Reading My Mother

READING

MY MOTHER

Kathleen Jones

Copyright © Kathleen Jones 2024

First published in 2024

by The Book Mill

The right of Kathleen Jones to be identified as the author

of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any

form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,

recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the

copyright holder. Enquiries can be made to the author’s

agents, the Blake Friedmann Literary Agency, 15 Highbury

Place, Highbury East, London N5 1QP.

Edited by Kelly Davis

Book and cover design

Copyright © Russell Holden, Pixel Tweaks

E-ISBN 978-1-0686991-1-5

Paperback ISBN 978-1-0686991-0-8

The Book Mill

www.thebookmill.co.uk

Dedicated

To my children

David, Peta, Meredith and Michal

For the cousins – who were also there

Anne, Jean, Joan, Norma, William, Graham,

Susan, Ian and Alison

In memory of my brother Jon Gordon Slight

Reviews

What Reviewers say about Kathleen Jones’ books.

‘A compelling narrative of a writer’s passion for her work.’

Helen Dunmore [Katherine Mansfield: The Storyteller]

‘ . . .reading it becomes a gripping, almost addictive experience.’

Angela Leighton, TLS [A Passionate Sisterhood]

‘What a wonderful story it is.’

Margaret Forster [A Passionate Sisterhood]

‘I read it with huge enjoyment – I think it’s by far the best biography yet.’

Dame Jacqueline Wilson [Katherine Mansfield: The Storyteller]

‘I found the Sun’s Companion an engrossing read, hard to put down. If you like to disappear into the world of a book, you’ll find this a satisfying read.’

Linda Gillard, author of ‘Cauldstane’ and ‘House of Silence’.

‘Kathleen Jones (no relation) is such a good writer and never more so than when she is writing about people engaged in the creative process – sculptors and painters as well as writers.’

Julia Jones [Three and Other Stories]

‘Utterly gripping and I didn’t want it to end.’

Debbie Bennett [The Sun’s Companion]

‘A perceptive, beautiful, and ultimately inspirational novel.’

Mari Biella [The Centauress]

‘This is such a bravura exercise in biography, I would suggest Kathleen Jones not only wins her case but should be awarded costs.’

Charlotte Cory, TLS [Catherine Cookson: The Biography]

Books by the same author

Poetry:

Hunger

The Rainmaker’s Wife

Mapping Emily

Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21

Unwritten Lives

Biography:

A Passionate Sisterhood: The Sisters, Wives and Daughters of the Lake Poets

Katherine Mansfield: The Storyteller

Christina Rossetti: Learning Not to be First

Catherine Cookson: The Biography

Finding Alexander

A Glorious Fame: Margaret Cavendish

Norman Nicholson: The Whispering Poet

Margaret Forster: A Life in Books

Travel:

Travelling to the Edge of the World

Fiction:

The Sun’s Companion

The Centauress

Mussolini’s Hat

As Kate Gordon:

A Practical Guide to Alternative Weddings

A Practical Guide to Alternative Baptism and Baby-Naming

A Practical Guide to Alternative Funerals

Introduction

When my mother died, I discovered that she had kept a reading diary for sixty years, since the end of the Second World War. I hardly ever saw her without a book – in her hand, or face down on a cushion, or bookmarked on the bedside table. We weren’t rich, so all our books were borrowed. One of my earliest memories is of standing with my mother in a travelling library and inhaling the strange, addictive odour of books.

She was a compulsive reader. In remote crofts and farmhouses beyond the reach of electricity, she taught me to read and helped me to discover a whole new world of story and adventure. Part-Italian, a town girl, she’d had a tough life and, as an adult, my relationship with her was often fraught. We had very little in common. Reading was almost the only thing we shared – a place of safety.

‘We are what we read,’ Jacob Epstein wrote. Books shape us in ways we often don’t understand. My mother was altered by the books she read – they made her what she became, just as the books I read shaped me. After her death, reading through the lists in her tiny diaries, absorbing her comments on them, I gradually began to understand the woman who had taught me to love the written word.

Quotes

‘Every poem, every book I’ve ever read has been a friend and a lover, good or bad. They’re part of the landscape of me.’

Clare Shaw

"Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone."

Rebecca Solnit, ‘Flight’, The Faraway Nearby

‘I feel certain that if I could read my way back, analytically, through the books of my childhood, the clues to everything could be found.’

Elizabeth Bowen, Collected Impressions

1

MOTHER AND DAUGHTER

The day before my mother died, she warned me that I would find my father’s love letters, and her own, in the old bureau in the sitting room.

‘They’re not very exciting,’ she said, with a smile that seemed almost regretful, as she leaned back against the pillows in the bed she’d shared with my father. She was as thin as a bird and her skin was almost transparent. ‘We didn’t write about passion.’

I suspected that, if the letters had contained anything very intimate, she might have already destroyed them. But perhaps I was doing her a disservice. After she died, I discovered that I didn’t know my mother as well as I thought I did.

