We tie the tent flaps and set off for the pub, leaving the shaky house by the stream. As we drive, the Home Service is taken up with Presidents Kennedy and Khrushchev: the smily young hero has blockaded Cuba; Russian ships are sailing towards it. There are words I don’t understand—diplomatic manoeuvres and retaliatory risks—and words that need no explanation, like World War Three. Will my father be too old to fight this time? I’ve had this daydream for years that if he’s called up for war we’ll keep him in the attic, like that picture I’ve seen at school of the Cavalier concealed in a tree-trunk. And if they send someone looking for him and ask me do I know where he is, when did I last see him, could they just look round, I’ll not give him away, I’ll keep his secret safe … Now the next war’s nearly here, though, my plan seems childish. Maybe this time no one will have to fight, it can all just be push-buttons. We slam the car doors and step into the pub car park. Annihilation must look like the sky does now, blindness and blackness. And serving in a war must feel like this—a strange place at night, the home you live in irretrievably vulnerable and far away.
It’s quiet inside, and the barman doesn’t seem to notice my juniority (does he take me for fourteen? eighteen? is he pretending not to see?). The warmth and cigarette smoke and sawdusty floorboards create a fug of sociability, but it’s hard to settle into, knowing we have to drive back to the cold tent, knowing the world may end. There are only men in here, big, smoking, laughing men jawing about war.
‘Them bloody Russkies need a taste of their own medicine,’ says the fat one with sideboards from his bar-stool. ‘This Kennedy’s called their tune. He’s the first to stand up to ‘em like we should have long since. I take my hat off to him.’
‘Nay, Frank,’ says the barman, ‘the Reds an’t been that bad. They’ve not dropped their bombs on anyone.’
‘Maybe so, but they’ve got as far as Cuba, and this Castro bugger is standing there with open arms saying come on in, there’s plenty room for thee, you can hide your nuclear weapons in my beard.’
‘It’s a Communist country, Frank, Cuba is, and there’s no law against making friends with Russians. It were them who invented Communism.’
‘Nay, tha’s wrong there, it were Karl Marx what invented Communism, and he lived in England. Great beard on him, too. I tell you, if we don’t stop these Commies pointing their weapons at us, we’ll all be for the chop.’
‘What a world it’s coming to,’ my father pipes up from our pock-marked brass table by the log fire, shaking his head, hoping some neutral, uncontentious remark like this will let him in on the conversation, will be the right kind of admission fee. The fat man with sideboards shuts up now, the barman goes off to serve another customer, and my father is left hanging there, at the edge of someone else’s talk, wanting to insinuate himself, to be accepted. I know how it will go from here, because it’s happened before in other pubs. My father will pick up our glasses, order another pint, start chatting to the man in sideboards, buy me shandy and crisps and say: ‘Marvellous part of the world: wish I knew it better. What’s your poison? Theakstons?’ I am beginning to miss my mother. I don’t want to watch what’s going to happen happening: my father slowly winning over the suspicious locals; the conversation turning from world politics to legends of local brawlers, womanizers, con artists; the pint after pint, the whisky chasers, then the one for the road, and the next one for the road and the last one for the road. I stare at the smoke rising from the logs and imagine one wisp of it journeying up the chimney and out through the stack into the night, to dissolve in the immense black spaces and be gone from sight if anyone were looking, and yet not be gone, for surely nothing can be lost forever, every trace of whatever happened on the earth is recorded somewhere, even the dimmest or shortest life must have its immortality: the stars are shooting us for someone.
It seems very late, but perhaps it’s no later than closing time when we leave, my father belatedly guilty at the sight of me sitting alone by the fire, a collage of deconstructed beer-mats across the brass table. The cold drizzle in the car park comes as a shock, and as we drive back the radio spits and crackles over the whish-whosh of the wipers—‘crisis’, ‘urgency’, ‘ultimatum’. Soon the headlights are picking out our frail little homestead: it looks like a story-book picture of the first pig’s house, the one made of straw. The wind is getting up now, not to wolf-howl strength, but enough to growl and yank at the guy-ropes. We stoop inside, relieved to be out of the rain, but even my father’s cheeriness can’t make this a homely place, let alone home. He hands me a flask of coffee, with whisky added. ‘That’ll help you sleep,’ he says, as my throat implodes, my stomach seethes with fission. I hear the rain beat the canvas. I hear the stream getting louder, more confident. I look up into the blackness and imagine Russian ships steaming across the dark sea and meeting American ships and all the bright final skies. There seems no kindly light that will lead us out of this, my father and me, here in our paper bag amid the encircling gloom.
