Precious Lives Page 2

  Coming home from school that day, cycling up the steep hill to our house, I saw my father waiting at the gate. He was very formally, very smartly dressed, still in his funeral clothes. We had moved from Orton Road and now lived, conveniently for funerals, in Richardson Street, bang opposite the cemetery. Our front windows gave us splendid vantage points for funeral processions, of which there were a great many in Carlisle in the 1950s. Carlisle people seemed to treat funerals with a Victorian intensity – lots of big, gleaming black cars, all crawling along bumper-to-bumper; masses of flowers, lavish wreaths and crosses; every single mourner in black, and many of the women heavily veiled. I was fascinated by these spectacles and resented my mother closing our curtains out of respect, when I wanted to position myself in the window so that I could see everything. I was always curious as to who had died, and how, and what of, and would even go so far as to walk to the cemetery later on, to find the fresh grave and read the cards on the wreaths in order to work out as much as I could.

  My father, when we were young, had often taken us for walks in the cemetery simply because it was more like a park than a cemetery if one could turn a blind eye to thousands of gravestones. He could. They disturbed him not one bit. He saw only the high standard of gardening and it pleased him. He admired all the bedding plants, the rows and rows of bright red geraniums and the pink and yellow dahlias, and the violently orange marigolds, all arranged in strictly geometric patterns. He approved of the brutally clipped hedges and trees lining the paths and he particularly liked the precision with which the whole cemetery was laid out, with everything neat and orderly. He made us walk properly in the cemetery, which is to say we were not allowed to run, or to walk across any graves, or to disturb any of the flowers. He didn’t like me to look at the cards attached to the wreaths either. He said they were private. I said how could they be private when they were displayed in public, but he just said, ‘Don’t argue.’

  So there he was, after his father’s funeral, waiting at the gate. Funerals had never bothered him and I saw no reason why this one should have done. I got off my bike and wheeled it towards him. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t ask him how he felt, or express any concern, or enquire how the funeral had been (but are there different ways a funeral, like a party, can ‘be’?). He opened the gate for me. ‘Are you coming?’ he asked. ‘Where?’ He glared at me, furious. ‘You know where.’ I smiled, I hoped derisively. ‘You mean to the cemetery? Isn’t the funeral over, then?’ I knew perfectly well it was. I knew perfectly well he meant go with him to look at the grave and the flowers. ‘Anyway, no,’ I said, ‘I’m not. What for? Why should I?’ And I rushed quickly through the gateway and up the path. Behind me I heard the gate being slammed shut so hard the whole frame shook and clanged. I turned to see my father marching off to the cemetery gates shouting: ‘Right! I’ll remember, don’t you worry! I’ll remember this!’ I laughed. He looked so ridiculous. Then I put my bike in the shed and went into the house, where I described this little scene to my mother. She was reproachful. ‘That wasn’t kind,’ she said. ‘When he’s just buried his Dad.’ ‘He didn’t care about his Dad,’ I said, ‘so I don’t know why he’s pretending now he’s dead.’ ‘It’s a matter of respect-for-the-dead,’ my mother said, wearily. ‘Well, I didn’t respect his Dad,’ I said, ‘and I’m not going to start now. It’s silly, stupid, all this respect for the dead stuff.’ ‘Oh, Margaret …’ my mother said, sadly. I mimicked her tone and made an exaggerated face of distress, trying to make her laugh and failing. Often, I could make her smile by acting penitent, but not that day.

  I made sure I was out before my father returned from his little pilgrimage. I went into the cemetery by the side entrance on Dalston Road. There was no fear of meeting him – I knew the route he would take and that he would have long since passed this point, the place where his own grandfather, after whom he was named, was buried. He always made us stop there and read the inscription so that we could marvel at this other Arthur Forster reaching ninety. He had an almost superstitious reverence for this gravestone, seeming to believe that if he read the name and the dates often enough he, too, would live until he was ninety. He would have passed it that day, on the way to the new part of the cemetery, up on the hillside, where his mother and now his father were buried, and as I entered by the side entrance he would be walking home down the main drive. I would not encounter him and thereby lose face. We were both very concerned about losing face in front of each other, but he need never know I had indeed come, if not to pay my respects to his father’s grave then at least to look at the wreaths. There were only six, a poor show by Carlisle standards. One from each of his two sons, one from a surviving brother, one from a sister-in-law, and two more from people whose names I didn’t know. Enough, just, to cover the raised hump of soil and grass sods under which the coffin lay.

