Precious Lives Read online

  Both diaries reported that 4 December 1990 was an exceptionally fine, mild, sunny day in north-west England. What a blessing. It made my father’s ninetieth-birthday lunch so much easier to organise and all the necessary travelling trouble-free. My brother Gordon and his wife Shirley drove up from Surrey, and my sister Pauline and her husband David from Northamptonshire, without any worries about icy roads or snowstorms. Hunter and I were already in Loweswater, where we’d moved from Caldbeck three years previously, preparing the house for the big event. It only involved seven of us, counting my father. It had been agreed that since 4 December fell on a Tuesday, and because the weather could not be depended on, the grandchildren would all telephone but not come up. So it was going to be a small party but the preparations felt immense. Roast beef was called for, best sirloin, a huge piece, or the birthday boy would think nothing of the meal. Roast beef of Old England was what he wanted, with all the trimmings – roast potatoes, boiled potatoes, boiled cabbage and Brussels sprouts and carrots and, of course, Yorkshire pudding with gravy. My mother (who died in 1981) had made deliciously light Yorkshire puddings. Alas, she had failed to pass the secret on to me but I was going to have to try to imitate hers, or the disappointment – ‘What, no Yorkshire pudding?’ – would ruin the dinner.

  I’m not much good at cakes either but luckily a professionally baked and iced cake was not just acceptable but preferred. It gave status. My father only ever ate sponge cake of the variety known as Madeira, and he didn’t like icing, but for his ninetieth the cake must look impressive, so he conceded that iced the cake would have to be in order for his name and age to be written upon it in blue. Cards were of more importance than presents. Cards, to be, in his opinion, real cards, had to have verses – none of this ‘left blank for your own message’ cheating. I’d made mine out of blue cardboard using photographs of him which roughly corresponded to each decade. Arthur, aged twenty, on his motor bike on the Isle of Man (where he went for the TT races); Arthur, aged thirty-one, marrying my mother; Arthur, aged forty, standing by a machine in the Metal Box factory – and so on. And I’d made up doggerel to go with each one which would pass muster, just, as verses. My present was a copy of The Times for 4 December 1900. He’d never in his life read The Times, but I thought he’d like the idea.

  He arrived at midday looking incredibly smart in his best suit and with a sparkling white shirt to go with it and a new blue tie – but then he always looked smart. A little unsteady getting out of my brother’s car but soon upright, trilby hat firmly on, bright blue silk handkerchief peeping out of his jacket pocket, shoes polished to army standards. No beaming smile on his face, however. No. Smiling was always a difficult, faintly embarrassing business. His lips could never learn the trick of opening up into a generous smile. If they attempted to, as they were then trying to, they wavered and quivered, resisting automatically the necessary abandon. But, ‘Grand day,’ he said, and, ‘Champion,’ and he nodded in salutation to each of us. No embraces, no kisses, perish the thought. He stood for a minute, surveying Mellbreak, the fell above Crummock Water which soars over our fields. The sun was full on it and every rock, every patch of green, was brilliantly lit. ‘Grand,’ he said again, and then was happy to be led into the conservatory, where the presents lay on the table. He settled himself in a comfortable chair and admired all the (hastily bought) plants but could hardly take his eyes off the view. The fells, usually so bleak at that time of the year, were indeed made soft and beautiful by the nature of that morning’s sunlight and this was the best present of all. We were each thanked for our respective gifts – ‘Thank you now, thank you very much’ – and photographs were allowed. We opened champagne (which he didn’t like but agreed was mandatory for the occasion), and then we trooped through to the kitchen for lunch.

