The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy (30 page)

She was sixty-eight but her health had given out; a great physical burden was a broken vertebra, incurred when she fell out of bed – at the time, I was away in the Amazon. She had never been robust, but she grew frailer thereafter until she seemed like a tiny bird, and in the week before Christmas 1982 she had a stroke in her sleep. My father phoned me at seven in the morning, panicking as was his wont, crying, Michael, Michael, I can’t wake your mother! She was alive, though deeply unconscious, and when I had helped my father do what needed to be done I drove across London to pick up John and we set off for Bebington, two hundred miles away up the M1 and when we got to the Watford Gap services area I knew that she had died, for I suddenly saw her in my mind bidding farewell, infinitely sad, and I phoned Mary at once and she said to me: ‘God’s taken her, Michael.’ We were numb with shock and grief. All of us: me, John, my father, Mary and Gordon. Mary especially was deeply distressed, but she was formidably strong and began to organise the funeral. The following day I sat down and wrote an obituary notice which I put in the Deaths column of the
Liverpool Echo
, and which I have kept as a record of my feelings at that moment:

McCarthy – Norah: December 21, 1982, peacefully and fortified by the rites of the Church, in Clatterbridge Hospital, after a stroke, suffered at home, Norah McCarthy
(née Day), beloved wife of Jack and adored mother of John and Michael and beloved sister of Mary and Gordon. Requiem Mass at St John’s, New Ferry, Wirral, December 29 at 9.15 am. (She had grown increasingly frail and was in constant and severe pain from a back injury but her spirit was undimmed. Her perception was still acute and her common sense was still robust. Her intellect was still adventurous and her belief in civilised values was unshaken. She still had a stubborn optimism and an undying willingness to see the good in people. She was still completely free from pettiness or cant or falsity of any kind. Her gentleness and tenderness were as natural when she died as they must have been when she was a girl. The love she bore, for you, for me, for all of us, was the way Eliot described it, a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.)

I keep it as a record of my feelings, for then a weird thing happened: my feelings disappeared.

I suggested at the beginning of this book that we have expectations of our experiences, seeking to match them against paradigms; but experience does not always run in straight lines. Nor did it here. At first I thought it was just a mood, although a bizarre and disquieting one: I stopped feeling sad. My grief was replaced by indifference and complete unconcern that she was dead. My mother whom I adored, before all others: how could this be? To try to recover my grief, a couple of days later – it was Christmas night – I went to see her body, lying in its coffin, for I was sure that would do the trick, that would make me sad again. But the visit was even more disturbing: she was not in the body, she was not
there
, it was just a
thing
, and the sight of it triggered some savagely upsetting emotion deep inside me which I did not recognise; all I knew was, it shocked me greatly and drove my feelings further away than ever.

I did not have any frame of reference to account for this. Grieving is prominent among our customs, but having your grief suddenly and unaccountably disappear was not socially sanctioned by anything I was aware of, and I was bewildered, and upset, at not being upset: with my intelligence I knew full well what Norah merited, in terms of a tribute of love, I had written it in her obituary, but now I could feel it no longer in my heart. Varus, Varus, give me back my feelings! They did not come. It was the start of a strange period in my life, a lost period, I suppose, which lasted nearly a decade; for not only did the feelings for my mother disappear, but I soon found, in a way which was utterly unexpected and wholly inexplicable, that my sense of my own self-worth had vanished along with them. There was a complete collapse of self-belief, and at thirty-five, after what had seemed to be a pretty successful and confident existence, I was suddenly left with a sense of worthlessness, of being a moral vacuum entirely. I continued to function but I felt I no longer cared for any of the values which, for example, Norah had enshrined; I felt I no longer cared for anything, I felt I was merely standing in the ruins of my identity in a very unhappy way, and I struggled to understand it, year after year, but could not. It was just a fog, and eventually, seven years after her death, I grasped that if I were ever to find my way through it then I would need professional help. And so I began to talk about it all, climbing the stairs two evenings a week to the attic flat in Crouch End with the picture of Freud on the bathroom wall.

