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The cruel stigma that haunted my mother and why I only told her I loved



Mary Ethel Bragg 1917-2012: I thought the world of her. There was only once in my life that I remember telling her that I loved her. It was a word she never used to me.

It was not the way we talked then, there, after the war, in a small stoic northern town wounded by a world conflict, exhausted but undefeated.

Now that she is dead, I sometimes feel I am drowning in affection and admiration for her.




Lord Bragg has told how he loved his mother, but could only tell her so when she was on her deathbed

It is still so difficult to use the word ‘love’. Why?

Maybe what was unspoken was more powerful to both of us, too valuable to squander in speech, too deep for words.

I got to know her best when she lay dying.


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It took four or five years, the stealthy relentless tide of dementia and the Alzheimer’s gradually overwhelming her mind.

And as I sat with her in that small hospital room, just the two of us, trying to arrest that terrible, frightening erosion of memory and personality, I got to know her better than ever before.

So even there, even in those final years, months, days, hours, she gave to me the gifts she had. As she had always done. I see that now.

Hers was a life that could so easily and excusably have sulked into self-pity or shame or complaint. It was none of those.




His mother, Mary Ethel, was born illegitimately, and carried that burden while she grew up

Even when she was in her last year, aged 95, and was asked by anyone ‘How are you?’ she would say ‘No complaints’. And then she would smile or laugh.

I can see that smile as I write this. It’s still so alive to me. I don’t think it will ever go away.

I can hear her laughter, too. She made me laugh more than anyone I have ever met, not least by the pleasure she took in cutting me off at the knees with a tough dry wit.

Compliments were a foreign country. I had never to get ‘above myself’ or, worst of all, ‘lose myself’.

That was part of the character of the times, but more than that it was the way to pass on her armour to me.

That attitude must have been formed at least partly from the cruel facts of her own background.

I remember three or four times in my childhood I was scrubbed up for a meeting with an elderly woman whom I did not know. I was never told who she was.

My mother ushered us into the largely unused parlour. She would then leave us. I would talk with this stranger for half an hour or so. I think I recall her kindly face, her hair parted down the middle in an old-fashioned way, but most of all the ten shilling note she gave me in an envelope when she left.


Melvyn remembers visiting a mysterious old lady as a child, and only learned that she was his biological grandmother when he grew older

When I was in my late teens, I learned, from my mother, that this was ‘Belle, her real mother’.

It was said, I’m sure, with embarrassment but with the determination that ‘it was about time I knew’. It was said once and I never referred to it again. Nor did my mother.

Such reticence over such a long period about such a subject might be unnecessary these days. But the past was different, and so were we. She thought that I had to be protected: and my mother, too, needed to sustain her secret.

For only now, now that she is dead, has the force of what she had to endure hit me.

And only now can I write about it.

She was born illegitimately in 1917. To be illegitimate then was to be ‘a bastard’, a stigma, almost a crime, a scar visible to so many who knew ‘the truth’ in that little gossiping town. The child stayed there. Belle the mother had to leave. My mother was fostered.

From one or two remarks, I think she herself learned of her illegitimacy when she was about eleven. It must have threatened to cripple her. ‘Everybody knew.’ Her foster mother was not her real mother, those called cousins and aunts and uncles not her real relations, and ‘everybody knew’. Who was she?

My mother became the fictional Mary in my new novel, Grace And Mary; Belle, her mother, became Grace. I finished the novel just before my mother’s death last year.

Belle, to whom I had given so little thought over so many years, began to appear in my mind as my mother’s illness took its first unmistakable grip.

What sort of life had the ‘good old days’ given her? Cut out of her child’s life. Cut off from her background. Hounded out of the town. An occasional 20-minute visit engineered by a daughter who had been parcelled out and grown up without her and, perhaps, feared in those days to engage with, let alone embrace the curse of the past.

My mother reacted not by running or hiding but by plunging fearlessly into the heart of the town and thus into the heart of knowingness.

What nerve it took to become, as she became, totally one of the crowd, rubbing shoulders with ‘everybody who knew’.

She was one of the crowd of girls who worked in the clothing factory making buttonholes from 14 until she was married and therefore obliged to leave.

She joined the cycling club, the Guides, went to every social and dance there was, and never missed going to the church to see a Saturday wedding. She cleaned houses, delivered post — she wholly immersed herself in the town, which knew that she was illegitimate.

She forged a spectacularly successful and rich ordinary life. On her own terms. ‘No complaints.’

It is so difficult now, in an age of no shame, and crocodile tears, fully to appreciate the savagery and sting of that word ‘bastard’.




He remembers his mother fondly from his childhood, despite never having said I love you to her at the time

Now often used as a jokey put-down, then it was a whipping, the use of a word as a punishment, designed to cause as much harm as a person could bear.

And she was not ‘hard’, she was never ‘hard’. But she was, indisputably, strong and resolute.

She loved singing. To near the very end she sang, we sang together, and the words and the melody came faultlessly through the otherwise wreckage of memory, the old songs.

And the town, Wigton, in Cumbria, became her book. Whenever I went out to shop or play or just to school, the first question she asked when I got back was ‘Who did you see up street?’

