Precious Lives

by Margaret Forster

  For a man of ninety years, his health was still good. His experience of doctors had been brief. He first went to his GP in 1916, when he injured his right knee in a motor-bike accident, but then it was eleven years before he troubled the doctor again with what was diagnosed as sciatica. In 1933, he had his ears syringed, in 1939 the doctor paid his first home visit to him when my father had influenza. He had no contact with any doctor during the forties and only one consultation in the fifties, about a sprained ankle. More bouts of flu followed in the sixties, but it was not until the seventies that his medical notes began to need more than two sheets of paper. He had still never been in hospital, though he had been there once for an X-ray. As far as he was concerned he was fine except for arthritis, which began to trouble him in his eighties. He’d had twinges in his hands and feet for years but he wasn’t incapacitated by the arthritis as his mother had been. She ended up totally crippled but he remained mobile, helped by some medication. He was constantly on the move, walking a mile a day and gardening in all weathers, which probably also helped. Most winters he had at least one heavy cold, always entered in his diary as ‘flue’, but he didn’t count that as being ill. It wasn’t actually he who had ‘flue’ anyway. It was ‘A’. Whenever there was anything wrong with him he referred to himself in the third person as ‘A’ or ‘AF’ – ‘A. got cold’, ‘A. improving’. And he always did improve, rapidly, usually within three days. ‘A. in bed’ was followed the next day with ‘A. up’ and then ‘A. out. All OK.’ He simply went to bed with a hot-water bottle and a glass of whisky, and stayed there till he felt better, getting up only to go to the bathroom and to open and close the curtains so that nobody would suspect he was ill. Since one of us, his three children, rang every day at six o’clock in the evening he made sure he was briefly up then to take our call and then he retired to bed satisfied he’d fooled us. Afterwards, when he was better, he would tell us he’d been in bed ill and say, triumphantly, ‘But I managed.’ Managing was the purpose of life. And when he could no longer manage he’d just pop off.

  At ninety, he visited his doctor’s surgery only to collect his prescription for his arthritis tablets and for some others to do with what he referred to as ‘the blood’. In March 1989, he’d broken his record of never having to go into the infirmary but he considered the record still stood because he was only there for a day while he had some kind of exploratory procedure to do with ‘the blood’. It was an odd episode about which he was deeply secretive. His diary records the unprecedented fact that he called for his doctor twice in January that year and again in February, and the reason was ‘BLOOD’, written in capital letters and underlined. The first I knew about his alarm was when he rang me in March to say he had to go into ‘that place’ for ‘an op, or something’ but if all went well and he had someone to take him home and stay with him they’d let him out the same day. ‘So I don’t know what I’m going to do,’ he finished in tones of the deepest gloom. I, of course, said I’d come and take him to the infirmary and stay with him. ‘I didn’t ask you, mind,’ he said. Quite. So I went to Carlisle, wondering if I dare ring his GP and ask what was going on, only to be greeted on my arrival with: ‘Don’t ask the doctor anything. Don’t you interfere. I know what’s what.’ I wished I did.

  He was very nervous on the morning he was due to go for treatment (or investigation). He cut himself shaving, changed his shirt twice, put new laces in his shoes and then broke one tying it up. ‘I suppose I’ll have to take everything off, likely,’ he said, face contorted in anguish at the awful prospect. I said yes, very likely. He sighed and swallowed, and said, ‘Can’t be helped.’ We took a taxi to the infirmary and he sat staring straight ahead, failing for once to direct the taxi driver as to precisely which route he should take. I thought that once we had arrived at the day ward I might get the opportunity to ask what was going to be done to my father, but I couldn’t ask in front of him, and after he had been admitted and I was on my own I could find nobody who knew. At any rate, a couple of hours later it, whatever ‘it’ was, was all over and he had come round from his first anaesthetic quite charmed with the experience. ‘Count to ten, they said, and, blow me, I got to four and next thing I was awake and it was done.’ We went home with him in high spirits and I cooked him steak because he’d missed his dinner and the anaesthetic, far from leaving him nauseated, had sharpened his already formidable appetite. ‘Well, that’s that,’ he said, when he’d finished eating, ‘over and done with. I thought I was a goner.’ I wondered if it was all over, whether the problem of ‘the blood’ had indeed been solved, but since he was not called upon to return and was in due course given some pills to do with ‘the blood’ I presumed he was right and whatever was wrong with him hadn’t been serious. But it seemed so ridiculous not to know what had happened, though he didn’t think so. Ignorance was definitely bliss in health matters as far as he was concerned.

