Happy Birthday | Patricia Ann Lish

My mother Patricia Ann Lish, was a talented performer and a dancer, is 69 today and in 2009 she will be 70. As far as I know.

She was in musical theatre and performed in the first West End production of The King & I, with Yul Brynner.   I think she played the “Little Eva” part.  She was also, with my “Aunt”, her best friend whose name I can’t spell but was pronounced Aethnae, a member of the dance troup The Dolly Birds, who appeared with Lionel Blair on one of the first TV shows in the very early 60’s. After a glass of wine, they told racy stories of travelling the country in dance acts, repertory theatre, dodgy b&b’s and Adam Faith!

When she met my father, Thomas Cochrane McKenzie, a naval officer, she fell in love, and was forced to give up her showbiz career and get married, by her mother, Amelia Lish, who was a wonderful woman but a right old matriarch. You had to give stuff up for love in those days…..you couldn’t have it all unless you were particularly strong willed and lucky.

She ended up back in Worthing, with two small babies, on her own most of the time, because Tom was at sea a lot. I remember him coming home and imposing his presence and rules on us but he was a distant and frightening figure. He was also a philanderer of the worst kind, smuggling women off the ship on one gangplank as my mother and his children came up the other. She knew but was trapped and helpless.

For some reason, he kept her short of money even though he was a First Officer in the Merchant Navy, and she had to go out to work in the local telephone exchange at night, leaving us in the good care of Janet, who was totally blind but somehow managed to look after us.

When I was about 7, and my sister Heather about 5, Mum suffered badly from depression, caused by loneliness, stress (and massive disappointment in life I would imagine).

She was forced by her doctor, her mother and my father, to endure several episodes of electric shock treatment during the 1960’s. This led to a complete breakdown and Dad took her off on a “world cruise” to recover. How much of a cruise going away on a Ben Line Merchant Navy ship might have been…..

One minute our mum was there, every day, all the time, the next she was gone – for two years. The abandonment issues that has caused are still very real. We were sent to live with our aunt and uncle who did their best, but we were desperately unhappy, and we ended up with our nan and grandad, who we loved, settled in with and were blissfully happy with.

Then Mum came home – and with a new Dad, the Chief Engineer from the same ship, another Scots sailer! A messy divorce ensued, two more children who we loved dearly and treated as our dollys, and we all – though my mum had nothing from her marriage due to a crap deal she made with my father who never honoured his side – gradually pieced their lives together. My stepfather was a good man – Alexander “Sandy” Cairncross who we came to love and still call Dad.

However, my Mum was not easy to live with, always striving to make something of herself and she made us all move every 18 months, buying up and renovating houses, clawing her way up the property ladder. Going from money in the bank, to debt on credit card, selling to pay it all off and starting again, creating equity as she went.

But the stress and constant moving took its toll, my dad escaped – as men often do – by having a long-running affair, and she eventually found out after months of him (and all of us) telling her she was imagining it. He left, she finished the latest house project, rented out the rooms and promptly had another breakdown, so total that I had to sign the papers to section her, as she was a danger to herself. I was 18.

She’s never been right since and while she looks like my mum, on the outside, on the inside she is paranoid to the point of hearing voices all the time, she is foul mouthed, racist and homophobic. Not good as I married a black man, her grandchildren are a beautiful chocolate colour, and my brother is gay.

Where is she now? No idea. Not dead, but she might as well be.

Her illness has made her impossible to be around, and she just won’t take the bloody tablets!  Paranoid Schizophrenia is a terrible thing – they look like the people you know and love, but their minds are taken over by the illness.  In my mum’s case, she has become a racist, homophobic old lady, which is awful because my ex-husband Irving Soremekun has half Nigerian, my children Phoebe Soremekun and Nelson Soremekun are a lovely chocolate colour, and my brother Alex is a happily gay man.

But it was her who taught us to be tolerant of all people, so it’s doubly shocking that her illness has changed her so completely.  And it’s doubly tragic that the so-called “Care In The Community” means that, unless she is a danger to herself or to others, she will get no help.  One doctor who shall remain nameless, once told us three sisters “Well at least she isn’t lonely with all those voices in her head!”.

Why am I paying tribute to her?

Because she was a bright, strong, talented woman who had a bloody tough life, who never had a chance to fulfil her potential.

Before her first breakdown she made me feel loved and clever enough that I’ve never lacked confidence and know that I can do anything I want to in life. She passed on her creativity and drive.

She instilled in me an ability to read, and a love of reading, and that love of reading has enabled me to learn anything I wanted to, since leaving school.

Her unintentional abandonment of us as very small girls, has pushed both of us to seek approval and love by being clever and special and needing to perform. I now own a business fulfilling my mission of giving women choice, and escaping economic traps, and I speak and write, and my sister, Heather Cairncross is now a world class Opera and Jazz singer

Everything I am, is down to her.

This is my tribute to my mother, Patricia Ann Lish.