Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Motherwell A Girlhood by Deborah Orr Motherwell: A Girlhood by Deborah Orr review – a masterpiece of self-exploration. I dealism in British architecture has much to answer for, yet we like the idea that optimism mixes well with fresh cement. Housing estates were built on a sort of visionary, infectious hope, drawing on particular memories of bombed-out tenements and overcrowded room-and-kitchens. I once saw some letters sent to David Gibson, Glasgow’s messianic early 1960s housing convenor – “he took seven sugars in his tea”, his wife said – which came from citizens desperate to escape the slums. “Please put us down for one of your high-rises and all the clean air up there,” one woman wrote. The poet Hugh MacDiarmid tapped into a modernist hankering, a common wellspring of the better life, when he wrote that “there are ruined buildings in the world, but no ruined stones”. Outside the cities, just by Nirvana, they were building perfect “schemes” for those who knew how to live. Deborah Orr’s mother knew all about that, or felt she did. Like many Britons of her generation and her class, she made something of a religion of keeping up appearances. She wasn’t from the slums herself, she was from Essex, but her husband was local and she loved their new house for being much more than a house, initially feeling they were renting a big new idea as much as a dwelling. “The people of Motherwell were used to being part of something much bigger than themselves,” her daughter writes. “When it went, so quickly … [it] became a town without a purpose.” Set in the Lanarkshire countryside south-east of Glasgow, Motherwell at its height made trams, heavy engineering parts, and produced 3m tons of steel every year, employing 14,000 people (more than half the town’s adult population), many of them at Ravenscraig, which was targeted through the 80s and closed in 1992. Maisonettes and flats at Muirhouse Housing Development, Motherwell, 1966. Photograph: George W Hales/Getty Images. The life of Motherwell was seen as an experiment that failed. As Orr would have been quick to say, all lives, looked at from a certain not un- Scottish perspective, are experiments that fail. But there are miracles too in the world of hard knocks, and Orr, by a kind of genius, finds the kernel of the town’s former existence, and locates the “mother” in its name. By doing so, finishing the book not long before she died last October at the age of 57, she produced what I believe to be the best memoir to appear out of Scotland since 1935, the year of Edwin Muir’s Scottish Journey . A good friend of mine and a former journalist of this parish – editor of Weekend magazine 1993-98, and later a columnist – she has left behind her a non-fiction book for the ages. Motherwell is a searching, truthful, shocking (and timely) observance of the blight that monetarist policies can bring about in a community of workers, indeed on a whole culture of fairness and improvement, while also showing – in sentences as clean as bone – the tireless misunderstandings that can starve a family of love. The family lived at 18 Clyde Terrace, a timber-clad, typical two-storey dwelling in the middle of others much the same, and she recalls the bureau that stood in the corner of the living room, overseen by her mother, Win, who managed all its papers, all its memories. Win could be a fierce custodian of the family narrative and she often recoiled from her brilliant daughter’s efforts to change the story. She once told me Deborah was “perverse”, and, of course, clever children must sometimes seem that way to their confused and fretful parents. Orr could be savage, thrawn and irrepressible, but she was also a born writer and a born improver of dull situations. Win worried about what people thought, Deborah didn’t. And over the years Win’s power came to seem entirely oppressive to her daughter, like the forces excoriating the town itself. On the west coast of Scotland they have as many expressions for embarrassment as the Inuit have for snow. You can be mortified or “black affronted” or “given a showing-up”, especially over matters of cleaning your house or paying your bills or “taking too much drink”. Early in Motherwell , it seems that Win is the engine of all this painful self-loathing, but then we see John, Deborah’s father, who is either an unskilled labourer at Ravenscraig (Deborah) or a trained engineer (Win). It shouldn’t really matter, but it does, very deeply, in the Orr scheme of things. Sifting through her memories as she tries to make sense of her life, Orr sees how she was never good enough, how life itself was never good enough, and that John was really a man of bigotry and anger. After Thatcherism, his world would be blown down in broad daylight, and he becomes an almost Hardyesque casualty of the land, someone carrying his trauma and his prejudices as if they were all he had. Deborah Orr as a child in Motherwell. Photograph: W&N. There is great accuracy in the book’s sociological depictions, great courage in its manner of uncovering family secrets. (There can be few better accounts of how the postwar working-class strove so complicatedly for “betterness”.) Yet the book’s greatness lies mainly in the psychological dimension, in the vivid portrait of her parents’ narcissism