Precious Lives Read online

  Sometimes we were blessed, sometimes we hit on a pub where real cooking was on offer. This was usually in the Eden Valley where the catchment area included monied folk. My father loved this valley but he had no regard for the superior cooking. If the pub had also made an attempt at any kind of artistic decor, and especially if it had a garden with tables and umbrellas, it was damned for ever. It wasn’t a real pub. It had lost itself. It was trying to be something it was not. He was against change. Life was about keeping everything the same. So, on the whole, we stuck to the dreary pubs and grew fatter and fatter, and felt more and more unhealthy as the summer went on. It was no good my ordering just bread and cheese – this annoyed him. I had to have something cooked or he was offended. Even refusing chips was an act of rebellion. If I asked for fish on its own and then picked the batter or orange breadcrumbs off it, he was displeased – ‘Waste not, want not,’ he’d say and shake his head.

  The solution to this state of affairs was to have a picnic. Funnily enough, my father liked picnics, though we had rarely had them as a family when I was growing up, and even when we did they amounted to not much more than a few sandwiches and a packet of biscuits all wrapped in greaseproof paper and fitting easily into coat pockets. My picnics were something else and they amused him. For a start, I had a proper wicker hamper, large and oblong, the sort with cute little leather straps fastening the plates onto the inside of the lid, and compartments for bottles and cups, all lined with gingham material – incredibly pretentious, and I loved it. My picnics, even apart from the hamper, were sumptuous, with all kinds of cold meats, and often a whole roast chicken, and little tasty pies (kept hot in a special separate bag) and crisp salads (dressings in screwtop jars) and small sausages and french bread (in the hot bag too) and cheeses and masses of fruit (melon, cherries, strawberries) and beer and wine and coffee and tea … Oh, it was a sight to behold when the hamper was opened. I always spread a proper cotton tablecloth before I set out the plates (yes, china not plastic) and had real cutlery and napkins and glasses. There was a tartan rug, and some cushions for us to loll on, and a collapsible chair for my father. It was a great performance and he relished it.

  Choosing where to have the picnic was a lengthy business in which my father and I conspired against Hunter, who was very easily satisfied and couldn’t understand why we kept rejecting what to him were perfectly good sites. ‘No, no,’ we’d cry, ‘not there. It’s too bumpy … too much gorse … not sheltered enough … can’t see the sea …’ Because these picnics were always beside the sea, always. On hot, still days in June and July, out on the Solway Marsh, at the end of the marsh road past Bowness-on-Solway where there was absolute peace and quiet, not a sound to be heard except for the seagulls and nothing to interrupt the view all the way across the Firth to the Scottish hills.

  ‘Champion,’ my father would say, having eaten and drunk heartily. Then he’d whistle before falling asleep, briefly, only to waken and say, ‘Champion’, again. Contentment mellowed him and he’d call me a good lass. Now, if ever, he was surely near to philosophising about life in his ninety-first year; now surely if asked he could say what life meant to him, why it was still so precious, why he wasn’t tired of it. But he said nothing and I asked nothing. He kept his thoughts to himself, either because he couldn’t articulate them or because he thought that was where they belonged.

  He was always reluctant to leave a picnic. As I began to pack up, he’d look astonished and say, ‘Are we off? Already? Oh well, have it your own way.’ ‘Already’ was after at least two hours. He’d grumble, just a bit, about having to get into the car and he’d say, ‘That’s that, then. Don’t know when I’ll have another picnic.’ I’d say, ‘Soon. The next brilliant day,’ and he’d reply, ‘There might never be another’ (pause) ‘or I might not still be here.’

  Once we departed for London at the end of the summer there was, of course, no question of more picnics. He missed them, but missed even more getting out into the country which he loved and knew so intimately. My mother’s death had released him from being more or less housebound, except for his short shopping forays, and for a while he’d tried to be adventurous and get himself out and about by bus. What he wanted to do, what would have satisfied him, was to go on a weekly Mystery Tour, but to his disgust the bus companies seemed to have phased Mystery Tours out – ‘Nobody bothers any more about them without cars,’ my father said. There was to be no more of the thrill of taking a Mystery Tour not knowing if he would end up in the Lake District or on the Solway coast. All mystery had gone. Now, he would have to choose his destination which wasn’t at all the same.