Later that evening, when she’d slipped into a morphine-induced sleep, from which I’d been warned she might never wake, I opened the bureau to look for the certificates and other documents I would shortly need. Overwhelmed by sadness, feeling guilty, as if I was trespassing on a very private life, I opened the crocheted woollen 1940s clutch bag in which she kept important things. It was a hideous shade of khaki. I cringed to think that my mother might once have carried it, but wartime fashion wasn’t about beauty or style. Inside the hand-sewn cotton lining, together with ration books and identity cards, there were about a dozen small Basildon Bond envelopes. I recognised my father’s looped scrawl and my mother’s neat copperplate, in faded blue ink, on fawn-coloured paper that might once have been cream or white. The ink had smudged in places. I didn’t open the letters; it would have felt obscene to read such private communications while my mother slept in the next room.

As I sorted through birth certificates and insurance policies, I realised the bag also contained a collection of little notebooks. One or two were a horrible khaki colour, like the clutch bag, with a government logo in the right-hand corner, a legacy of post-war austerity. Others had pretty floral covers. Curious, but also half-reluctant in case I’d stumbled on something not meant for my eyes, I opened one of them. A date was written at the top of the first page: January 1964. That was the year I’d left home for a more exciting life in London, the year my mother had what used to be called ‘a nervous breakdown’. But it wasn’t a diary. Down the page, neatly divided under monthly headings was a series of book titles and their authors, each one given a star rating from one to four, with the occasional comment from my mother. These were her reading diaries, and they ran from 1948 – two years after she married my father – to the present; almost sixty years of reading history.

I can’t remember my mother without a book in her hand; she read with her morning coffee and her afternoon tea. In the evenings in remote farmhouses she and my father sat in front of the fire and read by oil lamps or flickering candle-light. Sometimes it was a guilty pleasure – busy farmers’ wives weren’t supposed to bury their heads in books when they could have been doing something useful. I remember her jumping up to hide her book under a cushion when a neighbour knocked on the door and the lunch dishes were still in the sink. She put her finger to her lips to warn me not to say anything, and her cheeks flushed with shame.

As a small child, bedtime stories (and sometimes daytime stories) were a regular feature of my life. Beatrix Potter’s tales were my favourites, but I loved poetry even when I didn’t understand what it meant. My mother could recite huge chunks of Shakespeare and Wordsworth and almost the whole of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Her rendering of Longfellow’s Hiawatha was unforgettable, and the tragic saga of the Forsaken Merman always reduced me to tears as she reached the mournful conclusion: ‘Come away, children, come away’. The idea of a mother leaving her children was beyond my comprehension. Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky and The Walrus and the Carpenter were also in her repertoire. It didn’t matter how often I heard them, they gave me pleasure – and still do, because I can hear my mother’s voice when I read the words. She had a way of reading poetry aloud that caught the imagination. When she recited Omar Khayyam –

They say the Lion and the Lizard keep

The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep:

And Bahram, that great Hunter – the Wild Ass

Stamps o’er his Head and he lies fast asleep.

– the words took me straight to the Persian palaces of Persepolis and I became part of a fairytale, watching the Sultan’s tower ‘noosed with light’ and the stars outside my bedroom window flung into ‘the bowl of night’.

I knew all about Persepolis. On my mother’s bookshelves, next to the poetry books and the medical encyclopaedia, was a large, rather boring-looking tome in a plain binding, called The Wonders of the World. The photographs and drawings were in black and white, but the splendours of the world’s most famous antiquities were bright with colour in my imagination. It was too heavy for me to carry very far, so I read it on the floor. Persepolis, the book told me, had once had gates of gold and ivory before it was sacked by Alexander the Great. I looked at it so often that its carved staircases and pillared porticos were as familiar to me as pictures of my local village.

And only a decade and a half later, when I walked through the ransacked palaces of Persepolis as a young mother with a small child in my arms, I thought of my own mother and the book that had inspired my dreams of travel. The words in my head were the ones she used to recite; as a child I had not understood them but had loved their music. Now, as an adult in this abandoned city in the middle of the Iranian desert, the words made perfect sense:

One Moment in Annihilation’s Waste,

One Moment, of the Well of Life to taste –

The Stars are setting and the Caravan

Starts for the Dawn of Nothing – Oh, make haste!

Apart from our love for Omar Khayyam, there was a gulf between my mother and me. I didn’t get on terribly well with her when I was young. I was my father’s favourite, a tomboy, closer to him in temperament than to her. Her favourite was the brother who arrived nearly six years after I was born, a gentle, quiet baby who loved being cuddled and wasn’t always getting into mischief. ‘You were such a handful,’ she once told me, ‘I waited until you were at school before I had another.’

