Today would have been my mother's 72nd birthday. The more I learn about people’s experiences in childhood, the more I realise how lucky I was to have been brought up by someone like Mo: someone who appreciated, and even revelled in, everything that struck her as beautiful – a roadside bank of wild flowers, a passage in a novel, an operatic aria… She impatiently shared her reaction to these events with a kind of unbounded enthusiasm which people either found incredibly engaging and occasionally mildly startling. I don’t think she ever lost this ability to respond to things with wonder, even when plagued by migraines and insomnia in her later years.
And this is what she tried to cultivate in me too, beginning with the fairy tales which were my Ur myths (I’m so happy I was reared on the Ladybird “well loved tales” from the Brothers Grimm et al rather than the New Testament) and lullabies, through which she awakened in me an untutored musical gift, especially a love of songs of all kinds. Throughout her life, she had a special affinity for the magical world of childhood, which inspired many of her poems and striking expressionist paintings.
Although she insisted that she believed in “the absurd universe”, she had an idealistic moral insight, which seemed to encapsulate the moment and occasionally penetrate far beyond the political chatter on the News. I remember in particular how she could never forgive Blair after he refused while on walkabout somewhere to visit a family of a dead serviceman. She was appalled by the millions of pounds poured into wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I felt she was a good judge of what was truly important.
She encouraged all my projects as a boy and even into teenage years, when my taste for pop music and psychedelic culture were a thousand miles away from her world of Matisse, Schubert and Proust. She even inspired me to record my first “album” into a cassette recorder – a response to the story of the guard and the citadel in Kafka’s The Trial – when I only knew a couple of chords, couldn’t tune the guitar or sing a note in tune. Her efforts to bring out my creativity and her unstinting support for my efforts, probably not consciously noticed or valued by me at the time, meant that I never really doubted the worth of the hundreds of songs I wrote in my youth.
Sadly, Mo was more critical when it came to her own work, and decided to destroy many of her poems, complaining that they were inferior to the writers she admired, and some of her paintings are also missing. She left behind only the ones she thought would pass critical muster, as well as her Culture Vulture blog, where she began to share her passion for literature, and build up a small community of quite devoted fans.
Her tastes weren’t exclusively highbrow. She used to enjoy Strictly; she’d laugh out loud at Rory Bremner; and for several years was an avid fan of Eastenders, insisting that some of the dramatic situations were “as good as Shakespeare”.
She was driven only by passion, never duty, and would drop a project once her enthusiasm had dimmed. She spent several years intensively researching the history and significance of fairy tales, and another period reading deeply about Renaissance painters. Both projects ended overnight as soon as Mo felt she’d learned or experienced enough. Eastenders went the same way. Because I’d been entranced by her vivid paintings, I would often urge her to paint more, but she insisted it had become a chore. In the end, this may have been the case with her own life.
Death is always a tragedy. It’s still worth celebrating a life full of beauty, and in which love was well expressed. Mo was a mercurial, incredibly determined and wholly remarkable person. When her passion burned, it was bright like a star. Everyone who knew her well was touched by this, most of all me.
