Mum & Dad

I only have one photograph of my mother and father together. This image is from when dad had taken my mother to the South of France, I think a few months after I was born. This sounds normal enough, but it really wasn’t. The phrase ‘my parents on holiday together’ is so far from how things were in my upbringing. They weren’t married and didn’t properly live together for the brief time they were a couple. My mother was 18 or 19 in this picture. It must have been a wonderful time for her. When my father was there, it was as though the sun had come out and all it’s rays of warmth were pouring onto you. His body is turned to her with the full force of his attention. He was funny and incredibly exciting; he made things happen. My mother loved adventure and travel. This would have been her idea of the life she wanted to experience, and taken many courageous risks to have. She never fitted in to her Irish Catholic family and ran away to avoid being coerced into a conventional life of what she considered to be crushing drudgery. My parents split up two years after this picture was taken and kept an uneasy truce until the last years of my father’s life when they were more friendly. The last years of my father’s life turned out to be unbeknownst to us all, the last years of mum’s life too. Our family had been preparing for dad’s death. He was 88 and he had cancer. His friends had been paying what they knew would be final visits. We, his children, and his assistant and righthand man David Dawson were on a rota of being around. My mother was never ill but a few months earlier she had mentioned something about painkillers, which was very unusual. She was spending the weekend at a drum camp in Suffolk where she lived, learning to perfect her Bodhran Irish drum technique. On the Monday she checked into Ipswich hospital. She said they wanted to run some tests. A few days later Esther called me and told me that the doctors had said she had a week to live. Even writing this now, 13 years later, it shocks me. My parents, separated for all but two years of my life, with 20 years age difference, died in the same week, four days apart. My mother was completely unafraid. I remember her saying to me as I sat by her bed and told her how much I would miss her, that she felt detached from everything that was happening to her. She said she was sad that she would not be able to go to dad’s funeral. We laughed. It couldn’t have been more surreal.