Meg rants about 'Piper' and grief!

Today is the day that 'Piper' is published, a book that would never have been written but for my mother. Well, I wouldn't have been born but for my mother - but you know what I mean! Because I knew her, because I loved her, the story began to grow.

First, for my younger readers:

This bit's nothing to do with my mother - though she did have a passing interest in chocolate which I'm going to mention.If you read 'Piper' and I very much hope you do, you may be shocked by some of my ideas about what happens to the children. Sadly, most of them are based on things that actually happen to children here and now, in different parts of the world. Children go blind making carpets in India, children are kidnapped and 'traffiked' into slavery on cocoa farms or even worse situations, children have been shot down on the streets of Brazil, simply because they are homeless. This is all very depressing stuff - 'Piper' I hope, though it may disturb you, is not depressing. There is light at the end of the tunnel!If, however, you are shocked and challenged by some of this, please do what I suggest at the end and visit http://www.stopthetraffik.org/ to find out more. One of my young friends has recently written to Cadbury's to find out if they can guarantee that their cocoa beans come from farms which do not used traffiked children. Maybe you would like to do the same? Unfortunately, the variety of Fair Trade chocolate isn't huge, so it's important to keep up the pressure on the big companies to adopt Fair Trade policies More varieties of Fair Trade chocolate on our shelves has to be a good thing in every way - except for those tempted to eat too much, I suppose!

And now for the wrinklies' bit!

I didn't know when it started, that 2007 was a year I would spend weeping! Not all the time, of course, but an unprecedented amount! I spend a lot of time driving up and down the M40. This year it has felt like a vale of tears. I've wept into my swimming goggles, in showers, in the teeth of howling gales, over books, films, plays, down the phone to my friends and on my sister's, my children's and my husband's shoulders.Why? Well, it started with my dog dying in January and continued when our friend Nick died three days later - and then it just snowballed. When my friends' mothers simultaneously began to get ill and, in a couple of cases, die, it got worse. Suddenly, for whatever reason, I had begun to grieve for my parents, and in particular for my mother, Ruth Elizabeth Craven, who died 21 years ago. Suddenly, in a bizarre and completely unexpected way, I was actually feeling envy for the friends whose lives had been turned upside down by their aged parents. I had always felt lucky that I wasn't going to have to face all that; suddenly, I wanted to. I felt guilty that I wasn't able to. It felt like something one ought to do - to care for your parents when they are old and vulnerable. It felt like a rite of passsage that was denied me. Madness, I know and I don't expect sympathy. I didn't expect sympathy when I had no mother to show my babies, no built-in baby-sitter and no mother to consult about everything from sore nipples to bedtime routines - though I did feel pretty resentful about it from time to time. But suddenly I was grieving for all that too. And grieving that I hadn't been able to say goodbye. Someone told me that grief is like a pile of horse shit that is dumped on your doorstep. You don’t want it and you certainly didn’t order it – but the work of grieving is to get on and dig your way out. I have come to accept that, far from neatly ‘getting over it’, we do the digging for the rest of our lives. It’s not such bad work, actually. More interesting than you’d expect shoveling shit to be. You just need plenty of tissues for cleaning up.

One day recently, I found myself confronting the abyss I'd never dared peer into - the circumstances surrounding my mother's death. I'd always talked of my gratitude for them in the past - that, though she was actually riddled with cancer, she never knew and never had to undergo any treatment. That was because she died under the scanner. She had a heart attack. She was whisked off for a scan one morning, without my dad being there. Did she explain that she was claustrophobic? We will never know. I suspect she was too weak and brow-beaten by the suggestion that her pain was psychosomatic to say anything. And so she died alone and probably terrified. And, as I said to a friend recently, what I ought to do is go out into a field and howl. But I will never do that - so this is it instead. The howl in the field. Because someone should howl. Someone should rant and rage and keen. She would have died soon anyway - but it would have been kinder to have been surrounded by the people who loved her. Perhaps that's why, early this year, I felt compelled to organise a study day about alternative approaches to death. If you would like to know more on that topic, do contact the enormously helpful Natural Death Centre www.naturaldeath.org.uk

So what's all that got to do with 'Piper'? Well, Tanith, the central female character owes a lot to my mother. She grew out of my late appreciation that my brave, uncomplaining mum, who hid her tears in the pantry, spent most of her life in pain. As a child, I didn't give it a thought that she looked so old. She had me quite late in life - I knew that. But looking back, you could see the pain in the premature aging, in the lines of her face, the set of her jaw. In the sanctuary of childhood, she was just my mum. It is only now, now that I can't say or do anything, that I can see how her disability made her suffer.

'Piper' is, of course, very loosely based around the 'Pied Piper' story. From being very young, I felt for the child who was left behind, the child who was lame, like my mum. What happened to him? What would it be like to be the only child left when all the others had disappeared? He is quite literally isolated by his disability – as, in many ways, was my mum.

For my mum, isolation came very early. She was apparently born a healthy child – and then she lost the ability to walk. Possibly she had TB of the bone – we will never know. What we do know is that my grandmother, Elizabeth Edelston, a formidable woman, by all accounts, who had 8 older children, refused to be put off by the doctor who called her youngest daughter a ‘runt’ and told her to expect her to die. She waited until there was an opportunity to see a locum – who promptly referred my mother for treatment. Immediately, she was packed off to hospital in Heswall on the Wirral, many miles from her home on a farm, in a village outside Preston, Lancs. My mum remembered this clearly. She remembered her mother making the journey to see her once a week, spending almost the whole day on a bus. She remembered the kind nurse who called her Ruthie and tied a pink bow in her hair when her mother was coming. What she omitted to mention was that she stayed in that hospital for five years. I found that out when one of my aunts, in her eighties at the time, put herself on a train to come and help me when my four little children had chicken pox. Her eyes filled with tears at the memory of the three year old darling of the family being taken away and not returned until she was eight. I remember standing in our bathroom, not knowing what to do with the pain of hearing that. Moments like that help you understand why some people self-harm for release.

Worse was to come – the war, a bad blitz experience, major surgery on her hip, severe depressive illness and ECTs. But she was also emergency trained as a teacher, which she saw as a god-send, and she had two children, something she had thought would never happen. Throughout it all, she hung onto her faith in God. She never gave the impression that this was a straightforward, cut and dried issue. She was always wrestling, always working through issues about her faith, always trying to find out more.

I didn’t find her an easy woman to live with as I got older. It grieves me terribly that she died when I was still stuck in my adolescent relationship with her, aware more of the tension between us than the love. I would have liked to have grown through that and begun to know her on more equal terms – as I did, for a short period, with my dad. There is much of the way that she lived her life that I have rejected and I think she would have been uncomfortable with that – but there is more that is inbuilt and which I cannot discard – my own ever-questioning relationship with God for example. And these things that she taught me:

If you think you haven’t got any friends, look round for someone who needs one.

Don’t criticize something if you can’t put something better in its place.

If you don’t understand, ask. It’s amazing how often other people want to ask the same question.

Speak out. Stand up for what you believe in.

It is better to create something than to buy it.

If you work hard for something rather than it falling into your lap, you will value it more.

Enough! Too much already! ‘Piper’s’ Tanith is one tough cookie – and so was my mum. So all you people who are struggling with aged and ill parents, if you love them, make sure that they know. From an entirely selfish perspective, it will make things much easier for you later. Really, I don’t envy you and wish you well.

I mourn your loss so early, Ruth Elizabeth Craven. And I’m sorry you never really knew how much I cared. But then I didn’t know either.