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Motherless Sunday: A son’s painful journey to discover his mother’s complicated past

In this moving extract from his newly published book, ‘The Smallest Things’, Nick Duerden explores the difficult and haunting relationship between his mother and beloved grandmother

Sunday 31 March 2019 12:29 BST
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I always took pains to celebrate my mother on Mother’s Day. She didn’t really buy into it herself, although she did like the flowers. She wouldn’t eat the proffered chocolates – she was on a perpetual diet – but she appreciated the gesture. She was a complicated woman, my mother, and 20 years after her death I tried to find out what was at the root of that complication, and why her relationship with her own mother, my cherished grandmother, had been such a fractious one. Every Mother’s Day since her death, I remember her, and remember, too, just how much I continue to miss her.

A few years ago, I passed the night with friends around a Ouija board. Wine had been drunk beforehand. We spent several bewildering hours suspending disbelief while the planchette swung with gusto around the board’s alphabet, assiduously spelling out messages for us. It seemed that we could request an audience with some of our dearly departed just as efficiently as if we had called them on the phone, and each in turn appeared only too eager to communicate with us, one letter at a time.

We spoke with a dead aunt, a dead grandparent, and their responses were loquacious, melancholic, optimistic and even funny. None of us had any idea what was happening, or how, but it was riveting. After some time, it was my turn. I called up my late mother and, lo, my mother ‘’arrived’’, if that’s the word I’m looking for here. Following my friends’ lead, I asked if there was anything she wanted to tell me, and I braced myself for her answer, tingling with anticipation at what she might wish to convey to me from beyond the grave. ‘N’ was the first letter the planchette alighted on. ‘O’ was the second. “No.”

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