Precious Lives Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Margaret Forster

  List of Illustrations

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Picture Section

  Copyright

  About the Book

  A brilliant follow-up to HIDDEN LIVES, this account takes up the story of her gritty, northern father, Arthur. Margaret’s father was not a man to answer questions – least of all questions about life and death. So she attempts to answer them for herself, as she looks back at his life and indomitable character – from the perspective of his ninth decade – evoking incidents from her childhood, his working life and stubborn old age, trying to make sense of their largely unspoken relationship, and of his tenacious hold on life, and on his family. His life, and that of her sister-in-law, Marion, were ordinary, and apparently unremarkable, but when faced with death lives like these become strangely precious, Margaret Forster marvels at the tenacity of the human spirit, at its capacity to fight to the bitter end. PRECIOUS LIVES is her most personal book yet: an intimate, true and wonderful memoir about living and dying.

  About the Author

  Margaret Forster was born and brought up in Carlisle. She is the author of many acclaimed novels, biographies and memoirs, including Have the Men Had Enough?, Lady’s Maid, Mothers’ Boys, Shadow Baby, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Hidden Lives and Rich Desserts and Captain’s Thin. She is married to writer and journalist Hunter Davies and lives in London and the Lake District.

  Also by Margaret Forster

  Fiction

  Dames’ Delight

  Georgy Girl

  The Bogeyman

  The Travels of Maudie Tipstaff

  The Park

  Miss Owen-Owen is At Home

  Fenella Phizackerley

  Mr Bone’s Retreat

  The Seduction of Mrs Pendlebury

  Mother Can You Hear Me?

  The Bride of Lowther Fell

  Marital Rites

  Private Papers

  Have the Men Had Enough?

  Lady’s Maid

  The Battle for Christabel

  Mothers’ Boys

  Shadow Baby

  Non-Fiction

  The Rash Adventurer: The Rise and Fall of Charles Edward Stuart William Makepeace Thackeray: Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman Significant Sisters: The Grassroots of Active Feminism 1838–1939

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Daphne du Maurier

  Hidden Lives

  Rich Desserts and Captain’s Thin: A Family and Their Times 1831–1931

  Poetry

  Selected Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Editor)

  List of Illustrations

  1. Arthur Forster in his teens.

  2. The roaring twenties.

  3. Arthur with Lilian.

  4. At work in the Metal Box factory.

  5. Arthur fishing at Silloth.

  6. A picnic at Skinburness, 1983.

  7. Marion as a child, with twin sister and brothers.

  8. Marion with Margaret and family.

  9. Marion with her mother and niece, 1983.

  10. Arthur at Silloth, Easter 1988.

  11. Marion, centre stage, 1988.

  12. Arthur’s 90th birthday.

  13. Marion and Margaret, 1987.

  14. Marion with her mother and Annabel’s daughter.

  15. Marion, 6 months before she died.

  16. Arthur at 91.

  Margaret Forster

  PRECIOUS LIVES

  Prologue

  ‘THERE’S A DEAD dog down there,’ the woman said to my father. ‘Don’t let the little lass catch sight of it, it’s nasty; don’t take her along the river bank, mind.’ We were on a narrow path which led from the road to the river Caldew. It was fenced on both sides with wooden palings, loosely strung together with thick wire, and between these struts dandelions and nettles, growing in the rough grass, poked through. My father stopped, to let this woman pass. He stood with his back to the fence and ordered me to do the same. The path was very tight with barely enough room for one person to walk. She would have to squeeze past us as best she could. She had a dog of her own, a scruffy brown terrier, straining at the leash and whimpering. ‘She’s upset,’ the woman said over her shoulder once she was through the gap we’d created; ‘she got a fright, seeing that dead dog.’ My father started walking again, still in the direction of the river, and I followed. Behind us we heard the woman shouting, ‘You should turn back! There’s a dead dog down there, I told you! You shouldn’t let the lass see it! It’ll upset her! Cover her eyes when you get there, any road!’ This last instruction was very faint because by the time she gave it she was nearly at the other end of the path and we were nearly at the river.

