And when did you last
see your father?
BLAKE MORRISON
Contents
Title Page
Epigraph
Oulton Park
Airedale
Tonsils
Dogs
Bolton Abbey
Foetal
Camp Cuba
A Completely Different Story
Carwash
Johnson’s Baby Powder
The Man who Invented the Outdoor Sleeping-Bag
Diary
The Joy of Lech
Death
Three Visits
Coffin
Pacemaker
Sandra
Funeral
And when did you last?
Afterword
Praise
Also by Blake Morrison
About the Author
Copyright
In the morning, when everything was done, I gave her a long last farewell kiss in her coffin. I bent over her, and as I lowered my head into the coffin I felt the lead buckle under my hands … The grave was too narrow, the coffin wouldn’t fit. They shook it, pulled it, turned it this way and that; they took a spade and crowbars, and finally a gravedigger trod on it—just above Caroline’s head—to force it down. I was standing at the side, holding my hat in my hand; I threw it down with a cry.
… I wanted to tell you all this, thinking it would give you pleasure. You are sufficiently intelligent, and love me enough, to understand that word ‘pleasure’, which would make the bourgeois laugh.
Flaubert, letter to Maxime DuCamp, March 1846
… The odds is gone,
And there is nothing left remarkable
Beneath the visiting moon.
Antony and Cleopatra
Oulton Park
A HOT SEPTEMBER Saturday in 1959, and we are stationary in Cheshire. Ahead of us, a queue of cars stretches out of sight around the corner. We haven’t moved for ten minutes. Everyone has turned his engine off, and now my father does so too. In the sudden silence we can hear the distant whinge of what must be the first race of the afternoon, a ten-lap event for saloon cars. It is quarter past one. In an hour the drivers will be warming up for the main event, the Gold Cup—Graham Hill, Jack Brabham, Roy Salvadori, Stirling Moss and Joakim Bonnier. My father has always loved fast cars, and motor-racing has a strong British following just now, which is why we are stuck here in this country lane with hundreds of other cars.
My father does not like waiting in queues. He is used to patients waiting in queues to see him, but he is not used to waiting in queues himself. A queue, to him, means a man being denied the right to be where he wants to be at a time of his own choosing, which is at the front, now. Ten minutes have passed. What is happening up ahead? What fathead has caused this snarl-up? Why are no cars coming the other way? Has there been an accident? Why are there no police to sort it out? Every two minutes or so my father gets out of the car, crosses to the opposite verge and tries to see if there is movement up ahead. There isn’t. He gets back in and steams some more. The roof of our Alvis is down, the sun beating on to the leather upholstery, the chrome, the picnic basket. The hood is folded and pleated into the mysterious crevice between the boot and the narrow back seat where my sister and I are scrunched together as usual. The roof is nearly always down, whatever the weather: my father loves fresh air, and every car he has owned has been a convertible, so that he can have fresh air. But the air today is not fresh. There is a pall of high-rev exhaust, dust, petrol, boiling-over engines.
In the cars ahead and behind, people are laughing, eating sandwiches, drinking from beer bottles, enjoying the weather, settling into the familiar indignity of waiting-to-get-to-the-front. But my father is not like them. There are only two things on his mind: the invisible head of the queue and, not unrelated, the other half of the country lane, tantalizingly empty.
‘Just relax, Arthur,’ my mother says. ‘You’re in and out of the car like a blue-tailed fly.’
But being told to relax only incenses him. ‘What can it be?’ he demands. ‘Maybe there’s been an accident. Maybe they’re waiting for an ambulance.’ We all know where this last speculation is leading, even before he says it. ‘Maybe they need a doctor.’
‘No, Arthur,’ says my mother, as he opens the door again and stands on the wheel-arch to crane ahead.
‘It must be an accident,’ he announces. ‘I think I should drive up and see.’
‘No, Arthur. It’s just the numbers waiting to get in. And surely there must be doctors on the circuit.’
