Book Worm

I grew up in a house with no books.

It seems completely alien to me now. I trip over piles of books on the way to the bathroom. My son has lived his childhood in a house crammed with books. Though, ironically, I haven’t seen him read. Not for pleasure. Not since he was 12. (Secondary school knocked that right out of him.) But I take some comfort in the fact that until he was 12 he was a bookworm too. We read to him every single night. Book after book. He would beg us not to stop. My husband says those were the best years of his life.

My mother, Becky, didn’t read to me. It wasn’t what she did. She was too busy mothering me. It was her mother who taught me to read. I was three and she taught me through the medium of the obituary column. Old Nell’s eyes weren’t great and she needed to know who was dead and who wasn’t. I was her conduit.

Becky didn’t have a hand in it but she liked the fact that I was a ‘good reader’. I was more than that actually. I was the best reader in the whole class. Though that wasn’t necessarily where glory lay. Not when you always had to be the Narrator in the nativity play. Not when you wanted to be the Angel. Or Mary. Not when you had to stand behind a screen and NOT BE SEEN.

I remember running home, snot tripping, to tell my mother about this terrible injustice. She marched straight up to the school. (She was allowed to disappoint her own but woebetide anyone else who tried it) The teacher was cut from the same granite stone. She wouldn’t back down. There was no room on the assembly room stage. Not among the shepherds and the wise men and the donkeys and the baby jesus in his crib. Besides there was no one else in the class who could read it.

It was that simple. Welcome to show business.

So Becky spent the bulk of that week’s housekeeping on a brand new red velvet frock and I wore it. Behind the screen. No one else saw it but it had a huge bearing on the quality of my performance. Then she bundled it back in the bag and returned it to the shop.

My mother’s ambitions for me were never academic. She changed my school just as my Headmaster decided I should try for Oxbridge. He thought she was insane but I was unhappy and she knew it. I was fat and depressed and she wasn't having that. Besides she put more store in a different kind of intelligence. If I’d had the nouse to travel the world as an air hostess, find my meal ticket in the business class lounge and live a life of leisure by some tropical pool she would have slept easier. I didn’t. And her uneasy relationship with my contrary choices lasted the whole of her life.

She wasn’t surprised when I announced I was going to be an actress. (In her mind I’d always been a drama queen.) I couldn't say she jumped from the rooftops singing but she never stood in my way. She wasn’t impressed by fame, she was more impressed by money and I clearly wasn’t making any. Every time I got an acting job she’d sigh, ‘Oh, well. It’s a start’ She was still saying that 15 years later. I have no doubt she felt my constant rejection as keenly as I did and her tone always brightened whenever I phoned and said I was supply teaching again. She could never resist a quick, ‘You stick in there, hen. They might want you full time.’

Her reaction when I started writing was Becky all over. I used a story she'd told me about her and her six sisters as the basis for that first script. When it was finished I asked her if she’d like to see it. She hesitated. Then nodded. I watched her read it, slowly, page by page, face set. When she was done she looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘That’s fantastic’. There was a pause. Her sharp blue eyes glinted. ‘I didn’t know you could type!’

My mother is in everything I write. She didn’t read to me but she made me, in her words, ‘all the woman I’d ever be’. I think about my relationship with my own son and wonder if all those hours spent reading to him will have had as profound an effect. A few months ago he decided to purge his childhood and clean out his room. There were 5 huge boxes of books. I rescued the ones I couldn’t bear to lose sight of and labelled the rest ‘Calum’s Favourites’. One day he might open them again and share them with his kids. But if he doesn’t, I will. And I’ve left strict instructions that those are the books that go with me to the Care Home.