My mother has died at the age of 60. In the end it was a peaceful end to a spectacular life. She died in the morning as the dawn was breaking.
A beam of light shone briefly through the window before being swallowed up by a thick blanket of cloud. For those few moments we opened the blinds to let the sun fall on her one last time—a sun worshipper to the end.
Then the rain began to pour again, a deluge that had lasted for days.
A shiver in my bones just thinking about the weather. Those were words from one of her favourite songs. She loved the sun and warmth and though she was a white woman she was almost always brown. In the last few years I’d taken to texting her almost daily about the weather, and to tell her I loved her.
The day she told us she had cancer I was in the hills looking down on Castara when a magnificent rainbow arced across the sea. In Paris, a week before Christmas, on the rooftop of Printemps department store when my sister called to say mom was seriously unwell, a sunburst seared through a thin crack in the dark rainclouds, bathing a small section of the city in white light while the rest remained darkened.
I was with her on the night she died, bringing her what she asked for in her polite, reluctant way. She never wanted to be looked after, so when she asked you for something you knew she really needed it.
It felt good to bring her fizzy water, a cup of weak tea, a squeeze of orange juice, her toothbrush. How sweet she looked brushing her teeth. She asked me to bring her book. She was in no state to read, it was just her way of trying to stop me worrying.
She told me she was feeling better. She wasn’t. She wanted to protect me, my brother and my sister right until the end, as she had done through her entire life.
In the early hours of the morning I called my siblings and they rushed in cars from London. As I lay beside her waiting for them and for the doctor to give her something to make her feel calm, I stroked her hair. Had she an ounce of strength to resist she would have done, but I could see as she dozed that she liked how it felt.
She died peacefully in her sleep, at home, surrounded by her three beloved children just as she intended. And she had given us one last gift in a lifetime of giving everything to us—a happy Christmas.
My mother was unconventional to her very core. She often slept on blankets on the garden lawn in summer after coming home in the morning from night shifts at the hospital.
She used to drive a blue Citroen 2CV6 with a plastic roll-back convertible sunroof and plastic seats that scorched your legs on hot days. She drove up hill and over dale on camping expeditions to places she adored like Gordale Scar and Matlock. She never married and was a classic and complete single mother of three mixed-race children.
She sent the other two to private school and me to a grammar school which she ensured I would pass the entrance examination for by hiring a tutor for me. Our nursery was called simply “the Centre” and was run by feminists, lesbians and gays. From age five we went on Ban The Bomb marches and anti-Thatcher demonstrations.
We walked two miles to primary school along an urban nature trail called the Parkland Walk, a disused railway track. In winter she’d give us 20 pence for the bus fare. As toddlers in Camden she bought a family season ticket for London Zoo and pushed us in our prams through Regents Park and around the animal enclosures once a week. As a single mom she had to do the things fathers usually do too. I begged her to take us to Arsenal.
When she realised we lived within walking distance she rang the club box office to find out the cost of tickets and soon we went to our first game, a 2-1 win over Luton. The game featured the only three footballers she would ever remember by name: Mark and Brian Stein for Luton, and Arsenal’s Perry Groves, who she dubbed Twinkle Toes.
She took a degree in anthropology aged 29 with three children. She later retrained as a midwife, completing a second degree, and was a member of the Radical Midwives Association.
She believed in natural home births, promoted breastfeeding and delivered three of her six grandchildren herself.
She loved animals, especially her horse Brandy and her dogs Frank, Poppy and Smiffy. She was from Bradford and a proud Yorkshire woman, though she knew she couldn’t survive living there.
She needed freedom and adventure. She left aged 16 to au pair in Switzerland and travel Europe before doing the same in Canada after a brief stint as a stable girl in Essex.
Eventually in her early 20s she arrived in London and had us kids. The adventures never stopped though.
Through hills in Derbyshire, mountains in Scotland, fields in Wales, rivers in St Lucia, lakes in Italy and beaches in France we followed her joyfully.
I know I’ll start to feel lonely without her and I’ll have to find things to cope with that. Maybe I’ll write a book. It would be a fitting way to remember her, the most well-read person I have ever met.
She was a remarkable woman who did and said whatever she liked. Her values and ways were unique and will never be seen again. We thank her, Anne Surtees, for everything she taught us about life.
She is survived by three devoted children who will love and remember her every single day of the rest of our lives.