And When Did You Last See Your Father

by Blake Morrison

  Now we are sitting. A neighbour from across the road is reading the lesson, from The Pilgrim’s Progress . He has chosen this, he explains, because my father seemed to have something of a pilgrim about him, a man of communal spirit, one sometimes inclined to bully his fellow-men into making greater efforts, a cross between Mr Valiant-for-Truth and Mr Standfast: ‘When the day that he must go was come many accompanied him to the River side, into which, as he went, he said, “Death, where is thy sting? ” And as he went down deeper, he said, “Grave where is thy victory? ” So he passed over, and trumps sounded for him on the other side.’ My father would be sniggering at the ‘trumps’. It was his word for fart. His trumps had filled my childhood as noisily as his snores.

  We go to the second hymn now, ‘Lead, Kindly Light’, my mother’s choice—there are those lines about ‘encircling gloom’, and the second stanza (surely she didn’t intend this) brings back my father’s stubbornness: ‘I loved to choose … Pride ruled my will.’ Sitting down again, I see the snow behind the stained-glass window of Moses parting the Red Sea. I imagine my father going under the waves, or under the sea, and I hear out there or in my head a quote from Ecclesiasticus:

  And some there be, which have no memorial;

  Who are perished, as though they had never been;

  And are become as though they had never been born;

  And their children after them.

  The vicar begins to talk—knowledgeably: you wouldn’t guess he didn’t know my father. The congregation is like a great wave pressing at my back.

  ‘The sermon I gave last Sunday, the day on which Arthur Morrison died, contained this phrase: “Some may think they have believed in Christ, though their life denied it. Others may not imagine themselves to have believed, though their life has affirmed it.” It must be readily admitted that Arthur Morrison found little time for the Church and organized religion. He regarded religious activity as almost a contradiction in terms. He hated the time-wasting tedium of the committee. His whole life seemed to echo St James’s words in his epistle: “Be doers of the word and not hearers only.”

  ‘Today we come to bid farewell to a loving husband and devoted father; a valued colleague in his medical profession; a caring counsellor and confidant; a good friend to high and low, rich and poor. The splendid Village institute stands as a memorial to his vision and energy. But there were other examples: the successful youth club he ran in his stables’ harness room; the Best Kept Village and Britain in Bloom competition successes; the car boot sales and endless raffles. We gather up these deeds and bring them before Almighty God.’

  I half-turn, but the faces I see are all lifted to the vicar or sunk in memory of the car boot sales and Britain in Bloom. I feel time running fast through us all, and regret no one has brought a camera or camcorder, so we can play today back, so there can be a memorial. People video weddings—why not funerals, too?

  The vicar is winding up: ‘St Paul had a constant companion on his journeys across Asia Minor and into Europe: St Luke, whom Paul described as “the beloved physician”—on account of the love both given to and received from his patients. That phrase, “the beloved physician”, sums up Arthur Morrison perfectly. May he rest in peace.’

  We kneel with our psalters on blue-embroidered cushions, whispering to the children not to touch the large central heating pipe, black and hot beneath the pews. The last hymn, ‘Jerusalem’, isn’t in Thornton-in-Craven’s hymn-book; even in The English Hymnal , it creeps in only among the litanies, 656A, an annex to another hymn; we’ve had to get a sheet specially printed. My sister loves the music (she is crying before the first bar is over), and may have her other reasons: its fighting spirit; the ‘dark satanic mills’ that could be Earby’s; and because it’s by Blake, and my father’s middle name (his mother’s maiden name) is Blakemore—though he surely never read the poet in his life, would not have known who William Blake was if the name had come up in Trivial Pursuit.

  Now the last prayers are over, and we stand to leave our pews, and the bearers are picking up the coffin. As the British Legion man walks ahead out of the choir-stalls the top of his pole catches the carved wooden screen, and for a long horrible moment it snags there. He retreats a step and waggles it, and still it won’t come loose, but then he tries again, less discreetly, and it is free, and we turn behind him into the aisle, my mother, my sister and I in line together. I want to lift my head to nod meaningfully at the faces we now face, as if to say: It is all right, we are grieving but appeased now, thank you for coming. But I keep my head down until we are out of the porch and on to the wet flags and think: Now I will never know who was in church. The snow blows past, and I feel, belatedly, and with a sort of queasiness at feeling such feelings at all, the sort of pride my father once felt in me. His life had not flowered unseen, or been wasted on the desert air: the numbers proved it—here was a man of substance.

