Writers and Their Mothers by Dale Salwak

Author:Dale Salwak
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

© The Author(s) 2018

Dale Salwak (ed.)Writers and Their Mothershttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68348-5_11

11. ‘Persistent Ghost’

Anthony Thwaite1

(1)London, UK

I was an only child. My memories of my mother seem to fall into two periods, before wartime evacuation to the U.S. in June 1940 and after my return to England in June 1944. In the first period, as an only child, I was very close to her: later, though very fond and certainly dutiful, I felt less close. She was a warm and intelligent woman, wholly centered on my father and myself, having been brought up in difficult circumstances, with a feckless drunken father and a weak mother.

My strongest feelings about my mother, perhaps disappointingly, are about an old woman, in her nineties; and these are the feelings caught in these poems, written in the time leading up to her death, aged almost ninety-seven, and soon afterwards.  THROES

  Being with her now is a kind of boredom,

  A dullness in which guilt and pain both ache,

  When all my childish anguish after freedom

  Has long since vanished. Now I wait to take

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