LES Dawson used to tell mother-in-law jokes.
“I took my mother-in-law to Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors and one of the attendants said: Keep her moving sir, we’re stock-taking.”
“I can always tell when the mother in law’s coming to stay ... the mice throw themselves on the traps.”
He told the jokes with affection because he actually liked his mother-in-law.
I met my mother-in-law before I met my wife Maria. I was taken to a New Year’s eve party and Pat greeted me at the door. She was in her 30s and drop-dead gorgeous and I was 23. She linked my arm and gave me a kiss and I thought Christmas had come, never mind New Year. Then I saw 16-year-old Maria and knew where my future lay.
Mother-in-law jokes never seemed appropriate for Pat. She was beautiful, glamorous, witty and bursting with Lucille Ball personality. Now she has died after a long illness.
Her life was certainly a full one. She was part Irish, part English, part Flemish. Her father was illegitimate, the product of a Lady Chatterley affair between a gamekeeper and a titled lady.
Pat worked in a dress shop before she met and married Louis Colaluca, a member of a Blackpool business family. They had three children and a comfortable life but her world must have seemed like it had ended when Louis died of a heart attack aged 39 – just over a year after Maria and I met.
She never forgot Louis but she had the great good fortune to meet the second man in her life, Alex Cameron. They fell in love and married and moved to the West Coast of the United States more than 40 years ago. When she died Maria said, “It’s like the ceiling has gone.”
Up until now, there was always an older level than us. Maria was still one of the children. Not any more. We are it; we are the ceiling and will be the next to go in the natural progression that is life. It’s a time that combines grief for a loved one lost, and acknowledgement that time marches on.
There will be no mother-in-law jokes at Pat’s wake but plenty of wonderful memories about a very special lady.
