Watercolor by Magali Cazo for Harper’s Magazine
I went home for Christmas in 2009. My mum had been feeling unwell for a while and had taken to her bed on Christmas Eve. I was sitting downstairs in the living room, reading. My dad called down and asked if I could come upstairs. She had collapsed in the bathroom.
I phoned for an ambulance and, when it arrived, spoke calmly to the paramedics—a man and a woman. From the time of the first death in our extended family, I became aware of how those who fell apart, went to pieces, spent their time bawling, were viewed not with disdain, exactly, but with a lack of respect; crises meant you had to be able to cope, to get things done. In this emergency I needed to be as efficient and composed as possible. And I was—until, as they were carrying her out of the driveway on a gurney, to the ambulance and on to the hospital, I added a few final words to the female paramedic.
“My mum has a very large birthmark on her arm,” I said to this overworked woman who had seen everything, who was unshockable. “It’s been the most important thing in her life.” I couldn’t go on. I was crying. I forced myself to continue. “Can you please do everything you can to make sure that she is covered up in the hospital, that no one sees it?”
“Of course we will, lovey,” she said, with her Gloucestershire accent, the accent of my uncles Eric and Daryl that, to me, will always be the lilt and expression of kindness itself.
My mum worked as a dinner lady at the canteen of Naunton Park, the local school I attended until I passed the eleven-plus and went to grammar school. In 1983, around the time she reached the age at which council employees were obliged to retire, she left the canteen and became a cleaner at a residence hall for student doctors. When she’d worked at the canteen, she sometimes said that she would like to have been a seamstress; during the years when she worked as a cleaner, she came back again and again to how she would have loved to have been a seamstress. It’s true: she was a wonderful sewer of things, always repairing clothes for my dad and me and, when I was at junior school, making outfits for my Action Man, the ostensibly civilian clothes that allowed him to operate undercover as a secret agent. The living-room table was often covered in patterns and fabrics for the jackets or shirts she was making. Between these more ambitious undertakings, she was constantly darning socks, turning the collars of shirts, and hemming trousers. Sometimes she’d let me take the wheel of the sewing machine, but instead of maintaining the slow, steady trundle of sound that she kept up, I always exceeded it, thereby slowing us down.
In 2003, I visited the atelier in Paris where the finishing touches were being made to Ungaro’s haute couture collection. Some of the world’s most skilled seamstresses were employed there and were, presumably, paid well. Maybe if my mum had been French. . . . More modestly, whenever I walk past a dry cleaner’s and see someone in the window working attentively at a sewing machine, making alterations to dresses and jackets, I think: that’s what my mum would have liked to do. Technically it would surely have been achievable with a degree of diligence, training, and practice. How low her expectations of herself, her sense of self-worth, must have been not even to have attempted this. Her sense of life was that everything granted to everyone else was beyond her. The reason for this was plain to see, even though she took such pains to make sure that no one saw it. Her birthmark.
Nothing has ever been more painful for me to write about than my mother’s birthmark. Presenting myself in a consistently poor light has been more than a source of pleasure over the past thirty years. It’s been a point of principle that no one emerges from any page looking worse than the person writing it. No one, I think, has ever felt misrepresented by anything I’ve written, let alone betrayed. Even mentioning my mother’s birthmark is a betrayal.
At some point during or possibly just after the Second World War, my mum left the farm in Worthen, Shropshire, where she had grown up, to join her beautiful older sister, Hilda, in Cheltenham, working in RAF records. Before that, she had barely left the farm and the village where everyone knew her. The new job—her first—came as a shock. Early on, she was told to go to the supply cupboard and ask for a long stand or a big weight that turned into a very long wait: an entry-level joke and rite of passage that, to her, was mortifying. Then, gradually, she got used to both the work and living in a town that felt like a huge city. She and Hilda lodged with a family called the Bridgemans. They went to dances. My mum even had, also for the first time, some kind of alcoholic drink, was violently sick, and never had another. But the single most important thing about her time in Cheltenham was that it led to her going to East Grinstead.
