Counting My Chickens

My extraordinary mother, the writer Elspeth Barker, died in April 2022. She left this life on a balmy, sunny afternoon, just as if she was wandering down through her garden to the river with her dogs, pausing to stare at primroses and notice shades of green brightening on the canopied branches of her beloved beech tree. Her last days had been beatific in some ways as we, her five children, gathered around her and talked to her about some of her favourite things – picnics, beech trees, bluebells, jackdaws, poems, books. We read her Moorland Mousie, which had been a treasured book of her childhood, and felt the incredible privilege of walking beside her on her last journey.

Elspeth had mused on this herself, in an essay in her collection Dog Days (2012):

So September wanes and the early evenings are elegiac, still and scented with phlox and the straight plume of smoke going up from the bonfire. The dark shadow is there. I do not think Hannibal will see another summer . . . He walks towards me down the green slope with the low sun behind him; he is limned in golden light and his eyes are shining. He is a paradisiacal Labrador. I would not myself mind dying if I was certain we might meet like this, in a place where Labradors swim with seals and angels.

Walks with my mother were always full of wonder, and this last walk into the unknown, though it was not physical, was as wonderful as it was sorrowful. We were bewildered by the loss of her, the ways in which she was unique and funny and vivid and inimitable. There were always, with her, conversations to take up again, questions to mull over. There still are. That’s the way it is when someone dies. I wanted to continue the kind of conversations I had been having with her all my life. What do you think of Circe by Madeline Miller? How about Emily Wilson’s Iliad? Do you love that everyone seems obsessed with classical literature now? Did you really sleep through your finals? Why Labradors and not pugs? What was it like moving to rural Norfolk when you were 23, and having five children? How many times did you get engaged? Who were they all? What’s the name of the rose outside your bedroom window? Did you like your funeral? Where are you now? Is Dad (my father, the poet George Barker) there? All these questions crowded in and there were no answers. Silence. Forever. Or so I thought. But I had forgotten something. The act of writing transcends time. My mother was all the things a mother can be, and she was also a writer. She had enjoyed literary acclaim for her sole novel O Caledonia both when it was first published in 1991, and again when it was reissued just a year before her death – this time with a glowing introduction by the novelist Maggie O’Farrell. The appetite for her writing reached new enthusiasts second time round and Janet, the misunderstood heroine of this remarkable, funny, esoteric coming-of-age novel, gained a fan club. O Caledonia hit the New York Times bestseller list on its launch there in the spring of 2022. This all happened in a parallel universe to the one where we were having a funeral, saying goodbye to our childhood home and dealing with the bank manager, the vet and the lugubrious funeral directors. Looking back now, it appears that there was never actually a moment where the conversation went quiet with Mum. In sorting through her papers and books, stumbling across poignant shopping lists – ‘mince, onions, dog food, vino’, or variants on this theme – and hilarious long-ago letters to her best friend Kate from university, we found more of her. It was as if she whispered in my ear, ‘Psst, listen! I’m here.’ Twenty years ago, our mother had been encouraged by the Suffolk-based publisher Peter Tolhurst to put together that collection of essays, Dog Days, and they were published by his press, Black Dog Books. Tolhurst also published an edition of O Caledonia with some short stories she had written. Both these books had quietly gone out of print. I found my copy of Dog Days and let the book fall open at random. This is what I read:

In my own years of motherhood, a condition from which I now wish to abdicate, I too became the custodian, or should I say guardian, of an Aga. I concluded then that the Aga of my early life had been a household god of extreme temperament; but time had passed and doubtless things had improved. Wasn’t that what happened with time? I can only suppose I thought this because I was bemused by the enchanted mirage of one’s children’s early infancy; five of them, so various, so beautiful, so new. I made rice puddings and Stone Age loaves. I even made porridge. I thought I was an Earth Mother. The baby goat jumped on the hot plate and scorched his tiny hooves. My husband remarked that Hell would smell like this. Heedless, I brought dying kittens to life in the bottom oven, and hatched chicks. Only once did the Aga play me false. A downward swoop in temperature produced a clutch of stillborn Marans. ‘Marans glacés,’ observed the family wit.

Laughing and crying, I read on. Everything was there, everything that mattered to her was touched upon in essays about gardens, pigs, driving, Latin grammar, dogs and the malevolent Aga. Her voice, her glee for the anthropomorphism of animals and objects, her wit and her wisdom all sang from the pages. The acceptance of life in all its frustrations, fractures and occasional fabulousness was examined in Mum’s familiar tone. She was eccentric and clever and took no prisoners. Writing and being published has been my profession since the age of 20. But nothing in my career has been more profound than the experience, as a newly bereaved daughter, of sitting down the summer after she died to put my brilliant mother’s writing together in a collection and introduce it to a new audience. The circular nature of existence, and the woven shapes we make of it, showed themselves to me many years before when my father was ill and not far from dying. Then, my children were tiny and I felt that something was complete. In my first book, Come and Tell Me Some Lies (1994), an autobiographical novel, I wrote that ‘I, not he, now drove a big car through the country lanes, and he not I sat in the back seat making up nonsense songs which we sang together.’ Another circle appeared now, in the months after my mother’s death, as I immersed myself in her wit, and wandered with her through idiosyncrasies that I had forgotten, working out what themes and ideas in her essays could be woven into patterns, and how they could make a narrative. I realized I had done this before, when I was 20 and a colleague at the magazine where I worked had asked if I knew anyone who could write about hens. I knew that no one could write better about hens than my mother. Elspeth wrote about this experience in ‘From the Henhouse’, the essay which opens the new collection:

My oldest daughter, now working on a glossy magazine, telephoned. ‘Mum, you know the way you’re always going on about your hens. We’re doing an Easter feature with hen things. Write something.’ ‘I will, I will,’ I cried, but did nothing. She telephoned again. ‘I’m coming home this weekend. Have you done your hen piece?’ ‘Yes,’ said I. Driven by panic I wrote three thousand words overnight on the glories of hens I had known. The glossy wanted a hundred rather different words to thread around photographs of eggcups and hen tea-cosies. I sent my article to The Observer, who took it and printed it, and asked me for another. Then came a magic, dream letter from the fiction editor of a publishing house. She had read my pieces; was I thinking of writing a book? If so, she would be very interested. I could not believe this letter’s existence; I stood washing clothes at the sink and kept looking back at it on the kitchen table. At one point, in fact, it disappeared and I thought I had in- deed been dreaming; it turned up again among my son’s car documents.

Writing is essentially solitary, but in working on this collection, entitled Notes from the Henhouse, I often felt as though I was in collaboration with my mother. I wrote an introduction when the editing was done. It was hard because it was another goodbye. When it was written, I would be done, the book would be finished. The final full stop placed, the words the end the last thing to be written. Or so I thought. But I had forgotten something. I had forgotten how writing, like memory, plays games with time. I had forgotten how remembering and reliving brings more memories, and more moments lived. More time. Walking alongside Mum to bring her writing to the world again took me back to the life she and my father made for us. I began writing my own paragraphs and pages about that existence. This time I have conversations with both of them to guide me. I have his poetry, I have her prose. I have my life and their lives, and the life of our family. Once again I find the end is not written, there is more to say. So I am saying it in another book, but here, and for now, my mother must have the last word.

I find death absolutely unacceptable and I cannot come to terms with it . . . Where have they gone? As I see it, there are only two possibilities: that the spirit exists in some other plane of being, with no relation to our living selves, or that the spirit exists on some level that is still connected with us. Naturally I prefer the second idea. To say I believe it is too strong a statement; but I wish to live as though it were so.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 83 © Raffaella Barker 2024