Sunglassed in
Fleece nightwear
Vic-sticks for both nostrils
She declines on
Brown arm chair
To strain coughs through
weak muscles.
Reminiscing with mother
Course, she says
you might have never been born.
Your little nana worked hard,
at her three floor, full bed and board
guest-house.
I slept under tables,
sorted place settings before school
until 1955 and these Burmese boys
arrived in Weston-Super-Mare
started using our kitchen,
as small as it was, as small as I was.
And we loved their spices
and off-peak curry.
RAF Locking, where those
posh slim pilots
spent daytimes learning
some state of the art radio thing
and there was this one, Tin-tun,
who took a shine to me and me to him
How I remember that summer,
me with my mother, Tin-Tun and Thanian
on a short London weekend
me at thirteen and he twenty-three
and we all seemingly off to Burma.
All was set, we were going for good
until mum couldn’t get hold of
her husband, out there in Cardiff
gambling and unreachable again.
No contact means no joint permission
so their High Commission broke my heart.
Forlorn, I was unsure if my life could go on,
so, you see my dear
in more ways than one
you and your siblings
just might never have been born.
.
Irritated by ageing
These damn wars
This cancer
Oesteo-arthritis
And that political wanker
The lift that’s now broken
And fibro-myalgia
Sky box-sets half chosen
And that slump in the sofa
And another thing
That’s driving me raving
That wrong time on the cooker
Since daylight saving
And LBC phone-ins
With their adverts and trailers
And news on the TV
Strange views in the papers
And this dread filling giddiness
In my fuzzy thick head
And that there’s no-longer-two-of-us
And this cold space in bed
And the night sweating worry
For you children full grown
And clear memories of my past times
When not ill and alone.
(The first evening on a week’s visit to my mother)
Wired support.
Sitting here
in my orange peel recliner (built for good looks and bad backs alike) I percolate and inwardly bubble with empty fire of this second coffee steaming within this freshly brewing new day.
I am waiting for the next installment. The kettle to cool for the phone to call, for that burst of new light upon my parents dance trip and fall within the chaotic rhythms of multi-infarct-come-Alzheimer’s dementia.
A mixed picture indeed. An avalanche waiting to be side-stepped, to be witnessed on this hands free phone, 250 miles away from her tightly constrained stress and his unsteady brain freed body.
Yesterday, she was able to talk for a few moments. He had slept through the night for the first time in 3 days. She had stayed up, despite her own extreme sleep deprivation, driven to make sure he was still dry, still breathing. That he was resting, breathing, not wet, not………dead.
Still dry, still breathing, still……. not…….. dead.
Still dry, still not………. breathing, still….. my guilt, still…….. my awful thoughts that he’s still………not………. dead.
Of course, these thoughts, these fears are unspoken between us. Obtuse and hidden but constantly nagging within the haze of his and hers and my heart.
This wonderful, kind, supportive, generous and knowledgeable man reduced to this…..
This fear of his continued relentless demeaning demise, this disintegration, this nearness to wetness and discarding of all to dust and separation.
All of this oozes through the telephone wire.
All of this and more, spumes into my earpiece and swallows dark lumps into the pit of my soul.
This lack of control, this inability to stop the march of his illness, to be able to support her caring, to know how to discharge my role as distant, eldest son, all this and much much more lodges layers of grey bubbling silt deep into my stomach, rests large lumps of darkness deeper, deeper still….
Still breathing……still waiting to breathe once more…….and much much more….. for freshness and clean clear cut boundaries, for release of pain and deep gulps of air…. and
And I miss the content of her words, her brief briefing of the past day’s events.
As soon as I notice my drift into the stereoscopic cotton wool of my own self spun anxiousness, I try to re-waken to her voice, to clear my eardrums, to be there for her, but I fear I am again too late
‘Got to go darling,’ I hear her say,
‘He’s up again, holding himself. He’s wandering and fiddling and I think he needs the loo, best catch it before it’s too late again…….
Speak tomorrow darling, anytime after 11, hey?’
And now after my own spacious brand of sleeplessness, it is that ‘anytime after 11’ time, it is that tomorrow, it is that pulsing immediacy where and I am once again tragically, pathetically reluctant to pick up and phone home, and so…..
I pour myself into the much easier task of re-boiling the kettle once more.
Emerging within this new day
And so, a different approach to curating this moment by moment life. I write in a soft blur that comes while emerging from an ear ringing, heart pumping early morning meditation.
I have been staying at my parents rented flat over the past weekend. This is a pause before the 200 mile journey back to my own home town, a time to spend reflecting on the experience of writing this blog over the past few months. A time to digest the emotional impact if these past three days.
I would love to taste, to express a more inclusive spontaneous and free-flowing life. Something somehow, more precious, right now.
Maybe this blog can help with my aim of opening my heart to whatever flowers and withers within my vista.
November and December saw me meet an exhaustion of body spirit and mind that although well masked, drove grey tiredness into the very centre of my bones. I have not written here during this time.
Sitting here on this first day of 2018, with the starlings and woodpigeon calling from the exposed rafters in the adjacent, half finished buildings, with my parents asleep and relaxed in their bedroom, with the boats rocking gently in the grey-green marina directly outside this second floor flat window, I can sense a peacefulness tinged with the fizz of apprehension and the unknown.