According to her half sister, Rhoda, who after my childish failure to pronounce her name became known to us all as Yo, a pilot or a doctor who had some kind of romantic interest in my mum told her about the possibility of treatment at the hospital in East Grinstead where Sir Archibald McIndoe had pioneered techniques in skin grafting and plastic surgery. Things Yo says might be accurate, but she is not always reliable. Sometimes her versions of events are correct; she inhabits a realm where myth and fact become indistinguishable. So I was pleased to find, folded in an old wallet of my mum’s, a letter from McIndoe’s secretary at the Queen Victoria Hospital Plastic Surgery and Jaw Injuries Centre, in East Grinstead, dated October 20, 1947, to “Pilot I B. C. J. Cabnan, No. 2. Sgts. Mess, A.A.U. R.A.F. South Cerney, Nr Cirencester. Gloucestershire”: “Thank you for your letter regarding your friend Miss Tudor, Sir Archibald will be pleased to see her and advise on any possible treatment.”
I don’t have any of the correspondence that followed immediately after this, but I was able to obtain my mum’s medical records from the Queen Victoria Hospital, where, on November 11, 1947, she was seen as an outpatient by McIndoe himself, who wrote: “Hairy mole of left arm. Admit as soon as possible for grafting of hand and wrist.”
After a lengthy or at least undocumented hiatus, things began moving very quickly in early 1949, when, on January 14, McIndoe’s secretary sent this letter:
Dear Miss Tudor,
Further to my telegram I am writing to confirm that we shall have a bed for you on Monday, 17th January. Please time your arrival as near to 3.30 p.m. as possible and ask for the Almoner’s Office (American Wing).
Bring with you the usual toilet things, night clothes, two towels and ration book.
I would be glad if you would let me know immediately if this is not convenient.
Yours sincerely,
Secretary to Sir Archibald McIndoe
Three days later, she took the train to East Grinstead. According to Yo, their father had been opposed to the operation, though I have no idea why. And I don’t know whether she traveled alone or was accompanied by Hilda. The sky in the middle of the afternoon (which at that time of year is close to the end of the afternoon) was partly cloudy, the temperature in the fifties, not cold enough to require gloves, but she was wearing—as she always did—little concealing mitts that she had knitted herself.
The notes record that she was admitted to Queen Victoria Hospital, where she was examined:
This girl has an extensive hairy mole extending from her left shoulder to the left hand, as far as the knuckles involving practically the whole of the arm and forearm. It extends around a short way on the palm of the hand but the majority of the palm is clear. She has several smaller moles on the body and legs.
These smaller moles included three the size of the lenses of a pair of glasses—and perhaps a dozen very small ones—on her back; one the size of a small apple on her right shoulder; one the circumference of a teacup on her right wrist; one a cricket-ball-size bruise low down on her left buttock; one the size of a small saucer on her inner thigh; and one the size of a large casserole lid on her right hip.
But these are nothing, are almost irrelevant, compared with the left arm and hand. The “hairy mole” mentioned in the notes extends from her shoulder and completely covers every inch of her arm and hand. I’ve just looked at photos from the hospital as quickly as possible to check the details; they are terrible because they also show the body of a slim twenty-two-year-old “girl.” I say terrible, and that’s accurate, but it’s also true that my mum’s birthmark had absolutely no effect on me as a child. In a strange way I didn’t even notice it. We had baths together; I often saw both my parents naked. How readily children accept the world they are born into. There are no abnormalities in family life: a good thing in this instance, a dreadful thing in others.
The operation was performed by John Watson, one of McIndoe’s protégés, with Dr. Shippard serving as anaesthetist, on January 20, 1949:
The hairy mole was excised over an area extending from the base of the fingers and the dorsum of the thumb, around the margin of the thenar and hypothenar eminences, and the entire circumference of the forearm up to just below the elbow. The defect was then grafted with split skin cut with a Humby and Blair knife from the right thigh.
27.1.49: The graft has taken 100%.
11.2.49: Condition of the graft is satisfactory and she will be fit for discharge after further 5 days of physiotherapy to the hand and wrist. To be seen as Out Patient in 6 months time.
19.2.49: Patient discharged: to attend as Out Patient 17.6.49.
17.6.49: Seen as OP. Graft has settled in very well. She does not wish to have upper part of the area affected done at present. There are, however, webs at the distal end of the graft between all fingers and thumb which should be dealt with as soon as possible. Patient to be readmitted.
It’s not clear what happened after this. The next and last letter is dated April 30, 1951:
Dear Miss Tudor,
Thank you for your telegram saying that you are unable to come to the hospital.
