‘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 EMMA KENNEDY, began to understand her
Iwant 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 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’.
ILLUSTRATION: TOM PEAKE
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. 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
the passion she could cope with. Then, one day, I heard shouting from the garden, and looked out to see her chasing my father with a hoe before catching him on the head with it. He fell down and, for a moment, I thought she’d killed him. She looked up at my window and said: ‘I’ve hit your father with a hoe.’
The most shocking thing about this was her supreme calm. It was like she was saying,
‘Oh hello, we might go to the supermarket.’
‘Is he all right?’ I asked.
He moved.
‘Yes.’ Then she marched back to the house. This was something I was going to have to get used to. I lost count of the times I watched her spiral out of control. It was like a switch being flicked, 0 to 100 in seconds, her face etched with hatred. The cold, calculating cruelties: throwing a wooden ship my father had made her into the fire, hellbent on a revenge nobody could possibly understand. Sometimes, she’d lock herself in the bathroom with a carving knife. I’d stand at the door, begging her not to hurt herself. A child shouldn’t have to provide mental health crisis support but that’s what I did, constantly.
It’s hard not to consider her behaviour as abuse. Why were we so in thrall to her? The answer, I suppose, is the Good Brenda – the woman who could make you laugh like no other, who was one of the most charismatic individuals I’ve ever met. But there was also a sense she had no control over her bad side. The reason I can look back at her behaviour and not hate her is because there’s not a scrap of doubt in my mind that she could help it.
Good Brenda was the making of me. She encouraged me to think, to carve my own way, to be whoever I wanted. When I got into Oxford it was the happiest day of her life.
But when I told her I was leaving my job as a lawyer to write comedy, it sent her into a decline and she careered between disbelief, grief, fury and derision. It was at this point that she chose to have a second affair. I cannot overemphasise how entirely happy she was with my father, but as he sanguinely told me: ‘One bloke was not enough.’
‘He came on holiday with us,’ my father relayed, ‘and your mother used to tell me to go to the shops to pick up croissants. And I’d go because I was the only person who could drive and that’s when they’d be at it.’
She was in her early 50s at this point. Her lover was in his early 20s. But the affair came to an end when menopause and all that went with it – the fading looks, the loss of the sexuality that had powered through her – stripped Brenda of everything she thought she was. The mood swings returned, but this time with a paranoia beyond all reason.
We were so worn down with her we didn’t have the energy to sort her out. Anything for a quiet day. But the quiet days were growing fewer and something was about to happen that tested us again: Brenda had breast cancer. Just like that, the world stopped. It was a perfect storm: a serious illness hitting at the peak of her psychosis. Not only did she think she’d been given cancer by a CIA agent in a bookshop in Cambridge, she also thought all suggestions of treatment were a plot between the doctors, Dad and I to kill her.
Eventually, she accepted the minimum of treatment (the removal of the lump and some lymph nodes rather than a mastectomy) and during her recovery, a lightness began to creep back through the cracks. She was happier, calmer, and our relationship was restored.
But her treatment choices came back to haunt her. In 2012, her doctor found another lump in her breast. This time, there was no fixing it. I reached for her hand and neither of us spoke. The question of how much time she had left was something I pushed away. The thought of Brenda having an end point felt like an impossible affront.
When she died in 2014 I was a mess, caught in a riptide of grief. I felt haunted and empty. The only memories I had left were of the difficult Brenda. Eventually, despite my scepticism, I visited a psychic. I really wasn’t expecting anything to happen but when they said Brenda ‘was worried about your father’s leg’ I found myself gripping my elbows and staring. He’d broken his leg six months after Mum died and his knee still gave him trouble.
‘It’s like she’s two different people,’ the psychic frowned. ‘She wants you to know she regrets how she treated your dad. She was too dominant, didn’t appreciate him. She wants him to know she loved him. She thinks his new house suits him down to the ground and is glad he’s got nice neighbours. She can’t believe what they’ve done to the old house. She’s had a wander round.’
Then came the moment that gave me the greatest pause. ‘I’m getting the sense she was misunderstood in her lifetime. There was unhappiness when she was a child. It was never dealt with. If she’d had counselling early on, she’d have had a very different life.’
The suggestion that Brenda may have been desperately unhappy in childhood felt like a key finding the right lock – and it left me heartbroken. Perhaps we’d misunderstood her all along. Perhaps my thinking she had a personality disorder or depression wasn’t right at all. She had tried to kill herself aged 12. A happy child doesn’t do that.
Suddenly, her feelings of abandonment and shame, her issues with her father, her inability to trust came into sharp focus. Everything about Brenda started to make sense. Brenda’s bouts of depression were perhaps not that at all. What she had were short temper tantrums, screaming being her way of coping. She’d been taught never to complain. What she did talk about, however, was her absent father and how much she hated him, how she blamed him for her mother’s demise and for inflicting upon the family a sense of shame she never shook off.
A heavy chain connects our childhoods to the adults we become. Bob was a difficult man and it is in him I think Brenda’s edges were forged. He abandoned her and she never forgave him.
When the psychic mentioned her childhood unhappiness, whether through dumb luck or a genuine message from beyond the grave, I had a very sad answer to the question of why my mother behaved as she did.
A year after Brenda was buried, we gathered round her grave to see the stone that was now in place. We hadn’t had to think long about what the engraving was going to say. A BRILLIANT WOMAN
Yes. She was.
Letters From Brenda by Emma Kennedy is published by Hodder Studio, €21.99