Going back over what I have written so far, it strikes me that I’ve skated over so much, especially my mother’s life and my turbulent relationship with her and hers with the world, especially with men. In fact, a friend of mine, mentioned this to me, after reading the last part, that I really needed to expand on the life of my mum, so rather than get stuck into my time at art school, I’d like to revisit her some more. After all, she was central to my personal, political and creative life.
My mum loved to talk, she was a born story-teller, a trait I appear to have inherited. She also had to be the centre of attention, if she wasn’t, she would sulk, another trait I’ve inherited. We are so alike, it’s frightening. In many ways, she was way ahead of her time, a liberated woman born into an unliberated world. She told me that when she was at school, in Leeds, the boys and girls playgrounds were separated by a wall that she would climb over so she could play football with the boys. She was a beautiful child, with blue-black, curly hair and dark complexioned. A photograph taken of her when she was probably about ten years old shows a girl who didn’t look much different to my mother, thirty years later, or rather, my mother, thirty years later, didn’t look much different to the photo below, another trait I’ve inherited as well. The intense look in her hazel eyes, an adult looking out of a child’s face. She has her arm protectively around her younger sister, Flo. I very recently obtained this from my cousin Clair, granddaughter of Flo, who was the second youngest of Etty’s eight children and as many miscarriages, according to my mum, which speaks volumes about Rifel, her father. I burst into tears when I first saw it, it was the same face I knew so well. Even now, I well up every time I look at it.
There’s no doubt we had an intense relationship, made all the more intense after the death of my father when I was ten years old, a critical age, on the cusp of puberty. It’s a relationship that I’m trying to confront once again, trying make sense of it, of how it shaped me. I really didn’t understand her, I can’t say I even knew her. Had I tried to understand her? No, not really, I was too angry with her, too resentful, too immature, until it was too late and as a consequence, I carry this immense guilt about our relationship that I hope these explorations, to some degree, redress. Why bother now she’s dead these 32 years? Because, she made me what I am for better or for worse, I owe her a tremendous debt, a debt probably all boys owe their mothers, the unsung heroines of the crimes of capitalism, of patriarchy and misogyny, of the sacrifices mothers make for their children, sacrifices that men rarely make or are even aware of.
Here’s a photograph of my mother, taken in Blackpool in 1929, posing on the sea front, looking stunning, in a very pretty dress. She definitely had style. She was 19 and she must have driven the boys to distraction. Her looks and her character were the weapons that must have helped her ‘level the playing field’ in her relationships with men. I most certainly saw this decades later. She was already working on the stage as a chorus girl in 1929 and although she told me of some of her exploits in the theatre, she was short on details and timelines. But she did describe her relationship with the other chorus girls, alluding to the love affairs between them but never expanded on these observations except to say, some moonlighted as ‘ladies of the night’ (these are my words). She told me that she had some very wealthy boyfriends during this period, one took her flying in his plane, an heir to the GKN steel company, who gave her a set of innovative steel golf clubs, made with GKN steel of course, so I assume she learned to play golf. What a woman! You have to understand that she was not the daughter of wealth and privilege but the daughter of poor Russian-Jewish, socialist refugees from persecution. I really am very proud of her and writing and researching these essays, has actually made me admire her all the more so. Of course she had her faults, her weaknesses, her contradictions but like all women, everywhere, she made sacrifices that the men in her life were probably, at best, only dimly aware of.
I have this picture of Vera in my mind during this period, wrapping men around her little finger, employing her not inconsiderable sexual powers to get what she wanted. Am I correct? I think so and I base this on her relationship with my dad and my dad’s friends. She told me he was a very jealous man and probably very insecure, like his brothers and a few drinks inside him made him lose his inhibitions. She intimated to me that he could get violent but I have no recollection of any violence toward my mum or toward me, in fact neither of them ever raised so much as a finger to me. At some point, I would have been a teenager probably, or maybe older, she told me that dad was sexually inhibited, aren’t most men, especially of his era? Clearly she wasn’t but I can’t remember why she told me this morsel of intimacy, what prompted it? The idea that my mother, mothers have a sex life, is not something our repressed and hypocritical culture, especially the working class, entertains. Another regret of mine is that the death of my father prevented us from at least trying to get to know each other, our desires, our fears. What a shame. Surviving his death got in the way.
In the early 1930s, I’m not sure of the exact date, she married her first husband, Arthur Woolf, a saxophone player (she was mad about Jazz and musicians, she married two) and in May of 1935, Ian, my brother was born. The marriage was not a happy one. Apparently, Arthur was an abusive husband with a foul temper that got him fired from the orchestras he played in and no doubt contributed to the breakup of the marriage. Apparently he was a really good musician. I met him when I was a teenager and he was always very friendly toward me. It was during this period that my mother joined the Communist Party, I think in 1935, she told me the Spanish Civil War prompted her but her radical politics were already well instilled in her (along with all her sisters and brothers) by Etty and Rifel, her radical parents. I think Arthur was also a member and perhaps that was why she joined? Some time between 1935 and the outbreak of war in 1939, she met my father. Again, I’m not sure of the date mum and Arthur separated but she divorced him in 1943, two years before marrying my dad.
