Clarissa was never an easy person, you just didn’t warm to her, whatever were her good qualities. Writing all this, I can see her situation much more clearly than I did as a child and I can see how sorry my mother was for her and the feeling of obligation we had to look after her but, unspoken as it was, she must have had an awareness of that and it didn’t make her nicer. I’ll give one more example of that.
In December of 1969, we all had Hong Kong flu. We’d never been more ill in our lives. Clarissa didn’t come to stay, of course, we were too ill. I can’t think why we thought it was a good idea to cook Christmas dinner, but we did and then couldn’t eat it. I don’t know what we ate, but it went on for weeks. In the end, feeling we couldn’t put the food in the bin, I (being, by that time, the least ill member of the family) staggered the 150 yards or so down the garden to Oulton Broad and dumped it in the river, with the vague feeling that there was some sort of fish who’d eat anything.
We finally surfaced and, on the 23rd January, my father went off to an afternoon meeting, which he still wasn’t really well enough for and then he had a heart attack in the night. He’d had warning pains, which he’d put down to indigestion. Lowestoft hospital was a dreadful place at that time, the doctor in charge was a little tin god who ruled the place, badly. It was a mild heart attack, but he was given no treatment nor monitored and the second one, while Mummy was there at his bedside, was fatal.
I was at home for hours, waiting without news. I think a neighbour came in to be with me at some point, I don’t remember. Mummy came in, finally and said “he’s gone” and I didn’t understand. I wanted to ask if she meant he’d died but even 16-year-old peculiar Z wasn’t that tactless and I did do the right thing, I moved forward and hugged her and came to realise that Daddy had died.
Later in the morning, the neighbour went round to tell Miss Fitt. Mummy said she would need to be told. Miss Fitt immediately said that she wanted to be with her and was brought straight back. Mummy’s first thought of “how kind, she’s come to comfort me” was – well – she should have known better. “There!” said Clarissa. “Now you’ll know what it’s like to be lonely!”
Life went on and Clarissa kept coming to stay for Christmas and her birthday and she was in remarkably good health for her age. My mother thought of her as the Old Man of the Sea by that time, but we couldn’t neglect her and we did, in some ways, admire her for her sheer cussedness. She was thrilled when I had my babies.
But finally, time caught up. She fell in her hall one winter’s night and was found by her neighbour the next morning, barely alive and icy cold. She was taken to hospital and wrapped in foil-lined blankets and given all the care she needed to stay alive. She was 98 and a half by this time and I still wonder why they fought so hard for her life, when anything meaningful about it had been brought to an abrupt end. My mother sat for hours by her bedside every day and finally, after more than a week, she woke up. Jane wasn’t there at the time and, when she arrived in the afternoon, Clarissa accused her of never visiting. She was still the same misfit.
She couldn’t go back home, so went to a local nursing home on Lowestoft sea front. She walked in and it was the last time she walked. They really didn’t look after her very well, she had a shared room with a stranger and she just lived in that room. She came home to us for the day, when she was well enough and we visited her regularly. My mother wasn’t at all happy with her condition or care and made arrangements for her to be moved to another home. She mistrusted the people there and didn’t tell them, in case they tried to block it. She picked her up for the day, then returned her to the new place and only then told them she wasn’t coming back.
And so Clarissa moved to Estherene House in Kirkley Park Road, where she received great care for the rest of her life.
You’ve done a lovely job recalling Clarissa. I hated for it to end,
Well, that was a stark comment by Miss Fitt after your father’s death. She surely was a peculiar character. When you had mentioned her earlier on your blog, I thought the name was a clever alias, a word play.
What a character! When my father died my in-laws were on holiday. On their return home they came straight round to see us, wanting to know about his final days and hours. I knew that they would want to tell their friends all about it, so I told them the sad story. When I finished there was a silence and then my mother-in-law shrugged and said, “Well, we’ve all been through it” (referring to her own parents’ deaths 30 years previously.) At the time I was hurt (I was 34) but with hindsight I realise that they didn’t really mean to be hurtful, it was just their way.
No play on words, it really was her name. It didn’t occur to me until I was grown up that it could have described her too. I haven’t thought about her so much for many years, but I can’t really recall what it was that made her so annoying!
It’s hard to guess whether she was really being spiteful, Susan, or what else motivated her. It was the almost triumphant There! that made it so shocking.
I know exactly what you mean!
I think that as one get older one’s filters on what one says get lowered. Many people might think things they would never say, until they get older.
I don’t know. I was 16. My mother was 46. That level of cruelty isn’t to be overlooked, because she thought it. It was, maybe because of her age, the first thing she said, but it was that she even thought it, when she’d received such kindness, was pretty nasty.
Yes I think that you may have hit the nail on the head there – she thought it so she said it! And although old age may provide some sort of excuse, I have a friend who is 93 and is the soul of tact and kindness. That’s what I meant about my in-laws, they didn’t seem to have any empathy and certainly no filter! The example about my Dad’s death was just one of many I’m afraid. I could never work out how much was deliberate and how much was thoughtless.