An Empty Bliss Beyond This World
On memory, music and ordinary lives.
My Nanny Rose (middle) between two friends.
This essay is named after The Caretaker’s best-known ambient album, released in 2011. He created it with broken tracks and ballroom records to reflect the mind of an Alzheimer’s patient. The imagined individual is so far gone that they struggle to recall their life and have ceased to understand that they have a problem. The album was based on a 2010 study about the ability of people with that disease to remember the music of their era, as well as the context in which they experienced that music.
I realised that her life story, like most life stories, would be lost forever. It seemed I’d missed the chance to write it down and mine isn’t the kind of family to document anything or discuss thoughts and feelings. She could no longer remember where I lived or what I did for a living. A basic question posed and answered would be asked again seconds later. Food and pills were forgotten, as was the ability to self-hydrate. She used to put thoughtful messages in birthday and Christmas cards with beautiful cursive handwriting and sign them ‘Nanny Rose’ and now they weren’t addressed to anyone and just said ‘Rose’ inside. The handwriting was different – plain and almost childlike. That was the sign that carried the most damning imprint of time: a core idiosyncrasy gone.
If I went to her house in the outskirts of Bristol for a week, I thought that I could take my dictaphone and ask her as many questions as I could. It might not add up to much now her pool of memories was ever-decreasing concentric circles responding to droplets of stimuli, but it felt like the last chance to know anything real about her.
Rose was – and is, somewhere – a law-abiding Christian who condemned bad language in others but swore like a pirate with scurvy; a woman driven by anxiety that looped in obsessive-compulsive patterns, straight-forward in her manner of communication, funny and quick with responses. She was fiercely competitive (though pretended not to be) and a lover of rich things, someone who couldn’t be stopped from eating and drinking until every morsel on display had been consumed. Her character was stubborn but kind and content enough with a simple life: watching Coronation Street, drinking wine, pottering around in the home or garden and attending church.
On the first day of my trip, she was nestled into her armchair, where she currently spent her intermittent waking hours. When I explained to her what I was doing, she irritably said, “What do you want to go and do that for?” – then, with prompting, answered with some lucidity. Her early life was solidified in her mind. She looked younger talking about it.
Her childhood cottage was on the edge of a field of cows, lined with a hedge to keep them out. There was a big oak tree. They had a nearby allotment, shared with others who lived in the area, where they kept 30 or 40 chickens and grew potatoes – they’d sell sacks of potatoes, eggs, and occasionally chickens to supplement her mother’s widow pension. Opposite the house was a stile where they’d sit and observe the little that was going on.
Her single mother was always cooking stews and working around the house. They’d frequently take walks together in the fields and sit on the haystacks with a picnic. Rose had four brothers and one sister, with her arriving somewhere in the middle. Her siblings got on but she’d argue a lot with her sister Mary. (About what, I asked. “Anything,” she laughed.) Her brother Jim – their mum called him Rod and neither of these names were his – was her favourite since he was cheeky and always getting into trouble.
“My dad died when I was little, about six,” Rose said. “Heart attack or something. I couldn’t remember him, not really. My mum was left on her own with six children. A man came around from welfare, I suppose, said we had to go into a home. We said to our mum, ‘Don’t put us in a home, we’ll be good, promise!’”
That’s very young to remember that happening, I said.
“Well, it was an important conversation, that’s why,” she replied.
Was it always only the seven of them? “Mum never went out on dates. She ought to have done really. I never think she ever felt that way.”
As Rose grew up, she loved reading adventure books. When she had to help out with the cleaning, as all the children did, she’d hide a book and get it out when her mother was on the other side of the house. “My mum’d sneak up on me and go, ‘I knew you were reading!’” she recalled, her eyes tracking the memory. Beyond books, she loved singing and was a soprano in the church choir and the school choir.
They had, as was typical in England in the 1930s and 40s, a toilet in the back garden, rather than in the house. If it was raining and dark in Winter, you’d have to go down there with a candle.
I’d hate that, I said without thinking, I’d probably rather piss myself.
“You can’t shit yourself can you,” she said with a low-laugh. “I used to sit on the toilet and sing. They could hear me from the allotment doing their digging when I was singing on the loo.”