  The crematorium is six miles away and it’s a slow route. I imagine the funeral procession as the line of boys walking behind the teacher on a school outing in Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cent Coups —at each street corner someone slips away until only sir is left. The snow has stopped by the time we get there, but the wind is icier, and we wait in wreaths of breath while the coffin is unloaded again.

  it is a short service: two minutes of Albinoni on tape (his Adagio in G Minor, a piece I’d taken to playing with doomy repetitiveness just before my father’s illness), then the tape fading for three minutes of the vicar. As he speaks of committing to God this beloved servant, he reaches for the rope-pull which will swish the curtains round the coffin and activate the conveyor-belt—at which point Malcolm leaps from the front stalls and whisperingly intervenes: the family wish the coffin to remain visible and in place until after the service; it is they who will disappear, not the deceased. The vicar nods, the service ends, Albinoni resumes. We file out, a last look back at the big wooden box with the flowers on: it has so little to do with him, yet he is lying in it. As we reach the door, half a dozen mourners push through, late for this ceremony or early for the next. Outside, more cars pull up—one with my cousins in, who have lost their way. We stand for a moment or two in the knife of the wind. People shake hands with us, sorry for our trouble.

  Down the side of the crematorium, by the little wooden makeshift cross marked A B MORRISON , are the wreaths: my mother’s, the children’s, the grandchildren’s. I stand in his clothes—how well they fit me now—gazing down at the earth. Snow blows across his black scuffed shoes, the bottom of his greatcoat, his trouser turn-ups. Whoever put his cross up must have had trouble knocking the stake through the soil’s icy heart. A tear of catarrh drops from the end of my nose. I dig my heel in but the ground won’t give. I feel the frozen earth coming up through my soles.

  *

  We have put a white cloth over a table in his study, and this is where the bar is. I’ve arranged it, as he used to, in descending order of alcoholic strength: the serious bottles of brandy, whisky, rum and gin to the right; down through the sweet-sickly shades of vermouth, sherry and wine; on to the cellar-brown gleam of pale ales, Guinness and bitter; finally, far left, the bright, feel-good cartons of fruit juice. To one side of the bar, in front of his desk, its drop-lid firmly shut, is a lower, smaller table where the glasses and tankards are. He had a range of these: the dimpled pewter RAF tankard; the silver golf club mug, with its humanizing dent just below the twirly engraving; and countless other presentation cups—silver, brass, glass—won at squash or golf tournaments, or given at Christmas, one or two of which must still be hanging for him on hooks in local pubs. Among the glasses, in bowls, are crinkly crisps and salted nuts. Down the corridor, in the kitchen, are squishy, lard-tasting prawn vol-au-vents; ham and egg quiche; cheese and crab paste in thin-sliced, freckled brown sandwiches; old-fashioned Lancashire meat pies, yellow-crusted and serrated, and with a small jellied hole at the centre.

  The mourners step into the house, rubbing their cold hands, stamping the snow from t
heir shoes. They stand with drinks and cigarettes, and there’s a strange euphoria about it, the release of afterwards and the illusion that the man we have come in memory of must be about the place, somewhere. Once there’d been a party like this every New Year’s Eve, a Jacob’s joint—the host supplying drink and everyone else contributing a cold dish or salad or dessert. The guests were always the same thirty or forty people, and the venues had varied at first, but in time it came down to my father to organize things, and—being an eager host and reluctant guest—this meant holding it at his home. In time, too, the numbers dropped: last year there’d only been twenty. This year there won’t be a party at all—here it is, ten days early.