My mother only spoke once to me about what she did during WWII, in fact a rather long description of her time working in Fry’s Diecasting, an engineering firm that built parts for bombs for the war effort. The owner lived in the South of France for most of the war and she said he held back production because he wasn’t getting paid enough. Vera probably worked on a lathe or perhaps a milling machine, she never told me. The women were doing exactly same jobs as the men were doing but only earning a fraction of the wage the men were paid, so of course, Vera campaigned for equal pay. The men resented her, fighting to preserve their privilege.
Mum was fearless, she was afraid of no one and she was still like that in her 70s, until she was robbed near her flat on the way home one day and it changed her, she became extremely nervous and would jump at unexpected sounds. When I was a child, I used to accompany her to a street corner on Balham High Road, outside Clark’s shoe shop, every Saturday morning, where I would stand next to her while she sold the Daily Worker but one morning, we got there and her ‘spot’ was occupied by a man selling the newspaper of a fascist party, it was probably Oswald Mosley’s Union of British Fascists, it would have been the early 1950s. My mother told the man he was in her ‘spot’ and an argument ensued. In those days she was a smoker and while she argued with him, she got her cigarette lighter out of her handbag and set fire the bottom of the newspaper he was holding and we walked away, up the High Road that was crowded with shoppers. I don’t’ remember any reactions, except from him of course.
During my youth we would visit the local council estates, either selling the Worker or maybe canvassing for the local or national elections. She was like a travelling salesman, she would get her foot in the door and wouldn’t take no for an answer. It served as an invaluable education for my later activist years. What a change from today, when the only people going door-to-door are the Jehovah’s Witness (do they still do that?). Of standing on a wooden crate and holding a public meeting. I remember the first time I did it, on Tooting Broadway. I was petrified, my voice quavering and stuttering as I tried to calm my shattering nerves and proseletyze.
In the process of assembling these memories of my mother, it’s reawakening the experiences that for better or worse, made me and revealing the lost world of a collective culture, of working class intellectual life in postwar London. Many years later, I think in 1991, I was in London on a visit and hanging out with David Coetzee, a South African journalist, who had been in exile in London since the early 1960s and with whom I worked, publishing his journal, Southscan, a Journal of Southern African Affairs in the US via my Macintosh computer and a modem. Groundbreaking stuff back then. In 1986, email was in its infancy, especially when trying to send files from London to Brooklyn was very much a hit and miss affair. We were sitting in a pizza restaurant on Islington High Street, commiserating with each other about the demise of radical politics worldwide and getting progressively drunker and drunker as the afternoon wore on. David was grouching about the loss of our political space and he made a very telling observation; he pointed out that it wasn’t the demise of left politics that pissed him off so much as the loss of our culture, our history, in fact the wholesale abandonment of our past by the left, especially by the Communist Party. The destruction of culture is a kind of genocide.
***
It was 1989, I was living in Brooklyn, New York, my marriage of eleven years had ended and I had just discovered, on a trip to London to see my mum, that she had lung cancer. I had recently returned from a trip to Lusaka, Zambia where I was helping the African National Congress install a load of Macintosh computers I had acquired for the ANC’s Dept of Arts & Culture and training comrades in how to use them. I was working with my good friend, Nestor Otero on producing the Centro journal for the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York. The magazine was edited by Blanca Vazquez. I was also lecturing in the new discipline of desktop publishing at the Fashion Institute of New York, part of the State University of New York and I introduced digital publishing to Blanca.
But I was in a bad way, psychically speaking, barely holding it together and smoking far too much ganja. Blanca paid me a visit as she could see the state I was in and she suggested that I get in touch with Pat Robinson a friend of hers, that initiated an over twenty-five year relationship with Pat that we maintained until her death in 2015. Pat was this intense, radical black woman, who then was probably in her late 60s. One of the first Black women to be trained as a social worker to deal with, as she put it, the damage done to Black people by US capitalism, in reality, she was expected to keep a lid on things. Pat lived in Mt. Vernon in upstate New York and after a phone call, she agreed to see me. So every Thursday, I would hop on a train from Grand Central Station and Pat would meet me in her little silver Honda and we would drive to her apartment and sit in her kitchen, drink coffee and just talk. It didn’t take long for my mother to become the centre of these weekly discussions and I discovered that Pat was doing the same thing for mostly Black and Hispanic people in New York including Blanca, artists, writers, musicians and activists, damaged if you like, by US capitalism. Pat was part of a group of radical women, who in 1968 started up an organisation called the Red Stockings.
