[AnnieBL]

One thing I should probably add about my relationship with my mother. As time went by, I found it increasingly difficult to talk to her as more and more subjects seemed to be added to the taboo list, until I was largely confined to commonplaces and she to nostalgia of the 'do you remember' type. After her death I inherited a large box of letters largely consisting of most of my father's wartime letters to her, and a series of posthumous letters that she wrote to him while trying to get over his death, the last 16 years later. These also were much in the 'do you remember' vein. I now think that I was to some extent being made a proxy for my father,, and if I expressed views or opinions or behaved in ways which were not in line with what she felt my father's views or actions would have been, that was unacceptable. I remember the shock I felt when at age 12 I was summoned to the principal's office at school and was told that my mother was concerned with my behaviour, and that I was a disgrace to the memory of my dead father. The shock was not least because I had then no idea as to what behaviour he was referring, but I suppose now that I had not been behaving and indeed probably could not behave in line with what she would have expected from my father. In passing, I hope you were not too shocked by your sister's comment you reported in your program thread. Whatever she thought, she surely should not have made the comment - these things can stay with one and fester for a long, long time.