  I move among the wake, offering drinks, receiving condolences. People have their memories: they pass them on (and I flesh them out). Jack Jones, from down the village, remembers coming back here one summer midnight two decades ago and walking round the rough paddock (whisky glasses in hand, a heavy dew), my father complaining of the lack of village spirit and outlining his plans to start a Men of Thornton evening, a monthly gathering in the bar of the Manor House Hotel. Uncle Ron remembers lying on his back in the November wind under my father’s chalet, the two of them wirebrushing the sub-frame (the rust of sea salt, a drizzle of orange flakes). Brian and Hilly Thackeray remember staying in that same chalet one teenage summer, a crowd of us swimming in the dark (the lighthouse, phosphorescence, an angry man poking his head through the bedroom window after midnight demanding his daughter). Cousin Kela remembers the lobster my father caught by Llanbedrog headland; she had been sent back to fetch a bucket while the men used sticks to keep it from escaping (plunged grey in the boiling saucepan, it screamed and came out pink). Auntie Edna remembers how old Harry Hall took my father to court for refusing to chop the branches which hung over and took the light from his little cottage (a man in brown, suddenly frail and hard of hearing, winning the magistrate’s sympathy; my father to comply, lop and pay costs). Cousin Richard remembers my father inviting him over from Manchester during the school holidays to chop dead trees for firewood at one-and-six an hour: he filled the stable with chunks of elm (faint ripple rings on their white sawn surfaces, rosettes of fungus on the side), and went home a rich man. Perhaps he also remembers (but it’s not the day to mention it) my father forcing him to eat up his Brussel’s sprouts one Christmas dinner (turkey, paper hats, the heat-blown fairies in the wire candle-holder tinkling round and round). And Auntie Beaty, who’s here too of course … only Beaty’s memories stay closed.

  I keep the drinks topped up, his old job, ignoring the protests. The party has its own momentum now—wake or wedding, in the drink and cigarette smoke it’s easy to forget which, easy to think it’s just another New Year’s Eve. But then I catch sight of my father’s leather dog-lead hanging on the back of the door, and I think not just of him but of the others who aren’t here, either—those whose deaths had made him morbid in his last decade. No Granny. No Auntie Mary. No Florrie Wallbank, with her beauty spots and her hair piled high in a swirl of silver (died of cancer). No Bobby Dickinson, diminutive in his yellow V-necked golf jumper and a handicap of eight (routine operation that went wrong, haemorrhage). No Uncle Charles staring from his violet pock-marked face (leukaemia), nor Auntie Selene, with her kind magistrate’s eyes and dead, pasty, like-kissing-baking-powder cheeks (she had come six months after Charles’s death complaining of stomach pains, and when my mother laid her down on the bed she could feel tumours as big as golf balls). No Joan O’Neill, with the hollowed horse face, my mother’s great confidante, who lost two husbands from brain tumours before her own stroke. No Billy Cartwright, with his soft, doggy civility (keeled over from a heart attack while mowing the lawn). Above all, no Uncle Stephen, my godfather, who epitomized the exuberant unthinkingness—golf, alcohol and practical jokes—of my father’s crowd. A year ago, home from the hospital where he was being treated for depression (Stephen? depression ?), he had trooped down the garden to light a bonfire and was found in flames next to his petrol can; the inquest returned an open verdict. Fun and fresh air and cock-eyed optimism: it had all gone, with Stephen. Now my father had gone too.

  As the light darkens, everyone prepares to leave, putting down paper plates and empty glasses, hunting for coats. We kiss or shake hands at the door: ‘See you again,’ I say, but when will the next time be—my mother’s funeral, their own funerals? You have a childhood, and move away, and think vaguely that if you choose to come home again it will still be there, intact, as you left it. What was left of my childhood were these frail widows and widowers, stepping out into the snow, the coming night.

  Back inside, on the living-room floor, among the wine spills and dropped crisps, my daughter and her cousin are sitting with paper and crayons. They have an uncanny intimacy for children who live two hundred miles apart and who hardly ever see each other—perhaps not uncanny since they were born on the same day within hours of each other, a coincidence which became one of my father’s great triumphs (‘How often does that happen—two grandchildren at opposite ends of the country, born on the same day?’). Now they are seven. Their arms twined, their legs tucked under them, they have drawn a boat and written a story. They hand it to me, eighteen words long: ‘When a ship gets poorly it goes to port. Then it dies, then it dies, then it dies.’

