My 80-year-old mother spent seven days visiting an old friend
My 80-year-old mother spent seven days visiting an old friend — she returned looking half her size, carrying a suitcase that wasn't hers.
My mother has always been a cheerful woman, a bit heavy, who bakes and who has never missed a Sunday.
So when she said she was going to spend a week with Margery, who she grew up with, I was pleased for her.
Margery is three hours away and the two of them had not seen each other in twenty years.
And seven days later, when I went to get her off that train, I did not know her.
Her clothes were hanging off her shoulders. Her face had gone in.
And she was dragging an enormous black case.
"Mum. What's happened to you?"
And she made herself smile.
"Just a bit of stomach trouble, love."
And she had lost so much that I wanted to take her straight in.
And she would not have it.
And then I looked at that case.
She went with a little blue bag.
"Where's your own?"
And she got hold of that black handle.
"Margery gave me this one. Mine went."
And at home she took it straight into her bedroom and shut the door.
And that evening I rang Margery.
And a man answered.
And when I asked for her he went quiet.
"Margery hasn't lived here for eight years."
And my stomach went.
And I checked the number and it was the one my mother had given me before she went.
And the next morning I found her asleep in the chair.
And next to her was a train ticket dated three days before she was supposed to come back.
And under it was a luggage tag.
Not Margery's name. Not my mother's.
And I opened that case, quietly.
And inside it there were clothes folded neatly, and a sealed brown envelope, and one of those old digital cameras.
And I turned it on.
And the battery was almost gone.
And there were four photographs on it.
And I looked at the first one. And then the second.
And it was the last one that made me pick up my car keys.
Because I suddenly knew where I had to go.
Where she had been.
Welbury. The unit at the back of the hospital there.
Not Margery's and not anywhere near it.
She had booked herself in for seven days and arranged her own transport and told me a name out of an address book from about 1998.
And she gave me that number knowing nobody would answer it, because she had not spoken to Margery Crowle since about 2005 and had no idea whether that woman was alive.
She counted on me not ringing.
And I did ring. On the Monday evening. And that is the only reason any of this came out.
The four photographs.
They were not hers. The camera was not hers.
But she took all four.
The first is a window and a bit of a car park with a tree in it.
The second is a woman of about seventy-seven in a chair with a line in her arm, laughing at whoever is holding the camera.
The third is a tray with food on it that has not been touched.
And the fourth one is the chair next to my mother's.
Empty. With her own coat folded on it.
And the fourteenth of August, which is the day she was told, and what I was doing.
I have the diary and I made myself look.
It was a Thursday. I was at work in the morning and I finished at two.
And at twenty past two, which is when a woman in a room at Welbury was telling my eighty-year-old mother what she had, I was in a tile shop at Sarnmoor.
That is where I was. There is a receipt, timed 14:41, so I was in there a while.
And the Thursday she had asked me about — are you busy on the Thursday week — is that Thursday.
I had nothing on. That is the thing I cannot put down.
I did not say no because I was working; I finished at two. I said can I let you know because I was going to look at tiles and because I did not want to commit a whole afternoon to a thing at Welbury that she had described in eleven words as a thing.
And she described it in eleven words because that is how she asks.
And I have known how that woman asks for things since I was about fourteen, and I have been very proud of knowing it, and I have said so — you have to read between the lines with Mum — about forty times, to other people, as a thing I am good at.
Ottoline.
Ottoline Vass, seventy-seven, who was in the chair next to hers for five of those seven days, and whose case that is, and whose camera that was.
And they got on. My mother says they talked for about four hours a day for five days, which is more than she and I have talked in a year.
And Ottoline was on her own too.
And on the Thursday she gave my mother that case, because she was going home and because my mother's bag had gone at the station on the Monday, which is true — that part was not a lie.
And they wrote down each other's numbers.
And the camera was in the case because Ottoline had forgotten it was in there.
And they have spoken on the telephone about once a fortnight since the October of last year, and in the June they met at Caldmere for the day.
That is the whole of the suitcase. It is a kindness between two women in a waiting area and it took me about ten days of imagining the worst to find it out.
What the weight was.
