Over the years, whenever I have tried to recall my mother in my mind, the image has always been the same. I see her standing in the kitchen wearing an apron with a mop or a casserole dish in her hands.
I remember her being there every day when I came home from school. I would walk in the door and instantly be met by the sound of some old classic coming from the radio and the smell of whatever she had made for dinner cooking in the oven. She was an excellent cook. Cottage pie, apple tarts, cheese cake; she made it all from scratch. It was something I was always proud of when a friend came back from school with me. None of my other friends mum’s cooked, they were all busy, tired looking ladies dressed in crisp suits who worked in offices during the day.
My mother didn’t have a job. “This house is my work, along with everything inside it,” she used to say, looking at me and the oven gloves on her hands, her face hardening a distant expression on it. But she always came back to me and, with a quick smile, she would turn to the oven to check whatever was cooking inside.
She was a tall slim woman and in my eyes the most beautiful of all the mums I’d ever seen. She almost always wore her soft sandy hair pulled back in a clasp. Her clothes were plain but still pretty on her.
She didn’t collect from school. It was next door but one to our house and on the same side of the street so there was no busy roads for me to cross. I got home in about a minute but still it made me feel grown up to see my friends being collected by mothers or child minders. When I got in through the front door and dropped my bag on the floor I would run straight to the kitchen where she would great me with a hug and a biscuit. I would sit and eat whilst she got on with cleaning or the washing up, chatting away about whatever exciting things had happened at school that day. She always listened, answering and asking questions about it as though what I told her happily through a mouth full of crumbs was the most interesting thing in the world. Once I’d finished eating I would fetch my homework or a book and sit with it at the table just so I could still be near her whilst I read.
Sometimes I would just sit there and watch her. I used to love having her all to my self with only the housework to vie for her attention. I loved how she would mop the floor and then gracefully move across to the sink where she would clean my plate and finished by wiping the bubbles from around the sink with a cloth which she had left lying nearby, exactly for that purpose. In between jobs she would lean against the work top and read a page or two from some grown up women’s magazine. There always one lying open so that she could glance at the pictures of beautiful women dressed in beautiful clothes as she walked past from the cooker to the fridge. Sometimes, when she didn't know I was watching, I would see the smile fade away from her face to be replaced instead by a unfathomable look. I never thought much of it, at 8 years old all that mattered was the way she smiled when she looked at me.
At six o'clock my Dad would come home. He’d call hello from the hall, come into the kitchen and kiss us both, me and then my mother, on the cheek before going upstairs to take off his suit.
My time alone with her had ended until the next afternoon.
At night when we had all finished dinner I would go out and play with my friends in the street. I only went out to play after dinner on week days, never before: the afternoons were for my mother and me.
Those afternoons of my childhood were all happy memories for me. When other children gazed continually at the clock on the wall waiting for school to finish so they could go out and play, I longed to be walking through the door and into the kitchen where my mother would be undertaking the never-ending task of keeping the house immaculate.
One day I came home to find the kitchen empty. I remember running from room to room calling for her finding nothing but a tidy bareness in each. I went back to the kitchen and there was an envelope on the table. Her apron hung on the hook behind the kitchen door. The radio was silent and no magazine lay open on the worktop.
There was a cottage pie cooking in the oven. It was the last meal she made us.