It is one-thirty and silent now. The saloon race has finished. It is still over an hour until the Gold Cup itself, but there’s another race first, and the cars in the paddock to see, and besides …
‘Well, I’m not going to bloody well wait here any longer,’ he says. ‘We’ll never get in. We might as well turn round and give up.’ He sits there for another twenty seconds, then leans forward, opens the glove compartment and pulls out a stethoscope, which he hooks over the mirror on the windscreen. It hangs there like a skeleton, the membrane at the top, the metal and rubber leads dangling bow-legged, the two ivory earpieces clopping bonily against each other. He starts the engine, releases the handbrake, reverses two feet, then pulls out into the opposite side of the road.
‘No,’ says my mother again, half-heartedly. It could be that he is about to do a three-point turn and go back. No it couldn’t …
My father does not drive particularly quickly past the marooned cars ahead. No more than twenty miles an hour. Even so, it feels fast, and arrogant, and all the occupants turn and stare as they see us coming. Some appear to be angry. Some are shouting. ‘Point to the stethoscope, pet,’ he tells my mother, but she has slid down sideways in her passenger seat, out of sight, her bottom resting on the floor, from where she berates him.
‘God Almighty, Arthur, why do you have to do this? Why can’t you wait like everyone else? What if we meet something coming the other way?’ Now my sister and I do the same, hide ourselves below the seat. Our father is on his own. He is not with us, this bullying, shaming undemocratic cheat. Or rather, we are not with him.
My face pressed to the sweet-smelling upholstery, I imagine what is happening ahead. I can’t tell how far we have gone, how many blind corners we have taken. If we meet something, on this narrow country lane, we will have to reverse past all the cars we have just overtaken. That’s if we can stop in time. I wait for the squeal of brakes, the clash of metal.
After an eternity of—what?—two minutes, my mother sticks her head up and says, ‘Now you’ve had it,’ and my father replies, ‘No, there’s another gate beyond,’ and my sister and I raise ourselves to look. We are up level with the cars at the head of the queue, which are waiting to turn left into the brown ticket holders’ entrance, the plebs’ entrance. A steward steps out of the gateway towards us, but my father, pretending not to see him, doesn’t stop. He drives ahead, on to a clear piece of road where, two hundred yards away, half a dozen cars from the opposite direction are waiting to turn into another gateway. Unlike those we have left behind, these cars appear to be moving. Magnanimous, my father waits until the last of them has turned in, then drives through the stone gateposts and over the bumpy grass to where an armbanded steward in a tweed jacket is waiting by the roped entrance.
‘Good afternoon, sir. Red ticket holder?’ The question does not come as a shock: we have all seen the signs, numerous and clamorous, saying RED TICKET HOLDERS’ ENTRANCE . But my father is undeterred.
‘These, you mean,’ he says, and hands over his brown tickets.
‘No, sir, I’m afraid these are brown ticke
ts.’
‘But there must be some mistake. I applied for red tickets. To be honest, I didn’t even look.’
‘I’m sorry, sir, but these are brown tickets, and brown’s the next entrance, two hundred yards along. If you just swing round here, and …’
‘I’m happy to pay the difference.’
‘No, you see the rules say …’
‘I know where the brown entrance is, I’ve just spent the last hour queueing for it by mistake. I drove up here because I thought I was red. I can’t go back there now. The queue stretches for miles. And these children, you know, who’d been looking forward …’
By now half a dozen cars have gathered behind us. One of them parps. The steward is wavering.
‘You say you applied for red.’
‘Not only applied for, paid for. I’m a doctor, you see’—he points at the stethoscope—‘and I like being near the grand-stand.’
This double non-sequitur seems to clinch it.
‘All right, sir, but next time please check the tickets. Ahead and to your right.’