and the just-as-vivid portrait of her own, which to some heartbreaking degree was to prove the struggle of their lives. Her mother was traumatised by the war and by the expectations that followed. She clung on to her things, stuffing them into the bureau, but also to her disappointments, as if only they could define her, keep her voice central to the life of the family, cancelling any youthful or novel encroachments. All the time, Deborah is looking at Win and asking: “Did she mother well?” But she also asks who she is herself, how capable, how good. She writes about the history of violence and sectarianism, the scars they leave, and slowly, with a reporter’s skill, she shows the interior life of her people. On the day they blew Ravenscraig down, Deborah was there with her father, mother and brother David. They stood behind the cordon. “The crowd was sparse,” she writes. “There was still a lot of bitterness. It took six seconds for that huge, blue gasometer and those . massive elegant cooling towers to come down … After the . site was decommissioned, its buildings flattened and shovelled away, its earth decontaminated, there was just a big hole, in the town, in the shire, in so many people’s lives.” The local council let off some balloons, to represent every person who’d ever worked there, and the Orr family went home, like many others, to live out their myth of survival. In the present climate, this book should be given out on the NHS. It should also be dangled in the faces of one-nation opportunists, for whom working-class communities only become real when they vote Conservative. Motherwell shows, chapter and verse, the ravages of individualism, yet it also has the guts to demonstrate how working-class identity may be weaponised for intolerance, and snared by eager bigots into voting for its own dissolution. Great books forge a connection between the movement of single minds and the fate of nations, and Deborah, by looking at her own Scottish family and herself, put her finger on the anger and narcissism of the current political moment: “The unsettling thing about group narcissism is that there’s a level on which it works really well. Group narcissism tends to keep individual narcissism at bay. It helps to regulate the feelings of shame … Within the family, John’s expressions of contempt for others got him lots of attention.” Orr grew up in an atmosphere of what she calls “performative hate”. It’s not that her town had any sort of monopoly on that, but Motherwell’s decline, so spitefully speeded by the Thatcher “revolution”, got under the skin of many families, manacling them to a sense of waste. The proudest feature of her father’s life, according to him, was that he had never missed a day’s work in his life, a boast that persisted even after they made him redundant. People like to write about their people’s defiance, not their subservience, so this is a post-industrial story we have not quite heard before, allowing a genuine flushing-out of shame and fear about the whole ‘condition’ of the British working-class, as it used to be understood. The point is: it might never be understood that way again. Orr knew it was hard to speak up, and I believe she hoped for a new openness, ‘to take charge, to take complete control, of my own family, in my own words.’ Ravenscraig steelworks, Motherwell. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian. After dark, the lights of Ravenscraig could once be seen from the whole town, and far into the surrounding countryside. This book is like that, forging out of living memory a glowing vision of troubled belonging. In the writing of it, Deborah found a way to rise out of her sorrows and dependencies, her own difficult loves, and create a masterpiece of self-exploration. We can only mourn her loss and the brilliant books she might have written after this. On reading it, I thought again of how Kenneth Tynan once said he could never really love anybody who didn’t like Look Back in Anger . Well, let me put if differently, and say I shall feel sorry for those who dislike Motherwell , before admitting that feeling sorry comes all too easily. Motherwell: A Girlhood by Deborah Orr review – fitting legacy of a blazing talent. W hen journalist Deborah Orr died from breast cancer last year aged 57, it provoked an outpouring of grief of the most genuine kind. Those who knew Orr didn’t smooth away her edges. Instead we were treated to a series of evocative, honest and very funny stories about her singular vision, her sandpaper-rough tongue, the wild and cussed streak that ran right through her core. Motherwell: A Girlhood , the memoir that Orr had planned for so long, showcases all those qualities and more. Ostensibly the story of her awkward relationship with her formidable mother, Win, the book (named after the town near Glasgow where Orr grew up) is also a meditation on motherhood and a powerful depiction of a particular kind of working-class Scottish life in the 60s and 70s. Orr (like most journalists unable to resist a good pun) worries that, like her mother, she was unable to “mother well” even as she pokes the bruises left by her childhood and carefully unravels the ties – and town – that bound her parents together and that she was so desperate to break free from. “The rules were Win’s – and the power – but John