Winchester Words

Dear Mum,

The Beast from the East has returned to mark the 3^rd anniversary of your departure. The bitter easterly wind scours the valley beyond my window. The view of St Catherine’s is one that you would have loved. My eyes sting with the rawness of the freezing dry Siberian air, even staring through the double-glazed glass.

It has been a strange time here since you left. The Brexit you voted for, before checking out, has happened and adds to the general sense of despondency – especially for the young. Those like Alf, your grandchild has, on returning from travelling, spent a year without work. It is not what you were hoping for, I realise that, but it does nothing to help the situation going forward. The damage to our country is masked by another affliction that you have been spared. Corona Virus. A global pandemic that has savaged us disproportionately as the ‘fat man of Europe’, has created a sense of national and personal introspection. It must be hoped that we emerge as better people in a better place, but the signs are not encouraging.

I recall the early morning phone call that told me you were dying. I shook and sweated. I had to take a shower as, despite having a body that needs no deodorant, I stank, a pungent nervous sweat never known before. And then the call a little later to say you were gone. Somehow it was easier knowing you had left. The urgency to be there with you departed with you… alone …  in a foreign hospital. I flew out to see the places you had last looked upon. The snow, like a comfort blanket deadening sound, lying deep beneath the wings of the plane that carried me. I drove to where you were…but found only your shell.

On the sandy inlet that you walked to on the day before the hemorrhage, I plunged myself into mountainous Atlantic waves whipped up by Storm Emma. Clinging to the Algarvian handrail lest I be swept away, I felt your pleasure. You never let the little girl die inside you. It felt like you were there with me, laughing at the cold, the exhilaration of the waves pounding against the rocks and swirling up the boardwalk to where I clung, exfoliated by the fizzy foam and sand. An unconventional mother’s last kiss, but a kiss nonetheless.

The woman I had married, that family you hoped for friendship from, is no more. The critical bitterness that caused you to slap her, for her blasphemy, drove me away. The alienation of those who I love was a price I could not pay and so I am alone again mother. A status I know you endured twice, through pain of death, and then could not countenance a third time, despite the violence you lived with. The tragedy of widowhood to strike you in your twenties once is hard, twice, beyond belief. Better to be alone. I know you wished for the bravery that you saw me mustering the first time. It is a hard road, but I know you would understand as only a mother can. Especially one so well acquainted with loss and the sapping erosion of compromise and domestic abuse.

And so here we are, those of us living through these lockdown days. Poised on the brink of a new world. Hoping for a return ‘to normal’ but knowing it will not happen… unsure in what ways the experiences of the last year will affect our shared futures but knowing that it will.

My annex you would have loved. I remember you asking if I could not keep one of the two rooms in the newly converted attic for myself, the view is so impressive. I retain that view, lower down in the annex with its bijoux ensuite appeal. And it is across the subdued green of that view that I stare, contemplating what you would have made of the events of the past three years.