My Mother's Son (Part 1)
I have been a boy, I have been a young man, and I have been a middle-aged man. Now I am an old man, keeping company with memories of my late mother, to whom I owe more than I can say, and brushing aside memories of my late father, to whom I owe nothing. The main bulk of my own years is far behind me, and I have taken to loitering in the dusky shades of my twilight, pausing to think back and take stock. When I look at a particular photograph of me as an infant, a black-and-white snapshot taken in England, in which my grandmother is holding me in her arms and happily gazing down at me, while I, in turn, peer up at her with a perplexed expression, I am prompted to wonder whether the small, helpless child in that photograph had any inkling, fading as quickly as it arose, of the uneven road that lay before him in his life.
• • •
My mother was English. Joan Anne Collins was born in 1926, in Warrington, a town close to Liverpool, in the North West of England. She lived in Warrington for the next twenty-seven years: growing up, getting married, and giving birth to me. Her father, Edward Collins, was an Irish Catholic who had served with the British Army in France during World War I, fighting in the Battle of the Somme. He later worked, for forty-one years, as a watchman at Crosfields, a chemical factory in Warrington, and lived to be 103. Her mother, Edith Collins (formerly Eldridge), was an English Protestant and a homemaker. The union of an Irish Catholic man and an English Protestant woman was not common in England, and did not make for an easy marriage.
My mother and her older sister, Ivy, were brought up as Catholics (something to which my grandmother, in accordance with the inflexible rules of the Catholic Church, had to assent before she married my grandfather), going to Mass every morning and saying their prayers every night. My mother was exceedingly devout as a child, learning and quoting the Catechism, and even thinking of becoming a nun, an ambition that her father, a man who held to a stern religious outlook (and with whom my mother had a relationship that was, at times, a cause of distress to her), would have been likely to endorse.
When my mother was a child, she played mostly with other Irish Catholic children. Her father, who took a dim view of anyone who was not Irish or Catholic, discouraged her from being friendly with English Protestants. Because Warrington (on the edge of Greater Merseyside) was home to so many families of Irish lineage, it was not hard for my mother to abide by her father's wishes that she stick to "her own kind." She did not begin to think of herself as being "English" until she was eleven or twelve, when she decided that being English was less troublesome than being Irish.
To my mother, it seemed that the relations on the English side of her family were more reasonable and more approachable, and more fun to be around, than the relations on the Irish side. I grew up listening to her delightful stories about the uncles, aunts, and cousins on the English side, stories so full of English life, and so expressive of English mirth, that I came to feel that I knew all the characters she had described, without ever having met them.
At school, my mother, who loved books and craved learning, was an excellent student, standing out among the other students and always receiving high marks on her work, which resulted in her being awarded a scholarship to further her education. When my grandmother (meaning well, no doubt, but acting wrongly and shortsightedly) would not allow my mother to accept the scholarship, on the grounds that it would be unfair for my mother to have an advantage that had not been given to her sister (who probably had no interest in receiving a scholarship), my mother was understandably heartbroken. Knowing how the scholarship would have elevated her prospects, enabling her to better herself and opening the door to an otherwise unattainable future in which she could expand her horizons in life, it was a lost opportunity that she never got over, and never ceased to regret. After her formal schooling was concluded, she attended a business college for a short time, gaining clerical skills that helped her to find work as a receptionist and a secretary.
• • •
My mother was well-disposed toward most people, but she never had anything good to say regarding Germany and its citizens. Her family had lived through World War II, and when I was growing up, she frequently told me about her own experiences during the war years in Britain: firsthand accounts of nightly blackouts, scarcity of foodstuffs, carrying gas masks, and hearing Lord Haw-Haw on the wireless. As a teenager, she had to spend many nights in a bomb shelter. On September 14, 1940, a German plane dropped bombs on an afternoon fete in Warrington. Now referred to as the Thames Board Mill bombing, it resulted in sixteen people being killed and a number of injuries. My mother was outside when it happened and saw the plane overhead, flying so low that she could see the German pilot looking out of the cockpit, eyeing civilians on the ground.
