Plain Jane and No Nonsense

Today my mother’s body travels in a little wooden box to be turned into ash. I don’t feel emotionally attached it, in theory, I have no attachment to her body, her soul has long departed. I imagine Mum already crashing headlong into her new, or, depending on your beliefs, her real life, in the non-physical. I haven’t quite got to feeling her in the non-physical, but maybe that will come in time.

It’s no secret that I had issues with my mother, but since I became more aware of the, um, shall we say, differences in how she and I relate to people emotionally, I have been blown away by how other people see her. I’d like to write this piece from that perspective, in memory of Jane through the eyes of others.

In 1937, nearly 87 years ago, Sylvia Jane was born to Elsie and Henry. Elsie hated her own name and insisted on being called Sarah. Jane also hated her name Sylvia, but whether Granny had liked the name Sylvia was a mystery, since it seems Mum was always referred to as Jane.  I really don’t know much about Mum’s history, I’m not sure why. I think my sister got some of it when Mum “nursed her” after an operation as an adult, but I only ever got snippets. Mum always seemed surprised that I hadn’t somehow acquired this information, by osmosis presumably. So there may be many inaccuracies in this writing, but who’s going to challenge me?

Sylvia’s (Jane’s) parents had thought Elsie (Sarah) unable to have children and had adopted who I have only ever known as “Your Aunty Ann” (in a grim tone). Then to everyone’s surprise, Jane was born. Ann never knew she was adopted until she was an adult (a source of great pain to all involved), and whether her parents subconsciously over-compensated Ann for not being blood we don’t know, but Jane knew the sun shone out of Ann’s backside as far as her parents were concerned. I do know that from Jane’s perspective, Ann made her life a misery. I only met My Aunty Ann fleetingly, along with “cousins” occasionally (since we lived in Kenya and they, here) but don’t remember much. I did spend a night with them in my late teens, at someone’s funeral in the Isle of Wight, where I had been appointed “family representative”. I remember only two things: I was smoking in the deceased’s house, and before you judge me, anyone who was anyone, smoked back then, and the house was littered with ashtrays. I also recall specifically asking if it was OK, and my “cousins”, mumbled it was. My Aunty Ann swept in, furious, and snatched it all away, stating in an imperious voice that “we didn’t smoke in this house” (actually, not her house, but hey ho). Not a single “cousin” said anything, nor would they meet my eye. Later back at HER house (I didn’t even try to ask there) when she plonked chicken and mushroom pie in front of me, I ate it. Despite having been vegetarian for at least a few months. Again, don’t judge me, things were different then, vegetarians were weirdos, it just wasn’t worth the drama. I was scared of her. I thought my Mum was a scary lady but now I understood why My Aunty Ann had intimidated her. For the first and only time in my life, I heard myself say “well they aren’t blood anyway” by way of dismissing the entire family.

Jane went to Norwich City College at some point, and presumably there, met David, 5 years older than her and back from the Korean War. What he must’ve thought of a 16 year old girl who hadn’t been anywhere, after him serving in a war, I can’t imagine. Apparently, Mum had told me, he had said that anyone who would marry her would need their head examined, or words to that effect. Hey ho.

David wasn’t good enough for Henry’s daughter, Henry being the youngest bank manager that the Midland Bank had ever had, which was a big deal back then. But, in what will become an obvious Jane characteristic, she married him anyway at the age of 21. I have to admire her for that. Jane was so strong willed, when she set her mind on something, she would not be deterred. We all learned not to try.

David joined the Foreign & Commonwealth Office and took his young bride to Africa, to what was then the East African Protectorate of the British Empire, the Kenya Colony. This was during the Mau Mau uprising, so, a totally reckless or really brave move? Gotto admire them both for that. So they landed in Embakasi Airport, Nairobi, the capital, after a flight via Rome, Khartoum and Entebbe. A flight to Kenya takes about 8 and a half hours direct these days, I can’t imagine how long all that took, well over 24 hours all in all we think. David had gone ahead so Jane journeyed across those foreign lands alone. I imagine Jane, clutching a sun-hat to her head in the windy airport, climbing down the wonky steps from the aeroplane and David, overloaded with baggage as he ushers Jane on to a donkey, but I assume if they had planes, they may have had cars too.

