0427 We'D Never Have Guessed..

There’s so much we never know, would never have guessed, never asked, and now regret that we never asked, about what it was like for ‘them’ before we were born… I can’t remember exactly how old I was – eight? - when I knew that Mum couldn’t possibly have been my mother. She was so innocent, so simple, yet so quietly organised, so sensible, so unlike me - who was unlike Dad anyway, didn’t he remind me - that she could never have had.. sex? .. with Dad.. It must have been my ‘naughty’ aunt, who had me, ‘father unknown’ but conveniently adopted by my ‘parents’ - the one who had an eye for the boys and boy did the boys have eyes for her, who asked every evening if she could go out and play with them, while Dorothy did her homework, learned double-entry book-keeping by post, did part-time secretarial work, became the first female bank-clerk in the town, and still made the cakes and scones to sell in the terrace front-window shop before she went to morning school or work, while Grandad wheezed in the armchair, sick from the cotton mill.. It was only when my mother, in her sixties, took me on her annual holiday once to see my aunt (?) Mary, and the two played one-up all the time, that I realised the truth of this familiar family play of life: Two daughters, fighting for their father’s love, picking each their role: the one, doing all the right things to win his love; the other, forever testing his love with naughtiness; (she never married, just played the Magdalene) : he died, and yet they carried on their fight; Grandma was some bystander, I guess. And of course, Grandad loved his ‘scamp’ so much – she, the same twinkle in his eye that he had when he courted Grandma.. Who won, in the end? Neither? Both? After I saw that, it didn’t seem to matter so much which of them was really my mother. It would have been fair if they could, somehow, have shared me; and maybe, I them.