I will forever be grateful to the man who finally brought me the understanding and showed me the way out of the fog, but it took a long time: nearly three years more. It seemed to be an almost unbearably slow, painstaking process of unfolding layer after layer of emotions and of memories. But I possessed a signal advantage in John, as he had absolutely crystal clear recall of much of what had happened in the time of turmoil, which to
me then was just a jumbled and confused mass, and I found that I could feed my slowly growing understanding with the detail he could bring back, distressing though it was to him; as the man I was talking to remarked, you’ve got the computer, he’s got the data. The climactic moment of the whole process came in Wales, in the small coastal town of New Quay. I was on an assignment for
The Times
to go with Greenpeace to look at the dolphins of Cardigan Bay, and bad weather delayed the trip and I found I had a day to myself; I sat down in the hotel room and over several hours of intense thought I put everything together, everything I had learned, and in the evening finally discovered it.

I hated her.

I could hardly believe it. The mother whom I adored.

But there it was.

The hate was still there, at the deepest level of my whole being, in a place that had taken nearly three years to dig down to; I hated her for leaving me, in 1954, for saying nothing to me before she went, for not reassuring me or comforting me, but just abandoning me, just going. Yet the hate was something my psyche did not allow me to admit, and so, when I was seven, it morphed into indifference at her leaving; and in the same way, when she left for ever, when I was thirty-five, the mechanism kicked in again, and the indifference returned.

I hated her for abandoning me once more.

I hated her for being dead.

It was a great shock, but also a great illumination; and as soon as I got back home I went to the attic flat and poured it out, with the question I was desperate to ask: will it go now? The hate? Will it go away? Will it?

Andrea said, in his calm and quiet manner: ‘I think, something changes.’

‘What? What changes?’

‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘once you know what it is, it doesn’t control you any more.’

Certainly, I felt, that . . . things were shifting. The log-jam was moving. But there was still a part of it all which troubled me, which was now out in the open, and the next week I went for dinner with John, and I said to him: ‘You know, it really sort of bugs me that when Mum first went away to hospital, she didn’t say anything to us about it. I mean, before she went. Like, you know. To comfort us. Or whatever.’

John said: ‘But she did.’

‘When? When did she?’

‘She came up to our bedroom. She said, “I have to go away for a rest.” I was crying. I said, “Don’t go away, Mummy, please don’t go away,” and she said, “I have to, son.”’

I said: ‘I’m sorry, I don’t remember that. I just don’t remember that at all. I have no memory of it whatsoever.’

John said: ‘You were asleep.’

‘What?’

‘You were asleep. She didn’t want to wake you.’

‘I was
asleep
?’

‘Yes. She didn’t want to wake you up.’

My head started to swim.

I saw this night, this August night, an age ago, where a family fell to bits: a mother in her anguish, being parted, perhaps for ever, from her two small boys, the elder one in tears but the younger one sleeping, unseeing, unknowing . . . and three days later, as soon as I could, I drove north, I drove to Bebington and stood by her grave, and there, at long last, the log-jam suddenly burst, and I wept for her.

