It’s a little pointless wishing my mother a happy mother’s day seeing that she died the best part of 18 years ago, but of course I understand why people love to thank or remember their mothers on this, one of the most commercially successful days for the tat industry (see also father’s day, Easter, Christmas, Valentine’s Day and so on). Of course, I miss my mum but as ever the contrarian I have few fond memories of her later years, consumed as they were with pain through ill health and an empty existence in a residential care home. Her life ended suddenly one autumn morning when her heart finally gave up. It was not how I wanted things to be.
Neeltje Verburg from Rotterdam in the Netherlands had a tough life, living in poverty during the Second World War, losing every possession when three of the family homes were obliterated courtesy of the Luftwaffe, catching sparrows to eat, uncooked, from the balcony of the small flat in which she lived with her father Marinus, mother Anna and brother Jacobus. From the front window of one apartment in which the family eked out a miserable existence, Neeltje watched the invading Germans, saw the brave Dutch marines gunned down as they tried heroically to prevent the inevitable occupation that was sure to follow.
Meeting my father, a merchant seaman named Anthony Johansen, she moved to England in the mid 1950s, improving her written and spoken English as she went along, entirely self-taught, working for the rag trade in return for a financial pittance. My parents soon divorced but she made my childhood as happy as it could have been given we had nothing. She tried to hide the poverty of our lives to the point where I thought being poor was normal.
Long before the advent of supermarkets, mum would wait outside the butcher shop after a full day’s work to see if there were off cuts she could buy for a song, which would follow a visit to the grocer’s to get what she could before the rest of the fruit and veg was thrown away. And socks were what you got for Christmas and if you didn’t, mum would darn and re-darn the ones I already had. Never, not on one single occasion did she complain about the life she had been handed.
Neeltje, or Elly as she became known for reasons I never understood (it was probably because it was easier to say) had few friends, almost never socialised and, looking back, had the saddest life of any person I have ever known, except that she never appeared sad.
I don’t think I helped a great deal by developing ruinous mental health problems at a very early age that have persisted to this day, ruining my education and condemning me to a long and futile working life in the dead end of the civil service, but she dealt with all that, taking time off work to collect me from school and take me to a child psychiatrist for many years. This was unpaid time off and she bore, I later discovered, the financial cost by not eating at lunchtimes and by taking shorter bus journeys to save money.
In the late 1970s, she finally met her soul mate, Henry George Drury from Portishead via Cadbury Heath, someone who sailed with Anthony on the high seas and when she heard his wife Edna had died, Elly made her move. Soon they were living together in his bungalow which overlooked the Bristol Channel and later they married. These should have been the best days of her life and for a while it looked like they might be but I reckoned without her declining health. Elly always smoked cigarettes, a lot of them, and she always smoked them deeply down to the tip. Tobacco played havoc with her heart and circulation and her final 15 years were largely spent housebound and in pain.
Loyally, I still went to see her every week and I cherished many of the moments I spent with her. But the decline in her health was plain to see and because she refused to quit the poisoned weed the life she led made me very sad. Of course I loved her and her later health problems did nothing to change that but at the same time the decline, the ravages of a combination of tobacco and old age were at times horribly distressing.
One day I got the call from the owner of the residential care home to say I’d best high-tail it to Portishead because mum had been taken seriously ill. I got there to find she had actually died, but secretly I knew that already. In truth, part of her had died many years ago. Much of her life was a struggle and the triumph was still being there at the other side.
Her funeral was pitiful because almost no one was there. She had few friends and only her brother was still alive in the Netherlands and he was not remotely bothered when I had to phone him to say his sister had died. He certainly wasn’t coming to her funeral. I organised it, as best I could, and barely half a dozen people turned up. The ceremony, such as it was, still brings me overwhelming feelings of sadness. This decent, brave, loving loner deserved so much more. She was a migrant who came to Britain for love, who always worked hard and never claimed benefits and she died almost alone in a foreign land.
So today, mother’s day, I remember Neeltje Verburg, the Dutch woman who narrowly survived World War Two and died, virtually alone, still a stranger in a strange land. I’d have her back with me in a heartbeat, but not the physically broken woman of her latter years, just the incredibly strong, determined woman who defied the odds to bring me up, penniless and nearly friendless, with no family to support her.
Before pain and illness overwhelmed her, I tried hard to take her back to the Netherlands, for one last time, to take her to all the places she took me as a child, roles reversed, but my powers of persuasion were not enough. There was no one to go back and see, only memories, and she felt she didn’t need to go back to Rotterdam to experience them.
When I go back to Rotterdam, I always visit the places of my childhood and when I reach Leopoldstraat, where her mother lived and where we stayed when I was young, I know that this was where she truly belonged, her identity and what she was never changed, just her location.
Mother’s Day doesn’t make me happy, it makes me slightly sad. Not just for me, but for what Neeltje could have been and that is the biggest loss of them all.