  He took his arthritis tablets seriously, never failing to follow the instructions on the bottles. His prescription he regarded as a highly important piece of paper which he handled with something approaching awe. He called it his ‘prep’ and the handing in of this ‘prep’ and collecting of the pills it entitled him to was a solemn business. The chemist in Denton Holme got to know him very well. My father would not queue, so if there was even one person waiting when he arrived in the chemist’s shop he’d turn round and leave. The chemist would offer him a chair to sit on and say he would only need to wait five minutes at the most, but, no, my father couldn’t possibly wait. It was a waste of time. He had all the time in the world, but no, sitting on a chair for a few minutes in a chemist’s shop was too much. Sometimes, during the five summer months when we were living at Loweswater and visiting him at least twice a week, he’d give me his ‘prep’ with instructions to be very, very careful with it and, once I’d handed it over to the chemist, equally careful with the pills he would give me in return. I was also honoured occasionally with the task of collecting the prescription itself from the doctor’s surgery. ‘You can get my prep,’ he’d say, with the air of conferring a great favour – ‘Put it straight in your purse, mind, not your pocket, take no chances.’ It was a mistake then to make some mocking rejoinder about getting a Securicor guard to accompany me – prescriptions were like gold dust and should be treated as such. They were what kept him independent, or rather gave him access to the means which kept him independent.

  There was no doubt at all that as he entered his nineties what made his life precious to him was his independence. He did not want to feel in need of anyone’s support or help, not even his children’s. He liked to rule his own life, to decide each day exactly what he would do and when and how. It was what gave point to his existence. Activity of one sort or another was the key to the pleasure he still took in life, though pleasure is the wrong word. He never acknowledged doing anything for pleasure. Far too frivolous. On the contrary, he was motivated by obligation, by things having to be done with no choice about it. He had to get up every day, didn’t he? Well, then. And, once up, he had to wash and shave and dress and eat, didn’t he? So. Yet in the carrying out of all these rituals there was pleasure of a kind, even if he denied it. The first thing he did when he got up was to go into his kitchen, open the airing-cupboard door, and switch on the immersion heater for the hot-water tank. He loved this heater, which he called ‘the merser’, and he got definite pleasure from switching it on – click – and he was gratified, his day had begun. He’d wait a moment or two, feeling underneath the lagging round the tank, over which his socks and underclothes were draped to air, until the first faint warmth began and then he’d go back to bed until he reckoned the water would be properly hot enough to shave. A miracle of science to a man who’d spent half his life boiling water in a kettle if he wanted it hot.

  He shaved every day, another pleasure, or rather the smooth, clean face afterwards was the pleasure. Beards and moustaches were an abomination, a sign of laziness, slackness, or of being foreign. But then
came the real thrill of the day: the Cooked Breakfast. It used to be bacon, egg, sausage and fried bread, but now it was just bacon and toast. Good, thick, fatty bacon, though, from the butcher’s in Denton Holme, cut under his own eyes from a big joint and not any of that hopeless packaged stuff with all its flavour lost inside its plastic shroud. Three slices, fried until the fat oozed, then slammed between two slices of heavily buttered white toast – oh, and a generous dollop of HP sauce. He always used the same frying pan and if some of the bacon fat remained after the bacon was lifted out then so much the better. He left it there to congeal and start the next day’s bacon off nicely. He took his huge bacon sandwich through to his living-room and sat down to eat it at his table, spread with a tablecloth, keeping up the standards his wife had set. He had his Daily Express propped in front of him, leaning against the teapot sporting its woollen cosy. One cup of tea only, strongly brewed, with two sugars stirred into it. Grand. It set him up for the day, was the most important part of that day. He never, ever, started any day without his cooked breakfast. On the day the hospital phoned to say his wife had died at seven-thirty that morning he went straight to the kitchen, cooked his bacon and ate it at 8 a.m. as usual, grief-stricken though he was. He had to have his breakfast, didn’t he? Yes, he did. There was absolutely no question about it.

