4 days Ago
Decisions decisions. Do I buy the Marvellous Mother’s Day gift box with shades of baby pink, cream, and lemon or the Mother’s Day Bundle? Sounds like a mobile phone offer. Did the blood just drain from your face? Well, there’s still time.
Let’s console ourselves with a wee dram and some blether about our mums. I can hardly believe I remembered it was Mother’s Day. Then again, I can hardly believe my mum went to school.
Or wore miniskirts. Or listened not just to the Corries but to the Beatles – even collected newspaper cuttings of them. Ever asked your mum about her childhood? Before I existed – hard to contemplate – my mum, Margaret, would help her father in the shop in the evenings.
She’d scrub the floors in her tenement stairwell after school. This was in Bridgeton, Glasgow. Scots dialect hardly spoken except words like dreich – which it often is – and messages, which my mum still gets weekly.
Somehow, thankfully, my mother met my father, at school I think, way back with the dinosaurs – there are prints of the wedding under a bed at home. Otherwise there’d be no me. What does your mum do? You’d spot my mother was a teacher a mile off.
But you’d never guess she’d worked in Will’s cigarette factory in the college holidays – she screws her face up at any colour of plonk let alone cigs. Although you might catch her with a snowball – the yellow kind – at Christmas. She’s also tough as nails.
Mums are, aren’t they? She had to be, as a teacher in Easterhouse – not the most angelic of places. She had a knife pulled on her once. And went on strike for better pay.
And threw up outside the pictures once after eating too much. That’s my mum. And what she went through to have me.
Kept in hospital for a few weeks – the hot summer of 1976 too. I was a lot of bother even before I was born. And she gave up work – the done thing back then.
Would you do that? And then moved away from her family to the nice end of Medway when Dad got promoted. But mum made friends. She’s good at that.
There was Ann opposite – a hairdresser, who put up with my tantrums and walked me to school when mum went back to work. There was Grace where mum escaped on Wednesday nights to watch Dallas. She never told us what happened.
My mum – 46 years on – still looks after the neighbour’s cats. I love my mum, but. Well.
There was dinner. At the sight of mince and potatoes or pork chop my heart still sinks. Eaten on a diet of Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris.
That was the 80s. Got an iron constitution out of it though. And mum got me to school on time – after picking fleas off the dog who’d found a hedgehog in the garden; after clearing up the squashed giant house spider that stopped me going into the kitchen for a day.
I snivelled on the first day of big school – but mum had work to get to, my packed lunch to make, and I got over it. Has your mum ever embarrassed you? Mine was a supply teacher for a while and would turn up at my school with a pure wide Glaswegian accent heard down the corridors. There she was in the corner of my eye at assembly.
I was seven. If my school finished a day earlier for the holidays, my punishment was going with her and sitting in classrooms in other schools with kids I didn’t know. I survived.
And if I was looking peely-wally – last legs ill mind you - mum would drag me to the doctors. Dr Mallik behind his large desk smoking. Have you ever shocked your mum? It’s hard to do.
This column might. I phoned up from a call box in Brighton once to say I was off to Poland in five days’ time for my first job. “But you can’t”.
I did. And barely battered an eyelid. The likeness is almost done.
I just need to add a ball of wool and a Cairn terrier on her lap – she’s had three. I bet right now Meg is curled up on mum’s knee while she knits a hat for a Ukrainian baby. She doesn’t tell anyone.
When I was a child, mum and I would go to the Methodist church together. Till it became a block of flats. On Mother’s Day – Mothering Sunday – I would go up, rather embarrassed, to collect a daffodil.
I might collect one this Sunday at Patcham Methodist Church. It will mean more than Interflora. Things change – my mother hasn’t.
Here's tae oor mums. Alistair McNair is Leader of the Conservatives on Brighton & Hove City Council..