‘Books,’ Anthony Powell wrote, ‘have odd effects on different people’. Our tastes were fundamentally different. I despised the tacky sentiments of Patience Strong and the morally uplifting epigrams in the Friendship Books of Francis Gay. My mother was also very fond of a column called ‘the Man Who Sees’ in Woman’s Weekly. It was a series of thoughtful ruminations on various subjects while ‘the man’ went rambling outdoors in a trilby hat with a pipe in his mouth. My mother loved his cosy philosophies and so, for a while, did I – there were truths there that I could relate to. ‘Go into the woods in company and you come back empty – go alone and you come back with more than you can hold’ meant something to a girl who roamed the countryside on her own. But by the time I was thirteen or fourteen, I’d outgrown it and was hungry for things that went further into the wild hinterland of the mind. I gave my mother a hard time – once, in an argument, I called her gullible. I suspect there were times when I made her cry after I had ridiculed some precious belief of hers.

After she died, when I was numb with the loss of someone I still hadn’t fully appreciated, I took the things she’d left me back home and, for the first time, sat down to look at her reading diaries. The pages were covered with the titles of books I’d never read, by authors I’d never heard of. Some of these unknown books had been given four stars and underlined. I realised how little I had known this woman who had given me my love of literature – perhaps even the compulsion to become a writer myself. But those little diaries also took me back to darker places I was reluctant to revisit.

2

ELLA

When I was in my early teens, my mother ran away. She left the house in the middle of the night, barefoot, in her cotton nightdress, and ran down the fell track towards the main road. My father went after her and eventually brought her back, weeping and shivering, to sit by the fire. He wrapped her in a blanket, put another log on the embers and made her a cup of tea. ‘It’ll be all right, Tiny,’ I heard him say. ‘It’ll be all right.’

But it wasn’t.

Everything I’d believed to be secure crumbled that night. The scaffolding of my childhood collapsed and nothing would ever be the same again.

My father called her Tiny but her name was Ella. When she met my father, her surname was Brown, but on her birth certificate she was Ella Gordon Sutherland. She was born in a rented terraced house in North Shields, a poor suburb of Newcastle on the banks of the River Tyne, a fishing community that was also very dependent on the ship-building yards and the nearby coal mines for its prosperity. Her father was half-Italian, with a romantic history. His own father, William Sutherland, was the son of a family that owned ships and property. He had fallen in love with a pretty Italian girl on the quayside in Genoa, married her and brought her back to Tyneside after a mere three-week acquaintance. Francesca Maria Theresa Nagaro spoke no English and did not thrive on the Tyne, but she had two children, my grandfather Thomas and his sister Rosella, sometimes anglicised to Rose-Ella.

My grandfather used to teach us odd words in his Italian mother tongue. He liked his bacon and eggs cooked in olive oil – then only available at the chemist for medicinal purposes – and he could cook a decent macaroni. By the time the First World War broke out, all the family money, sailing ships, pubs and houses had gone – together with my great-grandmother Fanny, the ‘Italian Lady’, who died of a genetic degenerative heart condition she passed on to my mother. She also passed on her thick black hair (which was never cut) and her Roman nose. My mother was very self-conscious about her nose and so, when I inherited it, was I. If plastic surgery had been available when I was eighteen, it’s the one thing about myself I would have changed. But on my mother it somehow matched her dark hair and Latin looks.

Thomas Sutherland married Annie Gordon Young – another Tyneside girl from across the river at South Shields – whose father had been a merchant seaman. She was one of eleven children, eight of whom survived, brought up in one of those ‘two-up, two-down’ terraced houses with the capacity of a Tardis. Annie adored her father Jack, a fun-loving man who was something of a practical joker, but she hated her mother who apparently hated her back and was always subjecting her to petty cruelties. Annie told me it was because she didn’t have curly hair like her sisters. It left a deep mark.

I had always wondered why everyone in the family had Gordon as a second name – even the girls. My grandmother told me that her own grandfather had been conscripted into the English navy – press-ganged against his will, something that often happened in the 1800s. He had jumped ship in Germany, changed his name to Young (perhaps Jung?) to escape the death penalty for absconding, made his way back home and settled down under his new name. But, true to his Scottish roots, he insisted that all his children and their descendants should also be called Gordon.

There was a lot of Scottish blood in my mother. On her father’s side, the Sutherlands had been displaced by the Highland Clearances, though how they got so much money and property wasn’t clear. My grandfather thought they’d had illegitimate aristocratic roots, but it was probably more to do with entrepreneurship. They were a kind of Onedin family – owning sailing ships and public houses in a small way. At one time they owned streets of houses in North Shields but it was all gone by the time my grandfather turned ten years old.

Their lack of money was a tragedy for him because Fanny Nagaro had passed on the gifts of art and music – my grandfather taught himself to play the violin well enough to give lessons to others, and he was a spectacularly good painter. His work caught the eye of a Royal Academician living locally and he was given free lessons, but there was no money to send him to art college or educate him in music. By the time he was thirteen he was a bicycle delivery boy for a greengrocer, and at sixteen he was earning a living as a painter and decorator. He specialised in trompe l’oeil and special effects and was good enough to work on restoring stately homes across the north of England. His sister gave operatic recitals, and his son, my mother’s brother, became a very talented pianist.

My mother had a beautiful light soprano voice and music was a big part of my childhood. She belonged to the local choral society and I used to