Things My Mother Taught Me

Kathleen Ann Carr: 29 August 1933 - 28 December 2023

My mother, Kathleen Ann Carr, died on 28 December last year at 7.10 in the morning, at Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge. Much of this year has been taken up with preparations for her funeral and burial. She was the second parent I’ve lost, although the circumstances were very different.

My father, Bill Carr, died in Guyana in 1992 from cancer and alcohol-related illness. At the time of his death I had only seen him once since the disastrous collapse of my parents’ marriage in Georgetown in 1967, so I didn’t really feel his death as a loss. The father that I remembered was violent and abusive, and prone to vicious rages that turned my childhood into a traumazone. It wasn’t until five years later that I returned to Guyana myself and discovered another side to him.

My mother was ninety years old when she died. She had a very harsh old age, and suffered from multiple health problems that left her effectively disabled. In her final years, she had little appetite for the life she was forced to lead, and sank into despair and depression. Those years were searing for many people who knew her and cared about her, and especially for those of us who remembered the years when she wasn’t like that.

Like so many families, we found ourselves trying to solve a problem that had no solution, juggling different forms of care, none of which ‘worked’, essentially because my mother emotionally rejected them all, and could not thrive in any of the environments that we tried to provide for her.

Part-time and 24-hour home care, care homes - we tried them all, but nothing could halt her steep decline. The pandemic didn’t help, but even if it hadn’t happened, I think the outcome would have been much the same.

My mother had savings, and she could pay the eye-wateringly expensive costs that such care demanded, but at no point in this grim trajectory was she ever able to accommodate herself to a predicament that just got progressively worse. She was not a glass half-full person - her glass was mostly empty and she was not inclined, in her final years, to fill it.

In her last months, she rarely even left her bed. Her situation was not unique. Many of us are living much longer than we once expected to. A long life span, or a ‘good innings’ - as our sociopathic ex-PM memorably put it - was once seen as something to aspire towards and a hallmark of a ‘developed’ society, but it doesn’t always work out like that.

If things go wrong - and they can go very wrong - you can find yourself trapped in Tory Britain, dependent on the increasingly threadbare reserves of care provided by a society that often treats its oldest people with the same yawning contempt with which it treats its youngest.

I’m not referring to the actual care workers - many of whom were foreign, despite the endless denigration of immigrants so ingrained in British political discourse - who looked after my mother. Most of them were kind and thoughtful, and did their best, but there was only so much them any of them could do to help someone who had lost the will to go on

There was a time in my mother’s life when all this would have seemed unimaginable. Because she had so much courage and resilience. She left school at the age of 16 and took her articles of clerkship. In Jamaica she became a solicitor, where she also worked as a volunteer for the Howard League for Penal Reform, visiting prisoners in Trenchtown on death row.

My parents moved to the West Indies in 1960 at a unique point in history. It was a period of national liberation struggles, Third Worldism, Black Power, and decolonization, when the islands of the former ‘dustbin of empire’ were becoming independent; when English Literature - the subject my father taught at the University of the West Indies - was coming under the same criticisms regarding ‘stale white males’ and the ‘Western Canon’ that have become more familiar in recent years.

My dad was very much a representative of that canon, a lover of Conrad and Henry James, who believed in Matthew Arnold’s maxim of the ‘the best that can be thought and said.’ He was also a strong advocate of what later became known as ‘post-colonial literature’. He was a friend of Derek Walcott, Martin Carter, and other Caribbean writers, and Walcott even wrote a poem about him. He was a passionate and idiosyncratic leftist, who opposed both Bustamante’s government in Jamaica and the long tyranny of the Burnham years in Guyana.

He was also fairly useless as a father. In his public life he fought tyrants and bullies. In his own house, he was both.

Our households were domestic battlegrounds, littered with beatings and broken things, with overturned bookshelves, plate-smashings, with my father’s wild rages and vicious boozy tirades against my mother that went on late into many nights.

Parenting was not his strongpoint: if you were sick in the night he would slap you. Fail to eat your food and he would empty the plate on your head. On Christmas Day in Guyana, in 1966, my dad drank too much homemade punch and upturned the entire contents of everyone’s Christmas dinner onto the floor.

My mother was the one who picked up the pieces. She was the one who spent a week alone with three kids in a boarded-up house in Kingston during Hurricane Flora in 1963, because my dad had left us, as he often did. She was the one who shopped, got us to school, and did the things that parents are supposed to do, while my dad lectured and played at revolution. In newly-independent Guyana in 1966, she would go down to Stabroek Market to shop for vegetables, and see Prime Minister Forbes Burnham riding around on a white horse performing for his base.

Burnham was the British choice , who Britain and the US used to rid themselves of Cheddi Jagan’s socialist PPP, and who then went on to run Guyana into the ground.

My father naturally aligned himself with the PPP, which he later joined and campaigned for. The West Indies became his political theatre, where he acted out the legacies of his own emotionally-deprived childhood through politics, lecturing, and theatre, while slipping deeper into alcoholism. Parental separations, reconciliations, and occasional outbreaks of peace alternated with the vicious physical and verbal abuse of my mother.

