Joan Mary Susannah Chandler

If I’d told my mother that I intended to write about her and what she meant to me I’m pretty sure her initial reaction would have been a reminder, an object lesson in the way she viewed her world – don’t draw attention to yourself, don’t show off, don’t “blow your own trumpet”, don’t cause a fuss, don’t, just don’t cause or be any embarrassment for anyone. She’d say “nobody wants to look at me”, “nobody wants to listen to me” and “I’ll just stay in the background and hope that no one notices.”

I’m going to ignore those siren voices because, sadly, she isn’t here to hear me and she can’t complain or hide her face or blush or try to shrink into the scenery and become invisible. I’m also going to ignore her life-long aversion to the limelight because now, the most important thing to do - to remember her, to celebrate her, to pay tribute to her and her life and, for my own part, to say some things I should have said to her while she was alive but somehow didn’t ever manage to utter and to repeat in public and for my family, for her friends and for all who knew her – is to recall what a treasure she was and to describe how much, how terribly, fiercely and bitterly I will miss her now she’s gone.

Many will know how hard it was for her over the last year or two and particularly in the last few months. We watched in helpless sadness as dementia stripped her piece by piece of her abilities and faculties, her memory, her body and her mind and how cruel that seemed, how hard it was to witness and be unable to do anything about it. Enough of that! I have no wish any longer to dwell upon or recall the sorry shell to which disease and infirmity reduced her. I want with all my heart to remember another person - someone who, although quiet and unassuming, was determined, resolute, strong, persevering, long-suffering perhaps, but filled with uncritical and enduring love.

She loved her soap operas – Emmerdale, Eastenders and Coronation Street in particular - and talked about the characters and plots whenever she and I chatted on the phone. She loved the TV generally, relishing when she finally got the chance, the possession of the remote control – after years of living in a household dominated by men - she eventually grasped that prized possession and could watch whatever wanted and whenever she liked.
She loved going to the theatre with my father and relished trips to Stratford upon Avon to see the Royal Shakespeare Company, season after season for as long as she and my father could. They both loved so many plays – Privates on Parade, Piaf, A Chorus Line among them – but perhaps more than any, the famous dramatisation of Nicholas Nickleby and she took especial pleasure in my father’s delight in talking to the actors.
She loved music, not as a performer, although as a child and at school she sang and learned to play the piano. When she was on her own in later years, she played the cassette tapes and CDs that she loved, enjoying everything from Daniel O’Donnell and Westlife, through musicals and operetta, to Lesley Garrett, The Three Tenors, Joshua Bell and Maria Callas. She wasn’t demonstrative about it; she wasn’t demonstrative about anything – preferring to enjoy her pleasures quietly – but she did have her passions.

Although it was mostly confined to TV in her later years, she loved the cinema and movies too – talking excitedly about her visits – many times a week - to the pictures in her youth. Jeanette McDonald and Nelson Eddy were often mentioned and, of late, she loved some (occasionally surprising) films – I remember her talk of Greer Garson in Random Harvest, Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption and even ET. She loved ER, as she loved almost every hospital drama. She remembered Dr Kildare and never lost her enthusiasm for Richard Chamberlain, devouring every episode of Shogun and The Thorn Birds and never tiring of re-watching them.

I was overjoyed as a student and then as a resident in that city to discover that she loved York and enjoyed her visits so much. My time in that beautiful city was made much more memorable because of the connection that my mother and father made with that city. She came to love the East Riding of that county too and every chance she had to visit Andrew when he lived in Hull, then Willerby and then Walkington. Her only fear of Andrew’s home was engendered by the fact that it always seemed to snow when we were there together and –towards the end of her life and almost like a child – she imagined we’d be snowed in, trapped there, unable to leave. I think, and I’m sure she thought too that there are plenty of places in which it would have been far harder and more unpleasant to be trapped.

