(M)others and (D)aughters part II
After his death, in his study I found a box of glass plate negatives from when my grandfather was a young boy, from the 1910s. The toddler walking towards her mother is my great aunt Esther, my grandfather’s youngest sister, who became a real friend of mine. The blurry figure with her hands welcoming the girl is her mother, Nina. The other image, hanging next to this one is also of aunt Esther, some eight decades later, and as a pair I have hung on to them, between the two is a life time, they mean a lot to me. My great aunt Esther rarely spoke about her mother, except to say that she was a scholar and died young, and she felt sad and abandoned. What I never heard about was how driven Nina was and how hard she drilled her children, even using physical force and certainly shame and judgement. Now I look at that picture of mother and child and I feel chucked out of the safety it used to offer me.
The empty room full of boxes is from Sophie’s parents’ house. She cleared the house for sale as her mother needed supported living. Most of us have had to do this kind of moving, clearing, sorting, boxing, losing all sense of time. We have been talking about this departing generation of women – those that were housewives and mothers, why were so many of them brought up to be nothing, with no expectations? The role of caring and putting others’ needs before their own was so pervasive as to be almost invisible. NS
Clare Bayley joins Naomi Salaman and Sophie Gibson in the space of house clearance. Clare lays out her mother’s sewing kit in all its familiarity and contradictions. She writes;
My mother so wanted to be a good housewife – the type who has a tidy sewing-basket containing everything needed to darn her family’s socks, sew on our buttons, mend our tears. But she hated darning, and was not naturally tidy. If you looked under the duvet on her bed, you’d always find a pile of hidden clutter. Our socks went undarned. She wished to be calm, organised and housewifely. But she was not remotely calm, and tended towards chaos and drama. She was an excellent cook and a great storyteller, naturally gregarious, extrovert, sporty. She could still do handstands
when she was 70. She was energetic, tense and rarely sat down. She would frequently run up to the shops to buy small items she’d forgotten last time. She delighted in the stories of transgressions, and was not at all discreet. When I went through her sewing-basket after her death, I found it a rich tangle of artefacts which had lain there forgotten for decades, and charted her 94 years of family life. Among the items I found were:
A penny from 1966
A pen-knife from Paris
The Flora Macdonald needle pack
Newey’s world famed hooks and bar loops, by appointment to the Queen Mother
Chadwick’s pink wool and nylon, for Reinforcing and Mending
A scrap of pale blue darning wool
A marble
A lucky 15
Two pairs of dressmaker’s scissors
An implement to unpick a hem
One knitting needle
A wooden crochet hook
Two very long safety pins, whose function is mysterious.
The basket itself is round and exotic, with colourful, long-necked creatures woven into its rush. Inside there was also her button box. As a child I used to play with the buttons in this old sweetie tin as if they were jewels. Looking at them again after her death reminds me vividly of the clothes the buttons came from. Clothes were important to my mother – she could remember what she was wearing on all the
important days of her life. And looking at them, it reminds me also:
The blue and white dress she wore with a blue boater for my brother’s graduation. The pink and silver dressing-gown she wore when I was very young: the silver came off on your hands if you rubbed it. Leather buttons from my father’s tweed jackets. My own red jacket with military-style buttons which I wore for years. The pale jade silk dress she wore when her first great-grandchild was born. The toggle from my older sister’s duffle coat.
Clare Bayley
….
Thank you, Naomi — both very moving. The room with boxes is beautifully drawn.
I’d like to see the other photograph too, of great-aunt Esther at 94. She seems to have had a huge head of hair as a toddler! (Unless she’s wearing something on her head.) Would the photograph be any clearer if the black-and-white were reversed to make it a positive?
What is a “lucky 15”?