David was a land surveyor with the British Government for a while but at some point went into partnership with a couple of chums. Kenya gained her independence in 1963 and Stella was born in Eldoret a few years later. Jane had dobermans and we have endless pictures of Stella in a sun-hat lying in the grass with the dogs, with and without other babies that presumably lived in the area. A few years later Kate was also born. Less photos of her as the novelty of babies in the grass has worn off by then. But the Patterson family is now complete. Final. Never to be added to again, except with various pets along the way. The family tree emphatically stops here, with Stella and I.

Jane’s younger days in Kenya are a blur to me, no memories of my own, but films such as Out of Africa and White Mischief fill in my blanks. Jane was a teacher apparently but then became a housewife. Later she would play golf, dragging a reluctant Stella and I around carrying her bags, her being too tight to pay for a caddy. When Jane got a golf trolley for Christmas it was us who sighed with relief. We had servants in Kenya, as Jane explained it, it was right and proper to have servants, not least because you are giving employment to people. We had a “house boy” Matibo, who was at the complete opposite end of the scale to boy, he was ancient (mzee), then after Matibo, “house girl” (Rosa), a gardener on and off (Rosa’s brother), and then David had a number of men helping him with his land survey work (John, Jeremiah, Timothy), who also worked in the garden when David was working in his hut (home office).  They’d all pile into the landcover and rattle away for hours on end, coming back dusty and tired.

Jane was extremely generous with her servants. And kind. Very kind. Stella and I were forever coming across diagrams of female anatomy that Jane had drawn for Rosa, explaining that her sterilisation would not prevent the baby from being born. She educated them where she could, cared for their health, supported, sponsored and championed their children. Most of all she was extremely fair and respectful. We had to tidy our rooms before Rosa would clean. Rosa was NOT a servant to pick up after us, she would tell us. Jane kept in touch with Rosa by letter, long after she left Kenya. I remember when Timothy’s daughter had died. Most of these folks had family in far, far away places, whom they sent money to and some lived lonely lives in the towns and cities to support their families in the villages. Others had family with them but they all had roots in the villages. When Timothy’s daughter died, Jane knew that he believed that he had to take her body back to the village, a colossal expense. She also knew she couldn’t explain to him that his daughter would not be denied into heaven because although Timothy was undoubtably Christian, his traditions and folklore told him otherwise. Jane always taught us to respect other people’s beliefs. They didn’t want to lend him the money because he would never be able to pay it back. When Timothy stole the money instead, Jane understood why. We never saw him again. I liked Timothy, he’d made me a buffalo out of mud. I liked all of Dad’s men, they were generally quiet, strong men but laughed easily, like children giggling in a bus at the back of a teacher when David got bad tempered, sneaking glances at me and making me laugh too. We were so free there, free to sit in  the mud, the river, collecting dudus (bugs) or tadpoles, jumping the Christthorn hedges like horses, picking kiapples from the thorny hedges that loomed huge between our properties and loquats from the neighbours trees. We weren’t supervised and I never felt unsafe. I would love to sit in the courtyard of Rosa’s pitiful rooms, various sisters or Aunties cooking around a little burner, squatting on the concrete floor. I never questioned how they lived, so simple and spartan, maybe because things didn’t mean much to me then. I didn’t see the differences in our environment, though Jane would later point it out to me to make sure I was grateful and appreciative of my life and respectful of theirs. I loved their warmth and happiness, their ease and laughter, happily hugging and cuddling me, playing with my hair, teaching me Luo or Kikuyu and laughing at my efforts, insisting on oiling my legs so the skin didn’t look like cracked mud, showing me how to squash posho into a ball on my fingers to push into my mouth.

Jane had a quiet faith, a faith I almost admire. Having been to two Catholic Convents, I have an aversion to Faith with a capital F, and as an young adult, seeing the grief and fear and wars fought in the name of Faith, I abhor any organised religion. However Jane had a quiet unshakeable faith which she kept mostly to herself. We regularly visited children’s homes and orphanages, through the Church, Jane making us pick out toys from the very sparse collection we had, in order to share with those that had not. This was a very clear theme throughout my childhood.