  My father hadn’t spoken, either to me or to the woman; he hadn’t reacted at all to this information about a dead dog. He always ignored strangers. Whatever they chose to say to him, he ignored them, giving no indication he had even heard them. Not a muscle moved in his face as he stared beyond them. Only if he was particularly irritated by being addressed would any sound escape his compressed lips and then it was a whistle, slow and tuneless. But now he was not whistling. We walked on, my steps attempting to match his, but he turned his feet out slightly and this was difficult for me to copy. We were now walking along the broad, grassy margin bordering the river but there was no sign of a dead dog. All we saw were ducks. We’d come equipped to feed them and I was carrying a paper bag full of crusts. I started tearing these crusts up and throwing the bits of bread, and the ducks squawked and fought over it until it was all finished.

  We walked on. No dead dogs at all. I wanted to ask my father where he thought this dead animal might be but I didn’t. My father did not like chattering and he especially did not like chattering which consisted of questions. He wasn’t prone to speculation either. If there was a dead dog, we would come across it; if there wasn’t, if it had been a figment of the woman’s imagination, or if it lay in the direction we had not taken, we wouldn’t. That was all there was to it – nothing to talk about. So I turned it over in my own mind, all the time scanning the river bank and hoping we would find the corpse of the dog. About half a mile along the bank there was a little spur of land sticking out into the river. The dog was lying on the muddy slope facing us. It was a black dog. The water was lapping over its partly submerged legs, the slight swell only sufficient first to cover the legs up to the knee joints and then recede to just above the paws. Across the dog’s throat was a dark red gash. No blood was flowing; it was only sticking there, matted in the fur around the neck. We stopped. We stared. My father grunted. He liked things to come to pass: a dead dog had been promised, a dead dog had been found, everything was now satisfactory. ‘Dead,’ he said. I thought it might be considered permissible to ask a question. ‘Will it be buried?’ I asked. ‘Might be,’ my father said, ‘when the farmer finds it, if a fox doesn’t eat it first.’

  I was fairly sure foxes did not eat dogs. I was only six, but even so I felt there was something wrong with this suggestion. Foxes ate chickens. Lions ate dogs, maybe, but there were no lions in Carlisle, not even in a zoo, because the city had no zoo. But I hesitated to challenge my father, who did not take kindly to correction or contradiction. We continued on to Cummersdale then, and when we reached the textile factory we turned and began walking back. This was the prescribed length of the walk and it never varied. It was raining slightly by then and as we passed the
dead dog again I said, ‘The poor dog will get wet.’ ‘Don’t be so daft,’ my father said, scornfully: ‘there’s nowt poor about a dead dog. It isn’t poor, it’s dead. Dead as a doornail. It can’t feel a thing. No need to feel sorry for a dead dog. It’s had its chips. Finished.’ It was a veritable speech. Excited by this unusual flow of words from him I said, ‘What about a dead person?’ ‘What about them?’ my father said, growing annoyed. ‘They’re dead too, if they’re dead. Like the dog. If they’ve popped their clogs, they’re dead. There’s nothing anyone can do about it.’ He was walking faster and I was half-running to keep up. ‘What about heaven?’ I panted. ‘The heavens are going to open any minute,’ my father said, neatly turning the real question into a query about weather. ‘We’re in for a soaking. Your Mam won’t be pleased.’ We hurried on, down the narrow path again, into the road and along it, and there was the woman who had warned us about the dead dog putting her dustbin out. She saw us and shouted, ‘Did you see it? You didn’t let the little lass see it, did you? It would upset her, I told you …’ The rest was lost as we rushed up the hill past the cemetery. ‘Upset you!’ my father muttered. ‘Damn silly woman – as if the sight of a dead dog would upset you. You’ve got more sense.’