  Our table was unrecognisable, its battered wooden surface covered for the first time in its humble life by a rigidly starched pristine white cloth. There was even a linen napkin for each guest, ironed into triangles of geometric precision. There were flowers, blue cornflowers I’d managed to procure with great difficulty, in a crystal bowl (which once belonged to his mother) in the centre. The roast beef, mercilessly overcooked so that not a hint of pink flesh was visible when cut, was lying on a proper platter, a great oval dish of willow-patterned blue and white. The carving knife was for once sharpened to lethal efficiency and my brother carved with suitable skill and authority. The cabbage and Brussels sprouts had been satisfactorily boiled to eliminate any chance of crispness remaining and were piled in sodden heaps in tureens. The potatoes (roast) were browned perfectly and the potatoes (boiled) floury. The carrots, cut into chunks of the prescribed length (two inches), added a touch of robust colour. About the Yorkshire puddings it is better not to speak. I’d made individual ones, thinking I had a better chance of success, and not a single one had risen to the fluffy heights looked for. The gravy was in that quaint article called a gravy boat and looked suspiciously thin.

  We ate. My father ate more than anyone. Gordon gave him three slices of beef and he requested another, to be cut from the top of the joint where the fat was thickest. He relished fat, all kinds of fat, and had tortured us for years with his sucking and chewing of it. I gave him two roast potatoes and two boiled, and he said, ‘Put another of each on.’ He said he would risk a Yorkshire pudding but he might not finish it, and he swamped it with gravy, saying, ‘Is this gravy?’ I apologised for it and he very kindly said I was not to worry, there was an art to gravy which my mother had possessed and I did not, it couldn’t be helped. Such generosity. I was overwhelmed. He had seconds of the beef and then, after a short pause, we moved on to ice-cream. It was the only pudding he liked and he liked it plain, plain vanilla. The cake was lifted onto the cleared table and I lit the nine candles and we all sang: ‘Happy birthday, dear Arthur, happy birthday to you.’

  There was an odd sound. I couldn’t at first identify it. As our singing, surprisingly lusty, tailed off, there was this strange, compressed noise, half sigh, half groan. My father was weeping. His head was bowed, his shoulders hunched, and he was weeping not extravagantly but quite unnervingly distinctly. Hardly had we all registered this than he had taken out a handkerchief (not the blue one in his suit jacket top pocket which was for show and never to be used, not even in emergencies such as this) and was blowing his nose vigorously. ‘Damn silly,’ he muttered, and: ‘Don’t know what’s got into him. Ridiculous.’ He took his spectacles off and held them up and peered at them, as though they might be to blame for such outrageous behaviour. Shaking his head, he put them back on and said, ‘I’ll have some more of that ice-cream with a piece of the cake when it’s been cut.’ I gave him a knife and he cut it, down through the ‘A’ for Arthur.

  So it passed quickly, that one evidence of emotion we had ever seen him give way to. And we allowed it to, we encouraged the swift passing on to mundane matters, as relieved as he was that it was over. My father had never wept. When distressing things had happened – the commonplace tragedies of family life, the illnesses and accidents – he had always just grunted and said, ‘Pity.’ Even when my mother died he didn’t shed any tears before us (though he may well have done in private). He looked stricken, but he didn’t weep. In his diary for that day, he wrote, ‘Lily died. 7.30 a.m. Sad’ – and that was that. All his immense grief was rigidly contained before us. His concern when I went with him to the infirmary to see my mother’s dead body was over a missing knife. He hid his distress behind his fury that according to him it had been stolen. This wretched knife was a special knife, fashioned to act as a fork too, made specially for people, like my mother, who had had strokes and could only use one hand. It was not on the list of Patient’s Property we were given to sign before my mother’s few belongings could be released. One dressing-gown, one pair of slippers, one bed-jacket, six nightdresses, one hairbrush, one comb, one pair of glasses – but no knife. My father was livid. He held this list in a shaking hand and concentrated enough to read out the small
print at the bottom: ‘I agree that the above list covers all the items deposited by me.’ Waving the sheet of paper about he raged. ‘It doesn’t. There’s no knife!’ I didn’t waste time trying to persuade him that it surely didn’t matter when the knife was of no intrinsic value and in any case was only a reminder of a sad disability. I signed it myself, without his being aware I’d done so, in the privacy of the sister’s office. He left the ward triumphant, convinced he’d stood up for his rights. The energy he’d used up, this forceful display of righteous indignation, had kept any tears at bay.

