The other morning I wandered, sleep bleary and
glassesless, into the bathroom, looked in the mirror and thought "My God
you look like your Mother".
Then thought "Well at least you've still got all
your own teeth."
Which is exactly the sort of thing she would have said
…
and why I burst out laughing for no apparent reason
…
and started me thinking about Mum’s teeth.
In all the photographs I can think of from my early childhood
Mum had a closed lip smile. It gives her
image a slightly mischievous Mona Lisa quality, but I’m afraid it was down to
her teeth.
Mum was born in 1918 and I doubt her family had much
money for dentistry.
I’m sure her teeth
received attention from the RAF medics when she became a WAAF. There’s an old wives’ tale that you lose a
tooth for every child, so that’s four of them accounted for. But I believe a poor pre-natal and early
diet, cigarettes, mint imperials and an aversion to spending money on herself
at the dentists had a more detrimental effect on her teeth.
Part of the reason I'm aware of the lack of teeth is that I
can remember the surprise when she got her false ones. I was 7 and in bed with the measles, it was
late February and snowy outside. Mum
came into the bedroom one morning with a hugely swollen face. Those were the days when GPs visited and Dr
Phillips came to see us most days to check on my measles, and see how Granma’s
hardening arteries were going while he was there. It wasn’t unusual for him to pop in on his
way past to check on Granma. He took one look at Mum
and told her to go straight to the dentist as she obviously had abscesses.
There were some weeks (or so it seemed)
of Mum coming home with a mouth full of cotton wool and her face swathed in a
scarf against the cold and stares. Then
one day she came in wearing her false teeth and the difference was
amazing.
She had a smile.
Our home was a bungalow built by our
great-grandparents in the 1920s, before there was mains water to our village,
and was a little eccentric in that the bathroom led off the kitchen. Mum and Dad would leave their teeth steeping
overnight in plastic pots on the back of the wash-hand basin. Mum would sometimes get distracted whilst
rinsing them off in the morning and leave them lying in the basin whilst she
went to attend to whatever was more important than putting her teeth in. This meant that sometimes when I got up for
school they lay by the plughole grinning up at me.
For most of my childhood ours was a three-generation
household.
Granma passed away when I was 13 freeing Mum from caring
duties.
She got a job in the village
school as a School Meals Supervisor (definitely not a dinner lady), and was
provided with royal blue lab-coat style overalls.
When she retired in the mid-1980s she brought
them home “because they might be useful for something.”
Tragically this intelligent, self-educated, dynamic,
spirited woman developed Alzheimer’s.
Realising that our parents would, eventually, most
likely spend their final days in a care home (we all live away and uprooting
them would have been too cruel), Bigsister and Middlesister decided to start
‘sorting out the house’ in the 1990s.
This may sound premature but we are hoarders, throwing nothing away
unless it is completely worn out and utterly useless. Mum, having lived through the poverty of the
Depression and bringing up four children during post war austerity, was
particularly inclined to keep things “just in case”.
Imagine the scene.
It is Easter time and I am at home with baby
Ferretfingers, who is still breastfeeding. We are sitting in the living room with Dad who is
doing the Western Mail crossword. It is mid-evening and all is peaceful and silent.
Mum and the sisters are going through a wardrobe in
one of the bedrooms.
Suddenly there is a shrieking and thundering of
footsteps in the passage and they burst into the living-room.
First Bigsister whirls in looking horrified, gibbering “Oh
My Gawd I touched them” and throws herself into a chair.
Then Middlesister trying to supress her giggles and
holding something in a paper hanky.
Finally Mum with a look of mischievous childlike glee
on her face.
Bigsister had insisted on going through the pockets of
every garment “in case there’s a fiver in there.”
She had put her hand into the pocket of Mum’s School
Meals Supervisor overall and brought out …
a set of
false teeth.
We will never know why Mum had the teeth in her
overall.
None of us could remember her losing any, including
Dad.
We surmised she must have been wearing in a new set
and put the old set in her pocket to swap if her gums got uncomfortable.
She was unable, or unwilling, to tell us.
But I shall never ever forget that gleeful smile.
