Dismantling My Mother’s House is part memoir, part autofiction. It has been shortlisted for Jericho Wirter’s First500 and highly commended in the Bridport Memoir Prize (reaching the last 6%)
What follows in the first few pages of the as yet unpublished manuscript
Dismantling My Mother’s House
Mummy, goodbye, sharp, singular, definite, wakes me to the dark of an unfamiliar bedroom early one October morning. Mummy, goodbye. They sound only the once but breach me awake. I know the voice. Recognise it, despite not having heard it for decades. It’s the voice of my child-self ringing out. Even though I’ve no recordings of myself as a young girl, I know the voice with the conviction of a mother. It was my child-self calling, delicate, then silent. I sit up in bed reaching for the voice echoing inside my head.
Mummy goodbye fading into the dark.
There’s only me in my brother’s spare room, on the top floor of his house. The dark expands the depth of the silence. How had the voice come? I hadn’t spoken. I felt no resonance in my throat from calling myself awake. And it hadn’t been deep enough to be the voice of my adult-self. A child’s voice, for sure. Nor had I dreamt it. The voice was too external. Disembodied and real, how the first telephone conversations must have sounded to their listeners.
A knock at the door dislodges my thinking. A crack of light, followed by my brother, dispels it completely. He has news. The hospital’s phoned, Mum has died. He sits on the edge of the bed and explains whose phone was off and whose on and who phoned him and who else knows. He breathes in the space, my silence. I thank him. We agree to talk more in the morning and he leaves. I’m listening for the voice again. Perhaps there’s more to be heard. But there’s nothing in the room except me rustling the duvet and the sound of my teenage niece sobbing next door. In a minute, I’ll go to her.
I don’t know what happened. Perhaps I’d tapped into some splintering of time, or self. Or made a prophecy. Perhaps I’d experienced an extraordinary regression. Intuitively sensing exactly when Mum died, or when the hospital phoned my other brother. Had this crossed in the night, to be intersected by some other transmission, deep within my unconscious?
Then relief dispels the questions. Mum will no longer be in pain.
…
Three small rocks rise from the glossy white sea of Mum’s kitchen window sill. Each is populated by miniature creatures, humans and trees made from shells, beads, pipe-cleaners, string and glue. I made these palm-sized islands before starting school, before either me or Mum knew I needed glasses, back in the Seventies, when shell art was a popular activity. I may not have heard my child-voice in decades, but I’ve long lived among the outflows of her imagination. So many things I made at school and home – embroidered mats, felt-tipped bookmarks, Valentine day cards – that Mum kept until they fell apart. And on this first visit to Mum’s house since her death, the first since that nocturnal calling out, these usually overlooked creations demand my attention.
I spent hours constructing and inhabiting these anchorages while the larger world pulsed beyond my immediate concerns. I would choose and arrange the shells of absent animals to be the bodies of new beady-eyed creatures with string tails or wool hair or lacy hats. Here I was queen, bestowing life and safety to whoever took shape from the fiddlings of my nail-bitten fingers. And the time spent in intense construction didn’t require my leaving Mum’s orbit as she baked, sewed or tidied.
Over the fifty years of their existence, the softening of glue, slipping heads from torsos, and detaching of beady eyes has obscured the original anatomies, warping them into surreal creatures, grubbied by thickening dust. Still Mum had brought them with her from our family home to this, her new one, arranging them on the pristine sill, keeping them precious, safe.
…
The miniature rock islands bind this home to the one where I grew up. Photos of us as a young family also add anchors of familiarity to a house that definitely isn’t my home. The furniture I loved as a child gives this small modern mews the air of an old lady’s home. Here, her dark oak corner cupboards, card tables and foot-rests oppress the smaller, modern armchairs and a dining set bought to fit. The weight and soft clicks of the cupboard doors and heavy drawers I’ve opened and closed my entire life still reassure me, but the velvet upholstery and ornate legs impose an era of stiff backs and waxed etiquette on the compact rooms. Adding to this mash up are traces of the previous owner, whose smoking habit, despite fresh paint and new carpets, was never totally eradicated during the six years Mum lived here. And without the heating and Mum’s cooking, the tobacco tang is creeping back throughout the ground floor.
