7 Jan 2015

On leaving memories behind

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I now have my mother’s ashes in a neat little box on my bookshelf, between Ralph Griffiths’s Principality of Wales in the Later Middle Ages and the skull of a medieval nun from Cambridge. It’s a very small box to hold so many memories. Going through her clothes and papers was an amazing experience and I need to write another chapter of her life with all the things she never told me.

My daughter’s boyfriend Sean Wolfendale (@KingWolfy) helped with some of the most difficult bits – all those shelves of handbags and scarves. We still haven’t tackled the top shelf with its old letters and boxes. Sean wrote some poems about the experience, and then about the funeral.

Ninety Nine Boxes

She was put into numerous boxes

And stacked on all the surfaces.

Facing her was an eventuality

That they took on all at once

Before she became a permanent resident.

Picking her apart paper and page,

Evidence of her history and times,

Left over medicines and memories

That are ordered and divided

For decided removal

To provide some order

In a future without her.

Ninety Nine Bags

We dug through handbags,

Far too many for regular use

With some even retaining tags.

I was a poor man’s Indy

Digging out bric-a-brac,

Being attacked by fluff and mould.

An abundance of used tissues

And nail files hidden in folds,

I boldly dug deep to discover,

She was who we knew,

But from these things I take it,

Ready for runny noses and prison breaks.

Ninety Nine Pages

When the archive is explored

I’ve found an abundance of notes

That are bound by moments in time.

This letter! A first-hand account

Of the mounting tension lived

Before bombardments in World War 2.

But despite diamonds hidden in compartments,

For every gold filled memory

Is an old bill or drivers licence,

Empty envelopes that have lost their worth

And could we only stand the cold

They would not turn to firewood.

Ninety Nine Steps

She’s been resting for days now

This near centurion we’ve carried

Through fire and across fields

Through storms of feelings and tears

To a place where the wind is strong

And she can be released.

As our march comes to an end

And the blend of sieges upon our hearts

And honours upon our shoulders

Only bolden our movement to the future,

Whatever it might be that will harry us,

Through it she will carry us.

14 Nov 2014

How my grandmother chose her husband

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Things do come in threes.

Once there was a king and he had three daughters.

There was an ewe had three lambs and one of them was black.

There was a beautiful young woman and she had three suitors.

Reading through my mother’s reminiscences, I realise I haven’t told the story of how my grandmother chose her husband. She was brought up on a farm called Llanwensan, between Peterston-super-Ely and Llantrisant in the border vale of Glamorgan. Even at the end of the nineteenth century, the children of farming families didn’t marry early: they tried to save up enough to put down on a farm tenancy if they could. So my grandmother was in her early twenties, a beautiful young woman (you can see her picture, with the man she eventually married, at http://heritagetortoise.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/reminiscences_of_farming_life_in_the_1920s1.pdf), and an accomplished housewife. She was particularly known for making cheese.

Choosing a husband in the farming community means choosing a business partner. Blue eyes and rippling muscles are all very well but what you need is a capable farmer. She had three suitors, and how could she choose?

So one Sunday she invited all three of them to tea. She set before them bread of her own baking, butter of her own churning and cheese of her own making, and she sat and watched what they would do.

The first young man took his knife and cut the rind of the cheese. She thought ‘I won’t have him – he will always be wasteful and extravagant.’

The second young man ate the cheese, rind and all. She thought ‘I won’t have him – he will always be mean.’

The third young man took his knife and scraped a little of the rind off the cheese, and that was my grandfather.

I am writing while sitting with my mother and listening to her shallow breathing. She has said she wants to go, and she is now completely sedated and pain free, but something within her still refuses to give in. It’s the same stubborn determination that took her to grammar school and university, through the war and the difficult years after.

One flew east and one flew west.

Our family are scattered all over the world now but Mum’s final days have brought us together again: we have had emails from cousins in Australia, New Zealand and France as well as all the family in England saying how much they loved her, how good she was when they were young, remembering holidays they spent with her, looking for fossils on the beach at Southerndown or playing on the farm where she spent so much time with her own cousin Lynnus. Their memories are her memorial.

29 Oct 2014

The dying of the light

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If you teach death and commemoration, it’s a very strange experience caring for someone through the end of life. My mother – 99, brain like a steel trap but everything physical is failing – has decided to move to palliative care. She’s at home with us (she has lived in a granny flat attached to our house for some years) and we are nursing her with the help of district nurses, occupational therapists, private carers and some wonderful, underpaid, overworked, wonderful young women from a care agency via Social Services. Here in Wales we have good support in nursing the elderly in their own homes (Jeremy Hunt, please note – we spend our money keeping our old people OUT of hospital!) but as she has gone down hill more of my own time and emotional energy has been involved with her.

A week or so ago we had a couple of those very difficult conversations where she explained that she felt she obviously wasn’t going to get any better, she was afraid of the point where she became bedridden and could no longer manage her own body, and she wondered what she could do. She is of course at the point where virtually everything has to be done for her, and she didn’t want me to do anything I could be prosecuted for.  We talked through options like leaving the top off the emergency bottle of Oramorph and putting it where she could reach it, but she wasn’t sure she could manage to take it. She admitted she no longer wanted to eat, so I said ‘Well, don’t’. So she has gradually stopped eating, and after talking it through with the doctor she has stopped taking the medication that was propping her up. It has been a very difficult process for her, because she’s always been independent and knows exactly how she wants things done. All the family now want to come to visit and she has found it virtually impossible to let go instead of keeping strong so that she can entertain them properly.

