I was still in the garden when an uncle came alongside, close enough but not attempting touch.
He didn’t say she hits because she cares.
He didn’t tell me she punished only to make sure I grew up well.
He was silent for a long moment then asked if I knew what happened to her as a girl.
Although I spat hurt that I didn’t care whatever had happened, I liked this uncle we had barely known existed.
He was Uncle Sammy to us, and Samuel to our mother, and not seen before he came with bright shirts and the smooth, soft green pebble he held and rubbed as he stood beside me.
I know that is not what he actually put in my pocket, yet believed that was the start of my collection of stones.
What he did give was that one question.
It stayed.
This Sammy opened a tiny possibility that not everything was about me.
I was around ten so, of course, it was a known fact that all mothers had been daughters and once been girls, only I hadn’t believed it of our mother. Not really.
Our days were clouded with a past no one mentioned until Sam, in his striking clothes, arrived from Mexico.
School history meant only kings and distant wars and our parents’ history lay in a small handful of facts.
It hadn’t yet occurred to me to reach out for more than was on offer.
We children were to live in the present with its particular beliefs in a future – a brighter future for us, they said, but how were we ever to get there?
And what of unspoken shadows from before – were they shed once we found those promises ahead?
Our mother was Uncle Sammy’s sister yet all we had been told was that he abandoned family and that was not good.
We now learned he was clever but ran away from school and home at sixteen.
Now all these years later he was visiting his father and us.
We didn’t know our mother’s family – only how her mother died when we were small, while her father lived near an aunt and far from us. There was one other brother who also lived abroad.
Yet family was the most important thing, our mother said, and I assumed she meant herself.
Though we did, very occasionally, see two aunts on our father’s side.
She told us what was good behaviour and her view of the right way to raise us prevailed.
Our father was the one who, a few times, came out with clichés if he was around as I nursed my hurt.
He never questioned her authority in our hearing.
It had not entered my thoughts that the mother, to whom we had to submit, might ever have been powerless herself.
Yet there was Uncle Sammy’s question lingering in the murky swamp of me.
Despite rancid episodes mostly there was living with her and the family of five, then six and enjoying enough.
It all seemed too big to grasp except after my mother and I clashed – then she took shape as the “ she, she, she” I muttered to myself.
Somehow my own punishments could sink with barely a trace.
What stayed formed and visible, a stone that was kept, was an incident over the baby.
Danny was a late arrival when I was eleven.
Our mother got bigger and bigger with fat as well as baby and it all looked disgusting to me.
Then the boy with tiny fingers and toes, who came back with her from the hospital, completely won me over.
“He’s MINE,” I wrote in capitals in my notebook.
Little Danny seemed entirely trusting – putting up small arms for me to carry him.
He behaved as if everything felt safe, even our mother, and she was pleased to have such a contented baby.
“You weren’t like him,” she said to me as if that was entirely my fault,
but now the two of us could share an easy child.
My older sister and younger brother didn’t want him much but I did and hurried home from school to push him in the pram or play on the floor with his few toys.
I don’t recall what started it, that’s not what remains in lurid colours.
I think Danny playfully threw one of his small wooden blocks and maybe it hit something.
Our mother was across the room on the phone but, shouting NO, she rushed over, hauled him, pulled down his pants and smacked.
It seemed to go on and on and I didn’t fight her.
She probably hit him six times, a common threat around and one of her sayings was, “watch your step or you’ll get six of the best.”
Danny must have just been toilet trained by then so maybe three.
He didn’t cry and that seemed the worst of it.
You can cuddle a crying baby.
He just looked frightened.
How could he make sense?
Our mother returned to her phone call and Danny cowered under a chair, refusing to come out.
He wouldn’t let me get him and my tears flowed – it felt something broke that day.
Had I been hopeful that I could always protect my Danny?
For a brief spell there was fury and fantasy that I’d get her bamboo cane and whack and whack her big bottom, which I still disliked.
Although soon it was my own body absorbing attention.
My breasts grew and I bled each month and pulled away from family, including the still small Danny, though that is not as he remembers it.
Our mother complained about my becoming inaccessible and sulky but she stopped hitting, as she’d done with my sister, once periods began – so clearly there was something sexual in her power over bodies and the submission of girls, though that was impossible to mention to anyone.
The two boys were also hit and Danny must have learnt it was what our mother did if we broke any of her rules.
I became older and then went away.
It was not done to have grudges against a parent.
Even talk about childhood was not yet in vogue and rather unseemly.
Grievances might pass through me but rarely stayed long in my gut.
Or maybe I failed to recognise where they lodged, since they obviously were not conquered. However I kept hold of that incident with Danny – rather it kept some hold on me.
My partner and I went to my parents for tea and civil conversation a couple of times a year, but preferred to stay overnight with a school friend who had remained in that town.
Danny claimed he truly enjoyed going home for, as usual, he was the most cheerful of us four.
It became easier for me after Daphne was born.
In no time she was showing her grandmother the books she couldn’t yet read and then her schoolwork but she quite obviously much preferred my father, as I had done.
