It’s nearly a year and a half since my mum died and I miss her terribly. I want to talk to her, ask her advice, hang out in her beautiful flat (now sold), laugh, feel frustrated, all of it. Just after she died, I had a dream that she came back to life, the simplest kind of wish fulfilment. No science or magic was involved.  She was just back, sitting in the big chair in her bedroom, that supported her back but had come to dwarf her. She greeted me in her usual morning way, hello darling. I don’t think she knew she’d returned from the dead. She just asked about coffee and the paper. But within moments, she was again in the final stages of her life, in great pain from her arthritis and also from a stubborn wound on her leg (from another fall.). We could neither of us go back.

I wrote a piece about her final year but I wanted to share something different here – about her life. So below is an edited and annotated version of the little speech I gave about my mum at her funeral. I hope you enjoy finding out a bit about her. The funeral was a very small event, some friends of hers and mine, sitting round and sharing stories:

Marion Malik, 10 March 1934 to 29 March 2025

There are too many things to say so I’m not even going to try. Some of you knew her for a long time, 30 or 40 years, but in a life so long, that still leaves a lot of ground uncovered. So I want to say a little bit about her earlier life. 

Because she hadn’t been able to walk without pain, for a long time, it’s easy to forget how far she travelled. It’s only hundred and fifty miles from Newport in Shropshire – where she spent most of her childhood – to London. But that was her first, bold journey. 

She arrived in London in the mid-1950s, when she was in her early 20s, with her friend Kim. They rented a room in Maida Vale. She left behind two not very happy childhoods but also a safe and familiar world, a local boyfriend from Harper Adams Agricultural College and Young Conservative Party socials. (The cliché that people move to the right as they get older never applied to my mum who kept moving leftward)

London in the mid-1950s was still emerging from the war. I loved the stories she told about boarding houses with eccentric land ladies and even stranger residents. Rooms fixed up like ingenious caravans with concealed baths and carefully draped curtains. This London soon became the city she shared with Naeem (my dad, then a student from Pakistan, who’d moved from Amritsar to Lahore at the time of Partition). Through him, she was soon mixing with European and Commonwealth students from the LSE. Soon they were going to the Royal Court theatre and the Festival Hall (she kept every programme, I could only keep a selection.) They went to the new coffee bars and to the Gate and the Everyman to see the new cinema from France and Italy. Exciting. Not always easy. (but they were determined to be a part of this new world) And many of her old friends didn’t like her brown boyfriend. Once, before they were married, when he was safely away in Pakistan, a group of them tried to break them up, and set her up with a nice white boy instead. She was not persuaded.

A long marriage, difficult in parts, particularly in Naeem’s last years. But a couple of anecdotes from their early days. He first saw her, he said, at a party sitting on somebody’s knee, I think his name was Danny. When he first invited her out, they stopped at a bookshop where he sold a book to pay for lunch. There was a double date to play tennis. Something she was very good at. He had never played before but spent a fortune at the kit and went along, assuming he’d be great at it (typical). It all ended badly and he went off in a huff.In 1964, they travelled to Pakistan with the aim of settling there. They only stayed six months or so but she was a surprising hit with her parents-in-law. She also got on especially well with her sister-in-law, Naheed, despite her very limited Urdu and Naheed’s very limited English. I have a very intense memory – I would have been about 7 or 8 – of the two of them sitting in the garden of the house we were staying in in Nathia Gali (a hill station which I didn’t know then was in the Galyat range of the Himalayas). Everyone else was out or inside and they were sitting in the middle of the lawn, drinking lemonade and smoking brightly coloured Sobranie cigarettes – neither of them were smokers – gossiping and giggling.

When I was growing up, my mum’s working life seemed ordinary. It took quite a while to work out that it probably wasn’t in the 1970s.  Most of you know about some of the business ventures she and Naeem were involved, including a fashion company and various import-export businesses (foils to Cuba, towels, Afghan coats). Some of these were successful, others not so much. But she also had a working life, a career of her own. She was a cub reporter while she still lived in Shropshire and later worked for the Kensington News. When she and my dad lived briefly in Pakistan, she set up a woman’s page for an English language newspaper there. When they returned to England she started working for Associated Newspapers (which owned the Daily Mail and the Evening News), selling advertising to recruitment agencies and others. She was extremely good at this, at a time when very few women did this type of work. I used to love visiting her office in Fleet Street, entering by the back way where I saw and heard the paper being printed. Much later she worked for the publisher and bookseller the Folio Society which is why we have so many Folio books (Sadly rather few now as there was nowhere to house them, I just hope they have found good homes).

And of course, one thing you all know about Marion was how much she loved reading which, along with films and TV, she enjoyed nearly to the end of her life. She taught me to read at a precociously early age and encouraged me to launch myself at grown-up books. I remember her telling me about her own childhood reading – Lorna Doone, Wuthering Heights stand out – and how she listened to The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins one Christmas on the radio and shivered at the Shivering Sands.  The last year was immensely difficult for her (and us) as you know, and it will take me a long time to balance it with the rest. But it does include some good memories of things she enjoyed, pleasures she had. She read and reread a lot of books after she came out of hospital last April, in particular, Daphne Du Maurier, Iris Murdoch, Barbara Pym and Muriel Spark. Pym was a new writer for her, and she especially loved her novel Excellent Women about a young woman making her life in post-war London. Rebecca was, I think, her favourite novel. It was almost certainly the book she read the most times. It’s one of my favourite books too. and I remember her taking me to see Hitchcock’s film version of it at the Gate in Notting Hill – one of those moments when you sense you’re at last being allowed into a different adult world. We rewatched Rebecca at least twice over the past year as part of our own season of Hitchcock films. We probably watched at least 20 in all. Sometimes we tried to rank our favourites. Mine was/is always Vertigo. Hers varied. Sometimes it was North by Northwest, sometimes The Birds and, most often, Rear Window. One of the last films we watched together was To Catch A Thief. Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in the South of France, rich Americans getting their jewels stolen, an altercation in a flower market, glamourous swimsuits, exaggerated French accents.  She loved it.  Thinking about it yesterday, I was reminded of a story she told me about her first foreign holiday. She and Kim went to the South of France for a Summer in 1956 or 7, where they worked, picking and packing fruit, travelling about, learning a bit of French.  When they got back to London they felt, and probably were, tanned and glamorous and got invited to a party to which they went in pedal pushers and espadrilles. They also gave themselves French names, spoke in French accents and pretended they were French. I love to think of this but I have so many questions …