Handmade Part Three

PART THREE

Normandy 2

We keep our old photographs in a big plastic box in the cupboard above the wardrobe. A box of memories, packet after packet from a time when I took photographs on an old Olympus Trip, sending them away to be developed at Max Spielman’s or Boots. There are times when we lift the box down, sit around the table and retrieve the old packets. Surprised by what we discover, what we've forgotten, amused by what we find, we pass the photos around from one to another.

I lift the box down and search for the photographs from our Normandy holiday. When I find them, when I open the first packet, I'm surprised to find that they're black and white, unlike any of my other photographs. There is one colour reel which has images of Mont-Saint-Michel with pictures of the children and of my brother M and his partner. These are typical holiday snaps, although Alma is missing from the trip to Mount-Saint-Michel. In contrast, the black and white film is taken entirely in and around the house.

Why I chose to do this I don't remember but it seems prescient. They are dark, moody, images. The house itself being gloomy, old-fashioned, filled with french lace and heavy antique furniture. What light there was tunneled in through the tiled passageway that ran from back to front. These images are clearly my attempt at photography as art, not that I know the first thing about it, but I'm aiming to shoot something different. In their shadows, in the intense chiaroscuro did I catch the tension that was building from the start? Do they reflect the danger of resistance to come, the bitterness, the betrayal? I cannot say. But truthfully I suspect such an idea is only convenient in hindsight.

That summer in Normandy Alma and Kit, in their sixties, were back together after a separation of several years. As always there was the question of Alma's mental health, her insomnia, her addiction to the sleeping tablets which rarely worked. She was depressed and their relationship was as tense and unhappy as before their separation, only relieved by their enjoyment of being grandparents. I think Alma was on Prozac. If not then, she began taking it shortly after.

Neither of us were at our best. I was under considerable stress. Life was demanding. I worked full-time in a women's prison as the Deputy Education Manager with all the attendants pressures and I was bringing up two children. I remember being on a shorter fuse than usual.

We'd left for France knowing that J's father F was very sick with Motor Neuron Disease. We'd visited him shortly before the holiday. He was frail then but amazingly well cared for by J's mother, sister and sister's partner. He was still very much in the world. It was a shock therefore to get the news of his death. There was a lot to process. It seems that F had taken his own life while he still could. He knew what was coming down the line. Things were only going to get worse and I admired him for taking matters into his own hands. We all did, and we were all sad that it had come to this. Apart that is from Alma. Alma was not sad. Alma was angry.

What reason did she have for this anger? Why on the news of F's death did she suddenly become obstructive, difficult, unsympathetic?

The events of that day had put Alma firmly in the backseat. She was no longer the centre of attention. And would not be for some time. Thoughts, feelings, conversation all clustered around J and the funeral. What would we do? Would we go home? There were decisions to be made which had nothing to do with Alma. What was needed from her was to take a backseat, a quiet, supportive role. But this was a part she had little inclination to play. In contrast she began immediately that very day to impose herself as only she knew how. From my point of view, forgive the cliche, this would be the straw that broke the camel's back...

The Yellow Skirt

Three weeks after Alma's suicide attempt, I am back at school. Mrs B, my class teacher tells me to stand on my desk and invites everyone to admire my new yellow skirt. She tells them it's a present for looking after my mother who's been ill.

Of all my childhood clothes the yellow skirt burns brightest in my mind. If I close my eyes I can imagine wearing it still, feeling the pressure of its waistband on my skin. I push my hands deep into the patch pockets, spreading the material out from under its gathers. Thick chalky cotton, button through, with daisy buttons. As yellow as a buttercup. That Alma bought it for me, means she must have recognised my sacrifice. I'd been kept off school to look after her and to be her companion. It surprises me that Kit and Edith allowed it; that anyone allowed it but I can only conclude it came down to them or me.

