Sweet Adeline

I used to think it began with my mother’s stroke. Now I believe it began when I was four and she took a job as a housekeeper looking after old blind Mrs Toller. At first, Mrs Toller called me ‘the awful child’ but we were soon firm friends and I spent hours curled up on the settee beside her. She had once been a well-known flower illustrator and, despite her blindness, she taught me to draw snowdrops. I can see us now—heads bent over the paper as her deft fingers guided the pencil unseeingly to the right place.

I first met her at the flat in London when Wendy and I had been together for two years. I was made to move out to make room for her—the flat was tiny, two rooms, bathroom and a diminutive kitchen. I went the day before she arrived; all traces of my occupation of the flat were tidied away, my few clothes bundled into an old suitcase, my toothbrush secreted in the bathroom cupboard and my seaboots stuffed under the bed. My books were relegated to a top back shelf and out I went.

On 14 January, my mother had a stroke. Frank and I drove through the night, the blizzard blinding us with sleet and snow.

“You can take your mother home for the weekend,” the consultant told me, “but don’t expect too much. I don’t think she has much comprehension.”

I drove Wendy’s Mini up to the north of England and together we collected Adeline from the hospital and took her home. She was frail, her skin like rice paper, her eyes sunk in her head, and her clothes hanging round her. Wendy stayed and looked after her until she was on her feet and then she came back to London. Life slotted back into the groove we were beginning to make for ourselves. It was not an unpleasant groove.

Gladys stepped into the breach. She came every day from 9 am to 3 pm, looked after my mother and cleaned the house. I made arrangements to work from my mother’s home as much as I could. When I had to go to London, Gladys would wheel my mother home in the afternoon and she would stay with Gladys and her husband John until it was time for bed. Together they would wheel her back to her own home and either Gladys, Glen or Christine, who lived near Gladys and worked at the hospital during the day, would stay the night. My mother liked visiting Gladys’ home. She liked the coal fire and the black labrador Sam. Despite this, she often seemed depressed.

I have always regarded the marriage vows as a confession of mutual mistrust—how much stronger and more binding would a relationship be that survived without them, whose bonds lay deep in the heart rather than on a scrap of paper and the mumbling of a priest. It is because people cannot bring themselves to trust one another that their good faith must be circumscribed with a legal agreement. All the same, I understood clearly that I would never sell this opinion to Adeline, or to Wendy’s relations in Ireland or to the good folk who lived near Adeline, or even to Wendy herself. Wendy needed a commitment and needed help and support as I did myself. Without the help, from whatever quarter it might have come, I do not believe she could have carried through what she had embarked on. I was not myself a good advertisement for the institution of marriage, having already failed at the business twice, and therefore I was surprised, when I offered the contract to Wendy, that she accepted it. Neither of us has regretted it. Marriage for us has been tremendous fun and at the same time it made our lives easier in many respects. Adeline was delighted.

Little by little my mother started to improve. The bouts of screaming and the minor physical complaints became less frequent. She became more alert and could concentrate for longer. She started to smile again and her keen sense of humour began to revive so that she laughed when Gladys and Frank teased her, or at the amusing trivia which is part of all our lives.

My mother settled in immediately. On the first morning she explored her room. I had replaced her clothes in the drawers in the same order they had always been in so it was easy for her to find everything. I thought this would encourage her to select her clothes each day—her previous bedroom had been too cramped for her to do this.

Our bungalow has a crack in its foundation; otherwise we would never have been able to buy it. You can see the crack zigzagging up the brickwork on each of the side walls and snaking across the ceilings.

We came back on Friday afternoon. Each evening I had telephoned Gladys and asked my mother whether she wanted us to come back from holiday.

I have always looked on death as a renewal of life. I have always found it difficult to take part in the rigmarole of death which those who are left alive indulge themselves in—the weeping, the mourning, the funeral charade, the obituaries and the stone monuments are all for us, and not for the dead person. She is beyond it all, passing through the last, wonderful adventure whose joys and sufferings can never be told.

Our story is not unique. It is happening now in thousands of homes all over the country where families and single women or men care for elderly people handicapped by senility, Alzheimer’s disease, mental handicap or communication difficulties such as those my mother suffered. Now more women care for elderly dependants than care for young children and it will increase because the number of elderly dependants is rising rapidly.