  All I could think of as I stood there was that I was glad my grandfather was dead. I knew ‘glad’ was a wicked word to use with ‘dead’ but that’s what I was, positively glad. He was such a miserable old man, spending his days crouched over the fire in his gloomy, dark house. What had been the point of his continuing to live? Why should anyone be sad that it was all over? But my father was apparently feeling something, if only I could fathom what. Odd. I thought this very odd, and wished I could discuss his feelings with him. I practised asking him in my head but heard all too clearly the withering reply ‘Don’t talk daft.’ So I didn’t. I went home and said nothing. But I did find myself looking at my father after that and wondering if I would feel anything of what he had felt (even if I didn’t know what that was) when he himself died. This event, his death, was something I’d wished for many times in the previous few years, but I’d just recently stopped wishing it. I didn’t need him to die any more, because I was going to leave home and him soon, and so his existence was no longer of importance. The years of hating him were over. The sad thing was that I’d hated him with so little cause. He had never been cruel or violent. On the contrary, he had worked hard to feed and clothe me and give me treats. His sins were so trivial. I’d hated the way he shouted, his need to dominate, his scorn for books, his insistence that everything should be done his way. I’d hated the way he ate, his petty rules and regulations, his actual presence. Nothing to arouse hate, really. I was embarrassed to have to admit to myself how absurd my hatred had been. It was a relief to be done with it.

  But all the same his death would not be something I dreaded.

  *

  It was a glorious summer’s evening in London. My sister-in-law Marion had just come from work, straight to our house, straight into the garden, where she knew I would be sitting waiting under the pear tree with the chilled white wine and the Kalamata olives all ready for her. Every Wednesday she came and we both looked forward to it. It gave her such pleasure to sit in the cool of our shady garden and recover from her hectic day. She drank some wine, ate a few olives, sighed with contentment, and reached for her cigarettes. She lit one, head back, and inhaled deeply. ‘Bliss,’ she said. Not the wine, the olives, the garden, but the cigarette – ‘bliss’.

  Every now and again I went into the kitchen to baste the chicken I had in the oven. Whenever I came back out, there’d be another cigarette lit. In the winter, Marion never relished these pre-supper cigarettes so much. She was well aware that her brother, my husband, Hunter, loathed cigarette smoke and so she’d smoke only a couple then, sitting crouched by the kitchen door with it open a fraction, on even the coldest days. It made her feel furtive but she respected his right in his own home, and his need as an asthmatic, to keep his environment smoke-free. Until he left it at eighteen, he’d had to live in a smoke-filled house, where both his parents and his three siblings all puffed away, and he wasn’t going to endure it again. But now, in the summer, outside, Marion could smoke as much as she liked and what she liked was a lot.

  She sat and smoked, telling me about her day, which had been particularly fraught. She was a social worker, in Camden, and
had had to see to the removal of an old tramp from a pavement. The tramp, a woman, had six cats, all of whom slept with her, curled up among her bundles of clothes and rubbish. The people living in the block of flats outside which she’d parked herself were complaining more about the cats than her. ‘They want the cats put down,’ Marion said. ‘I mean, the idea, they’re perfectly healthy cats. I’d rather they wanted her put down.’ Then she laughed to show she was just being outrageous. ‘Oh dear,’ she said, ‘the poor body’s half dead anyway. She’s got everything wrong with her, it’s pitiful.’ While she told me what she’d done about this case she lit yet another cigarette. Knowing I shouldn’t, I pointed out she’d smoked more than usual. She shrugged.

  It was silly to protest about her smoking, but sometimes I couldn’t help it. It scared me. I kept reading about the proven dangers of heavy smoking, the sort Marion indulged in. She’d been one of those children who start cadging the odd fag very young, around eleven, and who by fifteen are smoking regularly. She was forty-one now and had been a serious smoker, on at least twenty a day, for many years. She loved smoking, adored it, and smoked with a passion incomprehensible to a non-smoker like me. Often I’d asked her to describe what cigarettes did for her, but she was never able to explain the pleasure enough for me to identify it as anything I’d felt myself. Was it like drinking wine? No, it was not, it was better. Smoking apparently did wonderful things. It soothed her but it also stimulated her, and she loved the taste. She was never going to give it up. She knew of the dangers but she was prepared to take the risk, announcing that even if smoking shortened her life she would settle for that rather than give up.

