Free Secrets My Mother Kept by Kath Hardy Page A

up her life had started to take their toll, and she looked older than her years. Her hair was silvery grey and had begun to thin, but her skin was still as soft as a baby’s. I can remember as an adult stroking her arm when she was near the end of her life, and wondering at its smoothness.
    One of the ways that Mum managed to provide the things she thought we needed was to get things on ‘tick’. This in effect meant buying from a door-to-door salesman, who would encourage Mum to ‘have now pay later’. Over the years these debts grew to mammoth proportions, and the weekly problem of deciding who she could pay this week must have been a constant pressure on her. Occasionally there would be a knock at the door and there would be a man with a parcel that would always contain some unnecessary item that we would rush to unwrap. At the time, Margaret and I thought it was wonderful. Looking back, it must have been a kind of addiction for Mum, or an antidote to the dreary monotony and tedium of her life. She always wanted to give us things, to be the gift giver, the supplier of everything wonderful and exciting. The sad thing was that she didn’t need to buy anyone’s adoration, loyalty and love. She got that for free.
     
    When Mum was cornered by her worries, and I suppose overwhelmed by the trap her life had become, she would sometimes tip over into flight mode. The first time I remember it happening was when she had just got back from the phone box over the road. We didn’t have a phone in the house until I was a teenager, but my Mum’s sisters did. Aunty often took us with her when she went to phone Aunt Maggie. She would sometimes make us wait outside, but more often we were allowed to squeeze in with her. She would dial the number saying ‘RIP rest in peace’ and laugh. It was ages before we worked out the reason for this was that Aunty Maggie’s code was Rippleway which was abbreviated to RIP. She seemed to talk for an age, and Margaret and I would jiggle and wiggle about getting more and more restless. What did she have to talk about that took so long? Sometimes she would joke to Aunt Mag, ‘They’re laughing at me these two – saucy monkeys.’
    When she was in a good mood she might placate us with the promise of some penny sweets from the sweetshop next to the phone box. There was an exciting array to choose from and we would spend an age on using up our thruppence.
    Once Mum came out from the phone box very upset.
    ‘Someone has taken my purse,’ she wailed. ‘We’ll have to go to the Police Station,’ and off we trundled to Chadwell Heath.
    She was crying desperately as we went inside.
    ‘My purse has been stolen,’ she wept to the kindly police officer behind the desk. ‘All of my food money was in it,’ she continued, only stopping periodically to dab at her eyes, and bend to give us a cuddle, as we had ‘caught’ her distress and now stood crying too.
    ‘All right madam, try to keep calm now,’ the police officer said soothingly, ‘then perhaps we can try to help you.’
    ‘I went to phone my sister,’ she told him, ‘and must have mistakenly left my purse in the phone box, then when I went back,’ here she burst into fresh tears, ‘when I went back it had gone!’
    The police officer lent forward and gave her a fresh hanky.
    ‘There, there madam,’ he said. ‘Just leave it with us and we’ll see what we can do.’
    He wrote down the details and promised Mum that they would do their best to find the culprit, but Mum could not be consoled.
    ‘You don’t understand,’ she whispered through her tears. ‘That was all the money I had for the children’s food. What am I going to do now?’
    I don’t know quite what happened next, but Mum was eventually handed an envelope, and she thanked the police officer profusely, and cheered up considerably as we walked all the way back home.
    ‘You see,’ she told us, ‘the police are so kind, they always help you when you’re in