Long before Heston Blumenthal graced our TV sets with such rare delights as snail porridge, Liquid nitrogen "scrambled" ice cream and fish eyeball cocktail, Mum was serving up fresh Turnip surprise with Marmite, crunchy spaghetti a la Beanfeast and fluff secrét, the ‘secrét’ being no-one knew what fluff was.
And not long after Basil Fawlty was astonishing guests with his own inimitable blend of haute cuisine and unique customer service Mum was providing just as polished a service with powdered OJ and egg cups full of margarine as part of her ‘renowned’ gastronomic breakfast delight after opening the house at Brancaster Staithe as a guest house.
But, the calamitous brew of spontaneity and lack of planning always seemed to work somehow. With Mum, the idea was formed and then straight into action. Make something happen and blow the consequences.
It happened that way in 1984 when we found ourselves – that’s Mum, Lisa, Ant & Ash, quite unexpectedly, in Florida for a Winnebago holiday of a lifetime.
One minute, school, the next, Miami and picking up a Winnebago the size of a bus. Of course, Mum had no clue how to drive such a juggernaut. But such minor considerations never seemed to factor into the equation with Mum. Her will be done. It shall be done! It began in the car park of the car-hire place with a careful reverse straight into a car behind us. Mum never felt a thing and drove on blissfully unaware of the destruction left in her wake. And it didn’t get much better after that as toll barriers on the interstate 95 proved no match for the 4-tonne beast. Camping sites weren’t left unscathed either, at one we left our enduring presence driving off with the sewage hose still attached to the mains outlet.
On finally arriving close to Disney World, Tampa, Mum, tired from the marathon journey up the I95, parked up overnight. The following morning, we awoke, somewhat refreshed, and Ash was detailed to find water for breakfast. He disappeared dragging a large plastic container in search of a tap. Sometime later, there was an authoritative rattle on the door demanding an immediate response so Lisa cautiously opened the door to be greeted by a police officer with 2 police cars behind him, lights flashing, complete with Ashley sitting in the back of one of them.
“Howdy Ma’am” said the officer, touching the brim of his hat, “does this little fella belong to you?”
“Yes”, said Lisa, “he’s my brother.”
“Ok. Ma’am, are you aware you’re trespassing on private property? There’s no overnight camping allowed here. Matter of fact, I’m scratching m’ah head to understand just how in the world you managed to get here.”
Needless to say, a few words from Mum in a plummy English accent and a smile was all that was required to reassure the officers that all was well. We found out later that Ash had made the front page of the local Tampa Bay newspaper as part of the crew that had managed to foil Walt Disney’s much fabled security perimeter.
That, for me, was Mum. Dive in head first and blow the consequences. The way she took on the World head-first made me intensely proud as her son growing up.
Yet I never really knew my mother at least not from an emotional point of view. To me, she seemed to have an impenetrable exterior that left you wondering quite where you stood. One minute, stability in the guise of a family home, the next off on some adventure we knew nothing about. In many ways it taught us independence, to think on our own. To stand up early and work things out for ourselves.
Mum was the true definition of British. Always the champion of the underdog. She liked nothing more than going against, and trying to beat, the odds. Whether in her own life or from following some course in a romantic story from history she’d happened upon. She conducted herself that way in life. At least as far as I remember. Always combative, never backing down, moving from one Pyrrhic victory to another. Her spirit indomitable, her will also. Whether it be dealing with particularly irksome customer services staff on the telephone or arguing with someone that, for her, had put obstacles in her way, she’d move on victorious, from one Dunkirk to another, from one Charge of the Light Brigade to the next. Inconsequential, yet always glorious, somehow.
I think Mum was a romantic at heart. I truly feel that. She knew Gone with the Wind back to front. And, I mean, every line. She’d often recite to lines to us while watching and I still remember the scene where Scarlett O’Hara shakes her fist and cries “As God is my witness, I’ll never go hungry again!”
I’ve often wondered whether she imagined herself sitting on some dusty veranda in the muggy heat of the Deep South at some plantation waiting for her beau to return from the war. The Greek tragedy unfolding before her eyes on screen to be re-enacted in life.
Ah, the civil war. Or, to be more exact, the Confederacy. The underdogs.
History was Mum’s passion. She was always searching for some link to the great and the good from the past. Old photographs of family and places were her obsession as was genealogy. At some time or other, we’ve been related to royalty, aristocracy, and an elite cast of the great and good, several times removed, you understand, but linked nevertheless. It was the hunt and chase that mattered for Mum, the intriguing possibility that it could be, might just be true.
When metal detecting gained in popularity Mum was already a pioneer. I have enduring memories of digging little holes in fields all over Norfolk in the quest for treasure and Roman booty.
One Summer, back in the Eighties, not long after investing in their first metal detector, Mum tasked Cyril with finding King John’s jewels. Unlike many expeditions, this followed careful research and planning. Clues were unearthed; theories formulated; ancient Domesday maps consulted; the search area narrowed down until, finally, with a heady brew of intrepid explorer and unabated excitement Mum and Cig set off on a history-changing expedition across North Norfolk.
To Mum, the historical consequences of such an expedition would be unfathomable as the 750-year-old Royal hoard was unearthed and offered up triumphantly to the authorities – treasure trove and finder’s fees notwithstanding, of course. I can hear Mum now reprising the words of Howard Carter as, beep by trowel, she unearthed one royal gem after another “I see things, Cig. Wonderful things!”
So, for a few days, one Summer, in the early 1980s an intrepid couple from London came closer than anyone to finding King John’s lost hoard. Closer than anyone to that elusive “X” marking the spot. Tracing and retracing those historical footsteps. Refining the search until, perhaps somewhat triumphant, Cig announced to Mum they were buried beneath the A17 near the Fosdyke River.
“There’s nothing for it, love, we’d need pneumatic drills to get at it.”
Thus ended one quintessentially British expedition.
As I remember Mum, the intrepid, if somewhat impulsive explorer; the firm believer in education; the romantic; the historian; and the champion of the underdog, I can think of no more fitting words to finish this with than those of one of Mum’s Civil War Confederate heroes, Robert E Lee:
“The march of Providence is so slow, and our desires so impatient; the work of progress is so immense and our means of aiding it so feeble; the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope.”