Waiting in the Wings

By Stevie Turner

At the grand old age of 92, my mother Dot suddenly starts telling me that she loves me. I am quite dumbstruck at these outbursts of emotion, as she has never mentioned the fact before in all of my 58 years. Over the entire course of my lifetime we have often argued bitterly, and have never really seen eye-to-eye over anything. I squirm with the inner knowledge that she wants me to reply in a similar vein, but try as I might, I cannot.

The guilt I feel at being unable to grant Dot her wish is overwhelming. As Dot's health deteriorates more towards the final chapters of her life, I take on the role of carer. I find the only way to bring her out of her perpetual misery is to reminisce on past events by showing her old family photographs, and by helping her to remember holidays and happier times.

We look back without anger and sometimes with a lot of laughter, getting to know each other better, raking over the past, and talking more than we have ever done. The process helps me, a middle-aged woman, understand the perils of ageing that I might one day face, and also the struggles that elderly people suffer on a day-to-day basis while stoically attempting to maintain their independence.

This is a true story, told in flashbacks and in modern-day often humorous conversations with my mother.   

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stevie Turner
• Release date: Nov 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781386030478

Stevie Turner

Stevie Turner  began her writing career as far back as 1969, when she won an inter-schools' writing competition after submitting a well-thumbed and hastily scribbled essay entitled 'My Pet'. A love of words and writing short stories and poems has carried on all throughout her life, but it is only now in middle age that she has started writing novels full-time and taking the author business seriously. Stevie works part time as a medical secretary in a busy NHS hospital in the East of England. She is married, with 2 adult sons and 4 grandchildren. So far she has published 10 novels, 4 novellas, a collection of 18 short stories (Life) relating to significant life events, and more recently her memoir 'Waiting in the Wings'. Her novels are realistic, but tend to shy away from the mainstream somewhat and focus on the darker side of relationships. However, you'll find that she does like to add in a little bit of humour along the way. Stevie's third novel 'A House Without Windows' was chosen as a medal winner in the New Apple Book Awards 2014 Suspense/Thriller category, and in late 2015 it won a Readers' Favorite Gold Award.  It was also considered for filming by a New York media production company in early 2018. An excerpt from her novel 'Repent at Leisure' made the shortlist for the Escalator Writing Competition in April 2016, and a short story, 'Checking Out', made the top 15 of the Creative Writing Institute's 2016 competition, and was published in their December 2016 anthology 'Explain!' 'For the Sake of a Child' screenplay won a Silver Award in the 2017 Depth of Field International Film Festival. Stevie has also recently branched out into the world of audio books and translations.  Some of her books have been translated into German, Italian and Spanish, and many English versions are on sale as audiobooks.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

When did that subtle change occur?  When did that capable, strong woman I had grown up with retreat into the wings from centre stage?  Somewhere along life’s rocky road I have missed the opening night of my mother’s fall into dereliction and decay.  Age and infirmity have cast their vile shadows, and the normal parent/child relationship has been reversed.

I have taken on the role of mother to Dorothy Eliza Wilkins, a helpless child of almost 92 summers.  Dot wants to die, but lives on regardless of her deteriorating body.  Her brain is shrinking along with stiffening bones and wasting muscles, and her recalcitrant bladder and bowels refuse to obey her commands.  Her spontaneous eruptions of excreta and many falls have slowly eroded her self-confidence, joie de vivre, and good humour.  There is mouldering food in her fridge that she cannot be bothered to clear out, and I am left with a shell that used to be my strong, capable mother.  She can complete the Daily Mail crossword every day, but phones me to ask whether she should take another antibiotic for the ulcerated leg acquired during her last fall. I tell her for the tenth time to take four tablets per day, but she cannot remember how many she has already taken. I give her one of my old pill boxes, but she does not use it. The doctor visits and asks questions to test her memory, and Dot gets them all correct. 

Dot is well aware who the current Prime Minister is, and which monarch is on the throne.  She knows her birthday is still two weeks away, but on the other hand she is getting mixed up with current days and dates, and no tradesmen who come to her flat are getting paid.  The milkman, the driver of the community bus, and the Meals on Wheels people are all jumping up and down and demanding money.  Dot shrugs and cannot remember how much she owes, and by the look of her I can tell that she doesn’t really care either.  I realise it is time for me to gently suggest taking over more of her financial affairs than I am doing already.  She readily agrees.