I wonder if you would be kind enough to let us know if you still wish to be admitted to the hospital, and if so, what time of the year would be most suitable.
She did not go back. Now that she knew what the operation and recovery involved, she could not face a second. It had all been too painful and, most importantly, that first operation had achieved its goal. The most visible part of the birthmark, up to the elbow, had gone. She no longer had to wear gloves or mitts. Below the elbow the skin looked raw, thin, transparent, veiny, as if several layers were missing. She wore a thick orange watch strap over the mole on her right wrist. She was always covering herself up, but she no longer had to do that quite so publicly. She said that she had shown her marks to my dad before they agreed to get married. That was a serious and lovely moment in their courtship, but the story I heard most often was about the evening they first met, at a dance at Cheltenham Town Hall during the war, when everyone had their gas masks with them. “Your mum was wearing hers,” he always joked. This might not stand up to scrutiny, since they were married in 1952, which would have meant a very long courtship.
The birthmark did not just sap my mum’s confidence; it marked her, from birth, as a kind of outcast. By the time the birthmark, or part of it, was removed, the physical mark was less important than its internalized and unseen psychological effect. So she sat at home with her needles and sewing machine, conscientiously mending clothes and making repairs, with great pride, privately. “You’re good with your brain,” she’d say to me after I started doing well at school. “I’m good with my hands.” And she was—she was. But not good enough to become a seamstress?
It’s possible that she didn’t mean what she said, that the thwarted dream of being a seamstress was another of the ways in which she consoled herself. There were so many things she claimed she would love to have done. Some, such as being able to enjoy a seaside holiday, wearing sleeveless dresses or a swimsuit on the beach (the only kind of holiday recognized as such back then, in the Sixties), were obviously prohibited by her birthmark, but others were quite easily within her grasp. This feeling—the opposite of the word we hear so often now, “entitlement”—that things were inaccessible was not second nature to her; it was her first nature, merging with the larger, class-determined culture of deference and knowing one’s place. The dream (of being a seamstress, of having the money to buy something slightly extravagant) was no sooner dreamt than denied or deferred. In keeping with this, the idea of being a seamstress was less an aspiration, a vision of a possible future that was not achieved, than a lament for a past that might have been different, when she might have been born into a different life and body, not one that had later to be painfully cut away, mended and stitched back together with a surgeon’s sharply specialized tools.
Out in the street, in supermarkets, or in pubs—though she set foot in them only reluctantly on perhaps half a dozen occasions—my mum was able to go about her business without attracting anyone’s attention or curiosity. At home, in the bath, seen only by myself and my dad and, on occasion, her sisters, her arm made no difference to anyone. But it marked her out as different, and inferior—a verdict she internalized absolutely.
The psychological damage was intensified by the way her own mother had lapsed into illness soon after her birth. When I asked what her mother had died of, my mum always replied: “Everything.” A superb and, like so many things in my family, comic answer. Medically, no one knew what caused my mum’s birthmark, but the familial explanation was that her mum had been kicked by a cow, milking it while pregnant. Some time after the death of her mum, her dad married again and had Rhoda.
My parents’ preoccupation with privacy was entangled with the secret of my mother’s birthmark. It was reinforced by my dad’s lifelong . . . I was going to say “obsession,” but that is not quite right. We tend to become obsessed with something and, after a while, grow out of that obsession and move on to something else. There’s a strong element of passion in it, whereas my dad’s need to save money was a slow-burning, unchanging aspect of his relation to the world. To spend money—to buy things—was a public declaration of having money, an invitation to have it taken away from you. He did not just remove money from his wallet reluctantly; he did it with extreme secrecy, careful not to permit shop assistants a glimpse of how many banknotes were in his carefully curated wallet—the permanent collection from which items were allowed out on loan only extremely rarely.
In addition to the moles, there were two little lumps on my mum’s elbow. One time she caught these on a brass light switch in the bedroom at our first house, on Fairfield Walk, while pulling on a cardigan, almost tearing them off. She had to go to the hospital to have stitches. I learned about this only afterward. At the time, all my dad said was, “Your mum’s had an accident.” On another occasion, also on Fairfield Walk, when I was in bed, I heard him call “Mary” in the calm voice—the exact same voice that called me up to the bathroom when she had collapsed on Christmas—that indicated some kind of trouble. One of the veins in his leg had started spurting blood—he had terrible varicose veins, but I’m guessing these were not the ones that erupted—and he had to go to the hospital. Strange and gory accidents in a domestic setting, both dealt with not just discreetly but as secretly as possible.
