February 2012

My mother died two years ago, on February 24th, 2010. She had been slipping slowly into dementia for much of the previous year and – just at the point in October 2009 at which my sister, brother and I had decided that she could probably no longer take care of herself – she contracted an infection and was taken into hospital. Within a few weeks she had declined to such an extent that she no longer recognised any of us, nor was she aware of where she was or what was happening to her. The four months of hospital visits that followed were amongst the hardest things I have yet had to do.

Had she survived a couple of months longer my Mother would have lived in the same house in Surrey (in the UK) for 50 years. We moved there when I was 6 and it was the house that I grew up in. As well as my mother and father – and the three of us children – my grandmother (on my mother’s side) lived with us in a two roomed ‘suite’ on the first floor. It was not a terribly grand villa, but it was clearly a good size.

My father died some seven years before my mother, after which she lived in the house on her own. She spoke many times about moving into a warden-assisted apartment – which would have made a great deal of sense – but when it came to it she couldn’t face the task of moving. What made this particularly onerous was that both she and my father were great hoarders. She collected books, pictures, calendars and knick-knacks… he never threw away any paperwork.

When my father retired from his job in the City he converted one of the bedrooms at home into an office, so that he could pretty much carry on as before – but without the commuting. His keen sense of duty had led him to volunteer as treasurer or secretary to a number of organisations and he produced mountains of paperwork for each. He steadfastly refused to countenance the purchase of a computer – rejecting all arguments to the effect that such would actually be of great benefit to him – and instead insisting on persevering with his manual typewriter on which he produced multiple copies using carbon paper.

It took 3 months after my mother’s death for the three of us to sort through all of the paperwork and personal effects, before we were in a position to get the house cleared. We found receipts and tickets and copies of letters (Father was a great letter writer – particularly of the complaining variety) dating back to the early 60s.

One particular correspondence tickled me. When Father bought the house in 1960 there was a small easement to be agreed concerning drainage rights for an adjacent property. This correspondence – between Father and a solicitor in one of the City law firms – ran for over two years and the two became sufficiently friendly that much of the substance of what was written concerned personal and family matters. When the issue was finally resolved – sometime in 1962, I believe – Father was paid the outstanding sum of around £3 0s 0p – this being of course in pre-decimal times.

As another example, Mother and Father – who never did really cultivate close friends but rather had a large circle of acquaintances, with many of whom father had struck up conversations on some train journey (neither of them drove!) – met a Dutch couple on a holiday. After this brief encounter the two couples exchanged postcards at regular intervals for the next several decades. We must have found over 1000 postcards stacked away in a bureau!

Why Mother and Father kept these correspondences and artifacts I have no idea. In a way it seemed a terrible shame to break up what would probably have appeared to the social historian as a fascinating snapshot of late twentieth century life, but – practically – there was little else that we could do.

All this makes me very glad that Kickass Canada Girl and I decided to move apartments last year – a process that involved a fair degree of rationalisation and clearing out. We now have less baggage and – however much we like where we are now – less of an emotional attachment to our current home. This should make things considerably easier for us as we make our way- imperceptibly – across the Atlantic.