Memories

A year ago today, Jenny Goddard (aka Mama, aka Jenny Scott Smith, aka Jenny Zamenhof Goddard) passed away. I can’t quite believe it’s been a whole year, but also can’t quite believe that it wasn’t only a few weeks ago. (To be fair, a lot of that disconnect with time is down to the weirdness of being in Coronavirus lockdown, but I imagine I’d have similar feelings without it.)

I have had (and continue to have) big plans about a commemorative project of some kind that combines portraits of her, with drawings of things and places that are integral to her (I have pages in one of my sketchbooks with little doodles of Golden Virginia packets, sorobans, Rubik’s cubes, Esperanto stars (and speech bubbles with other languages in, too), passports, Spectrums, cannabis leaves (yeah, she’s dead – I think it’s OK to admit that she spent a significant amount of life under the influence of marijuana – I, of course, never inhaled), sci fi books, oil pastels, waitressing trays, knitted patchwork skirts, and much, much more.

I’ve not done more than draw/paint (it’s digital – I’m never positive what to call it) three portraits, draw the sketches and think a whole bunch. Today, I took the day off from work to spend time on Jenny in some way. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, but sat down in the morning with a sketchbook and, instead of drawing, I wrote down elements of Jenny and stories an anecdotes I felt like sharing.

And the following is the evening result of typing those up (while sat in the shade of the back garden and under greater and greater influence of Prosecco – and a glass of Rioja with dinner because Jenny liked a glass of Rioja – so apologies if it gets less and less lucid as it reaches the final themes).

I have many more little stories and anecdotes and character traits that I would love to share in written form, like this. I imagine the art project will also come to fruition at some point, but I have realised that there is no law that says it must be completed by a particular time after her death. I will continue to remember and think of her, as will others whose lives she was in, whether or not it’s recorded or memorialised in written or artistic form. (That said, please do share any of your own stories, anecdotes or art inspired by Jenny.)

Jenny the actor

Brenda from Birmingham

When I was little Jenny used to have this other personality, called Brenda. Brenda had a Brummie accent and that’s mostly all I can remember about her, except that Jenny would ‘be’ Brenda for what felt like ages and would refuse to admit she was actually Jenny. It was done out of fun (I assume!), but it was actually a little bit scary at the time. When she’d first switch to Brenda it would make me giggle and laugh so much, but the determination with which she stuck as Brenda felt a little scary after a while and I can still feel that doubt and the little whirring in my young brain trying to work out what was real and what wasn’t.

The visiting Czechs

One time, when I was either seven or eight (it was during my home education years, after we started learning Esperanto and before we moved to Spain) we’d been to Cheltenham for the day (I really can’t remember what we’d been doing there, but there’s a fairly decent chance it was a museum, art gallery or something else that would count as an educational trip) and we were hitching back to Painswick (we did a lot of hitching in those days – I’m not certain whether that was due to a paucity in public transport or because we didn’t have the money, or could even have just been a general enjoyment of hitching and meeting people for a brief moment in time, but not long enough to have to get to know them or worry about what they thought of us). While we stood with our thumbs out, Jenny suggested we could pretend to be from another country and we could speak Esperanto to each other. We decided we needed to pick an obscure country rather than one where a British person would have a decent chance of at least recognising the language. So we picked Czech. To be honest, this was a little risky, as we travelling from Cheltenham, which was the Gloucestershire hotspot of Esperanto at the time (with a whole couple of dozen Esperantists who would meet once a month for an evening of chatting in Esperanto, and singing songs and looking at slides – many of them of trains, because three of the Esperantists in the group were also trainspotters). Oh yes, and the group was made up entirely of people over 70 (possibly over 80), except for me and Jenny! I suppose we would have known any Esperantists who picked us up and would have spoken to them in Esperanto. Anyway, we were picked up by an elderly (I thought – bear in mind I was seven or eight at the time, so they may actually have been in their 40s!) couple who gave us lots of advice about places to visit in Gloucestershire. It was a fun thing and I have a feeling we tried it a couple more times and may have actually ended up getting a lift from Bob, the Esperantist engineer who lived in Painswick and normally gave us a lift to and from Esperanto meetings.

