Why do things my mother told me when I was a child still stick in my head after all these years, even when they make no sense?
Like her saying: “You can always tell a gentleman by whether his shoes are shined.” It made no sense at all. But I believed her.
Once when she, my brother (the one close to my age, now dead) and I were returning home from a weekend at a bay house near the Crane where she had been chaperoning a group of 18- to 21-year-olds (including my much older and still living, crazy brother and wild sister), out of the blue she said solemnly: “I want you to forget everything you saw and heard this weekend.”
Oh my God, what had we missed? It must have been really good! And all because we’d spent the time playing cars in the sand with our collection of empty Limacol, Witch Hazel and Vaseline Hair Tonic bottles.
Or when she told us that an old family friend, whose right hand was twisted and gnarled from severe chronic arthritis, had got that way from masturbating too much (this was part of her bizarre and bewildering sex talk to two puberty-stricken boys). The only effect it had on us was to make us look with awe, tinged with envy at that poor old man.
The other weary refrain we heard was: “Just go back to bed.”
Because our mother was a young widow she had become a beacon for troubled and abused women. She was a sympathetic listener and a practical person. Short on talk, but quick on solutions. So our house eventually became a refuge for battered wives.
In the middle of the night a banging on the front door would awaken us. My brother and I would stumble sleepily out of our bedrooms to see our mother helping a sobbing woman into the kitchen. Her eyes black and blue; her lips swollen and bleeding.
Our mother would say to us: “Just go back to bed.”
Occasionally, we would be asked to get some alcohol, cotton wool, plasters and other paraphernalia my mother kept in a medicine chest in her room. She would spend the rest of the night patching up the woman, but mostly just feeding her coffee and Phensics and easing the pain inside her.
One of us would be moved out of our bedroom and the woman bedded down for what remained of the early morning. Then my mother would empty the overflowing ashtray, shower and go to work.
One night we saw the no-nonsense side of our mother. She always slept with a .32 revolver under her pillow (that’s a whole other story). After one brutalized hysterical woman had arrived in a taxi, her drunken husband followed her and burst into the house demanding his wife. My mother whipped out the revolver and backed him down the front steps. In like a lion, out like a lamb.
However clever we thought we were, our mother was always one step ahead of us. This was in the days when the community helped a single mother raise a child. Every evening we had to have dinner with her and watch as she chewed each mouthful of food 32 times (another thing she told us) as we listened in agony to the laughter of our friends playing outside.
She always laid her trap; and we always fell into it.
“What did you do today?” (trap laid).
“Nothing.”
“You didn’t go anywhere?” (trap set).
“No.”
“Well, somebody told me they saw you walking barefoot down Bay Street below the Esplanade.” (trap sprung: game, set and match).
The hardest thing I guess she ever had to tell me was: “Daddy isn’t coming home.”
That was the Sunday my father drowned at Cattlewash; his body swept out to sea, never to be found.
It made no sense at all. But I believed her.
• Peter Laurie is retired diplomat and commentator on social issues.