  But after a lot of complaining, that’s what he was obliged to do. His first choice would always be Silloth, by train, but Dr Beeching had axed the branch line to it long ago, robbing car-less people like my father of easy access to their favourite holiday resort. My father had gone on that Silloth train all his life and the short journey, half an hour or so, had never failed to excite him. The train was always grossly overcrowded no matter how many extra coaches were put on the various engines – on summer weekends the platform for the Silloth trains would be literally packed solid with working-class people and their children. The fights to get on were alarming. My father had often travelled in the luggage van, thankful to get on at all, and he never minded the crush. He knew all the stops by heart, and exactly when to crane out of the window, as the train rounded the last bend, in order to see the church spire in the middle of Silloth. The engine would give a double toot at this point and everyone would swear they could smell the sea. As a young man he prided himself on being first off the train, jumping off before it had stopped, and racing ahead of the hordes to bag his favourite fishing spot on the sea wall. Later, encumbered by his children and a wife who thought it unseemly to rush in any circumstances, he’d been forced to shuffle along with the masses and he’d found it very frustrating.

  The Silloth train no longer being an option, he had to condescend to go by bus or not go at all. He only did it once. He presented himself at 9.30 a.m. one September day, a Monday (so he hoped the bus would be empty and it almost was), at the bus station and was first on the bus. That pleased him. He hesitated only momentarily before choosing a seat on the right-hand side (the sea would be on the right when the bus got to the coast) halfway down, avoiding the seat over the wheels. He had a window beside him and was able to control the opening and shutting of it himself as well as be privy to a grand view when one appeared. He had his raincoat with him and his stick, but he didn’t carry any food or drink. The bus was bound for Maryport via Silloth and Allonby and it would stop there an hour before returning to Carlisle, which would give him plenty of time to refresh himself at a pub.

  The bus started dead on time – more gratification – and he enjoyed every single minute of the ride, even going through the city and passing the end of the road where he had once lived, in the days when he’d cycled everywhere. The bus was relatively new, the seats well upholstered, and the noise of the engine not too loud. There were only eight other passengers, all women, all sitting at the back, so their cackling hardly disturbed him. There was an irritatingly long stop in Wigton, but the rest of the journey was speedy, and when they hit the sea road the tide was in and the sun fairly making the water sparkle. He saw several fishing boats and a big tanker turning to go into the dock and wished he’d had his binoculars with him. Allonby was deserted except for horses galloping on the sands (where I had learned to walk). He had a pie and a pint at Maryport and a walk around – ‘There’s not much at Maryport, mind, not these days’ – and then got back onto the bus. Someone was in his seat. A woman. He stood and glared at her and tapped his stick on the ground and ‘acted dumb’, as he put it later. She asked if she had taken his seat. He said she had that. She moved.

  When he got home, he rang me to describe his day and say how smashing it had been and how he intended to take bus trips regularly, as a treat, and that he fancied Keswick the following week. But he never
ventured forth on an outing again. I kept asking him why not and he said, ‘Reasons’. These reasons remained undivulged but I suspect may have had something to do with his beginning to need to go to the lavatory very frequently, and his terror of an accident on the bus. He stayed near home after this, getting his fresh air in the garden, looking forward to being taken on outings when we came again, but not noticeably pining for them. They were not part of his routine, of his life, when he was on his own, and he coped. He was still remarkably fit for his age and proud of his independence even if his freedom of movement had become curtailed.

  It couldn’t go on for ever, of course. He might not have been waiting for a crisis, but we were, and in May 1992 it came.

  On 25 April, my father spent a long afternoon in the garden, digging and weeding, pausing every half-hour to take a rest on a bench I’d persuaded him to let me put up against the garage wall. Next day, a Sunday, he walked his usual mile to and from the cemetery to visit my mother’s grave, as he had done every Sunday since she had died eleven years before. My mother wasn’t actually buried there, she’d been cremated, but we’d put her ashes under a sod lifted from her parents’ grave and so he regarded her as being there. ‘I don’t know why I go,’ he’d say, shaking his head. ‘It’s daft.’ When he’d seen the fine grey-white ash after the cremation he’d been shocked and turned white and said, ‘To think she’s come to that.’ But ever since, with the ash under the grass in front of the marble cross recording her parents’ names and dates, he’d liked the idea of something being there and of being able to pay his regular respects. Besides, Sunday morning visits to the cemetery became another routine, another way of giving his week a structure. By then the walk was quite an effort, involving the return up a steep incline, but it was just this effort he enjoyed.