  But now, on his ninetieth birthday, he had wept, if briefly. From happiness, I could only presume. After my mother died, when finally we were leaving him to go back to London, he said to me, ‘I suppose I might see you all some time.’ It was said as I was leaving his house, as I walked down the hall to the door, with him behind me. I turned and said, ‘Whatever do you mean, you might see us, some time?’ He mumbled, ‘With your Mam gone …’ ‘What difference does that make?’ I said sharply. ‘For heaven’s sake, we’ll be coming all the holidays exactly as always.’ But his thinking had been painfully obvious: our mother was the one we all loved, she was the draw, and without her we would discard him. We didn’t, of course, but if it had gratified him that our attentions had remained the same, he never said so. I imagined that those few tears at his birthday lunch were because he felt valued for himself and perhaps felt fortunate. But perhaps not. Nobody was foolish or brave enough to ask him. His embarrassment was ours and we all conspired to get over it as rapidly as possible with much eating of cake.

  The rest of the day passed in a haze of relief – it was over, he was ninety, the great event had taken place, the celebrating had been well and truly done. He sat in the conservatory all afternoon with his binoculars trained on the craggy end of Mellbreak while he followed a particularly huge bird, hoping it would prove to be an eagle (it didn’t, it was at the best a buzzard). My sister and her husband took him home, stopping in Cockermouth, where the spire of All Saints was to be lit up in his honour (or anyone else’s, if they were prepared to pay for it). It didn’t light up very convincingly but my father, unusually, was prepared to be indulgent and told me later on the telephone that it had been a poor show but I was not to mind. In his diary, he wrote: ‘Good day. Dry. Sun. 90 year old. At Loweswater for lunch. Margaret cooking good. G & S, D & P, H & M. And me, AF.’

  We expected him to shift his sights to a hundred now he’d reached ninety, but he didn’t. In fact, he seemed a little puzzled as to how to approach the rest of his life however long it turned out to be. ‘I can’t go on for ever,’ he said, soon after, and I made the smart and silly rejoinder, ‘I don’t see why not.’ It clearly fascinated him wondering how long he could indeed go on for, but meanwhile he carried on conducting his future around the demands of his garden. On 23 April 1991 he sowed three rows of potatoes and two rows of onions to feed himself for that year; on the 30th he planted six new rose bushes: Silver Lining, Tahiti Hybrid Tea, Colour Wonder, Fragrant Cloud, Sutters Gold, and Speraks Yellow. They would take at least three years to establish and flower to his satisfaction. On 1 June he bought a new raincoat ‘to see me out’. Considering his old one had lasted twenty-five years, this was alarming. Life was clearly continuing as normal and no lack of confidence in it was being betrayed.

  We had good outings with him that summer, all recorded as ‘smashing’. The best of them were, as ever, to the seaside, to Silloth and Skinburness, lunching at the Skinburness Hotel. There was a special thrill for my father in patronising this hotel, which he thought of as very grand. The manager, an affable fellow, very formally dressed, liked to go round chatting to patrons, and my father liked us to chat to him. ‘You’ve been coming here a long time, I gather, Mr Forster?’ he said, having been told this by Hunter (who was far too talkative for my father’s liking). He grunted. ‘You know this place well, do you?’ the manager persisted. ‘Should do,’ my father said. ‘Put the boiler in, didn’t I? In 1921. No, 1920. Walked with it on my back from Silloth Station, didn’t I?’ Did he? The manager couldn’t know, we couldn’t know, but nobody dared dispute it. I actually didn’t want to, though it sounded impossible. It conjured up such a magnificent picture: my father, the working man personified, staggering along the sea wall all the way from Silloth, a boiler on his back, bowed down with the weight of it, the waves crashing to the left of him, showering him with icy spray, the wind howling all around, threatening to knock him over, but on he goes, arriving at last, drenched and exhausted, at the posh hotel, making his way to the tradesman’s entrance and being shown by some disdainful lackey to the boiler room, where he fits the new boiler … Really? Surely he meant he carried his tools on his back, or parts for the new boiler, and not an actual boiler? A boiler for an hotel would be enormous; he couldn’t have attempted to lift it on his own, never mind carry it. But we all smiled and raised our eyebrows at each another and said nothing. It wasn’t so much that we were being condescending, allowing him his unlikely story, as wanting him to be happy with his memory.