Me, the eight-year-old carer. The best of it, walking down the street with Alma. Alma in her Dior New Look, cotton poplin summer dress, with its nipped in waist and wide skirt, splashed in purple and blue, hair up and high heels. Alma's heels were only ever high. Me in my newly bought yellow skirt. A twenty-nine-year-old glam puss who liked to think she was a cut above the neighbours and her yellow-skirted hostage of a daughter. Who did Alma want to impress? Perhaps the lover who'd rejected her. Perhaps nobody in particular. Probably everybody

A Yellow Field

2024

In a writing workshop I'm running at Collected Books, an independent bookshop in Durham city, I tell the story of the yellow skirt. We are well into the workshop which has been lively and friendly. I hadn’t intended to tell this story, it wasn't in my plan or notes. I'd been making the point that although we don't have to tell-all in memoir - although there is no tell-all, only our-tell or our-truth - we should not hold too much back. We must be prepared to be vulnerable in our writing. In vulnerability lies our connection with our reader. I guess because of this I thought I should be open and vulnerable and share something of my story. Or perhaps I gauged the mood, feeling it was a safe space and wanting to be heard. This was the first time I'd told the story other than to a close member of my family.

I tell it simply. I say,' When I was eight my mother bought me a yellow skirt. It was a present for looking after her following her suicide attempt.' There is an immediate and powerful shift in atmosphere, heads come up. The mood is suddenly attentive and serious. The writers know how to honour a story, how to embrace vulnerability. How to validate without words.

I wonder what I was looking for when I told this story. What was I looking for besides making a workshop point? Perhaps it was a sympathetic response. Maybe. But I know that any feeling human being would respond sympathetically. More than this I think it was the desire to be heard, to know myself and to own my story. To bring it out into the light. I wanted to make this memory real, to reclaim it from the liminal space of dream and disconnection. I wanted to transform it and by doing so to retrieve the agency I'd lost in childhood.

Sweet Grass and Rye

2024

In my garden the day after the workshop, sat beneath an umbrella in the July heat, by pots of velvet black petunias and blue scabious, I note there are no yellow flowers on show. I am famous in my family and among friends for never wearing yellow and for not liking yellow flowers. Though in the wild I love primroses and cowslips. They're different. I toy with the idea that this is a throw back to the yellow skirt, the time when my childhood was lost. Then I remember that Alma bought it for me, and I chose it, that it was a symbol of Alma's attention- I hesitate to use the word love- of her unspoken appreciation.

I imagine the skirt to be a field of everything yellow, of buttercups and cowslips, of sunflowers with heads turned to the sun. I imagine Alma and I walking together in the yellow field, just as I walked in the field by the river with my daughter K two days before her wedding. When we picked wild grasses as tall as her to decorate the church. When she disappeared from view among the sweet grass and the rye. When I took a photograph in my mind, so that I would forever remember the beauty of that day.

In such a field are the good things that Alma gifted me, my love of colour and beauty, of those cowslip fields and primrose woods. Above all my determination to be a different kind of mother.

When I told the story of the yellow skirt in the workshop, a writer commented, 'this makes me think of my mother.' When I read the beginning of this story-my trip to the West Country to see Alma when she was dying-at another event, a listener commented, 'I want to read that book.'

I do not underestimate how powerful telling my story can be, particularly when there are others who may identify with it and see a likeness with their own.

J reads my work in progress and says it's a brave thing to write like this. I'm grateful for the reassurance. J never says what he doesn't think. But being honest, I know I'm compelled to write this. It is a selfish rather than a brave act.

Mrs G

Following Alma's breakdown our days are spent walking on glass. The slightest accident or noise, a dropped pan, a spilled drink, sets Alma off. I fear the slightest mishap and the fear makes me clumsy. I spend a lot of time in my bedroom because Alma is fond of sending me upstairs for misdemeanours that I now find hard to imagine. I was as good as a child can be.

There is no key turning in the lock, there is no lock on my bedroom door, but there may as well have been.

How often was I 'locked away'? I'm not sure. Perhaps these are just the memories that have stayed with me. Like the memories of those who came to my rescue.

