My mother’s letters and her love of stories

It is a year today since my mother died. My daughters Isla and Kirstie took my dad down to the crematorium where there is a small rock and a plaque to commemorate my mother. We went armed with some wonderfully coloured roses. The weather has been fairly grim the last few days but it was kind enough to give us some mild and dry time this afternoon. It was mild enough and dry enough to sit for a while on the bench close to my mother’s remembrance stone.

A stone is one thing but I had another memory of my mother today. When I was at university up in Scotland, she wrote me a letter every week. This was long before social media and even mobile phones, of course. I may have been irritated often by the contents of the letters and slightly embarrassed even to be receiving weekly letters from my mother but secretly I liked to see the envelope in my pigeon hole by the door when I came down the stairs in the morning. They usually arrived on the Friday, I seem to remember. There was always humour in her letters. Cruel humour sometimes, aimed at family or neighbours or even my father. She wrote well and each letter tended to be a complete story. Nothing was wasted.

My mother always wanted to write. Apart from the letters to me — which continued after I left university and traveled in Europe and then further afield — she didn’t write. At one time, she took a distance writing course but she soon gave up. It wasn’t what she had expected.

As well as telling great stories in her letters, she was a wonderful narrator both of her early life — and the larger than life characters in her family — and the years she and my dad spent in Nigeria before I was born there. Tales of emirs and snakes and dusty roads and the bush and outdoor toilets and trying to cook — everything that brought to life an existence in the north of that great country in the years leading up to independence.

When I grew into my teens, I asked her to write them down, to base her stories that she so desperately wanted to write on the life she had led. She refused. She claimed that nobody would want to rad such things. I knew different, of course.

She also had a notion that a writer used imagination to fuel stories. To rely on the facts was somehow cheating. The phrase ‘write what you know’ held no interest for her. As she grew older I would buy her countless books written by women recalling their years in Africa. Memoirs and even novels. She loved them but never appeared to make the connection I was perhaps rather cruelly trying to bring to her notice.

By the time she died I had almost forgotten that she had even wanted to write. That is sad for us both. But I have her letters and I remember the stories. Perhaps the saddest part is that it was my mother’s telling of the stories of their time in Africa that kept those memories alive for my father. He has lost the teller of the tales and his access to the tales themselves with my mother’s passing.