In those days women who found themselves in that situation very rarely got much support. And my father was the great man, Matthew Arnold-cum-Che Guevara. He was the dazzling lecturer, the organic intellectual who appeared on the ‘Brains Trust’ TV show in Kingston to pontificate on a range of matters, including…ahem, bringing up children.

But even in these circumstances, my mother managed to prosper. In Jamaica, she became such a good lawyer that when Victor Mishcon, the founder of Mishcon de Reya, visited Kingston on business, he told her to look him up in England if she ever needed a job.

In Georgetown she couldn’t find work, and my dad became too deranged during those nine months for her or anyone else to cope with.

And so she came back to England, with four kids, no money, and no prospects - a soon-to-become-divorcee at a time when single mothers were not held in much esteem. She never took up Mishcon’s offer, but she went on to become a partner in her firm (at a time when only 3 percent of lawyers in the UK were women) while bringing up children who were still reeling from the madness of my father’s household.

Somehow she managed it. But she was often ill, and her chain-smoking didn’t help. I used to tease her about her ability to catch any virus drifting in from the Fens. But in her prime, when we were gone, she travelled all over the world, mostly with organized tours. She saw dozens of countries, and loved them all. Travel was her reward and her escape from herself.

My mother’s past in the West Indies, and her frequent travels, gave her politics a very Third World-ish orientation. She was never as leftwing or as political as my father, but she had strong moral principles. Her maxim,which she often repeated to us, was ‘do whatever you want, but don’t hurt anyone.’

She always gave money to development charities. She was very sympathetic to the Palestinians, partly because I had been to Gaza and the Occupied Territories, and also because she saw the Palestinians as the underdogs, with whom she always sympathized, just as my father did.

These issues of justice, liberation, literature, and morality were another component of the tumultuous life that I led with my parents in the West Indies. I grew up in houses filled with books, with the names of writers constantly being passed back and forth in car journeys and mealtimes; with my father constantly trying to force Shakespeare and other ‘great literature’ down my youthful throat even though I preferred James Bond, Jesse James, and the Hulk.

I heard the music of Dylan, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul, and Mary ushering in the new world of hope and protest from my parents’ little record player, and the Mighty Sparrow, Ska, Frank Sinatra, and Herb Albert and His Tijuana Brass that provided their party music.

Sometimes you learn things because of your parents, and you also learn things in spite of them. In my case it was both. I learned from my father that I did not want to be the kind of man he was, and I sensed that he himself could not be the sober, wise man that a part of him genuinely wanted to be. I learned - earlier than most - from both my parents about the Holocaust, and slavery, about racism and apartheid, and World War II.

As a child, I was shocked to find that I lived in a world where such things could happen, and I dimly sensed that it was part of the responsibility of being alive to do what I could to stop them from happening again.

I also learned - belatedly, from my dad’s point of view - to revere great writing, and books have accompanied me throughout my life. But my mother was the one who breathed poetry into me at a time when I barely understood the words she read, beyond the vague sense of mystery and the longing to be somewhere else that her readings often expressed.

She once told us that she was ill in bed in August 1963 on the day before her birthday, when she heard Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech. I don’t know if she heard it on the radio or whether it was playing on a loudspeaker in the college campus. Perhaps she was suffering from one of her ‘viruses’ or the consequences of one of my father’s assaults.

But this poignant anecdote expresses the contradictions between the personal and political that were so much part of my parents’ lives. On the one hand, my sick, unhappy mother. On the other, King’s evangelical cadences and rich stream of metaphors calling on America to live up to its own promises. These hopeful messages permeated my childhood.

My mother was born in the year Hitler came to power. She spent the last two months of her life horrified by the merciless bombing of Gaza, which she watched all through the day with her characteristic obsessiveness. Even as her memory crumbled, and she was disconnected from so many things, she continued to donate to NGOs and charities working in Gaza.

After she died, someone stole twenty pounds from her hand-bag while she lay in her hospital bed. My mother would have given that money to anyone who had needed it, without a second thought.

She deserved a better end. I would have liked her to leave the world, surrounded by her children and grandchildren, knowing that some of the ideals that she and my father had once shared had not been in vain.

But history doesn't always give us what we want or what we expect, either personally or politically. All we can do is toil in the dark and the chaos, and look to the light when light appears, and hope that our small efforts are contributing to something better than what we are seeing around us.

Sooner or later, we all end up as other people’s memories.

And even in these dark times, when there is not much light around, I try to think of my parents not at their worst, but at their best, and I try to remain faithful to the best dreams that they once had. And when I think of my mother, I still hear her singing A Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall and Where Have all the Flowers Gone, and I remember wondering what the hard rain was, and where had the flowers gone?

And I can still hear Dylan’s chiming guitar and bold, confident voice on my parents’ record player, telling the world that the times were changing, reminding me that, sixty years later, there is still so much to change.