My Father’s Wives
I’ve just finished writing a short guide aimed at people who want to write their life stories. I’ve worked as a ghostwriter for over twenty years, writing countless memoirs for clients, and wanted to offer something to older people who want to have a go at writing it themselves, rather than immediately reaching out to a professional. It’s a nuts and bolts how-to guide taking the reader from concept to publication, with lots of exercises designed to get people writing. It was fun to write, and the process of creating it also partly came about because of my changing relationships with the significant older people in my life.
Fact is, I’m up to my neck in old ladies.
My father (long dead, much missed, a wonderful man) had three wives. The first was my mother, and the third my lovely stepmother. Needless to say, they don’t speak to each other and live sixty miles apart, but I, as the ‘child/stepchild’ (I’m about to turn 60…) rush between them, trying to make their elderly decline at their respective ages of 85 and almost 86 just a little smoother. (It is probably for the best that the second wife vanished without trace from my life when I was 16. Hands feeling fairly full right now.)
There is something wonderfully brave about both these women (as well as frustrating: please, put in your hearing aid is something I say far too frequently). They mostly talk about their health problems and who has died that week. Their occasional outings are to memorial services and funerals (sometimes the same ones, where I imagine they studiously ignore each other). But they have a lot in common. The things they have taken for granted since they were first conscious, such as walking unaided in a body that doesn’t hurt, and remembering stuff, is seeping slowly away from them in a depressing trickle. Their friends from school, work, life, are dying or already dead. My stepmother occasionally panics and says ‘I don’t want to be the last one left. What shall I do, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with me?’ It seems you can have FOMO on death.
Overall, they are both remarkable about this relentless stripping away. wThey rarely complain. They spend hours, even days, essentially alone, living in their heads. My stepmother reads widely, mostly books about Hitler, and my mother watches a lot of television, a new habit acquired after her recent move to a care home. She has become particularly keen on horse racing.
The quieter they become, the more I want to know the things about them that I’ve never thought to ask. Their life before me, I suppose. My stepmother tells me how she was born on the third night of the London Blitz, in the basement of a nursing home on the Edgware Road, and how it was so traumatic that her mother rejected her, sending her home to Ireland to be raised for five years by her grandmother, until she was placed in a convent in England, where she remained until she was sixteen. Then she ran away to France, worked as an au pair, and was spotted as a model. She can’t remember what happened to her mother and only met her a handful of times. In her adult life, there’s lots of survival and glamour and three very distinct husbands. So much material to draw on that explains the person she became: Resilient, funny, resourceful. I try to persuade her to start writing her memoir. We discuss structure and as she breaks out the white wine early one evening I suggest she could tell it in three acts, each act being a husband, and a prologue and an epilogue bookending things.
My mother also talks vaguely about her family when I visit: Of people who died before I was born or conscious, and also her own mother, P, who she is certain was the raw material for the bolter character in Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate. Five husbands, P had, living in various places including on Park Lane, London, (this was the late 1940s when London was presumably a very different place) and the south of France, while my mother was largely raised by her grandparents in Hertfordshire. All this and more (here’s a taster: P’s brother was charged with murdering his wife at the Old Bailey – he got off, but what scandal!) tossed off breezily as she eats another shortbread biscuit.
Write it down, I plead. If not now, when?
Just Write It! 8 easy steps to writing your life story will be out in early September.