tended to be their enforcer,” she writes of her father, and as the book progresses so does a growing unease about just who enabled whom in this tight, tense relationship. Win was a hoarder, “weird about allowing things out of Clyde Terrace” and constantly on edge about what other people might think. The sort of woman who made enemies easily but was also “resourceful, vivacious, terrifyingly well-organised and copiously talented as an artist and a craftswoman”. She could be “great company” and was “adored not just by my father but by her whole, large family in Essex”. Yet she was also prone to sudden outbursts and terrible punishments, once making the young Deborah wear a badge saying: “I am a cheat” after she’d peeked at the tiles in a Scrabble game. Maisonettes and flats in Muirhouse, Motherwell, where Deborah Orr grew up. Photograph: George W Hales/Getty Images. By contrast, John initially appears as a benign force. The man Orr idolises, who cracks jokes and carries her on his shoulders, and whose world “is bigger than my mum’s”. But here too the faultlines can be seen. “My dad was funny, but his humour was cruel,” Orr writes. He was both drinker and gambler, a man filled with “performative anger” whose temper might not be as quick to rise as Win’s, but whose violence simmered behind that quick smile and ready wit. As the book progresses, so a picture slowly unfolds of a toxic marriage in which each partner was committed to upholding their idealised vision of the other at the expense of anyone else, be they friend, relation or, most troublingly, child. “I realise now that my mother’s main trouble was her pathological inability to understand at all that I was a separate entity from her. She wanted to keep me with her, in the same way as she wanted to keep her arm with her.” It’s an arresting and deeply unsettling image but, despite her memoir’s subtitle, Orr is interested in far more than simply picking dry the bones of her girlhood. Thus alongside her vivid memories of a now vanished way of life built on factory employment, regular churchgoing and the dream of a “house with a back and front door”, runs a thoughtful and thought-provoking examination of the nature of narcissism. It’s a subject that Orr, who divorced Will Self in 2018, knows a great deal about, although those hoping for the copious spilling of literary beans will largely be disappointed despite some pointed passages. “When I first moved in with my former husband … he inspected my collection of books, plucking the ones he fancied out of his shelves and taking them up to his office… He didn’t ask, or mention it in any way, and I tried and failed not to mind.” Later we learn that: “He once told me, early in our marriage: ‘I’m jealous of your thoughts, because they’re inside you.’ I thought it was the creepiest thing I’d ever heard. He thought it was an ardent declaration of love.” Motherwell: identity, industry and independence. Motherwell was published posthumously in 2020 by Deborah Orr’s estate. Orr lost her battle with breast cancer in 2019 and her memoir was published in the wake of her death. Deborah Orr spent her life working as a journalist and columnist. Previously Orr worked as an editor on the Guardian Weekend magazine. In the memoir Orr comments on the academic elitism within the media industry in the UK. In particular, Orr remarks that ‘I’m probably still the one Weekend editor whose dad earned his living on a factory floor’. Motherwell is a memoir of a girlhood. However, it is also a testament to a life which was tragically cut short due to Orr’s recent struggle with cancer. The book’s title and content is firmly rooted in Motherwell, the Scottish town where Orr spent her childhood. ‘Motherwell lost its identity in the industrial restructuring of the 1980s’ The memoir contains a vivid sense of place. Orr charts the political policies that changed the shape of Motherwell at the end of the twentieth- century. In particular, Orr notes how the ex-mining town was devastated by the forced closure of the industry by Thatcher’s hostile government. Orr observes that ‘Motherwell lost its identity in the industrial restructuring of the 1980s’. Conservative cuts and policies radically changed the character of Motherwell. The political changes impacted the community, the family and the landscape. Orr remembers Thatcher’s ‘rent to buy’ scheme and the impact it had on her working-class parents who finally had the opportunity to buy their council house. Throughout the memoir Orr reflects on her Scottish hometown alongside her family life and strained relationship with her mother. I was struck with the depth of Orr’s memory. The journalist is able to recall childhood memories with vivid detail which is a talent in itself. Orr’s antagonistic relationship with her mother dominates the memoir. In particular, Orr feels like she married to appease her mother who hated her ‘career girl’ lifestyle. ‘My mother’s whole existence, all seventy-six years of it, was ordered by the choices of men’ Win, Orr’s mother, spent her life looking after her husband and raising a family. Orr sharply observes that ‘My mother’s whole existence, all seventy-six years of it, was ordered by the choices of men’. Win’s life was shaped by the decisions of men. In particular, her husband and the doctor who induced the birth