Mum died earlier this month. It feels like years, and at the same time it feels as if it’s not quite happened yet. Grief plays havoc with your sense of time. But my sister Sharon and I are lucky. There is so much to celebrate in Marje’s long life, not least the hope she gave us in her final weeks.
To be fair, she had given me and so many others hope throughout her life. I’ve written about her before in the Guardian. Last year I interviewed her for a supplement about ageing. The headline was “Bloody cheek, I’m not ageing”. She was 94 at the time. Back then she gave me hope that the older you got, the funnier you could become.
Marje had a tough start in life. Born in Salford in 1928, the youngest of four children, she always said her parents were tired of parenting by the time she came along. So they rarely praised her or went to school parents’ evenings. If they were proud when she became head girl, they didn’t show it.
She suffered horrendous sexual abuse in her early childhood. It went on for years, and her abuser threatened to kill her if she uttered a word. Marje could so easily have become bitter, angry and untrusting. Instead she grew into a teenager and woman dedicated to bringing the best out of people. She wasn’t political with a capital P, but she always championed the underdog.
Marje was both an adventurer and unsure of herself – a wussy pioneer. In 1949, after gaining a teaching certificate at Birmingham university she went to live in the newly formed state of Israel. She learned Ivrit, or modern Hebrew, and lived on a moshav, a cooperative farm. Marje was a quiet idealist.
When she returned to Salford, she found her niche – teaching children in a school for children with physical and mental disabilities. Marje was told that literacy was beyond many of the kids, but that wasn’t going to stop her. She became a second mum to many of the children. At weekends, she would take a few back home with her – these were very different times. There were mangled wheelchairs, toxins accidentally ingested, regular visits to A&E. Again, it didn’t stop her. She gave them such hope.
Her biggest mission was probably me. I got a mystery illness, and it went on and on. Our GP (my dad’s best friend) and the consultant told her I was a malingerer and that she had Munchausen’s by proxy. A more vile, and less true, thing could not have been said. She fought the GP, the medical establishment and Dad to get a second opinion. After a brain biopsy, I was diagnosed with encephalitis. Mum gave me life twice.
When I got better, two years later, the local authority said I would never catch up at a normal school and would have to remain at the open-air school I’d started attending. Mum successfully fought for me to go to a regular comp.
Kersal High didn’t have a sixth form, so I went to Bury Grammar for sixth form. But a couple of months later, when the A-level English teacher called me an “obstreperous bastard” for failing to agree that The Waste Land was optimistic, I decided I’d had enough. I walked out with a few choice words. Again, Marje fought for me – this time to get me into Eccles sixth-form college. When I messed up my A-levels she pleaded with Leeds University to take me, telling them I’d had a horribly disrupted childhood. I only found out about these battles years later. She never said a word to me about them. I would have failed so many times without Marje.
She gave Dad hope when she looked after him through decades of psychotic depression. She gave my autistic daughter Maya hope by coming to London from Manchester for two days a week to support her at primary school. She taught her to read, of course.
Marje wasn’t a saint or a sop. Anything but. She had an unerring bullshit detector, and was an acute judge of character. But she always knew who was uncomfortable in their skin and would benefit from a kind word.
Perhaps it was the way she died that gave me most hope. She passed away with such grace. Marje was hospitalised after a urinary tract infection. In her final days she was mostly too weak to talk for the minutes she was awake. But somehow she would always manage a word for the lovely staff on ward L6 at Salford Royal. She’d open her eyes, smile at them and say, “Thank you so much.” They were nearly all women. Often, she’d stay awake just long enough to say: “You are so pretty.” They looked that little bit taller when they left her bedside.
A few days before she died, I thought she was on her way out. Her eyes glazed over, and she looked so otherworldly. “I’m going now,” she whispered to me. Where are you off to, Mum?, I asked. She lifted a finger and pointed to the sky. It was unusually confident for her. “You know what, Si, this has been so much nicer than I thought it would be,” she said.
After she died, my partner, Diane, reminded me of Maya Angelou’s words. “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” And Marje made people feel the best.
Simon Hattenstone is a features writer for the Guardian
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