Their privacy was a derangement, since no one was interested in them, neither individuals nor the state, whose intrusive reach they perceived in terms that made them citizens of a psychological GDR. Nothing shamed them more than when my behavior drew attention to them, as when I went berserk while trying and failing to reverse a rented car out of the drive—I was fifty at the time, unable to figure out the push-button hand brake. Their abiding need for privacy may have played a part in what has proved my productive and profitable indifference to it: a willingness to share and display all the psychological nooks and naked crannies of my life.
In the hospital at East Grinstead, my mum had to be immersed in a saline bath. This was one of McIndoe’s wartime breakthroughs after he noticed that burned pilots such as Richard Hillary, who had bailed out over the sea, healed more quickly than those who had done so over dry land. So the experience of floating in salt water was extended to many of his patients. It was upsetting to my mum because she had to be not only naked—embarrassing enough for any twenty-two-year-old girl—but exposed. She had vivid memories of the pilots and other military personnel being treated for burns, though this was of course many years after the Battle of Britain. My mum was not injured—burned, maimed—but, looked at differently, her injury had occurred at birth and it was total. There was no confidence to be regained, because she’d had none. Whereas Hillary had suffered the trauma both of transformation from being handsome to hideous (though he still enjoyed success with women), and loss of status (that of fighter pilot), my mum had been born as something monstrous. In his memoir, The Last Enemy, Hillary writes of how desperate he was to recover an earlier sense of himself; my mum was born into a life of self-effacement. She would have wanted to serve pilots like him.
Many of these pilots and crew had suffered such terrible burns to their eyes and faces that they remained disfigured even after multiple rounds of surgery. Compared with them, she spent very little time in the operating room and convalescing. Unlike the pilots, she had not been part of that great validating adventure of national history, the Battle of Britain, but for a farm girl from Shropshire, being at McIndoe’s hospital was itself the big adventure of her life. It was painful, traumatic, but the surgery had worked, to a degree. Even though she couldn’t face the prospect of returning for subsequent operations, she went back to East Grinstead in memory, and talked about her time there more frequently than about any other period in her life—just as my dad talked about the only time he had spent abroad, when he was in the British Army during the war, in India. Her admiration for and gratitude to McIndoe were boundless. Many times she repeated something he had said to her: “It’s the things people say that hurt.”
As important as McIndoe’s surgical skill was the attention he paid to the need for his patients to become psychologically and socially rehabilitated after their life-transforming injuries. The fundamental ethos of life at the hospital in East Grinstead was the loosening of hierarchy within the RAF. Distinctions of rank were insignificant compared with the democratizing experience of injury and surgery. In 1941, a group of patients formed the Guinea Pig Club. Membership of what started out as a drinking club was restricted to Allied aircrew who had undergone at least two operations for burns or injuries. Women were not allowed to join but were invited to events. There was a lot of drunken, riotous fun. My mum came later, was still a guinea pig of sorts, but the atmosphere of belonging fostered by the club—a kind of elevated inclusiveness—was anathema to her: she was a lesser being, inferior, at home in her sense of inferiority. Later, she felt at home as a dinner lady, part of a team whose companionship she adored. As with Battle of Britain pilots, there was a strong sense of self-sacrifice in this. Unless she was incapable of getting out of bed, she always went to work at the canteen when sick, because her absence would have made it so much harder for the others. This sense of belonging, of being part of a team, was lost when she reached retirement age and worked as a cleaner at the residence hall for student doctors. One of her bosses asked her to call him by his first name. She said she preferred to call him Mr. Whatever. People talk quite readily of inferiority complexes, but in my mum’s case there was nothing complex about it. It was horribly simple. Where could esteem, a sense of self-worth, come from? That was simple too. Kindness, unfailing honesty, and reliability: true refinement. And being good with her hands—but not so good that she could become a seamstress.
On the High Street in East Grinstead, there is a statue of Sir Archibald McIndoe standing with his hands on the shoulders of an RAF patient seated in front of him, head twisted to the left, in pain and in safe hands, healed and scarred. It is easy to imagine the great surgeon with a different patient: my mum, with history laying its hand tenderly on her thin shoulders.
