TASHY HEARS

CHANGES

Parents are funny things aren’t they? I suppose when you are writing some of this stuff for your own children, that may not be as rhetorical as I had intended. In 1968, I was seriously thinking about emigrating to Australia. My mother offered her support in a very non-supportive way. At that time, those wishing to emigrate could go for £10 but you went by sea, the journey taking, I think, at least 3 weeks. My mother wondered what I would do if she was ill. It would be difficult to get back. She actually lived for another 27 years and for many of those years she kept asking me why I hadn’t gone to Australia.

I was very lucky that, for the last three months of my father’s life, I was on a career break, moving from the city to education. We spent many hours talking, when I would go and sit with him each Tuesday while my mother went shopping. I learnt a lot but, as I am well aware, not enough.

I was also lucky enough to spend time with my mother in her final days in the winter of 1994-95. In October 1994 I had started the travelling for the coastline project I was running at that time but came home in late November for a break. My mother had taken advice from others, not me, and decided to have an operation on a lump she had found in her breast some 4 years before. It was not causing her pain or discomfort at the time but she heeded the advice that she should get it checked. She had her operation a few days after we got back, came out of hospital a day later but, from then on, steadily deteriorated until she died at the end of February 1995. Nothing, and no-one, will ever convince me other than the operation rapidly hastened her death.

During December I saw her every day and, again, we talked. She knew she hadn’t long left, giving me instructions on where to find things, what to do with things once she was gone. She also began to reminisce about the old days. One afternoon she suddenly said, “I don’t know why you didn’t keep up your singing and playing”, referring to the time when I would spend most evenings in my bedroom, playing guitar and singing. I suppose at that time, the mid-sixties, there were thousands of kids all wanting to be the next Beatles, Stones etc. Being shy, joining a group was a harder thing to do for me and I also lived well away from my friends, so I would practice alone.

This song, Changes, was, she told me that afternoon, her favourite and she would sit outside my bedroom door in the evening and it sounded so beautiful, it made her cry. If she had told me this back then, maybe I would have thought about a different career. The song was written by Phil Ochs, who, in my mind, was a better protest song writer than Bob Dylan. Many of his songs had a more vicious side to them but not this one. I was going to tell you some things about Phil Ochs but I found this version of Changes by Neil Young who tells things so much better. Phil Ochs took his own life in 1976, at the age of 35.