This is the way it was with my father. Minor duplicities. Little fiddles. Money-saving, time-saving, privilege-attaining fragments of opportunism. The queue-jump, the backhander, the deal under the table. Parking where you shouldn’t, drinking after hours, accepting the poached pheasant and the goods off the back of a lorry. ‘They’ were killjoys, after all—‘they’ meaning the establishment to which, despite being a middle-class professional, a GP, he didn’t belong; our job, as ordinary folk trying to get the most out of life, was to outwit them. Serious lawbreaking would have scared him, though he envied and often praised to us those who had pulled off ingenious crimes, like the Great Train Robbers or, before them, the men who intercepted a lorry carrying a large number of old banknotes to the incinerator (‘Still in currency, you see, but not new so there was no record of the numbers and they couldn’t be traced. Nobody got hurt, either. Brilliant, quite brilliant’). He was not himself up to being criminal in a big way, but he was lost if he couldn’t cheat in a small way: so much of his pleasure derived from it. I grew up thinking it absolutely normal, that most Englishmen were like this. I still suspect that’s the case.
My childhood was a web of little scams and triumphs. The time we stayed at a hotel situated near the fifth tee of a famous golf-course—Troon, was it?—and discovered that if we started at the fifth hole and finished at the fourth we could avoid the clubhouse and green fees. The private tennis clubs and yacht clubs and drinking clubs we got into (especially on Sundays in dry counties of Wales) by giving someone else’s name: by the time the man on the door had failed to find it, my father would have read the names on the list upside-down—‘There, see, Wilson—no Wilson, I said, not Watson’; if all else failed, you could try slipping the chap a one-pound note. With his innocence, confidence and hail-fellow cheeriness, my father could usually talk his way into anything, and usually, when caught, out of anything.
He failed only once. We were on holiday, skiing, in Aviemore, and he treated us to a drink in one of the posher hotels. On his way back from the lavatories, he noticed a sauna room for residents near a small back entrance. For the rest of the week, we sneaked in to enjoy residents’ saunas. On the last day, though, we were towelling ourselves dry when an angry manager walked in: ‘You’re not residents, are you?’
I waited for some artless reply—‘You mean the saunas aren’t open to the public, like the bars? I thought …’—but for once my father stammered and looked guilty. We ended up paying some exorbitant sum and being banned from the hotel. I was indignant. I discovered he was fallible. I felt conned.
Oulton Park, half an hour later. We have met up with our cousins in the brown car park—they of course got here on time—and brought them back to the entrance to the paddock. My father has assumed that, with the red tickets he’s wangled, we are entitled to enter the paddock for nothing, along with our guests. He is wrong. Tickets to the paddock cost a guinea. There are ten of us. We’re talking serious money.
‘We’ll buy one , anyway,’ my father is saying to the man in the ticket-booth, and he comes back with it, a small brown paper card, like a library ticket, with a piece of string attached to a hole at the top so you can thread it through your lapel. ‘Let me just investigate,’ he says, and disappears through the gate, the steward seeing the lapel-ticket and nodding him through: no stamp on the hand or name-check. In ten minutes or so my father is back. He whispers to my Uncle Ron, hands him the ticket and leads the rest of us to a wooden-slatted fence in a quiet corner of the car park. Soon Uncle Ron appears on the other side of the fence, in an equally quiet corner of the paddock, and passes the ticket through the slats. Cousin Richard takes the ticket this time and repeats the procedure. One by one we all troop round: Kela, Auntie Mary, Edward, Jane, Gillian, my mother, me. In five minutes, all ten of us are inside.
‘Marvellous,’ my father says. ‘Three pounds eleven shillings and we’ve got four red tickets and ten of us in the paddock. That’d be costing anyone else twenty guineas. Not bad.’
We stand round Jack Brabham’s Cooper, its bonnet opened like a body on an operating table, a mass of tubes and wires and gleamy bits of white and silver. I touch the metal behind the cockpit and think of my green Dinky car, no. 8, which I call Jack Brabham in the races I have on the carpet against the red Ferrari no. 1 (Fangio) and the silver Maserati no. 3 (Salvadori) and the yellow Jaguar no. 4 (Stirling Moss). I like Jack Brabham to win, and somehow he always does, though I swear I push the cars equally. It is quiet at home, pretending. Here at Oulton Park it’s not quiet: there’s a headachy mix of petrol and sun and engine roar.
