I have written poetry from as far back as I can remember. Not the highbrow type that takes a lot of understanding, just simple words forming simple rhymes. Some poets feel that the rhyming word is unimportant and too often contrived but my poetry always rhymes. I enjoy the challenge of trying to get the sentiment across and the rhyme just right. Until the time that I set about writing this collection of verse my poetry had mostly been the humorous kind. Little verses written for family and friends or maybe about something funny that had happened at work. I would write a few verses and usually add my own wicked twist to the tale. Everyone seemed to enjoy them, probably because they were about people or events that they knew personally.
The poetry is this work is not humorous, quite the opposite in fact. It may require some explanation so I shall attempt to give a little background information to enable the reader to understand why I wrote it. To appreciate the content of the poetry the reader will need to know a little about me, and about my family but I shall be as brief as possible as the main thrust of this work is the poetry and not a family history.
The head of our family was our father, Job Alfred Rock, an outstanding name for an outstanding man. How can I best describe my Dad? When I asked myself this question the first word that came to mind was ‘strong’. He was a typical father of the Fifties, working hard in a factory for a low wage whilst Mom was left to care for the home and family. That was how he wanted it. That was her place as he said many times, particularly when she asked if she could join the neighbouring wives to do a little part time work. He had charisma, a strong character and presence. It always felt good to be in his company. He wasn’t just any old Dad. Dad wasn’t the ‘touchy feely’ type and I can’t remember one single hug or loving kiss. He was someone to be worshipped from afar, like Elvis or The Beatles, we hero-worshipped him. Praise from Dad was like a blessing from the Pope. It didn’t come very often but when it did it was something wonderful, never to be forgotten. Dad showed his love by his actions, not his words. We knew that he cared for us and we loved him. He was truly a father to be proud of.
Our Mother, Elsie Maria Rock, married Dad when she was twenty-one and immediately set about her mission in life, which was to make a home and raise a family. The word that best describes Mom, I think, is ‘homemaker’. She did everything. Decorating, gardening, sewing, she did it all and she could produce the most mouth-watering meals out of nothing. Mother was the exact opposite of Dad in that she was a very quiet inoffensive lady. If she found a pound in the street she would feel guilty for a week. There was never any spare money in our house and Mom could have won a gold medal in the ‘make do and mend’ Olympics.
My elder sister Chris was born is 1945. She is a mixture of personalities. On the one hand she is a ‘soft touch’. She was always bringing home any old stray that she found, and not always the animal variety. I remember that she once brought home a grass snake that she had found in the street which eventually became our pet. Chris will still help anyone out. It doesn’t matter who they are. If someone needs help she will go out of her way to provide it. At other times she is a lot like Dad, with a great inner strength and determination. Chris always thinks that her way is the right way and that no-one can do a job as well as she can. As children we were very close. She was a proper ‘our wench’ as we say in the Black Country. Wherever Chris was, that is where I would be. She carried me around and included me in all her plans. Of course as we grew older and our lives took different paths we drifted apart. Don’t get me wrong, whenever I needed her she never let me down but our lives seemed to get in the way of our relationship. Although we only seemed to get together on ‘occasions’, Christmas and birthdays and so on, we always kept in touch through Mother. Chris works full time and so usually visited at weekends but my job allowed me to visit during the week. Consequently there were always lots of messages passed back and forth.
I am the second child, Cath, born in 1950. Chris always says that I am a ‘tough nut’ but I don’t think I am really. It’s just the face that I like to show the World. Like my Dad I find it difficult to show my feelings and yet I have always been an extrovert, never afraid to do a ‘bit of a turn’. Mother always said that I should have gone onto the stage. Perhaps my poetry will be my stage. The rest of the world sees a gregarious happy-go-lucky woman but the real me is content to sit in the garden with a cup of coffee in one hand and my pen in the other. I am really a bit of a loner, preferring my own company and that of my husband to anything else in the world.
Our brother Roy is the youngest, born in 1957. There is a lot of Mother in Roy. I have always found him to be a quiet gentle man but maybe his wife has a different opinion. Mom worried about us all but especially about Roy. In her later years she was always struggling up to the shops to buy him chocolate and biscuits as she constantly thought that he didn’t eat enough. Every Sunday morning she would be up early baking cakes, bread pudding and apple pies to feed him up when he came to visit. Roy, and his partner Janice, now his wife, lived at home with Mom and Dad and didn’t leave until he was well into his thirties so there was a very special bond between him and Mom and Dad. All in all we were an ordinary working class family living happily in a two bed-roomed post war prefab. Nothing special.