Becoming a young woman was her favourite stage in life: there were the pleasures of dressing up, prepping her hair. “I was coming down the road one day and our Jim was sat on the stile with Don Goth and I was wearing an A-line dress, it was pink, and came across all here,” she remembered, pressing her hands to her chest. “I was walking all nicely like, and Don Goth said, ‘That’s a nice bit of stuff coming down here int it…hold on a minute, that’s your Rose.’” She laughed. “I always remember him saying that.”
I asked who Don Goth was, wondering if either of us got the name right considering he sounded like a toss-up between a Tim Burton protagonist and a mafia boss.
“Some bloke who lived down the road, his mum was a widow too. Our Jim was about a year and a half older than me so he was about that I’d expect.”
Most of her clothes were hand-me-downs but luckily she was the older sister and Mary got all of hers. Rose got some nicer, more fashionable stuff. Looking well put together was less a matter of vanity than of pride – a signal to others, including men, that she could take care of herself. “The first boy I went out with, he had blue eyes, that’s all I can remember about him…Johnny, his name was.”
Did he ask you out?
“I can’t remember now.”
How old were you?
“Oh, I can’t remember that,” she said, suddenly becoming disorientated. She changed the subject to the present day, grappled at anything: what was going on out the window, where had everyone gone – though I’m not sure who she meant – then her eyes started to close. “It’s so cold in here,” she said, as she drifted off.
That conversation gave me false hope that I’d get somewhere. Each interaction following it, she was less coherent, more irascible. I couldn’t tell if she didn’t want to speak or couldn’t unlock anything beyond those early years – a final room in the house of her mind that hadn’t been plundered of objects and images. I decided to call over the rest of the family to continue the story but their memories were nearly as bad. People couldn’t agree on facts or a timeline, favouring their version of events, their own faulty recollections independently weak.
This is what transpired from those conversations about Rose that may or may not be true: Rose left the cottage to marry a man and became pregnant with his child. He was abusive and cheated on her. Her son, Stephen, was born in a monastery delivered by monks while her husband was nowhere to be found but believed to be with another woman. After a few years of trying to make the family of three work, Rose left and took her son with her. The pair moved back in with her mother at the cottage while Rose decided on her course of action.
Stephen’s first memory is in that house – he can’t recall anything of this previous life. He was happy there but was already becoming the naughtiest child for miles around. His favourite party trick was locking visitors in the outside toilet whenever they went in.
Rose would travel to Bristol, the nearby city, to see a friend and on one of those visits met Norman, my grandad. It was unusual then for a divorced single mother to find love and stability again; off-kilter for an eligible bachelor to choose such a social burden. Rose instantly fell for him (“I liked his humour. Nice eyes. Nice and kind,” she remembered as others spoke). They married quickly one cold, rainy February in the Bristol registry office. They moved into the same house Rose still lives in now and Norman adopted and loved Stephen as his own son. Two more children were born: Helen, my mum, and then Robert, the youngest. There was plenty of love and a lot of conflict and squabbling.
Stephen’s habit of locking people in the toilet extended to this new home. He tormented his little sister enough that she says he’s lucky she forgave him as an adult (though he maintains that she was given special treatment by their parents). Rose would whack him with a wooden spoon as punishment. Once, she broke the wooden spoon hitting him and then gave him another round of whacking for breaking the wooden spoon. He dreaded Rose and Norman coming into school on parents’ evening. He’d always get a “hiding” when they got back home because each evening was the same: Stephen is constantly messing around, he doesn’t try, he distracts the other children, he won’t amount to anything. When Helen and Robert joined a new class or got a new subject teacher, teachers would groan, “Oh god, you’re not Stephen’s sibling are you?”
The kids would roam around the streets of Bristol with handmade wooden go-karts and footballs for hours, in the way you could in the seventies without fear of paedophiles or health and safety violations. Stephen had a nemesis on their street: a German woman who tried to kick him. In response, he stole things from her and put them down the drain. He played Sparks – ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us’ on a boombox outside her house really loud and she’d come out and shout at him in German. The other neighbours were similarly seen as antagonists. Anyone who complained at them for playing football in the street was reprimanded. Stephen and his cousin across the road would go to the allotment to steal cabbages and when it got dark, piss all over the cabbages and leave them on doorsteps. The next day they’d chat with their adversaries, who would remark on how delicious the mysterious cabbage had been at lunch and Stephen would roll around laughing.
