I lost my mother on April 1st this year, 9 months after losing my father. I have already written about him, and I have added the eulogy I wrote about my mother here:
Renate, our mother was born in Spandau in Berlin in 1932, and according to our maternal grandmother, was, a perfect looking little baby. However, her curiosity and naturally inquisitive nature began to develop so that by the time she was four, my grandmother had to drag her off the bus because she had persisted in asking every elderly gentleman why they didn’t have any hair.
They moved to the North of Germany when she was about six and life as the middle child of four other siblings became filled with the fear of the Russian invasion, culminating in her becoming a refugee on her thirteenth birthday and fleeing to the south via various relatives. During this time, she spent occasions in hospital, once for her tonsils and once for her appendix, and spent most of her recovery wandering around, writing love letters for long term patients and sitting by the beds of others asking them questions about their lives.
At sixteen, she went to a boarding school that specialised in training towards teaching and drama. There she was offered a scholarship to the equivalent of RADA in Germany, but she turned it down. She didn’t mind speaking in public, but she hated the idea of being or playing anyone but herself.
By the time she was 21 she had learnt shorthand, typing and English, and went to a posting in the North of England to improve her language skills, while working as an au pair. She managed to become friends with other au pairs, went hiking in Scotland with them and reached her 22nd birthday. The plan was to return to Germany for good after that but her friends invited her on a coach trip with other locals to the Lake District. Little did she know her fate was going to alter from that decision.
She met our father, the eighteen-year-old Terry Walsh on this fated trip. He had specifically agreed to come, because he had heard that there were some interesting, not English, young women joining. While he decided on that day that he had met the woman he was going to marry, describing her as a woman with a beautiful soul, Renate was not quite as fast in feeling the same way. She was struck by his deep voice and soulful manner, but she had much to achieve in the next few years. They spent her last two weeks in England dating, she being introduced to our paternal grandparents, who had hoped she might too flighty to be a keeper for their young son, but they found that Renate was the opposite of that.
Renate returned to Germany, Terry and she agreeing to write and to visit each other. She moved to Dusseldorf near her eldest beloved sister Barbara, where she started looking for work. She got work as a bilingual secretary for several organisations, but the job she loved most was an American Management Consultancy named George S May. She was by this time earning more than Terry in England and was posted at one point to Paris where she stayed at the famous George V Hotel and worked and played hard. There is a photo somewhere (cut?) where Renate is high kicking in a hotel room, to demonstrate just how high her legs could go, the rest of the team applauding. The letters she writes to our father are peppered throughout with stories of her having met a nice Englishman here or an American man there, all of whom save their last cigarette for her. It must have driven Terry mad with jealousy.
He popped the question finally, although worried that he might not ever earn enough to look after her and a potential family, and they married in 1960. Terry had looked for work for Renate when she came to live briefly back in England before they married, and she settled for more au pair work, having had to hand in her notice with a very reluctant George S May.
A tough time began for them in which they moved around northern parts of the UK, where Terry was originally from. At this point Terry was working for Cross & Blackwell. Jonathan, their first child was born in 1962, and Renate later told me that his arrival made everything good with the world. She felt totally in the right space to be a mother and embraced its challenges with joy. Her second child was born in 1965, my good self, and she felt that completed the picture. However, major adventures were afoot, beginning with a spell in the South of England.
Around 1970 family Walsh were posted to Bangkok, Thailand. Our mother looked after us and the home, but her work did not end there. Once the German Embassy had heard that a fully qualified, bilingual secretary had arrived, they demanded her presence. She didn’t even lose the job when Terry came to one of the parties and imitated Hitler, using a comb for a moustache. In fact, they insisted she bring him to all their soirees.
By 1973 family Walsh had moved to Kobe Japan, where Renate found herself teaching English language for adult classes. Somewhere on this globe, there must be a few Japanese people who are equipped with grammatically perfect English and a whisper of a German accent when they speak it. As a little girl, whenever I was in her company, our mother Renate commanded a great presence. New noodle shops would invite us to sit and enjoy the first meal on the house, because we were told we would bring good luck. That was the effect she had.
1976 took Family Walsh to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia where once again the German embassy leapt with joy to be able to have Renate Walsh run the office, this time taking on the important role of helping hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees who had arrived. She had a special key that hung around her neck that opened the safe which held the stamp. That stamp would free the refugees to enter Germany and begin a new life. She loved the work because she felt she could do good, the way she felt the English Quakers had, when she had been a refugee.
Around 1981 family Walsh found themselves in Seoul, Korea. The first British school (do you mean a school for British children or a British school for Korean children?) for English speaking children was set up there, by our mother and a handful of others. Perhaps the pain of having had to send both my brother and me to boarding school due to the lack of expatriate good education had forged her mindset to ensure that other parents did not have to suffer that kind of separation in the future.
By this time, my brother and I were adults and our parents now resided in Switzerland, where Renate became a keen player of bridge, hosted many Christmases for us and our friends, and enjoyed the fact that she was able to speak to her son or daughter as often as she liked on the phone or even fly across to the UK to see us more frequently. It was in the Swiss mountains that she one day came across a woman desperate to escape her cruel ‘employers’. Renate recognised a woman in trouble when she saw one and without a moment’s hesitation took the woman to her own home, contacted her embassy and ensured her safe escape from what turned out to be a case of modern slavery.
In 1996 Retirement brought our parents to West Chiltington, West Sussex. My mother and I went on several trips together – Paris, Amsterdam, Madrid, York and a regular twice a year haunt was a health hotel called Grayshott. She had got into the habit of Kneipping (pronounced kanipe-ing). This was based on a herbalist called Dr Kneipp, who believed you got energy from the dew in the grass if you walked on it barefoot at dawn. My mother and I could be seen around the hotel lawns, barefoot at dawn, wandering in our dressing gowns. It aroused interest in the manager who consequently invited us for drinks, (which is something that happened all the time with our mother).
She was a complete original, who never really minded what other people thought of her. She was not only our mother, but my best friend and we shall miss her and remember her forever.
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Now I have to learn how to adjust to a world without them both. Both parents were in my life until my ripe age of fifty-nine. It is not just that I miss them both so very much, but I miss the world with them in it and prefer to believe that they are still in it.
The existential angst that has accompanied this horrible time plagues me regularly, making me beg the question of why does one bother marching on. The answer has to be that if marching on is the only thing one can do for now, then so be it. I am lucky enough to have a large set of loving friends and a very supportive, caring husband. I am unlucky enough not to have had the fortune of bearing children, due to the earlier ectopics, fibroids and the hysterectomy that I underwent as a consequence. Growing older is going to have to be a challenge that I face without the exceptional love and adoration that I regularly received from my parents. I do wonder at my age why I am persisting to attempt to express myself, whether that is through my acting ability, or my novel writing or my film script writing or whether it is when I attempt to put colours on paper or canvas. I keep reminding myself that the sheer, random luck of having been born at all is something to be treasured and celebrated in every which way. Travelling will be my mission with the husband and learning methods to enjoy all that life can give. My garden, the glorious Thames and its rich history, the mystery of why we are all here sharing this experience.
On a practical note, I enter this new period in my life with a relatively new agent in addition to my commercial agent, new headshots once again, as the body and face continues its rapid changes so that self discovery appears to be an industrial daily habit, new membership of a few clubs to do with women in film, tv and writing, so that I can generate some motivation and get my engine running. I see both a physical therapist and a psychological therapist regularly to work on how to get my balance on these moody waters. And that is it, for now. Wish me luck and love, as I climb aboard and get my sails ready and wait for that wind to blow.
Kate Terence's Letters from London 