Twenty Five Million Ghosts

by Steve Aitchsmith

  Everybody in London originates from immigrants, some long ago and some more recently. The indigenous peoples were overpowered and effectively displaced millennia ago as Rome exercised its cultural, military and social hegemony over the land. Since then, every new group has just fed the constant growth and evolution of the place.

  So it is, that in the modern Hackney, the black/white and developing arty ways of life sit alongside diehard pockets of the older society to form the local core culture. This being London, any number of small enclaves of other traditions and people pad out the social dynamic. Every large city entertains diversity but London is the finest example, challenged only, perhaps, by New York.

  I tend to refer to the world in which I was brought up as the original culture. I know that’s not true but it was dominant for a long time and it makes an easy shorthand for me. When I say it, I really mean the group of people that made up the London workers. They came from famished Ireland, enclosed Scotland, the played out mines of Wales, the over farmed home counties and as refugees from various European conflicts and oppressions. All of this, from pre medieval times onwards, to eventually man the Victorian commercial infrastructure and create additional riches for the wealthy.

  They coalesced into the early Victorian bunch that tried to reassert themselves after the world wars but were so impaired that their social demise was inevitable. In terms of vanishing cultures, it was historically one of the more pleasant disintegrations, wartime violence notwithstanding. Most of the war survivors got richer, better educated and obtained greater rights. As more waves of immigrants arrived to replace the workforce, the originals moved on to better things.

  This didn’t stop some of them from complaining that their culture had been cleansed and marginalised by the new people. Many sat in their comfortable suburban semis and moaned about the lost world. It’s something that is silly, really, but it’s easy to be nostalgic for an imagined golden past.

  In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Irish poured into Britain to dig the canals and build the infrastructure of the industrial revolution. In their wake the Romans returned, no longer the terrifying legions of the Caesars but by then emasculated as an imperial power and now characterised by an ornate and wealthy church.

  Somehow, the expansionist church of Rome had long ago established itself as a political power in Ireland but in the process had become so particularly Irish that it is reasonable to speak of Irish Catholicism as a connected but individual branch of Rome.

  Mainland Britain retained some suspicion of Catholicism but had begun to move towards the discomforted but ultimately tolerant, though slightly reluctant, realism that would distinguish it as a modern nation.

  The Roman/Irish church brought with it a group of Nuns. An Irish nun is a formidable creature that enforces the required behaviour of Rome, Ireland branch, with an assertiveness that will intimidate the strongest of people. Unrelentingly rule enforcing, they engendered fear of hellfire while demanding respect and obedience from the navvies that toiled, lived, loved and died in building the infrastructure of British growth and industrialisation. The nuns administered to the medical and welfare needs of the expat Irish, they provided the welfare the employers didn’t, couldn’t or wouldn’t. Irishmen were cheap and plentiful and it made no economic sense to do more than just pay them their wages. Their welfare was their concern and not the problem of the employers.

  The nuns were well regarded by both those they came to care for and the local community. Despite their fearsome and fiery reputation, local working class English took advantage of the care the nuns offered. For their part, the nuns happily but sternly gave that care. It’s not clear to me how all of this was funded but it must at least have had some fiduciary support from the Catholic church. While recent revelations have damaged the reputation of the church, especially in Ireland, these were simpler times and many people took their Christian duty seriously. The nuns built a hospital in Hackney and called it St. Joseph’s hospital and hospice.

  The post-war arrival of the welfare state led to National Health Service involvement in St. Joseph’s and it became purely a hospice in the modern sense, where the dying receive gentle palliative care and their passing is managed. Nonetheless, the Church of Rome, Ireland, maintained its substantial involvement in the place.

  Today it is staffed by doctors, nurses, nuns and priests. Some of the nuns and priests are also doctors and nurses. The denomination or religion of the NHS workers is irrelevant. The patients are of any or no religion. Dave is the priest in charge of pastoral assistance to the patients and their families. That’s how I got to know him.

  St. Joseph’s site is just off Hackney High Road. I don’t think it’s the original building but it is old, at least parts of it are. Much of it is the heavily built sooty brick that for many years characterised large official buildings in London. Some of it was destroyed in the second war and I’m told that for a while it operated out of prefabricated buildings in the grounds of the remaining old monolithic structure.

  Now it is that mixture of modern steel and glass that seems delicate in comparison to the robust looking older masonry with which it is integrated. The entrance hall reception area displays some old and faded sepia photographs of the founding nuns and a smallish crucifix adorns one of the walls. Other than that, the only indication of church involvement is an obviously RC influenced chapel. A small sign beneath a statue of the virgin Mary proclaims this chapel to be multifaith and suitable for use by people of all beliefs who wish to quietly reflect.

  Scurrying back and forth throughout the building are still some nuns and occasionally a priest. They are working hard but it doesn’t really assist the multifaith claim. I think they’d be better off proclaiming their own faith but making it clear that their ministrations are not limited to Roman Catholics. The current position can make the place look a bit shifty and incompetent, since it’s clearly RC trying to pretend it isn’t but without hiding.

