The Sense of an Ending
by Catherine Jagoe
Image courtesy of Wikimedia
In one of those coincidences linked only by time and place, my mother and Queen Elizabeth died within a few months of each other. The news of my mother’s death came in a call from my sister while I was at home in Wisconsin, on my way upstairs. When I saw her icon flash up on my cell, I knew to steel myself. It was late evening, which meant it was the wee hours in England. Her calling me at 2:30 a.m. could only mean one thing. I was due to fly out the next day, had known there was a good chance I wouldn’t make it in time. My mother’s breathing had turned stertorous—the death rattle—36 hours earlier. My three siblings were already at the house, taking turns to stand vigil as her life waned, at an uneven but inexorable pace. Reading their updates, it felt as if I were watching the lights of a city wink out, one by one.
I had read many of her favorite poems to her—Yeats, Keats, Dylan Thomas, Shakespeare—that afternoon via FaceTime on my brother’s phone. She was unconscious, but occasionally made wordless sounds, as if trying to surface from a drugged slumber. I could see that her still-beautiful face had turned into a sharp-boned, open-mouthed mask, the shadows under her eyes deepened to mauve. As I heard my sister say my name—her voice altered, blurred—a combination of dread, grief, relief, unreality, and desolation bloomed in me instantaneously, like ink in a glass of water. I can still feel my hand on the banister’s cool, pale wood.
I learned of Elizabeth’s death from a casual remark by my husband on an after-dinner walk. “Too bad about the queen.” We had come to a bridge, the point on our loop where the gathering September dark was the deepest. Caught unawares, my reaction surprised me. I stopped dead, clutched his arm.
“Oh!” I said. “Oh … I wish … I wish you’d warned me.” I felt slightly winded. He was already apologizing.
“I’m sorry, I assumed you knew.”
“No. I had my phone off this afternoon.”
Even when I lived in England, I wasn’t a monarchist, and thirty-five years in America have only cemented that conviction. I wasn’t expecting to be affected by this.
“It’s the end of an era,” I added, searching for words. “She’s been queen my whole life. The whole of my parents’ lives, too.”
It is one of the oldest truisms in the world that you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. Over and over, we find ourselves remarking the presence of some element in our lives only when it becomes an absence. If I thought about the queen at all over the years, it was with faint derision. But her death made me re-see her life and the way it had accompanied and permeated my own. It heightened and crystallized my sadness about the looming loss of our childhood home.
The queen was a decade older than my mother, eight years older than my father, but outlived them both. For seventy years she has been the figurehead on the prow of the ship of state. Seventy years of being a screen onto which people projected their dreams of nationhood; seventy years of being on screens around the world; seventy years of drinking sherry in Waterford crystal and Assam in Wedgwood bone china. That takes a toll. The dazzling, animated young princess beaming at her new husband morphed by degrees into an expressionless dowager, as if all liveliness had been bleached out of her. The vivacious brunette was transformed into a 1950s shopfront mannequin in less than ten years by palace handlers. The bouffant permed hair, first dark and latterly snow-white, backcombed off her forehead. The pearl necklace, never fewer than two strings. The bright dress or coat, trimmed hat, matching discreetly-heeled pumps. Early on, matching gloves to go with the dress. Always a handbag, even though presumably she didn’t need to carry one.
Her face is in wallets and purses and pockets, on the coins I fumble with in the supermarket whenever I’m back to the UK, their shapes and weights and values no longer familiar. It’s on the top right-hand corner of every letter I receive from home. The queen’s voice, too, is etched into our consciousness. Watching her annual Christmas speeches now is a curiously unsettling experience. The most famous woman in the world was also the most private. She contrived to recite her annual message of faith, hope, and charity for the requisite nine minutes with an earnestness that is undermined by the startling immobility of her facial muscles. Only her lips and eyelids move, as if she were a ventriloquist’s doll, a solemn and dutiful one, like the ten-year-old she was when she learned that her life as a minor royal had vanished in a puff of smoke. “Stirring” is not a word you would choose to characterize the queen’s speeches. Rather, it’s her stillness and caution that strike you, and her fossilized accent speaking to us from the 1930s, an echo of extinct voices only now heard on British WWII newsreels.
The sale of my mother’s house, Saint Mary’s Cottage (known as SMC in our family shorthand), which had been wending its way through the lengthy legal process involved in real estate deals in the UK, was finally confirmed just after the queen died. A closing date was set in early October. As both house and home, I had been conflicted about it almost from the time we moved there, in 1969. The knowledge that I didn’t belong—would never belong anywhere—was already in me then, at eight, thanks to a spate of international and national moves that had left me with a permanent sense of outsidership.