Mrs G, three doors down to my mother who is hanging out the washing: ‘You haven’t got that girl shut up in her room again Alma, have you?’ She says it lightly but with edge. I have always remembered it. I remember thinking, here is someone on my side.

I hear her through the open window. I'm kneeling on the stool resting my arms on the windowsill though making sure Alma doesn't see me. I'm looking out to the garden's end and to Kit's muddy strawberry patch, waiting for him coming in from work, waiting for the sound of him wheeling his motorbike through the shared passageway. Not that his presence will change anything. Kit never overrules Alma. The only option for me and M is to fly under the radar as best we can. The only option in the dark is to kneel on the stool, arms resting on the windowsill and watch the stars come out.

Watching the Dark

On her second Christmas my granddaughter is in the house with us. She and I take to what we call, 'watching the dark.' Late afternoon I lift her up onto the kitchen counter by the window that looks out over the garden. Putting my arms around her to keep her safe, I switch off the light. We talk about how it's growing dark outside, about what we can still see, whether the birds are hiding in the trees getting ready to sleep. We hear the fat wood pigeons coo, catch a glimpse of a rising moon. Look for stars. When she's had enough I carry her into the hall where a lighted five-pointed star decoration sits on the hall table. She switches it off and on endlessly. Later, we read Mog in the Dark. I leave out the scary bits where the birds have teeth.

It seems like no time since I knelt on the stool by the window in my childhood bedroom, leaning on the windowsill, looking out into the dark, counting stars, praying on them, looking beyond at another sea, another set of possibilities. Like the estuary, the night sky was a place of transcendence. Swallowing stars, I could forget what was happening downstairs, happening sometimes in my room, where I woke, hearing things I didn't want to hear, and pretending to be asleep. I became hypervigilant praying for nights without incident, but I also knew the power and fascination of the dark.

Night black, silvery light, the headlamps of Kit's motorbike as we drove to Bridgwater Fair (a place Alma would not be seen dead in) me holding tight, leaning into each corner of the road. The walk up to the fairground and the rides, the smell of fried onions scooped up onto hot dogs, the giant salt and mustard pots, tomato sauce, Kiaora orange, and the dolls, the crinoline dolls hanging above the steel drums that spun the candy floss. Adorned in net skirts of every colour, neon bright. How I wanted one, how I wanted to believe in a world of fairytales and fairy crowns and dolls and music and all the excitement of the fair. In the field we won a coconut and rode on the Big Wheel swinging in the smoky night air looking out over the town and the countryside beyond from where we'd come.

I knew the thrill of the dark, that stars paved the way to other worlds, that for a child leaning on a stool looking out of a window, stars were the hooks on which to hang unspoken words. I knew that night fairs were the stuff of dreams and were not all 'cheap tat,' like Alma said.

A Roll-on Girdle

The years after Alma's breakdown are as dark as a mountain range before the sun has made it over the summit. Indistinct and shadowy, they fold into each other, and I cannot distinguish between them. Alma spends a great deal of time crying and lying in bed. I bring her cups of tea. I look after the house. I do everything in my power to make her happy, to make things right. In time she will improve gradually though never completely.

I see it in her fattening belly, a swelling the roll-on girdle fails to disguise. I ask her if it's a baby. She tells me it is. She cries. She says Doctor W has told her she's perfectly healthy and she must have the baby even though she doesn't want it and is terribly frightened. I worry for her.

Tumblers of castor oil, and Widow Welch's quinine pills in their small, papery white box appear on the sink side in the kitchen. I know they have something to do with an unwanted baby.

Weeks later Alma comes to my room after I've gone to bed. She sits on the mauve candlewick bedspread and tells me the baby has gone. The ghost of a sister or brother unknown, has been flushed out. She tells me it was done in a hot bath with a bottle of gin and that Kit helped. She is smiling, relieved, she could not go through childbirth again. I am equally relieved. I am happy for her. I am happy for me. There are enough problems in this house. I am nine years old and I have enough to do. I do not want anyone else to look after.