Everybody in the vicinity hears on a more than regular basis that Dot is ready to depart this earthly struggle. She tells me her three favourite tunes which must get played at her funeral; Mendelssohn’s ‘On Wings of Song’, The Beatles’ ‘The Long and Winding Road’, and Frank Sinatra’s version of ‘That’s Life’.  This gives me a sudden mental image of ‘Old Blue Eyes’ standing in a dinner suit over my mother’s open coffin with a microphone in his hand, warbling to her waxy features and bringing her to life again at the shock of coming face-to-face with a celebrity she had yearned to meet all her life.

I suggest to her moving to residential care to have 24 hour support with her incontinence, but she will not hear of it.  She is steadfastly against giving up her independence.  I tell her that she cannot cope very well without help from myself and from the carers, who visit three times a day for fifteen minutes.  She cries and thanks me for all I do for her, but begs me not to put her in a home.  I compromise and ask if she would agree to look around a very sheltered housing complex where she can have her own flat, but where carers are on hand 24 hours a day if she needs them.  To my delight she reluctantly agrees.

My mother is so frail that I baulk at taking her out of her flat.  My husband Sam agrees to help me get her in and out of the car and lift her into a wheelchair before driving back to work.  Dot hates wheelchairs, but at 92 the walking stick or three-wheeled walker are now both insufficient for outside use.  We are careful not to damage the paper-thin skin on her shins which bleeds at the slightest knock, or the painful ulcer on her lower right leg which makes her wince every time she moves her leg. 

When we arrive at her current housing complex Dot is once again in the toilet, complaining for the thousandth time of her leaky bladder.  Time marches on, but there is no hurrying her.  Dot doesn’t want to leave her flat.  Again she cannot remember how many pills she has taken, and her ulcerated leg is still red and swollen.  I check my watch impatiently and imagine the housing manager awarding the one vacant flat to somebody else. Dot calls me into the toilet, while my husband waits outside.  There is blood on her pad.

How many tablets did the doctor want me to take?

Four every day.  I help her with a new pad. How many have you taken?

I don’t know. Dot sighs. One, I think.

I check the amount of tablets in the packet; there should be eleven left for the next three days.  I can see fifteen.

In very sheltered housing you’ll get help with taking medication.

I don’t need any help.  Dot shakes her head.

There’s blood on your pad, Mum.

Good.  I’m on the way out then.

I try and change the subject.

The doctor has written a referral to the urologists, so we’ll find out what’s causing it. In the meantime, let’s get going and see the flat.  You don’t have to move if you don’t want to, but it’ll be good to see what’s available.

I’m not getting rid of any furniture.  Dot waggles a crooked finger at me. "I like all my things around me, just as you do."

Nobody’s asking you to. 

I pray the flat is not smaller than the one in which she currently resides.

THAT WOMAN’S STARING at me.

We are at the modern very sheltered housing complex in the next village to ours in Suffolk, UK. Dot’s needs are manifold, and it is taking her three hours every morning to get herself washed and dressed.  She will accept no help to wash intimate parts of her body, and insists on getting up at 5am to begin her ministrations. All she will let the carers do is wash her feet.  I am trying to get her around to thinking of long term care.

The poor lady has dementia, Mum.  She can’t help it.

Well I don’t like her staring; it’s unnerving.

I turn the wheelchair around so that Dot faces out towards the garden, but the resident ambles over to peer directly at Mum, interested to see a new face.  Mum gives her a glare and turns her head away, and I pray for the manager to appear. 

Manager Sally is cheerful and answers all Dot’s questions. The complex is new, light, airy and spacious, as are the individual flats.  It is perfect for Dot, but she is not sure.  All her rent and laundry would be taken care of for the price of £245 per week, and with all care funded by Social Services.  However, Mum finds fault with the small garden, the lack of carpet in the foyer, the horrible cup of coffee she is served, and the three demented ladies who follow us about.  Sally’s smile begins to falter somewhat.

You’d have your own flat, Mum.  The ladies wouldn’t be able to get in.

Don’t rush me; I’ve got to think about it.

I roll my eyes with frustration in Sally’s direction, and call Sam from work again to help lift Dot back into the car, which I cannot do.  There is silence as we travel back.  Dot is mulling things over in her head, while I mentally compose an email to Angela, Mum’s social worker.

