Yesterday I saw a post about the Marvel Try Out Book from 1983.
I’m pretty sure I had this and deduction brought me to having it some time around my 13th or 14th birthday. I know I got an Amstrad CPC464 when I was 14, and it feels likely this was before the computer but it certainly rang a bell of recognition deep inside a dark vault.
Likely it was a gift from my mum. Herself something of a frustrated artist. The house would be dotted with eyes, drawn in that faux-70s art style that probably would have been big when my mum was impressionable enough to have seen it.
Mum was 17 when she had me, a child herself. There followed four more boys, and she never really had much of a chance to grow into being her own human being. She was very much the epitome of a mum. I think in my kinder moments, in those times when I do something for someone and expect nothing in return, I feel like that’s partly my mum’s doing.
“they fuck you up your mum and dad, they don’t mean to but they do”
One of my favourite poems (Phillip Larkin’s This Be the Verse) is just heard as it’s first line. Because it really resonates, but they fuck you up in lots of ways, sometimes negative, sometimes positive. Sometimes it’s by leaving you so reliant on the shape of them that when that shape is gone, it leaves a vast aching unfillable void. You can certainly paper over it and layer paint on that, and wallpaper on that and more paint, and more paper, until you have something that looks like a solid structure. But all it will take is to see a photo of the Marvel Try Out Book from 1983 and suddenly you’ve pushed your hands through the paper wall and you’re staring into hurt that floods right in.
And the thing is, I don’t think my mum was unique in the world. How many women just make their lives for their own children, and then their grandchildren and then other people’s children. And how many people write books about them? They are the foundation that holds up the world. Certainly my mum was the foundation for me.
My mum’s sister, my aunt Francis, told me mum was the only person she ever met that was excited for the school holidays. She lived for a house full of chaos.
When I posted about the Marvel book on bluesky and talked about my mum, a son of one of my dad’s oldest friends replied:
I remember your Ma a bit (I first remember a holiday visiting Strangford?). She was luminous, had a great laugh and would take the time to speak with a weird kid.
And she was right about your art.
Mum was luminous. How could she not be? she was filled with love.
