When the pandemic let up a little last August, I came over from Poland to spend some time with Mum. We took the opportunity to make some little outings in the car to places round about, and one that particularly sticks in my mind was a drive out into the Fens on an intermittently rainy Sunday afternoon. We were heading towards Gosberton, but Mum was evidently in an exploring mood, because on the way through Dowsby she asked me to take a detour into Dunsby Fen. The road began in a quite civilised country fashion, with nice-looking old cottages and even a few somewhat grander buildings on both sides. But before very long both the tarmac and the buildings petered out, at the edge of a farmyard. I stopped the car and said to Mum, “I suppose we’ll have to turn round now.” On the other side of the farmyard, a huge agricultural vehicle was coming towards us along the unmade single track that the road had become. If it had been up to me, I am fairly sure I wouldn’t have attempted to go any further. But Mum said, “Oh no, just wait for him to turn into the yard and we can go on.” 

The track ran straight as a Roman road – with a deep dyke on one side and possibly a shallow ditch on the other. It was very muddy and it seemed miles before we reached any more indications of habitation – a farmhouse that must surely be as isolated as anywhere in the whole country. This was also the only place where there was any chance of safely turning, and fortunately Mum did concede that probably we wouldn’t see much of anything different if we went on to the end, though she did say she thought we would come to the river and spot Pinchbeck on the other side of it. Of course, on the way back, as I had feared, we met another farm vehicle coming in the opposite direction, and I had no alternative but to back a couple of hundred yards with that terrifying dyke making me wonder if my driving skills were really up to this. But Mum enjoyed every moment of it. We went on all round Gosberton, Quadring and Donington, concluding the expedition, as so many times in our family’s past, with a picnic in the car while the rain pelted down outside! In her diary, as I discovered after she died, she summed up the day in two words: "Hilarious adventure".

Afterwards I thought how remarkable it was that at the age of 92, Mum still had that wonderful, adventurous spirit which had not too many years earlier made her take a child’s delight in a precarious rickshaw ride, narrowly avoiding piles of bagged-up rubbish, tearing across Times Square with Liz and me, as the quickest way of getting from Grand Central Station to a Broadway show. The rest of the family were shocked to the core to think that we had agreed to such an unorthodox and risky means of transport. 

When I think of Mum on that day out in the Lincolnshire Fens last August, I see that she was curious to the end, and was always eager to discover new things, not only in remote places but even in ones she had known from childhood. And I also recall a piece of advice of Dad’s: “You should always leave a party while you’re still enjoying yourself”. 

I have a feeling that this is exactly what Mum did.