We wake very early. The stream has burst its banks, and our tent, which has no groundsheet, is standing in an inch of water. I peer down and see water swishing about the metal legs of the camp-bed. My back feels damp, my bottom wet—it is wet, dunked where the camp-bed sags in the middle. Outside it’s raining still and the wind whines to be off its leash. We drag ourselves out of our sleeping-bags and into our shoes, and splosh about in a sort of panic to be gone, breaking up the camp-beds, uprooting the pegs, dismantling the poles, tearing the canvas from its frame. It seems extraordinary, in the light of day, that we should have chosen this site—the stream looks higher than the fold of grass we pitched the tent in. But at least the tedious rituals of tent-packing can be dispensed with: we just dump the stuff higgledy-piggledy in the boot, and by eight o’clock are on the road, the fan of the car heater noisily combating our sogged gloom. ‘We can dry the tent out later, spread it over some bushes while we have a picnic lunch,’ says my father, peering through the metronome of the windscreen wipers.
We have two mixed grills (‘Do you do dippy bread?’) in a steamed-up Ambleside café, walk soddenly round the town, have lunch in a Patterdale pub. It stops raining round four—‘Told you our luck was in’—but it’s too late by then to think of drying the tent, even if the sun had come out, which it hasn’t. There’s nothing to stop us putting it up damp, of course, which is what my father seems determined to do. He gets the map out. ‘Got it, just the spot,’ he says, and we drive on through more flooded lanes, damp hedgerows, mist-obscured fells. ‘Must ring surgery,’ he says, pulling up by a red telephone box, not for the first time on this holiday, or others. Surely it’s too early for surgery? Who can he be ringing? Through the mist of panes, I can see his head nodding. Any sane person would have called it quits by now, would have turned round and gone home, but here we are, proving ourselves hardy and hearty, pointlessly.
An hour later, I am sitting in front of a hotel lounge fire. My father fetches me a whisky mac: ‘You’re all right, they’ll not notice, it’ll help you thaw out. My feet are like ice.’
‘Thanks, Dad.’ He is still gloating at the trick he has pulled on me—trick or treat, I’m not sure which.
‘Happier now?’
‘Yes.’
‘Maybe it’s soft, but I didn’t see any point sleeping in that sodding tent with the forecast for more rain.’
‘You’re right.’
‘And it is our last night, and we’re still boys away together. If I’d been on my own, or with Uncle Ron, I’d have stuck it, but there was no point making you miserable—I sometimes forget, you are only twelve.’
I let this go, too relieved to be here to argue. There is a television in the corner of the room, a little grey window high in a walnut tower, and when the news comes on there are pictures of a smiling President Kennedy: the Russian ships have turned back, the newsreader says, and Mr Khrushchev has agreed to dismantle all his missile bases in Cuba. A man with a microphone stands in front of the White House and s
ays: ‘No one here yet knows what precisely made the Russians back down.’
My father and I clink glasses.
‘Here’s to Kennedy,’ he says.
‘To Kennedy,’ I reply, my eyes watering over.
A Completely Different Story
MY FATHER IS asleep, and has been for hours. His rasping slowness and stiff-mouthed, dry-lipped wide-openness remind me of Terry Kilmartin, my old boss, three days before he died in the Lister hospital. Terry’s had been a long, slow cancer, and on that last visit there seemed a peace and acceptance about him I hadn’t seen during the pain-tautened months before. His freckled hand lay on the white deck and I held it, just as I’ve held my father’s today: love, obeisance, the pupil paying respect to his mentor. But what sort of peace and acceptance is it that only morphine brings? I want my mentors back, awake and doubting.
