Blessed - The Autobiography by George Best

Author:George Best
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781446447918
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 2012-04-23T21:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

PICKING UP THE PIECES

I WAS AWARE that Mum’s drinking problem had become serious because I’d received several calls from Carol in the months before her death, asking if I could go home to visit, but she has since told me that she knew there wasn’t much I could do. There isn’t anything anyone can do for an alcoholic. Carol, I think, just wanted someone to give her some support because unless you’ve experienced it, you can’t have any idea what it’s like to live with someone with a drink problem.

Over the years I’d got out of the habit of going home because I’d been too busy leading my own life. And when Carol started asking me to go back, I was having enough trouble keeping my own life together. Remember, I’d always run away from trouble and I wasn’t inclined to run towards it.

It was tough on her, my dad, and the rest of the children. And it was hard for me to understand because my memories were of my loving, non-drinking mum from my childhood. It’s good that Carol can remember her like that, too, so that there was someone else who could tell people what a great mum she had been and prove that I had not imagined all that.

‘Mum has really got a problem,’ Carol would phone and say, ‘but she’d love to see you. It would be great if you could find the time to come over.’

Two years earlier I had managed that trip to see Mum following her heart attack. Now, here I was, flying to Belfast for her funeral with Angela, who hadn’t even met Mum or Dad or any of my family. So it was difficult for her as well, although on the journey from Los Angeles, I was more in a daze than anything else. It was only when we got to the house and I saw the state of my dad and sisters that I really broke down. It was the first time I had been at any family funeral or wedding since my grandad’s death when I was 11, when I’d sat under a lamp post and cried. There were lots of relatives whom I hadn’t seen for years, making me feel almost as much a stranger as Angela.

I certainly did not want to see my mother lying in her coffin, having seen her looking so poorly on my previous visit. I wanted to remember her like my mum, my beautiful, loving mum, not like what she had become. It was hard enough going to the funeral, which, as was still the custom in those days, only the men attended.

Angela, with her Hollywood ways and get-up-and-go attitude, must have seemed like someone from another planet to my sisters and my Irish aunties. But when we came back from the graveyard, she had them all doing these Jane Fonda type exercises in the front room. Bizarre as the scene was, it helped to take their minds off it all for an hour or so.

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