Liberation was within the grasp of my mother and her peers, but their arms were not long enough to reach it
IT WAS AN OLD PHOTO FRAME containing a picture of me and my siblings from the early Seventies; four of us, sitting on the dunes in Enniscrone beach. My brother and I — two moody teenagers — our middle sister, a grinning pre-pubescent and ‘baby’ Clare in her favourite blue, flowery dress, posing coquettishly between us all.
Taken on a childhood holiday in Ireland, it is one of only a few photographs that exists of the four of us together. I had stolen it years ago from my mother, after my brother died, meaning to copy it and send the original back - but never getting round to it. The worn, wooden frame looks out of place in our new house, so I was replacing it with a snazzy modern one.
As I peeled back the cork board at the back, another picture fell out.
It was a black and white photo of two women, almost equal height, except that one was sporting a black, messy beehive that drew her almost a foot above the other, short haired one. Both were wearing faded Sixties shift dresses — one plain, one floral — and they were both standing, arms relaxed behind their backs, against a plain wall.
I am always taken aback when I see pictures of my mother as a young woman. No matter how old one gets or how familiar one becomes with the business of ageing, somehow the elemental pull of nature dictates that our mothers could not have not existed before us.
The short-haired, younger woman standing next to Mam was her sister, Sheila. She was smiling but my mother was frowning, squinting against the sun. She was always a beautiful woman and quick to smile in pictures. But here she was pouting and wearing a harried, worried expression.
I turned the picture over and checked the date. 1967. She was already mother to my brother and I, yet she looked so young.
The picture would have been taken in Scotland where my brother and I were born. As newly qualified teachers my parents started their family life in a housing estate in the new town of Glenrothes in Fife.
‘I had always planned to move to London,’ I remember my mother telling me. ‘I wanted my children to grow up surrounded by arts and culture.’
At 17, my mother had left Ballina, County Mayo to visit her cousins, Maureen and Kay, in London. She had a ball going to Skiffle clubs and working in Boots chemist in Marble Arch. Despite a glamorous stint with Aer Lingus in Dublin and then qualifying to teach in Scotland, my mother held onto her London dream.
However, she soon discovered that London in the Sixties did not ‘swing’ for Irish Catholic women with small children. While the media were depicting the newly sexually emancipated English having a ball, my mother and her peers were still being held in the cloying, guilty grip of the Catholic church. They remained loyal to wedding vows, and stayed at home cooking and cleaning and minding their children.
While the world around them partied, the majority of my mother’s generation of Irish emigrants spent the decade picking rusk crumbs out of their Drayloncovered sofas in the London suburbs, struggling with twin-tubs and cooking big dinners for tired husbands — in my mother’s case, after doing a day’s teaching herself.
Joan Baez was singing on their kitchen transistor about revolution. Erica Jong, the Female Eunuch, Gloria Steinem, free thinking, free love — it must have seemed that everyone was free except them. The revolution was happening on their doorsteps but not in their homes. Mam and her contemporaries drummed independence into their daughters. ‘See the world, have your own money. Any fool can get married and have children don’t sell yourself short.’ Liberation was within the grasp of my mother and her peers but their arms were not long enough to reach it. Did having kids rob my mother of all her Sixties fun? I copied the picture of the four of us and put it in the new frame, then brought the old frame back to her.
As I showed her the picture of her younger self she immediately said, ‘Sheila had come up to Scotland to look after you and your brother. You gave her hell. When she came down on the first morning the two of you had covered the carpet in coal and cornflakes!’ We laughed, and then she added: ‘We had come to find a house in London. Your father had somewhere picked out but I didn’t like it. I wanted be somewhere that was safe for children to play outside.’ The suburban cul-de-sac she insisted on had been a great place to grow up.
Mam curled her hands around the picture and looked at it for a moment. Was she wistful for her lost youth? ‘Just look at the state of my hair,’ she sighed, then slid the picture back in the frame behind the one of us four.