CHAPTER THIRTEEN – THE CLEVEDON YEARS

 

For millions of motorists heading down the M5 to the holiday haunts of Devon and Cornwall, Clevedon is just a name on a blue motorway sign as they descend from the split level section that cuts through the Gordano valley, but to those in the know it is a Victorian gem.

 

Its charming seafront has remained largely unchanged since the 19th century thanks in part to the fact that it overlooks the muddy Severn estuary and lacks the golden sands and aquamarine waters which have attracted the hordes to resorts further down the South West peninsular.  

 

Our son, Paul Matthew, was born on October 15, 1970, the day before Clevedon Pier collapsed – it was the result of the over-filling of a water bag there to test the safety of the structure for insurance purposes, but some of my colleagues said it had been caused by me dancing for joy.

 

My fatherly euphoria was slightly dampened when Eric Price rang to berate me for the pictures in that morning’s Daily Express of a coach party stranded in the lion reserve at the Longleat Safari Park in Wiltshire – “Don’t we have any reporters in that area,” he stormed.

 

Some years later the Gibbs family were to hold a book sale in the seafront bandstand to help raise funds for the repairing of the pier, in no small measure saved by a plea from Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman, when the Weston-super-Mare-based council was threatening it with demolition.

 

My father was delighted by the arrival of his first grandchild, exclaiming when he first saw Paul – “Look at the child. You can tell there’s breeding there.”

 

Sadly my last contacts with my father were the unhappiest, caused by my habitual tardiness and his punctilious punctuality – he used to call me “Eric Delay-me” with a nod to the famous bandleader of the time.

 

In November, 1971, I stayed overnight with my parents in Domonic Drive en-route for a press trip to Miami Beach and my father with typical kindness volunteered to drive me to Heathrow Airport.

 

Half an hour before my allotted time for arising, he was champing at the bit, I resisted the reveille call and we left in simmering silence, first delivering my mother to her school in Deptford and then fighting through rush-hour traffic on the South Circular route, where an unfortunate lane change brought a scrape from a lorry along the side of his beloved VW Beetle.

 

He dropped me at the airport and left with barely a word – and my following indulgent days being royally indulged in the Florida sunshine were tinged by thoughts of our row, so I hunted down a Zippo cigarette lighter, which I knew he had always lusted after.  

 

On my return to New Eltham, the present seemed to please him and I left the next day on better terms than the frostiness of Heathrow – indeed my mother told me later that he had proudly showed off his new lighter in the pub the next evening.

 

But I never saw my father again – he died of a stroke just over a week later and I often wonder whether the stress of our last journey together had at least been partly responsible.

 

He went as he would have wanted to – in bed alongside the girl of his dreams – his Fig.

 

His last words to my mother, as he turned over to pour a second cup of tea, were: “I’m not worried about money” – but he must have been with his car desperately needing new tyres and a looming repair to the scarred bodywork.

 

For my mother the shock of his loss was almost too much to bear, but with typical courage she consoled herself with the doctor’s words – she told me afterwards: “He said your father would have been a very sick man had he survived and he would have hated that.”

 

Back in the West Country our “pigeon pair” was completed with the arrival of our daughter, Katherine Jane, on March 15, 1973.

 

My mother later told me she was sad that we had not chosen any family names for our children – but maybe she had forgotten that her grandmother, Kitty Gibbs, had been christened Kate and possibly did not know that her great grandmother was called Jane.

 

My mother worked on past retirement age at Christopher Marlowe school, but she needed little encouragement in 1976 when we suggested she move to Clevedon – Alison had the chance of a job in the town’s hospital casualty department and who we thought could make a better baby-sitter.

 

Her move to the three-bedroom semi-detached house we found for her in Macleod Close - a quiet cul-de-sac within sight of the dog walkers of Marshalls Field and the sea wall - might not have been at her suggestion, but it gave her new outlets for the love she had always given in abundance and, as she often declared, it made her feel like she was on holiday every day.

 

It also brought into sharp focus a dynamic personality, which I am certain she had carefully muted so that my father could be allowed to shine.

 

Throughout my childhood she admirably played an unselfish supporting role, ever-present as the family’s cook, bottle-washer, laundry maid, cleaner, nurse, adviser and confidante – there to soothe away hurts, both physical and psychological, and to soften my father’s firm discipline, although never in front of him.

 

But ensconsed in her cosy home by the sea, she was re-born, exploring the town from the heights of Hill Road to The Triangle centre, walking miles with her shopping trolley just to bag a bargain and buying frivolous gadgets, plus knife racks and ice buckets, with her new-found wealth – she often said she felt guilty because the sale of the higher value London house meant she had more money than she and my father had ever enjoyed.

 

My long working hours, from 2pm until 11pm or midnight plus, meant I hardly saw my mother during the week, but she was there to tend to Paul and Katie, picking them up from school in later years, making their tea, tackling any left-over washing-up and ironing and reading stories at bedtime – the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe being a particular favourite.

 

And she provided a welcome temporary home for me when my marriage ended in divorce in 1983 – her sadness tempered by the pleasure of being able to look after one of her boys again.

 

However that did not prevent her looking for a new “bachelor pad” for me and on one of her daily perambulations she spotted in an estate agent’s window a town house up for sale in the woods behind Clevedon’s lofty Dial Hill.

 

We were told the property had been under offer for some time, but that if I could finalise the necessary arrangements first it would be mine, so after my mother and I made an inspection of the inside by torchlight – we could not find the power switch – I instructed a solicitor and we completed in a breathtaking five days.

 

It did not please a friend of mine as it turned out the other bidder was his mother-in-law and our success meant she would stay with him and his wife for even longer.