Later on when the plan to move back to the UK “for our education” was hatched, they sold their house in Nairobi and rented instead. Unable to take local currency out of the country my parents had a bit of extra cash: I got a horse and Stella got a motorbike. My joy was complete, spending days with my face buried in the warm musty smell of Arthur when we weren’t out on the vlei (fields), jumping hay bales and ditches. He was at livery near the house and I’d cycle over there daily when I was home (I was at weekly boarding school). When I dropped the envelope with a month’s livery, I was devastated that nobody handed it back, and terrified of Jane’s reaction. She in fact was very matter of fact about it. When I asked how someone could steal from us she looked me right in the eye and asked if I appreciated how much money it was to one of the syces (stablehands) who probably picked it up. What do you expect she asked, when you have so much and they have so little? There was no judgement in Jane about things like that. Plenty of judgement about a lot of things, but not that.

Fast forward to back in the UK, Norwich, England where Jane struggled to work whilst David stayed on in Kenya for me to finish my O levels. She got jobs typing and teaching, working with YTS (Youth Training Schemes) school leavers getting on the job training. She tried really hard to make it a worthwhile experience for them, exasperated at how employers were using them as cheap labour instead of teaching them skills. Fast forward again on to Perth in Scotland, where she set up a business support centre, teaching herself to use a computer, a desk top publishing package, printing and photocopying, requiring a dizzying array of technical skills she had to teach herself before the advent of YouTube. I don’t know how she did it, but she did. David, now returned, was not thriving and whilst he pottered about he didn’t really do, or couldn’t do, much to help. Eventually he was diagnosed with ME which was a “new fangled thing” and no help was available. When I moved to Yugoslavia to teach English, Jane was inspired. She suddenly took herself off to Cyprus to get a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) qualification and before you could say “sell the flat” they had moved first to Turkey (apparently only because Stella, returning from a holiday in Turkey, had mentioned they might like there) for Jane to teach English. After an initial stint in Turkey, they moved back to Kenya for a few years, and then settled back in Turkey, where Jane was again teaching in Ankara.

I never visited them in Ankara, we had the occasional holiday on the Turkish coast at a beautiful village called Kaş on the South West coast. I don’t know much about her life in Turkey at that time, but what I do know is that Jane had friends everywhere she went. I am astonished at how dearly these people hold her. From my viewpoint of judgemental and prickly, unloving mother, Jane was much loved by people, showing them a side we just didn’t see. She has friends, especially young friends (and by that I mean my age) who hold her so dearly it allows to see her in a different (if not slightly confused) light. Bedriye, Şükran, Kim, “daughters” who adored her, and for whom she moved heaven and earth to help.

David died in Ankara the day after Jane retired. They had all these plans you see, I wonder if he just couldn’t face another new exciting journey. I know nothing of his life in Turkey but got the impression he had little routines to fill the days while Jane was working. Stella says he loved it there. When I returned his library books, the young clerk went pale and tearful and went through to the back where a couple more tearful faces appeared, quietly and visibly shocked that he was dead. They didn’t speak English and I no Turkish, but their grief was palpable. I got the impression he spent a lot of time there. That was a pivotal moment for me processing that he was dead. Maybe it was just all too much for him to move on. The flat belonged to the school so they had to leave as soon as Jane’s job ended.

Jane followed their plan, settling around the corner from where they had both decided to continue their life, in a little village called Akyaka on the South West coast of Turkey, about 3 hours west of Kaş, having made friends around Fethiye which was en route. There she quickly built up a life of street dogs, neutering, strays, fundraising, drawing maps of the area (there weren’t any!), mapping heron nests and all manner of things to keep her busy. She lived there nearly 20 years, an elderly single woman alone in Turkey, battling on in her own strange way, creating chaos wherever she went, but making friends along the way.  Eventually she came back to the UK, living in Edinburgh. Her dementia worsened and she then moved to Reading in England to be close to Stella as she needed daily support. The year she moved down, Stella organised an 80th birthday for her and we endeavoured to contact all her old friends in the UK. Bearing in mind she has been out of the country longer than she had been in it, the response was overwhelming. I can’t recall how many people came but it was astonishing. More astonishing was the letters and cards that arrived to wish her happy birthday, before the event. I don’t know if it was the dementia or a blissful self-confidence but Jane never questioned why she suddenly had 40-50 birthday cards and wishes, happily leafing through them, humming and ha’ing at the news inside.

