My mother's last words, my father's thoughts

A few months ago, my step-mother (my father's second wife who my dad married after my mother died) came round and gave me a file with something my father had written in it. When I looked inside I saw a few lines of my dad's writing and thought that it was notes for one of his talks. As I had been to many of his talks and have a book of them (wonderfully edited by John Richmond), I thought I'd read the notes later...at some point...but it wouldn't be urgent. So I tucked it in with some other files.

A few weeks later I pulled out the file again, read the first few lines and realised that it wasn't notes for a talk. It was a piece of writing my father had done within hours of my mother dying. This was 1976, they had been together since 1936. After a few lines, I could read that my father was writing this piece from a point of trauma while saying that he didn't even know why he was writing it.

I glanced at a few pages and caught sight of one or two phrases and bits of dialogue between my father and mother, including unbelievably brave, knowing, calm things she said, even though she knew it was nearly all over. She was looking at the face of death and accepting it, while at the same time trying to cope with pain, incapacity and disfigurement.

\
Again, I put it to one side. I guess I didn't want to revisit scenes where I had been with the pair of them, especially as it would force me to think about what it's going to be like when I die, and thinking about what a near scrape I had in 2020 and of course thinking about the last hours with Eddie, my son.

But today, I thought to myself, why delay this anymore? Apart from anything else I owe it to everyone else in the family as it's part of our family history. So I got down to typing it up. This was quite handy, in that my touch typing is OK but not brilliant, so I was looking at my father's writing, not the keyboard, typing just as I used to watch my mother doing, who was a brilliant touch typist, in days when mistakes had to be 'snopaked', and typed over! She hardly made any mistakes. I can even now hear the clack clack of her stand-up typewriter, sitting on its dark blue woolly mat.

So what with me making mistakes and not being able to read some key words (thanks Emma for doing some great deciphering) I was one step removed from the trauma and despair of it all. I also knew that my father managed to get out of the hole he felt he was in, and was lucky to meet the wonderful Betty, with whom he spent the rest of his life.
At this stage, I don't feel ready to share it in public but there's one bit that jumped off the page at me. He is at one point, in effect looking at my mother's emaciated body and he writes 'Auschwitz, Auschwitz, Auschwitz'.

I remember him saying that during the nightmarish nights that he spent with her as she was dying, he did blur the reality of my mother and the images that he remembered from films and TV of 'the camps'. Mostly, as my brother and I were growing up, our parents kept their horror at what had happened, to themselves. With one exception: when we were in Weimar in 1957 and they went off 'somewhere' where we weren't allowed to go because it would be too awful for us to go. It was Buchenwald. When they came back, my mother in particular, was silent with the horror of it.

So what with one thing and another, seeing these words, I wondered whether my father had not shared with us how these images had persisted in his mind. That said, I remember with huge fondness and gratitude, the night him and me stayed up late and watched the whole of 'Le Chagrin and la Pitié' which tells the story of the Nazi occupation of France. I remember him turning to me at one point and saying, 'That's what must have happened to my uncles.' From then on, we could always refer to 'Le Chagrin et la Pitié' and my excursions into that history, into his family history, is laced with my memories of that time we watched the film together.

Even so, I didn't realise that these things were so near the surface in his time of trauma with my mother.

That's all for now.