Mum came here from the home I grew up in, where she’d lived for almost fifty years. Buying it from his parents, she and Dad moved in just before I was born. She’d spent the last years of the swinging sixties, such as they were in Yorkshire, rearranging rooms, replacing windows and painting walls to make the house her own, fit for her family. That house, like this new one, had a solidity typical of many houses in Harrogate. The spa town still is an anomaly of sorts in Yorkshire, although its gentility has been more closely matched by the gentrification in the nearby cities of Leeds and York. For my first eighteen years I’d loved living in that home, steeped in my father’s family history. It was as much inside me as I’d lived within it. An enclave, constructed by her, scuffed and taken for granted by the rest of us, as we ranged within and beyond it, always knowing it as a place to return to.
Even so, that home was less intimate than the very first one she’d provided me. In utero we were fused in a slow collaboration of bodies. There, one cell grew from another, multiplying into folds of flesh, in a network of needs, functions and sensibilities that fastened us together over the nine months of which I’ve no sure recollection.
I’d always done the leaving. Mum was always there when I returned. But now, all these sensations of home, holding me within their invisible scaffolds, pitch more air than architecture. The solidity I’d taken for granted, that I’d assumed was of my own making, now feels as empty as this house that needs to be cleared. And my body, untethered, unfocused, doesn’t know where or how to put itself.
…
It’s four years since I felt similarly bewildered.
Mum was still planning to live until she was a hundred when I went to the Arctic. I’d gone to Svalbard, with thirty other artists, for a residency aboard a repurposed brigantine. It was June and the sun did not set, merely rearranged the shadows of mountains, glaciers and moraines. What looked a few hundred metres away often turned out to be ten kilometres, or further. Million year old air hissed and popped from the bitty bergs we passed. I breathed in the exhalations of lives long gone. A glacier formed over four thousand years took five minutes to calve its front wall.
In the face of all this I shrank. And in the process of shying away from what I saw, I opened up. And not just me. Everyone on the boat was gawping and cooing, an assortment of infants scrabbling before the deliberations of rock, ice, mud and water reshaping before us. Every moment was an event, a first, that bore witness to the actions of the industrialised world. Every moment was an act of recalibration. We were face to face with the consequences of two hundred plus years of not looking. And now I didn’t know where to settle my gaze.
No more so than the afternoon we headed for the rock at the most northern tip of the archipelago. Rossøya barely broke the waters. It was a bony mound, far less ornate than the ones I’d made and inhabited with shells, string and beads. There was no sign of the driftwood and washed-up plastics we’d found on other beaches earlier in the trip. This piece of land swelled white where snow lay unmelted, black in crevices threading across it, and green at its slimy rim. Ancient continental crust three billion years old, once part of the earth’s mantle, had been pressed upwards by magma, to thicken and aerate on meeting the sky.
The sea was not white but grey. There was still the threat of unseen ice so we inched towards the rock. I was used to living on the water, the roil of a boat, sleeping in motion, being surrounded by the slap and cut of ocean for weeks at time, sometimes only seeing the curvature of the earth as horizon for days. Lucky as I was to have sailed as crew and skipper at various times throughout my adult life, here I toddled on deck. This land was unlike anything I’d witnessed before. Bundled in layers of fleece and thermals, legs outspread, keeping myself upright in the boat’s movement, I was dubious about getting too close to this low arc of rock.
I couldn’t articulate what made me uneasy. It was as if I could feel the act of seeing in my whole body, not just a cognisant recognition of rock. I was turned inside out, feeling the rock skimming below the skin of my throat or stomach. It was similar to what happens when I’m concentrating, making or writing something, trying to articulate how I find the world. Except I wasn’t making anything, just watching this low lying rock be washed by water that both connected and separated us. It was as if I was finding this remote place was within me, too, as if I was recovering an ancient memory for the first time. It felt both true and awkward simultaneously. In my pocket was a piece of fossilised coral from when Svalbard was 50° farther south. Past and present, distance and proximity, mashed together, pulverising any rationale in the grip of wide-eyed wonder. I was fifty-one years old and had never felt such a child.
