It was Christmas time, so all the flights from London were packed. ‘Surely,’ I remonstrated with my travel agent, ‘there must be another airline – Malaysian can’t be full.’ It was. Finally he found the last seat – first class only – on Singapore Airlines, in four hours’ time. ‘It’s very expensive – why not wait twelve hours for QF2?’ But this was no time to bother about money. And besides, if you can’t fly 12,000 miles to your mother’s deathbed drowning your sorrows in Krug and caviar, when can you?
By the time I landed in Singapore, emails from my brother were reporting that my mother was hanging on, but only just. It was seven more hours to Sydney, where the crowds of Christmas returnees swelled the queues at the immigration desks, and even the ‘Express’ lane was long. I felt like jumping it – going to the front and shouting, ‘My mother is dying, let me through!’ The line miraculously shortened (people in the wrong lane) and a kindly immigration official made the magic sign on my entry card, signifying ‘Not suspicious – let straight through’. I had brought no baggage, and soon my taxi driver was hammering across Sydney to the Royal North Shore Hospital, where Tim was waiting outside.
The public wing of the Royal North Shore (will they drop the ‘Royal’ when we become a republic, I wondered idly) had just been rebuilt, and gave a good impression of being a happy, Christmassy place. We took the lift to the ninth floor. Ward 9E was unusual in that unlike other wards it had no name and no description. ‘That,’ said my brother, ‘is because it’s the death ward.’ Easy to deduce, but not easy to face when you have a close relative in it.
My mother was in the farthest bed, with mussed hair and no dentures, but definitely – always and forever – Mum. Some hours later, she woke and lifted, with effort, her eyelids. Her eyes moved in my direction. They lit up and I saw the attempt to smile. It was this moment that made it all worthwhile: the moment of recognition.
Joy Robertson is – although I must now sadly say, was – ninety-three, and I will hit the next person who says ‘At least she had a good innings.’ I had spoken to her only the previous week, when she said she felt better after a couple of days of illness and was back to her permanent chair beside my father, who was ninety-five, keeping him company as his mind quietly travelled towards dementia. I always called her before I took a flight overseas – a subconscious need to know she was okay. This time the flight was to Israel, to give a lecture on genocide at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Telling Jewish people about genocide may seem a superfluous exercise, but it was an opportunity to develop my theory about the links between the Armenian massacres and the Holocaust. Just as I was checking in at the King David Hotel, festooned with images of all the great statesmen who had stayed there, a Michelin man approached the desk in tight-fitting Lycra shorts with muscles rippling. ‘Where’s the gym?’ asked Tony Abbott. Then I saw the sign – ‘Meeting: Australia–Israel–UK Dialogue.’ We chatted about the uncertainty of the times – the glint in his eye suggesting that the uncertainty would extend to the Australia prime ministership, from which he had been ousted by Malcolm Turnbull a couple of months before. Later, I bumped into Bill Shorten and his team, after a busy day in which they had managed to meet both Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas. It’s touching, really, how Australians think that by coming to the Middle East they can help to solve the insoluble – notwithstanding the lesson they should have learnt from the fate of Robert Menzies’ Suez mission back in 1956. I did my bit by prefacing my lecture with a ‘welcome to country’ on behalf of the occupied Palestinians, but I doubt that this will catch on in Israel, or make much contribution to peace if it does.
I allowed my hosts to take me on the Christian tourist trail, to Bethlehem in the West Bank and then along the Stations of the Cross in old Jerusalem. It is a favourite tour with visitors – a chance to see the ‘stations’ where Jesus faltered while carrying his cross to the hill of Golgotha. At the fourth, where Jesus is said to have stopped to farewell his mother (there is even a tracing of where her feet were imprinted in the sand), I had a definite presentiment about my own mother; as well, a fleeting thought that I could not remember this station from my studies of the gospels. I was slightly shaken, and anxious to get back to the King David, where I received an email that my mother had gone to hospital for tests, but nothing to worry about. It would be good to get back to London, in case there was. And when I did, I received my brother’s summons.
