Alexander Chancellor
REMIND ME WHO I AM, AGAIN by Linda Grant (Granta)
It is told in this book how Frankie Vaughan, the handsome crooner once thought to be England’s answer to Frank Sinatra, came to acquire his surname. His real name was Francis Abelson, and he lived as a child with his sister, his mother and his grandmother in a house in Devon Street, Liverpool, next door to Linda Grant’s family, the Ginsbergs. His mother would look at him and say in her Yiddish accent: “Frankie, you’re number von.” “And that’s how he came to be known as Vaughan,” Grant reports.
This is, I believe, the only funny story in her book, unless you count as amusing the muddles and mis-statements of people suffering from senile dementia; unless you find it funny when the author’s demented mother, Rose, refers to a church spire as a “tree” because they both “go up”, or to a bus as a “clock” because “clocks take you home”. But those things aren’t in the least funny, really.
Linda Grant’s book about her mother’s loss of memory (her disease is Multi- Infarct Dementia, not Alzheimer’s, though the effect is much the same) is almost unbearably sad to read, for there are few things sadder to witness than a parent’s unavailing struggle against mental atrophy. And the sadness is increased in this particular case by Grant’s belated yearning to discover more about her tricky, secretive family and their Jewish immigrant forebears at just the moment when her father has died and her mother’s memory is going.
This is a beautifully written and rigorously honest book, in which the author does not conceal the strong ambivalence of her own feelings towards her parents.
The implicit lesson of her story is to resist the urge to assuage one’s own guilt in dealing with a problem of this kind, but to consider only the patient’s interests, however unattractive the consequences may appear.
But all is not necessarily lost. Often some corner of the brain continues to tick away. Rose Grant, a lifelong shopping enthusiast, can still match a jacket and a blouse when she is taken shopping . And last year she laid some flowers in front of a window at Harrods that had been turned into a shrine to Diana, Princess of Wales. “Those poor boys,” she said afterwards. “Left without a mother.”
A pause, and then: “Do you think she’ll remarry?”