of Deborah and her brother. The tensions between Win and Deborah intensify over the course of the memoir. Motherwell documents the generational conflicts which played out between a daughter and her mother over two overlapping lifetimes. Orr is influenced by second-wave feminism and critical of her mother for allowing patriarchal figures to make decisions on her behalf. However, Win’s choices are a product of her upbringing alongside her conditioning within patriarchal society. The memoir critiques Win’s choices but refrains from delving into her past which, for me, is an oversight. ‘We were both in bad moods when we parted, and I never saw my mother again’ Orr reflected on the last time she saw her mother in a Guardian article. She shared that ‘We were both in bad moods when we parted, and I never saw my mother again’. Win’s death created space for Orr to reflect on her relationship with her mother and publish it in her memoir. Motherwell works through strained family bonds, the pressure of parental expectations, and the importance of following your own path. The memoir is a recollection of a girlhood as well as a sociological study of Motherwell and the political turbulence it has experienced. I was unaware of Orr’s recent passing before I read Motherwell . I think the posthumous publication adds another dimension of sadness to the memoir and the relationships it vividly depicts. However, Motherwell stands as a testament to Orr and the legacy of her journalism. Deborah Orr (2019) Motherwell: A Girlhood. I was shocked—well, that’s the wrong word, but I can’t think of the right one—that Deborah Orr was dead. She’s the same age as me, or would have been— Motherwell: A Girlhood was a message from beyond the grave. She died in 2019. She came from Motherwell. The title is a dead giveaway. And there’s a whole stack of her achievements listed on flyleaf with a picture of her, a haunting picture, in retrospect. Look at the cover image and, in contrast, a picture of Deborah aged around seven or eight, long hair, smiling for the camera, crinoline dress, blue and white pattern, white socks up to the knees and shiny white shoes. A proper little girl. Deborah Orr’s achievements, including writing and editing for The Guardian, which at the time was as novel as a woman Prime minister, not because of her background, but despite it. One of the commonest tricks played on the working class is to point at the exception to the rule and say there’s one there. There’s a black swan. Upward social mobility is possible for those that work. My message to you and I’m sure Deborah Orr’s would be too is – fuck off. We’ve been moving backward to the dark ages bit by bit since the Thatcher/ Reagan revolution. An era when Deborah Orr escaped to the glory of a London squat, roughly, when this book ends. Deborah was named after the Scottish film star, Deborah Kerr, her mother Win, loved all the glamour and glitter of Hollywood, but the grim reality is here in this joke the author loved (and I do too) about a Yorkshireman on his deathbed. ‘Steven? Are you here?’ ‘Mary? Are you here?’ ‘Bethany? Are you here?’ ‘I’m here, Grandad.’ ‘Aaron? Are you here?’ ‘I’m here, Grandad.’ ‘Then why’s the hall light on?’ Here’s one of your markers if you want to apply for your passport to poverty. I laughed out loud, while recognising my da skulking in the hallway waiting to pounce because I was on the phone. ‘That’s no a piano,’ Dessy, my da said. The memoir is structured around memento mori . The Bureau, Baby’s First Haircut, The Wedding Clippings, The Dolls. The Dope Box, Letter to Crispin, Untitled, The Last Vestiges of John. ‘I loved Win’s wide black velvet belt, so tiny that she kept for years, a reminder to herself of her lovely curvaceous figure, “before I had children”.’ John was Deborah’s dad, the centre of his world. He was the baby of a family of five, as was her mum, Win, who was English. Win was under five-foot small, but gorgeous, everybody said so. John was luck to have Win, Win was lucky to have John. They all lived happy ever after isn’t much of a story. ‘John and Win met, and had their miscegenated, cross-border romance because of the war. Without the war, I was always told I wouldn’t have existed.’ When Deborah recalls three increasingly brutal rapes by different men—the playful rape at University, if you don’t squeal, I won’t tell; to the accidental rape, you’re sleeping, so I’ll just fuck you because we talked earlier; to the hands on the throat and you might never live to tell the tale— and her mother’s surprise that sex could be pleasurable and not something done to you, then her mum sides with the rapists. She sides with women jury members that found rapists and murderers such as Peter Manuel not guilty because women shouldn’t have put themselves in such a positon to be bludgeoned. The natural positon of women was to think of Scotland, or even England in her case, when John, a good man, forced himself on her. Her wee brother David was brought up with different expectations, he’d go on to make his mark on the world. John and Win were great believers in the natural order of things. No Catholics, no blacks, no dogs as landlords used to mark on the front door even though dogs couldn’t read. John couldn’t read either, not really. Like many others he’d left school at twelve or thirteen to