  And being there did make him happy. He loved the drive there in our comfortable car, especially the moment when we turned off the Silloth road to follow the small winding road that led to the marsh and we saw the Solway across it. The landscape is so empty and lonely there, so flat and wide, that the eye can sweep across it uninterrupted until it meets the Scottish hills on the other side of the estuary. We always drove very, very slowly, not at all in a hurry to reach the hotel. But he liked going into the hotel too. Every minute change in its interior decor was noted and commented on – ‘Hello! New wallpaper!’ – as though it was revolutionary. He preferred eating in the bar (more stories about 1920) but on Sundays he quite liked the thrill of lunching in the dining-room with the sense of occasion this gave. He approved of its formality, the pale-green linen tablecloths and the crystal goblets and the china plates, but he didn’t like the wickerwork chairs, which he said cut into his back. I said they looked pretty, though, and that always started us off on a discussion worthy of William Morris, of comfort versus art, of usefulness versus beauty.

  Sometimes our outings were more adventurous. My father liked the old outings but he liked exploring too, especially if there was an object to the exploration. He liked it best of all if we were trying to find some place and got lost. One bitterly cold March day we drove to the Pennines in search of a restaurant we’d read about which was near Alston. He hadn’t been anywhere near Alston for decades and he was all excitement as we started on the long climb up to it, reminiscing about how he’d toiled up once on his bike. It began to snow, great swirling clouds of snowflakes billowing around the car. My father loved it. The mild element of possible danger delighted him. ‘We might get snowed in,’ he said. I winced at the horror of that prospect – snowed in, with my father … On we went, the snow first lessening, so that we could see perfectly, then sweeping down again in thick gusts of wind so that visibility all but disappeared. It was hard to credit we were going to find any building at all, never mind anything as fancy as a restaurant. We reached Alston and then left it behind, pressing on into even more remote territory, still climbing, still pursued by snow flurries. ‘Maybe we should turn back,’ I murmured. ‘Let’s find somewhere to eat in Alston.’ ‘Turn back?’ my father said, in tones of outrage. ‘After we’ve come all this way? Don’t be daft.’ He was so content himself, secure in the front seat of our big car driving through this wild landscape. ‘We can’t give up,’ he said, firmly, ‘no good doing that. We’ll carry on. We’ll find it.’

  And we did. A strangely dark house up a lane, the way down to it treacherous. There was no one else in this ‘restaurant’, which was really just someone’s home. But once inside we sat very happily in a shabby, rather artistic sitting-room where there was a huge log fire and the owner, a woman who was both cook and waitress, served us the most delicious meal, steak so tender my father never stopped exclaiming and an array of vegetables of astonishing variety co
nsidering the time of year and the obvious fact that they had not been frozen. Her apple pie was sublime, the apples in quarters, firm but not hard, and the pastry light and flaky – oh, how we drooled, even my father who never touched puddings. We drank as well, which may have contributed a good deal to what followed. My father had two pints of beer, which he downed even more quickly than usual, and then, as it was so cold outside, a whisky. ‘Grand,’ he said, ‘and you were going to give up. Never give up. Never-give-up.’ ‘Thank you, oh wise one,’ I said. He sighed with what seemed like true happiness and then suddenly said, ‘One day soon, I’ll just pop off. Pop.’ We laughed – it was impossible not to, he had said it in such a droll fashion, making a real popping sound, and he repeated it. ‘Pop. I’ll just pop off.’ It was clear this is how death seemed to him, a matter of popping off, disappearing in a puff of smoke, all done in a second. He might not understand how this would be managed, but this appeared not to bother him. It would be arranged. All he had to do was what he called ‘put my time in’. Life was nothing more than a sentence fixed by a hidden judge and it did not frustrate him not to know its length. It was not his to reason why. He had no religious faith whatsoever but that made no difference to his conviction that there was a plan for when he would die.