Christmas Eve was spent on death watch. The occupant of a next-door bed had passed on, and I could sleep there restlessly, although not as restlessly as my poor mother. I watched as the nurses from India and Fiji held and washed her so gently. There was nothing to read in the newspapers. There was also a matter still bothering me – that apparent premonition at the fourth Station of the Cross.
I am not superstitious, for one thing, and besides, why could I not recall this meeting from my Sunday School and blasphemy trial studies of the Gospels? I asked at the nurse’s station for a Bible. They could not find one – a sign of the advance of secularity, when even our death wards have no Bibles. Eventually a book by Mr Gideon was found in another ward, and a quick flip through the Apostles confirmed that my memory was correct – half the so-called Stations of the Cross – including the fourth – are Catholic frauds, dreamt up (says Wikipedia, so this may not be correct) by St Francis of Assisi in the fourteenth century, and perpetuated in Jerusalem for the benefit of the tourist trade. This information actually came as a relief: my presentiment was not a supernatural message from the mother of God at the place where she parted from her son, merely a reminder to and by myself that I should keep an eye on my sick parent.
Although I have seen bullet-ridden bodies in my human rights work, I had never been at a deathbed. I assumed it would be like the last scene in La Bohème – the heroine, reclining and declining, singing in a lower register, the tenor turning his back to gaze out the window while his friends are the first to realise that the fat lady will not sing again. A modern version would have doctors and social workers – the real ‘grief counsellors’ I suppose – singing to relatives their resigned aria ‘Miracles Do Not Happen’. I teased them by telling them about my grandmother, Fol, who at the age of seventy-three stepped on a rusty garden rake and developed a tetanus from which all the doctors advised she would shortly die. ‘She’s had a good innings,’ they said (in those days, she actually had) and offered an easeful death. For some reason my parents refused to turn off her life support, and she recovered to live to a sprightly ninety-six. ‘Oh, but her case was written up in the medical textbooks,’ they said, as if that made all the difference. Our public hospitals are now predisposed towards the ‘easeful death’ philosophy of Peter Singer, a philosophy I did something to disseminate in Hypotheticals. That did not stop me from questioning it, although in my mother’s case it was a no-contest. She was an enthusiastic euthanasiast, and had left us clear instructions to end the kind of pain that I had watched her endure over the past two nights.
On Christmas Day, just as all Australian families were settling down to joyful lunches, Joy stopped breathing. I am relieved, in a way, that I was not actually with her – at the very end I had left for a quick visit to my hapless father, wheelchair-bound in the family home not quite realising what was happening. They had been married for seventy-three years, and when the message came I could not tell him.
‘We find that relatives are often disappointed,’ said the funeral director, ‘when their loved ones die on public holidays.’ Funeral directors talk in euphemisms – relatives are frustrated, angry and let-down because hospitals, which maintain medical and nursing services on public holidays, cannot do the same with the basic administration required for the disposal of corpses. Nor can crematoria. Between Christmas and New Year, they remain in a state of suspension, and it was with great difficulty that we could arrange for Mum to be present at her own funeral a week later. (I am not even sure she was, but I did not open the coffin to check.) She could not be cremated until the workers r
eturned after the New Year. I expressed a wish to be in the vicinity, but this was not allowed – I was told that the cremation had taken place at 8.30 am, when I imagine there was a mass burning of the remains of those who had died over the past ten days.
It was all very unsatisfactory, but the funeral itself went off as well as possible in the 35-degree heat of a summer Sydney day. Jules read ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on’ from The Tempest and we had the Judy Collins version of ‘In My Life’, counterpointed with Wordsworth’s ‘Surprised by Joy’ in the printed program:
Surprised by joy – impatient as the wind
I turned to share the transport – Oh! with whom
But thee, long buried in the silent tomb,
That spot which no vicissitude can find?
Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind –
But how could I forget thee? – Through what power,
Even for the least division of an hour,
Have I been so beguiled as to be blind
To my most grievous loss! – That thought’s return
Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore,
Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn,
Knowing my heart’s best treasure was no more;
That neither present time, nor years unborn
Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.