I felt othered in the family also, often at odds with my mother, a domestic goddess who was home. “You’re so sensitive!” she would remark, scornfully, her dark eyes flashing, if I expressed distress about something. Home didn’t provide the unconditional warmth and acceptance I yearned for, or only fleetingly. I experienced it more often as a place of chaos, my parents’ own little planet, a hermetic, topsy-turvy universe, in which I often felt unseen. My father seemed remote, authoritarian, and delegated emotion-management to my mother. A charismatic and sociable woman, she was capable of great warmth and empathy, but also icy silences punctuated by outbursts of damning criticism. She thought that it was good to “get it all out,” and would sometimes unleash wrath so wounding it was almost unbearable. She never learned to listen to others’ points of view.
When I returned on visits as an adult, I was overcome by old hurts, which would seem to rise like a miasma from the walls. I chafed privately, too, at all the things about the house that drove me crazy—the water heater chugging loud as a steamship’s engine, the cold, the broken kitchen utensils and malfunctioning appliances, the overstuffed drawers and closets (my parents never threw anything away), the dank downstairs toilet with woodlice, the lack of a shower.
Four days after the queen’s funeral, the auctioneers were due to start emptying SMC. The texts my siblings and I had been exchanging about this process became a flurry. Questions and answers flew back and forth thick and fast. What shall we do with the purple glass decanter? The willow-pattern crockery? The hundreds of books? The carved ivory ornaments now that ivory is illegal? The brass candlesticks, the pewter tankards, the copy of Now We Are Six, inscribed by my grandfather to Dad on his fourth Christmas, Kuala Lumpur, 1938? The packing cases in the loft? The church pew in the kitchen? My mother’s silks and saris, acquired while volunteering in India? The garden tools? The bust of Mozart? The barometer? The clapped-out old piano? Where are the volumes of Flora Britannica and Baba of Kano?
The contents of the house—all the things that made for contentedness (and discontent), the things that for better or worse made it home—will be removed, although “removed” doesn’t seem strong or final or precise enough for that process. “Ransacked” comes to mind. The necessary violence of the salvage company: all the familiar furniture and objects, the ones none of us can take, being smashed, burned, thrown into dumpsters. The physical effort involved in lifting and hauling out all the contents is connected in my mind to the labor of the queen’s eight pallbearers, trained to betray no sign of strain as they lift and shoulder her coffin, walk endless yards with it in careful, perfectly synchronized steps.
I recall every inch of the garden at SMC, with its roses and holly, its clumps of gillyflowers and lady’s mantle, its Juneberry and apple and damson trees. The wood pigeons constantly cooing, “Take two cows, Paddy, two,” the soothing chorus I woke up to for so many years. I am trying not to think of the house after the salvage company left, standing empty of all but the stained old carpets, the cornucopia of domestic objects that made it a home removed to be sold off at auction for people interested in cheap junk, the unsellable things hauled to the tip for destruction. It’s not just the objects that have gone, of course, the physical detritus of family life. Over time, SMC’s signature scent (because, of course, every house has one) evolved to smell of old age, what the Japanese call karei-shu (old person smell). That note first entered faintly with my grandparents’ furniture and books, inherited after they died, and grew stronger as my parents aged. Now it, too, will have vanished.
The queen represented constancy, however despised or dismissed. Born in 1926, she embodied an ethos that was already vanishing about what it meant to be a public figure. In her book Quiet, Susan Cain reminds us that the Culture of Character prevailed through the early twentieth century. In it, duty, reliability, decorum, and ethical integrity counted for more than charisma or self-promotion. “[T]he ideal self was serious, disciplined, and honorable,” not “bold and entertaining,” as in the Culture of Personality that has come to replace it.
Viewed in this light, the queen’s speeches make more sense. The qualities now admired in public figures were not her ideals at all. She took her constitutional duty not to interfere in politics seriously and applied herself to the lifelong task of never putting a foot wrong, never making a controversial remark, being pleasantly inscrutable, a smiling, waving cipher, Defender of the Faith. She had desperately wanted not to be queen. After fate took its startling turn, leaving her next in line for the throne, the girl could be seen at night, in her grandmother’s words, “ardently praying for a brother.” None was forthcoming.
But once queen, she just kept on keeping on. Perhaps the only time she let slip her feelings about the job was in a comment she made after an intruder shinned up a drainpipe at Buckingham Palace and broke into her bedroom early in the morning. She reacted with her usual sangfroid; got up, put on her slippers and robe, and told him to get out. He wouldn’t leave, insisted on yakking at her until help arrived. “He just talked the usual bilge that people talk to me on walkabout. I can handle that,” she remarked sturdily.
My maternal grandmother—who adored the queen—loved the hymn “Abide with Me.” I can still hear her tremulous soprano singing Change and decay in all around I see / O Thou, who changest not, abide with me. That was the queen’s value to the nation and to me personally. And—I’ve come to see in the light of her death—SMC’s value in my life: an abiding presence, my sea anchor, for 53 years.
My glamorous, sexy, vibrant, headstrong mother—in many ways so unlike the queen—was the heart and hearth of the household. After her funeral, I spent some weeks alone at SMC. As the writer in the family, I’d been tasked with reading the thousands of letters dating back to 1858 that were stored all over the house in boxes and trunks, putting them in order and deciding what to keep and what to discard. Among them were my father’s love letters to her from the 1950s, which I read with awe and tenderness. In their correspondence, his pet name for her—I had not known this, since I never heard him use an endearment to anyone—was “my Queen.”