One of my mother's other stories from the war involved a young priest from St. Benedict's, the church that she attended, being killed in the war. He had been a friend of hers, and had given her a small religious medal, purchased on a visit to a holy site, as a gift. On May 8, 1945, when the war in Europe ended, my mother joined the grateful crowd that gathered at Bank Park in Warrington to rejoice in the Allied victory over the Nazis, all night long.
Before my mother met my father, she had a romance with a young man who was, in all likelihood, the one great love of her life. He was posh, good-looking, and bookish (a trait that made him an eminently suitable match for her), and his affluent family liked my mother, inviting her to stay with them at the hotel that they owned, but he and my mother came to a parting of the ways because my mother, who was aware of having come from more humble origins than he did, began to feel uncomfortable about what she later described to me as the "differences in class" between them. She worried that, by attaching her affections to a young man of his standing, she might have been reaching too high above herself. For the rest of her life, she carried a lingering sadness over the way things had gone with that boyfriend, believing that she probably should have stuck with him, rather than choosing to withdraw from the relationship.
Photographs of my mother taken during that period of her life show her to have been an attractive young woman who was always smartly turned out, with a demure, refined bearing and eyes that conveyed the glint of an eager intellect. All of which, of course, begs the question of how and why she ended up with my father, who was decidedly less impressive in both his appearance and his character. I suspect that, in her youth, my mother tended to undervalue herself. She certainly deserved a husband more worthy than my two-faced father, who treated her in an utterly abominable manner.
• • •
My father was an American. Paul Dailey Morton was born in 1930, in Erie, Pennsylvania, and had two younger siblings, a brother and a sister. His Irish-American family packed up and moved across the country to California in 1945, settling in San Francisco, where my father finished his high-school years. During the early 1950s, when my father was serving in the United States Air Force, he was stationed at a well-known base in England, RAF Burtonwood, in Warrington, where my mother lived. After they met through friends, they began a romance and became engaged. (Many such romances between American servicemen and British women happened in the United Kingdom during and after World War II, with some of them leading to weddings, and some of them leading only to broken promises.) My mother, plighting her troth unwisely, had committed herself to a marriage that would, further down the line and to her considerable detriment, show itself to be the most serious mistake of her life.
My father and my mother were married in Warrington, in a Catholic ceremony, in April, 1952. Their marriage would last fourteen years, yielding three children and ending in divorce. After they were married, they took their honeymoon on the Continent, visiting France, Germany, and Switzerland. I was born, their first child and a month overdue, in a hospital at RAF Burtonwood in August, 1953. The nurse who aided in my delivery was Irish, and she was pleased to find out that I would bear the same name as Michael Collins, one of the leaders of the Irish revolution. Although I was soon granted dual citizenship (UK/USA), receiving an American passport, arranged by my father, from the American Consulate in Liverpool when I was two months old, I was British by birth and by maternal descent (with an underpinning of Irishness). I was also, as time would tell, British by choice and by disposition. I did not know it yet, but America and I were destined to be sour adversaries, always at odds, never seeing eye to eye on anything.
In November, 1953, my family (my father, my mother, and myself) moved from Warrington to the United States, crossing the Atlantic by air on the Flying Tiger Line, with a brief stopover in Greenland. We arrived in New York City on the day before Thanksgiving, when millions of Americans were preparing to celebrate what they believed to be their God-given "plenty" by stuffing themselves with a feast of roast turkey and pumpkin pie. My mother had been to the United States once before, sailing to America by herself on the Queen Mary in the spring of 1949, staying stateside for several months while visiting her sister, who by then was living in Youngstown, Ohio (having also married an American serviceman who had been stationed at RAF Burtonwood). During her stay in Ohio, she had her first taste of American prosperity, but she also had her first view of American racism, when she lost her way downtown and happened to board a bus that took her through the "black" part of Youngstown, where her sister's neighbors never went, and where the only white face was her own.
