My mother would tell the same story over and over again relentlessly. 
This particular one took place during the war, when she was in the WAAF.
She would begin with her cigarette suspended, hovering mid-air as she took a deep breath, her darkened eyebrows arched, eyes agleam. Then she would dive full-throttle into her tale: ‘Darling, have I told you this one before?’
No time to react, to interject tactfully with ‘Well Mum, actually’…before the story hurtled along, unimpeded. No stopping the flow.
Something would lurch inside me, like a heavy stone slowly falling downwards through my entrails. There was no-one around to save me. The surrounding silence weighed on me like a tomb. The heavy gold brocade of the sitting-room curtains gleamed, the cigarette box seemed to grow, the royal blue carpet loomed and almost came up to hit me in the face. 
‘So, I walked out of the canteen with my girlfriend, arm in arm, very jolly it was, and some-one said as we passed, Elaine, you look full of beans!”
I must have heard this story twenty times at least. Although a mere few hours in her company drove me to a frenzy, I had a great aching tenderness for my mother, and I did not want to cause her any upset. 
So began the struggle within me, always the same, where a terrible desire to leap up and shout, ‘Stop, Stop! Mum, I’ve heard it a million times before!’, encountered a desire for patience, for understanding, for love. 
The two opposing forces met within me, facing one-another like the antlers of two stags, colliding, pushing, forcing, gaining one inch here, one inch there, as though a warring camp had pitched its tent within my body.
‘And guess what, I said, well Elspeth, I’ve just devoured a plate of baked beans in the canteen, so I AM full of beans!’ 
And her crimson mouth would pucker at the amusement, the sheer hilarity of it: her war-time memories, her youth, her years with the girls, walking arm in arm in uniform, their brogues clicking on the stony path, their nylons carefully darned, buoyed by a sense of purpose, matiness, being part of the great effort…
‘Darling, I haven’t bored you with this little tale before, have I?’
I sat there, perfectly still, holding on tight, tight, tight, until the antlers had been lowered and the stone had settled, and I was able to say carefully: 
‘No Mum, you haven’t. It’s lovely’’.

PhR July 2023