BOOK EXTRACT
SA author Julia Martin chats to us about her mom, and memory as touchstone. PLUS we share an extract from her moving memoir, The Blackridge House
‘My mom made me understand how our memories give us a sense of self, and when they aren’t there, it’s very scary.’
Bedridden in a nursing home, Julia Martin’s mother started telling her stories – stories of her carefree childhood, her brothers and sisters, her forbidding mother and the house she grew up in: Blackridge, near Pietermaritzburg. Seven years after her mother’s death, Julia wrote a moving memoir about her quest to find her childhood home.
from her bed in the nursing home, Elizabeth Martin spent her days watching the birds and squirrels frolicking in the syringa tree just outside her window. ‘At more than 90 years old, lying immobilised in this bed, most of the people she remembered were dead. The hours were so long, and the world had become strange,’ writes Julia, her daughter. ‘But the ring doves, the turtle doves and the rock pigeons returned each day, and she could ask the nurses to feed them.’
At 92, her mom’s dementia had stolen her memories, seemingly overnight. ‘It wasn’t a slide into forgetfulness – it was a switch,’ says Julia. Her mom went for a hip operation and woke up from the anaesthetic confused and terrified. ‘People told me this is what sometimes happens when old people are given general anaesthetic. Most often, they said, the person returns to their senses fairly soon. But after the surgery my mother never quite regained her clarity of mind.’ Despite seven successive surgeries, her hip kept dislocating, and she was eventually confined to her bed.
Although Elizabeth still remembered with perfect recall the names, plumage and characteristics of the birds outside her window, most of her other memories had dimmed. What she was left with was the house and the people from her youth, and a nagging feeling of being homesick, even though she’d left KwaZulu-Natal behind some 30 years ago.
‘Now, when the lifetime of stories that made up a self had almost disappeared,’ writes Julia, ‘what she had left was early childhood and the present moment. As other things faded into forgetting, what remained were a small wood-andiron house, and a garden with deep trees. And water, there had to be water. In the gathering dark of the nursing home bed, that first place gleamed like a lighted window.’
And so Julia sets out to find Blackridge, with nothing much to guide her other than her mom’s vague recollections, a few faded photographs and the kindness of strangers in Pietermaritzburg.
‘They just got it,’ says Julia. ‘This very innocent idea of looking for your mother’s house; there’s nothing self-serving about it. It resonated with people, and they wanted to help.’
We won’t spoil the ending, but we will say this: The Blackridge House is ultimately more about the quest itself than tracking down the house. It brought Elizabeth untold joy that her daughter was looking
for the childhood home she so loved. For Julia it was an attempt to piece things together and a way to reach out to her mother. In the process, she also learnt a lot about her grandparents, the world her mom grew up in, and her own history. ‘It’s also a meditation on home and dislocation, and on memory and forgetting,’ Julia says.
‘My mom made me understand how our memories give us a sense of self, and when they aren’t there, it’s very scary – because our self coheres through memories and conventions and things, and if the memories aren’t there, then who am I? It’s given me respect for that capacity, but also a realisation that it can all slip away.’
‘I remember when her sister Letty died, years before, she said, “I feel as if the branch I’ve been sitting on has cracked.” Letty was 10 years older and something of a mother figure to Elizabeth. That image gives a sense that “that which I was putting my weight on” was gone. When my father died, his brother in Canada said, “I feel like a library of my past has just burnt down.” Which is another lovely image.’
Julia’s twins, Sky and Sophie, then 12, are also a big part of her journey – and in some ways they were better at dealing with her mom’s condition than Julia was. In one instance, Elizabeth starts phoning, confused, asking when they’ll be collecting her from the train station she believes she will be arriving at soon. Julia tries, fruitlessly, to convince her that she’s not going anywhere. Sky, however, simply reassures her that they’ll be there, waiting for her – a strategy that instantly calms her.
In another instance, Julia struggles with a decision that will impact her mom’s health, and Sky and Sophie make a seemingly obvious suggestion: ask her what she wants.
‘I learnt a lot from them,’ says Julia. ‘A lot of people I know kept their children away from ageing or sick parents, and I wasn’t going to do that. When I visited my mom, they came with me. I felt it was an extraordinary education in compassion for them to have that experience. But it also went the other way. They were not as clogged up with ideas about the situation. They were more direct, I think. And I suppose they weren’t dealing with the grief of “this is my mother”. There was a little bit more distance with it being Granny.’
At her funeral, Sky played the piano and Sophie read a poem Elizabeth had written as a child.
‘I think they learnt an enormous amount about being kind and present. There is so much to be gained from different generations spending time together.’
Although Elizabeth passed away in 2012, it took Julia nearly seven years to write The Blackridge House. ‘I was avoiding it, in a way.
It was a hard project – the hardest thing I’ve done. This is my act of mourning and love. It’s processing the whole experience. It’s tricky because you want to represent the person truthfully, but you don’t want to present them to the world in a way that is diminishing. She was diminished in some ways by the dementia, but in a curious way it also opened things up for her and for me, in our interactions. She was an extraordinary person even in the throes of dementia. So I wanted to convey that it wasn’t just a diminishing – my mother was more poetic and less inhibited.’
‘She would get cross sometimes. And more emotional. But there was never a sense of “we’d lost her”. She was there. Right until the last day. Her last words were, “utterly beautiful.” I was holding up a rose. So she was still there. We were lucky.
‘Even the Blackridge stories started to slip away in the end, and that just brought her right into the present. Where we can all spend more time, I think.’