  She didn’t, of course, believe it would shorten her life. Her mother had been a smoker and her lungs, when she died, in her eightieth year, of Alzheimer’s, had been very healthy. But I’d read, that day, some new report in a newspaper about the rise of lung cancer statistics for women of Marion’s age and I suppose this was what made me worry even more than usual about her smoking. I didn’t want to nag her – it would do no good anyway – but I mentioned that I thought she had actually increased the number of cigarettes per day that she smoked. ‘Oh, don’t start that,’ she said. ‘You know what I think. I don’t care if it kills me, I don’t mind about dying. It’s not that I want to die, but I don’t really care – not enough to give up smoking, anyway.’ We started to argue, which spoiled the evening. I said she wasn’t thinking of the dying, the process, just of being dead. She wasn’t thinking of those who loved her, who would have to watch her endure this and who cared about her continuing to live, even if she herself didn’t hold her life as precious. I ranted on quite a bit and she groaned and asked if that chicken was ready yet.

  After she’d gone, I went over and over what she had said about trading years of her life, if necessary, for the pleasures of smoking. She’d said everyone had to die sometime so why worry about it, but, although Marion was certainly not a thoughtless person, that seemed to me thoughtless. In the midst of life we are in death, yes, but I’d noted by then that the moment people actually were dying the struggle to hold on to life became compulsive and fierce. Life, which Marion could be so philosophical about when in no imminent danger of dying, became exceedingly precious the moment it was about to be taken away. The dying want every second of life, whatever the circumstances of it. Or else it is wanted for them.

  It seemed to me there was something I could not quite grasp about that. I wanted to know why life remains precious to those whose lives seem far from being so to everyone else. What, when one is dying, does this value consist of? Within the same eighteen months I watched my father die of extreme old age and my sister-in-law die, aged fifty-six, of cancer (though not lung cancer). Their attitudes and their experience of dying revealed a kind of answer that was on the one hand consoling and on the other dismaying.

  I

  MY FATHER, WHO left school in 1913, aged thirteen, was certainly not illiterate. He could read and write perfectly well but he did neither fluently. Writing, especially, he found difficult, something he had to labour over, with even a signature requiring concentration. Writing of any sort worried him, and so it was a surprise after he died to find he had kept a diary and had written in it every day. He may have kept earlier diaries but the ones which have survived start in 1969. He gave that one up in May. In 1970, he got to July before he stopped, but from 1971 he completed the entire year and as time went on wrote more, not less.

  On 4 June 1990, my father recorded that he was eighty-nine and a half years old, but only did so in one of the two diaries he was in fact keeping, the Expert Diary, a gardener’s diary published by D. G. Hessayon. ‘Got out Bright and Sunny. Dismantled edge. Big job. Tidy up. 89 1/2 year old.’ In his other diary (Nestlé’s, given to him by my brother, who worked for that company) the entry reads: ‘Bright and Sunny. Warm. Bit wind. Dismantling edge. Big job for me. All OK.’ Two diaries filled in, with almost exactly the same mundane information, simply because he had been given two for Christmas and it would be a waste not to use both. I don’t know what dismantling an edge means, though I expect gardeners do, but I know why he recorded a half-birthday: he wanted to reach ninety, like his grandfather. The nearer his ninetieth birthday came, the more impressed he was by his own age. It was hugely significant.