Revenge could also be had within the family in a slower-burning form. They played a lot of boardgames – Stephen cheated, Helen was ridiculously good at them. When they played Scrabble, it would often end with Rose throwing over the board and calling someone a little bitch. Once, Rose and Norman went away for the weekend and the kids had a house party. Robert’s friends came over and in a drunken, boisterous act, held Robert’s head to the barbecue. He lost his hair in a big spot and it never grew back. From then on, Stephen called him Archie after Helen’s bald pet parrot. To this day, Stephen refers to Robert as Archie and people think it’s his real name.
Holidays are the events that all of us recall best for their distinction from everyday life. Once, in Bala, North Wales, Norman went off over the mountains. No one knew where he had gone so Rose called the police. Eventually he returned as if nothing had happened; Rose concluded he must have found a pub, got drunk and didn’t want to cop to it. There was the time on another UK holiday when the car broke down because of a hole in the exhaust and Norman ordered them all to rip into all the gum they had to make a spitty ball to patch it up. Faster, faster, faster, Rose told the children as they all chewed, inpatient to get home.
Eventually, Rose’s children would grow up and leave the home. It was especially difficult to let go of Helen, the only daughter. When at sixteen, Helen left to live with her boyfriend in London, Rose dropped her off at the coach station to travel there alone. Rose sobbed as she watched the coach drive off.
This was what the family knew. But then at random intervals, Rose would interject, remembering some detail: scraps of a life, parts that seemed meaningless. The time that Norman went on the local radio as a representative for his work and the family gathered around the stereo to listen to him being interviewed. An odd remark made by a friend’s husband. The colour of a tank top. Vast swathes of time – decades, even – and significant events were gone. Haruki Murakami wrote in his novel After Dark that memories are the fuel people burn to stay alive: “Important memories, not-so-important memories, totally useless memories: there’s no distinction—they’re all just fuel.” As the fire of existence goes out, there’s even less distinction between memories. It probably only matters that there’s something still burning in the embers to be occasionally stoked.
By my last night with Rose I had given up trying to extract more stories from her. I decided to stay sharp and attentive in the hours we had together in a bid to make a memory of my own. We played a simple board game and drank wine and Rose tried to bypass my mother to manipulate me into pouring her more, though her concoction of medicines meant she wasn’t allowed any at all. Let her live a little, I thought, and poured her more. A Doris Day playlist played from my phone. She was Rose’s favourite singer and Hollywood actress.
I got up to put on the soundtrack of a film we must have watched almost a dozen times together, Calamity Jane. It’s a 1953 Western musical set in Dakota in the 1870s, very loosely based on the life of the frontierswoman Calamity Jane (played by Day) and an alleged romance she had with folk hero and gunslinger Wild Bill Hickok. In the musical, Jane strikes up a close friendship with stage performer Katie while pursuing a crush on Bill but it gets messy when Katie and Bill fall for each other. The songs are fun. It’s pretty gay as well if you ask me, but I think that gets missed in most family viewings.
As “The Deadwood Stage” plays off my iPhone, I start to dance around the kitchen. My mum is washing dishes. We both sing along, laughing at each other. Rose is sitting at the table with her wine and her eyes closed and head bowed and I wonder if she’s about to fall asleep. Then she starts singing along, moving her arms very slightly as though she’s dancing. I let the whole soundtrack run and she knew nearly every word to every song without missing a transition or refrain. Her eyes didn’t open until it was over.
The next day I went to hug Rose in her armchair to say goodbye. She gave me a mumbled farewell and said that I had to come to see her soon. As I walked out the hallway towards the front door, she heard me leaving and said, “Come and say goodbye to me then!”. I had a lump in my throat as I dropped my bags and went back to say goodbye like nothing had happened. This bewildering cycle repeated a few times. I co-operated thinking it would stop, until it hurt too much and I called out to ask my mum for help. My mum waited by the chair with Rose, and as I closed the door behind me, I heard her reassure my nan that I’d already said goodbye.
Beautiful piece, thank you for sharing 🩷