Not seven days.
That is the thing I have had to take and it took me until about the February.
You cannot do that in a week. Nobody can.
My mother had been going down since about the March of 2025.
Seven months.
And I saw that woman every single Sunday.
And the Monday evening, when I rang that number, which is the only reason any of this came out.
And I have been letting that stand as instinct.
It was not instinct. It was the station.
I had seen her at about four o'clock and I had driven her home, and she had gone into that bedroom and shut the door.
And I went home and I did not ring anybody for about three hours.
I made the tea. I watched something.
And at about eight o'clock I rang my husband's mother, of all people, and talked to her for twenty minutes about the extension.
And then at about twenty past nine I rang Margery Crowle's number.
Three and a half hours between seeing my mother's face at a station and picking up a telephone.
And I have told it for a year as though I went home and rang straight away.
And the thing I have not been able to work out, and have stopped trying to, is what I was doing in those three and a half hours.
I know what I was not doing, which is going back round there.
Why I did not see it.
Because I saw her every Sunday.
That is the whole answer and everybody says it to me and it is true and it does not help.
And underneath it there is something more specific, which took longer.
She dressed for it.
Cardigans from about the May. The big navy one and the grey one, over everything, in and out of the house, all summer.
And in the June I said something about it — you'll roast in that, Mum — and she said she felt the cold now.
And I accepted that, which anybody would.
And in the August she stopped wearing her rings, and I noticed that, and I said something about her hands, and she said they were swollen.
They were not swollen. They were the opposite.
And I had the evidence and I had the two remarks I made about it, and both times she gave me an answer and both times I took it.
And the seven months, which I have put down as a number and which I have made myself itemise.
March to October 2025.
That is about thirty-one Sundays, and I missed four of them, which means I sat at a table opposite that woman twenty-seven times while it was happening.
And I have gone back through what I talked about on those Sundays, because Nuala asked me and because I keep a diary for work.
The extension. We were doing the extension from the February to the July and it is all I talked about for about five months.
Dai's car in the June. My eldest's results in the August.
And a thing at my work in the September that I was very wound up about and that I now cannot remember the substance of.
Twenty-seven Sundays.
And I can tell you what the kitchen units cost and I cannot tell you when my mother stopped having pudding.
She stopped. Ottoline knew about it; it came up at that table in the June of this year, in passing, as a medical thing.
My mother has not eaten a pudding since about the April of 2025, at a table she sat at twenty-seven times, in front of a daughter who was choosing tiles.
The June.
And here is the one.
She told me.
On the eleventh of June, 2025, in her own kitchen, while I was doing something at the sink.
She said: "I've got to go and see somebody about my stomach in a couple of weeks."
That is the sentence. That is the whole of it.
And I said: "Oh, it'll be nothing."
And then I said something about Dai's car, which is what we had been talking about before, and she let me.
Eight words.
And I have said them to myself about four hundred times since the October and they do not get any better.
The fifth of August.
And there is a second one and it is worse.
She asked me.
Not directly, because she does not do directly, and I know that about her and I have known it for forty-eight years.
On the fifth of August, on the telephone, she said: "Are you busy on the Thursday week? Only I've got a thing at Welbury."
And I said: "Thursday week — can I let you know?"
And I did not let her know.
I did not ring back about it and she did not raise it again.
And on the fourteenth of August she went to Welbury on a train on her own.
And on the following Sunday she came to dinner and made a trifle.
And the cardigans, which I have put down as her hiding it.
She was not hiding it. That is what I decided in the November and what I have been telling people, and in the April she corrected me.
She said: "I wasn't covering it up, love. I was cold."
And then she said the rest of it, which I had not asked for.
She said that from about the June she had been cold all the time, indoors, in a summer, and that it was one of the worst parts of it, and that she had two of those cardigans on most evenings on her own in that house.
And I said that I had not known she was cold.
And she said: "No. You said I'd roast."
Not unkindly. She was agreeing with me.
And I have spent a year describing those cardigans as a clever old woman's camouflage, because that version has her being crafty and me being outwitted.