On her long dressing-table stool at the end of the bed, my mother and I discuss funeral arrangements. We’re nervous with each other, not sure if this is the right way to go about things, prefacing each new item—the wake, the will, what to do with his ashes—with ‘I’m sorry, it sounds macabre, but …’ His dying is all we can think about, but is talking about it immoral, inauspicious, defeatist? She tells me how at his insistence she phoned the garage this morning to see if the new headlamps had come in and how they’ve just rung back and quoted seventy pounds—at which point my father wakes and says, ‘I’m sure Halfords could do it cheaper,’ then goes off again. We snigger at how the word garage sparked him into consciousness, whereas he’d slept through coffin and crematorium . Or is he just pretending not to hear? Mothers shut out the memory of childbirth pain once labour is over: my father has blanked off the diagnosis often days ago in much the same way. He can’t hear the word death because he knows he’s getting better.
I wander into his study. In one corner is the Amiga he acquired a year ago: in the last few months he’s been teaching himself to type and word-process. In the opposite corner is his old drop-leaf desk, and above it, on the wall, a map of the West Riding, circa 1616, a barometer stuck between Fair and Changeable, and brass plates engraved with cheeky pub mottoes (A WOMAN’S BEST 10 YEARS ARE BETWEEN THE AGES OF 28 AND 30; IF YOU’RE SO DAMN SMART, WHY AIN’T YOU RICH?; EVERYTHING I LIKE IS IMMORAL, ILLEGAL OR FATTENING; A WIFE IS SOMEONE WHO STANDS BY HER HUSBAND THROUGH ALL THE TROUBLES HE’D NOT HAVE HAD IF HE HADN’T MARRIED HER; and, his catchphrase, I MAY NOT BE RIGHT, BUT I’M NEVER WRONG ). In the middle of the desk is the letter he told me would be there, the one which he sat composing for three hours the day before I came, printed out on computer paper:
CONFIDENTIAL
Dear Drs,
I am writing to apologize for failing to keep you fully aquainted [sic ] with updates of our medical history.
When Kim and I retired I decided that we would look after each other as far as possible without having to trouble you busy practitioners. I even prevailed upon consultants, many of whom are our personal friends, not to forward any reports to Earby surgery—particularly as we all know how rapidly news spreads around the ‘grape-vine’—until WE gave the go-ahead.
That time now appears to have come!!!
About three and a half years ago, despite having no comlaint [sic ], I went to Airedale, just to try out the Treadmill, and I was very disappointed to leam that I had an irregular heart action. I was heavily reassured that it would not affect my life expectancy, nor my day-to-day activity, gardening, etc. To ensure additional care I was fitted with a Dual Chamber Pace Maker.
This, above all, made me determined that no rumour ‘Dr Morrison has a bad heart’ [sic ] and I continued to work and behave normally.
A year ago I developed auricular fibrillation and I was put on amiodarone 200 mgm daily, recovered rapidly and resumed my normal activities.
Now however I have a completely different story to tell. I have an adherent Splenic Obstruction with Ascites, now by-passed, and you will be getting full details via the post.
I do not require a visit, in fact I would hate one, at present—no offence intended.
Arthur Β. Morrison
The letter is unsigned. I read it several times, then put it back as I found it.
Why had he contacted his GP now? Because he knew that to get your death-certificate signed, without first undergoing a post-mortem, you have to have seen a doctor in the previous twelve months? But surely a hospital doctor’s signature would have done; besides, this letter specifically asked the local GPs not to visit him. Was it an atonement for his unprofessionalism? I could imagine him bollocking anyone who’d behaved as he had, who’d not been to his doctor for fifteen years—‘You’ve been avoiding me: well, it’s your funeral.’ But mainly, I think, the letter was intended for us, the family: he had printed out three copies, and from time to time would ask me if I’d read it. Still denying in conversation how near to death he was, he had written the letter to acknowledge that he did know, and wanted us to know, and wanted us to know he knew.