Dad died in 1991. He had suffered heart problems for some years and on March 29th, Roy’s birthday and Good Friday, following a happy day spent shopping in Birmingham’s Rag Market with Mom and watching horse racing on TV with Roy he went out to potter in the garden, his other passion discovered after retirement. He was pruning the roses when he had a massive heart attack and died where he fell, catching his head against a rose thorn and sending a trickle of blood down his temple. When we arrived he was lying on the settee in the living room and Mom was devastated. It took a while for Mom to get over losing Dad but in time she made a nice, quiet life for herself.
In October 1999 Mom found out that she had Cancer. The tumour was in her tongue. The surgery to remove it left her frail and vulnerable though she never asked for help she needed looking after. The three of us fell neatly into our respective roles. I did the housework and some shopping, Roy and Jan dealt with decorating, gardening and financial things, Chris did gardening and looked after Mom’s hair, she always liked it nice, and anything medical, hospital visits, prescriptions and so on. This went on for some months but it was obvious that Mom wasn’t getting any better. Sadly, she found another lump in her neck and a visit to the consultant confirmed our worst fears. The Cancer was back. Mom endured more horrific surgery but this time it was not successful. She was advised to try a course of radio therapy but she refused, accepting her fate. She was tired. She was weak. She just wanted to be left alone in her own home and accept whatever happened. She’d had enough.
September 2000 was a month of decisions. Chris and I knew that Mom wanted to die at home so we put our lives on hold and moved in with her to help her through it. I am not going to write down what happened to Mother during those five weeks that it took her to die. Those memories are for me and my family alone. Suffice it to say that the last two days of her life were spent in hospital. Although this wasn’t what any of us wanted, events took their own course and the decision was taken out of our hands. She was such a quiet, gentle woman but she fought like a tiger to stay alive, just for one more look at our faces, as she would have said. I wasn’t there at the end. It happened to be our thirty-third wedding anniversary. Graham, my husband, picked me up from the hospital at nine and we went for a quiet drink together. We had hardly seen each other for five weeks so we thought we should try to mark the occasion.I climbed into bed at midnight and Chris rang at 12.40 to tell me it was all over. My Mom was dead.
Graham dropped me off at the hospital so that I could look at her lovely face one last time. It was the saddest sight I have ever seen and for the first time in my life I knew what a broken heart felt like. She had been such a good woman and such a caring Mom. She didn’t deserve to die like that. Those five weeks that the three of us spent together changed my life completely. I feel such a close bond now with my sister having shared such a moving experience. There were so many horrible times but also so many tender moments. Pictures that will be forever in my mind; the way that Mother would rub her brow across my forearm as I helped her to sit up in bed; the three of us holding hands on that hospital bed; the way that she always struggled to sit up and look tidy whenever the doctor called round to the house; her friend calling round to ask if she could do anything and Mom answering simply “pray for me”; the time that she pointed to us three children in turn and said “I love the sight of your faces”; lying by her side through those long sleepless nights listening to her breathing. When we told her we were taking her home from hospital and she refused, saying that now she knew how bad it would be, she would stay as it would be too much for us. Even at the end her first concern was us. Seeing a star through the hospital window and repeating that old childhood rhyme…..‘Starlight, star bright, first star I see tonightI wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight’…and wishing that she could die quickly.
I made a promise to myself that I would not cry at Mom’s funeral but would sing at the top of my voice. I was sad, but more than that I was proud. Proud that Elsie Maria Rock had been my mother and so proud that I had been able to pay back just a tiny part of all the love and care that she had heaped on me throughout my life. Throughout Mother’s illness I did no writing at all. There was nothing inside me.
A couple of days after the funeral Chris rang to say that she had written a poem for me but it was about two weeks later that I allowed her to read it to me over the phone. I cried so much when I heard it. That poem is the first one in the collection and the only one of Chris’s that is included. It is called ‘I Choose You’. Chris’s birthday was coming up and so I decided to repay the compliment. Everything that had happened to us had been too painful to talk about. It seemed to be our secret, and so I wrote ‘Grief Is A Secret’. The floodgates were open and after this the words seemed to fly across the page. I hope that the reader will not find this poetry morbid for that was not my intention, and neither do I profess to be a great literary genius. This work is just my way of coming to terms with what has happened. The poems have been written with some sadness, yes, but also with love and pride. If you have known the joy of having a loving mother and if you have lost that mother then perhaps at some quiet time you will thumb through these pages and find a little comfort as you sit thoughtfully ‘Remembering Mother’.
