Things I’ve inherited from my mother

It’s a month now since my mum’s funeral, and in that time I have cleared her house. It meant staying in the house during the week after the funeral and every weekend after that. I didn’t mind: after living there during mum’s final illness it was feeling more like home than my own house. My safe space.

My sisters didn’t want to come back (in the end, one did and one didn’t). I always did. And I found that going through mum’s stuff made me feel close to her. Not the personal stuff that you’d imagine. The clutter.

I realised I could identify with her thought processes. Never throw away something that can still be used (even if you never will). Never throw away something that might come in useful. I do all that too. As an environmentalist, I hate throwing things away. I didn’t know mum was a hoarder, but it was comforting to discover a new thing that we had in common.

Mum wasn’t an environmentalist but she was thrifty, frugal even. (I’m grateful, because mum’s carefulness means there is actually a legacy: my parents started off poor.) She grew up during the war, with austerity. She knew how to make do and mend, and carried that into the 21st century. So, along with blue eyes, a moral compass and borderline alexythymia, I’ve inherited from my mother:

Several years’ worth of margarine tubs and ready-meal containers. Because she used them to freeze single portions of food. But she didn’t use ALL of them. The freezer wasn’t that big.

Partial sheets of coloured paper, from doing craft with children at church.

A stash of Damart pens. Having once bought some thermal vests, I know how hard it is to get off Damart’s mailing list. It looks like the same thing happened to mum.

A lifetime’s supply of hankies. Along with a cupboard full of crockery that was never used, this is part of the hoard she kept after her own mother died, because she thought things might be useful. I suspect I’m doing the same now: I’ve brought the hankies home with me, and a lot more too.

Then there’s the good stuff: a box file marked “death”, which saved us a lot of hassle. She did this before she even got ill – when she turned 80, I think. She’d been giving us instructions for her funeral for so long it had become a family joke. Now, I’m grateful. Thank you, mum, for being organised.

Letters and cards that I’d sent her, going back to childhood. Mementoes of achievements, like the programme for my MA graduation. (And the same for her other children, and grandchildren.)

Then there’s the unexpected stuff: a plastic bag of letters and cards marked “Burn without reading”. My sister did as she was told. I wouldn’t have done, if I’d found them first. Maybe all families have secrets.

And then there’s the actual nice stuff.

A bookcase full of children’s books, kept for the grandchildren and still waiting for great-grandchildren. I’m taking some of these: A A Milne, E Nesbit, Noel Streatfeild, Rosemary Sutcliff. And Tom’s Midnight Garden, which I didn’t read until an adult but which still made me cry.

Dozens of photo albums. I always asked to have the family albums, because I’m nostalgic and the eldest. But I was only thinking of the two that spanned the 1950s and 70s, in the days when photos were black and white and expensive. I didn’t know there were so many more, in colour, full of cruises and grandchildren. I’ve no idea where they are going to go.

 And something to bring comfort in our first Christmas apart. The plastic nativity set belonged to my mum as a child so it dates back to the 1940s, along with the fairy for the Christmas tree.

The crib figures are painted now but I remember them as cream-coloured. It was part of the Christmas ritual to repaint them every year. We took turns, like we took turns to open the 24th window on the advent calendar that was shared between four of us. (When I said mum was organised, I meant very organised.)

The set is partial, after all these years. The angel’s wings are broken, and the shepherd is held together with Blu Tack, like a lot of things in mum’s house. (I don’t know how long she’d had the Blu Tack, but the writing on the back of the package says you can use it for cleaning typewriters.) Baby Jesus disappeared some time in the early 1960s and we had to improvise. One year mum made a baby out of royal icing left over from the Christmas cake. My sister ate it.

I don’t know what the new Baby is made from, but he’s there. My mother is not. But these things might keep her close, for a while.