My mother’s poetry

‘Palace Pier. Making Memories That Last Forever.” That’s what the poster outside Brighton’s best-known tourist attraction promises. I take a photo on my phone to show my mum, knowing she’d like that. Because despite having vascular dementia and regularly losing many things, from her walking stick to the Christian names of close family members, she hasn’t lost her sense of humour. I tell her this frequently, framing it as a compliment. Whether that’s what she hears is another question.

The living room in her fifth-floor flat has a view; sitting in her huge purple armchair at the window she can see the grey-green Channel and, on a clear day, the offshore windfarm. When both the sea fog and what she refers to as the fogginess inside her head are absent, she’ll wave a finger and ask you to look out “at the wind turbines”. On other days, they’re simply “the windmills”. The other week she called them “the turning towers”.

“Masking” is not the right word for whatever this is. The books on dementia talk about the brain’s amazing plasticity, but in my mum’s case it seems to me as if, faced with adversity, she is creating something akin to poetry.

In the case of individuals she actually knows, some people have become the places that she associates them with. “Have you spoken to Forfar?”

Forfar is my friend John who was born there, just north of her own birthplace, Dundee. Sometimes she’ll refer to him as Mr Bridie because his family were quite famous for making the meat pies, a Scottish delicacy not unlike the Cornish pasty. If my daughter is visiting, she’ll be asked what Shepherd’s Bush is up to and Martha will give her an update on her friend Iris, who once lived in that unlovely corner of London. Now both these people sometimes refer to themselves using my mother’s nicknames.

There are hundreds of books you can reach for that promise to help you better understand what dementia is and how to deal with it as an occasional carer. I use that word with caution as I do precious little caring compared with others: the carers the council provides are amazing, and even more so my sister, Zoe. If you want to live a longer, healthier life, be sure to have at least one daughter: that’s Atul Gawande’s advice and just about everything he says is worth listening to.

What else has reading taught me? That music is a great spur to memory. My mum’s Sony CD player is still going strong. She has her favourites, the Holy Trinity of Joan, Joni and Judy. But when she wants a break from Baez, Mitchell and Collins, there are two other CDs she listens to. First a Roddy Frame album about heartbreak and then a gem of a record called The Lost Songs of St Kilda. Both of these put her in a remembering mood.

It seems the grande amore of her life was not really with either of her husbands, the fathers to her children, but with a Scottish dentist whom she’d met when very young and dated for little more than a year before deciding it couldn’t work. The dentist later died by suicide and Mum never really talked about him. Now it seems that she had never stopped thinking about him, loving him in fact, and wondering what a life with this man, Stewart, would have been like.

Other men feature quite prominently. One offered her a job on Woman’s Own just weeks after she’d got off the Dundee to London train. “He was naughty.” The job came on the condition that her new boss would do her washing. “I thought he’d misspoken and I had to launder his clothes, but he hadn’t. Every Friday I’d bring in a bag of dirty washing. It had to be all of my washing, if you know what I mean.” “Disinhibition” the books call this, and speaking as her son I would call it a mixed blessing.

I read books about dementia with two aims in mind. The first is to better understand what my mum is going through to help me become better at dealing with it. The second is for research for a book I’ve written, a crime novel.

My book, The Darkest Tide, features a character called Arthur Cotton who kept the accounts for the Brighton mob back in the 1960s. As his dementia takes hold, he can no longer keep their secrets and as a result risks being pushed off the end of Palace Pier with a bullet in his head. His daughter must find out what he knows before that happens.

The “slow losing” of everything, up to and including the names of the people you love most, is a big thing to think about. As Arthur says in the book: “Even the word ‘memory’ seemed too small for what these were to him. They were the cornerstones, the underpinning without which the entire structure would fall. Without which, it might as well fall, because without these memories, what really was the point?”

I ordered the books on dementia when I was living abroad and without a UK address, so I had them sent to my mum’s flat for me to pick up. She’d opened the padded envelopes, but I found the books back inside the envelopes and untouched. I apologised, and said I hoped seeing them wasn’t upsetting. She dismissed these concerns with a wave.

“They looked interesting enough, but I didn’t really fancy them,” she said, before asking: “You’re going to read them though, are you?” I nodded. “OK then, but do me a favour: don’t tell me how they end.”

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