Will they be able to stay here? Will they be separated by dint of ill health and old age creeping upon them at different rates? Will I be able to live up to my mums expectation of being able to sort out the social work assessment and unravel the financial implications of increasing care needs?
It seems that my dear step dad will, probably, need residential or nursing care quite soon. Yesterday he could walk and hold a knife and fork and was content to spend hours sleeping lopsidedly in his old leather chair. The day before he was fighting the wonderful, humble and gentle carer as she tried to wash him and change his pad, he was unable to work out how to unlock his knee joints to sit down and had developed a yellowish-blue tinge that seem ominously, unspokenly sad.
And now, with the scorched grass on the distant mud flats beginning to recover from last nights wind driven bonfire, with the plastic corks and purple glitter, with the party hats and burnt out firework casings absorbing the damp still pavements and walkways, I gaze out beyond these floor-to-ceiling triple glazed upvc windows and wonder what this year has in store.
Six degrees of desolation
On top of my mantle shelf I have a silvered old army photo, shimmering like dew between green glass, hidden behind later digital additions to my Mower family archive. It is of a grand-father I never knew, a man that my dad hardly knew either. He has kindly eyes and my overlarge nose.
He is to me a fatigued silvering ghost, merely a man whose urge to serve became his untimely watery grave, and more so than this, he has over the years, become an intimate deeply seated sliver of the ‘untarnished mirror in which Eternal images constantly dwell.’
Did he, did this figment of my lineage, manage to free himself from the confines of that landing craft? Or were you, Mr Mower Snr, shredded by shrapnel upon that fateful World War 11 Anzio beach? Or were you merely mown down in the waters before your feet hit the rocks and sand?
April 5th 1944. Shot. How many times I do not know, but Dead, you were most definitely shot dead only three days after my father’s second birthday.
When was it written that that swim was to be your drowning last?
How long did you believe the offensive lies, how long before salt brine and Italian sand mixed with you and your blooded brothers in arms?
William Edward Mower: Wiltshire Regiment. My unknown grandad, ripped from this world aged 31. Permanently stripped from kith and kin on that April day. Sacrificed to be dug deep, alongside 2,025 other souls whose eyes and mouths and flesh were raked with bullets and mortar and then scraped upon sand to be disappeared within the regimental lines of Italian marble and stinking mud.
I know the facts that came after you, but none about you as a living breathing man.
I see a digital copy of a grave stone that says ‘In ever loving memory of a dear husband and daddy, we loved him so dearly.’ Such tender words concocted by my grandma, not so long before she quickly remarried and birthed two new additions to her three grieving sons, who in turn became uncles and aunties who gave cousins aplenty, that in between the funerals are largely invisible to me.
But what emotion for the loss of William Mower can there really be inside of me? What connection can I have to the history of a name which, until my late teens, I never even knew existed. What connection to a name I never saw in the flesh?
To a name as distant to me as the non-related:
William Henry Mower: a Deck hand, lost at sea aged 23 on November 3, 1914. A ‘Drifter, husband and much-loved son’, a body never found, a name among 36,068 etched into marble plaques at Tower Hill.
and
William Charles Henry Mower, a Lance Seargent, dead to this world on May 18, 1915 aged but 24, but one of the 13,482 dead and deeply lost in the rows of Le Touret Memorial, in the Pas de Calais cemetery.
and
William Mower, you, a Private Royal Scot dying from unrecorded events within the 13th Battalion on the 11th day of May, 1916. You with no middle name and no age to die. You, also snuffed out to lay with another 20,661 in another memorial in the offending death sprawl of Pas de Calais cemetery.
and
William Percy Elves Mower, a Light Railway Sapper of the Royal Engineers who died 18 July 1917, aged 25, ‘One of the dearest, one of the best, now in Gods keeping, Safe at rest,’ buried with 10,120 more in West Vlaanderen, Belgium.
and
William Harry Mower, the Sick berth steward, aged 33 whose family paid 3 ½ d per word to change your profession to Royal Navy Petty Officer, to honour your July 9th death, re-chiselling new words sometime after your 1918 demise. New words to weather upon a headstone to cover your bones while buried at home in Norwich. You too a William Mower long dead and buried with 533 of your fellow wartime casualties.
You six: carrying the same name but not necessarily the same blood-line as I.
You six: nestled beneath the sod and stone with 80,884 other disparate desperate souls.
You 80,890 dead: mere fragments of the millions upon millions destroyed, maimed and grieved during wartimes aplenty.
You: countless human beings blooded together into State sponsored graves by Governing bodies who charged families for headstone inscriptions, no doubt as some form of balm for officially guiding sons and daughters, husbands and wives, into a kill and be killed vortex of mad desolation.
You: countless endless mass of disappeared flesh and bone, Should I stand to honour you upon this upcoming eleventh hour, of the eleventh month of our yearly gathering of collective despair?
Should I stand to grieve for an unknown intimate family member? Should I hang my head for all courageous cadavers ever unseen?
Should I stand to say, ‘Shame on you, you insatiable wasteful warring whoring Nation States?’
Should I stand to say, ‘There but for the grace of God go I?’
Yes, this year I think the answers ‘Yes.’
This year, with renewed hope, with white and red poppies held aloft, I will in silence make my stand.
city slowness 