The evening of the event was lovely and we met so many people again. It was an incredible credit to how all these people saw my mother. There would be the odd knowing wink or smile when Jane would refer to one or other of us in her classically rude and thoughtless manner, as if they all saw these quirks, but that’s all they were and they accepted her, with all her rudeness and oddness, and loved her anyway. In my defence, they didn’t have to live with her, but it was absolutely both baffling and humbling to me the overwhelming response of love and appreciation for Jane, my mother, on her 80th birthday.

As we sat at a table “for the kids”, with the children of other families who has also been in Kenya, children who had been friends in those simple years, whose trees we had climbed, books we had borrowed, cars we had slept in (children would all sleep in the car at a party), we all marvelled at our respective mothers. There were 6 of us, all daughters to 3 different mothers. The mothers in question, were all slightly odd, certainly quirky. Strong, mindful women, either loud and commanding, or quietly determined, who had danced off to Africa when little, if anything ,was known about it, and had battled to create a life in those barren, dry and hostile lands, against impossible odds. Leaving the security of everything they knew and their families, they had raised their own children in a strange country and called it home. Did you have to be that sort of nutter to do that, we pondered, as we each acknowledged and compared the “damage” these women had inflicted on us with their strange inability to nurture their own children, despite their obvious capability in every other area of life. Were these all women who suffered the same emotional neglect from their own mothers, and that’s why leaving home didn’t phase them? Or was it that isolated life that had made them emotionally unavailable? Alone without any family or support in an unforgiving environment, before the days of “engaged fathers”, or overseas phone calls, TV shows or even women’s radio… I guess we’ll never know.

We dreaded putting Jane in a home but it because increasingly difficult for Stella to care for her. She’s always been awkward and requiring your constant attention, even in the most benign and harmless way, she would divert every second of your attention to her or to what she was reading or watching or doing. With the additional confusion and lack of memory she got angry and frustrated. She couldn’t be left alone for a second or she’d dismantle the light socket, fill the microwave with water, or something so stupid that she couldn’t explain and would deny emphatically. I will be forever grateful to Stella for taking her on when I couldn’t function anymore, and she cared for her with more patience and grace than I would ever be capable of. She cared for Jane long after she could’ve given up and it was a battle to convince her she couldn’t continue. Jane went into a home in Devon, and settled quite well. It was a lovely home focussing particularly on dementia, and whilst Jane wasn’t responsible for anything in reality, she felt she had control over her life in that environment, being able to make coffee in the common room, all adding to the sense of independence.  After COVID her money ran out, the council wanted to move her to another (cheaper) home in Devon, but we insisted they bring her to Scotland so she would be close to me.

I didn’t know the nursing home existed when we moved here, but now I feel divinely protected in the way things worked out. I couldn’t have identified a more suitable home (Bandrum Nursing Home, Saline, Dunfermline) for Jane and the care she received was unwaveringly outstanding. I learned a lot in the last few years, not just from Jane, but from being in the home with people, residents and carers alike. Learning patience and compassion from the staff, as they so effortlessly stroke, caress, comfort people, whilst I struggled to treat Jane with any gentleness. I learned though. It was hard, but having been rejected so many times as a child, they showed me that she was now in a place to receive, and even give, affection. I learned that people’s quality of life is individual, and cannot be determined by metrics. Jane became gentle, fun-loving, even cheeky. I think the years of her constant struggle with having to be capable, independent, reliable, finally relaxed and she became happier, less aggressive and less challenging. Jane was their favourite, they told me. Not least because she didn’t hit them. It’s a low bar, but they did genuinely like Jane. She was still feisty, still a character, still minxy in her own way, making faces and being silly. Insisting on running in the corridor. “You’re so special,” she would say to me as soon as I walked in, in her last few weeks. “How lovely you look,” she would tell people who came into her view. I can’t describe how completely the opposite this is of the Jane of previous years, quick to criticise, but refusing to complement lest it swell your head.

Plain Jane and no nonsense. The home called her Sylvia initially, and indeed, it was still on her door when she died, because that’s the name on her birth certificate. It was a sign of how changed she was when they called her Sylvia in the home and she didn’t chew their faces off. Gradually they started to call her Jane. “Plain Jane”, she announced one day. “Plain Jane and no nonsense.” After that they all called her Plain Jane, “and no nonsense” Mum would finish off proudly.

Rest in peace, Plain Jane.