About Mary, my mother...
updated six months after her death

Mary was born into the First World War and bore her own children into the Second. Between those times she followed her mother Elsie into the Society of Friends. Unlike her mother, she became and remained a pacifist.

Mary was the third of five children, born in Trinidad where her father Eric, was resident judge. Next born were twin boys. A year into the war, one of them, Christopher, died. Their mother took the other four children home to England, the advantages of modern medical care outweighing the danger of German torpedoes on the Atlantic crossing.

This was the first of several separations that marked Mary’s life, and later ours. Now I realise how much family break-up, like family fortune, stems from our traditional matrix of empire, war and class. (With the difference that marriages so divided by continents require no divorce.)

Mary’s father stayed in Trinidad and for the next ten years his children didn’t see much of him. When he came home, the family had learned to live without the gruff old bigot: an Ulster protestant, Eric walked out of any Sunday service that smacked to him of Papism; lipstick was for Scarlet Women not his daughters. Mary remembered having to kiss him, the porridge in his moustache, before leaving for school. Only later did she begin to feel for the poor old prodigal, returning as a stranger to his own family. She just remembered his big hands bathing her as a baby, before they left Trinidad. How many British judges bathed their babies then?

My own father George walked out when Mary grew fat with me. Men often fall in love with images, and now his image of her was spoilt. I wonder how much of her heartache then fed through to me. After days, or weeks – Mary never told me - George came back. When I was born, he liked me, though maybe I too was not quite what he expected. They’d chosen the name David, but, according to Mary, George looked at me and said ‘We cant call him David… Gregory, Gregory Grunt.’ His elder brother, Gerald, had called him Grunt when they were boys, and for years my father called me Grunt, which I still associate with his laughter and affection. George’s behaviour may have left much to be desired, for Mary at least, but for us children his was the lighter, happier presence. Perhaps he had the advantage of the prodigal, feted whenever he returned – from work, the war, or sailing holidays. She was fated to be always with us – except when we were sent away to school. Odd that parents of their class found it normal to put their children in care. Was it that they attached so little importance to childcare, or lacked confidence in their own abilities. My theory is that prep- and public schools were designed less for happy families than for nation-building: children were systematically removed from intimate family and local community, and the gap filled with more abstract vocation, institutional loyalties and duties. William of Wickham founded Winchester to produce reliable and competent functionaries, as distinct from clerics. And the system extended to a whole range of other professions, institutionalised substitutes for more direct humanity.

As young children in England, Mary and her brothers and sister spent a lot of their time in the nursery with scolding nannies and mutual bickering relieved by what Mary remembered as rather formal meetings with their mother in the drawing room. Elsie was a highminded and public-spirited woman, but little bodies – perhaps all bodies - bored her. She had little interest in day to day childcare, let alone childsplay. For Mary, getting away to Downe House, founded and run by her mother’s sister Olive, was a liberation. Elder sister Erica was already there and Anne Bradby, later Ridler, became a friend for life.

At school Mary was quite bright and read a lot. She regarded herself as hopeless at games and wanted to become a nurse. That was vetoed by her family, backed by her father’s doctor brother, Almroth Wright. Reasons given were poor pay and unsocial hours, but there may also have been fears for her health – when infections were more common and effective drugs more rare - or her virtue.

Were nurses easy game to doctors then, and is this something that her famous uncle would have taken into account?

Perhaps the great doctor should have known better, or perhaps he did, and a few years later George and Mary were married from his house in Paddington. By then, Mary had suffered another setback. She got to Oxford and read English for a year or two at St Hilda’s before announcing her intention to marry George. Then her father – who always felt poor in his big house on Blackheath – stopped paying her fees. ‘You’ll have a husband to support you and wont need a degree.’

This was a terrible come-down, and Mary felt it all her life, never quite confident of her own ability or social standing in a class where Oxbridge educations was the norm. What would she have done if she HAD gone on to get her degree? Would George have been any more willing to let her out to work, or she more able to overcome his opposition? As we knew them, Mary was always the more downright and forceful in her beliefs and opinions, but it seems to have been George who mostly got his way. And that was so from the start. Mary said she’d been incredulous when he asked her to marry him; she’d not taken him seriously at all. But he seemed quite undeterred and later remarked, in a matter of fact sort of way, ‘You will, you know.’