Of course, she loved her visits to David and to see her beloved grand-daughters and Nancy, their mother. She always wished she’d visited more often – liking Leamington Spa, Rode and then Beckington (and its farm shop, of course). Her more recent visits to Somerset may not have been as frequent, but she looked forward to them, loving the chance to visit David and Petra.

She loved her holidays, although she didn’t always love the work and change that they involved. She loved her trips with my father, even if they did involve a massive amount of preparation and work for her; she never went anywhere without a first aid kit and a parachute. I know she didn’t love flying and have the finger-nail marks my hands to this day as proof of her terror of being in a plane and off the ground. She loved especially the efforts made by her brother Barry in helping the family enjoy its holidays together – from our time in Fowey in the school summer vacations to the holidays he arranged for my mother and father with Barry Andrew and Robb to Mallorca. In fact, she loved the chance to go out for a ride – whether for the afternoon and for shopping with Lorna and Basil, out for tea and a visit to a garden centre with Ann or on longer visits to see me or my brothers for weekends or for Christmas.

She loved the visits she received from family and friends at home in Pamela Road, loved especially and was so grateful for the time that Jeannie found to spend with her and came to rely on and look forward to the company that meant so much to her when her memory began to let her down. She always wished she’d been more brave and wished she might have found the confidence to step out and return a few visits herself – even if just across Pinhoe Road to see Gwen and Julie, who stayed in constant touch.

She loved frogs – and nobody knew why; pictured in magazines or books, on TV and in real life. She collected them and amassed a huge number – in cloth, porcelain, plastic and metal that lived on shelves and in cabinets all over the house. Her particular favourite – a little, stuffed Jeremy Fisher – was with her in bed at Sainthill House in her last days and is with her now.

She loved cooking and her fruit pies were the stuff of legend. She gave me my interest in food and cooking, taught me the importance and value of sharing a meal around a proper dining table and loved to help me in my kitchen whenever she came to visit.

She loved cake. She could always find room for a slice of cake no matter how much she’d eaten before and stopping somewhere for a cup of tea – wherever we were going – was nothing if the tea or coffee wasn’t accompanied by a cake. Even in the last few months, when going into the city for a walk around the shops was getting difficult and when the coffee she used to like became too strong for her taste, she always looked forward to and eagerly devoured a muffin.

She loved shopping. Oh how she loved shopping! Not clothes especially, nor shoes, nor perfume or luxuries. Although she loved the scale and Aladdin’s cave that was IKEA it paled beside her special love – food shopping, in supermarkets, any and all of them. The highlight of any trip or visit was the chance to walk the aisles, pushing the trolley – with a confidence she seemed to lack in other enterprises – and filling it with far more than she could ever use. The kitchen cupboards were packed. So was the space under the stairs, in the front room and behind the sofa. She bought for others when she wasn’t buying for herself and quoted her mother saying “stock’s as good as cash”. She could have fed the street. I think her love of supermarkets may even have given us her last word. Struggling to make herself understood as her body failed her, her final voiced word – that my brother Andrew was lucky enough to hear – was “Waitrose”; tasteful to the end.

When she came to need some help around the house, she was lucky and benefited from the care provided by Paul and the girls employed by Social Services. She came to love the team of care workers who visited her three time a day and gave her affection and comfort as well as domestic support. She loved her home – the house that she and my father had worked so hard to buy against the odds and which gave us all so many happy years. When I think of her, I want to think of her there, content and in comfort.
Sadly, there came a time when she couldn’t manage on her own in such a large house and we faced the enormous challenge of finding a home for her in which she might feel welcome, comfortable, safe and secure and we were lucky – very lucky – to find a place she also came to love - Sainthill House; not so much for the place itself, but for the wonderful staff who took her to their hearts – all of them. From the moment that Psylla invited my mother to stay, all the caring, affectionate and patient staff made sure she had all the care she needed and more. We couldn’t have hoped for a better home away from home. She loved them and I know they loved her too.
She loved her family – all of them. She may not have expressed it often or voiced it loudly, but she did so quietly, deeply, constantly and consistently. She felt a duty and connection unaffected by distance or time with all her relatives and, if she could have spoken up in these final months she would have made it known, I am sure.