Green aliens

Jenny and her best friend, Vicky, (also my best friend’s mum) set up a drama group at Roxborough House in Stroud. They used to go to a grown-up drama group there and enjoyed it and thought it would be great to have a group for kids, playing similar drama games. This was also during my home-educated years, when Jenny and Brian made sure I had lots of opportunities to do things with groups that I was missing out of at school – so I went to swimming, trampoline and gymnastics classes, as well as this drama group. It was great fun – we played lots of games and laughed a lot. They decided it would be cool to have an end-of-year play and we did one about some aliens arriving on Earth and how strange everything seemed to them. I don’t really remember the content of the play that much, but I do remember that Jenny and I played an alien and her child and we had our heads covered in tin foil and green face paint all over us and I think were probably otherwise dressed in black t-shirt and black leggings. Jenny was actually very good at acting and could take on an entirely different persona seemingly at the drop of the hat (and the previous story about the hitch-hiking make-believe was not uncommon – often we would just give ourselves different names and have very slightly different lives, like living in a fancier house, or having a different job, or having two brothers, and so on. It was a really useful way to push away the nerves of getting up on stage and I have used it in my working life, as well as in the few drama productions I was in during my teenage years. Essentially, if you create a persona who is confident and knows what they are talking about and has every right to be up on that stage/running that meeting/speaking to a conference, then you believe it and you come across that way. (There is a risk of getting sucked in to believing you’re always acting the part, though, and forgetting that you do have the knowledge, experience and right to be speaking – classic impostor syndrome.)

Jenny’s tips for self-defence

I’ve mentioned hitch-hiking a few times now. This was a huge part of my childhood. Jenny and I hitched to Europe to go Esperanto congresses and events. We hitched round the UK a bit, visiting family. And we frequently hitched from Painswick to Stroud or Cheltenham, and sometimes Gloucester (though it was a lot harder to hitch to Gloucester because there wasn’t really a good place to stand). I was very comfortable with this as a mode of transport and no concept of it being rude to be taking lifts for free. Jenny did, however, always make sure that I understood the possible dangers and had strategies to deal with them – the worst-case scenario being opening the door and jumping out of a moving car (child locks were pretty rare then – as were seatbelts!). The biggest issue she came up against – she often hitchhiked on her own, as well as with me or with Brian – was men expecting, or hoping, to be paid for the lift in a non-financial way. I’m not sure how often she encountered this, but it definitely came up more than once. And it happened one time while I was there, too – the driver putting his hand on her leg, while I was sat in the back. I wasn’t really aware of it, until we got out of the car not hugely far from where we’d got in and she told me why we weren’t going all the way to the town we were expecting to go to.

Jenny’s biggest tip, if you find yourself in this situation? Not to talk yourself out of it, not to kick and bit. But to pick your nose and fart as much as you can. That pretty much always puts them off, apparently. And I have to admit to using it myself, when I started getting a funny feeling about a guy who was regularly giving me lift after work (I was working on an employment training scheme where I was paid £10 on top of normal income support; we got travel expenses and, since there were no buses in the school holidays I got taxi fare and didn’t have to put in receipts because taxi drivers didn’t give receipts in those days – I got £5 a day for taxi fare, which was £25 a week at a time when I was receiving £40 a week – I used the money to pay for a driving lesson a week, which I would never have been able to afford otherwise, and the driving instructor picked me up from Stroud and dropped me in Bisley, so I only had to hitch four days a week). Anyway, every Friday afternoon this same guy would stop and pick me up and at first he just chatted pleasantly. But after a few weeks he would give me some quite creepy looks and his hand slipped off the gear stick a few too many times, so I remembered Jenny’s tips and started picking my nose and managed to fart loudly a couple of times and he stopped picking me up. (Of course, it could be a coincidence, but I like to think it was Jenny’s self-defence tips!)

Jenny the climber

When Jenny was a child, she loved climbing. She climbed trees, climbed derelict building sites, climbed buildings and even climbed onto their roof. Apparently, one time she managed to fall through a greenhouse or conservatory roof, but I can’t remember the exact details. When I was little we would go to the park (the ‘rec’) a lot and she would climb the climbing frame and swing on the swings and climb some of those trees, too – joining in as much as, if not more than, me. When we lived in Spain, we had to climb five flights of stairs to our apartment on the top floor, multiple times a day. She also still happily climbed up the climbing frames in parks and swung on the swings. One night, after we’d been out to a bar for most of the night and were walking home, she decided to climb up onto the edge of a bridge we were crossing and walk along it. I’m pretty sure she was very drunk and absolutely no concept of the extreme danger (there wasn’t actually any water in the riverbed in Valencia, as the river had been redirected some time before – all there was at the time was a small trickle of sewage that ran along the middle of the river bed, so a fall would have been fatal) – not to mention her ten-year-old daughter walking beside her and desperately wanting her to climb down. But, in all honestly, it wouldn’t have been entirely out of character for her to climb up and walk along it without a drop of alcohol (though it would have been a tad less scary to me).

#nofilter Jenny

I feel like this is something that came with age, but there’s a really strong chance that it was more that I didn’t notice it when I was a kid. Because your mum (or your Mama or your Jenny as she was to me, and to Eva – never Mum or Mummy) is always your mum and just is, I suppose. It’s only once others’ opinions and perceptions start becoming more important – and noticeable – that you start to realise that maybe this isn’t other people’s normal. (And, of course, there is the question of ‘What, actually, is normal?’ and it’s quite possibly that the quirks and idiosyncrasies of our mother are not much weirder than those of plenty of other mothers.)

