Fifteen years ago today my mother died.
It was a Friday. Mum had been in a residential home for just over a year at that point. At the age of eighty six, she was going downhill and her death was not unexpected. We had visited her the weekend before but she could no longer hold a proper conversation and the strings that connected her to real life were either broken or frayed.
At around ten o'clock that Friday morning, the residential home phoned my workplace with an important message. I needed to get over to the home in Beverley, East Yorkshire as soon as possible as the end was clearly nigh. The only trouble is that I did not receive that message until four o'clock in the afternoon and by that time Mum had gone to join the angels.
The woman on the school reception desk had failed to pass the message on to me. She said she had called the English office phone but nobody answered. I explained that I had been teaching a class at that time and besides, as it was such an important personal message why had she not kept trying or perhaps she could have sent a messenger directly to me.?
I could and would have driven over to the residential home to be beside my mother as she passed away but I was denied that opportunity. It was typical of that school. They wanted teaching staff to give their all and more but when it came down to conveying a momentous message to a loyal member of staff, they could not manage it.
Anyway, amongst the boxes in my late brother's spare room, I found that familiar photograph of my mother. It used to stand on the window sill of the dining room in my childhood home. It was taken in New Delhi, India in December 1945. She would have been twenty four years old. World War II was over and so was her service to the Royal Air Force. It was time to come home with her new husband - my father, Philip.
Mum was a strong woman who lived a fulfilling life. She was an organiser, a singer, a skilled craftswoman and a fervent Labour Party supporter. With a mother like that, her sons could never question women's equality. She proved it all the time but had a soft heart too. I still miss her and I think about her every day.
from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/IyZr4NJ
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