  And when did you last?

  When did you last see your father? Was it when they burnt the coffin? Put the lid on it? When he exhaled his last breath? When he last sat up and said something? When he last recognized me? When he last smiled? When he last did something for himself unaided? When he last felt healthy? When he last thought he might be healthy, before they brought the news? The weeks before he left us, or life left him, were a series of depletions; each day we thought ‘he can’t get less like himself than this,’ and each day he did. I keep trying to find the last moment when he was still unmistakably there, in the fullness of his being, him .

  When did you last see your father? I sit at my desk in the mortuary-cold basement of the new house, the one he helped me buy, his pacemaker in an alcove above my word processor, and the shelves of books have no more meaning than to remind me: these are the first shelves I ever put up without him. I try to write, but there is only one subject, him. I watch the news: Yugoslavia, the General Election, the royal separations—the news he didn’t live to see. I’ve lost sight not only of his life, what it meant and added up to, but of mine. When my three children come back from school, their cries echo emptily round the house and I feel I’m giving no more than a stranger could give them—drinks, attention, bedtime stories. Never to have loved seems best: love means two people getting too close; it means people wanting to be with each other all the time, and then one of them dying and leaving the other bereft. A fox comes trotting up the lawn towards my window, printing itself in the dew, as though it owned the place. I feel as if an iron plate had come down through the middle of me, as if I were locked inside the blackness of myself. I thought that to see my father dying might remove my fear of death, and so it did. I hadn’t reckoned on its making death seem preferable to life.

  When did you last see your father? I try to remember where I first heard the question asked, or saw it written. I invent contexts for it: sprawled by their Harley Davidsons in some sixties film, their dope smoked, their six-pack emptied, late at night, two drop-out bikers have begun to confide in each other about their pasts, and one asks the other: ‘When did you last see your father?’ Another film, a television documentary about the young homeless, and in the horrid brightness of a police interview room a kindly WPC is eking what information she can from a fourteen-year-old Geordie boy found bruised and shivering in a shop doorway near King’s Cross: ‘When did you last see your father?’ Or maybe it was my own father who had used the phrase. I remember him telling me, at some point in my late teens or twenties when I was drifting away from him, seeing less of him, how badly he’d taken the death of his father, and how he didn’t want this to happen to me: ‘I
used to see Grandpa every weekend. But for some reason I’d not seen him for about six weeks, and then he had his heart attack and was dead. There were rows we’d had we hadn’t really settled. I remember someone at the wake asking “When did you last see your father?” and me feeling terrible.’ The absent patriarch, the orphaned child: there’s no end of possibilities, no end of plots to this one story.

  When did you last see your father? A friend says: ‘You know it’s a painting, of course. Something to do with Charles the Second, I think. It hung on the stairs in my boarding-school, the first thing you’d see each term, just what you needed when your father had dumped you like a sack of potatoes. You know the one—it’s incredibly famous.’ I don’t know it, or if I do I’ve forgotten. But suddenly everybody I meet seems to allude to it, or parody the phrase: variations on it are the stuff of sitcoms or Whitehall farce. I turn up the painting shortly afterwards, a Victorian tableau of the Civil War, the Cavalier boy standing stiffly on a stool before a table of Puritan inquisitors—‘And When Did You Last See Your Father?’ I suppose I must have seen the painting before, but if so I’d forgotten it. Certainly I’d forgotten the ‘And’ in the title. Everyone else seems to forget it too, just as they forget the artist (W. F. Yeames) and mistake the subject (not Charles the Second, just a boy from any Royalist family). But the ‘And’ is important. It lets us know how cunning the interrogator is, how uncasual his casual-seeming enquiry: the more innocent the boy is, the less he understands the rules of the adult world, the more he will give away. And to judge from his posture, the boy is as guileless as the interrogator requires: we know he will blab the truth out, betray his father to the enemy, expose his secret place.