Memories of Jo Hawker
My mother, Frances Josephine, was a farmer’s daughter, the second of four sisters, and the only one to be named after two uncles – Frank and Joseph. Her parents were immigrants – a Welsh-American couple who’d settled in Worcestershire with their brother and sister. She grew up in a household of eight, drove a tractor at the age of twelve, and liked to drink warm milk straight from the cow.
Mum liked both her Christian names, and made full use of them both. Family and friends called her Jo, but at work she was known as Frances. It could get confusing. In the last ten years she was very grateful – and we were very grateful – to get paid help from a lot of people, including several who were at her funeral. What I always found interesting is that she asked most of the people who helped her call her Frances. It was as if she felt that it was a professional working relationship she had with them – she often talked about training carers up into the job of looking after her – and she wanted to keep it professional.
It’s interesting also because when she was a child, Mum was used to her family taking in strangers and caring for them as part of the family. First they took Barnardo’s orphans, and later German and Italian prisoners of war to work on the land. Perhaps it was they who first got Mum interested in languages. Or perhaps it was because the adults in the house used to speak Welsh when they didn’t want the children to understand. She was the first in her family to pass her 11+ and go to university, in London, where she studied French and German.
But she was always interested in other cultures and languages. Her father died during her O-levels, and her family moved to Malvern. There she used to wake up early and go for long walks. Once she got as far as the next town, Ledbury, found herself out of puff and out of money, and a Gypsy paid for her bus fare home. In college her closest friends were overseas students who went to work in Asia. Her best friends as a young mother in Birmingham were Nigerian refugees, Pakistani immigrants, and Orthodox Jews. She taught many people in her village conversational French and German, and liked to sing French songs to us as children. Much later, she liked to get to know her carers, especially when they came from different countries and she could learn about their backgrounds, or speak French – or Welsh – with them.
But it was care for people who struggled because of their backgrounds that really interested Mum. She was a pioneering social worker several times. She started out working in a psychiatric hospital In the 1950s just when they were starting to close and settle patients in the community (you thought that wasn’t till decades later? Mum would have put you right). There she ran a music appreciation group for the patients, which seemed to involve being a kind of request DJ, and which was probably the only time she ever listened much to pop music. She told us the most popular request was Cliff Richard’s Living Doll. What she never told us was that the hospital was a pioneer in the therapeutic use of LSD.
After that, she was a child care officer, in the days before they were called social workers, driving orphans to meet new foster parents. In the late 80s she set up a kind of adult fostering scheme in Warwickshire, where families would take in and look after older people and people with disabilities to live with them. She ran it very successfully for a few years until rate capping came in, and the funding was cut. She always hoped that she’d get that when she became disabled enough to need it. Sadly, though it still exists as a care option – it’s now called shared living – from what I gather it was never developed in the way that she was doing 25 years ago, and wasn’t really available when she needed it herself.
It was when she was training as a social worker that Mum got to know one of her course tutors, Ken Hawker. Actually Ken and Jo had known each other for years, since he was evacuated to his cousins in Malvern. Now they became friends, and after a few troubles – I’ll get to those – were married in 1969. Two years later I was born, and three years after that my sister Katherine came along. My parents had 33 happy years together in Birmingham, Tyneside, and then Leicestershire before Dad died suddenly in 2003. That was hard for all of us, and Mum never really got over losing him.
But there’s a lot more to their story. Mum and Dad both grew up in a small, tight-knit and unusual church group known as the Exclusive Brethren. People who grew up Exclusive Brethren have varied reactions to their experience. What I learnt about it from my parents’ viewpoint – to grossly and unfairly oversimplify things – is that it gave them a solid Christian upbringing until it went seriously wacky throughout the 1960s. Leaving the Brethren was not what you did lightly or easily. My parents and their immediate family did leave, but not all at the same time and not without a great deal of pain in the process. Mum left by refusing to break contact with Dad, soon before they got engaged. Thankfully her sisters and their mother left the same afternoon, by refusing to break contact with her. My Gran told the Brethren that if her 32-year-old daughter was going “out into the world”, as the Brethren put it, she had better go out too and look after her.