  I’m sure the intention is to make everybody welcome and it’s preferable to the believe or burn for eternity approach. I’m never very comfortable with aggressive religious presentation and anybody who claims to hold the one and only truth worries me. I’m born Anglican which means I go to church once in a while, rarely, and hold a not very well defined faith in a church that has an introspective tendency to bicker internally and to appear disinterested in explaining its mission. I would describe myself as an agnostic who leans towards faith. In view of my history it is probably not surprising that I’m really quite conservative in that respect.

  Dave wanders around chatting to everybody in the hospice, making people feel more comfortable and reconciled to the reality of the place. It’s what he’s good at and it is a remarkable soft skill that is natural to him. Only the truly strong and tough can be that effortlessly gentle. With me he’s blunt and to the point but that’s also his skill, he just knows what works for me and that I have no interest in euphemisms. I’ve seen the ugly world and so has he. We can talk in a straight way that wouldn’t work for many.

  Should you ever wish to have whatever faith you hold challenged, feel uselessly helpless and be made angry at the same time, visit a children’s hospice.

  To reach the ward in which my mother is cared for, I have to take a lift to the third floor, pass the children’s complex and walk several long pastel painted corridors to the ward.

  Small groups of kids stampede in and out of the complex as they seek play and adventure. Many of them are just as noisy and obstructive as they are supposed to be. Some of them are so ill they are unable to leave the complex to explore the wider building. All of them will die decades too soon. Life-limited condition, such is the modern euphemism that is applied to their circumstance.

  It makes me angry, they are just kids. Nobody has any right to call them life-limited. It’s just wrong, that’s all. They will die, that’s the truth and the simple fact o
f the situation and I balk at any attempt to make it sound cutesy. This is a little burst of frustrated powerlessness that assails me every time I pass them. I’m old enough and experienced enough not to expect a fair world but that doesn’t prevent the surge of silent anger. Death has no right to stalk the young and fate has no business neutralising such potential and promise.

  It contrasts sharply with the happy noises that regularly filter out of the place. I’ve seen death in most of its forms, all of them ugly. I’ve learned that people can come to terms with any horror but it defeats me how anybody can cope with working there.

  The feelings engendered by passing the children’s complex diverge sharply from, and in a way assist with, the more normal ordeal of entering the geriatric ward. At least this is the proper way of things and the clean, aseptic atmosphere is strangely reassuring.

  The spotlessly white uniformed attendants in the ward greeted me brightly as I entered and ushered me towards the bed where my mother lay. If anything, the ward always seems too white, overpoweringly white. It’s almost as if somebody decided to recreate some early Hollywood idea of the anteroom to Heaven. Obviously, that was not the intention but the place was and is a little too clinical for its purpose. Still, at least the people here are at the natural end to their lives, nothing here to be angry about. Here lives only sadness, maybe mixed with regret and, hopefully, fine memories.

  Somewhere in the building must be rooms for people of other ages, neither too young nor properly old. I expect they supply their own anger. I suppose that age based segregation of the dying serves some useful purpose.

  My mother was in a bed towards the end of the ward, near the full length windows. The headboard end of the mattress was raised in the semi sit up position and a small flat screen TV hovered in front of her held by an arching metal arm. Everything was white except the black casing of the TV. The clashing colours made it look as though it were floating in the ethereal mist surrounding the queue awaiting Charon’s services.

  A clear plastic tube ran from her left arm into a small yellow box on the side cabinet. A constantly green light and an occasionally flashing amber light indicated something to somebody. In her right hand my mother held a small pen like device, her thumb hovering over a button at the top. In this way she could administer her own morphine as and when she needed it. As I walked towards her I noticed that she pressed the button about every five seconds or so.

  A mother’s smile calms every child, whatever their age. I kissed her gently on the forehead. She looked gaunt and pained in spite of the smile, the last four years had seen her undergo operation after operation. Each invasive procedure left her weaker and more dependent on care.

  About a year ago the final operation and chemo left her too weak to continue and she was sent home. The regular visiting nurse was charming and efficient and helped her enjoy as much time as possible in her normal environment. Then her legs began to swell, they grew heavy with fluid and limited her movement. She was able to struggle through everyday life for several weeks but eventually the nurse arranged for her to be placed in St. Joseph’s.

  I remember talking to Dave about her at this time. “It’s a shame about the legs,” I told him. “It’s just one more thing that she has to suffer.” I’d met him two operations ago, when my mother was placed in the hospice for assessment. He sought me out, I’m not sure why but that’s the way he is. He has an almost supernatural instinct that identifies who he needs to speak to. We got on well and developed a friendship from the start.

  “It’s always the legs,” he said at the same time as he made me coffee in his small office at the back of the chapel. “Always the legs. They say it’s to show you that you can’t run away. That’s true but I think it’s also likely to be a holistic failure of function in the whole body. In prolonged illness the legs fail first nearly always.” That was typical of him; accept the clear truth of the folk tale but offer the probable scientific reason for it as if he were making a daft suggestion.

