About her Mother’s Face   Now that her memory has degraded, the daughter wonders if she overestimated her mother’s beauty. Youthful photographs, like the early snaps of Marilyn, offer no clues as to her face’s full potential. And the portrait taken in middle age to celebrate her beauty’s climax, is disfigured by melancholy. Her mother was ordinary until she joined the school girls’ crush, as they peeped at her through the stage curtains. Grew up to be invisible by her side, as men and women gawped at her in the street like a gorgeous freak. When paparazzi raised their cameras reflexively at the airport, it was clear her face deserved a wider audience than East Kent. Yet her ambition was to ‘look out her kitchen window and see a reliable husband digging in his garden.’ In civilian life her beauty only drew a gold rush of rogues to her front door, and like Rita Hayworth, she could never live up to her face’s promise. She became a sheep in a wolf’s skin coat trotting down the high street unable to pay the gas bill. Incredible now, the daughter’s cultish existence, where house keeping was willingly sacrificed for turtle soap and Vichy skin preparations . Her mother’s mornings observance; heated rollers crowning snow white’s hair and a wing of 50s movie star eyeliner swept above moss agate eyes that changed colour with her mood. Since the house keeping would never have stretched to a face lift, the daughter wonders what her mother would  have done when heads stopped turning like sunflowers. 'That’ll be me,' she teased as they watched Sunset Boulevard,  but she would never have resorted to shoring up her own facial  landslide with a chin hammock and tape behind her ears. Becoming perhaps the Garbo of the housing estate, or made up for a life time’s abstinence like Elizabeth Taylor. Twenty years since the daughter has really seen her mother’s face. Occasionally her memory is ambushed by the appearance of Ava Gardner on the TV and she changes channels. Fiona Sinclair If you have any comments on this poem, Fiona Sinclair would like to hear from you.