My Daughter, My Mother by Annie Murray Read Free Book Online

he going to be?’
    ‘They know what they’re doing, Dad,’ Karen said. She took out a compact and peered at her face. Joanne looked down at the ripped knees of her jeans. Should she have dressed up for a hospital visit? Too late now anyway.
    There was a quiet ‘Huh!’ from Fred Tolley.
    Margaret didn’t seem especially pleased to see them. Once again they took turns to be with her, but she seemed odd and distracted. Her hair needed a comb and she kept moving her head restlessly from side to side on the pillow on which she was propped, which didn’t make it look any better. She had on her own flower-patterned nightie now.
    ‘I don’t know why there’s had to be all this fuss,’ she said ungraciously when they arrived. ‘You don’t need to keep traipsing over here like this. I just want to go home.’
    They’d brought flowers and cake.
    ‘We thought we’d have your birthday party,’ Karen said chirpily. Her eyes were immaculately made up in shades of mauve, and the gold chain of her little bag gleamed against her navy jacket. ‘You can have another one later, but we thought it’d be nice—’
    ‘Oh, don’t be so ridiculous!’ Margaret erupted, with such force that they never dared get out the cake – a nice chocolate one that Karen had bought from Marks and Spencer – to cut up.
    When Joanne was left alone with her, her mother lay looking across the ward as if there was no one there with her. Joanne felt very uncomfortable. Margaret’s silence was not a calm one. She seemed to be lying there seething with emotion. Joanne didn’t know how to talk to her, didn’t know what it was all about, other than being in hospital, which she hated.
    ‘How’re you feeling now, Mom?’ she asked gently, trying to break the spell that her mother seemed to be caught in.
    ‘Terrible.’ It was said in barely a whisper and her eyes filled. Joanne felt panic. This closed, emotionless mother she had known all her life seemed suddenly broken open, as if she couldn’t stop the tears coming.
    ‘D’you feel . . . ill?’ she ventured to ask.
    ‘I feel terrible,’ she repeated. Terrible in every way , she seemed to be saying. Sick in my body, my head, my soul . . . I can’t bear being in my own skin . She moved her head again as if to shake something out of it. Her perm was already coming loose and her face had changed, seemed slacker somehow.
    ‘I can’t seem to stop it. Can’t stop my head. Everything’s rushing by. I just can’t . . .’ And she dissolved into tears like a helpless little girl.

Seven
    Worcestershire, September 1939
    ‘Margaret? Well, that’s a mouthful of a name. While you’re in my house you’ll be known as Meg, and that’s that.’
    It was the evening of Saturday 2nd September 1939, and her first sight and sound of Mrs Nora Paige at the door of her Worcestershire cottage: aged forty-something, with thick limbs, staring eyes and lank black hair strung up in a net day and night.
    That morning had been the last time Margaret ever saw her mother.
    The memories kept rushing in on her, scrambled and intense like dreams, except that she was awake and still couldn’t stop them, any more than she could prevent the endless dryness of her mouth or her sleepless nights when she lay trapped by recollection, aching for sleep so that she could escape.
    The morning of Saturday 2nd September 1939: each time it replayed, it was the same. Margaret was downstairs. The Old Man was up there, sleeping it off as usual. Her half-brothers, so far as she recalled, had not been there. Elsie, her half-sister, who was nineteen then, had already left for the factory. Margaret had been sitting on the bottom step of the stairs (‘You’ll get splinters in your bum,’ Tommy kept telling her, but she always sat there anyway), picking at the scab on her knee. She’d tripped over on the way back from the wharf, when she and Tommy had been sent out for the coal. Tommy was her only full brother, two years older. She