Birthday, deathday

This morning, Facebook reminded me that 11 July is my mother’s birthday. They failed to point out that it’s also the anniversary of her death (three years ago, when she’d just turned 94, thanks for asking). I imagine Facebook doesn’t know she died, as I suspect no one told them – I certainly didn’t. Probably I wouldn’t have got a birthday reminder if they’d known.

As it happens, I hadn’t forgotten. How could I? Especially since the two anniversaries fall on the same date. That’s a symmetry she might have found amusing.

She was born in 1924. England was struggling to recover from the battering it took to emerge on the winning side of the First World War. “A land fit for heroes”, the men coming back from the front had been promised; what they found was a land of unemployment, poverty even hunger: in 1936, when she was 12, she’d have heard the news of the Jarrow Hunger Marches, to ram that point home.

Where did she hear that news? Most likely, on what was still called the wireless: the radio. My mother was to watch the media world change again and again. My parents only gave in to having a TV in the sixties. She found video tapes a great innovation, and when that technology was overtaken, she switched smoothly to DVDs. On the other hand, she never quite made the move to streaming. A third technology? She was feeling her age and couldn’t cope with such a radical new shift.

At one point, my family was living abroad but I used to spend a few days working in Britain most weeks. I’d stay with her some of the time, so I saw more of her then than after we moved back to England. With her, we regularly watched films or series, on TV or video or DVD, and I owe a lot of that side of my education to those visits. A key moment was when she introduced me to, and got me hooked on, The West Wing.

But back to the days of wireless. That was how, when she was fifteen, she heard the then Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, announce in sombre tones:

This morning the British ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by 11 o'clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.

Just under 21 years since the end of one terrible bloodletting in war with Germany, her country was about to plunge into another.

Less than a year later, with the British Army rescued from the jaws of disaster by the extraordinary flotilla of small boats at Dunkirk, there was a speech from a very different Prime Minister. Churchill declared:

… we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

“We shall never surrender”. Even in Churchill’s Conservative Party, there were leading figures who favoured opening peace negotiations with Hitler. 

“Those words sent a tingle up my spine,” my mother told me. “They stiffened the backbone of everyone in England who heard them.”

“In God’s good time,” Churchill had said, about the US joining the war. When I was young, my mother could still not quite forgive the Americans for taking so long to come to Britain’s aid. But in the end they did, and the Empire, as Churchill said, gave the country far more strength than it could ever have summoned alone.

She might have felt her backbone strengthened by Churchill’s speech, but she joined the other party, ending the war as private secretary to a Labour Member of Parliament. So she witnessed an extraordinary occurrence. Voters, and especially the returning soldiers, decided that they weren’t going to be fooled again as they had been in 1918, with all the talk of a land fit for heroes. They voted Labour.

Labour woman in war time
My mother in, I believe, Hyde Park

My mother was with her colleagues in Labour headquarters watching the results come in, slowly, especially as many of the soldiers’ votes were cast far from home. The atmosphere was tense as they waited for a victory they hadn’t expected but now seemed possible. It was as much a relief as a joy when the result came in that meant that Labour had won a majority.

“The door opened, and this little figure walked across the room. He was quiet and modest as ever, doing nothing to attract attention. But people saw it was Clement Attlee, who’d just been elected as the next Prime Minister. And everyone stood and started applauding. He just looked around and waved and smiled.”

So began the premiership of arguably the best Prime Minister of the twentieth century. Under him, the National Health Service was set up, so at last people could get the healthcare they needed, not the healthcare they could afford.

And the Empire Churchill had spoken of so warmly began to break up. Attlee made sure, in the teeth of dogged resistance from the Conservatives, in particular Churchill, that India won independence from Britain. After it had, the other colonies began to follow, until by the sixties only a small residue of that sad and oppressive institution, the British Empire, still remained.

In Capri in 1949
She was on a holiday with her future husband,
my future father

By then, my mother was living abroad herself. She watched from afar as Britain, an imperial power no more, struggled to find itself a role. Without much success. Just as it struggled with its declining industrial base, its rising unemployment, its weak international trade.

She was delighted when the country joined what was then the European Economic Community, later the European Union. At last, it seemed Britain had found a niche for itself, in another international body, but one that unlike the Empire was freely constituted by willing participants. 

You can imagine how sad she was to see the country decide to leave it in 2016. 

By then she was 92, and she was living back in England, as were we. She was lively and alert right up to the day she lost consciousness in hospital. Just before she was admitted, she and I went for the last of our regular lunch outings in Oxford where she lived. We bemoaned the behaviour of the Theresa May government, and the petty-mindedness of Brexit England, with its fear of anything unknown, and especially of foreigners.

I didn’t tell her at the time, but I was already keen to get away from all that myself. I couldn’t leave while she was alive and needing a little care, or at least the assurance that someone who cared wasn’t far away. But then, in 2018, she slid away quietly from her coma, on her 94th birthday. 

That freed me twice over. We could go and, with the inheritance she left, we could afford to go. It’s sad that she had to die for that to happen, but I suspect she might have taken some satisfaction from making it possible.

There’s plenty wrong with Spain. There’s a hard right here as unpleasant as Boris Johnson. There is, however, also a generosity towards others which I once felt characterised England too. It’s still there in England, of course, but sadly swamped by the mean-spiritedness that runs the show today.

That all means I live now in a kinder country where I feel strangely at home, foreign though it may be. Something for which I thank my mother repeatedly. 

With no need for a reminder from Facebook.