Mary always liked reading and read to us. As a teenager she and her friend Ann were spellbound by a writer, Charles Williams (precursor of magical realism? ) who they met on holiday at Aisholt in the Quantocks. Among Mary’s papers are several beginnings of journals, a first few handwritten pages in otherwise empty exercise books. Her sister had been secretary to TS Elliot, Ann Ridler became a respected poet, and Mary may have been too much in awe of Writing to believe in her own or keep at it. If so, I know how she felt.

But, unlike me, Mary kept reading. She read fast, and, in her later years at least, indiscriminately. I sometimes felt she never quite adapted to real life, the bitty mundanity of things, her own and other people’s inadequacies. In later life, again, gardens were an exception. She always loved flowers, but, once there were no more children to tend to, she took to the practical business of gardening with a new enthusiasm.

Perhaps Mary should have been a nurse. Just before the war, she had plans to open a children’s home and they rented a large house. But money ran out before the bombing and evacuations began. In my childhood memories, it was when we were ill, hurt or in danger that Mary excelled herself. She may have found everyday housework demeaning, but in emergency she was transformed. She was calm and capable, gentle and cheerful: with such a mother and nurse, how could we be upset or afraid or ill for long? Nor was it only when we were ill or in danger. Although Mary was often cross with us, especially me, her eldest, this was made up at bedtime. It wasn’t just the comfort of a story or nursery rhyme and prayers by the bed. Somehow I was also made to understand that whatever we’d argued over wasn’t all my fault. At the end of the day, Mary was humble, understanding and honest with us.

Later, when I got into trouble at school or gave up what looked like a good job, or brought back a partner who might have seemed unsuitable (that word again!), neither Mary nor George turned their backs on us. This wasn’t because Mary didn’t care about convention or what other people thought, but when it came to it – out of love for us or for underlying truth – she never sided with the enemy. The last time I saw her, a week or so before she died, I said I would like to tell her some of this, the nice things I remembered about her, rather than save it in memoriam. She was pleased, thanked me for thanking her. I also asked if she’d sometimes have been disappointed in me, and she said she had. But for once we were happy together, and it didn’t matter any more.

Mary often longed for a career in the wider world, but at home she was rarely just a housewife. In the war, once we got our own house, we shared it with a Jewish refugee family. Then, after the war, when the Wachters went back to Austria, their place was taken by the widow and children of Mary’s younger brother Tony. A succession of au pairs became friends, grannies and great aunts moved in next door and for some years, about when I was leaving home, Mary became a sort of foster mother to half a dozen nephews and nieces, sent back to school in England from overseas bases and colonies.

News of Tony’s death in the Ardennes came as a terrible shock. He and Mary had been very close, but when war broke out Tony joined up and had little time for her pacifism. Direct experience of war may have changed his mind, and his last letters from the front were thoughtful and affectionate. Mary had told him she was worried about losing George, to the enemy or other women. Now Tony told her not to worry, he knew how it felt, for both of them, and George would be back.

George came back and Tony didn’t. Tony’s Tanya came to live in our house with her two children. Tanya’s mother had painted the portrait of George that I now have on the wall. It was commissioned, Mary said, so that we would have something to remember him by if he was killed. As it was, George came safely home and – unless Mary imagined it – fell in love with Tony’s widow Tanya.

Whatever wounds the war opened up between them remained hidden from us. There must have been ideological differences too. Now I wonder how they felt, even before George was called up, when he brought home little boxes of sten-gun parts for us to assemble on the dining room table. (No wonder those guns were unreliable!) Later, I asked my mother why she had seemed so calm one afternoon in London when a flying bomb bumbled overhead. We were having a picnic tea in the big garden, the Kensington square behind our house, and we all stayed put. We may even have had malt bread. When I asked Mary, half a century later, why she’d taken it so calmly, she couldn’t remember the occasion ‘By then I may have felt we had nothing to lose,’ she said. For me that picnic stood out as a happy time with her, along with a bicycle ride in the country years later, when we stopped for a glass of cider, at a wooden table in the sun outside a pub.