  He was furious with himself on 2 July. ‘Light showers. Mild. Cut grass. Front and Back. Had a Fall in Back. No Reason for it. Damage glasses. Worse. Eye. Bit blood. Pack up for the day.’ Then he hid. He didn’t want his kind, caring neighbours to see his damaged face. They would be concerned and might tell somebody, and somebody might call the doctor and the doctor might make him go to the infirmary, and he was not having that. So on Tuesday and Wednesday he kept out of sight, though he worried that this in itself would cause suspicion. He was a man of rigid routine. He shopped every weekday in his local shopping area, Denton Holme. He walked the half-mile there and caught the bus back, arriving home at twelve noon precisely. This shopping was important and people knew it was. Strangely, for a working man of his era, my father had always liked to shop. It was a task he was always happy to do for my mother and he did it well, going to the covered market to buy heavy foodstuffs so that she wouldn’t be too burdened carrying them home herself. Once he’d retired and she had had her first minor stroke, he’d more or less taken over all the shopping. So the shopkeepers of Denton Holme knew him well. They knew he nipped into the betting shop after he’d been to the butcher’s for his sausages and before he went into the bread shop for his teacakes. Should he fail to turn up for more than a couple of days, enquiries as to his health might be made – which they were. Mrs Nixon rang up on Wednesday evening to ask if he was all right. ‘Grand,’ he said, ‘only I’ve been too busy to get out. I’ve been sorting bedding.’ Explanation accepted, he was relieved. He’d got away with his Fall and by the next day the cut over his eye had stopped bleeding and the swelling was down. He could go out again, and anyway he had to because he had no bread left.

  This episode did rather emphasise how low he kept his stock of food and how shopping had taken on another dimension. In his extreme old age it provided the spur, indeed it fulfilled the positive need, to go out at all. It motivated him in a way he liked. Again and again I’d asked him to let me fill his cupboards with emergency provisions in case he became housebound, but he would not allow it. ‘No! I have to get out,’ he said. He accepted a couple of tins of Nestlé’s food which my brother occasionally brought him, but he would not permit any methodical piling up of nourishing foods that would keep. This was why they knew him so well in the local shops and knew exactly what he bought and where. They were kind to him in unobtrusive ways. Realising that it was a struggle for him to load his shopping bag and hold his stick to keep his balance, the shopkeepers were adept at helping him. His worn leather bag was not very large and it filled quickly, but then he had not much to put in it, since he only bought two ounces of this and a quarter of that. Bread was purchased once a week, a large th
ick-sliced white loaf, and filled the bag, but then he bought nothing else that day.

  He didn’t attempt, after his fall, to go to town that Thursday, though it was his regular day for doing so. It was an adventure, by then, going ‘up street’ and he looked forward to it. He went to Marks & Spencer’s food hall, where they sold plaice, individual portions, in breadcrumbs, and since first I’d bought it for him he’d become addicted to it. He only bought this fish and a bag of Devon Toffees. The price of Marks & Spencer’s vegetables appalled him, and he still grew all he needed in his own garden. On his way to and from Marks & Spencer, he liked to take in what was happening in English Street. ‘Ruination’ was his description. He disapproved of the Town Hall being painted in a terracotta colour and saw no sense in pedestrianising the area in front of it – ‘it’s like the bloomin’ Sahara’ (the paving bricks used were rust-red and the space wonderfully large and open). The attractive benches dotted around were an abomination and only encouraged idlers to sit about. But he missed his weekly jaunt when he could not manage it, in spite of being spared the tension of getting the bus. He had trouble dismounting – the bus drivers often pulled up too far from the kerb for him to alight with ease and he would attempt to get them to correct their parking position, which could lead to heated exchanges of words. Then there was the performance over his bus pass. He always had it ready, but some drivers didn’t bother looking at it and he insisted they should. So it was exhausting going to town, but it was also stimulating, and he missed it.

  Three weeks after this fall, my father’s sister-in-law died. Nan was eighty-two, seven years younger than he was. ‘Nan died. Change in weather. Carlisle Races’ he wrote in one diary and in the other, still without the slightest trace of any emotion, ‘Nan died. Change in weather. Dull. Run to Caldbeck H & M.’ So I and my family were staying in our cottage at Caldbeck, twenty minutes away in the northern fells, which is why I came to hear his comment that day on my aunt’s death. ‘She had it coming,’ he said. ‘She was a good age.’ There was neither regret nor the smallest evidence of distress in this statement. He had never liked Nan and there was about him that day an undeniable and not entirely pleasant air of triumph: she was dead, he had won, he was going to make ninety. He didn’t seem to regard Nan’s death as heralding his own. There was no sighing, no shuddering, no intimation of his own mortality. Yet, obviously, if he thought Nan had died at a good age and that she had had it coming, how much more was he and did he? But he appeared quite serene and untroubled.