Read She Left Me the Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me for Free Online

Nana Mouskouri–style glasses, my mother grinning, and even Frank looking quite jolly. He had disgraced himself on that trip, said my mother, by refusing to travel on the Underground and demanding his dinner at the same time every night. My mother did an impression of him: “Faith, where are my boiled eggs?” Frank was English, of course.
    And her brother Mike had come, before I was born, to play against England in the South African hockey team. He was in goal. My mother had shown him and his teammates around London, and when they asked her a question she didn’t know—“Is Marble Arch really made out of marble?”—she just made up the answer. When I was a year old, my mother had a gigantic row with her in-laws, scooped me up, and fled back to South Africa for a month. There was a photo from that trip of a round, pasty-faced baby, ears sticking out at right angles, surrounded by cousins I didn’t recognize.
    â€œWeren’t you worried?” I said once, pointing at my ears.
    â€œDon’t you criticize my child,” said my mother fiercely, and she repeated the story of Debbie, who’d been pregnant at the same time as my mother, but whereas Debbie’s baby “looked like a pig,” I was beautiful. “She just couldn’t see it!” My mother looked freshly amazed every time.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    AMONG THE PHOTOS from that trip was one of my mother with her auntie Kathy. Kathy was very old by then, sitting beside my mother with Uncle Dick, her husband, on somebody’s wicker porch furniture. My mother spoke very highly of Kathy, whom, after that one and only meeting, she identified as the source of various sterling traits in the family. “Auntie Kathy,” she said, “had a very sharp tongue.”
    It was Kathy who told my mother what had happened in the immediate aftermath of Sarah’s death: that efforts to adopt her had been made by Sarah’s sisters, but that her father had rejected them. That they had kept track of him for a few years and had been relieved to hear he’d remarried. That Kathy had sent his new wife some little vests for the child, and that she had them sent back, with a note saying they weren’t in need of charity. Then the family disappeared.
    Kathy spent years trying to find her late sister’s baby. Another sister, Johanna, even named my mother sole heir to her and Charlie’s farm, as if the convention of an advantageous will to draw people out of obscurity like a magnet might summon her back to them. But when Johanna died, some years later, my mother failed to materialize. When Kathy retired from the search, her daughter Gloria, a year older than my mother and born in the same bed, took it up.
    It was Gloria who finally tracked my mother to London, by which time she was in her thirties and married to my dad. Gloria sent her a letter, introducing herself as a member of her mother’s family and asking, “Hey, what happened? We’ve been looking for you for thirty years. Someone left you a farm . . .”
    My mother stared blankly when she said this and shrugged at the shame of it all. She couldn’t blame her mother for picking her father. “He was the exciting choice,” she said helplessly. If you were twenty-two and had a shortened life expectancy, you wouldn’t marry a man called Trevor, either.
    â€œWhat happened to the farm?” I said.
    â€œIt went to someone else.”
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    MY MOTHER’S FRIENDS during those early years in London were a circle of gay men, who became like substitute family. During school holidays, we drove down in her Mini to see them: my godfather, Len, Bob and Nick, Ken and David, Willy and Barry, Edward—“dear Edward”—Roger, and Kenneth. They were mainly artists and architects. They had large abstract paintings on their walls and Eames chairs in their