And then, all of a sudden I had to go home. We’d been living in Australia for five years. Five years! The time just flies on by when you’re busy reinventing yourself. Still, I thought of England as home. Strange thing was, I’d never once felt homesick even though I was as far away as you could get.
As I put the phone down though I wondered how I’d feel when I went back. Then I got to thinking about all that time I’d spent trying to write those damned books, all that time being proud even as I went to the brink of living out on the streets, all that time thinking about what I wanted to do and striving to do it. I think that none of this had been good, and that’s why I never felt homesick - it was a relief to be away from it all, from the pressure, the strain, the depression. But sometimes you have to go back and when Tom told me that the cancer had almost gone but then it had come back stronger and fitter and marched on in my mum’s body until she just couldn’t take it any more I sat and I thought. I sat thinking about all the time I’d spent by myself when perhaps I could have spent some of it with my family, spent some of it with my mother. You know, I think that you never believe your parents will die. Of course you know they will but most people never focus in on it, don’t spend all their time thinking about it, which I suppose is how it should be. But one minute your parents are healthy and fit and doing stuff and the next minute something like this can happen and they change down a gear, the brakes go on and suddenly, before you know it, they are barely the people you’ve known all your life.  
I managed to get through to my mum on the phone in the hospital and she said she didn’t know where she was. She sounded just like my granny before she died. I mean that she had a Yorkshire accent. My mum hadn’t had a Yorkshire accent in all the time I’d known her, which of course was all my life, though I guess she must have had a twang when I was little because I was born in Middlesbrough when she was 21. She taught in a tough inner city Middlesbrough school and she was an only child and I think she must have been lonely when she was a kid, though she never said she was. I just guessed. She told me one day, with more than a trace of bitterness that there had been lots of things she’d wanted to do. I was too embarrassed by this uncharacteristic outburst to ask exactly what those things had been and instead I just said, “well, you should have done them then”.
Since I’ve grown up a bit I’ve had things like that said to me and boy does it sting. In the depths of my own personal despair someone in Britain once said to me, “you know, I don’t think you’ll be able to pull yourself out of this.” Bollocks, I said to myself at the time. I spat the word in my head. Sometimes you just have to take your problems and you just have to say bollocks to them. I wished my mother had said bollocks to a few things. She might have had a bit more fun if she had, rather than bottling it all up inside like she did. Look, it’s just a personal thing, but I reckon you live longer if you let go a bit. I’ve bottled stuff up and I’ve let things go and letting go is the way. I think if you do that then you’ll live a whole lot longer and I intend to live for, well, forever actually, so let go, have a shout, move some stuff around. Live longer.
When I got her on the phone in that hospital she said, “I’m leaving you -” and then her voice trembled and I thought, God, here I am on the other side of the bloody world and she’s on the phone and she just so happens to be dying at this very moment, and then she got control of her voice again and continued, “- leaving you some money.” I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.
I talked to Tom and told him I’d fix a flight but it was Easter and everything was closed so we had to wait until the Tuesday. On Tuesday I got a flight booked for later that week, it was the best I could do, but early the next evening the phone rang and I answered it and my sister was there and she told me mum had died. My first thought was, oh God, that’s really going to give Tom something to complain about. Of course I was right, but this time you couldn’t blame him. Really you couldn’t.
One day, mum had told me that a friend of her’s had revealed some damning evidence about the way Mr Kipling cakes were made and that as a result she would never buy them or eat them again. I asked her what she knew and she said it was so terrible that she couldn’t tell me. I wish I’d quizzed her because now there’s no way I’m ever going to find out what the story was, and of course it also means I’ll never eat a Mr Kipling cake again, which is a shame because I always rather liked them.