It was enough to put anyone off God for life, and did put many off. But not Mum. She took her faith seriously, and found that God carried her through troubles when the church didn’t. A college friend reminded me that she was Prayer Secretary of their Christian Union and used to spend a lot of time praying. After leaving the Brethren, she and Dad joined the Church of England. Mum sang alto in church choirs and was secretary of the Church Council for a while. She was active in the church where her funeral took place, and when she couldn’t manage to get down the slope and steps into the building, carried on going to a more accessible church in the parish as much as she could, even if it meant being very late and (once) getting accidentally locked in church. She told me that she always used to feel close to Jesus and would chat to Him about anything. One of the most painful things in her last years was that she felt she had lost some of that closeness as she became more physically disabled. But what she did cherish in that time was the sacred choral music that she’d always enjoyed singing – especially Bach and other early composers. She had Radio 3 on constantly and could take or leave some of it, but woe betide you if you interrupted St Matthew’s Passion or Choral Evensong.
Mum tried her hand at so many other things too. She made use of becoming a mother by not only staying home and playing with us, but also doing Open University modules on child development, for which she tape recorded me and my sister playing with our friends and wrote transcripts that she used in her essays. She got a Masters’ degree with a dissertation on why people do voluntary work. Even in the month that she died I was asked not to throw her writers’ course away yet, in case she needed it. The only thing she didn’t like was cooking and housework.
Mum didn’t like living in towns. When she moved to the Leicestershire countryside in 1980 it was a longed-for return to her beloved countryside, where she could grow and eat her own fruit and vegetables and cultivate grapes. She enjoyed many happy years there. Even when she was too disabled to do all the gardening herself she still liked to walk up and down to the front gate with her grandson Jamie and tend pot plants.
There were so many other things about Mum. The way she laughed at different things from other people, and saw the funny side when things went wrong. Phone calls that began, “Where is the…”. Instructions that gave you the whole history of the object you were looking for. She often taught me not to cry over spilt milk, but Mum was the only person I knew who actually did. “Lets not talk about that now.” One of her favourite humorous passages was about the hero of Three Men in a Boat, who read a medical dictionary and convinced himself he had all the illnesses in it. Well, Mum complained of a lot of illnesses, but she had most of them, and often even more than the ones she’d noticed. She doesn’t have them now.
Just before she turned 70 Mum started to show symptoms of what turned out to be a form of muscular dystrophy. She didn’t give up and fought against losing her mobility and independence for ten years. In 2015 she moved to a care home in Leicester. It wasn’t what she wanted to do, but she had a whole flat to herself, could pay for as much care time as she needed, and she made the most of it. Friends and family who visited her there saw how her lifestyle had improved and said they’d had better conversations with her than they'd had in years. Just a few weeks before she died, we had a great time celebrating her 80th birthday in her flat with a few friends. I hoped her next ten years would be better than the last ten. But it wasn’t to be. After surviving many falls and hospital visits, the last one left her fighting pneumonia and unable to move her arms and legs properly. It was too much this time. The doctors said she might have a few weeks. I talked about this with Mum and she said, “Oh good, I’ll be over this pain soon.” Only the next morning, she’d just had some breakfast and was chatting with the nurses. When the doctors came to see her 5 minutes later she had stopped breathing.
There was an inquest. The doctors thought that the pneumonia had probably been coming on before she fell, and might have contributed to her falling. The way her neck fractured meant that her paralysis took a few days to develop, so the fracture wasn't discovered until the day before she died. It wouldn't have been safe to operate, but discovering the fracture earlier wouldn't have helped. The doctors were surprised she died so quickly, but noted that she had become very frail. The coroner decided it was essentially natural causes and could not have been prevented.
It was the kind of quick end she wanted. No more pain, no more frustration, no more asking where we’d put her stuff. Rest in peace Mum. You’re free again.
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