We live in a street where babies disappear. Women like Alma, desperate not to have another child, forced into the backstreets, forced to take a knitting needle and do the job themselves. An ambulance called. A young hairdresser who makes the trip to London, found dead in a hotel room. Alma believed that women deserved better. I inherited those beliefs and have tried to live by them, particularly in my working life, speaking out on behalf of abused women, especially of women in prison. In my youth I was one of many ordinary, young women who marched through, South-East London - through New Cross and Deptford - in opposition to the James White anti-abortion bill of 1975.

Blue Dress - 1

Dr W says Alma needs to get out of the house. She goes to work in the local factory along with the men and women from the estate who work there, including her lover. I'm not sure it's over. He is still in our orbit. Although it doesn't alter much for us, except more time alone in the house, the factory brings Alma back to life. The heels come out, smokey grey stockings, a turquoise overall with a Bardot collar, she is never without make-up, immaculate, stylish. Alma has a new audience.

She sews still, though rarely for money. Among other things, she makes me a blue seersucker dress with pearl buttons and two rows of lace trim either side on the bodice. The fabric is patterned with tiny white bows and is the colour of a summer sky. It ripples to the touch and is beyond doubt my favourite dress. I feel light and altered wearing it. It has the power as clothes sometimes do, to transform. It takes away the heaviness in my body, the puppy fat as the adults like to call it, but more than that it takes away the sadness in my soul. It is Alma at her best, maker of beautiful clothes.

I sometimes wish I’d kept it. I wonder how it would be to see the shape and the size of it, the shape and size of the small person that was me. But then I wonder would meeting the dress mean the memories I hold of it would be lost? Could the object really live up to all it has come to represent for me, that small, blue world, that was the better part of childhood. Would I be disappointed?

There is a sense in which I’ve been chasing the blue dress all my life. The dress that speaks of the out of doors, of sky and sea, an escape from the black, troubled rooms of the house, something to make me feel pretty at a time when I felt ugly and unloved. Looking back across the blue of distance, I see that when worn, my dress temporarily set me dreaming and free, in Rebecca Solnit’s words, it was …the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed.

Blue Dress 2

June 2023

On market day in Marseillan, on the edge of the Etang du Thau, a salt-water lagoon, I buy a dress. A simple shift in that very French shade of lavender blue, the colour of painted shutters, the colour of the horizon across the still, mirror waters of the Etang. The moment I spot it on its market rail I know it will be impossible to resist. I watch it as I drink my coffee in the Cafe Marine, willing someone else to come along and buy it so I won’t have to do the whole, should I-shouldn’t Ior do-I-really-need-another-dress, dance. But nobody does

When I finally make up my mind to buy, I imagine it will be too small. But it isn’t and not expensive either. Later, on the generous bookshelves of the beautiful house in which I'm staying, I find Rebecca Solnit’s, A Field Guide to Getting Lost. I turn to one of my favourite essays, The Blue of Distance, where Solnit ponders the problems of yearning and the blue that is out of reach. She writes, For many years I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that colour of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. This she says is the colour of solitude and desire, the colour of where you are not. According to the poet, Robert Hass, blue is the colour of longing.

There is never a time when I haven’t sought to posses that blue, like the ultramarine of Vermeer, never a time when I didn’t have at least one blue dress in my wardrobe. Some have been memorable. There was a Biba dress bought in the Abingdon Road store in Kensington, there was the Laura Ashley print, left beneath a lover's bed after a hasty retreat, and posted on to me. There was the pale, blue, chambray dress, I wore when the children were small. In a blue dress I can inhabit the best of myself. As someone who struggles endlessly with liking herself or her appearance, a blue dress is a precious thing.

Pink Corset

We are still at Edith's a lot, especially after school. If Alma is cloth, Edith is food - chopping fresh herbs for her home-made faggots, stirring Christmas puddings and cakes, rolling out the pastry for a blackcurrant tart. Edith is steamed puddings and drop scones.

