#### Personal History

December 5, 2016 Issue

# Lessons from My Mother

## I had a sense that she was a good teacher, but I had no idea that she was such an influential one, and in the very area I had chosen.

### By James Wood

Credit Illustration by Gérard DuBois

At my mother’s funeral, I was calmer than I had ever imagined being. She was eighty-seven and had lived a long and fruitful life, and for some time her body had been signalling its eagerness to depart: almost blind from macular degeneration, emaciated, she had been bedridden for months, after a bad fall. She died alone, but my father and I were at her side a few hours before her death. In the hospital room, grief conspired with natural curiosity: so this is how a body near death functions; this is how most of us will go. . . . Six or seven seconds passed between deep breaths; each was likely to be the last, and the renewal of breath, when it came, seemed almost like a strange, teasing physiological game—no, not yet, not quite. In the days before she died, a sentence from “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” kept coming to my mind. Peter Ivanovich is looking at Ivan Ilyich’s corpse: “The expression on the face said that what was necessary had been accomplished, and accomplished rightly.” Those words sustained me. A long life, a fulfilling career as a schoolteacher, a merciful end (relatively speaking), three children and a devoted husband: what was necessary had been accomplished, and accomplished rightly.

And there was another “right” thing, which would have satisfied Tolstoy in his late religious phase. My mother died a Christian, sure that she was going to meet her Redeemer. I don’t share that belief, but in those last months I was sometimes consoled by the thought of my parents’ consolation. My mother had chosen all the readings and the hymns for her funeral, and I admired the optimism that filled the church. We ended the service with an old Methodist rabble-rouser, “Thine Be the Glory, Risen Conquering Son,” sung to a tune from Handel’s “Judas Maccabaeus.” It was hard not to be moved when the minister said that my mother was finally at one with the Lord she had spent a lifetime serving: she was now in the glory of his presence. Could these words, beautifully improbable, possess the power entrusted to them? For a moment, it seemed as if the ugly oak coffin, sitting on trestles near the altar, were less a final box than the husk of another husk, the body now joyously unimportant, finally discarded. The ancient promise: the soul has thrown off its impediments and is flying away.

There was a moment when I came close to tears, and it involved another set of words. I feared discomposure, didn’t want to be an embarrassment (that shaming English shame). But it was not so easy when the minister read this prayer: “O Lord, support us all the day long, until the shadows lengthen and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then in thy mercy grant us a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last.” It’s a beautiful plea—“a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last.” But the phrase I found most moving was “and our work is done.” Like most mothers, mine worked very hard: the never finished labor of maternity. In many ways, she was an almost stereotypically Scottish mother (the goyish version of the Jewish caricature)—passionate, narrow, judgmental, always aspiring. Her children were her artifacts, through which she created the drama of her own restless ambitions. These ambitions were moral and social. She wanted us to be morally successful, to get the best possible grades from the Great Examiner. It was my mother who told me that my untidy bedroom was unworthy of good Christian living (it showed “poor stewardship”), that I should speak not of “luck” but of “blessing,” and who was made distinctly nervous by my talk of having a beer in a pub (“only ever half a pint, I hope”; her own Scottish mother had signed the “temperance pledge,” and never drank). The emphasis, in Protestant fashion, was rigorous and corrective. There was plenty of happiness in our household, but it was rarely religious happiness. The self was viewed with suspicion, as if it were a mob of appetites and hedonism. As an adolescent, I was often told that “self, self, self is all you think about,” and that “selfishness is your whole philosophy.” Life was understood to be constant moral work, a job that could never really be “done,” because the ideal was Jesus’ unsurpassable perfection. My mother and I quarrelled over the corpse of my religious faith. She told me that at night she prayed I would “come back into the fold.” As a young man, I lined up my pagan, life-loving heroes—Nietzsche, Camus, D. H. Lawrence, Keith Moon, Ian Dury—in glorious defensive formation: reasons to be cheerful.