  We were drenched by the time we’d walked across Dalston Road and up Dunmail Drive over to Orton Road, where we lived then. My father stopped when we reached our gate. ‘No need to mention dead dogs to your Mam,’ he warned. I understood perfectly why not. My mother’s response to anything whatsoever to do with death was not my father’s. She would get upset, even over a dog. But in that respect I was like my father. I wasn’t frightened by the word ‘dead’. I was interested, curious. Everything to do with dying was secretive and talked about in whispers, whispers which I tried hard to hear. It was the same with being born. This subject, too, was shrouded in mystery. It was equally hard to understand both – how life started and how it ended fascinated me but no one was prepared to enlighten me about either. My mother was emotional about births and deaths but my father was matter-of-fact. He appeared not to be afraid of death. It was just something inevitable. He had no religious beliefs, unlike my mother. He never went to church or said his prayers. There was no hint in anything he said or did that he thought of life as so precious that the thought of it ending was terrifying.

  At this time, he was forty-four years old.

  *

  On Whit Monday, three years later, when I was nine, my father took me to climb Catbells, the fell above Derwent Water. We left the house very early to catch the bus to Keswick. It was a magnificent May morning with the kind of faint mist hanging low over the trees which always signified a good day to come but, although confident of sun, we took our raincoats with us. We were going a long way, after all, almost forty miles into the hills of the Lake District, and we wouldn’t be back until late. We had sandwiches wrapped carefully by my mother in greaseproof paper, ham for my father and cheese for me, and biscuits. Beer and lemonade we would buy later, in Keswick.

  Before we went to the bus station, we stopped at a telephone box. My father produced a slip of paper and some pennies from his pocket. ‘Ring this number,’ he said. ‘It’s the doctor’s. Tell them to send him to 84 Richardson Street for your grandma. I’ll keep watch.’ I didn’t even query these instructions or ask what he was keeping watch for. He didn’t like telephones whereas I longed to have one in our house. He kept one foot in the door of the phone box while I rang. I delivered the message, pleased to have pressed button ‘A’ at the right time to speak, and when the doctor’s receptionist asked why my grandma needed the doctor to visit I turned to my father, who was listening intently through the slightly open door, and passed this on. ‘Because he’s been sent for,’ he said, angrily. ‘She might be dying.’ I repeated this, wondering why my father was so cross. I hadn’t known my grandmother might be dying. It seemed good news to me. My mother had been at my grandparents’ house all the day before. I’d heard her say to my father that his mother was very poorly and would need Dr Stevenson the next day, but I hadn’t realised ‘very poorly’ might mean dying. As we went on to the bus station I started to ask my father about this turn of events but he shut me up. ‘Don’t spoil the day,’ he said. So I didn’t, though it did strike me as unfair that he was going off for a day out while my mother was going to spend it yet again with his perhaps dying parent.

  The bus we caught was a double-decker and we went upstairs and sat at the front. It seemed a long and bumpy ride, with the bus going very slowly, its top deck brushing sometimes quite dangerously against the branches of overhanging trees once we were out of Carlisle and on the narrow roads of the real countryside. A double-decker was a cumbersome vehicle for such roads and its progress was occasionally unsteady as it lurched round corners, but we were always braced for the sudden interruptions in its speed. My father, looking ahead, could always predict when the nature of a bend meant the bus would have to brake sharply and throw us sideways and he’d tell me to hold on to the bar in front. I’d stretch out my arms to their full extent and just manage to do this. ‘Good lass,’ he’d say. That was all he said. As usual, there was no talking, except if he pointed out such sheep, cows or birds he decided were worthy of comment.

