My mother, always the glamour puss

She was a New Zealand butcher's daughter who clawed her way up the social ladder and married a man who agreed she was a cut above. But as Craig Sherborne, her only child, grew up he had to humour his mother's increasingly dark moods, until dementia finally took hold
Elderly lady
Caring for an elderly relative with dementia can be a challenge. Photograph: Guardian

My mother wants me to marry her. She asks the nurses, "How do I look?" They say, "Beautiful young lady. Quite the stunner." She looks every day of her 85 years, skin turned to crumpled paper; red blue eyes in a baggy pucker. Dementia is never about telling the truth. It makes a virtue of being a liar. She nods off and wakes in different decades. One favourite is the day she married my father. That day was 56 years ago. She practises the art of lipstick on her face, pink figure-of-eights as if kissing. I'm her son, but also his facial likeness. He's dead, but I'm here as if to court her. "Give me my rings and propose," she pleads. Silver and diamonds, mini thistle-head crowns. I bring them in whenever I visit. She accuses nurses of trying to steal them if I leave them on her.

My parents were born in New Zealand. My father was the son of a South Island barber, my mother a common old butcher's daughter. Common, that's how she viewed barbers and butchers. She had too many airs for butcher forebears. When my parents went into business, North Island pubs that turned a nice penny, the word pub was forbidden. It was beneath her. "An hotel" was the proper term. And don't ever call her a barmaid.

As business got better, my mother's airs got grander. My father adored her as a regal catch. A glamour puss with her glistening beehive hair, long nails red and filed like carvings with perfect curved edges. So refined and tasteful with her fussiness over outfits. Not just outfits, but the apricot towels that matched the bathroom carpet: "Apricot, not pink," she'd say. Pink is not apricot any more than auburn hair tint is brown-blond. It was only natural, my father said, that such a woman would have her little quirks, her nerves. I called her Heels as my personal nickname. It was those high shoes she was fond of, a balancing act on little stilts.

In 1972 they sold up in New Zealand and moved to Sydney, Australia. Such stylish rungs of rich-folk there - they know how to promenade at a racecourse. A real city, not a backwater. A sign we're getting ahead in life, that we've come a long way from just butchers and barbers.

They bought a liquor outlet known by the better name of "a cellars". My father owned racehorses and they won their fill. As for me, the only child, I didn't need friends. We were a family of three, and that was politics enough: a mother who thinks she's a cut above all others; a father who indulges her in the fantasy. If she was a cut above others then I was expected to be that way, too. The one benefit was that I could do no wrong. Failed exams, rudeness to teachers, no son of hers could have a flaw. The flaw was always in others. You get outside friends - outside us three - and you'll be let down by them, because they will judge you less kindly. Only we three could depend on each other. This loyalty is the definition of love.

Heels tried to climb the ladder of Sydney's racing social set. The better people she referred to as "hoi polloi". But she only got halfway up. You had to be judges or models, doctors, parliamentarians or tycoons to go the whole way. On good days she'd comfort herself that halfway up is better than no way up at all. At least you've got others below you. She and her South Island beau had come a long way from butchers and barbers.

On bad days she got drunk on cheap Riesling, drew the blinds and cursed life for its black gift of damned failure. We had a green-blue view of the ocean, but what was an ocean compared with her needs? She started to swear more. Words she had always hated as "coarse". The world was full of bastards, pricks and shits now. Her looks were always something she could trade on. Now she cursed swollen ankles, varicose veins.

My father had an idea. Why not sell out of the liquor trade and start afresh in agriculture? That's the kind of industry you feel proud to pass on to your son, wholesome through the generations. A farm back home in fertile New Zealand where, unlike Australia, it regularly rains. There's hardly ever drought. I'll finish my Sydney schooling, but each holiday we can fly to the farm where I'll learn agriculture to secure my financial future.

My mother protested - all those cows and stink and rough-diamond peasants! But he won her over with a plan to build a mansion. A white, mock-Tudor affair where they would be duke and duchess of their domain.

She wasn't what you would call farm material in her flash, Sydney pants suits, gold jewellery, sapphires, thick make-up and sprayed high hair. Her gestures so flamboyant. Her habit of talking loudly with a plum in her mouth. Yet here she was among dowdy, religious, rural folk. Not society types, but close-knit Brethren. Each holiday she waited for an invitation to a "do", a party, a neighbourly tea-and-scones put on by the local ladies to welcome her into their fold. She felt shunned, and she was not a woman to be rejected.

She would stand at the window and say, "I know they're out there. I can feel their eyes on me." She'd get me to check with binoculars if neighbours were spying on us from their own windows. One time I tortured her, the way a teenage boy will: yes, they are out there, I lied. But I made sure I told her I was joking or else one of her episodes would start. "Getting all worked up", my father called them. Fits of temper where she'd tear at her stylish hair, and yell her shit and bastard language till spit bubbled down her chin.

She decided to take the initiative in the welcoming process. She'd dolled us up, champagne in hand, for a visit to our nearest neighbour. The only alcohol they'd ever had in the house was a bottle of beer as drench for cow bloat. The only chat they cared for was about milking. An old lady, the mother-in-law of the house, kept calling from a room up the hall. "Who is it?"

"It's the new people."

