The Scottish Mail on Sunday - You
‘I decided to work out what was wrong with my mother, and why’
She could be captivating one minute, then furious and vicious the next; but it was only after Brenda’s death that her daughter, writer and actress began to understand her
want to tell you the story of Brenda, my mother. It’s a story that involves betrayal, disappointment, a suicide attempt, affairs, love, passion and fury. Brenda was a difficult and volatile woman, and our relationship was complicated. When she died, I realised I didn’t really know her story at all.
The day after her death, my father Tony and I sat in the garden and finally had the conversation I’d been waiting to have for 40 years. ‘Do you think Mum had an undiagnosed mental illness?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ he said quietly. ‘I think she probably did.’ There are many things to feel guilty about when someone dies, but what I felt most ashamed of was this: my mother had a serious mental illness, and I did nothing about it.
Brenda could be the greatest person in any room: she had presence, charisma, was funny and generous to a fault but she could also turn on a sixpence, as fast and furious as a lightning strike – and it was that dark, vicious Brenda we all tried to avoid. So, we didn’t ask, we didn’t discuss, we didn’t question. We all had a form of Stockholm syndrome, and nothing ever got better. And now she was dead and all I was left with were questions.
The weeks and months after my mother’s death took their toll. Not a day passed when I didn’t think about her. In the end, I decided to try to work out what was wrong with Brenda and why.
My mother’s childhood fell apart when she was 12. After a string of affairs, her father Bob ran off with another woman. My grandmother Elizabeth, an Irish Catholic, refused to divorce him, and was left scraping to make ends meet to provide for Brenda and her younger sister, Phyllis. Furious with her father’s betrayal, my mother told people he had died.
Brenda was known as ‘the mad sister’.
During one fury, she ran her hand across the mantelpiece, sending her mother’s precious ornaments flying; she threw her dinner against the wall; and after Bob left, tried to kill herself.
My mother didn’t want to be Brenda, the poor abandoned kid who lived on an estate. She wanted to be Vanity Fair’s Becky Sharp. She wanted to be better than she was.
Brenda was also rather beautiful – a cross between Julie Christie and Audrey Hepburn; if she struggled, it wasn’t with attracting men. Love, her dad’s behaviour had taught her, was about doing what you wanted with whomever you wanted and damn the consequences. It was a lesson she’d take to heart.
Brenda met my father in 1966 when they worked at a school in Sheffield. He was in the staff room when in walked Brenda, the new teacher. ‘Everything stopped,’ he told me.
She was engaged but it didn’t put either of them off. For a while she saw both men – it was not to be the last time she juggled more than one lover – until Dad decided it was probably time for her to make a choice.
When my mother became pregnant with me she was devastated. She’d done everything within her power to make a future for herself with a proper career and prospects. Yet here she was, at 24, locked into a domesticity she abhorred. In 1967, when I was born, you had a baby and that was the end of that.
However, I had a more profound effect on Brenda than stalling her career – it was the start of a deep-set postnatal depression. In those days it was never addressed and Brenda created such a hard shell for herself that to admit to depression, a weakness, was unthinkable. She never spoke of it, despite repeated bouts.
In 1970, everything changed. The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer came out. It was the clarion call to women everywhere. Brenda read and reread it until she was shouting bits at my father. The regrets she’d had about getting married and being a mother came to a crescendo. No more was Brenda going to be told what to do.
Brenda returned to work and was a brilliant and adored teacher. But there was more to be enjoyed and she decided, like a character from a 17th-century novel set in a French court, that she was going to take a younger lover.
Daniel [not his real name] looked like James Dean. He’d been having a bad time and my mother had been supporting him. They grew closer and she took him to my childhood bedroom where they ‘had a fumble’. The affair lasted three years. Brenda had no intention of leaving my dad – their sex life was as active as ever – but she loved the fact she was doing precisely what she wanted. She was living The Female Eunuch dream.
She was happy, fulfilled and getting all