 

My mother helped me set up my new home and sort out the patio garden, but made sure that I was provided with daily lunches back in Macleod Close and she was back to doing my washing and ironing that should have been a thing of the past.

 

The years that followed allowed me to appreciate all the many virtues of my mother and it was small repayment to take her on regular outings, including visits to the Royal Bath & West Show at Shepton Mallet, where HTV presenter Bruce Hockin would entertain her as a guest of honour in their hospitality stand – she described these as her “computer days” - mentally stored to savour later.

 

She especially enjoyed our Christmas Day expeditions, when we would pack a picnic of smoked salmon and avocado sandwiches, plus winebox, and head off on empty roads to a mystery destination from Stratford-upon-Avon to the Quantocks and from the New Forest to the North Devon coast.

 

Interestingly she never asked to go to the Exmouth area and I am sure now that was because she would have found it too painful to visit the many scenes of her pre-war  happiness without her Man by her side.

 

In the late Nineties, my brother, Hugh, took early retirement from the Civil Service and became an increasingly regular visitor to Clevedon, spending weeks on end being cosseted by my mother, who of course loved having both her boys so close at hand.

 

But she was unselfish enough to be delighted when Sally came into my life and I spent more and more time away in Oxfordshire.

 

My memories of my mother are infused with the scents and lotions that she favoured – from the 4711 eau de cologne she sprinkled on her handkerchiefs to the Creme Simon face cream that kept her skin soft and youthful to the end of her days.

 

But sadly it was on a visit with my brother to a chemists’ shop in Portishead to buy perfume that she tripped on a kerbstone and fell, fracturing her hip and necessitating an ambulance journey to the Bristol Royal Infirmary, where a metal pin was fitted in an emergency operation.

 

The resulting loss of mobility meant that my mother could no longer cope on her own and so to our surprise and relief she agreed to leave Macleod Close and go into a residential care home.

 

She accepted being looked after for the first time in her life rather too completely, expecting to be waited on hand and foot because she was paying for it, which meant her losing much of the independence of spirit which had characterised her previously

 

There was also increasing discomfort from her hip, which her doctor put down to “referred pain” from the operation – a diagnosis which proved less than accurate when the metal pin was discovered poking through her skin.

 

My mother was taken to Frenchay Hospital, Bristol, where after two days of distressing delays she was given a new hip, plus the unwelcome bonus of a hospital bug.

 

When she was eventually discharged, the residential care home decided she needed too much care and we had to find her a place in another Clevedon home, which seemed ideal until the home’s owner, standing in for the matron, decided that my mother’s Zimmer frame should be removed to stop her walking around in the lounge.

 

My mother’s objections led to a tug-of-war and a blow to her face, which prompted a council inquiry and the owner’s decision to close in advance of censure, making the loyal staff redundant and evicting all the residents, including my mother.

 

Her third care home was found in Dial Hill Road, less than half a mile from my home, and there she stayed, mostly in her room as she did not want to be surrounded by “old people.”

 

Unsurprisingly with the Gibbs coincidences it was the same Victorian building in which my friend from my early Bristol newspaper days, Pat Calver, had rented a flat with her then boyfriend, Lyn Loder, who was later, with his wife, Sue, to make my bereaved return to the town bearable and become my bird-watching guru. 

 

Lyn had a shining intelligence, a phenomenal memory and a love of music and puns – for him I coined the phrase, a Witipedia of eclectic knowledge and, with a nod to his sub-aqua hobby, a man of diver’s talents.

 

He was also a gifted artist, like Sue, and a graphic designer and when I gave him a photograph of my parents and a letter bearing my mother’s lipstick kiss he swiftly created the cover which will hopefully one day adorn my book, The Tunnel of Love, and continues to delight me.

 

By the end of April, 2007, my mother was becoming increasingly agitated and distracted, not helped by bouts of deafness and one afternoon I sat by her bed as she lay fitfully dozing and said to her: “Come on, Mum, you’ve done enough – it’s time to let go.”

 

She died peacefully the following morning – May 1.

 

That evening Sally and I had planned to go with my longest-standing friends, Colin Cook and his wife, Blanaid (Blon), to a concert in Cheltenham given by the appropriately French-Canadian Madeleine Peyroux and we knew my mother would not have wanted us to cancel – she always said it was important to remember the person and not “the old dressing gown left behind.”

 

The concert’s stand-out song was Charlie Chaplin’s Smile, which seemed to encapsulate my mother’s philosophy perfectly and we played it at her funeral along with Massenet’s Meditation from Thais – hauntingly-beautiful with its nuances of exotic romance.

 

My mother had her own deeply-felt religion, which she needed no church to validate, and with her sense of fun she would have approved of our choice of the delightfully-styled Rent-a-Rev Chris Horseman to conduct the service at the Weston Crematorium.

 

And it was him I chose to read out the last poem I would ever write for my mother.

 

LA CHERE GRANDMÈRE

 

La chere Grandmère beyond compare

Best mother and true friend

The keeper of the family tales

A fighter to the end

In Edmonton, Alberta

Began her odyssey

And steadfastly through wars and woes

She spanned the century

She loved her man, she loved her boys

She was their firm support

Dispensing words of wisdom

The joys of life she taught

She passed on French to children

She stored computer days

Intelligence shone through her

Ne’er ceasing to amaze

Once she found her Clevedon

There was no need to roam

She gave out tea and biscuits

With welcome to her home

Shopping, washing, ironing

All helped to keep her young

Looking after others’ needs

A heroine unsung

She had her hates, but less than loves

Her goodness plain to see

And sweet she found the uses

Of life’s adversity

We’ll miss you more than telling

Yet we will not despair

Your soul will still be with us -

Au revoir, la chere Grandmère