Roots: introducing Mrs Jackson: March 27th 2020

This was going to be titled 'Meet my Mother', but I remembered how she preferred to be addressed formally. Any doctors or nurses who asked if they could call her by her first name were met with a sharp "No!" And when I was in her class at primary school, as a four-year-old child, I was warned to call her "Mrs Jackson" rather than "Mam". Weird, no?

Don't be fooled by this glamorous pic. She was, to use a contemporary phrase, one of life's Bloody Difficult Women. She was very religious (Roman Catholic) and very strict. And it's fair to say she scared the life out of me as a child and for most of my adult life, because neither of us quite grasped that once I was 18 I didn't have to do what she told me any more. In her last five years, though, she began to suffer from dementia. And as she grew frailer, she mellowed out a lot and needed a lot of care from me and my sister.

Growing up

It was during this time, oddly enough, that I got to know her better and also to understand more about her. What I also came to realise, in the way that you do as you get older, is that she had a really tough upbringing and made a lot of sacrifices for her family, for which I was pretty ungrateful. The fact that she was able to train as a teacher and work while bringing up a family, from the post-war years onwards, is testament to the fact that (although she would never use the words) she was a pretty good feminist role model. She was a fierce believer in the importance of education and of women being economically independent from men. I am where I am because I'm standing on her shoulders.

Under my skin

Gardening was one of her great loves and she did it well into her eighties. I remember her telling me that when she was at teacher training college, she studied trees and nature, and just as she could recite huge long poems by rote, she could also tell you the name of just about any plant. I haven't inherited this skill, although just occasionally I find myself saying, "Oh, that's a Something-or-other-ii" and have no idea how I know, other than she must have told me and by some miracle, I actually listened. She got under my skin a lot more than I care to admit.

Rules

My mother had all sorts of rules when it came to gardening. I noticed yesterday that I am not always clear what is a weed and what is not (apart from dandelions, which are bastards). The current thinking is that all plants have some kind of purpose and weeds are only weeds if you don't like them. Mrs Jackson would have had none of this. She couldn't bear weeds and would certainly not have taken my view, which is that I'm going to wait to see how some of them turn out before making a decision on whether to uproot or not.

She had very firm likes and dislikes. She liked a lot of yellow, so my knowledge of yellow flowering shrubs is disproportionately good. There are some strange and disparate things that creep into my memory, such as you should never put tulips and daffodils in the same vase (and I still don't) and that she didn't like tulips in the garden anyway, only in a vase, and I am going that way too.

She didn't like anything that spreads, and that's where we differ, as I suspect "ground cover" is going to be my friend in the coming months.

She couldn't do everything

But she was no good at growing edibles, apart from mint and rhubarb. (Oh, how I hated rhubarb when I was a kid. Quite like it now though). Edibles are going to form part of my plan, though. I first thought about this as we approached one of the dreaded Brexit deadlines, because I believe stockpiling is anti-social, but maybe growing your own food is not. We got as far as bunging some seed potatoes into a growbag, and although they were decidedly small potatoes, they were relatively successful. So definitely doing that again. More about Digging for Victory another day.

What I learned today

Dandelion roots go on, and on, and on. And on.

It's a bit Gorillas in the Mist out there. Am I still expected to go out and do stuff? I am?