Concerning Mother

'Let's revisit last week's conversation
and think through why the stories you make up
concern abuse and cruel sarcasm.
You said, I quote, “My childhood seemed a waste,
so many futile sunny days; singing
happy birthday made me cry. I felt diseased.”

I wonder why you chose that word—'diseased',
not lonely, or anxious? Conversation—
you claimed it helped, “Maybe the words we waste
stave off white space, and I, through you, make up
a paltry life, and feel fulfilled singing
from your hymn sheet.” Was that your sarcasm?'

'No, more like the crumbling edge. Sarcasm
is just a puritan's social disease'.
She smiles, takes notes, as if to say, 'Why waste
your humour on a shrink?' So I make up
to please her, a bogus conversation
with mother, on how I hated her singing.

'I cannot see her face; I hear her singing,
a rich contralto voice; my sarcasm—
shielding the cat's ears as she sang'. ''Why make up
these tales? Last week's concerned childhood disease—
your allergy to cats'. Conversation
falters; costly moments go to waste.

'Like litter blown across a weed-strewn waste,
her songs are lost.' 'No, think about her singing.
I know how hard you find this conversation,
don't hide behind your phony sarcasm'.
'Towards the end she lost her voice; the disease
stole it. She mouthed the words, doing her makeup propped up at the mirror, daubing makeup
on hollow cheeks, her pocked face gone to waste.
Later, bedridden, when finally disease
addled her mind, I ended-up singing
old songs to comfort her. No sarcasm—
just sentimental songs, our final conversation'.

These memories I make up—Mother's singing,
her terminal disease, my sarcasm—
I waste today in ritual conversation.

I don't know exactly when I wrote this, before the end of 2005 certainly, as the poem was published in 'Loch Raven Review' in December of that year. The piece is significant to me in two ways.

From the point of view of form, then it shows that my membership of Eratosphere and willingness to sustain collateral damage from critical broadsides emanating from its 'Deep End' workshop paid dividends.  One downside of my heavy involvement with the Sonnet Board meant I did end up writing a lot of sonnets which in the end seemed limiting. Eratosphere brought me into contact with poets writing in all kinds of different forms. In particular I became interested in the use of repedents in forms such as the pantoum, vlllanelle, rondeau, and as in the case here, the sestina.

The notion that we live in an age of replication is not a new one. As early as 1936 Walter Benjamin in his influential essay, 'Works of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction' speculated on the possible  effects of replication on cultural activities. Today we can replicate messages across the globe electronically through Twitter or Youtube in an instant. We have yet to fully comprehend the social and psychological consequences of being  'wired' humans. It struck me that repeating forms provide an interesting device to explore both inner psychological compulsions and the repetitive nature of new media.

The second reason why this poem has a deep personal significance for me is it the first time I had ever written about the death of my mother even though thirty years elapsed between her final illness and the moment when I came to write this poem. My father and I looked after her during the final stages of a terminal illness during the Winter of 1975/6.  It was a salutary and challenging experience for a young man scarcely out of his teens.

Over the next year I started my first permanent job, Gill and I moved into our first house together, I gave-up smoking and seemed to manage to eradicate the bouts of anxiety  and depression which dogged my later teenage years. The experience of caring for my mother catapulted me from adolescence into adulthood. Gill's love and support helped me through the grief and during our twenties we began to build a professional life as teachers and had lots of fun cycle-camping all over England and France. The traumatic effect of my mother's death was not apparent to me until years later when in middle age I was faced with a recurrence of some of the mental health issues which I assumed I had overcome. 

The trigger was the death of my father in May 1998. We were required by the local authority to clear his council house - my family home - within three weeks of his death. This involved two frantic weekends soon after the funeral when my brother-in-law Donald and I basically  divided up all the family possessions to be sold or disposed of. It has struck me since how  everything in this country in affected by the class divide. Middle class people's parents own houses; disposal of family assets after their death takes time, no doubt involves complicated and upsetting legal wrangling and not a small amount of sibling in-fighting. However traumatic, the process takes time, wealth gets passed on, there is a sense of one generation passing and the next continuing onwards. 

In working class communities these events are much more perfunctory: my experience was - you collect the death certificate; a solicitor sorts the estate valued at a couple of thousand pounds in less than a week; you drive 150 miles up and down the A1  from your own home  then spend two frantic weekends sorting through household goods, most of it proves valueless so you take it to the dump; a van from the local auctioneers turns up removes a utility bedroom suite that has acquired vintage status; you lock the front door for the last time, take the keys and rent book to the council offices and sign a statement accepting responsibility for any damage to the house; the woman at the desk carries on a conversation with her colleague concerning her mother's ailments but manages a grunt of goodbye as you leave. The end.

What was so upsetting was even though more than twenty years had elapsed since my mother's death all her possessions were still there in the house, her coat hanging by the front door, her clothes in the wardrobe and her red plastic handbag on the shelf above containing her purse, make up and a notebook with family phone numbers in it.

Even amidst loss and bereavement life carries on. That year was a busy time in many respects. Over the summer we took a six week trip through France, Corsica, Sardinia and Italy. We had a fabulous time. In September I started a new, more senior job at  a different college. I took on much greater responsibility for staff management, some people were difficult or manipulative which was something I was not used to dealing with. My boss was recognised by all and sundry as a legend in his own imagination and enjoyed 'being impossible'. The role demanded ever longer hours and evening work; I found I was seeing less of my family. I did not exactly fall apart, however as the millennium approached I found it more and more difficult to keep myself together, I sensed that rather than being a person I had become a collection of roles and responsibilities which at times seemed in conflict with one another.

Added to this I was approaching my mid-forties and that famed male menopausal moment when blokes are struck by a mysterious urge to buy a Porsche, take up marathon running or go bungee jumping. My midlife crisis did not include any of that, instead I invented an alter-ego. I always have been imaginative and have liked making-up stories. Even in my most determinedly bourgeois early forties I still amused myself by thinking up plots for thrillers and spy stories that I knew I would never write or invented silly characters to amuse the kids. Being a daydreamer is one thing, getting the urge to write is another. In writers' mode it's phrases that occur to you all the time, your head gets peopled by strangers and sometimes those strangers talk to you or chat to each other in your head.. That the Internet was able to put me in touch with other writers, that web-boards existed where I could exchange ideas, the fact that I ended up as a writer called 'Alan Wickes,' all those things did help me. Through my poetry's 'mad other' I could just about deal with what otherwise may well have become an overwhelming period of loss, confused identity, irrational desire and sublimated grief

Gill was the real hero here, never probing too deeply into the real extent of my malaise but providing the love and support that kept us all going.. I was in a bit of a  state, off and on, for three or four years and sensing maybe that I was not really resolving my inner conflicts Gill did suggest in the end that I talked to a counsellor. I only had six or so meetings but the opportunity to say stuff out loud that I had chosen or felt obliged to keep hidden, particularly concerning my childhood, proved helpful. Taken as a whole much of my poetry seems to concern variations on a 'narrative of loss' -  but.maybe less so in recent years. Time now perhaps for a different narrative altogether. I hope so.

The details of 'Concerning Mother' are largely fictional. The therapeutic setting is real, but the conversation is not; I have never claimed to be allergic to cats, I just have an irrational hatred of them. Its true though that my mother was always singing around the house  - sentimental ballads from the Thirties and Forties - it is one of my abiding memories of her.

Carol Dixon, Violet Turpie, Violet Ryan, Peter Turpie and Pete Turpie, December 1973.