Edith is the Labour Party through and through. She is the local secretary, much to Jack's disapproval. Her heroes are Nye Bevan and Tony Benn. Edith at the table, writing case unzipped, a Labour Party pen in hand, on official business. She keeps a poem I write about the sea, youthful and romantic, tucked inside that case, along with the small, sepia photographs of her brothers who died in the Great War.

Edith reading Mills and Boon, fishing out the ten bob note she keeps tucked away in the bra of her lobster pink corset, and taking me out to Forte's ice cream parlour. Always the same order of two North Poles. Italian ice cream, not Walls, never Mr Whippy, but Italian, vanilla ice cream, sandwiched between thin, crisp wafers and topped with raspberry sauce, served on a silver dish with a long spoon. Edith has coffee in a fluted glass.

The sea surrounds us, transforming itself from wintery grey to summer blue, high tide to low, mud to water. Waiting for the bus home from Edith's on the seafront looking out across Burnham Bay, the islands of Flat Holm and Steep Holm rise like blue whales before the horizon, the stretch of the Welsh coast and its distant coastal lights induce a kind of longing.

My dreams of happier times are made watching the sea. It's where I write the first small poems in my head.

Tsunami

The sands of Burnham Bay stretch to Brean Down. We walk there with Jack. Tracking the litter of the sea: the wrack, sticks, claw and crab, the broken shells. In later years we will go alone. Magpies flit from dune to dune. Above, a skylark holds fast to the blue. The tide is out. The four-legged lighthouse sits chalk-white, in a vast expanse of sand and mud, a mud whose silver sheen dulls as it dries in the heat. A mud that harbours quicksand. Beware this place of danger, a place of uncertain footing, where water seeps underground, where a man might be sucked under in minutes, where a car may disappear. Or so we are told.

When I am ten, or thereabouts, I dream of a tsunami. The dream is etched on my memory. I am crouched behind the war memorial at the bottom of Seaview Road. Far out to sea, the horizon is marked by a line of incoming waves, crested like sheaves of corn. I am afraid. I know this is a tidal wave, I fear it coming to engulf me.

It is only when I'm writing my first book, The Sweet Track, that I learn about the inundation of 1607, when crested waves appeared on the horizon, when a sea wall gave way: huges and mighty hilles of water, tomboling over one another, in such sort, as if the greatest mountains in the world had overwhelmed the lowe valeyes or marshy grounds. The flood extended for twenty miles inland and thirty villages were submerged.

A century later after the great storms of 1703 when boats are driven ashore and grounded in meadows, the lowland women will design a floating cradle to ensure that no baby’s life is ever lost in flood.

Oslo Dream

2024

We are visiting Oslo with my son D and daughter-in-law H, and our twin granddaughters. H has family connections to the city, her family still have an apartment there. The visit has been long anticipated. J and I are excited to be there and happy in our Airbnb just down road from D and H. While we are there, I write the following In my notebook:

In the basement flat in Oslo, I dream of a child. She's standing by deep water, dangerously close to an ocean of green. She is about to fall in. She will drown. J is with me. We turn to each other in horror. He puts his fingers to his lips and mouths, don't say a word.

I cannot look, I turn away. J throws himself at the child and pulls her to safety.

How could we be so negligent of a child in our care? One of our granddaughters? We agree we are ashamed and shouldn't tell anyone what's happened.

Later, on the steps of the Opera House overlooking the waters of the Oslofjord, I have a flashback to the dream. Then as if out of nowhere I am reminded of how J never pandered to Alma, was never, ever, charmed by her. I wonder then if the child in my dream was not one of my granddaughters as I had first assumed. I wonder if the child was me.

Clark's Sandals White Socks

I'm sitting on the stone steps, summer-brown legs stretching out before me, Clark's sandals and white socks, waiting for the library to open after lunch. I've finished the book I took out earlier, having spent all morning at Edith's reading it. By age ten I've read my way through the whole of the children's section of this small library, not much bigger than a church hall. A hallowed, hushed space, smelling of polish and paper, the map of it still lives in my head. It was my second home. Encyclopaedias and atlases to the right as you entered and the low chairs and book-boxes of the children's section. To the left was the librarians' desk and the reference section with its catalogue and round table and chairs. Lining the back wall and down the right was the holy grail of adult fiction. You had to be twelve to get an adult ticket and even then you were discouraged from taking out books deemed unsuitable.

