17 July, 1927

Don’t worry: this post will be more cheerful.  My Mum-in-law would have been 83 today if she hadn’t died in 2001.  She was a wonderful woman with a huge personality.  She reminds me of Catherine Cookson’s Maggie in The Invitation, but with the nasty taken out. 

She was born with a heart condition so she spent a lot of time off school and wasn’t very well-educated; but it didn’t matter because she was full of love and kindness.  She never minded not receiving gifts for birthdays and Christmas, but she would be incredibly hurt if you didn’t send her a card.

As a child she had every life-threatening disease ever invented.  She and her sister had scarlet fever and her sister died; when they told the doctor he said, ‘Don’t you mean Elsie?’  She was a real fighter.  She had a lot of health issues and controlling her weight was important.  She ate huge amounts of vegetables and that meant we had to stifle our laughter a lot because she would be propelled across the room by wind power. 

One day, when she was in her sixties, apropos of nothing she said to me, ‘When Dad goes with me these days, I can take it or leave it.’  Your stunned silence now mirrors my own then.

I loved her to bits.  You can read more about her here.

I wish her grandson shared a little of her openness.  Just last night I was telling my friend that Tory Boy was going back into campus accommodation for his final year; just this morning he told me that before he left Lancaster he had arranged a house-share with four friends.  He’s been home two weeks.  I guess he thought it might be a bit late to tell us as we’re delivering him back there in September.

This is the same child who didn’t tell us his exam results (good – phew) until we realised they had been out a week and asked him for them; who told us about Tory Girl seven months after they started dating; the boy I would collect him from school and ask about his day and would claim that he couldn’t remember what he had done or how it had gone.  The words blood – stone – knife through a mother’s heart come to mind.

Spud is like a positive to TB’s negative.  He had no problem in his first year of high school (aged eleven) in telling us about the exciting things that had happened, such as the moment he had to squeeze between two gorgeous sixth-form girls (eighteen) and accidentally touched the bottom of one.

My boys are like chalk and cheese: one sets my teeth on edge and the other makes me break out in spots.