I’ve been surprised by how common her experience is and how much help and support is available. When I told the doctor she had decided to stop eating he went immediately into end-of-life care mode and even had all the relevant paperwork. Several of her carers have also said they’ve looked after people through similar decisions. Ironically this has all happened during the parliamentary debates over assisted dying and the reviews of Atul Gawande’s book (http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/22/being-mortal-medicine-what-matters-atul-gawande-review for the Guardian review). I’ve come across the idea of giving up eating as a way of hastening the end of life but newspaper reports always present it as an extreme and terrible thing to do, starving oneself to death. In fact, for a lot of people, on heavy medication for things like arthritic pain, eating becomes a struggle and it’s almost easier to give up. There are medieval parallels as well – the endura of the Cathars, the belief in the western Catholic tradition that after receiving the last rites you had to turn your back on life. The much-maligned (and much misunderstood – both by the media and by some of the people tasked with implementing it) Liverpool Pathway is actually nothing new. What we need now is to be able to talk more openly about these issues and how they can be managed. We might then be able to move gradually to a position where more could be done in the way of sedation and pain relief even if it shortened life. We have already moved on a long way since my father’s death of cancer in 1970. He died in dreadful pain with the doctors unwilling to give him enough morphine in case it damaged his health. Really … with his bones rotting under him … things are better now and they could get better again without actually confronting the difficult prospect of assisted dying.

My mother had an amazing life. I have to remind people that when this intelligent and capable woman was born in 1915, women didn’t have the vote in parliamentary elections. She was in her teens before women had the vote on the same terms as men. Her generation weren’t the absolute pioneers – more importantly, they were the wome who made good what the pioneers had achieved and made it the norm. So they were the women who insisted on the right to a grammar school education, a University degree, a profession, the right to remain in that profession after marriage, the right to return to work after having children, all those things we value but perhaps too much take for granted.

Her reminiscences of her upbringing on a farm between Newport and Cardiff, her education and her life as a teacher in Chepstow in WWII are a remarkable document. They first appeared in the Gwent County History Association’s newsletter and used to be on the Association’s web site but they seem to have vanished (probably yet another consequence of the merger) so here they are again.

Reminiscences of farming life in the 1920s

Education for the people

Larkfield Grammar School in World War II

War Years in Chepstow

 

30 Jun 2013

The Women’s Race for Life

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Well, the tortoise and hare thing didn’t work, but we had fun anyway. About 2,000 women running, jogging and walking 5 km around the park in Cwmbran to raise money to fight cancer.

We like the Cwmbran Race for Life because it’s nice and relaxed, we can miss the pre-match warm-up and the silly young men in tutus, and we can run with Cara the pilgrim dog.

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In previous years I’ve been the one who wanted to keep running and my daughter got out of puff. This year she has been training so we ran for 2 km, walked and ran a bit, then she said she wanted to run so off she went. But I made it back only a minute after her – 34 mins to her 33. Cara would probably have done it in 15 mins, and she’s older than me in doggy years.

The Race for Life gives you the opportunity to run to celebrate someone who has survived cancer, or in memory of someone who has died. My daughter ran this year ‘for boobs’ – as well as working for a public health charity, Ash Wales, she has this year been a student volunteer co-ordinator for CoppaFeel. This is a charity which encourages young women to look after their breasts and teaches them how to check for signs of cancer.

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I ran in memory of my old friend Paul Courtney, the archaeologist, who died in May. Paul was one of the cleverest men I know, a leading expert on medieval archaeology and the theory of material culture. In spite of all this, and a publication record that most of us can only envy, he never had a ‘proper job’ – he kept going on badly-paid freelance contracts and occasional media work. Apparently this was because as a young man he was heavily involved with CND and the Young Communists – and when he was newly qualified and looking for work in the 1980s he was clearly ‘not one of us’. Self-censorship by the academic establishment goes back that far – and it was their loss.

On the way home I started wondering whether Race for Life had been about for long enough to qualify as ‘intangible heritage’. Intangible heritage is things like events and customs, rather than places and objects. In Wales, it could mean the Eisteddfod, the Mari Lwyd or the rugby internationals. Elsewhere it includes things like Mardi Gras, the Mexican Day of the Dead, Up Helly A and the Venetian carnival. My colleague David Howell, who tweets as @Kasuuta, runs an online newspaper on heritage issues and another specifically on intangible heritage – http://paper.li/Kasuutta/1347263108 and http://paper.li/Kasuutta/1347264840 for examples.

It’s a long time since I’ve done any serious running. My knees got more and more creaky. The real crisis came when I knelt down in front of a class to fix the computer and couldn’t get up again. It took the 2 strongest lads in the class to put me back on my feet, and my colleagues made silly remarks about how I’d only done it to get (insert name of cute student here) to give me a cuddle. So that was the end of running. Instead I go hill walking but somehow that uses different muscles.

As does crawling round church floors looking for medieval tombstones. But the hill walking is probably better training for pilgrimages.