  Nor was there ever any question about the shape of the rest of the day. Dishes had to be washed, almost before he’d finished eating from them, and dried and put away; clothes had to be soaked and scrubbed and then carried through into the garage (in which no car of his own had ever stood), where they had to be put through the mangle, then taken into the garden and pegged onto the clothes line, which then had to be hauled aloft with a long prop; shopping had to be done in Denton Holme, so it was on with his hat and coat and a firm grasp of his walking stick (only for use on such excursions) and off he had to go, at eleven o’clock, in order to get all his messages done and his bets put on and still be home in time for his dinner (bit of cold meat, bit of potato, another cup of tea) at twelve-thirty. Then a rest. A rest was not really in his plan for the day, it was not acknowledged as positively having to be allowed for, but it happened. A rest, a snooze, but only for half an hour, because he had to get into the garden to weed or dig, or cut the grass. In the summer the grass had to be cut every day so that it would not get too much for his old-fashioned mower and his waning strength. Then it was back into the house for his tea (a sandwich) so that he was ready to watch the Six o’Clock News on television and whatever programmes he fancied after that (sport, quizzes, gardening) until nine-thirty, when he had to have his supper (crackers and cheese) and go to bed, where he slept soundly and deeply.

  He depended on nobody. What had to be done was done by and for himself. Life, his life, was about functioning on his own. Human contact and involvement were minimal. There was no need for them. He had his good neighbours to say hello to if he wished, he had shopkeepers to exchange the time of day with, he had his regular daily telephone calls from his children to keep him in touch. No friends came to see him. He had never valued friends and wasn’t going to start now. His wife had been the one with friends. Every day, when she was alive, there had been someone dropping in, but she’d died nearly ten years ago and since then his diaries had recorded ‘no visitors’. But this was not a complaint, nor was it noted sadly, not yet. If he wanted visitors he knew he could have them, but was still at the stage of not wanting them. They kept him back. They had to be talked to and listened to, and finally encouraged to leave if they were the stubborn type. Occasionally, an old friend of his wife’s did think she should call in on poor Arthur, all on his own, and would ring up and suggest a visit, only to be told: ‘I’m busy.’ Should anyone turn up uninvited he was perfectly capable of keeping them standing on the doorstep until they became discouraged and left and never, of course, came again. The only exceptions to this were children. Anyone with a child was welcome. Then, he became quite sociable and ushered the child in (ignoring the adult). He liked children, especially the under-fives, and they liked him.

  What he liked best was playing with them. In his opinion, children didn’t need toys. Games could be made out of ordinary household objects and he proceeded to prove this with every visiting small child. Out would come his round, wickerwork peg basket and a pan and he’d start picking pegs out and throwing them into the pan and then, when six or seven had clattered in he’d put a lid on the pan and shake it violently before pouring them out and starting again. Children under three loved this and would immediately start to copy him and he’d cheer extravagantly as each wooden peg landed noisily in the pan. For older ones he had other entertainments. He’d bring out a leather pouch in which he kept old pennies and they were invited to scrutinise each penny, then put it on a pile according to its date, and soon they had a row of little towers balancing on the table. There was only one 1900 penny among them and the game was to find it. Then there was his bundle of knotted string which had to be unravelled to see who could get the longest length, and his box of postcards to be sorted into towns and countries, and his photograph albums in which babies now adults had to be identified, and his address book which popped open when each letter of the alphabet was pressed – oh, he was endlessly resourceful.