Her social aspirations weren’t always compatible with her religious aspirations, though they proceeded from the same extraordinary will. The woman who wanted to assign luck to godly providence also believed deeply in the earned fortune of hard work. She understood, again in familiar Scottish fashion, that social advancement was best achieved through education. Her own origins were lower middle class, petit bourgeois: she had an uncle who was a doctor—the star of the family—but neither of her parents had gone to university. Her mother had a Scottish accent; hers came and went. She told me that she had been bullied at her fairly ordinary state school for affecting, like Margaret Thatcher, a “posh” accent a few stations above her class; it was always difficult for me to assess Mrs. Thatcher with any neutrality, because in demeanor and sheer force of will she so reminded me of my mother.

Teaching ran in my family. My father was also a teacher, and my mother’s grandfather was in charge of a small junior school, long gone, in a house situated in gentle fields outside Edinburgh. Mother remembered visiting him during the summer holidays, when, so she told me, he would coach private pupils, boys headed for expensive boarding schools in Scotland and England. Over the years, a few of these boys, suitably crammed with exam-busting power, went to Eton, and it was this knowledge that gave my mother the idea that if she had sons she would “send them to Eton.”

An absurd story, in part because women of my mother’s class were not exactly invited to think of Eton as within their reach. They had not enough money, and certainly not enough social standing. But I believe what she told me, because it sounds so magnificently like her, and because she achieved her ambition. It was financial insanity, even with the help of scholarships and bursaries, to try to send two sons to Eton and a daughter to a boarding school in Scotland, and it brought my parents to the verge of ruin. (I will never forget the moment when my father phoned me to ask if he could borrow five hundred pounds. He was sixty-two, and perilously close to being broke; I was twenty-five, had just started working for a London newspaper, and had my first regular salary.)

Eton was also unnecessary: there was a good grammar school not far from our town, a place that sent kids every year to Oxford and Cambridge. But who is defining necessity? I guess that my mother considered the unnecessary surplus of private education—the invisible social lift that a place like Eton offered—absolutely necessary. If not, why else put her family through the hardship and labor? And mostly that’s what it was. Not for me, the lucky beneficiary of my mother’s quixotic and self-abnegating striving, but for my perpetually impoverished parents. My father, a zoologist, had no more money than his modest salary from an English university; Mother taught at the local girls’ school. They needed every penny. Had they sat down, at the start of it all, and run the numbers on the back of an envelope, they would never have contemplated private education for their three children. But they believed in sacrifice, and they probably imagined that they could muddle through somehow, borne aloft by my mother’s surging triumphalism. And by extra work: in addition to his teaching, my father marked Open University and high-school exam papers in the summer vacation. And my mother, in addition to her weekday school teaching, took on a Saturday job, at a bookshop in town. There cannot be many old Etonians, in the entire history of that fabled and fortunate place, whose mothers, daunted by debt, worked a Saturday job, standing behind a cash register. When I was young, I wasn’t proud enough of her; indeed, I was probably a bit ashamed.

Yet that tremendous force of character was riddled with anxiety and doubt. Her anxiety was structurally related to her ambition; her vigilance resembled the omniscient uncertainty of immigrant parents. (The story of social class in Britain is, figuratively, one of emigration and immigration: a voyaging out of one station or place and into another. At Eton, I was a spy from the obscure North of England and the equally obscure middle classes, quickly learning the language and the signification of the surprisingly hospitable enemy.) My mother fiercely desired her children’s success, but never quite believed in it. We were like the parishioners who Jonathan Edwards warned were suspended over Hell by “a slender thread,” which an angry God might sever at any minute. Was this a theological fear that became a social one, or the other way around? Certainly, the two anxieties were inextricable: look away from the struggle, for one second, and you may fall. In our household, there could be no complacency. Mother didn’t assume I would go to Cambridge or Oxford; she didn’t assume I would get to university at all, despite indications to the contrary. If you get to university—that was the menacing conditional. Exams were sites of strenuous terror, doors that opened onto everything desirable but that could as easily be closed in one’s face.

“I’m starting to think humans don’t even like winning free cruises.”

