Preamble

I promised my sisters I wouldn't spill the beans until they were both dead. It's still hard to believe they're gone. Father suffered a heart attack on a Rhine river cruiser in 1962. Inexplicably mother was at his side when it happened and later snidely described the event as an example of fate's exquisite symmetry: 'he died in agony in the country where he plotted his profligate days'. Mother went on ageing forever. She seemed immortal. This is not a linear narrative; interesting bits came to light during the writing and I wedged them in.

Father, Irish-Catholic, Swansea born and a great raconteur, claimed blarney was the genius of Gaelic oral tradition. He had a seductive intelligence and was compulsive listening. Mother, gifted beyond her rewards, weeded his grave for a quarter of a century - a spit-pot for her venom after 'forty years of wedlock hell'. She kept plausible diaries: 'to cope with the nightmare'. Frankly I don't believe the sordid details that damned father. Looking back over shared memory, her version of family life reads as a fanciful and often vicious distortion.

Mother was born and raised in Clifton and took care to distinguish it from Bristol city. Father often remarked on the snobbery and sanctimonious prejudice of Clifton locals. His dealings with mother's bigoted parents were fraught and her testimony gives unwitting credence to his view. Towards the end of her life she dumped her scurrilous diaries in predictable places - pre-posthumous banking; the world would know her truth. She grew more hate obsessed after his death. She resented not having him around as living proof of his deceits and treachery. When great aunt Doris died, mother gave up smoking. Craven A fags had been a shared moment of spite. She loved tea, and a pot of rich Darjeeling would release a flood of pent-up nastiness. She faced death with courage, given her terrified musing on its claustrophobic horrors. But she'd written herself dry so wherever she is, she'll be satisfied.

I've met very few folk who do not recall dad as a decent good natured man. But what really passes between parents? Had my sisters sieved the debris of mother's last years they'd have buried her diaries with her. However, I got there first and now draw on their vexatious ramblings. Sigmund Freud would say she wrote her own case history. As kids we were close to father. Mother wouldn't let anyone get close to her until she was dying. In her last days the consuming malice stopped. My sisters had joined me when death shut her up. I caught her last gasp - an almost inaudible whisper: 'be there God - don't two-time me like that bastard Parnell'.
Mother and deathbed theatre at their dramatic best.

She crowded our childhood. If we were inclined to self-pity we could argue she scarred us for life. Adult understanding tempers her mischief but it doesn't excuse it. First memories are of grim poverty. As kids we slept on empty bellies and woke to hunger in squalid unheated rooms. Father, gone before daybreak, was never back before midnight. Mother had us believe that what he did was in some way shameful. The truth was colourful and enhanced his credit; he handled adversity with larger-than-life ingenuity. With him out of the flat mother made free with destructive games centred on our crime of existing. We were the fruit of a treacherous marriage. After-school torment began with hunger: 'your sod of a father's left no money'. Still dressed in our threadbare outdoor clothes and accused of baffling misdemeanours she'd line us up at the flat entrance to await imaginary council officials coming to cart us off to an 'institution'. Bewildered and frightened we grizzled our eyes out until her buzz for terrorising had passed. Father was unaware of all this, and childish wisdom held us back from involving him. Parental quarrels were hateful and we were never bold enough to call her bluff. This real abuse is locked in real memory.

Lost memory syndrome is bullshit.