My mother no longer drew attention to the fact that we were not close but once said in a mocking tone, “girls and their daddies and now your girl with her grandpa”.
The two boys seemed able to tease our mother after they grew tall and fit.
There was no question now of who was stronger, they towered over her and smiled at that, while my sister and I each skirted round her.
There was one time with my mother as grandmother which seemed likely to erupt – she made some threat to Daphne – nothing like her old style, but even so I could have knocked her flat – she was still large and flabby but I did martial arts and weight lifting.
Instead of shouting, as I wished, I managed a curt rebuke that we did not accept an adult threatening our daughter, or any child, and silently vowed I would never leave our five year old alone with her.
I’m sure my mother believed Daphne, insufficiently checked, would grow into a spoilt brat.
A month before my thirty-fifth birthday our mother died.
For a year we behaved decently as if there had never been ambivalence and became four dutiful children visiting regularly and helping arrange care. Only our father actually looked after her himself.
The final two weeks she was in hospital, still breathing though quite out of it on morphine, with eyes totally glazed.
I arrived on my final visit with Dan, leaving my father to play with Daphne in the park.
As I entered our mother’s single room sobbing came out of me and didn’t stop.
A strange thought flew in as I stepped towards her.
I knelt beside the bed and heard myself say “please, please hit me if you can then love me.”
It was startling but I soon realised that either it hadn’t been said aloud, as I thought, or Dan didn’t hear.
And though it was disconcerting to find myself so upset, it meant a start to talking with my sister.
I still don’t know if she was right but she said “of course it’s distressing – for us, it’s the end of the line – all hope of one day becoming closer and all hopes for different mothering are fully extinguished.”
But it was Danny who was astounding.
He was unnerved to see me crying and immediately began on a plan to cheer me for my birthday, saying he realised I had once been his gentle mother and kind and he was very grateful.
His plan was a secret but I knew he was making arrangements with my partner and told me when to get ten days off work.
Our daughter, at eight, was old enough to leave.
Though she still flopped against me, as if my flesh was her pillow, or stretched alongside as languidly as the cat, she preferred to take her father’s hand if we three were out together. And the other grandmother, a good Church woman I tried to like, was only too keen to get her son back without me.
My mother-in-law would talk to Daphne of Jesus while Danny whisked me to Mexico.
He had made money quickly and knew my repeated resolution was to one day visit Uncle Sammy.
We’d only met that one time yet somehow Sam remained on my side.
He responded to news of our mother’s decline that he longer felt up to travel and I said, in Danny’s hearing, that if I really wanted to see him it should not be forever postponed.
So, there we were on the plane and I tried telling Danny of my particular encounter with our uncle.
It seemed the reason we were there.
But Dan deflected – “Come on, let’s just enjoy ourselves. She did her best. She was brought up the same way and all parents have power even if you pretend not to. Anyway, lots of kids had it far worse.”
He was right that she wasn’t brutal but something lingered for me that probably kept me apart from her.
If, for Dan, it was all dismissed as just part of being a child, why was he taking me to speak with Sammy?
He had no inkling of what my uncle still represented twenty five years on, just as he had no sense of his own shock at being hit that first time, yet I’d kept it, pebble-hard.
It seemed far worse to witness that than having her smack me.
What became clear was how, although I was no longer crying, Dan was taking me to Mexico since my distress had upset him.
If I stayed cheerful, he would be more comfortable. What he wanted from this trip was for me to be pleased with his gift.
Sammy could not have been a warmer, more welcoming host.
Marco, his partner of whom we’d heard nothing, seemed to have more bite and a sharper tongue about our family but was funny and teased us.
He was a superb cook and we learnt that the two of them had run a very successful restaurant.
I found Dan and Sammy had already planned an itinerary but were offering choices.
After Dan’s response on the plane, I waited to get my uncle on his own.
My opening would be more careful with him.
On day three, Sam was picking herbs in the garden for Marco, who had Danny chopping vegetables and there was laughter as that pair cooked.
I asked Sam if I could take in the herbs then talk to him for a moment, as we strolled in their impressive garden.
Just being beside him gave me peace.
That Danny and I came mattered to Sam. He hadn’t run away at sixteen.
His mother heard he had been seen with two known gay men and told him if he ever went near such filth again he was not welcome and she would change the locks.
Though Marco’s siblings and offspring came to stay, we were the first of Sam’s family.
Sammy was open to talking but had little memory of when I was ten and no idea of his significance.
He couldn’t understand what he might have meant when he asked if I knew what had happened to my mother and found it hard to believe that was what he said.
He barely knew his big sister, who was eight years older and took no interest in him.
Along with the rest of the family, she seemed threatened that he was a soft boy, not tough enough, and liking pretty clothes.
She’d left home by the time their father shook and shook him, at twelve, saying it was time for any son of his to stop being a wimp!
He supposed our mother was hit as children were then.
However, what Sammy did recognise from long ago was my description of the green stone he held in his hand as he stood beside me.
It was jade and his first love token from Marco. He went to get it from beside his bed.
He could show me that.
***