually less than a year.

I am hazy about timing and details, partly because I was still only nine and was never told the half of it, but also because I was desperate to forget how unhappy the divorce made me. At some point my mother moved to the farthest Cambridgeshire Fens for a job as an estate agent, and I can remember going to the windy Norfolk coast when we visited her, walking miles to the sea which receded across the flat grey sands almost to the point of invisibility. We ate chips and played on the slot machines, just as we did when we visited our cousins and went to the beach with them.

Like many of my mother’s jobs, this didn’t last for long. The new man in her life swindled her out of a large sum of money, and so she slunk back to her mother’s house in Worcester, back to the spare room, another job as an estate agent, us visiting every fortnight and what must have been an overwhelming sense that, despite all her efforts, she would remain stuck there for ever.

The other person who was sometimes also present when we came to see her was my mother’s sister Anne, who had a personality so strong that she was the only person in the world who could strike fear into my father. ‘She could charm the birds off the trees,’ he would say, but this wasn’t said approvingly. My mother felt that Anne had been a blight on her life, domineering and overshadowing her childhood, although she never explained to me how this had manifested itself.

She didn’t need to. I understood anyway, because almost all the memories I have of Anne are marked by intense fear. Fortunately she only made rare appearances. By the time I was nine or ten and could remember her properly, she had left the country after roaring through a difficult divorce in which she too had left her children with their father followed by a nursing career in London, when she lived in Fulham and used Harrods as her corner shop.

The problems really started when Anne decided she could talk to me as an adult. By then she lived in the West Indies, on the small island of Bequia, where she was proud to be the only white woman who danced in the carnival, returning every year or two to see her mother and any other of her relatives who might come into view.

A snapshot of one of these visits has been seared on to my brain by embarrassment. I am sitting in one of my grandmother’s armchairs, dark brown and built in the 1930s with high arms and a seat sunk down by the failure of its ancient springs. A tall woman, Anne is standing over me so that I am unable to escape its depths.

‘Well,’ she booms at an impossibly un-private volume, ‘I hope you are getting out and having lots of fun.’

She puts great emphasis on the word ‘lots’, and I know exactly what she is implying. She hopes I am having a great deal of sex. But I am not. I am an unhappy and overweight teenager, so terrified of any kind of intimacy that my hair is stiffened with half a can of hairspray each day and I drape myself with belts covered in metal studs. Of course I have no answer for her. All I want is for the chair to finally give in and swallow me into its depths. At the other end of the room, I can see through the French windows to where spring sunshine is beginning to fall on the lawn and the peonies. Stuck in the chair, all I can do is nod, hoping that this will satisfy her.

‘Excellent.’ In my memory she looms exaggeratedly huge, and I am afraid she is going to trap me here for ever. Finally, however, she moved off to interrogate someone else and I was able to haul myself out of the chair and disappear down to the far end of the garden, where I could pretend to be interested in the vegetables and contemplate how useless I was.

In 1980 my mother’s life got a lot better when my great-grandmother, Carrie Jenkins, died. From my mother’s account, she was the kind of person who improved things by dying, and this wasn’t only true for my mother. Carrie’s daughter, my grandmother Antoinette, achieved a far greater emancipation. Carrie had been rich, but also cantankerous and controlling, and my grandmother had been almost entirely dependent on her for money. Now, at the age of sixty-six, my grandmother was not only free for the first time in her life, she also had the means to do whatever she wanted. The solid and sensible red-brick suburban villa in the Worcester suburbs was exchanged for her heart’s real desire: a picture-postcard half-timbered cottage in the countryside out towards the Malvern Hills. Here she installed the three things she’d always wanted: a four-poster bed, a Jacuzzi bath and a ride-on mower. Her ambitions fulfilled, my grandmother settled down to tend her garden and stitch industrial quantities of patchwork.

The money she’d inherited from Carrie Jenkins gave Antoinette not simply the funds to pay for her own dreams but plenty to spare, so she divided the remainder out between her four surviving children: Anne, Mags and my mother, along with her last-born son, Mike (baptized Allan Michael). My mother was able to buy Rose Terrace with her portion. She never moved again.

At the time when my mother bought the house, its charms weren’t immediately obvious. Perched on top of a steep hill at the edge of Worcester, the views over rooftops and, if you craned a bit, the cathedral gave it pretensions to a good setting. The quirkiness of the area appealed to her, from the multi-generational Indian families settled into the red-brick villas to the ancient Italian deli which had been serving workers as they rushed to and from the engineering works since the 1940s. The factories had closed, but Ceci’s carried on, serving then rare gourmet treats like artichokes in oil and risotto rice to my mother and any other brave soul who ventured past.