After my mum’s collapse on Christmas, she stayed in the hospital for several weeks. She was dehydrated—and had been, I joked to the doctor, for at least forty years of drinking nothing but tea—but that was only the obvious, easily treatable problem. Tests revealed that there was a mass on her lungs from which, inevitably, she would die.
Everyone had always assumed that my mum would outlive my dad. There was even a sort of plan in place for what life might be like after he had gone. My mum’s adoration of her sister was unchanging in spite of the constant changes in Hilda’s impossibly glamorous life. In the late Seventies, Hilda’s longtime lover, C.B., a self-made millionaire, had taken her on a cruise, combining luxury ships and first-class plane travel. This proved a costly mistake on his part, as Hilda fell in love with one of the pilots. She abandoned C.B. and married Peter McKeown soon afterward. They lived in his sprawling coach house in Lingfield, not far from East Grinstead, but also bought a little flat in Cheltenham. Everyone liked Peter, including my dad, even though he was a Tory. When Peter died in early 2011, Hilda went to live in the Cheltenham flat on her own. The tacit plan was that in the event of my dad’s dying my mum would move in and the two sisters would spend their last years together in the flat. Their lives could not have been more different, but in old age, with their dandelion hair, they began to look strikingly alike—until my mum looked less like her sister and more like someone who was dying.
Dreadful though they were, those last eighteen months of her life were not without some fun interludes. She was given fentanyl to manage the pain, and this led at first to an intensification of the tendency to tell again stories we’d already heard multiple times before about her girlhood in Shropshire with Hilda and her time at the canteen. There was a soothing quality to the incessant repetition, which had previously been a source of irritation and boredom. Before, I had hardly paid attention when she told me, over and over, of the value of all the silver and other riches held in the china cabinet. Now we enjoyed a shared vision of my future as a more or less permanently delighted guest on the Antiques Roadshow. I began to look forward to hearing again and again the secret—of which I’d been in receipt for more than forty years—of “how to make bread-and-butter pudding”: stale bread. (She was right: the bread-and-butter pudding I’d eaten in overpriced restaurants was never as nice as hers.) My dad had predicted that after going to Oxford I would find the kind of conversations we had at home boring. Compared with what, though? He had in mind, I suppose, the unheard—but somehow heard-of—dialect of Hampstead Highbrow, in which there was no chat or gossip, only earnest discussion of literature, philosophy, theater, ideas, and whatnot. (Talk about boring!) He was right, in that increasing portions of what would go on in my life fell outside the language that we shared, but wrong in terms of the kind of talk I’d move on to—because in many ways I didn’t move on at all. After the intoxication of the ideological years—dialectic, hegemony, repressive state apparatuses—I felt most at home in the idiom of the ironic switchback, an educationally enhanced version of something that still came under the broad conversational church-pub known as banter. Without which the last phase of my mum’s life would have been unendurable.
As the fentanyl took hold, the harsh and shrunken reality of her circumstances gradually softened. Instead of an image of herself in bed, the mirror on the opposite wall offered a portal to another world in which memory was mingled with fantasy.
“There are pigs out there,” she said. “Big ones with yellow faces. Massive they are. They’re black with white faces.” From time to time she got it into her head that we were going somewhere, that she was ready to pack her bags. This may have been a metaphor, but unlike Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar,” it was a scheme rich in practical if incoherent details: coach times, allocated seats, the quality of water (suggesting that the destination, while never named, lay beyond our national borders). Fussing over things like this was a good sign: the remainder and reminder of a self that was melting away.
“How old am I?”
“A hundred?’ I joked.
“One hundred and sixty-five.”
Other bits of her delirium were the opposite of fun.
“He’s dangerous,” she whispered about my dad when he had left the room. This was unfair, obviously, especially as he made so much effort to keep her covered whenever the various carers arrived. The protection was notional—they came, precisely, to undress and change her clothes—but it kept faith with the defining fact of who she was and who they were to each other.
I was spared most of this, most of the misery of her dying—by which, in addition to the cleaning up, I mean the not dying: the lingering, the rallying. She had requested not to be resuscitated, but when the paramedics came after another collapse they somehow overlooked this instruction and brought her back to life. She was not so much dying as diminishing until there was so little left of her that there was not enough to summon up the effort required to die.