Beneath the three printouts I find his medical card, the old brown National Health envelope with red ruled boxes on the front. It’s been stamped twice—5 Jul 1948 in a circle and YN 24 Apr 1975 in an oblong. Inside is a single brown card and four new-looking, stapled-together letters: 1. 11 Oct 1991, confirming no abnormality at the Endoscopy Clinic but for a ‘moderate-sized hernia’; 2. A discharge certificate dated 27.9.91 after an earlier investigation of ‘bellyache’; 3. A letter from the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Centre in Swansea, acknowledging application for a driving licence but requesting details of any changes in his medical condition since his last application; 4. A letter of 28 November 1978 about a haemorrhoidectomy—‘Three primary piles (very large left lateral) and two secondary piles dissected up, ligated and removed.’
The card itself is terse—just twenty-two entries in forty-four years, seven of them to do with a lung infection in the long cold winter of 1962, and three others recording polio injections and boosters. There are no entries at all between 1964 and 1976—his fifties and early sixties. Hastily compressed in the small space at the top and bottom of the card, and written (like most of the other entries) in his own hand, is some detail about the fitting of a pacemaker (11.4.88) and about severe stomach pain (10.10.91). He has been a fit man, and there are only three entries of substance:
24.10.53 Diarrhoea, nausea and colic. PMA: SG age
8. Recurrent tonsillitis, Ts and As age 22.
9.6.64 Ruptured Tendon Achilles (L)
?.?.83 Ac Glaucoma. Bilaltl irridectomy
The last presumably refers to an eye problem, or operation, but did he ever tell me about it? What does PMA stand for in the first entry? Previous Medical Account? Ts and As must mean the removal of tonsils (and adenoids?) at twenty-two, an operation which, having endured or benefited from himself, he later inflicted on me and my sister. But what is SG? And why is there no record of the operation to relieve pain in his wrists? Here is the biography of his body, but so abbreviated and random I can find no way to connect it with him.
It’s only the Achilles tendon rupture I can recall. One Whitsun holiday he had gone swimming at Airedale baths with my sister, then twelve, and had been teaching her how to dive. The previous year, I had been his hopeless pupil (‘Don’t keep bringing your knees down. What are you so afraid of?’), and now it was my sister’s turn to be put through the hoop. He took her to the deep end to show how it was done. Running, leaping, then coming down heavily on the end of the board (and he was heavy then for a man of five foot eight: twelve and a half stone), he had snapped the tendon as he rose in the air, landed in the water with a flapping ankle, and had to be lifted from the pool. He realized what he’d done, but got himself home, strapped up the ankle and drove my sister the hundred miles back to her school in Windermere (less use of the clutch than usual?). Next day he saw the surgeon, who confirmed the rupture and kept him in hospital. It became family lore that this was what you got for showing off: three months in plaster, or worse. I wondered
whether there hadn’t been some young women in the pool other than my sister he was trying to impress—maybe that had been his Achilles heel.
Apart from some complaints about the itchiness of the cast, he made a joke of it all—the doctor coming home in plaster not from some chic Alpine skiing trip but from the local baths. But jokes within the family were one thing; wearing his indignity in front of patients was another. Far from reacting as we expected—business as usual, a chauffeur wangled from somewhere to get him out on his visiting rounds—he refused to go to surgery in a wheelchair. It was an odd period, a long six weeks: while he languished morosely at home, the other two GPs in the practice (one of them my mother) had to cover for him. ‘Do you really need to go to Cawder Ghyll quite so much?’ he’d ask when she came back from the local maternity hospital: guilty at the extra surgeries she had to take, he somehow expected the pre-and post natal work she normally did to fade away, for babies to have the decency to stop being born for a bit. In the end, the third partner began to grumble: if my father was so wheelchair-bound, how come he was still drinking at the Cross Keys every night? The answer was that my mother, bullied into it, drove him there—unloading him from and reloading him into his wheelchair. But even her patience was wearing thin: people were beginning to notice what his wheelchair did and didn’t allow him to do. A few days later my father resumed surgery, on crutches.
And When Did You Last See Your Father Page 7