"Who?" the old lady kept on calling. When she finally clicked who we were, she called, "That fancy pants tart?" My mother held herself together until she had got out the door, and then let one of her episodes explode. She insisted we sell the shit bastard farm. But the episode passed, and she began to tolerate the farm again. I called the episodes "ghost train rides" as I got used to them. She would return from the journey breezy with cheer, invigorated. She apologised for swearing.

Nobody went to see doctors about such things. Not our kind of people. Our family of three. Besides, she could turn the breeziness on in an instant if the outside world was looking and asking questions. She took the slightest questioning as an attack on her character. My father learned that the best way was to ply her with drink, which he did before midday if necessary. He wasn't trying to kill her, he had just worked out her "medicine". He took pleasure, I think, in having that edge on her, that secret to her soul. He felt important, smarter than any doctor. There was bickering intimacy in the ritual.

Sometimes I'd help by singing my impressions of crooners. I had a good voice, and serenading her made her feel "womanly again". But it was my father who was her best friend. Her two other best friends were cask wine and television. He'd go off to the races and liked to flirt with the ladies. To my knowledge, he took it no further. When he came home he gently administered more medicine.

I left them to their ritual at age 22, getting free of ghost train rides and their kind of airs. I went overseas and seldom saw them for years. A family of two was all my parents had now. The farm was sold because their only son didn't want it. He had his own airs of being a writer. There were no signs of any grandchildren. I had vowed never to have children.

I've had my chances - two marriages - but no leap of faith prevailed. What's it like to see your DNA in your offspring? Your mother's gait, your father's shoulders mixed in with features from your lover's kin? I always shied in case ghost trains would show in them. "Christ, you're just like your grandma," I feared I'd think. "Here we go again. History does repeat." You can't ply kids with drink for a ritual. You ply love and patience, commitment. I feared I wouldn't stick it out, one of those no-hoper fathers who would up and leave at the first tantrum.

My mother has been in a nursing home in Queensland for two years. Before that, she lived in her Gold Coast apartment, surviving on tea and saccharine. I live 2,000 miles away in Melbourne, so I couldn't help to cook for her. She fought letting Meals on Wheels through the apartment's fortress door. The Alzheimer's people got similar treatment. Sometimes she didn't use the toilet and pissed on the floor. When someone stepped in it she said she'd spilt her cuppa. Carers would try to coax her to the shower, but she accused them of wanting to see her nude.

Some days she couldn't work out how to unsnib the fortress lock and chain. The woman downstairs heard her calling, "Mummy! Mummy!" Her husband rang me to complain that she'd be trapped if there were a fire.

One time he tried to fix her television. Nothing wrong with it - she had forgotten to work the clicker. "Press the green button. The green. No, the green," he instructed her, and wrote it down for a prompt card. She called him a bossy bastard shit and he lost his temper and swore back that he'd had a gutful. He rang me to say he was sorry. "You've got to put her away somewhere. It's time. I mean that nicely."

Five o'clock next morning she rode the lift, up, down, up, down, until it stopped going and they found her fallen over on basement level swearing blue murder about the faultiness of lifts. At the hospital she refused to undress or get into bed. She bared her teeth rather than let a doctor touch her. When I arrived, she demanded I take her home and count her rings to make sure none of those mongrel bastards had robbed her fingers.

When I refused to take her home she sat in a chair and hugged her handbag. She cursed me. "You never was worth a pinch of shit. You wouldn't treat me like this if your father was alive. Your father called you his biggest disappointment." She glazed over with a blank look as if failing to recognise me for a second.

She yelled, "You're all talking about me behind my back. You and them out there. What are they saying about me?" I told her to stop embarrassing us both.

That's not the way to handle the matter, said the Alzheimer's nurse. "You are a parent to her now, and she's your child." The nurse said I wasn't to call it a nursing home, this place we were sending her. Call it a hotel. Tell her it's a holiday. A lovely room near the water where she'll be treated like a princess. When that tactic failed and my mother hugged her handbag even tighter, doctors prepared a paste of anti-psychotic drugs and fooled her that it was delicious, soft food. She's been fed that paste daily ever since.

Two years ago the rings hula-hooped her shrunken, stick fingers like the property of someone else's bigger self. Two years here in Island wing have fed her fingers back to normal. "Say you'll never leave me," she flirts and frets. Her Mr Magoo spectacles her see-through veil. "Of course I won't," I lie, and she settles.

She says there's something wrong with the other patients. She calls them "oldies" and "maddies", "lovelies" and "cows". She watches her watch until it ticks her asleep.

She wakes in the 1970s and asks: "How's the hotel going? Done the stocktaking, Bert?"

"Yes," I reply. Bert was my father.

"Good. Mum rang the other day." She's been dead for 30 years. "She's worried about me and wants me home at her place. You take me."


"Good. I'm going to get her to mind my pennies. And I'll get her to make me a scarf."

Today a singing troupe is singing Roll out the Barrel in the lounge where the worst maddies and lovelies have been wheeled. When notes are missed there are no giggles or frowns. A saving grace, because if laughter is numbed so must be suffering. "Do you want me to take your rings off, mother?"


"I've got to go."



"I'll go with you."

"Not today."


"When you get better?"

"I'm better now."

"Maybe next time. Soon."

Soon is the other word for never.

• Since writing this article, Craig Sherborne's mother has died. His memoir, Muck, is published by Old Street, priced £12.99. To order a copy for £11.99, with free UK p&p, go to or call 0330 333 6846

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