earn scraps of money. Motherwell was built on steel and coal. Ravenscraig once employed 14 000 men and was the most efficient steel makers in the world. He became part of the working-class aristocracy when he got a job in Colville, girder makers, prior to nationalisation at the age of fifteen. He even became a heroic figure to many hardened by the noise and daily grind, when he pushed a man aside and away from a red-hot girder that had slipped its chains and would have slipped through his body just as easily. Health and safety was still to be invented. Deborah believes he suffered from post-traumatic-stress disorder and that’s what led him away from the life mapped out for him—to Essex and Win—and back again. John returned to Motherwell with his beautiful bride to working class life and the hope of a decent council house. Win had a believe, common to most rich folk, what’s yours is mine and what’s mine is mine, especially in regard to her daughter. Her father, John, as protector and saviour, aided her in this belief. His hates were his hates and vice versa. John, for example, had mates whom he thought ‘the sun shone out of their arse’, then it didn’t shine very much. Then it was them that was the arse. He ditched them. And he waged petty hate campaigns against his neighbours. A conversation I heard today goes something like this, ‘They’ve just moved into the house for five minutes and noo they’re getting everything.’ I’ll translate. My neighbours are getting a new path. The same as other council house tenants. Imagine they were black, or homosexual or even worse English. Deborah suggests her mum suffered from a narcissistic personality. She wasn’t a narcissistic sociopath such as the moron’s moron Trump, or little Trump, Johnson, but she recognised the same self-centredness and hate. As long as Deborah remained a child and under her mother’s thumb, she was a good girl. Nobody hates so much and as well as the Scottish and we’ve got long memories. SNP channels that hate. Win fitted right in. Win-win. But I couldn’t quite forgive Win and John for voting Tory. Voting for Thatcher. But I guess that makes sense. Deborah’s life ran in a separate trajectory to mine. The same, but different. RIP. Orr's Motherwell unpicks the complexities of familial relationships. Motherwell , the incisive memoir by Deborah Orr, unpicks the complexities of familial relationships. Over the past year, I have had the privilege of being among the early readers of some outstanding memoirs which chart their authors’ challenging childhoods and the after-effects thereof: Educated by Tara Westover; Lowborn by Kerry Hudson; and My Past is a Foreign Country by Zeba Talkanhi to name just three. In Motherwell: A Girlhood , Deborah Orr does something subtly different. While—like Lowborn —it is a memoir of a Scottish working-class upbringing, in her case in a series of council flats and houses in the Lanarkshire town of Motherwell, there is little obvious misery. Orr had two loving parents and did well at school. And while there were few luxuries and no fancy holidays, she wanted for very little. But still she couldn’t wait to get away. At 18, she left to go to university, and then moved to London, carving out a hugely successful career as one of our most incisive journalists and commentators. The first female editor of the Guardian’ s Weekend magazine by the age of 30, Orr is also a playwright and the co- creator of "Enquirer", commissioned by the National Theatre of Scotland, performed around the country and broadcast on BBC Radio 4, and shortlisted for New Play of the Year in the Critics’ Awards for Theatre in Scotland. So far, so working-class girl made good. But in Motherwell , rather than celebrate this journey, Orr grapples with what the decision to leave cost her; and how it demonstrates the yawning generation gap between her and her parents that could never be bridged. Memorably framed through a series of long-retained objects from her childhood which Orr discovers in a bureau she inherits from her parents—among them a lock of her baby hair, her parents’ wedding photograph, her school reports—the result is an utterly riveting, often blackly comic, and astonishingly honest début memoir, striking in its understanding of how the places and people we come from make us who we are. While Motherwell , with its astonishingly apt title, takes in all her family relationships including those with her late father, brother and extended families in both Scotland and England, centre stage is Orr’s complex relationship with her late mother, Win. Born and brought up in rural Essex, Win moved north of the border in the 1960s after marrying Orr’s Scottish father, John. Of both her parents, denied the opportunity for much formal education, Orr writes: "they had no idea how intelligent they were". But Win appeared to have few aspirations beyond becoming a "brilliant housewife" and natural homemaker that she clearly was. "She was amazing," writes Orr. "She was accomplished, resourceful, vivacious, terrifyingly well-organised and copiously talented as an artist and craftswoman. When I was little, I worshipped her." Flying the nest But ultimately, Win had very little control over the course that her life would take. "In some part of my mother, stuffed down and denied, there was unwelcome cognisance that her