Judith Johnson
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Remembering Mam

16/11/2013

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I have lost a number of loved ones, among them three of my brothers and my father, and most recently, my mother-in-law. In each case, the things that bothered me about that person, their shortcomings as I perceived them, the small injuries they had done me, were, on their death, very shortly put into a different perspective: the long view of a life once it has ended. Any grievances rose to the top of my feelings about them and floated away – I could see these old judgements for what they were – nothing like as important as I had held them in my mind. What was left was the fondness in my heart for people, the essence of who they truly were. 
 
I first met Mam when I was nineteen. She and Dad, on hearing that Martin’s new girlfriend would be spending Christmas on her own in London, invited me down to their home near Swansea. Dad was there at Swansea Bus Station to meet us, looking smart and shoe-polished, warmly shaking me by the hand and saying “Welcome to Wales!” Mam and Nan waited back at the bungalow with a hot meal. Mam cared for Nan, her elderly mother, until Nan's death.
 
Mam became  like a second mother to me – my own Mum being largely absent in those years, living in Spain. Mam taught me how to wrap my baby son Welsh shawl style so that I could carry him round for as long as I needed to, swaddled against my heartbeat, and leaving my right arm free. She showed me so many small things, which gathered together, comprised what I had not been taught in my own home. And she was a wonderful grandmother to our boy. She came up to London to help out when he was born, she was always willing and ready to assist when needed. I had an ectopic pregnancy only weeks before we moved to Sussex, and she travelled up on the train to fetch our five year old son down to Wales while my husband packed up the house and finished the tasks involved in closing down my theatrical agency. When my son had febrile convulsions in the second year of his life, she was a calm and reassuring presence at my side. She herself suffered from some OCD issues, yet in spite of this, she was in many ways a sure and steady person to have with you in frightening times. She and Dad were generous, though they had never had much money – unasked for, they would pay for new shoes for our son, coal in a hard winter when interest rates had soared, took us for a week’s holiday to their beloved Blackpool when funds were low. And they were always kind and scrupulously fair in their gifts to all their grandchildren. 
  
We had many wonderful summer holidays in Wales – Mam would pack up sandwiches, crisps, fruit and a bottle of pop for our outings to the beach on the Gower, or trips to Carreg Cennen etc. We never came back up the M4 towards home without provisions for the journey. And Mam faithfully sent cards for birthdays, tests passed, anniversaries etc. 
 
There’s an old story that the Welsh people is the lost tribe of Israel, and Mam certainly had some things in common with the archetypal Jewish Mama: her two sons were the apples of her eyes, and could do very little wrong, and naturally enough, that rankles with daughters-in-law from time to time! We had a joke that if Martin or my son asked for a special dish, whatever hour it was, e.g. gammon, egg and chips at midnight, if remotely possible Mam would happily oblige, whereas if I asked for muesli for breakfast when toast was the norm, I
was blinkin’ awkward!
 
We got on each other’s nerves from time to time – we both had quite strong wills – and we had one or two quarrels, but we got through them.
 
Like I said ,Mam suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder. She used to say that I couldn’t know how bad “her nerves” were, and although I sympathised, as a young woman I also felt annoyed by her odd ways – always having to check a certain number of times that the gas cooker was off, that the door was locked, every time she left the house. It’s only with hindsight and experience of my own ‘funny’ ways, with years of struggling with my own character defects and bad habits, that I see how hard it is to overcome these things.
 
But Mam was also very brave. After Dad died, she worked hard to get out and about on her own, join classes, take the bus to Llanelli, Swansea, Aberdare and Carmarthen to eat in cafes, and do her shopping with her little rucksack. And she had some great qualities – she was patient, caring, constant in her affections and loving in very practical ways. 
 
After my father-in-law's death in 1995, Mam missed him dreadfully – she used to sigh and say “Oh Judy, I miss that man”. They met when she was fourteen and she said she could never think of being with another man. Towards the end of her life, when Mam suffered more and more with loneliness, she would always end telephone conversations with the philosophical words “Dyna fordd y mae” (that’s how it is).
 
When Mam was dying in hospital, my son and I drove down to Wales to see her. We sat with her and held her hands, stroked her forehead, gave her kisses. We had no idea how long it would be before her heart gave out, and regretfully I returned to work in Kent while Martin stayed with her. He sat alone with her through her last night, only two days later, and rang the next morning to tell me that she had just passed away. On Wednesday it will be a  year since she died. I miss her.



Loving and cherishing those around us is a very worthwhile practice to
aim for. As someone once wrote: “Any good that I can do, or any kindness that I
can show to any fellow-creature, let me do it now. Let me not defer it or
neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again”.


