In a photo I’m leaning with Mum against a railing in Richmond Park. I’m seven and Mum is laughing, holding a cigarette in one hand, reaching out for me with her other. It’s late autumn, and golden leaves are turning to rust and lie scattered across the grass. I can smell the familiar sweetness of her favourite perfume, which I know is called Fidji because she tells my father off if he doesn’t buy her the right one. She’s wearing a brilliant white coat bought from Bentalls earlier in the day, and looks like a film star, something of the hedonism and lived-in wiliness of Ava Gardner, but her need to reach out for me tells me she’s still my mum.

In the photo I’m looking at her laughing and reaching out to me, my expression happy but also slightly quizzical, marvelling, but already not quite believing what I’m seeing. For though I have many photos of Mum laughing at a camera, and she maintained a wicked sense of humour right up until the end, I struggle to remember many episodes of her laughing as much in life (though if I dared to dig deeper I’d remember more), the depression that took over in late middle-age and for the rest of her life, crumpling her features into a perpetual grimace, colouring my mood and memories of her, distorting the happier mental pictures I try to focus on and hold inside.

Richmond Park was where she was happy but it was also significant in her downfall. If there had been an inquest into her death in her mid-seventies, I might have brought in this picture as an exhibit, as background evidence of how Richmond and its park offered refuge but also shadowed her decline.

Between World Wars, Mum’s father had died from TB, his lungs slowly rotting away after being gassed on the Somme. Mum’s mother, who had only been eighteen when she’d given birth to her, took off to catch up on the life she felt she’d missed out on, to let it all out amidst the delirious, unbridled twenties, a debauched sepia print of her on an ocean liner, cigar in mouth, lying across the laps of two men in cockeyed sailors’ caps, who looked like they’d just drunk the bar dry.

Mum was seven, the same age as I am in the photo, when she’d been dumped in an unforgiving convent in India, spending the next ten years holed up there, never visited by her mother. Attending on a meagre army widow’s scholarship, she was treated worse than the other girls – more chores, cheaper meals, and harsher punishments – and didn’t leave the grounds until her teens, when her grandmother and aunt finally rescued her for summer holidays to their home in Richmond. In 1942 she turned eighteen, finally left the convent, joined up as a Wren, and moved in with them. ‘The war years’, she’d often say ‘were the happiest I’ve ever been’, the excitement and risk somehow enlivening her, the fleeting romances (she was proposed to three times), and comfort and delight of walks and picnics with her newfound family in Richmond Park.

As long as I can remember Mum wanted to return to live in Richmond, but she never got her wish, only posthumously getting there when she stopped eating after her suicide attempt by swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills had failed. In the long shrinking countdown to her days, she repeatedly asked that my sister and I scatter her ashes in Richmond Park’s Isabella Plantation.

Months after her funeral, we stole at dusk into the plantation, so fewer people might see us, as if we were committing an illicit act best kept from view. We found a cluster of bushes away from a path and I took the urn out of my bag and dug a hole for her ashes to go in. When I opened the urn, a splutter of wind lifted a mist of grey ash over my face and hair. Hysteria took us over and we laughed and couldn’t stop. Eventually, I shook my head and spat out the ashes, and we patted them down into the soil and tried to say a few appropriate funereal words. Whether it was the cold, the hysteria, or the sadness and bitterness of her final years, it became impossible to say anything with real conviction. And inevitably when we returned a year later, we couldn’t locate the bushes where we’d scattered the ashes – more laughter, more hysteria.

Ten years after scattering the ashes I went with my wife and daughters to live in Richmond. It sometimes felt like an act of betrayal towards her, though I know she’d have been mostly happy for us too. She was everywhere, accompanying us on walks along the Thames towpath, queuing in the perfume section in Bentalls, outside her Gran’s Victorian redbrick ground-floor flat in East Sheen and most of all in Richmond Park, even though I sometimes did my best not to see her there.

There is a photo of my daughters taken in Spring in Isabella Plantation, aged four and five, in bright purple and pink Chelsea FC tee-shirts (Mum, like her mother before her, supporting Arsenal to maintain a phoney and mischievous rivalry between us), laughing and mucking about in front of a riot of Technicolor rhododendrons.

We never again tried to find Mum’s ashes on the many visits we made there, but leaving the park we had to pass the railings where I’d stood with her decades before. Mum still reaching out, pleading for me take her hand; so now, I do the next best thing and write it all down and get to hear her laughter and hold her once again.

*Richmond Park was published this year in ‘Modern Nature Anthology – Responses to Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature’, Artful Scribe/John Hansard Gallery, Edited by Joanna Barnard. https://artfulscribe.co.uk/shop