She lived on into the second week of Wimbledon that year. Uncle Daryl and I were in the living room, watching Andy Murray beat Richard Gasquet. The nurses were upstairs with my aunt. They changed her clothes and the sheets while she was in bed. After putting the old sheets in the washing machine, Yo broke down in the kitchen with Auntie Hilda, who seemed slightly crazy because she was going deaf. And then, after breaking down, Yo got on with cleaning and tidying. One of the cooks from the canteen where my mum had worked came by. She’d suffered a slight stroke but was now recovered. The garbagemen had not taken away the wheelie bin stuffed with recyclables. I wheeled it back from the street and into the garden. The reason they had not taken it away was because someone had put my mum’s pads and under-things in there. I burned them in the garden. They were highly flammable but soaked in urine that smelled not only of piss but of dehydration and all the drugs she was taking. I was like my dad, who was always burning stuff, keeping the home fires burning. Thin smoke drifted, though not enough to disturb any of the neighbors whose sheets were hanging out to dry a few doors away. That was a characteristic of these fires of ours: always more smoke than fire, rarely any flames, but not much smoke either. It was difficult to burn these sodden gauzes and pads. They smoldered and fumed. I kept tossing in matches, poking and turning things over, breathing in fumes.
By now we were all united by variants of a single thought: When will she die? Several times I was there by my mum’s bedside with Yo when we thought she’d breathed her last. But then, instead of the death rattle we’d read about, there’d be a gurgle, a life gurgle, and she was breathing again, not dying.
There were arguments with my dad over little things. Yo and I were going to throw out the toilet brush and buy a new one. He was set stubbornly against this extravagance.
“But it’s so dirty,” I said.
“Well, it’s got a dirty job to do,” he said.
Good point. Yo went ahead and washed it, with a hose in the garden.
Everything was about my mum’s dying. The world turned around her. One afternoon, I heard the distant rumble of propeller aircraft. I looked up and, incredibly, saw a Hurricane, a Spitfire, and a Lancaster Bomber: part of a display by the RAF. A grateful nation was paying its accidental respects. Rafael Nadal saw off the challenge of Juan Martín del Potro in spite of an injury to his foot: an epic match in fading light. In the garden that same day, my dad told me about a big onion he had grown. There was such a contrast between the ugliness of the interior of the house and the beauty of the garden. All beauty was external. In the garden costs did not apply: it was free from the tyranny of price and not subject to taste. In a garden anyone can be as cultivated, as refined, as anyone else. My dad saw this beauty only as a blur, around the washed-out center, because of his macular degeneration. Inside or outside he mainly just sat there, “thinking about your mum,” he said.
In the living room, because he couldn’t see, the speaking clock would burst into life every quarter hour and announce the time, at maximum volume, because his hearing, though not as bad as his eyesight, was also bad. “Five o’clock pm.” Every fifteen minutes we’d get an update: the horrible reign of time, dead time that refuses to die. Several times I thought I would go into the toolshed, come back with a hammer, and smash that clock to pieces.
One of my mum’s hands became swollen and bloated as though filled with cold water—totally dead, as if it had gotten fed up waiting and had moved on to decomposition.
I went into her bedroom on the morning of June 29 after a normal night. My dad was still asleep in the little box room next door. She was obviously dead. After all the uncertainties, there was no doubt about this: the slight but absolute difference between lying there alive, motionless except for her breathing, and being dead. I told my dad that she was dead. The doctor, when he came, shone a light into her eyes: her eyes, obviously, but no longer her. The considerate undertakers came and carried her downstairs and out the front door, wheeled her down the drive and away.
In the garden, I sat, sometimes with my dad, on the green-painted swing bench, sometimes alone, looking at the house, the house with windows in it, made of beige-pink bricks. One of the windows was my bedroom, reflecting the gorgeous top of a tree. Grass, flowers, and always sky. Thick hedges, not as neat as they had been years earlier. Sheds, coal bunker, garage, and conservatory. Next door. The lawn, blades of grass, and the unlit bonfire. The fence at the bottom of the garden and the sound of the road. Birds in flight, over the roof of the house. Shifting clouds, sudden clarities of light and leaves. The apprehended world. That’s the phrase that kept tolling in my head: the apprehended world.