  If these distractions flagged, he’d take the child by the hand into his garage to explore. He’d let them soak a towel in a bucket of water and then stand the child on a stool in front of his aged mangle and help them feed it into the rollers and turn the handle until the water streamed out. Children loved that. The compressing of the towel and the extracting of the water seemed a miracle to them unmatched by any modern washing machine, and they liked showing off their strength in the turning of the stiff handle, not realising my father was doing most of the turning. The pleasure he derived from their pleasure was visible and extraordinary and it created a bond between him and the children which other adults marvelled at. But his power over them vanished when the children reached puberty, especially the girls. Then he became awkward with them and critical, and he was inclined to label them ‘spoiled’ and separate himself from them.

  This was how his life went on, his routine marking the days out and disturbed only when his family were staying nearby at Loweswater, forty miles away. Hunter and I were there for our five months each summer; Gordon and Shirley for a week in December for his birthday and a week in May; Pauline and David for three weeks at Christmas, two weeks at Easter, a week in October and very often a week in February. The grandchildren came and went for other odd weeks, so that for three-quarters of the year he had family visiting regularly. But even then routines had to be observed. No one could call on him before noon – ‘I’ll be out. Don’t bother’ – and he didn’t like outings or visits on Saturdays – ‘It isn’t convenient’ (i.e. sport on television). He wanted everything organised round his routines and we humoured him, even when his routine didn’t fit in with what we wanted. We drove obediently to his favourite places, with him directing. He couldn’t read a map but he knew exactly the route he wished to take and it was ‘turn right’ and ‘turn left, then left at the crossroads’, until often we had covered a hundred miles and were exhausted but he was in his element. If he misdirected us it was quite likely to be because he intended to – he liked claiming to be lost, because this would extend the drive.

  We always stopped for lunch in pubs of his choice, most of them pretty to look at and horrible to eat in. When my mother was alive there was none of this. Then, I would make the lunch in their own kitchen and the drives were in the afternoons and the meal we ate out was tea. She loathed pubs as much as my father loved them, but once she was gone his way was open to patronise all the pubs in Cumbria – and how we worked our way through them. The gloomier the interior, the colder the atmosphere, the more overpowering the smell of staleness, the greasier the lunch, the more my father enjoyed himself. He’d establish himself on an uncomfortable wooden chair and make me read the menu out loud, not because he couldn’t r
ead it but because he couldn’t seem to take menus in: however simple – and pub menus were very basic indeed – they somehow baffled him. What he wanted to eat was his favourite dish: fried plaice with chips. If this was not on the menu there was consternation – ‘Poor do, no plaice.’ I’d suggest haddock, or cod, but, no, if he was going to eat fish it had to be plaice and not cod, battered or otherwise. Haddock was quite beyond the pale. It had bones. Bones might stick in his throat. He was not going to take the chance at his age. He might choke to death. The Queen Mother, his exact contemporary, had once taken a chance on haddock and look what nearly happened to her. I said I’d no idea what nearly happened to her. He expressed exaggerated surprise and said he thought I was educated and kept up with what was important in newspapers. Dear me, fancy not knowing a fish bone had got stuck in the Queen Mother’s throat and she’d nearly been a goner.

  We’d settle down to the awful meal with my father agreeing to have Cumberland sausage with his chips. While he concentrated on tucking in, I’d sit and wonder how buildings so attractive outside could be so ruined inside. In most of those where we ate, the old fittings had been chucked out and new ones put in. Stone floors had been covered with patterned carpets, stone walls plastered then wallpapered, old lamps replaced with strip lighting. Curiously, old prints and photographs survived and, though often garishly reframed, were the most interesting things to look at, a relief to the eye. Meanwhile, my father was finishing his pint and commenting on its quality. Some beers he detested. Jennings was one, which was unfortunate because Jennings is a Cumbrian brewery and ubiquitous in the county’s pubs. Luckily there was no one to hear his opinion of the beer, because when we ate there, on weekday lunchtimes, there was no one else in these out-of-the-way pubs. The barmaid was always slightly aggrieved at having to go and stick whatever we’d chosen into a microwave, and my father would say, ‘She’s got a face on her, that ’un. She’ll turn the beer if she isn’t careful.’