34 • The Sunday Times MagazineM
y mother died suddenly
at the beginning of spring.
It happened six days after
her 73rd birthday and the
day before my older son
celebrated turning five.
The last time we saw her
she walked across the car
park wearing a crown for
him to wear on the big
day. It was also a few
months before the publication of my first
book. The two things would have been
unrelated except that the book is a
memoir about motherhood and my
experience of postnatal depression in the
months after my second son was born.
So they have inevitably intertwined; she
wasn’t just my mother, she was my template
for motherhood.
For a long time I didn’t plan to have
children of my own. I just didn’t yearn for
them the way some people seem to. I’d
stumbled into a career in journalism in
my twenties and clicked with it straight
away. It gave me intellectual satisfaction
and enough money to live on. What more
could there be in life? I said this to my
mother whenever the subject came up.
She paid little attention until I reached my
late twenties and it dawned on her that
I might actually mean it. Then began her
intense and prolonged campaign to get me
to change my mind.
My mother was very English in many
ways, but in her approach to motherhood
she was not. She had come to this country
aged 14 from Sri Lanka or, as it was then,
Ceylon. When it came to boundaries,
privacy and interference in the lives of her
children, her approach was straight from
the Asian mother’s lexicon. She loved
us abundantly, worried incessantly and
meddled at will. Subtlety did not feature
at all. I adored her, we all did, but this
wasn’t an enjoyable time for either of us.
I remember emotional guilt trips and
frequent evocations of my lonely, barren
future. She called me on Friday nights only
to berate me for picking up the phone when
I ought to be out searching for a mate. One
year she gave me a top with Chinese script
down one side. “What does it mean?” my
brother-in-law asked. She glared at me. “It’s
an ancient Chinese proverb. It means ‘Find
man, have baby’, ” she said.
My girlfriends, most of whom were
already settling down, found the whole
thing hilarious. It even spawned a game:
think of the most unsuitable partner you
could muster and then imagine how my
mother would spin him as a catch. Bernie
Ecclestone? Virile. Quasimodo? What a
magnificent hump.
Motherhood had always been a big part
of her identity. She was the eldest of six
children and had first assumed the role
of mini-matriarch when her own mother
— my grandmother — was shepherdingthe family from Sri Lanka via Pakistan and,
eventually, to the new town of Basildon.
She liked it — the bossy parts in particular.
She also had an affinity with children.
She knew how to communicate with them,
how to bring their world to life. She was
also at her happiest when behaving like
one. When I look back at the fabric of my
childhood, the practical jokes she played on
us are one of the most consistent threads.
She used to hide at bus stops as we walked
down the street and then leap out again,
shaking with mirth. She’d drop ice cubes
down my T-shirt on hot days and conceal
herself behind me in order to throw nuts or
other small missiles at my head. She found
herself hilarious and, however grudgingly,
it was hard not to agree.
She also knew first-hand how precious
life could be. I am the youngest of my
parents’ four children. They met at
university and their first, a little girl called
Leila, followed a few years later. She was
born with severe heart problems and died
when she was six years old, two and a half
years before I was born. I know now how
remarkably my parents coped with Leila’s
death, but I think on some level I sensed it
growing up as well. They never hid her from
us or made us tiptoe around their grief.
Mum in particular encouraged me to ask
questions and I think she liked telling me
her stories. Leila remained a part of our
family history. There was always a picture of
her on the mantelpiece when I was growing
up. There still is today.
I’d like to say that knowing what Mum
had been through made me more forgiving
of her when she began to fret that my
ovaries were in decline, but it didn’t. I found
the pressure overwhelming. It seemed
ridiculous to me that she couldn’t see that
there might be another way of living; thatAbove: Rosie’s
mother, Cheryl, with
her daughter Leila.
Below: Leila died of
heart problems at
the age of six, before
Rosie was bornMY MOTHER WOULD
CALL ME AT NIGHT
ONLY TO BERATE ME
FOR PICKING UP THE
PHONE WHEN I
SHOULD HAVE BEEN
OUT FINDING A MATE