Snapshot: The photo that my mother died next to

This photograph was taken of my mother, Irene Brown, in the early 1950s in Greenwich Village, New York. My brother and I love this image, for many obvious reasons: it so perfectly and by chance captures the time and place and our mother at a real highpoint in her early life.

My parents were fortunate to be sponsored to go and work in New York soon after my father returned from the army and postwar Europe. While he began a career in publishing, she found work in a gallery that was part of a department store on Fifth Avenue and started a career in art that would last all her life.

We can only imagine what it must have been like for them in the heart of the Village at that time. Postwar America was at a peak of creativity in New York, and the neighbourhood home to Jackson Pollock and the abstract expressionists alongside the beat generation where Ginsberg and Kerouac paced the city streets at dawn. It was a time when Americans thought of the English as David Niven descended from the blood of Winston Churchill – rare, attractive and inevitably well-spoken birds.

We can only imagine because sadly my mother began to succumb to Alzheimer’s disease around the time I was informed enough to ask her about her youth. Her memories began to be pulled from her like loose strands of hair, single strands that together formed so much of what she knew as her life. As the memories slipped away, we surrounded her with photographs that we could call upon to remind her of who she was at first, and later of who we were.

Towards what became the very end in hospital, the closing weeks, the passing days, we took four photographs into her room to keep her company. Partly for her, when she saw them she was happily reminded for a time; partly for the doctors and nurses who we hoped, when they entered to ease her pain and comfort her, might also be reminded that the confused, sometimes frightened creature in their care had once been young and beautiful like them with a life ahead of her instead of where it now lay.

The photograph is a precious thing, a talisman, a reminder of a woman, a wife, a friend a mother. And we treasure it – because we can no longer treasure her. She died with the photograph beside her on 16 September, 2014. But in this, she lives on.

Gareth Brown

Playlist: An unlikely lullaby for my son

Theme from M*A*S*H (Suicide Is Painless)

“Suicide is painless / It brings on many changes / And I can take or leave it if I please”

I first watched the television series of M*A*S*H sitting on the sofa with my mum as a teenager. This in itself was quite surprising, but I think we were both attracted to Alan Alda, who played Hawkeye – for different reasons. Naturally I was in a rebellious phase, pushing the boundaries at home and at school, breaking the rules for the “right” reasons and very anti-war. Hawkeye seemed to embody, albeit in masculine form, what I stood for.

Twenty or so years later, after the birth of my son who refused to go to sleep easily, I found myself watching M*A*S*H again. After flying into Seattle en route to Canada for a holiday, my two-year-old’s (non) sleeping habits were causing me problems. I used to stay awake late into the night trying to encourage him to sleep but without much success. I flicked through the TV channels hoping to find something to entertain me, or even us, and joyfully came across endless replays of M*A*S*H. Amazingly, the theme tune (no lyrics on the TV version) worked almost instantly as a miraculous lullaby and my son fell asleep.

This night-time scene was repeated all through our three-week road trip; I usually treated myself to a couple of episodes next to my snoring son before going off to sleep myself.

Fast forward – which is what it seems like – to the present day and once again I am occasionally enjoying sitting on the sofa watching episodes of M*A*S*H – only now with my slightly rebellious teenage son wide awake beside me.

Lee Parsell

We love to eat: Grandma Con’s curried eggs

Ingredients

6 large free range eggs
4 tbsp mayonnaise
½ tbsp tomato ketchup
2 tsp mild curry powder
Pinch of salt/pepper
Salad/herbs for decoration (tomato, radish, parsley, chives, whatever you have to hand)

Hard boil the eggs, allow to cool and remove the shells. Slice them in half length-ways. Scoop out the yolks with a teaspoon, placing them in a bowl before mashing with a fork. Season with salt and pepper. Mix in the mayonnaise, curry powder and ketchup until smooth. The quantities listed above are just a guide – adjust to taste. Spoon the mixture back into the hollowed egg halves and decorate with herbs and tiny wedges of vegetable. Arrange on a plate garnished with salad leaves.

This recipe takes me back to childhood holidays spent in the arid heat of Western Australia during the early 1980s: the smell of cool water hitting hot earth when Grandad hosed the garden at dusk; my infantile joy at discovering a fresh egg beneath one of Grandma’s hens in the chook yard. Grandma Con’s famous curried eggs were a delicacy loved by all.

This was the one recipe that accompanied my mother on her voyage from Australia to England in the 60s, where she met my father, had two children, and has remained ever since. She would make Grandma Con’s curried eggs whenever we had a buffet and as a teenager, it was always my responsibility to decorate them. I loved adorning each egg half with sprigs of parsley and shards of radish or tomato, making each one unique.

Curried eggs are now a firm favourite of my husband’s. I don’t make them often, as Mum ensures that they always grace the buffet table whenever we visit her and Dad in Suffolk. But I will be making them this October in honour of Grandma Con, who would have turned 101 this month.

Sophie Sellars

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