The librarians take pity on me and issue me with an adult ticket two years early. I ignore Trollope, he looks daunting. I read Rider Haggard, then Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy, later Burgess's A Clockwork Orange which blows my mind with its invented language. I am in love with words and the library is a lifeline. A safe, quiet place with rules. A place of myriad possibilities. Reading is where I slip into other worlds, where my imagination takes flight and where without knowing it a writer's apprenticeship begins.

Stories are an integral part of our life and Kit is the storyteller. He invents a series of bedtime stories for me about a giraffe called Jim, who escapes London zoo and wanders through the streets getting his neck stuck down holes and in the stairways of double decker buses. For M he invents a camel called Clarence who's always in trouble and in need of rescue by the cavalry. When I'm past the age for bedtime stories I listen in to M's, anticipating that moment when the cavalry come charging over the hill to rescue Clarence.

When I move north with J in our late twenties before the children are born and I'm out at sea in a foreign country, I make for Bishop Auckland, Town Hall Library. At the time it is also a Centre for the Arts run by the elegant and cultured G, muse to so many painters and writers. In time she becomes a valued friend. Not for the first time a library and its books save my life.

A Confirmation Dress

I don't want to be Alma's daughter. I wish she were different. I want that cliche of a mother: plump, kind, cuddly, the mother who stays at home, who makes your tea. I wish I were Catholic like my cousins, but Kit is lapsed and refuses to go back despite the priest calling at the house. I mourn the lost romance of Sunday gloves and veil, the stations of the cross, the convent school.

Chased out of the house by Alma, M and I go to various Sunday schools. I start going to church, to St Andrews C of E on the seafront. I often go alone. I ask to be christened. I want to be saved. Alma and Kit agree. M gets christened with me, he has no choice. He remembers being with Kit when Kit phones the Bishop from the telephone box near our house in South Avenue to discuss the arrangements for my confirmation.

Now God is in my life, I decide I'm going to be a missionary somewhere far away. The best thing about this plan is how much it upsets Alma. She clearly has other plans for a daughter of hers. But I insist on it. I take the moral high ground, it's the only ground I can ever lay claim to. Being a goody-goody is what Alma calls it, it's one of the things she likes to call me. Her label for me. It's true, I am. I am doing my best to be good.

Did I take up religion for her as well as me? Surely one of us had to repent, one of us had to ask for God's forgiveness. Was I the sin eater?

The tower of St Andrews Church leans, the porch welcomes. Inside is the smell of mould on plaster and damp paper, the must of ancient hymn books, prayer books, the scent of easter flowers, wine and bread. There's a stillness like the stillness of Vermeer, motes of dust hanging in fractured light. The Young Woman With a Water Pitcher, becomes the vicar at the stone font, holy water poured from jugs, slipping through fingers. Like the library, St Andrews is a sanctuary, a place where I am loved even if it's by a God I cannot see. A place where I can swaddle myself in the comfort of language: it's form, its cadence, prose, poetry. I read the prayer book, the King James bible: John 1 - In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.

Alma is not much interested in 'the word,' or in matters pertaining to God. She is more interested in getting out, being seen and admired. I know because I'm often trailing along with her and fast becoming her confidante. Since her lover's rejection she's filled with bitterness. The

world is not a fair or happy place and there's no hope in it, especially for women. I don’t want to see the world through Alma's eyes, its too sad. But I don’t dare say so. I don’t see how it's Kit's fault that she's so unhappy. I don't enjoy the way she talks about other women around us, about the way they look, about 'letting themselves go.' She is a fierce, angry critic for whom all women are rivals, all women are fair game.

