A souvenir ruler from Iona Abbey. A fountain pen. A long-empty bottle of Bostik clear glue with its blue plastic top and inbuilt brush. These are three of the things I find in my mother’s desk; they’ve been there since before she died, fifteen years ago.
There’s an entire drawer heavy with scissors, pens and pencils (lead and coloured) piled in, higgledy piggledy. By contrast, the drawer above is meticulously organized (more like the mum I remember!) with ancient sellotape, yellowed with age, bulldog clips, stapler, hole punch, still full of the confetti of tiny paper discs, blu-tack and a long-dead calculator, arranged neatly in the compartments of a cutlery holder.
Since our older son Paddy left to live in the UK three years ago, I have used his bedroom as a study. I have spread my papers and folders and stationary over his vast desk and in its capacious drawers. Preparing for him and his sweetheart to move back in with us, I am in the process of vacating their space.
Having my own desk is a necessity of life and I discovered mum’s in our upstairs room and reinstated it for active service. I have created a little writing nook in a corner of our TV room and it works well; hard up against a window that looks out on the new spring green of the vine covering our back verandah and the vivid red of the bottle brush just behind.
The desk is much smaller than the one I’m used to, but it will do nicely. Sitting at it takes me back to the study in the last house mum and dad lived in together, where dad nursed her tenderly until her death.
Their study was a spacious, light filled room that took up the whole width of their house. The long windows looked out on the river of traffic that is Hoddle St, but in this room all was calm. It was lined with books – mainly theology. They both had desks there; it was there they spent a great deal of their time. I always liked to think of them, working away in silent togetherness, in their own little worlds but profoundly connected by their love for each other and for the written word with which they both ministered to many.
There are other things I find in mum’s desk drawers. A pile of dad’s business cards from his last parish, which happens to be the one my husband has just started working at. And a tiny address book which has on the cover ‘BOOKS READ 1990’. The first few pages are for January, then it peters out. In January she would have been at the beach, consuming piles of books as her daughters do. But her holiday reading is a little different from mine.
No less than three books by eminent Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann. What’s right with the church, by William Willimon. Ellie Wiesel’s Night. Ah, thank goodness, an Agatha Christie, Bony and the Kelly Gang by Arthur Upfield and The Trapp Family on Wheels. Over the page I find The Cross of the Son of God by Martin Hengel, a biography (which is the genre I mostly remember her reading) and a Rumer Godden.
I can’t bear to jettison anything. The drawers and their contents look so pristine, I doubt anyone has opened them since mum died, and they make me feel connected to her. We were different in many ways; Mum so much more literary and academic than I will ever be, so much more reserved, but the longer I sit at her desk, the more I realize how much we have in common. I should be cleaning this stuff out, but the mass of pencils, the old business cards and the little notebooks will stay for a while. I sit at mum’s desk, writing, and hope that a little of the qualities she employed here – her courage, intellectual rigour and deep love of beautiful language will seep through to me, if not by genetics, then by osmosis.