For the same reason, she only warily encouraged my desire to be a writer. I might just be able to pull it off, but only if I worked at it, with devotion and Protestant modesty. The profession of letters was generally admirable, but the idea of my being a writer made her anxious: How would I earn a living? What sort of social status could I ever achieve? Was writing, at bottom, even a moral activity? I tried to make my case, aware of how flimsy and amoral my ambitions sounded. Her idol was the writer and politician John Buchan, the son of a Free Church of Scotland minister who rose from that relatively humble background to the heights of Oxford, later becoming a Member of Parliament and the governor-general of Canada: a man of substance. I didn’t take him very seriously as a writer; as I saw it, Buchan’s worldly success richly compensated for—and effectively obliterated—the eccentricity of his wanting to be a writer in the first place. But I understood why his example meant so much to my mother, and why she used it to push me on. John Buchan, she would intone, rose at five in the morning to write his books (not least “The Thirty-nine Steps”), before going out into the world and earning a living: “You will have to work like that if you want to achieve anything comparable.” She preferred the security of the law, or medicine (the path my brother took), or the academy (a shabby but dependable cousin to these grander professions). Her expressed hope was that when she answered the phone and a stranger asked to speak to Dr. Wood she could reply, “Which one? My husband, or one of my three children? We have four Dr. Woods in this house.” (She ended up with only two, her husband and my brother.)

In many ways, she was a natural teacher. She marched her children around English stately homes and told us the history of these places, in loud, confident tones; we sometimes feared that she might be mistaken for a docent. She took us to many museums, and to the great sites of Scottish history—Culloden, Glenfinnan, Glencoe. She certainly encouraged us; more often she goaded, enforced. But she also defended us. When my first-grade teacher reported that I could read “fluently enough, but without much comprehension,” she took it up with the school. Years later, when I got a B in an English exam (it was my best subject, so I was “supposed” to get an A), she made me sit for the exam again, the unspoken but hovering implication being that I would keep retaking it until the expected grade was achieved. My father, in his usual mild manner, went along with all these incursions and improvements.

It was a joke in our family that my mother and Muriel Spark’s great fictional creation, Miss Jean Brodie, shared a certain temperament, as well as a profession that was really a vocation. Like Miss Brodie (or like Maggie Smith’s impersonation, in the 1969 movie), my mother had a genteel Anglo-Scots accent, taught at a private girls’ school, was forceful and opinionated, had firm ideas about education, and was clearly a wonderful presence in the classroom, filling the girls’ heads with strange stories, historical gossip, unusual dates, nice prejudices, delicious facts. I know that she loved talking to her classes about her own children; over the years, I would encounter some of her former pupils, and was amused by how much these young women knew about our family life. (They invariably knew that I played the trumpet, and had been to Eton.) When my mother used John Buchan’s work ethic as a moral goad, it was hard not to hear Miss Brodie telling her girls that she was going to learn Greek: “John Stuart Mill used to rise at dawn to learn Greek at the age of five, and what John Stuart Mill could do as an infant at dawn, I too can do on a Saturday afternoon in my prime.”

In Spark’s novel, we never see Miss Brodie not performing, we never see her just at home, offstage, not being a teacher. If she was anything like my mother, that may be an authorial mercy. Though authoritative with her young pupils and with her own children, my mother was not a confident or worldly woman. The anticipation of teaching made her extremely nervous, physically sick at times. The days just before the beginning of term, after the blessing of the holidays, were always tense and furious, full of melancholy and complaint. If she was a natural teacher, she was never an easy one. One of my fondest childhood memories is of standing outside the bathroom door and listening to her on the other side, as she methodically whispered words and dates: she had a history textbook with her in the bathroom, and was cramming for class. If I had been asked, when I was a child, how my mother liked teaching, I would have replied that she hated it. And because of this knowledge my siblings and I were sometimes condescending toward my mother’s work. Today, I would probably say that she disliked it but was powerfully, helplessly drawn to it. Now that I am myself a parent, I realize how perpetually exhausted and overloaded she must have been, how every muscle and nerve must have been pulled taut: three children, a week’s work at school, an extra job on Saturdays, the constant drag of debt. And Sunday, alas, was not a day of rest, but more work—what seemed like endless churchgoing.

