Our house, in suburban north London, was filled with music and hilarity. But it was also full of unspoken anxieties and undiagnosed mental illness. I wouldn’t truly understand it until long after my mother’s death, when I was just 14 – a death that left that once loud, vibrant and painstakingly well-kept house in quiet disarray.
Throughout my childhood, mum hosted fantastic dinner parties for charitable causes. Guests saw her in her element: effervescent. She was like a movie star, funny and sharp and off-piste with her wit. In a different time, she would have been an actress, but the only stage she had to perform on was the domestic one. So she became an all-singing, all-dancing home-maker who walked down the street belting show tunes with my father and went through phases of painting everything in our house gold, including family heirlooms.
But what was bright and beautiful in company was too much for the banality of day-to-day life. She seemed to need to remain in constant motion. I don’t think I ever saw her sit down in the house. You couldn’t have a conversation with her inside those four walls. The only time she watched television was when she was ironing, in front of horror movies. The house was run like a military operation, always with some domestic mission to accomplish: every day she would clean it from top to bottom, each week polish a chandelier, and prepare for weekends away by putting cling film on the shelves to protect them from dust.
Mum would have been happy to hear people say “it’s like a hotel here”, but I didn’t want to live in a hotel where any mess would cause mum to snap. I wanted to kick off my shoes and chat with my mum. But in our family, you didn’t sit at the dinner table and have a discussion. Instead, we would write songs together and perform them, or share music that touched us.
Both my parents were really moved by music. Crying while listening to symphonies was an acceptable way to show emotion, even to gain approval. But suggesting to mum that she seek help for her apparent anxiety, OCD and ADHD, as my older sister often tried to, was not.
The issues that held our family captive were never allowed to be articulated. Like so much else in our lives, they lived in the abstract – yet their presence was overwhelmingly physical.
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