life had been limited by her sex and class." As a result, she couldn’t contemplate the idea that her daughter might want to make different choices from her own; and, backed by her husband, repeatedly undermined Orr’s attempts to assert her own identity. "If she had no agency in the Big World, why should other women have it?" When Orr left Motherwell to go to university, her mother railed against the idea that her only daughter could ever want to leave her orbit. "She lived in her own world and she wanted me to live in it with her." Orr’s refusal to do so casts a long shadow of guilt over her adult life, and it is only in her late fifties, after the death of both of her parents, that Orr begins to understand just how deeply it has affected her. The award-winning fiction writer and memoir author Alice Jolly recently told me that she believes you can’t write a good memoir without spilling some blood. The ruthless honesty in Motherwell cuts deep, and none of its protagonists escape unscathed—not Orr’s mother, nor her father, nor (though rather more tangentially) her ex partner, Will Self. But her scalpel is at its sharpest when she turns it on herself; on her foibles, and on her poor choices. For example, though still proudly working-class, she is also quick to slice through her own inverted snobbery. "The more humble my beginnings, the more I appeared to have achieved. I emphasised my lowly parents to feel prouder of myself," she writes. Legacy of love Ultimately what Motherwell does so well is to unpack—with great understanding and no mean wit—that complex and tangled mixture of light and shade that characterises so many parent-child relationships; relationships that are essentially loving but which—as Philip Larkin famously recorded—also brand us with character traits and hang-ups that remain with us all our lives. As Orr memorably puts it: "Your Mum and Dad may fuck you up but only because they didn’t know how fucked up they were themselves." Motherwell is not a book lacking in affection. On contrary, it is Orr’s heartfelt tribute to her home town, and to all that went into the making of her, for better and for worse. But written in her late fifties, having mothered two now grown sons of her own, it is also her attempt to gain control of her own emotional history at last. Early on, she writes of how her mother once named all her childhood dolls for her. "Win", she writes, was "in charge of all the words". In Motherwell , it is finally Orr’s turn to take charge. This is not quite the usual interview-format Author Profile because sadly, having been diagnosed with breast cancer earlier this year, Deborah Orr was not well enough for our original intended interview to take place. In lieu of this, below is the prologue to Motherwell , an outstanding memoir which, publishing as it does in January, sets the bar very high for the genre in 2020. Book Extract That view. That stunning, dystopian panorama. A world unto itself, stretched out perfectly flat as far as the horizon, monochrome like the telly. Except for the occasional blast of pale-custard. Spikes of flame, so fast-moving that they seemed solid, roared implacably into the sky, day and night. Gas burnoff. A steelworks twice the size of Monaco. At the time it was built, Ravenscraig was the largest, most technologically advanced strip mill in Europe: the black, thumping heart of our town and the lives of everyone in it. We Orrs lived pretty much on the edge of the complex. Everyone did. But you could only ever fully grasp the monolithic achievement of the place from one high point, as you came into town from the north. You were never, ever quite prepared for the Craig’s dark satanic majesty, no matter how many times you’d seen it. We lived in thrall to it. Beyond all else, that denatured, slightly hell-like hyper-mechanised landscape provoked awe. It seemed indestructible, irrevocable. But it survived, intact for only thirty-three years, from 1959 until 1992. High industrial Gothic, one of the wonders of the post-war settlement. All gone now. The place turned out to be an elaborate folly. Motherwell is the town I was born and bred in, a coal and steel town on the lip of the Clyde Valley. By the time I was thirty years old it wasn’t a coal and steel town any more. Motherwell lost its identity in the industrial restructuring of the 1980s, along with wave after wave of redundant workers. Personal identities were shattered. But group identity was shattered too. The people of Motherwell were used to being part of something much, much bigger than themselves. When it went, so quickly, Motherwell became a town without a purpose. I couldn’t stand the place, even when it was still in its pomp. But I loved it too. Still do. Motherwell is where my mum lived, because that’s where my dad came from. Even at the start of the 1960s, women did what their husbands w anted, in matters large and small. But Win was from rural Essex and found life in Lanarkshire challenging. She explained all this to me from when I was old enough to listen, or maybe even long before. Yet, despite all those confidences, over so many years, Motherwell is the place where I failed to get to know my mother very well at all. Until after she was dead. That was when I started to realise that there were respects in which she hadn’t mothered well at all.