But, like the queen, my mother had a powerful sense of duty and fidelity. My parents’ marriage—which was full of battles as well as love—lasted 57 years, through a silver and a golden anniversary. It was punctuated by spells when my mother would refuse to speak to my father—or us—for some unknown infraction. He could be boorish and imperious, barking commands from his sitting-room throne to whichever female was nearest. “Bring me a cup of coffee!” He never learned to cook or help with the house or the care of his four children. He never dispensed hugs. Stoicism had been beaten into him during his boarding-school education. My mother frequently railed against his reserve and inexpressiveness. Yet despite their fights, she cared for him at home throughout his 14 years of Alzheimer’s, stubbornly and sometimes crazily determined to honor her marriage vow of “in sickness and in health,” no matter what it cost her.
My grief was and is complicated, as grief so often is. I loved my mother deeply, but she hurt me repeatedly throughout my life. I was her firstborn, and she had to learn to be a mother to an emotionally dissimilar child. Curiously, her parenting style with me mirrored the queen’s with Prince Charles, which was, by all accounts, often chilly and unsympathetic. Both women were raised at a time when good parenting meant teaching one’s offspring to be tough by ignoring or belittling their woes. My mother also imbibed that lesson from the nuns at her convent school. “They called me the Tragedy Queen,” she said, reminiscing. She would often laugh at this story, self-mockingly, and we would laugh, too. It’s only in recent years that I came to wonder: why did she look so sad as a child? What were her sorrows? What would have happened if someone had listened and sympathized? Would the two of us have experienced less conflict later on?
Yet in my weeks alone at SMC, reading letters as sunlight changed to lamplight day after day, I had for the first time a sustained sense of peace and wellbeing in the house. My emotional battles there were finally over, my worry and fear for my mother laid to rest. Her suffering over. I began to see how my parents had created the home they (and I) had craved, by dint of long residency. Ultimately, they chose to abandon the peripatetic colonial life in which they were brought up, children of Empire both. They did not want their own children sent overseas to be schooled in distance and homesickness. In 1963, they came back from a post in Africa for good, with me in tow. As soon as it became possible, six years later, my father took a teaching job in Shropshire that came with a rented house—SMC—with a rambling garden, fruit trees, a view of the Welsh hills. It was a wonderful place in summer, with bees droning in the climbing roses and all the windows and doors flung open to the green world outside. So they stayed put, eventually scraping together the funds to buy the house. They stayed so long that even though we were considered outsiders in the town when we arrived, the family has now earned acceptance there. I see, now that it is gone, that it was a place to which I can claim to have belonged.
In many small ways, the queen entered SMC and was coeval with it. In Dad’s drawer, I found her Silver and Golden Jubilee coins he had kept. The Silver one was familiar to me, summoning memories of 1977 when I was a mopey, snappish teenager; that long, hot summer, the grass desiccated by drought, the scent of buddleia. And earlier, aged 12, watching Princess Anne’s wedding with my friend the town policeman’s daughter, in their house behind the station. One of the things I found in the boxes in the attic was my father’s diary for 1953, documenting how as a 19-year-old, he camped out overnight on the Mall in order to see the young queen’s coronation carriage pass. I even found his coronation ticket, allowing him to be there. Imagining him at the age my son is now, excited to be a witness to history, leaves me strangely moved.
But having at last experienced home as home, it was about to be over. There is an accidental symmetry between the end of the queen’s reign and the end of an era of home in our family’s life. Saint Mary’s Cottage will become a mythical place, spoken of with longing and loss, like other, earlier family homes—The Lilacs in Huntingdonshire on my mother’s side, Rhodaville and the Ferry House in County Cork on my father’s. I suspect the queen’s reign will come to occupy that legendary territory too, imagined as representing a lost national unity and stability, glimpsed only in the rear-view mirror.
The end of SMC, and my belated recognition of its centrality in my life, serves as a reminder not to disregard the power of the place where I live now. If I limit my vision of home to the house I once occupied with my parents and siblings, with all its hubbub and conflict, comforts and regrets, I risk downplaying the importance of the one I’ve lived in for thirty-plus years in Wisconsin. More than merely the place we happen to occupy (as I’ve tended to assume), it’s the place where my husband and I have raised a child. So doubtless my son sees this house in Wisconsin as home, even though I don’t yet think of it as truly mine. Perhaps I never will, until old age forces me out of it. It houses our own shabby but peaceful hybrid of England and America. We harvest greens, herbs, and tomatoes from the garden, cook together, squabble, make music, kiss each other good night. I’ve tried to provide stable emotional support for our son, so he won’t have the ambivalent relationship to home that I do. Only time will tell if I succeeded.
Photo by Catherine Jagoe