And what they actually were is an eighty-year-old woman sitting in her own front room in July with two jumpers on, eleven minutes from my house.
What that appointment was.
The one where they tell you.
I know that now because I asked, in the November, and she told me straight away. She has never once refused me an answer since all of it came out; that is not what this is.
She was told what she had, in a room at Welbury, at about twenty past two in the afternoon on the fourteenth of August, 2025.
On her own.
And then she got a train, and the next Sunday she came to my house and made a pudding and asked after my children.
And the folder, which she is right about and which exists.
I did my father's in 2016 and my aunt Bron's in 2021 and I was good at both and everybody said so.
And in the January I got my father's out of the loft, because of what she said in the car, and I looked at it properly for the first time in nine years.
It is an arch file. There are dividers in it.
Appointments. Correspondence. Medication. Finance. Notes.
And the Notes section is forty-one pages in my handwriting and it is a record of everything that was said to that man by anybody over fourteen months.
And I read about nine pages of it in the loft and had to stop.
Not because of the content.
Because of what is not in it.
There is nothing in forty-one pages about what he thought about any of it. Not one line. There is what he was told and what I asked and what I was told and what I did about it.
My father died in the January of 2017 and I have forty-one pages of it and I do not know what he was frightened of.
And my mother sat in that house and watched me build it.
And nine years later she got a bus timetable off a librarian.
Why she did not tell me after that.
I have asked her and I have had three answers and the third one is the real one.
The first was that she did not want to worry anybody, which is what they all say.
The second was that she wanted to know what she was dealing with first, which is reasonable and which was true in the August.
And the third one came in the March of this year, in the car, not looking at me.
She said: "You'd have taken it over, love."
And I said that was not fair.
And she said: "Ffion. You'd have had a folder."
And she is right. I would have had a folder. I am the one in this family who has a folder; I did my father's in 2016 and I did my aunt's in 2021 and I was good at both.
And she watched me do both of those, and what she took from it is that the way to have something taken over completely is to tell Ffion.
And at eighty, with that, she wanted seven days on her own first.
And the bus timetable from the library, which I have used twice now as a lovely detail.
It is not lovely. I have been doing that thing where you make a hard fact charming.
She went to Sarnmoor library on the second of October, 2025, and asked a man at a desk to print off the Welbury connections for her, because she does not use a computer and because she was not going to ask me.
And she paid twenty pence for it.
And in the April she showed it to me, because I asked. It is three sheets and she had written on it in biro — times, and a note about where to change, and the name of the stop.
And at the bottom of the third sheet she had written: ask about the one back at 4.
She was eighty and she had been told in the August what she had, and on the second of October she stood at a library desk working out how to get herself to a unit three hours away and back.
And I was eleven minutes up the road with a car on the drive that does that journey in two hours and ten.
She never asked. I know. She never asked for any of it.
And she asked once, on the fifth of August, in eleven words, and I said I would let her know.
The seven days.
That is what the week at Welbury was.
It was the first cycle of something and it is not dramatic and I am not going to set out the medical side of it here.
And she booked it, and she booked a room at a place on the Welbury road, and she did the whole of it herself at eighty years old with a bus timetable printed off at the library.
And in the middle of it she sat next to a woman called Ottoline Vass for five days and they talked for four hours a day.
And she came back three days early because the last two sessions were moved, which is the ticket I found.
And the brown envelope, which I said I did not open and which is the one thing I did well.
And I want to be accurate about that, because I have been quoting it as proof of something.
I photographed both sides and I put it back.
And then on the Thursday — the day after Welbury — I looked at those two photographs on my phone for about twenty minutes.
There is a name on the front and a part of an address, and on the back there is a return label from the unit with a department on it.
And I typed that department into my phone and read about it for about half an hour.
And that is how I found out what sort of unit my mother had been sitting in, two days before she told me herself.
So I did not open it. I used it.
And when she did finally tell me, on the Friday evening, in her front room, I did the thing I am least proud of in all of this.
I let her explain the whole of it to me from the beginning.
I asked questions. I let that woman take twenty minutes to tell her daughter what she had, carefully, in the order she had clearly worked out.
And I already knew. I had known since Thursday afternoon.