•

To have recovered my feelings for my mother after nearly ten years, and to have understood why I lost them, and in so doing to have come to understand fully what happened in childhood,
even though it had long seemed so confused and so obscure, was, as might be imagined, of great significance in my life, and a source of joy, not least as the mended love for Norah seemed even more complete; all that was missing, I felt somehow, was a marker of it, although what that might be, I did not know. I merely felt the common human need for meaning-making, for signing with ceremony of some sort the great events of life – birth . . . marriage . . . death – and now, the recovery of love. In the absence of any such marker, I tried to look with more empathy on the others who had been caught in the upset, beginning with John, and after he came to terms with his alcoholism, which was severe, we were able to explore his own truly tormented feelings about Norah’s mental crisis and its aftermath with an insightful and patient woman who, impossible as it once might have seemed, gradually gave him something approaching peace. With the others – with my father Jack, with Mary and with Gordon – I talked to them as much as I could about what had happened, and found a similar attitude in all three of them, which was a sort of burning regret, that they had not acted as they should have done with Norah – they felt that, even though they had not properly comprehended what was happening or what her ailment was, in some way nevertheless they had failed her. I think at the heart of it was a consciousness of her qualities, of the love she bore, of her goodness, if you like, which they all felt they had themselves fallen short of, my father most acutely. Jack had come to realise what his sins were – they had been sins of omission. He had been a talented writer of light verse, and one day, quite unexpectedly, he put a piece of paper in my hand which said:

There is no way I can forget

The things I failed to do.

Piaf found nothing to regret

But I have much to rue.

My heart opened to him at once and I loved him, then, until the day he died.

They died one after another, in fact, in the last three years of the old century, and we buried them with Norah; the four of them lie together, Norah’s love, it seemed to me, enfolding them all. I marked the grave with a headstone, and that was a worthwhile meaning-making, although underneath I still longed for something more, some fitting way in which I could commemorate for myself how truly exceptional she was, but I had to wait another ten years, for another generation; a guiltless one this time. In 2009 Jo and I brought Flora and Seb to the Wirral to see the grave, as they were old enough now, at seventeen and twelve respectively, to learn about the grandparents they had never known. It was a Sunday at the beginning of April; a cold morning of pale sunshine filtering through high clouds with a wintry north wind, though even in the chill air the cemetery was a pleasing place, lines of dark green cypresses and mature hollies giving it an Italian feel. We found the grave and the children read what was written on the headstone, and we stood in silence thinking about it, and as we did so a dead leaf came tumbling through the air towards us on the wind and fell at our feet, right at the grave’s very edge. And then, in the thin sunlight, it opened its wings: it was a peacock.

I was taken aback.

I was taken aback just as I was by the swallowtail in Rimini and the morpho in the Amazon and the monarch in the garden in Boston.

The butterfly at my mother’s grave.

It was ragged and rough after its overwintering, but the splendour of its colours was discernible still, the maroon wings and the four eyespots with their amethyst cores . . . and at once it set something alight in me, as butterflies have always been able to do, it set alight the fiery trail that led right back through my life to the summer of 1954 and the original time of turmoil,
to the small boy gazing up at the buddleia. All day I thought about it, all through the journey back to London, and all of the evening, and the next morning I went into the office – the newsroom of the
Independent
– and offered a suggestion for a series of summer features, which the paper was always on the lookout for. I would try to see, I said, all the British butterflies – all fifty-eight species – over a single summer, and we would invite readers to join in and see how many they could find themselves, with a prize for the best entry. It was a good idea, and Roger Alton, the peerless editor (gone too soon, alas), and Oliver Wright, the sharp and energetic news editor, readily agreed, and the following week we launched the series with a magnificent butterfly wallchart the Indy graphics department produced, so captivating that when we later announced we still had some left, more than a thousand schools emailed us asking for copies. We called the series The Great British Butterfly Hunt and I started on it at once, seeking the help of Butterfly Conservation (BC), that most estimable of charities, which the chief executive, Martin Warren, willingly agreed to provide; and so, a month later, I found myself on the top of Butser Hill in Hampshire, at 888 feet the highest point in the South Downs, with Dan Hoare, BC’s south-east England man, looking for the Duke of Burgundy. His Grace the Duke. The only British member of a worldwide butterfly family, the Riodinidae, the metalmarks; a true rarity. At seven years old I had thrilled to the romance of its name in
The Observer’s Book of Butterflies
– no one knows how the butterfly came by it – but the wee beastie itself had always escaped me, and now it was very scarce and getting scarcer, and Dan had taken me to see it at one of its few breeding sites.