Much as I don't like this, in our small-back-room life it's me and her against the world. Despite my misgivings, I'm on her side, sharing her unhappiness and pain. Defending her. Wondering what I can do to make the sadness go away. You might call it a romance of sorts. I am friend, partner, confidante. But I don’t want to hear about her lover, especially how he lied. Because now I have to admit I have something in common with him. Because by the time I am eleven, I take a beating from Alma which will teach me to lie with the best of them.

The Art of Lying

That I learn the art of lying, does not mean I will lie in the telling of this story. Doubts inevitably creep in, there are times when exhuming the past, I have the feeling I'm getting it wrong. That the timeline is confused, the story impenetrable. That somewhere beneath it all, lies the true series of events, and if only I could go back in time, they would reveal themselves. It would all make sense, and my memory would be vindicated. But there is only my truth, only the imperfect, perspective of my imperfect, remembering self. And I can only offer you my truth-telling and my determination not to lie.

Quilt

2024

I've come to my usual spot in the Town Hall Café with my pen and notebook. I'm reading May Sarton’s, Journal of a Solitude, again, a book I never tire of, jotting down thoughts and direct quotes. When I finish I close my notebook, drink my tea and look up. The cafe is sparsely populated now. I watch the odd newcomer drifting in and my eye is caught by three blue panels hanging like large curtains, on frames, near the wide entrance. Somehow I'd failed to notice them coming in. From where I’m sitting I can see that each panel is made up of a series of squares. Each square is different. I think perhaps it's an arts project where young people get to represent themselves with their names and the things that are important to them. There are Newcastle United Football Club shields, the black and white stripes of the club shirt, there are photocopied photographs, there are sequins, lace and hearts.

On leaving the cafe, I stop to look more closely. The images are mostly naive, but celebratory and alive. They are full of colour and embroidery, painting and printing. I move over to the large banner that accompanies the exhibition and read: This memorial quilt was created by those who have lost loved ones to suicide in the North-East... Recognition dawns, now I see what this is, of course. How had I not seen? These are not the representations of young people alive and working in their art room at school, these are tributes to the lost. One hundred and twenty squares in all and each to a much-loved person who had taken their life.

My heart is in my mouth. I go back to the panels. I read the names: Michael, Samuel, Tyler, Jeanette, Quinn, Dad.. Dad - a cream coloured square with a line drawing of a set of steps and halfway up a red heart and the words halfway up the stairs is the stair where I sit. Lisa with pink flamingos and butterflies. Son. How I wonder is it possible to bear the loss of a son.Sam, Rachel and Naomi. A square bearing the words, hope is the thing with feathers. There are embroidered puffins, bridges, stars and flowers. There are angels' wings.

I go back to the first panel. I go back to Dad, I swallow hard. The quilt has ambushed me, taken me completely by surprise, and yet my first thought as I move away, as I leave, is that I was meant to see this. It comes to me in a way that it never has before, like a wake-up call that rocks me back onto my heels. What if Alma had committed suicide, what would my life have been?

I walk back to my car, turning over the question in my mind. A question I have never fully explored until now. Perhaps because until now anger and pity have got in the way. I sense a shift. I'm seeing it differently. My perspective has altered because I'm on this journey. Perhaps that's why I am so sure of the answer when it comes. That despite everything, if Alma had died my life would have been less. My life would have undoubtedly been less.

When she was well, Alma looked after us, met our practical needs. She had high standards. Alma wanted us to be someone, to move away from small town life, to succeed especially at school. It was Alma who tested us before exams. Alma who insisted the Encyclopedias should be bought. She set huge store by homework and reports. She kept pace with music and fashion, always learning, never standing still. It was Alma who encouraged us to be individuals, to expect more and never to be ordinary.

It was Alma who told Kit, 'Hush you'll wake the children.'

Alma hung on despite her struggle with depression and unhappiness. Despite her lack of fulfilment and lack of the love she so craved, Alma lived, and Alma stayed. And for the first time I am able to recognise the difference this made.