I loved my mother. And my mother loved me. She loved my wife. She loved our children. That’s it really. I didn’t have any “issues” with her. We never had a row. Not even when I failed to realise that Copydex glue for carpets was supposed to be applied to the underside. She didn’t have any hang-ups and she didn’t leave me with any. I really liked her, too. She was great fun, my mum.
Literally the only annoying thing she ever did was die. Although, to be fair, that has proved properly annoying.
And the only mystery, really, the only puzzle to work out, was why was she like that? Given all that she experienced, her lack of oddness was a little . . . odd.
When my father died in 2011, after a long illness, I was at Stamford Bridge with my boys, watching Chelsea play Norwich City. I came back to find Mum, still with Dad in his room at the hospice, coming to terms with the biggest tragedy of her life. She looked at me and looked at him and looked back at me and said: “Where do you think he has gone?” Then she paused and with a half smile asked: “What was the score?”
It was very typical of Mum. A well-developed sense of the absurd. An instinct for a gently mischievous thing to say, that didn’t desert her even in these terrible circumstances. And, above all, an interest in other people and their preoccupations. She had no interest in football, but she had a lot of interest in me.
Being interested in other people was one of Mum’s most marked traits. When we would sit in a café, I would sometimes notice her staring at a family at a nearby table. She wasn’t judging anybody, still less disapproving of them, just watching — and finding it all fascinating.
In the last couple of years of her life, when she couldn’t get out much any more (like Old Mr Grace in Are You Being Served?, as she would have wanted me to point out), I would call her up and she just wanted to talk about me. What I was doing, what I thought about this or about that, who I’d met, how I was.
She was always a bit surprised when so many people visited her or called her up. I wasn’t. Everyone likes to talk about themselves.
I took her to a football match (Chelsea v West Ham) when she was in her seventies and, about the same time, to a pop concert (David Essex). She wanted to know what the fuss was about.
When Mum died, The Times ran a large obituary, I was invited to talk about her on Radio 4, and the prime minister (Theresa May) sent me a three-page handwritten letter marvelling about her life. I completely understood why that had happened, but she would have been astonished, I’m sure.
She was so busy listening to other people’s stories that she was occasionally surprised to be told how remarkable her own was. I remember her asking me in all seriousness, before giving a talk at our synagogue, whether I thought anyone would be interested in the fact that through the fence at Belsen she had seen Anne Frank, whom she had known. Should she mention it?
Some people found it very difficult to talk about their experiences and feelings as Holocaust survivors. I remember Mum being visited by the son of someone she had been in the camps with, and him saying that his mother hadn’t told him a thing. Mum offered to describe it, but he said he wouldn’t feel right about it. I think some families really suffered in silence.
But we were never like that. Mum would talk about it. When you asked. But she didn’t want it to define her.
She was a maths teacher. She had a science degree. She made excellent chicken soup with matzo balls for Friday evening dinner. She read Winnie-the-Pooh to her children. She did all the driving. She could make spaghetti bolognese for 20 of our friends who happened by unexpectedly. She was an early adopter of new technology, who preferred the instruction booklet to the gadget. She was all these things before she was a survivor.
I think she determined that Hitler may have killed her mother, and her aunt, and her uncle, and her cousin. But he wasn’t going to spoil her life. She wasn’t going to be his victim.
Instead of greeting everything as if it was another Hitler, she felt that nothing was as bad as that. So she would never row with the neighbours over a hedge, never quit the synagogue council in a petty dispute, never disapprove of her children’s choices or partners. She had it all in proportion.
I will miss her on Mothers’ Day. But only because I miss her every day. Yes, as a son misses a parent. But also just as a person. She was great fun, my mum.
Oh. It was 3-1, by the way. The score.