My eulogy raised a few laughs at Graeme’s expense (particularly from his children) when I told how Mum had wrestled with the dilemma of what to do about the cannabis plant that, as a rebellious teenager, he had grown in her beloved garden. Should she uproot it, or should she report it to the police? In the end, she decided to leave it. ‘But I am certainly not going to water it!’
We ended with Dame Joan’s ‘Addio del passato’ from La Traviata. Over a montage of photos from her life ‘As Time Goes By’ played – the song she had heard on her first date with my father back in wartime Townsville. For my father, in his wheelchair in the front row, it was a farewell to Joy, in more ways than one.
We knew the risk – when one long-term partner dies, the other often follows within a short time. My father evinced that intention by the simple expedient of refusing to eat. Before long he was being treated in hospital – with enough success for me to return to England for a few weeks and leave Tim to hold the fort. I left after reading Dad the introductory section of this book, about his Wirraway crash, and he smiled enigmatically. He may have had some dementia, but I think he knew what he was going to do.
Back in Britain, life had never been so boring. ‘Brexit’ was an intelligence test that its citizens had failed, and for a number of years those who live there will be condemned to hearing the tedious negotiations with Europe about the terms for departure. I had a bet on the result with the philosopher A. C. Grayling some months before the referendum. ‘Oh, the British are far too intelligent to vote to leave,’ he declared.
‘They will,’ I countered. ‘I’m an Australian and I know how Anglo-Saxons can panic at the prospect of swarthy people in boats coming towards them.’
There would be lots of refugees in boats on the Med in the summer, just when the referendum was to be held. AC bet me a dinner, which I accepted. But he’s smart and was first to ask where I would take him when he won. ‘Oh,’ I said expansively (and expensively). ‘To Skye Gyngell’s new restaurant at Somerset House. Where will you take me?’
‘To the Garrick,’ AC replied – his men-only club which serves overcooked beef and a pudding called ‘spotted dick’. I have not yet bothered to collect my winnings.
The medical bulletins from Sydney were optimistic at first, and our plans to persuade Dad back to an interest in life were under way, notably via a carefully constructed path that would take his wheelchair down to the garden which our parents had lovingly cultivated together. But then came another refusal to eat, and a return to hospital for force-feeding, then home again, and the doctors’ use of the p word – ‘palliative care’, which seems to mean keeping the dying as comfortable as possible until death. I made plans for an early return, disrupted by a bout of bronchial pneumonia picked up in the freeze of the English winter. The inevitable email arrived: my father had died peacefully in his sleep – and it was off to Heathrow again. I arrived the night before his funeral and painfully coughed my way through his eulogy.
It was all so familiar, this ritual in the crematorium chapel, the arguments over the music and which photographs to put on the memorial card. We discovered a letter Dad had written to his mother from the front line in 1943, with the Magee poem ‘High Flight’, as if to reassure her that if he was killed in combat he would die happy. We reproduced it on the card, and rounded up the grand children for the funeral readings. It’s not an ordeal I want my (currently hypothetical) grandchildren to go through: if I have any forewarning of my own death I shall choose the music (the judge’s song from Gilbert & Sullivan’s Trial by Jury; the human rights duet from Don Carlos; ‘Love Me, I’m a Liberal’; and Wagner’s ‘Liebestod’), the place (a small theatre, probably – unlike Kerry Packer, I will not fill the Opera House) and (be warned) I will if possible pre-record my own eulogy – my final speech, so to speak.
For Dad, we played June Bronhill singing the ‘Invocation to Death’ from Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld – he had heard it once on my teenage record player and said he would like it played at his funeral. The request had lodged in my memory. My brother’s wife rustled up some real musicians to play the Intermezzo from Carmen and some exit music, a hastily arranged rendition on trombone and trumpet of ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ from South Pacific. I would have preferred Dad to depart to ‘There Is Nothing Like a Dame’ (after all, he had Betty Boop on the fuselage of his Kittyhawk), but was outvoted. There is much to be said (funeral directors please note) for ending sad services with a blast. The best conclusion to a commemoration that I have attended was for Sir Tom Bingham, a brilliant Law Lord, in Westminster Abbey. After all the gloomy reminiscences (at seventy-five, he was too young to die) there emerged from behind the catafalque a fully-fledged New Orleans jazz band belting out ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’.