A few months after the funeral, I got an e-mail from one of her former students, Katrina Porteous. I knew her name, because she is a poet, who has written eloquently about the North of England, in particular about the Northumberland coast, where she lives. She was one of my mother’s great success stories—Durham High School for Girls, a brilliant history degree at Cambridge University, a Harkness Fellowship to Berkeley and Harvard, and several acclaimed books of verse since the publication of her first collection, “The Lost Music,” in 1996. Mother had spoken of Katrina, and, a year before she died, had given me one of her books. But she was five years older than me, and we hadn’t known each other. We had learned of each other’s movements, literary and otherwise, intermittently and remotely, through my mother.

Katrina had not been in touch with my parents for a long time, and was writing to ask if my mother was in good health, “and whether it might be possible to contact her.” She went on, “I’d like to thank her for the encouragement and inspiration she gave me. She really was the most wonderful teacher. I’ve recently published a new poetry collection with Bloodaxe, and would love to send it to her. Would that be possible?”

It was strange to receive this message, so soon after my mother’s funeral, as if Katrina had some eerie premonition that all was not well, as if the long silence were speaking to her, laden with significance. It was strange, too, to be communicating as two middle-aged people. In my mind, my mother’s “old girls” were still girls, as I was still my mother’s boy. What linked us was lost in our far-off childhoods; and here we were, two graying adults talking across a waste of gain and loss. I wrote to her on Christmas Day, and told her that my mother had died in July. I added that I had been moved by the tributes my father had received from former Durham High School girls. Her e-mail, I told her, was one of the most moving: because she was a writer, and because of the accident of its timing.

Katrina replied four days later. She said she was especially touched to hear from me at Christmas, when she was at home with her own parents, now in their eighties, “in the house from which I travelled to Durham High School every day as a child. One is powerfully transported back to earlier times in those moments.” She continued, “Your mother was and will always remain a profound influence in my life. She gave me the confidence to believe in myself as a ‘writer’ at a precocious age, when I had no right to think of myself as such, but every opportunity to become one. (I am still trying.) Growing up in Consett, the only child of a scientist and a lovely but utterly unbookish mother, I encountered in yours the first ‘woman of letters’ I had met. She was also kind, sensitive, principled and spirited. I adored her. I am so sorry not to have taken the opportunity when I had it to tell her how much her example has meant to me.”

Had Katrina spoken this at my mother’s funeral, I would not have stayed so calm. She, as a pupil, said what I, as a son, could not. Her words were simple and forthright and grateful, while mine would have been complicated and wary and not grateful enough. Did I want to take Katrina’s words as my own? Was I jealous of the easy literary encouragement she received? Perhaps, though surely what made her tribute so moving was precisely that it came from someone else. All sons adore their complicated mothers, in one way or another. But how powerful to encounter, from someone else, the beautifully uncomplicated statement “I adored her.” And Katrina’s message was a revelation, as if one of Miss Brodie’s girls had materialized, in order to write a letter to me. I had a sense that my mother was a good teacher, but I had no idea that she had been such an influential one, and in the very area I had chosen, and struggled to succeed in, often in the face of parental doubts. She had been not just a good teacher but a crucial literary encourager, and I had not been able to see this well enough—because as a mother her pedagogy was so fraught, so anxious and vicarious, and was such a difficult companion of her role as a parent.

Sometimes, in anger or rebellion, I had felt that it was at best a frustration and at worst a misfortune to be the son of such a possessive and sharply gifted teacher. But my father knew better. To my surprise, he had these words put on her gravestone: “A devoted mother and grandmother and dear friend of many, including her former pupils.” He had properly assessed the components of her identity, the parts of her great labor, the variety of her lifework. What was necessary had been accomplished, and accomplished rightly. Her work was done. ♦

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