  My mother had not really been watching the TV. Some Australian soap, with no sound, played out its storyline unobserved in front her. Beautiful young people being unhealthily intense and judgemental about their teenage relationships, soaps are nothing more than dramatic stereotypes where thespians perform the imagined lives of people and a culture that only exists in the prejudices of the viewers. I know from watching TV that a popular soap set in the East End is a stylised theatrical representation of what the place might look like if most of the old culture hadn’t swanned off elsewhere and most of the new immigrants stayed in their homes. I suspect all of the other soaps are the same ‘not quite but slightly’ misrepresentation. Oops, thinking about Dave may have accidently caused me to talk like him.

  An observer might find it odd but my mother and I tend not to speak very much. We sit in a comfortable silence much of the time. What conversation there is tends to be factual and informative and we rarely, if ever, discuss anything abstract.

  She was born into poverty and worked from about the age of three. She collected coal in barrows, small ones I assume, and walked them through the streets to households that had paid her a halfpenny to do so.

  Ha’penny coal pushed through dangerous streets for people who should have given her food and shelter and fetched their own bloody coal. That’s the pre-war East End in a nutshell. Those rich enough to do so used their relative wealth to abuse the destitute, even the children, although the people doing it would probably be shocked if they knew I considered them abusers. They most likely felt that they were helping a poor child earn her way, sod her education and innocence.

  I suspect that some things that we do now will be looked on in horror by future generations. I don’t know what, maybe the way we treat our elderly. The way we deprive them of liberty when they get confused, consign them to horrid practical care in segregated homes, subdue them with drugs and prevent them from doing the things they want. And why? Because they may be a danger to themselves with their forgetfulness and confusion. By that reasoning we all have moments when authority would cheerfully deprive us of our freedom. Just who do they think they are to make this judgement?

  I’ve visited a few of these homes for various reasons. They are like something described by Dante, filled with the hopeless and soulless remnants of once lively people, now drugged to ensure compliance and forcefully regimented to a timetable that suits the home’s management. Large halls filled with the silent dazed and dribbling living dead overseen by the poorly paid and minimally skilled making profit for a disguised and uncaring business. I know that I for one would rather die a few years earlier than live a pointless existence devoid of all that makes life worth living. I have no intention of spending my final years sitting in a chair drooling.

  I look on old peoples’ homes as mainly, though not always, benign concentration camps for those so old or frail they’d slow the frenetic world they now obstruct. Part of me is outraged by the contempt in which we hold the elders. I’ve expressed this view to people who work within the homes and invariably they have stated that they are just doing a job in a role sanctioned by law. Who knows what the future might make of us? Ways of thinking change and nothing is good or bad forever: The ancient Egyptians practiced incest and until relatively recently Europe considered slavery OK.

  The influence of her formative years meant that my mother grew up believing that the strata of society one was born into was immutable; the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate and all of that infuriating rubbish. The result was that she felt that as long as you followed the rules made by an unequal and advantaged but benevolent ruling class, did not cause trouble and worked hard then one’s life would always be tolerable and well fed.

  I hold views that are the opposite of that and it’s difficult for us to discuss them. She holds her views self-evident and in a way it’s cruel to challenge them. Her views and approach to life enabled her to survive
and even prosper slightly as a grateful recipient of largesse in a world she was unable to challenge.

  She and my father provided me with food, clothing, shelter and a sense of security, I witnessed their struggle to do these things. My father was nearly always working and yet there was never quite enough money. I vividly recall my mother weeping because she had accidently burnt a ten-shilling note, so tired that in her stupor she threw it into the open fire with some rubbish. We lived on bread and dripping for three days after that. These things motivated me and the sense of security they worked so hard to achieve for me provided the confidence not to fear the rulers.

  Therefore, I hold that one must fight for oneself, that the ruling classes are mostly self-serving crooks, and bending rules and making trouble when necessary are essential prerequisites of one’s own independence. Oh yes, I almost forgot; reliance on the state limits one’s freedom and creates dependence on people who do not necessarily have your best interests at heart. Every penny of benefit granted by the authorities is payment for the surrender of a slice of one’s own liberty.

  That’s why we never really discussed politics or any other abstract matter. Another reason is that I have inadvertently progressed to post grad academically and she spent about five years in school before work, class expectations and millions of tons of bombs interrupted her education. Although she made herself sufficiently literate, it resulted in a limited spoken vocabulary which always inhibits expression. I have often wished we’d talked in more depth.

  In conversation with her I would always revert to my childhood tongue, it is a variant of standard English that in many respects is like a creole. I’m referring to the real London voice, not the ridiculous mockney favoured of some TV celebrities and shows. Like all such localised languages, it depends on the culture where it resides and that culture is more or less in accordance with my mother’s views, except that it’s acceptable to cheat and steal a bit. I would no more use complicated language to my mother than I would write ‘fuck’ in an academic essay. In actual fact, I have written ‘fuck’ in an academic essay but it was relevant, honest.