Margaret Wheeler
e-mail: litestate@margaretwheeler.com
Margaret Wheeler wrote this piece in 1964, when she was 56. Her intended readers at that time were those of The Guardian newspaper, not members of her own family.
In her covering letter to Mary Stott (of The Guardian) dated 25th September 1964, Margaret wrote:
`I am enclosing a thing entitled "Grandma" which I wrote immediately after reading "Granny Institutionalised" by M. A. Fitton (Sept. 23rd); I felt very strongly that somebody ought to put the case on behalf of Granny, because by the time she is ready to be "institutionalised" she can't put the case for herself. Let me know if you can't use it, will you please?'
The paper obviously could use it; the piece was published shortly afterwards as an article in its own right under Margaret's name, and she received the standard payment of six guineas for it. There was very little blue-pencilling by the editors and tyepesetters; but the text as it is reproduced here is that which Margaret originally wrote, not as it finally appeared in print.
Grandma
After my mother's second stroke, which left her not really "with it" any more, unable to walk unaided, and with slurred speech and an unfamiliar gravelly voice, I listened to what the doctor had to say, with a sinking heart.
"She really ought to go into a home where they will have every facility for looking after her," he finished up - "I suppose you wouldn't consider it?"
"No. I couldn't possibly," I said, steadily, and meant it.
"Well," said the doctor, picking up his bits and pieces as he made to leave, "it will be a long hard struggle - you know that, don't you? I will do what I can of course, but it won't be much."Even now I don't really know why I couldn't let my mother go - was it because in all her long and loving and very active life she had never, on any occasion, failed any of us that I couldn't abandon her now, when she was old and frail and helpless? I did know of course that she would have hated to go into any institution, however well-found, well-supported and well-staffed, and that whether she had hidden her grief or betrayed it, it would have been there; did I reflect at that time that no-one who feels lost, lonely, and abandoned, can feel happy and secure as well? I just don't know; all I did know was that middle-age, menopause, large family of children growing up and all, I had to look after her myself. And my father as well.
There were mountains of washing to do; at one time they filled my horizon; but I remembered the mountains of washing my mother herself had done and the numerous occasions when she had come to my help and waded into mine with a will when the children were small. I remember her voice, young and gay then, saying "Look, if you do it this way it halves the job" and my own voice, even younger and more gay, replying "It's not halving the job but getting rid of it altogether I'm interested in!" and the two of us laughing as we got on with it anyway.
I remember the cooking, and the little tricks and stratagems and special ways of doing things my mother had taught me herself, and how much I had to use and rely on them when I was cooking for a hungry family all coming in at different times, for my mother's own now-capricious appetite, for an invalid child, a husband and father for whom nothing but the best was good enough, and one of my sons who had unaccountably gone mad about French cooking. "Two women into one kitchen, won't go" my mother used to say when she came to stay with us - "Who's going to be boss this week?"
So we took it in turns, and on those occasions when my mother was boss I was always rather meanly glad, because the woman who runs the kitchen does all the work and is everyone's servant, and this was a welcome respite for me.Looking after a helpless elderly person meant being housebound myself without holidays and almost without breaks; but it had only been because of my mother's active connivance that I had ever had a holiday or a break when the children were small. Sometimes she had the whole lot to stay with her and as this meant rather a full house, some of them - and they looked forward to this as a great treat - had to sleep in beds made up on the floor; sometimes she made the long journey to us, to take over for a time while my husband - who was devoted to her - and I, had a holiday; on these occasions the children hurled themselves at her before she was fairly on the doorstep, asking awful questions like "Grandma! What have you brought us this time?" or even once "Grandma! How old are you? Are you more than a hundred?" to settle an argument they'd been having.
And she was always with me when my babies were born; I can't think what I'd have done without her.In the last year or two she was like a little old baby herself most of the time; often I felt a fierce anger that anyone of such vitality and gaiety and sympathy should have been reduced to this pathetic little old bag of bones, sitting in a pretty blue dressing-gown on the side of the bed, looking up at me with eyes a little bewildered, a little lost, because she couldn't quite remember who she was, or where, or why, or what she was supposed to be doing, as her gentle old fingers plucked and pleated haphazardly at the coverlets.
Sometimes, without warning, she was back with us again, with all her buttons on. There was an occasion I remember when for weeks she had been convinced I was her mother, her sister, or her favourite aunt, and just as I'd got accustomed to being these various people she suddenly got the hang of things again and used my right name.
"Oh, Ma," I said, with relief, and no tact whatsoever, "I am glad you know me again - for weeks you've been thinking I was all sorts of people that I'm not."
"Oh dear," said my mother, her face crumpling up, poor old poppet, as though she were going to cry - "I never thought that would happen to me. My mother was like that too."
"Never mind, Ma," I said, "Grandma was a wonderful person to be like, wasn't she?"; but a chill was creeping over me - my grandmother, my mother - me too, perhaps, someday?The last of her lucid intervals I have never forgotten. "Why are you keeping me in this prison?" she said suddenly, one morning, her dark eyes bright with the old intelligence.
"It's not meant to be a prison, Ma," I said, "you're supposed to be having a holiday here to help you get well again."
"What a yarn," said my mother, "I'm going to die, aren't I? Well, I want to go home. I want to be in my own home again for" - and this was the last time I saw the old familiar twinkle - "this special occasion."
"Okay, Ma," I said, with feelings so mixed I could barely speak; and bulldozed a way through all the difficulties that arose, to get her back into her own home - my old home - so that she could die in peace with all the well-loved and familiar people and things around her.I am a grandmother myself now, and the thought that somewhere sometime, there may be an institution waiting for me - help! somebody, quick! - H E L P ! !
But it's no use shouting for help, is it?
Women - my own sex - who know the problem inside out, from top to bottom, and the answer - (all-embracing relief nursing help brought into the home itself and domestic help too, for all who need it, when they need it) - haven't got the common-or-garden gumption to gang up together in their thousands and hundreds of thousands, and all their associations and societies for this and that, to organise and pay for it themselves, on a nation-wide scale, have they?
Women with large families to look after, women with chronically ill relatives, spinsters with aged mothers and a job to do; widows who have to work and bring up a family, university women wishing to go back to an interrupted career, teachers and nurses wanting to work again when their families are off hand, mothers of handicapped children, old couples struggling to manage on their own, women wishing to paint or sculpt or write or go in for politics, all these and countless others know the need and the answer but like bees on a window-pane they all go on buzzing and droning helplessly in the same old way.
No wonder men say: Women!!Looking Stead
September 25th 1964copyright © Margaret Wheeler 1964, 1998
This text was also privately re-printed for the author and her immediate family in January 1992.
Not for re-publication, sale or distribution.
more about Madge:
[ Margaret Wheeler - short biography ]
[ Dear Mr Shaw - text of Epilogue ]
selected texts by Madge:
[ Guardian reprint - Grandma (1964) ]
[ Reminiscences to Sheila (1981) ]
[ Letter to G.B.S. (July 1946) ]
[ Letter to G.B.S. (Aug. 1946) ]
Margaret's complete literary output throughout the whole of her life is currently being edited for publication, both digitally (in TEI-encoded format), and in conventional (i.e. printed book) form.
Serious enquiries from interested publishers should be sent via e-mail in the first instance.
Editors wishing to commission material on Margaret are welcomed, although journalists and free-lance media "researchers" after no more than free material for a story for their own financial gain will be politely turned away.
Information initially prepared and published by
Sheila Bourner & Martin Wheeler
February 2000
to accompany the Channel4 TV social history documentary film series
A Family Century
this site © copyright 2008 Martin Wheeler