I grew up with grey army blankets.
They were coarse and scratchy.
We had white linen sheets and soft feather pillows, but the blankets were less than lovely.
Blankets were expensive whilst the left overs from the second world war were cheap.
We were, however, taught to make our bed with hospital corners.
The sheet laid down first, the mattress picked up and one corner of the sheet folded and tucked under, the other corner folded and tucked neath the mattress making for a perfect envelope.
A sharp angular affair.
The blankets laid on top then tucked in strategically.
Time it was we had hospital matrons with their starchy uniforms and officious demeanour.
Somehow their discipline entered our homes.
Waking in the morning meant untangling the feet from the end of the bed and remaking the bed for inspection. Not that we were punished for shoddy corners but neatness was expected.
The first time I came across a duvet was in 1973.
Touring Germany we stayed in a hotel in the Black Forest.
Waterfalls and fir trees, gateaux and a white crinkly duvet that sounded like a bag of crisps when you turned over. It was a far cry from grey army blankets.
And then they caught on in Britain and all of a sudden everybody was talking about togs and John Lewis who sold them at extortionate prices.
My mother stuck to woolen blankets and crocheted throws that she made herself.
Her legacy lingers on. I have one of her crocheted creations hanging over the back of the armchair in my bedroom.
I don’t crochet but my mothers parenting skills, the art of persuasion, is sill present in my life.
When I was about to give birth my mother told me to sing. ‘Then the baby will come out easily.’
I meditated instead.
When the dawter was being a tyrannical toddler my mother told me to turn round ten times to lessen the irritation.
That worked.
I never lost my temper the twirling did the trick.
When I was a difficult teenager mornings were trouble. I neither needed or wanted any kind of conversation. I was rude and abrasive. My mother, rather than berate me, made a series of cards.
Like Bob Dylan she held them up.
‘Breakfast?’
‘Tea?’
‘Toast?’
‘Shall I leave you alone?’
‘Do you want a lift school?’
‘Your hair looks nice’
And so on.
Inevitably it made me laugh. The art of persuasion.
The sins of the father the bon mot of the mother.
I still do all sorts like she did.
I have an old table spoon that belonged to her. When making chicken soup its her spoon for skimming off the fat. She called it ‘shahing’
‘When the first lot of water comes to the boil shah off the scum.’
So I do.
I scrape carrots – not peel.
I iron knickers and tea towels.
I complain when I’m bending, hearing my mothers grunt ‘Oy!’
I now fold my hands like she did. Two little wrinkled hands in my lap.
Although when they’re long enough I do paint my nails with ‘Old Delhi’ nail varnish. A deep, dark, red.
My mother thought that manicured nails spelt a life of leisure, laziness and my Great Aunty Becky, who never married and filed her nails to a girly point.
I don’t do crosswords like my mother but I do sing along to classical music.
When she got to her late eighties my mother cried at the kitchen table.
‘I am of no use anymore’ she lamented.
Which of course was not true, but her life of service had come to an end.
Now I understand her dilemma.
If not pottering and pickling if not being useful then what’s the point?
Louise Hay would say that just being alive is a positive act.
But try telling that to a grieving widow. I have a friend who’s husband died suddenly. After 43 years she is now alone.
She has a house, a son, a garden a pension and a library of books. But she’s lost.
The silence, the emptiness, her need for a purpose eats away at her.
I remember a radio programme years ago listening to a professor who lost his wife after 60 years of marriage.
‘How do you cope?” asked the interviewer.
‘You learn to deal with it in the end. But it’s like walking with a limp.’
I tell the widow this but it makes no never mind.
I, on the other hand, am having to deal with the loss of the old git gradually.
He’s grown a beard and lays a fire every day.
He’s benign in his silence and has stopped driving. He wears a bobble hat in bed and sleeps for England.
He comes alive when young children are present and then goes and chops wood for his fire.
He would stop eating if we let him.
I miss his humour.
I miss his chatter.
I miss his soft belly.
When he’s upstairs in bed I practice life without him.
It’s 4.32 a.m.and I’m writing this. That’s one way to fill the time.
But in truth filling the space without him in it takes effort.
I have a German friend who has been single for years. She’s 70 now and still wind surfs. She buys designer clothes and reads two English novels a week.
She has perfected the art of being alone.
She still works and has the body of an eighteen year old.
Would I trade all that for a life with the Northern git. I dont think so.
But hurtling towards death is now a reality.
Some hurtle slower than others.
I’m tiptoeing my way through life, aware that the grim reaper is hovering but I dont pay him any attention.
‘When the time comes, you’ll be ready.’ my mother used to say.
Like those hospital corners there was a precision to her thinking.
Shut up and get on with it.
Long live denial……