CHAPTER 2

No child nowadays needs to endure a dislocated hip due to a breech birth, and osteomyelitis without the aid of antibiotics.  After a traumatic labour at home with no medical aid and helped only by a local woman who is there to bring babies into the world and lay out the dead, Dot is pulled from her mother’s womb by her left leg on 21 st May 1924.  As a child of twelve years she bears with fortitude six months in a plaster cast in order to try and rectify her hip, which has caused her left leg to be two inches shorter than her right.  The treatment does not work and she goes on to discover that for a successful result, her hip abnormality should have been corrected at the age of two.

There is worse to come. Even now Dot often wonders what her life would have been like if her aunt had not been chasing her along the street when she was four.  Dot was wearing a calliper on the shortened left leg at the time, and cannot remember why she was running away, but suddenly she falls over and injures her good right leg.  The leg does not heal, there is no Penicillin, and she needs several gruelling operations at the Middlesex Hospital in London to release the osteomyelitis poison from inside her bones.  She is left with a series of long scars on the front and back of her right thigh, and nightmares due to being held down by the surgeons in order to be anaesthetised by a foul-smelling gas emanating from a mask placed over her face.  Her mother, Elsie, is instructed not to visit as Dot convalesces in Bexhill as it would upset her daughter, and Dot has an abiding memory of looking for her mother’s face in vain through the glass door of the children’s ward. At any rate Elsie, an impecunious single parent, would never have been able to afford the cost of travelling from the home she shares with her father, two of her brothers, and her two children in East London’s Bethnal Green all the way out to the comparable grandeur of Bexhill-on-sea.

Released from hospital but still having to wear a calliper, she soon learns to run about with the other ragamuffins of Bonner Street and ignore her considerable infirmities.  She loves her grandfather, who enjoys having his daughter and grandchildren close at hand.  The love is returned a hundredfold.

Dot is sent to a special school for crippled children and excels at creative writing.  Because of her condition she is not allowed to leave school until she is 15, the year after World War II breaks out.  By this time she has taught herself to type.  An old piano given to her by her mostly absent father also serves to satisfy Dot’s musical yearnings, and she teaches herself to play songs by ear using notes and chords from the C Major scale. Realising that Elsie has two jobs and is struggling to keep her and her younger brother financially, Dot quickly secures a post as a messenger girl and trainee switchboard operator, in the days when jobs are two a penny.  Every Friday afternoon without fail, my grandmother arrives at the factory gates of Allen & Hanbury’s in Old Ford, East London, to wait impatiently for her daughter’s wages.  Dot is loyal to her mother, especially after all the fruitless trips in the past to Old Street police station with Elsie to discover once again that Harold, her father, had not paid in any maintenance money.  However, on one such trip they did notice a new fish and chip shop along the route in Harold’s name whilst riding home on an open-topped bus.  Elsie pulls both Dot and Albert off the bus, strides into the shop, and demands money there and then from her errant husband.

Dot’s natural sense of order is a complete antithesis to that of her mother, and so her relationship with Elsie can sometimes be a little strained. Elsie’s lackadaisical attitude to keeping the house clean and tidy irritates Dot greatly, who takes it upon herself to carry out all housework.  Also, her mother’s tendency to let people walk all over her is totally alien to Dot’s highly developed sense of injustice.

My mother’s ability to touch type earns her a promotion to the office typing pool.  Miss Harding is in charge of the typists, and Dot has to keep her nose to the grindstone.  Miss Harding’s frequent icy stares coupled with the phrase ‘Why are we marking time?’ installs fear into the hearts of the female typists, and Dot is afraid to even ask to go to the toilet, waiting until her half hour lunch break to relieve herself. 

In her late teens Dot’s grandfather dies, and Harold briefly returns from his womanising wanderings. The family move to a two bedroomed flat in Ranwell Close, Old Ford, and Harold begins to lay down the law, forbidding Dot to buy new clothes or make-up with her wages and insisting that she be home by 9 o’clock each evening.  Dot is just starting to socialise with her workmates and to enjoy nights out at the cinema and local dances, and rails at the injustice and double standards imposed by a man whom she learns had previously been found guilty of bigamy at the Old Bailey and had spent three months in prison sewing mailbags.  However, terrified of her father’s wrath she ensures she never misses a deadline, mentally willing tardy public transport to arrive whilst shivering with fear at bus stops.