  So he was fit enough that weekend but on 30 April he fell again. He was watering some plants he’d just put in, going backwards and forwards to the tap with an empty soup tin because he could no longer manage to use his watering can and keep his balance. He didn’t really agree with watering – ‘Folk water far too damn much’ – but where new plants were concerned he conceded a little water was necessary. He tripped on the path as he was carrying the last lot of water. It was amazing he hadn’t done so before. This path was made of concrete slabs which he’d laid himself, unevenly, many years before and which were now lethal for anyone the least bit doddery. Again and again we’d offered to re-lay this path, but it was the usual story – ‘No!’ and ‘It’ll see me out, don’t you worry.’

  This time, he didn’t hurt his eye. In falling, he put out his hand to save himself and fell on his right wrist. The pain was intense but he struggled to get himself up from the path before anyone saw him and managed to hobble into the house. Luckily – or, in his opinion, unluckily – he had in fact been seen by his neighbour Mr Nixon, who came to check he was not hurt. ‘I’m all right,’ my father said. ‘I’ll manage.’ He bathed his wrist in water as hot as he could bear and then he took two aspirin and rested. But the pain didn’t wear off and he was awake all night. In the morning, he could do nothing with his right hand and it was very awkward frying his bacon using his left hand to hold the pan. Just as he’d finished eating his breakfast (though he’d felt sick and hadn’t enjoyed it), Mrs Nixon came knocking on the door and he had to answer it. She saw how awful he looked and asked permission to call the doctor. ‘Go on, then,’ he said, grumpily, ‘have it your own way.’ The doctor came and, suspecting a fracture (correctly), said he would have to go to the infirmary. The obliging Nixons said they would take him, but, though grateful, this put my father in a foul mood. He made it plain that he was not going to ‘stop in’ even if ‘they’ said he had to. He was coming home, whatever.

  He had always both hated and feared the infirmary and his, on the whole, tolerable experience in 1989, over ‘the blood’, had done nothing to endear it to him. This hostility dated from long ago, sometime in the forties, when he’d had some sort of accident at work and damaged his right leg. It was not broken but he could hardly walk and the pain was dreadful. Instead of going straight to the infirmary, or at least to the doctor (this was pre-NHS and would have had to be paid for), he insisted on being taken home. I remember him coming in just before I left for school, his face ashen, the lines of it set in a grimace as he tried to control the pain. My mother was full of commonsense as well as concern, telling him he would have to seek some medical advice, but he was adamant: he was not going near any doctor and especially not at the infirmary. A night went by as well as a day as he struggled to subdue the pain and recover, helped by doses of whisky and aspirin, but by the next morning the sweat stood out on his forehead and he couldn’t talk, he was in so much pain. It was frightening to see the exercising of such will power and even more frightening to see it fail. My mother meanwhile took matters into her own hands and organised the one neighbour in all the area who had a car to come and take my father to the infirmary.

  He was gone a very long time. I went to school, came back from school, and he still wasn’t home. My mother was convinced he’d been admitted and was in the process of putting her coat on to go to the infirmary when my father walked into the house looking exhausted but triumphant. It seemed he’d been put in a cubicle when he arrived at the infirmary, and told to remove his trousers and lie on the bed. He’d obeyed, reluctantly, and eventually a doctor came along, examined him, and said the leg would have to be set in plaster, without explaining why. Someone else would be along soon to take him to the plaster room. But no one came along soon. Hours went by and the longer my father waited the more unhappy he felt about having his leg put in plaster. He wouldn’t be able to work, and if he couldn’t work he wasn’t at all sure he would be fully paid and if he wasn’t fully paid the rent and coal bill might not get paid … it was dreadful to imagine. So in this kind of mental turmoil, and still in acute pain, he made his mind up. He got off the bed, put his trousers on and limped agonisingly slowly out of the infirmary, almost fainting with the effort. But he wasn’t going home, or to any other doctor. He was going to Geordie Long’s.