From New York City we headed westward to Northern California, where my father's family lived, to start a new life for ourselves in the San Francisco Bay Area. (In later years, my mother and I ruefully agreed that it could have been much worse: instead of California, we might have been plunked down in Ohio, as had happened to her sister, or somewhere else in the Midwest, or, worst of all, in one of the Southern states.) My father was returning to his homeland, taking up where he had left off when he entered the Air Force, but my mother, going along with my father's wishes, was leaving behind everything that she had ever known: her country, her heritage, her family, and her friends. She was willingly taking a huge step into the unknown, choosing to believe that she could rely on my father, and rely on America, to treat her fairly and provide her with a beneficial future. A future that, she trusted, would be "better" than whatever future that she might have had in England.
• • •
After our arrival in California, my father worked at the United States Post Office, and was later employed as an optical dispenser at Jenkel-Davidson, a company that sold eyeglasses. My father was all front and all for himself: a barefaced phony and an imprudent spendthrift, always trying to impress people, always taking care with his appearance and always in debt, attiring himself in fine suits from Brooks Brothers and acting as if he was a well-heeled man about town (which he was not and never would be). He was also prone to fits of peevish anger, given to breaking things and slamming doors. If he became angry while he was driving, he would step on the gas, scaring the hell out of my mother and me. My mother was a meek, dutiful housewife who had to make do with a small amount of money, running the household on a meager budget while my father left a trail of mounting bills, heedlessly behaving as if he could draw upon an endless supply of ready cash. She rarely complained out loud, but even as a child I could detect her underlying frustration at my father's looseness with money.
My mother's thrift came directly from her own upbringing. Her family in England had not been poor, but they never had any money to waste, and during World War II, they had to be careful with their weekly expenses and do without things, as did most households in the United Kingdom. My mother thought carefully about what she was buying before she made a purchase. She was not a penny pincher, or tightfisted, but she did want to receive value for her money. She also wanted quality (and where clothing was concerned, a touch of style), and, if she felt it was warranted, she would spend a little more to get it. To her, a good winter coat, one that was well-made, might cost more than a coat of lesser quality, but if it was better made and more durable, it was likely to last longer. My father had no such standards when making a purchase. He bought whatever he wanted, regardless of its quality and regardless of whether he could afford it.
Although my mother liked the casual life that she found in California, her first years in the United States (which also were the first years of my childhood) were sometimes awkward for her. She was English, still getting her bearings in the "land of the free and the home of the brave," and she was frequently taken aback by the crude habits and brutish opinions of her new American neighbors. My mother was a shy person, never one to put herself forward, but her unalloyed Englishness set her apart, making her an object of curiosity to those who knew her.
In the America of the 1950s, being anything other than a true-blue American was a distinct novelty. Every time my mother spoke, Americans would say, "Oh, I just love your accent!" The more she received that uncouth response, the less she was inclined to speak. When my friends heard my mother telling me to "watch out for lorries in the street," they were puzzled, and asked me why she "talked funny." Because I spent so much time with my mother (who had only been residing in America for a short time), I learned to talk by listening to her, and I came to pronounce many words in the same way that she did, which also provoked unhelpful comments. I knew, from an early age, that my mother and I were different from the Americans around us.
We ended up living in Gregory Gardens, a standard American housing tract in the city of Pleasant Hill, in Contra Costa County, with wide streets (without sidewalks) that were lined, from one end to the other, with tidy rows of ranch houses, each with a tree in front. Most of the houses, all of which looked essentially the same, were occupied by young families of middle income: fathers and mothers with either school-age children or toddlers (or both). To my mother, who had lived through all the hardships and deprivations of wartime England, it must have appeared, at the outset, to be a desirable community in which to settle, wonderfully tempting and unbelievably prosperous, with a dry climate that permitted one to be less dependent on wearing a raincoat and using an umbrella. In the long term, however, she saw beyond the more pleasing aspects of American suburbia, and came to discern that behind the superficially alluring lifestyle, in which everyone seemed hellbent on getting ahead and having too much of everything, there were elements of an unwholesome verity that was less conducive to happiness.