Dot carries on working through the wartime bombing raids, as does everybody else around her, and refuses to go down into the air raid shelters, hating the noise, smell, and feeling of confinement.  However, one evening as she sits with Elsie listening to the radio, the war is brought home to Ranwell Close in the most shocking way.  Suddenly without any warning all the glass in their front room windows shatter, covering both women in tiny shards.  A bomb has exploded in the street outside, and there are many fatalities and casualties.  The shock causes Dot to cease menstruating for a year, and also brings on the start of pneumonia. 

I HATED MY FATHER, you know.

Dot is in a reflective mood, and for the umpteenth time her mind has returned to the early 1940’s (her favourite way to start a conversation is ‘during the war’...).  I ask a question that has often bothered me.

Why didn’t you just stand up to him?  You’ve never exactly been the shy, retiring type.

I don’t know; probably because at the time I hadn’t worked out that his bark was worse than his bite.  Dot grins ruefully. He never actually ever hit me at all.

Mental abuse is just as damaging as physical abuse, and seventy years later Dot still cannot forgive, forget, and move on from those teenage years when Harold returned to the marital home.  By 1945 he had gone again, bringing great relief to Dot and her mother.  Albert, Dot’s brother, is serving in the Seaforth Highlanders, and Elsie and Dot continue sharing a cosy existence in their little two-bedroomed flat in Old Ford, opposite the Gunmaker’s Lane entrance to Victoria Park.  Elsie cleans houses and works full time at Keeley & Tong’s biscuit factory off the Cambridge Heath Road, and between them they manage to make ends meet. However, this idyllic co-habitation is interrupted in 1948 by Albert and his pregnant wife Maggie, who have been thrown out of their room at Maggie’s parents’ home.  Dot does not get on with her sister-in-law, whom she swears has mental health issues, and to have her living under her own and Elsie’s roof causes endless tension and arguments.  By the time her brother and his wife eventually find a place of their own, two years have passed, the internal doors are damaged due to always being slammed with considerable force, and Dot is at the end of her tether.

Dot’s first love, Lindsay, an American airman, had long since returned to the USA, and Dot feels certain she will never marry because of her shortened leg and the fact that as a child her nose had been broken in a fall.  She has also lost several teeth, as dentists at that time extracted teeth instead of treating toothache, but happily a false set makes up the shortfall. She has thick, lustrous dark hair, pale grey eyes and a good figure, but feels ugly and unwanted, despite having a good circle of girlfriends at work.  She loves clothes, and free from Harold’s rules and regulations, regales herself in sartorial splendour. With more than a touch of rouge, eyeshadow and mascara, life is as good as she can make it.  Maggie has finally gone, and Dot can have her bedroom back again.

HAROLD RETURNS AGAIN briefly after the war, and is proud of the way Dot has taught herself to play the piano.  He begins finding pubs and clubs where she can display her talent, making sure to be constantly on guard to shoo away any marauding male who offers to buy his daughter a drink, judging all men by his own less-than-ideal standards. 

Dot enjoys being the centre of attention by playing old singalong songs in the pubs.  After tinkling the ivories for two hours one evening she stops for a rest and picks up her glass of lemonade.  Feeling a slight tap on her shoulder, she looks around and is aware of two brown eyes staring at her.

Can I buy you a drink?

Harold is nowhere in sight.  Dot is mesmerised by the smouldering Omar Sharif-type eyes, which belong to a short man, stockily built, and sporting a beautiful head of black curly hair.

Okay.

The eyes and curly hair are characteristic traits of one John Hawkes. The curly hair runs in his mother’s family, and Dot finds out that John works with his uncle delivering coal.  John is smitten with Dot, and soon gets around Harold’s bluster and brusqueness with the characteristic laugh that can be heard all around the room. 

Dot and John are married in October of 1952.  Dot has married at the relatively late age of 28, but at last has found somebody who loves her.  Harold does not attend the wedding but Elsie does, spending most of the time on the arm of John’s father Frank.

JOHN IS THREE YEARS younger than Dot, and was born in September 1927, the second child of my East End grandparents Frank and Nell Hawkes, and the only one of their three children to inherit the luxuriant black curly hair from a distant Spanish ancestor.  By the time John