She loved her mother and father and began, in these last couple of years, to talk about them more and more – the wonderful and formidable Florence and the gentle, saintly Stanley. For me, in sorrow, they are faded figures from my youth, lost when I was still young and I probably didn’t value them as much as I know I should have.

My mother loved her brothers – Roy, taken from us cruelly and unexpectedly, and John, so recently gone before her. But is was her younger brother Barry whom she loved with a passion; some years older than him, she was almost more a mother than a sister to him and every triumph and achievement of his was a joy and special pleasure to her.

She loved her grand-daughters – Harriet, Dorothy, Susannah and Phoebe – perfect in her eyes and a fabulous blessing in her life. She lived for their visits, thrilled to their talents and their progress in the world and would have walked through fire for them.

She loved her darling daughter Susan, snatched tragically away from her when only a child, and whose glorious, luminous soul she treasured and mourned every day of her life. I wish with all my heart that I could have known her. How different all our lives would have been.

She loved my brothers. She loved Andrew and she loved David, her miracle twin sons, so much. In the awful struggle of life after losing her first born child, what love and comfort she found in the birth and life of her little boys, arriving together. So similar, so different, their talents and their achievements, at school (even if causing a stir by refusing to get a haircut and ending up in the pages of the Express and Echo), at college, at university, in work, in artistic, sporting or social endeavour, in everything they did, she adored them.

She loved my father, Chaz or Charlie to almost all who knew him, and was utterly devoted to him. She was devastated by the stroke that disabled him, but rose to that incredible challenge and managed – on her own – to take him on trips and holidays all over the country and even abroad. Uncomplaining, she managed everything – including things that she would previously thought beyond her. She took an unparalleled joy from the things he loved and suffered with him when he suffered or couldn’t find anything to look forward to – no holiday could be enjoyed by him unless he knew the next was already planned or booked. It might have been enough to savour the experience of sitting in the front row of the theatre to see Cyrano de Bergerac, but I saw her face and watched her relishing his enjoyment at being able, once again, despite his stroke, to be transported by the stage and truly, immediately suspending his disbelief. It didn’t stop him almost ruining the spell by shouting out “I know him!”, however, when Derek Jacobi walked on stage.

I know she loved me too. I loved her more than I can say and if I have one regret, one simple but painful realisation with which I will berate myself with for the rest of my days, it’s that I didn’t tell her how much I loved her and how much she meant to me every time I spoke to her. I had the pleasure, the joy and the delight of sharing a lot of my time with her and was happy to do so whenever I could. She was my beginning and my heart, my pivot, the constant, un-moving centre around which my life revolved and I owe her everything. When, after my father died and I’d been living in Exeter with her for a year or two and I met someone and moved back to London to carry on with my career, I left her on her own. She was suddenly truly alone and had to cope with everything –without my help and without the company on which she’d relied. She must have been bereft, frightened and fearful after always having someone of her family with whom to share the house and her time. Yet, she never once complained. She did what she always did; she accepted it as her lot. Years later, she told me – as we walked around Sainsbury’s – that she was glad I’d gone back to London, re-started my career and built myself another life. She told me that she understood and knew that it was the most important thing for me to do and that I mustn’t think she ever blamed me for leaving her and getting on with life. And that was her, wasn’t it? Never thinking of herself, always thinking first of someone else.

Well now, at last, we can and must think of her – first, foremost and above all. She was a beautiful, patient, devoted and loving soul who gave so much to everyone she knew. She loved quietly and without any fuss or but in profusion, nevertheless. I didn’t tell her what I should have told her while she was alive – loudly, proudly and frequently – so let me do it now. I loved you and I’ll love you still, my darling mother.