One heartening feature of my father’s funeral was the attendance, in full uniform despite the sweltering heat – this time it reached 40 degrees – of some RAAF top brass, honouring one of their last combat pilots from Australia’s first fighter squadron. They had organised a Tiger Moth flypast (I guess all the Wirraways have by now crashed) but it was too hot for them to take off. Afterwards, I walked into the leafy grounds to observe the resting place of my parents’ ashes, beneath a straggling shrub that needed watering. There was space for more containers, the crematorium official heavily hinted – perhaps I might purchase a place? I have always been a bit leery of ending up as ashes, ever since a client – a defendant in a big drug bust – had the container on his desk seized by police, who sent it off for forensic analysis believing that the substance inside would be some exotic drug. It was, however, his mother. Ashes cannot be spread in the Old Bailey (although perhaps someone could climb up and leave mine in her scales). I was as a child much taken by Robin Hood, who roused himself from his deathbed, called for his trusty bow and one arrow, and used the last of his strength to shoot it into Sherwood Forest. ‘Bury me where you find it’ was his dying instruction to Friar Tuck, presumably his executor. But I have always fancied a tombstone, which could elliptically be inscribed ‘Rather his own man’. Spike Milligan has an appropriate epitaph: ‘I told you I was ill.’ Kathy wants on hers ‘At last, a good plot.’
I returned home – to Longueville, overlooking the tinkling masts of the boats in the bay, where my twin parental anchors had been moored for half a century. I stayed alone for a fortnight, nursing my bronchitis on the sunny balcony, speaking to executors, talking of wills and fobbing off inquiries from estate agents who had scented a commission from the death notices in the Herald. I packed my father’s ‘things’ – his uniforms and flying goggles were consigned to the little museum at Chiltern
which commemorates his amazing crash. I souvenired his silk cravat, overprinted with a detailed map of New Guinea and the islands, issued by the RAAF during the war to help pilots if they had to crash-land in places occupied by the Japanese. The house seemed smaller now my parents were not in it, and it felt odd to be orphaned at the age of seventy. Perhaps I am the one who has had a good innings. Then, to bring me down to earth, came an email from the British tax authorities, asking whether, post-Brexit, I would still be claiming an Australian domicile of origin. Would I be returning to live in Australia, to work or retire there, or had I given this old nationality up? I told them I had just acquired a burial plot, my superannuation was safe from Malcolm Turnbull and I was in the market for a beach house somewhere north of Port Macquarie, where my hard-won British pension will pay for beer and oysters and not much else.
Languidly, I watched the ABC program Q&A – on which I occasionally appear – and, with nothing better to do, spoke aloud the answers I would have given had I been on the panel. Yassmin Abdel-Magied declared that Sharia law was feminist – I put her right, as I hope did the ABC fact checkers. Everyone seemed to be freaking out about a blackout in South Australia, caused by a freak storm but alleged to be punishment for the state’s reliance on alternative energy. ‘Come on,’ I apostatised, ‘blackouts are productive. Remember all the babies who were born nine months after that blackout in New York? We could do with more South Australians. They are quite useful – Sir Don Bradman, the Chappell Brothers, John Bannon, Roma Mitchell, Julian Disney … And the occasional blackout is a small price to pay for doing the right thing by climate change. Here’s my message to South Australians. Next time there’s a blackout, just light the candles and fuck.’
That would have shocked the audience but enlivened a dull program. Tony Jones would pretend to be upset about the use of the f-word, and I would say that the ABC doubtless has fuck checkers as well as fact checkers. But, wait a minute – could I say the word ‘fuck’? Not if my mother had been watching, which she always was. But not now. Perhaps I would say it – as an example of how my life might change.
Rather His Own Man Page 47