Later, Moss overtakes Brabham on lap six, and stays there for the next sixty-nine laps. A car comes off the circuit between Lodge Corner and Deer Leap, just along from where we’re standing. There is blood, splintered wood and broken glass. My father disappears—‘just to see if I can help.’ He comes back strangely quiet, and whispers to my mother: ‘Nothing I could do.’
Airedale
HE IS SITTING on the far side of the bed, or someone is, someone in a thin green gown, not at all like him. Hospitals have a way of disorienting people. But it can’t be this. My father is used to hospitals. This hospital, Airedale, is the one to which, in his last decade as a GP, he would refer most of his cases. This ward, Ward 19, is one to which he’s come, even since retirement, to see old patients. Even this room, no. 2, a private room given to him because he is, or was, a doctor, he knows from earlier visits. But today he isn’t visiting. Today he’s the patient. Today the visitor is me.
If it it were my father visiting, this person on the far side of the bed would get short shrift. What do you call this, then? A nightie? Not quite your style, is it? Where are your flannel pyjamas? He has a white cotton blanket over his knees: What, in this hot room, a baby blanket? Let’s have those windows open, let’s get some air in the place . He turns his head only a fraction when I enter: Come on, cheer up, it might never happen . But it will happen, he knows it will happen, we all know it will happen, sooner rather than later, and that is why I’m here.
‘Feeling rough, Dad?’ I ask.
‘Too true.’
I hug him a moment, then slide two chairs beside the bed: a small plastic chair next to his, for me; and a slightly more comfortable armchair—actually, as minimal as that, a chair with arms—for my mother.
Close up, I see how loose the skin is hanging on his face. He isn’t pale—the old tanned ruddiness is there—but his Bournville-dark eyes have lost their light: no one now could mistake him, as he sometimes used to be mistaken, for Micky Rooney. His neck seems stiff; his head is thrust slightly forward, like a tortoise’s from its shell: it is as if it is being pushed from the back to offset the recession at the front, the literal loss of face. His hands, when he takes a sip from the clear plastic beaker of water, are gently shaking. He seems to be on the other side of some invisible divide, a screen of pain.
‘You’re feeling
better than yesterday, though?’
‘Yes.’
‘And it is only four days since the operation.’
‘True.’
‘And Mum says the doctors are pleased.’
‘if I could just sort my waterworks out. My tummy’s so swollen.’
‘Tummy’: a word he’s always used, even to adults, part of the old-fashioned bedside manner, an on-the-level-with-children cosiness. I can see him peering down at me, pouched eyes and churred Whitbread breath, in the long night of some childhood temperature, the walls coming and going, and him the only fixed point: ‘Is your tum-tum hurting? Tell Daddy where it hurts.’ Tum-ti-tum-tum-tum: there’s a music of trust here—no need to panic about illness or ring for the doctor or rush to the chemists, because my parents are doctors, their surgery is our home, and the chemist is on our bathroom shelves. But now it’s me leaning over him. Now I’m being the parent, the doctor, the one with the bedside manner.
‘Does it hurt peeing?’
‘Not much. I had a catheter in yesterday, but I was peeing round it, so they took it out. Last night I wet the bed.’
‘But it’s uncomfortable?’
‘My penis is so engorged: it’s like elephantiasis, I tell you.’
After ‘tummy’, the textbook chill of ‘penis’ seems odd. Perhaps it’s in deference to my mother: a little later, when she’s out of the room, he shouts from the lavatory, over the faint squits and squishes, ‘There’s more piss coming out of my arse than my prick.’ But ‘penis’ sounds correct, denoting something distant from him, a part that’s barely part of him any more. There’s no wry nod and wink, no after-leer, with the reference to engorgement. If anything tells me he’s ill, it’s this neglect of the opportunity for a dirty laugh.
‘Soup, doctor?’ asks the student nurse from the door—Kieran, it says, on his lapel. ‘Oh, no,’ he says, consulting his clipboard, ‘You’re down for orange juice.’
And When Did You Last See Your Father Page 1
