Dear Mum, Thank you

Dear Mum,

Just wanted to write this letter to thank you for being someone else. Someone other than my mum. Someone in addition to her.

It’s not that you weren’t a good Mum. As we all said at your funeral, you were the best mum in the world. As all children do at funerals, we were quick to attest to your skills at cooking, caring, looking after our family.

When Dad died, we talked about how good a father he was too. We also talked about him being a soldier, a bus conductor, an artist. It was as if there were two dads but only one mum. Whereas both of you, of course, had lives before us, and both of you continued those lives, to some extent, after.

You were born and raised in the London district of Lambeth, Mum, before being bombed out and moved to the St Helier housing estate in south west London. There, later, you met Dad. As a child of working-class Lambeth, you of course knew the 'Lambeth Walk,' that daft conga-like dance proclaiming the independence and individuality of the citizens of that part of London.

Hardly getting anywhere with your schooling, as you said, spending more time in bomb shelters than in a classroom, you left school at 14. First working in the hellish heat of a hospital laundry, later becoming a seamstress, sewing shirts in that other kind of hell-hole, the Pimlico sweatshop you worked in. I often wander around that now-so-fashionable and exclusive part of central London, wondering which of the chic town-houses was that hell hole you knew.

The work you did before you were married at 18 years old would, these days, be described as "child exploitation." If it occurred in someplace outside of our occidental world, it would bring down obloquy on brand owner, importer and retailer alike. They would no doubt move manufacture elsewhere, throwing many newly unemployed families into an even greater grinding poverty than previously they endured. It would at least mean the saving of some reputations, and the salving of many a western consumer conscience.

Sweat shop or not, that work gave you your identity and your dignity as a worker, a wage-earner and a provider. First to your birth family, soon after to your own new new family. For, unlike the mythical housewife of imaginary history, you did not cease working at the point of motherhood. You continued in employment throughout your life, until retiring, at age 65, on a tiny pension and your life's savings. I only wish you and Dad has spent more of this money on yourselves in your twilight years. Instead, you did what you always wanted to do, leave it for us. To give us something you never had.

This working-class identity you and Dad carried with you throughout your life was not a burden. You bore it with pride, spoke of it almost as a badge of honour. When I hear soap-opera actors speaking to chat-show hosts about their "working-class credentials", it makes me want to spit. Their oh-so-working-class accents may well have their origins in class and geography but I cannot abide what I describe as "professional cockneys." I use the term to describe, not just those who culture or exaggerate a vaguely East-London accent, but all those in the public eye who have little to commend them other than their accent.

You may have been solidly working class, Mum, you may not have been ashamed of it, were rightly proud of your identity, but you would never see it as a qualification in its own right. It was just what you were.

Freed of the yoke of motherhood (I know you never thought of it thus. Know you found joy in the love you gave to we five children). Freed from this bondage, you did to some extent return to your roots. You always enjoyed a good game of bingo at the local community centre. It was, as you said, your night out. Your chance to enjoy time with friends in a lively social environment. You enjoyed watching TV too and had a particular affinity to programmes like Coronation Street. In that imaginary world, when first you watched it, a world of black and white, you saw, I think, a reflection of you own life.

You and Dad made many friends in later life, after you had moved to your last home, just the two of you. Another housing estate, albeit a smarter, almost rural one, with a more diverse range of residents. Still a social environment, you and Dad became the elder couple, the "folks who lived on on the hill," who younger families would see as representing stability.

Why are these things important to me, now that you are both gone from this world? They are not just memories, some are not memories at all. At least they are not my memories because I never knew the seamstress, the laundry worker, the child labourer. I did see the working woman and could see the working class girl that you were. One of the most touching photos I have seen was you sitting on the doorstep of your family home with your sisters. A group of little girls with hopes and dreams of the future.

I never saw those dreams, of course, so I cannot say if all or any of them came true, and whether the reality matched any of the dreaming. I do know that my own childhood dreams, youthful dreams, went away at one point in my life. I lost them and was troubled that I could not find them. Then I realised the dreams had not been lost, they just transformed themselves into little children. Three little children who had their own dreams.

These things, these memories of my mother, and the woman and child who was not my mother, are important because motherhood is important and because being a worker, a working woman, a working class woman, are all important too. Some of this identity I have taken as a gift from you. The parental identity and the working class identity.

Pride in my class is akin to pride in my parents and their stories. It doesn't matter that I have adopted all sorts of modern, urban, middle-class ways, I am as much working class as I grew up to be under your loving care. I don't make a point of telling people this because it would be unseemly, unnecessary and self-satisfying to do so. That I can sew, cook, work with my hands and my brain, be a reasonably capable father, is all down to you, Mum and to Dad, who I learnt other things from too. That I write now to you is because I want to remember that part of you that never left you, or me. That part of you that is me.

Thank you for your part in my life, for your part in your own life, and for giving me what I needed to carry on with my own life.

Thank you Mum.

See you on the other side.

Your little boy Raymond.