After the war, ideological differences became less important. Mary remained a Quaker and a pacifist, George an agnostic with a shelf full of orange New Left Bookclub books – which disappeared as the Cold War set in. (Did the ripples of McCarthy extend this far?) George and Mary shared the outrage and pity of Suez and Hungary, Prague and Vietnam, and some of that got through to me. As time went on, they also shared more happiness. When George’s elder brother Gerald died, he left them enough for George to stop work and buy Fawler Manor. It was only now that George had given up his job that Mary felt able to go out to work. It may have been simply that with children gone she had more time, but it was also clear that they were now comfortably off; her voluntary work was acceptable, not like a paid job when people might have thought he couldn’t afford to keep her. Mary committed herself to Quaker business and Marriage Guidance.

She also took to gardening. As a child, I remember it was George who dug and planted vegetables at weekends. Now he’d retired, the vegetable patch slowly reverted to grass and it was Mary who took up spade and trowel, planting and weeding long herbaceous borders, head high with daisies and delphiniums.

When George died, 11 years ago, he left a letter with his will in which he said that Mary had made a better man of him. With him gone, after 60 years together, she often wished she too were dead. I found it hard to answer when she said that: how can such gaps be filled, such an intimate absence, large as life?

In her childhood, before meeting George, Mary didn’t get much tender loving care or playfulness. George brought a lightness and humour new to her. She had the courage of her moral convictions, but he had a more primitive confidence in his own feelings, impulses right or wrong. Without him, on her own in a ‘sheltered’ Oxford flat, there was little that we, the rest of her family, could do with our dutiful visits and telephone calls. Mary didn’t find it easy to make new friends – as distinct from Friends – or float on casual acquaintance.

Among Quakers, Mary was confident, capable, even authoritative. Perhaps it was the egalitarian simplicity of the Society of Friends that freed her, or a shared moral commitment absent in other social gatherings – in which Mary often felt ill-at-ease. Perhaps she also had a class advantage, even without an Oxford degree. People recalled her principled effectiveness in committee work, and the beauty of her voice in ministry… Whereas, as a teenager, I would hear her speak in meeting, serene, eyes closed, and think ‘If you could see her at home!’

Several times in the last few years of her life, Mary became seriously ill – a fall, a minor stroke or infection, sometimes all combined. Several times we thought she would die and talked of living wills, but each time she clung to life and revived. On one occasion, as she was leaving hospital in a wheelchair, a tall black male nurse called across ‘Hey, Mary, aren’t you going to say goodbye?’ She turned and they shook hands. She said ‘I hope you have a very happy life.’

Afterwards she remarked how strange it had been to be washed and changed by a big black man. I remembered her talking of her father’s big hands bathing her, and wondered if there were also black hands then, a nursemaid’s perhaps, in Trinidad. More recently, when Mary stayed with us in Wales, it was Ada’s Papist hands (do
these things come out in the wash?) On one occasion, when Mary was taken ill in Oxford, it was I, with help from Janet, her grand-daughter, who was privileged to do the washing and changing. Good for us, if not for Mary who was barely conscious.

Maybe Mary should have been a nurse, but it wasn’t just good nursing, in the technical sense – or even good NHS medicine – that brought her back to life, or helped her die so peacefully. I think what made the difference had more to do with kind hands and hearts, and that what she got from her carers in hospital and nursing home was a new, very basic, but life-giving confidence in her own existence

Mary’s class and upbringing had led her to believe that what mattered in life as how she performed and appeared. Not quite Manners makyth man – George’s Winchester motto – but righteous behaviour and belief. For 90 years she had
tried to do and think aright, to live up to high standards and ideals. Then, with old age and sickness… All fall down! Sick to death non-compos and fit for nothing, why should anyone care for such stinking mess?

Except they did, even strangers, who cared enough to feed, wash, change, bethere at her side to welcome her back. Smiling, embracing her.

It seems to me that Mary had a new lightness about her last summer at St Katharines in Wantage. I don’t think it was just a loss of memory that freed her to be happy, made her eager to get up, out and about again. What she’d learnt, or relearned, late in life was this: if people could bear and care for her at her worst, and greet her with a smile or caress when she opened here eyes, she MUST be worth something. If that was true, then life could be worth living too. Good enough to be going on with!


Greg Wilkinson 21.11.08
(with additions 29.3.09)