Things My Mother Never Told Me by Blake Morrison

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Immediately and throughout, Blake Morrison conveys a mother’s courage, silence and love and I'm immersed in a life uncannily like my own.

Mothers often fail to mention the parts they play, leaving their children to piece together the truth. Letters from Morrison’s father (a Medical Officer stationed in Iceland and The Azores for the RAF in WWII) to a girlfriend complain of pointlessly wasted time (“oodled around”), tinkering with an old wireless, going to the beach, getting drunk, playing sport, and treating his whoring colleagues for VD. Evidently, this girlfriend contributes more to the war effort as a surgeon delivering babies and saving lives at home. The couple dreams of an end to their separation. The father (Protestant) promises this (Catholic) Irish girlfriend they will marry despite their parents’ total intolerance for the other religion.

Soon after the war ends, they are married in what the reader may feel is a confusion of love-sickness, fate, rebellion, duty and idealism. The author is born to them, and looking back on this childhood, finds himself on some level baffled. In this home, the father, archetypal, rules the roost and the mother, an archetypal “other half”, is forced to compromise far more than her religion. Father, a practical, extravert keen on fresh air and beer, works as a country GP, urging his wife to give up doctoring to focus on house-keeping. He acts “entitled”, as a speeding drunken driver and in a clandestine and denied extra-marital affair: he transgresses with impunity. Mother, a quiet and determined introvert, continues with little support to care for the family and work as a GP (supporting her husband’s practice) while suffering frequent bouts of migraine and ill-health.

We find the mother surrendered in the conflict, giving up her identity to accept the injustice and inequality. With his grudging ambivalence towards the father, we sense the author's love for the mother shining through: he took his mother’s side. Much like Morrison’s, my mother, also a thoughtful introvert GP, saw more action at home when she drove an ambulance in the blitz than my father who stewed pointlessly in Malta watching romantic films after failing his pilot training. A difference was the extent of my father’s blind and rebellious idealism that in the end defeated my mother’s capacity to hold us together.

The details may vary but a memoir as good as this tells the truth of a human heart to strengthen the reader in the certain knowledge they are not alone.



View all my reviews