3 hours ago
5
My mother, Gwen, liked to describe things in broad brush strokes. Me and my sister’s teenage years, mid-80s to early 90s, she’d cover with: “Zoe was delinquent, couldn’t get a word of sense out of her.” Or: “1986? That was the year Stacey was awful.” Going through photo albums to make a montage for her funeral, all her pictures from that era were testament to our ill-behaviour: me, sniffing a geranium, sarcastically; Stace, outside a cafe in an indeterminable European city where you can almost lip-read her stroppy “piss off” to camera in the still moment.
Gwen was politically engaged – you’d come downstairs on a Wednesday morning to find a handwritten letter starting, “Dear Pérez de Cuéllar, I cannot deplore enough your silence on the matter of the Western Sahara” – and heavily involved in progressive politics: our kitchen was full of posters that would have to catch on fire before they’d ever get taken down. There was one fighting pit closures, for example, right next to one about having no planet B, and mum went heavy on the spoof public information campaigns. Instead of the government’s “protect and survive” leaflets, telling you how to survive a nuclear war by taking a door off its hinges and propping it against a wall, there was a “protest and survive” poster; a rip-off of the “Don’t Die of Ignorance” HIV campaign, which said something like “Don’t Die of Tories”, and “Heroin isn’t the only thing that damages your mind”, featuring a man reading (I think?) The Sun.
Her constant refrain, throughout, was how amazing it was that me and Stace weren’t more bothered about the demise of the Greater London Council (GLC) or the impending nuclear holocaust, even though, more often than not, we were right there with her at the protest. There was never any photographic proof of this, it being considered frivolous to treat a march like a sightseeing event, so the only times, in retrospect, something definitely happened, it was because it got covered in the Wandsworth Borough News. “Do you know, when the Iraq war broke out, these girls didn’t even notice?” Gwen would say. Or: “Heaven help constitutional reform when the next generation won’t even stop drinking cider in their bedrooms to go to a Charter 88 meeting.”
But when we were going through photos for her funeral, a lot of them, especially the ones her friends sent, tell a completely different story, one in which my sister and I both have pretty sunny dispositions. This particularly stood out in the photobooth shot, given that here we all are in an extremely tight space, smiling. Sure, maybe she’d bribed us, though she wasn’t a very bribey person. But we’re plainly not, as her legend had it, allergic to her.
And OK, none of our family photos look like the Gilmore Girls – glamorous, fun-loving single mother, plus sweet-natured teenage honeys on the brink of selfhood – a show our mum would have absolutely despised as sentimental trash. But nor do they look the way she told it, the later years of our childhood sounding like a cross between Tenko (her, battling unimaginable adversity) and Rosemary’s Baby (us, possessed by the devil). I’m pretty sure we did notice the outbreak of the Iraq war, too.