In fact, there were conversations I had with Jenny, when I was a child – mostly during those home-ed years and in Spain (which was a kind of mélange of school and home-ed, with me attending a school, but doing my own work with my own books during a lot of the classes, but integrating socially and learning to speak pretty fluent Spanish) – which, as someone bringing up daughters now seem both really ‘with it’ and important discussions and, at the same time, a little bit too far, perhaps. Mostly these revolved around bodily functions of various kinds.

The #nofilter Jenny I’m thinking of, though, is more the one who appeared in later years – or perhaps the one who affected me more in later years. The Jenny who would talk very loudly about her latest bowel movements on the bus. The Jenny who decided to talk about her sex life with my dad at his wake. The Jenny who thought it wise to loudly state something about it being time to understand that men only want you for your vaginas (she may not have used that word!) at her granddaughter’s 10^th (I think) birthday celebration.

This Jenny made me cringe time and time again. I could see the social lines she overstepped, even when I couldn’t see my own (for I am carved from the same stone, albeit with a little extra polish and slabs of paint). But, at the same time, I envied the freeness with which she could throw these statements and questions out there. She didn’t have a full concept of social norms and behaviours – or she didn’t give a damn about them, perhaps. The ability to switch off caring about what others think sounds almost like a superpower to me. (Of course, it’s quite possible that she spent every second agonising about what people thought and still was not able to get it remotely right. If so, I’d like to return that inheritance, please.)

Jenny and food (and addictive personality)

Jenny had some kind of sense disconnect when it came to food. She told me on a number of occasions that she never really got enjoyment from food like she could see others doing. Though she did often express pleasure at food I’d cooked (maybe she did get more of the social nuances than I thought!).

She could, however, be quite obsessive about food. She was quite amenable to special diets (or food fads, depending on your perspective!) and credits both mine and Eva’s births to a special diet (macrobiotic for me and raw food diet for Eva). She would find a dish that she liked (or, possibly, that fulfilled all the nutritional criteria she wanted it to) and would eat it again and again. And she was a creature of habit, too – I wrote my A Level language coursework about addictive personalities (I basically wrote the same thing for French and German and translated them!) and they were largely based on Jenny and her various obsessions. Peanut butter on toast was her breakfast for not quite as long as I can remember, but possibly as long as Eva can. But she couldn’t eat it until about 10 or 11 am and it tended to merge with lunch, though not always. In later years, she needed to have it drizzled with linseed oil and it was a mixture of different nuts, not just peanuts. But it was always on a wholemeal granary (or malted) toast and had butter (or spreadable Lurpak) underneath it.

When I ran off to rescue her in Jamaica last January (she had a severe hypomanic episode) and ended up staying with her and accompanying her back, rather than persuading her to come home early, she had a need to eat a sandwich with cream cheese and beansprouts (and often needed to add plantain chips and sliced tomatoes as well), and then pour mango juice on it and weigh the whole thing down with a heavy plate for an hour or two, before eating it. That was definitely an extreme example of food obsession – however, it was all routed in nutritional needs. Since she didn’t really get enjoyment out of the food, a lot of the time, it was more about making sure that a meal could provide a specific range of nutrients (which you can see that the bizarre sandwich in Jamaica did).

In her later years, living in her first very own home (what an amazing feeling that was for her –first time she got to make all the decorating decisions, first time she could completely decide where everything went, first time where she could pick the colours and explore charity shops and the like to fill it with things she liked) she would make something that would then turn into the bulk of the week’s meals. After her wonderful trip to India, this was predominantly a (vegetable) curry of some kind, but sometimes it might be a more Mediterranean sauce. Sometimes she would have a naan bread last three days and sometimes she would heat up a vegetable pasty and have it alongside the curry or sauce. Or some vegetables and potatoes on the side. I remember going round there to stay for a couple of days when she’d been in hospital and was staying away from dairy (though not completely vegan) – she had some tortellini, which she would eat with roasted vegetables and top with hummus (actually very nice).

Actually, for someone who stated she didn’t ever find enjoyment in food, she would go to a lot of trouble with it! Oh, and she would take forever to cook a meal in later years, which I found very frustrating. She always thought it would take about half an hour, and it would take at least an hour, often two!

She did teach me some great recipes, when I was younger, though. Mama’s cauliflower cheese was the best (as were Papa’s Sunday quiches). I also really loved the pancake ‘cake’ she made, which I feel strongly I would hate now (but I have my own very tasty pancake lasagne that I make, which must, in some way, be inspired by hers). There were layers of pancakes, interspersed with Campbells Condensed Asparagus soup, tinned asparagus and tinned spinach. All topped with a breadcrumb and cheese crust (which was the same as the topping on the cauliflower cheese). I loved that soooo much that I made it for my first boyfriend in college (I can’t remember the last time I saw any of those tins, except maybe asparagus) and he was not impressed. Pretty sure I made it once for Chris, too, and he also was unimpressed. I bet Jack Monroe would love it!

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