What I did when I found out.
I drove to Welbury.
That is the bit of this I have told about forty times — the keys, the fourth photograph, the three hours.
And I got there at about half eleven on a Wednesday morning and I went to that unit and I stood at a desk and I asked about my mother.
And a woman of about thirty told me, politely, four times, that she could not discuss a patient with me.
And I got upset. Not shouting. The other thing, which is worse.
And in the end she said: "Has your mum told you she's a patient here?"
And I said no.
And she said: "Then I'd start there, love."
And I drove three hours home.
And I had been in that building for eleven minutes.
The envelope.
It was sealed and it was in that case and I did not open it.
I want one thing in this account where I behaved well and that is the one.
And it is Ottoline's — her discharge things and a card for her neighbour — and my mother posted it on to her in the November.
And what I did instead of opening it, on that Wednesday morning, is photograph it.
Both sides. With my phone. Before I put it back.
Which I have never told my mother and which I am not going to.
And the fourteenth of August, which is the day she was told, and what I was doing.
I have the diary and I made myself look.
It was a Thursday. I was at work in the morning and I finished at two.
And at twenty past two, which is when a woman in a room at Welbury was telling my eighty-year-old mother what she had, I was in a tile shop at Sarnmoor.
That is where I was. There is a receipt, timed 14:41, so I was in there a while.
And the Thursday she had asked me about — are you busy on the Thursday week — is that Thursday.
I had nothing on. That is the thing I cannot put down.
I did not say no because I was working; I finished at two. I said can I let you know because I was going to look at tiles and because I did not want to commit a whole afternoon to a thing at Welbury that she had described in eleven words as a thing.
And she described it in eleven words because that is how she asks.
And I have known how that woman asks for things since I was about fourteen, and I have been very proud of knowing it, and I have said so — you have to read between the lines with Mum — about forty times, to other people, as a thing I am good at.
Ottoline.
She is seventy-eight now and I have met her twice.
And in the June, at Caldmere, when the two of them had their day, I drove my mother there and I sat with them for about half an hour before I left them to it.
And Ottoline Vass said one thing to me at that table that I have been carrying since.
She said: "She talked about you every day."
And I said something.
And she said: "She told me you were the capable one."
***The capable one.***
That is what my mother called me, for five days, to a stranger, in a chair, with a line in her arm.
And it is the nicest thing and it is also the reason she did not ring me on the fourteenth of August.
And the forty tellings, which I counted in the September and which are the reason I am writing this.
It is a very good story and it has a suitcase in it.
I have told it at work four times. At my cousin's in the January. To two women at the school gate who I do not really know.
And it has four parts and I know where the breath goes. The station. The number that nobody answered. The ticket under the chair. And then the camera.
And the fourth photograph is where I stop.
And every time, somebody says the same thing, which is: oh, Ffion. You poor thing.
Meaning me. In a story about an eighty-year-old woman who booked her own transport with a bus timetable from a library.
And I say something modest and let it stand.
And my mother has heard me tell it. Twice, in her own front room, to other people.
And the second time, in the April, when I got to the bit about the empty chair, she got up and went to put the kettle on.
And I carried on telling it.
And the last thing.
The fourth photograph.
The empty chair with her coat on it.
And for about four months I read it the way anybody would, which is as a woman photographing her own loneliness.
And in the February I asked her about it, and she looked at it on the camera for a while and then she laughed.
Because they let you bring somebody. There are two chairs at every one.
And on the first day — the Monday, before she met Ottoline — she was on her own, and she had put her coat on the second chair because there was nowhere else for it.
And she took a photograph of it to send to me.
That is what it was for. She was going to send it to me with something funny underneath about having a whole chair for her coat.
And then she did not send it, because sending it meant explaining where she was.
So it sat on a borrowed camera for seven days and came home in a stranger's suitcase, and I found it on a Wednesday morning and drove three hours.
And she had taken it on the Monday, at about nine in the morning, for me.
May you like
It had my name on it from the second she pressed the button.
And it is the only photograph of that week that anybody took of nothing at all — and it is the one that got me into the car, eleven days late.
