To end at the beginning

This book began life as a testimonial to my mother such that, ‘printed, her memory will last’ (cf. Barthes 1993: 63). I realise this to be a slender hope. The bookshelves – both real and virtual – are rammed with words by and about the ‘unknown and the vanished’ (Woolf 1930: 23). In the best-case scenario, an infinitesimal trace just might prevail. This will suffice. After all, skirting the edge of total occlusion is apposite if one accepts that ‘our true heroes tend to be anonymous’ (Boorstin 1992: 76). But when we die, so too do our personal paragons. It is upsetting to watch as a loved one recedes into the hordes of innominate ‘never-weres’ (Simak 1950: 11–12). My late mother is well on her way to oblivion. She leaves behind a body interred in a natural burial site devoid of a headstone. In lieu of such a marker in the landscape is a book in a library: ‘a memorial for those without memorials’ (Carter 1993: 24). When it comes to nonentities it is imperative that those who outlive them do all in their power ‘to disrupt time, to challenge death’ (Carter 1993: 18). Consequently, there is an onus on me to keep her memory alive (Bobbio 2001: 64). On these pages, this invisible, nobody-person vies for attention with monarchs and ministers of state. Yet even here, she misses out. I have allowed this book to be dominated by ‘somebody people’. ¹ That one of these somebodies happens to be ‘a revenant Oedipal mother figure’ is doubly regrettable (Duff 2010: 182). My single puny act of resistance is to minimise the use of Big Ben’s ‘correct’ title. This is unlikely to condemn its royal namesake to obscurity given the prodigious list of places, buildings, infrastructure, things, awards and schemes named after Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Mountbatten-Windsor. ²