  Geordie Long was by occupation a barber, but was far more famous in Carlisle for being a bone-setter. He had a shop in Caldewgate, where he cut hair and shaved customers. Behind it, for those who wanted this additional service, he had another room, where he set bones. This had come about through customers complaining about their necks aching, so while Geordie was cutting their hair he had begun to massage necks in an attempt to ease the pain; and he had discovered he had a talent for it. He had no professional qualifications whatever but grew so interested in the problem, not just of sore necks but of sore wrists, sore legs, sore backs, that he began reading up on anatomy in the library. Soon he was not only massaging muscles but manipulating bones – with a pull there and a jerk here he found he could sort out all kinds of aches and pains. He was still primarily a barber, but the queues were outside the back room where he did his bone-setting (he was always called that, a bone-setter, not a physiotherapist or an osteopath). He charged people half-a-crown, if they could manage that, but if they couldn’t they were told to leave what they could afford on the mantelpiece. Everyone had complete faith in Geordie and never queried his lack of qualifications or worried about the safety of his methods. Unlike the doctors at the infirmary, he was a cheerful man, working-class himself and incapable of patronising anyone. He never claimed to cure people, saying only that he’d try to ease their pain, and always warned that whatever was wrong with them might not, in fact, be curable through his touch.

  This was the man my father took himself off to. Somehow, he limped the half mile down to Caldewgate from the infirmary but collapsed as soon as he got to the barber’s shop. The bone-setting waiting-room was crowded, as usual, but nobody minded when Geordie (who had always cut my father’s hair) came out from his consulting-room – grand name for a bare room with only a high couch in it – and, seeing the state my father was in, took him straight in. What Geordie then
actually did I don’t know, and certainly my father never did either, but it worked. He apparently put his hands on my father’s leg, felt it carefully over and over again, every inch of it, then he did what was merely described afterwards as ‘this’ and ‘that’ (which, seemingly, was excruciating and my father was ashamed to have to admit he’d let out a yell) and, hey presto, the leg functioned again. He invited my father to walk and he did, gingerly. The pain had not quite gone but it was a different and perfectly bearable pain and Geordie said it would soon go. He paid Geordie and left, arriving home to rage against the damned stupid doctor at that infirmary who would have had his leg put in plaster for weeks.

  Ever after, the infirmary was a place where they tried to trick you and was to be avoided at all costs. The first question he always asked if anyone was ill was, ‘Will it mean the infirmary?’ To be ill enough to have to go into the infirmary was the worst possible news, but then all illness was bad news. Everyone feels this, of course, but my father felt it in an exaggerated way. He had no patience with illness. He resented and resisted it, seeing it as an enemy that had to be fought and conquered, if possible unaided. Anyone who liked to talk about their illness irritated him. He had no interest in symptoms and even less in treatments. He looked for the same kind of determination to deny illness in his children as he had himself. We all tried hard to measure up, but my brother, who was often ill as a child, had a hard time of it and so, later, did my younger sister. I pleased him most by failing to succumb, as they did, to scarlet fever and all manner of other childhood diseases. But when I was ten, my luck temporarily ran out and I had jaundice rather badly. He had no idea how to cope. I lay in bed for weeks, hardly able to lift my head from the pillow and constantly sick, and he said it was ‘not like Margaret’ in a disappointed voice. My mother was irritated, said I was just a child like any other child and I couldn’t help being ill, for heaven’s sake. She said he should show some sympathy. But he didn’t know how to. In his lunch hour, when he’d cycled home from the Metal Box factory and had eaten his meal, he’d come upstairs to sit with me. I’d pretend to be asleep, embarrassed for him. I’d hear him coming up the stairs and I’d turn to the wall and close my eyes tight and breathe heavily. I knew he was sitting there, at my bedside, in his boiler suit but with newly scrubbed hands. He’d clear his throat. I’d stay still. Sometimes he pulled the blanket round me and tucked it in. Then, after a few minutes, he’d go. I’d hear him say to my mother, ‘She seems to be sleeping nice. I didn’t disturb her.’ I imagine he sensed I wasn’t sleeping at all, but he allowed me to pretend because it suited him. He cared, but he didn’t know how to talk to a sick child. He hated to see me, usually a fizz of energy, listless and he didn’t want to acknowledge I might be suffering. Illness, all illness, scared him and he didn’t believe that involving himself in it, learning to understand it, would help banish his fear or at least put it into perspective. Disease could lead to death and there was no need to think about that.