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

the high street, talking to the woman about horses. She told us about the time her pet rat died and she dissected it to see how it worked, pinned out the skin and laid out the bones. It was a startlingly unsentimental thing for a child to do. My mother blinked when she told us this, as one does when confronted, unexpectedly, with one’s own reflection.
    Because of the age gap, my mother arranged a playdate for her niece with older siblings of a friend of mine. It didn’t go well. They teased her about something—her accent or her shyness. Anyway, my mother got wind of it and never let it go. It gave her immense satisfaction when these girls grew up and, “despite all their advantages,” didn’t go to university or amount to anything much beyond marriage. She persecuted their mother with news of my progress—would literally stalk her down the high street into every shop, until she had her cornered in the post office, whereupon she pinned her flat against the wall and made her listen to my exam results. Or Victoria’s exam results; my cousin did become a vet, after seven years of training. My mother could wait. She was in it for the long game. You worked hard, time passed, the wheel eventually turned.
    One of the things my mother admired about her niece was her good manners, which she thought important in a child. To that end, she policed a strict no-swearing zone around me while I was growing up, so strict in fact that I remember the two occasions when it was broken. “It’s not big and it’s not clever,” she said, when I expressed a reluctance to go to Brownies and prefaced it with the words “Oh my God.” And then we were walking down a London street with my godfather one day when it started to rain. “It’s pissing it down,” he said, and received a look from my mother to turn a man to stone.
    Years later, she was driving me to school when a car cut in front of us at the roundabout by the garden center. I was in my teens by then. “What a cunt!” said my mother airily, and gave me a sly look. “What?” she said, feigning surprise as my jaw hit the floor. “Didn’t you know your mother had a filthy mouth?” She had tried her best, she said. If I wasn’t well-spoken after all these years, there was nothing more she could do. “It’s enough now.”
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    IT WAS AN ATTITUDE she wanted me to inherit; not quite stiff upper lip, which she considered too English, but a less-repressed version of that. Whining was not permissible. Undervaluing oneself was not permissible. “For goodness’ sake,” she said, when I had the temerity to suggest I might have to slip down a grade in tennis coaching. “Of course you can do it, you’re my child, aren’t you?” (I feel a pressure from beyond the grave to point out that I held my place in the top stream.) I wasn’t much interested in inheriting an attitude. I was entering a materialistic phase. My mother showed me the things she had brought over on the boat with her: the trunk in the garage, with her name and cabin number on the side; all the books; and the dinner service. She had me try on the bespoke suit, but it was too big. I read her copy of
Gone with the Wind
, which she said her best friend in Johannesburg had given to her. “To Dear Pauline,” it said on the flyleaf. “God Bless! All my love, Joan, December 16th 1956”—my mother’s birthday. My mother looked sentimental at the mention of Joan. And then there was the gun.
    Of everything she brought over with her it was the item she most wanted me to have. “This will be yours one day,” she said, long before those kinds of conversations were necessary. In the end, however, the price of a gesture can be too high to bear. In 1990, a gun amnesty was declared in Britain, and my mother decided that, after all, it might get me into