Yes Mum, I’m still all right and still my mother’s daughter

Even at my age, my 88-year-old mother still asks if I’m all right.

This morning, with me in Paris, France, and my mother in Adelaide, Australia, in a nursing home, with my sister Karin at her side, we had a Skype call.

Expecting the call to be ‘a few minutes’ – her call to her brother in Berlin was 10 minutes – Mum surprised us by talking and talking and talking. For one hour and 17 minutes. She would have kept on talking, but she was called for dinner, even though she had a muffin while talking to me.

The highlight for me was when she said to my sister Karin: ‘she looks very beautiful, doesn’t she?’ Aww, thanks Mum.

I look more like my father than my mother, I think – but, even so, when I was visiting rural England in 1986, to the small village where I was born, I walked up a farm drive-way to look for Mr. Mountford. I was born in the cottage in the farm. To the man fixing a tractor, who was surprised to see a woman walking towards the cottage – it was an unannounced visit, just to see if I could find the farm – I asked, ‘Is this the Mountford farm?’

He looked at me, put his hands on his hips, and said, ‘You must be Chris’s daughter.’ It was Mr. Mountford’s son, and I was two years old when he last saw me – and he would have been younger than eight years old. My parents travelled to Australia, by ship, on the British ‘assisted-passage’ ticket when I was two. I guess if he can recognize me, I must be my mother’s daughter.

I'm second from the left, looking at my mother. Number 2, 3, 4 and 6 from the left are Mum's - the others are a cousin and a friend from next door. Number 6 from the left is my sister Karin - on roller skates!

MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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