For various reasons, I have been thinking less about Mum herself, and more about the world that she came from. A flawed world in many ways, her micro-world was one that she touched, that she helped to shape, and which shaped her. It is sad that she is gone (and still feels enormously so), but it is also sad that so little is left of the world – the people, the organisations, and the places, but above all the people that she knew. Like Dad’s world, long gone, there are clues here and there, but already it is hard to evoke some of the experiences that she must have had. I have placed small amounts of surviving documentation in Wirral Archives, and am grateful to that service for being so helpful, but for experiences I will try to enlist some of those who knew her. Not so much for information, but for impressions of her, aspects that illuminate her experience away from those that I witnessed, or which she featured in the many recordings that I made with her from the 1990s to the end.
But why do this? It is not for the “retrospective CV”, the kind of biographical production which is a factual history of one person, useful and interesting though that might be. I feel that there may be some wider interest in aspects of the kind of life that one middle-class lady, in a small suburban town, lived – what it was like to know her, and what it was like inside the organisations in which she was involved. That is, perhaps, the public justification. But my private reason is to shore up at least one floor in a private tower of grief, a grief in whose shadows I, and perhaps others, live for now. Maybe it is an act of love to find out more, to communicate with others who cared about her. Perhaps it is an act of self-preservation – avoiding the feeling that, over my father Joe, I was too late in contacting people to try to recover some sense of him.
When my first wife died, a very nice caring lady, whom I had only encountered as secretary to a small national pressure group in which I was involved, wrote to me several times, with helpful emails. Her own mother had died recently, and she was sharing her thoughts, although of course Mum was very much still around, and very helpful too. This lady advised me to talk to people who knew my wife, to get what, she warned gently, might prove to be different views of her. I did follow her advice in part, and I should now set out to do the same with Mum. I am not sure what she would think about this. I never felt that she was reconciled to dying, and I do not recall her venturing an opinion as to how she might be remembered. There is much to find.
Joan Boughey Recalled 