 

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Berlin in October

2/11/2013

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PicturePretzel seller in the Pariserplatz, Brandenburg Gate
Last week I popped over to Berlin for a quick few days which included escorting a school group for the day. This was my third trip – each of them a flying visit –
but as a history and people buff, I always strive to see as much as I can of this amazing place. Like all cities, you could spend weeks in the German capital, and not discover all there is to see, but physically being there encourages me to read more about its history. I am an avid history reader, but for me the role of fiction and memoir is equally important in learning about a place or time: Judith Kerr’s wonderful When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit illuminates what it was like to be a child in Berlin and fleeing from oppression, Paul Dowswell’s excellent Auslander is a great read for teenagers studying Nazi Berlin. I can recommend two witness accounts by non-natives about Berlin during the war years, Christabel Bielenberg’s The Past is Myself and Marie Vassiltchikov's Berlin Diaries, 1940-1945. And last but not least, there is Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus, based on his father’s experience of the Holocaust.
 
I can’t speak too highly of the tour guides I’ve encountered in Berlin: at the Wannsee Villa, Topography of Terror, German History Museum etc. They are clearly dedicated to presenting 20th century German history for visiting schoolchildren with as much clarity as possible. So what did I see this time? We had a guided tour of the Olympic Stadium in Charlottenburg. The ideology behind the building of the Stadium was explained: how Hitler rejected the glass structure first suggested and brought in Speer to devise the monumental, classical final version; how the stand where Hitler stood to view the games was cut out and removed to avoid it becoming a  neo-Nazi shrine; how the 1936 Olympics were used as a massive, and mostly successful, propaganda campaign for Hitler’s regime (nothing changed there then?); how the signs saying No Dogs, No Jews were put back up as soon as the athletes and journalists had gone home. Recently a new modern roof has been built, and Berlin’s much-loved football club Hertha BSC commissioned a special blue running-track in their colours. The surrounding sports fields, once parking-place for the British Army’s tanks when this area was part of the British Occupation Sector after the War, have now been returned to Berlin residents for their recreational use.
 
On Saturday evening I went to see a German friend in an amateur production of Agatha Christie’s The Unexpected Guest. I followed quite a lot of the play in my now less than fluent German, and just managed to work out who-dun-it in the last few minutes! The venue was a beautifully restored 19th century covered market hall – the Arminiusmarkthalle – in Moabit, and the evening was enlivened by a small diamante t-shirted miniature dog in the company of a large adoring lady, who barked at crucial moments (dog not the lady!), and a drunken man who laughed and commented very loudly throughout the first half. The man was gently persuaded to leave at the interval, the dog stayed for the denouement! 
 
On Sunday we took the school group round some of the WW2/Cold War sights, using Berlin’s superb public transport system and shanks’ pony. We paused in front of the Reichstag for a quick revision of Hitler’s take-over of power and then on to a circuit of the Brandenburg Gate, the Jewish Memorial, the old Nazi Ministry building in Wilhelmstrasse, Checkpoint Charlie, Alexanderplatz, the Dom and the German History Museum. The students had visited Bergen/Belsen en route to Berlin, and the little museum underneath the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was a good counterpoint, an excellent visit for people of all ages, but particularly for schoolchildren. With its quiet, darkened rooms, illuminated by large lit facsimiles of postcards and letters, its photographic displays taking you right into the centre of some of the personal family stories behind the terrible massive numbers and facts of the Final Solution, and the room filled  only with benches, where the short facts of lives of those murdered in the Holocaust are spoken by an aonymous recorded voice, one after the other (apparently it would take over 6 years to read them all), this is a place that goes right to the heart. I had to wipe a tear from my eye, and one of the teachers had a similar experience when he read a letter written from a young man to his father en route to Auschwitz.

There is currently a fantastic display on the street corner by Checkpoint Charlie of the background to the Cold War and fall of the Berlin Wall. Particularly touching was a photograph of the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich playing for passers-by following the fall of the Wall in 1989.

It would take too long to list everything seen even on this very short visit to Berlin. If you have an interest in history, in Germany, in people, in architecture, in politics, in art, in film or music – you would not be disappointed here. I met a couple on the train to Schoenefeld Airport who’d travelled to see their favourite rock band, The Editors, in Amsterdam and then
Berlin. Their train journey from Amsterdam had been interrupted for 8 hours by a WW2 unexploded German bomb under the line. Not an uncommon experience even now seventy years on apparently in an area of Holland that was severely blitzed. The two young women catching up on their sleep in the seats next to me on the flight back had gone to Berlin for the ‘clubbing’.
 
I hope to visit many more times, and with a bit of luck and a fair following wind, the Berlin Marathon would be a nice cherry on the top of my running ambitions! 
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    Lifelong bookworm, love writing too. Have been a theatrical agent and reflexologist among other things, attitude to life summed up by Walt Whitman's MIRACLES.

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