My mother — as I remember her best

Nine cups of milky Nescafé Gold Blend a day; a low-tar cigarette smouldering; a hot-water-bottle always on her lap; the Times crossword almost completed at the Formica table; knitting on the go; and novels — she always read the last page first. She was one of that generation of women who didn’t go to university but were incredibly well-read and knew poems by heart.

This was Kathleen, the mother of Nicholas Royle, novelist and professor of English at Sussex University. In a remarkable and moving memoir he has captured and preserved a loving, kind, impatient woman — and perhaps, with her, all of our mothers in the sweet predictability of their sayings and habits.

These were her catchphrases: ‘ouijamiflip’ for ‘thingummyjig’; ‘the state of the place!’; ‘spend a penny’; ‘spick and span’; ‘all’s fair in love and war’; ‘too late she cries!’ And her core advice (she was a nurse in her working life): ‘Never lose the common touch.’

She had a wonderful, therapeutic capacity to listen to others, and especially to young people. When Nicholas brought a girlfriend home he waited patiently for her to come up to his bedroom, but she just went on sitting at the Formica table, deeply engaged in conversation with his mother. Kathleen cared so much about all living things that if anyone even gave her a bunch of flowers she rushed frantically to get them into water.

If only it had been all like that. But unbearable tragedy struck. A lump appeared on Royle’s younger brother Simon’s arm when he was 20. Seven years later, in 1986, he was dead from cancer. The two saddest sentences Royle ever heard his mother speak were ‘It’s the same thing’ — which was what she said to him on the telephone to explain that Simon’s cancer had returned with a vengeance after remission — and, later, ‘I’m losing my marbles’.