The story begins when my mother, Mary, a compulsive diarist now unable to write due to mental deterioration, asks me to ‘write everything down’. This commitment seems simple at first, a tale of aging and of nursing homes, but it quickly becomes complicated. How can I write the end of her story without understanding the beginning? How can I understand our complicated relationship without knowing what had formed her? As I explore her legacy of journals, letters and writings, I begin to listen in a new way. In her correspondence, scrapbooks and boxes of published and unpublished writing, I discover a woman I did not know. Falling deeper into her story, I begin to write in her voice, letting her tell her own tale, also including excerpts from her diaries, letters and writings.
Mary’s story begins in working class England after the First World War. She was a dreamy child who won a scholarship to grammar school but found maneuvering the world difficult. From the age of nine she kept a diary and harboured ambitions of being a writer. She comes of age as England comes to war again and she is conscripted into national army service. Fleeing an unsatisfactory romance, she volunteers for overseas service, arriving in Kenya in 1943. She marries a Jewish refugee from Berlin but a radical vision of freedom within marriage crashes against their unresolved pasts and current challenges. As her life takes her from colonial Africa to the hardships of postwar England to emigration to Canada, Mary writes.
I was never interested in this writing as a child, resentful that she seemed to prefer being with her typewriter to being with me and absorbing my father’s attitude that her writing was of no value. Now I read her writing compulsively as she becomes increasingly ill and moves to a nursing home. She is more and more unable to answer questions about her life that I never was interested to ask and so I become increasingly immersed in her written legacy. I read all this at home; in the nursing home I sit beside her and record this last part of her story, as she asked me to do.
Interwoven with Mary’s telling of her story and my writings in the nursing home is our relationship, past and present. Mary’s writings and my reflections lead to an examination of themes of memory and truth, loss and yearning, and ultimately, conflict and reconciliation. Slowly, the two stories merge into one.
The Road to Keringet
Cranberry Tree Press, 2012
The Road to Keringet
Cranberry Tree Press, 2012