I was one of the map-makers of her world. She kept watch over the town which knew her secret.
The sins of the mother would not be visited on her child.

I was an only child, born in October 1939 just after the war started. When my father came back, they decided not to have more children. Only once, I tried to ask her why not and she shut me out with a cloud of vagueness.


In the war I was with her everywhere. We slept in the same bedroom, and when I was a child, in the same bed. I went with her strapped onto the pillion of her bike, to the houses she cleaned. And to the pea-and-pie suppers, the ‘outings’.

My mother never drank. Well, a small glass of sweet sherry at Christmas. Not a great recommendation for the pub landlady she became when I was eight.


Melvyn Bragg when he was three years old. He cared for his mother during her long death

She could be implacable. When young men in that small northern town were about to get married and came into the pub (she knew all of them and their mothers and their fathers) they would be told they should not waste their money on drink but save up. Sheepishly they would leave the pub.

‘They’ll just go up to the Lion And Lamb,’ Dad would say. It made no difference.

We went on holidays together — my mother and myself — at Butlins, in Ayr, or at Morecambe. Dad never came along. He wouldn’t trust the pub to anyone else.

In Morecambe we stayed in a boarding house, our room so small and left so beautifully clean and tidy every morning by my mother that the tip she always insisted on tucking under the pillowcase on our last day should have come in the other direction.

And those holidays were amazing because they were in the realm of ordinary pleasure. We were part of the mass, the generality, free, the people of our country strolling along the seaside free as birds, on holiday, like everybody else.

To be ‘like everybody else’ was what she wanted more than anything.

So to the onset of her illness.

One morning when we were in church, she fainted and appeared to be dead. A young woman vet clambered over the pews and found there was still a pulse in her neck. By some act of God, there was an ambulance nearby and it arrived in five minutes to take her to hospital.

After that all seemed well. But then there was her wandering around the familiar alleyways in puzzlement, the broken ankle, the hospital, the transfer to the nursing home by the sea, the last years, the final well of life, the constant, on my part, but repressed welling of tears.

She would not have liked to see that.

The time came when she had to go into a nursing home.


It was a few miles from Wigton, in the seaside town of Silloth. She knew Silloth. For many years the big treat had been to go to Silloth on a day-trip. I’d been with her on many a Sunday afternoon in summer, taken along to shiver on the sands of the west beach.

The nursing home stands behind that beach and I was very lucky indeed that there was such a wonderful warm and efficient place in a town she knew.

It is 300 miles from London, where I live, but she was near her friends and in the comfort of so many who knew her. Despite the distance, I could visit her regularly.

So what did we do?


In the early years we could go out. Down the coast to look at the sea and sometimes eat an ice cream. Inland at daffodil time to see the armies of daffodils along the roadside, in the byways, on river banks, down cart tracks, in woods. And see friends for tea, be in a ‘real’ house and once or twice risk a longer trip into the Lakes.

But increasingly it was the Home itself — the sitting room with the television, a little walk around the building, Singin’ In The Rain on DVD and a singalong, and my attempts to retrieve her memory. In this way I thought I could slow down her drift away from her identity.




Everyone in the small town of Wigton knew that Ethel was illegitimate, but despite this she became as involved in the community as possible

In the novel this is a strong part of the story. In reality, she never mentioned Grace/Belle and nor did I, but I wanted to run the two women together through the 20th century and celebrate and honour both of them.

Sometimes I would go up there and find her asleep and so I’d sit and watch over her. Perhaps read the Cumberland News I had brought for her. Even in her 90s she could read the smallest print without glasses.

Mostly I would just look at her and take comfort in the steady breathing.

Did I ever want her to die? Never. Not once. I wish she were living now even as she was on those sleeping days, in the world, in no pain.

Or was she in pain? Did she dream? Or was her sleep dreamless? As the sleep of children is supposed to be. Or was it something darker? And was there locked inside her, always, that fearful hurt that she could not and would not ever express? And where was she going to?

Perhaps I’ve never thought as much and as hard about fundamental questions as when I knew I was about to lose my mother.

To the very end it remained inconceivable to me that she could die. Right up to her final raw gasps for breath. It seemed that the weaker she got the stronger my feelings for her grew.

I had never spent so much time alone with her since I’d been a small child. As if all my life I had wanted to give myself permission to feel as deeply and closely as I now did.

I spoon-fed her as she had spoon-fed me, her child; I read to her as she had read to me. I tucked the blanket around her thin shoulders to make sure she kept warm, as she had surely done for me. I pecked her on her sleepy cheek ‘good night’ as she might have done to me.

And as the end came, I sat beside her bed through the night and watched over her.

I could not get enough of seeing her. Her face was worn now and so tired but still, I dare to say, had the lineaments of her loveliness.

I wanted her to be there for ever, as long as there was a pulse.

It was on what proved to be her last day that I was told she was very near the end.

Sleeping deeply. For two nights I’d slept in a chair in her room. I slept lightly and I would wake up whenever the rhythm and sound of her breathing changed.

I had heard or read that the last sense to go was sound and that however far away she seemed to be, she would still be able to hear a voice.

Early on that morning, just after dawn, I pulled my chair as close as possible to her bed and whispered, at last without embarrassment: ‘I love you very much, you know.’

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