  Arriving in Keswick was exciting. It was so different from Carlisle, much smaller, the streets much narrower, and it was all grey, built of grey stone and slate, whereas Carlisle had mostly sandstone buildings. It had a different atmosphere too, full as it usually was of climbers and walkers dressed in all the appropriate gear and giving to the place a permanent holiday air. But in fact the streets that day were almost empty. We were so early, as we walked through them to the lake, that the shops which sold mountain boots and ropes and rucksacks were not yet open. It was becoming warm, the mist gone, and the sun beginning to blaze from a thrillingly blue sky such as we’d rarely seen in Keswick. There would be crowds later but we were ahead of them, ahead of all those still in their bed-and-breakfasts, and youth hostels and caravans and tents. The road to the lake was almost deserted and when we reached it and went to the kiosk where tickets for the steamers were sold it wasn’t yet open. ‘First in the queue,’ my father said, with immense satisfaction. He hated queues. He had no patience and could not queue. We were also first onto the first steamer of the day (except it wasn’t a steam boat, though called that, but a motor launch). Again, we sat at the front. The seats were hard and uncomfortable, just three slats of varnished wood with high backs to them. The boat ride across the lake to Nichol End was even bumpier and noisier than the bus had been but we loved it. Ahead of us, as the boat ploughed its way on, with masses of spray, between little islands we could see blue-black mountains silhouetted against the brighter blue of the sky. My father pointed and said, ‘That’s it, that’s the one, that’s Catbells.’ I couldn’t believe we were going to climb so high.

  But it didn’t take long. My father led the way along a woodland track and through a meadow and then we were at the foot of Catbells. He pointed out the path, and I was off, way ahead of him in minutes. I didn’t keep stopping to admire the view, as he did, and so I was soon at the top, panting and hot-faced and longing for my lemonade which he had in his raincoat pocket. It seemed to take him ages to arrive, wiping the sweat from his brow and scarlet with effort, and then we spread both our coats out and he lay full length while I immediately drank the lemonade (which was disappointingly warm and flat and not at all thirst-quenching). Picnic over, I was ready to go down, but my father seemed to be asleep. I wandered round the area of the summit, looking down at the shimmering lake on one side and into the densely green folds of the Newlands Valley on the other. Beautiful, but I was bored now. I wanted action. From behind the handkerchief spread over his face my father told me to settle myself, he was in no hurry to go down. ‘It might be the last time I ever climb up here,’ he said. I was puzzled. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘I’m getting on,’ he said. ‘I might not be able to manage it. This might be the last time before I go.’
/>   Go? I knew what he meant. My mother, with her ever-present intimations of mortality, talked like that all the time. He meant he might die. He meant he might never climb Catbells again before he died. I couldn’t see his expression, because of the handkerchief still over his face. Was he serious? But he was always serious. I sat down again and tried to wait patiently. Why was he suddenly sounding like my mother, with this uncharacteristic if oblique reference to dying? I wondered if it was because of my grandmother being apparently so near to death. Maybe everyone after a certain age started thinking about dying.

  Eventually, he hauled himself up and we went down, slowly, in silence. He never did climb Catbells again but it wasn’t because he wasn’t fit enough. He could have done it easily at any time in the next twenty or so years, but somehow he just never did. My grandmother didn’t die then either. She had another five horrible years, completely crippled with rheumatoid arthritis, to endure. We never discussed how my father felt about this.

  When we got home that day my mother asked if we had enjoyed ourselves. ‘Grand day,’ my father said. ‘Smashing. Everything went right, couldn’t have been better.’ My mother looked at me and I nodded. I wanted to tell her it had been such a grand day, such a smashing day, my father had thought about dying. But I didn’t.

  *

  My father’s father, George James Forster, died when I was seventeen and certainly old enough to appreciate the significance of this death. There was a funeral, with a church service (though George never darkened a church door in his lifetime) and then a tea at the Co-op. I didn’t go to either. My excuse was that I was studying hard for A-levels and couldn’t afford to miss a single lesson, and this was accepted. I quite regretted that no fuss was made about this, since I wanted the opportunity to make a self-righteous statement about feeling nothing for my grandfather, no grief whatsoever, and that therefore it would be hypocritical to go to his funeral. I was very hot on the evils of hypocrisy.