At some point during these weekly confabs, Pat introduced me to a book called ‘The Words to Say It’ by Marie Cardinal, it’s an autobiographical novel, about the daughter of French colonial settlers in Algeria and her journey through mental illness and her eventual recovery. It’s not normally the sort of book I would have read, at least back then. A funny aside to this. Pat lent me her copy but I wanted a copy of my own. The only place I could find it was in a feminist bookshop on the West side of Manhattan, so I paid the shop a visit. On entering the place, I asked about the book and the reaction was, ‘What’s a man doing asking for this book?’ Nevertheless, I bought it in spite of the frosty reception, I had to order it and make a return visit for it. I didn’t regard it as a feminist book but two things emerged, at least to me; one was the poisonous nature of French colonialism and second, the poisonous nature of French bourgeois family life, the two obviously went hand-in-hand.
Just how poisonous, as far as my condition was concerned was revealed by a particular section in the book in which Cardinale visits her family’s apartment in Paris and as she walks through the claustrophobic interior of heavy drapes and over-the-top furnishings, she’s struck by a feeling that she had had all her life that somehow, the apartment triggered, that she now recognised as one of fear. When I read this, it hit me like a bomb because I realised that my feeling was the same as hers- fear and like her, I had carried it all my life without recognising it. When I told Pat this, she said, ‘why do you think I gave you the book to read?’ Pat went further and connected it to my early childhood. I argued with Pat over this. Was she claiming that my mother was the source of my fear? Then a conversation I had had with my mother, I couldn’t remember when, in which she told me that after the birth of her son by her first marriage (Ian, my half brother), she never wanted to get pregnant again. Apparently she’d had a lot health problems during and after the birth and that during the war she had gotten pregnant again (and that had to have been by my father) and had a failed ‘backstreet abortion’. Was that me and if so, could it be connected to the fear I had been carrying all my life? She also told me that my father wanted a child, yet obviously, she didn’t want to get pregnant again.
I think I visited Pat for less than two months before she told me that she had to move down to Florida to be near her family, her eldest son had AIDS, so we were never able to pursue these and other issues any further, at least not face-to-face and the question of the source of my fear remained unresolved. Frankly, I was devastated but at the same time, I think subconsciously, I was reluctant to pursue the issue. It meant asking questions I didn’t want to ask, nor have the answers to, thus until this essay, I’ve not seriously considered the implications the conversation about my mother’s failed abortion. Could my lifelong feeling of fear really be connected? Could the fear have been communicated to me in the womb?
Before Pat left for Florida she said to me that I needed to speak to my mother before she died and believe me, I tried, I really tried. If only we both had the courage to be honest with each other but fear, again, obviously possessed the both of us, perhps for different reasons, or maybe not? Hers was her fear of dying. Several weeks before she died, she moved into a hospice in Clapham, a very beautiful location, the place was full of flowers. I made the trip from New York to be with her, I had made several over the preceding months. I visited her almost every day and got to know other people there, who were also in the last weeks of their lives. The experience moved me immensely, I wanted to come back and make a movie there. The day before she died, I visited her and unbidden, her neighbour in the block of flats where she lived, decided to visit as well. Very prescient, she normally asked me if she could come. Vera was very weak, she hadn’t eaten anything all week, I’d managed to get her to drink some orange juice.
We had one, last conversation on the day before she died. She seemed peaceful, not agitated or fearful, maybe she was just too exhausted to fight anymore? My last words to her were,’It’s time to let go mum’ and she acknowledged me. The following morning I went into town and bought a tape of Miles Davis’ latest record and listened to it as I walked across Clapham Common on my Walkman, toward the hospice. As I entered a nurse intercepted me as I walked toward to her room. She didn’t have to say anything. I walked in and there she was, she had died shortly before I got there. I broke down and cried like a baby. I just couldn’t approach her. The image of her face has never left me ever since. The nurse came up to me and asked me if I wanted to go and sit down in a private room which I did. I felt drained. Later, the nurse came to me with a plastic bag with her nightie, a hair brush and her handbag in it.
Part IV: Before and after mum
Thank you, William. I think you are very brave.
I'm sending healing thoughts. xxx
A few thoughts after reading through this, for the umpteenth time. I will, at some point consolidate these episodes into a single book and expand on it at the same time and hopefully get it published. There's so much I haven't said, I'm an impatient writer and as I mentioned in the second installment, writing triggers the memory, incidents, feelings, get recalled by the act of writing but I'm the kind of writer who rarely edits what I've written except for details, rather, if I think it doesn't work, I remove it completely. Words tend to flow out of me unbidden and it's best not to tamper with them too much. I discovered this when writing song lyrics and poetry. One can overthink the creative process and ruin things.