► A brain tumour turned my mum into a comedian
When she awoke from surgery, Ruth Linton’s behaviour had changed. But what terrified her children turned out to be a form of liberation for their mother
V MY MUM is, in many ways, the archetypal glamorous Jewish grandmother.
She serves my children crudités on her best plates when they go for tea and puts cucumber in their water. A blow dry or platter of sandwiches are the solution to everything and, when Chanukah fell at the same time as Christmas, she garnished the salt beef with cranberries.
She’s always been pretty funny. But when she was diagnosed with a meningioma — a slow-growing brain tumour detected, after months of crushing headaches, in August 2014 — packing out the upstairs room of a Manchester pub with her own stand-up comedy act was the last thing I expected to feature in her recovery.
By the time the tumour was detected, it was critical. She was placed on a massive dose of steroids to stem it and operated on two days later. There was no time to process.
When she awoke from surgery, the steroids had triggered a chemical imbalance in her brain. Her behaviour was so out of character — like scripting the movie of her life and questioning whether my husband’s friend ‘Rossy’ was the Messiah — it terrified my brother and me.
The potent mix of heavy medication and trauma had awoken comedy in her. She stayed in hospital for a month, finding everything hilarious, while we toiled with how we’d get back the mum we knew.
The three-year recovery was worse. As doctors sought to re-stabilise her, she plunged to the lowest low. “I felt like a ghost. I couldn’t think beyond a day; I had no hope. I couldn’t imagine having any sort of life again,” she says, five years on.
She returned to her job on a perfume counter with the help of friends, family and her oncologist, but she barely socialised. At some point, however, in summer 2018, she found herself bingewatching The Marvellous Mrs Maisel, the Emmy-award winning Amazon Prime show with a vastly Jewish flavour, set in 1950s Manhattan.
It opens with Yom Kippur and Midge Maisel, the immaculately coiffed and overdressed protagonist, reeling from news of her husband’s affair. She abandons prep for the after-the-fast meal, gets blind drunk on kiddish wine and heads downtown, in her nightgown, to the Gaslight comedy club where she steals the mic and launches her comedy career.
“I loved her,” mum says. “Whatever ‘it’ is, she had it. I saw a woman who could do anything once she freed herself from expectations.
“I suppose I related. I’m divorced now but, as a newlywed, I remember feeling pre-conditioned to think that it matters what people think about you. Dinner parties made me nervous — filtering myself to be the kind of Jewish wife people expected. I’d listen to guests who thought they were funny and think to myself ‘I’m funnier’. I had comedy in me. I wanted some of what Mrs Maisel had.”
She booked herself on a course at a pub she would absolutely never have otherwise set foot in — and certainly wouldn’t use the toilet in — and started gigging on the amateur circuit. Her confidence flooded back.
“I was being given the go ahead to say what I thought without restraint or expectations. I liked the freedom.
“Being ill brought home to me that others don’t have to approve of — or even understand — who you are.
“Friends say stand up takes guts but making an arrangement for three months next Saturday, learning to bank online or getting somewhere on time is far scarier to me.” Mum spent a year intermittently gigging before she let me see her act which, much like her new interest, is not what you’d expect of a 60-something woman. Most of it is just her life. “My son was applying for a job and had to answer the question: ‘What are your faults?’ she tells the crowd. “So he asked me: ‘Mum, what are my faults?‘ ‘Darling, I’m your mother,’ I said. ‘You don’t have any; phone grandma.’” The rest of it is sweary and features gags about prison, Love Island and sex. That unpredictability is what makes it fun. “At my age, maybe it’s more usual to play bridge,” mum says. “In many ways, it is not our time any more but we can still make a difference by being true to ourselves. We have to make things happen for ourselves and it helps if you’re ok with risking making a fool of yourself too.”
After watching Mrs Maisel, she booked herself on a comedy course