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about this, remarking: ‘It’s like having your mother waiting up for you after a party.’
    I realised what different experiences we’d had in regard to our mothers. I would have dreaded my mother waiting up, as she would almost certainly have been plastered.
    Even now, while trying to enjoy myself, I was half-waiting for another accident to happen. Sure enough, the next day I heard that my mother had fallen, a few hours after I left her, and
fractured her leg. This was her second, or even third, break since my father died in 1974; I had lost count. She was in hospital and had already undergone another operation. Her drinking had at
last been brought into the open and the doctors had advised her to get dried out. However, she had refused to go to the place they suggested – very near Knowle – as my brother Nicky had
been in a psychiatric unit there.
    I went by train to visit my mother in the hospital. She looked better than I expected; her hair was tidy and she did not seem as unhinged as she sometimes did. When I entered her room she gave
me a defiant look as if to say: ‘Don’t you dare tell me
why
I fell . . .!’ When a nurse brought her lunch, she said she’d been told to offer my mother whisky with it
– presumably because without it she would suffer from withdrawal symptoms. My mother said grandly: ‘No thank you, I don’t drink spirits. They don’t agree with me.’
When the nurse had gone, my mother did mention her drinking to me, but in a veiled way, saying that one of the young hospital doctors belonged to Alcoholics Anonymous. She told me she’d been
suffering from hallucinations and wondered if this was what having DTs was like. She thought a young black doctor had visited her in the night and asked: ‘Are you afraid of me?’ She
imagined that she heard another doctor tell her: ‘You are going to be committed to a mental hospital as you tried to commit suicide twice.’
    Perhaps I should have taken the opportunity then to discuss her drinking, since she had given me that opening. But I had been schooled for years not to mention it and the whole subject of my
mother’s drunkenness filled me with fear and shame.
    Sitting beside her, I watched different patients go past her door. Each one called out to her. My mother, so charming to strangers, had already made friends. Two were in wheelchairs. One was an
old man who loved gardening; another was an old lady from Yorkshire who told us that most of her life she had lived in a house with ‘a tortuous staircase’; then, when she finally moved
south to a bungalow in Seaford, she fell and broke her leg.
    Friends had sent my mother flowers. I was wary; I couldn’t allow myself to feel sympathetic. I was constantly wondering what further disaster would occur.
    In January 1981, Andrew and I married. My mother seemed pleased but, particularly when my children were little, I would have liked to have had a mother who helped me. When my
Aunt Rosemary visited me in London, she did ordinary things, like going with me when I collected my children from school. She came to my son’s swimming gala. My mother never did anything like
this. Even my friend J’s mother, who, like mine, was well off, had come from her home abroad when he and his wife had their first baby. I had just had my daughter and my mother was still on
holiday in Majorca – J was shocked by this – and when the baby was four days old it was Molly who came to the West London Hospital and then escorted us and our new baby to our house in
Sussex, as my husband had not yet learned to drive.
    J’s mother, I saw, had even made apple sauce. My own mother couldn’t cook. She had once attended a Women’s Institute cookery class, but when the instructor began with
‘I’m sure you all know how to make a white sauce . . .’ she was so terrified that she never went again.
    Most women of her generation, even those brought up to be waited on, learned to cook during or after the war. Why