Yet this was not quite true. He discovered that an old neighbour of his, a young woman at the time she had lived opposite him in the 1940s, was also in this home and his curiosity was greater than his desire to keep himself to himself. He just wanted to look at her, as he put it, partly because he couldn’t credit that someone more than thirty years younger was actually in the same predicament as himself. He had to have it proved, and so he got one of the nurses to take him along to this patient’s room, to show him where it was. ‘Come and get me in five minutes, mind,’ he instructed her. ‘That’ll be long enough. Don’t forget: five minutes, then you come and say I’m wanted, doesn’t matter for what.’ When the nurse dutifully collected him, he was clearly shaken by the state he’d found the younger woman in. She’d had a massive stroke which had left her paralysed down one side and with only parrot-fashion speech. ‘It was no good talking to her,’ my father later told me on the telephone. ‘She couldn’t say a bloomin’ word back. She just nodded. They should have told me. They shouldn’t have let me in for that. Bad. It was a shock.’ I listened, sensing that the shock had been deeper than he made plain. ‘She’s had it,’ he went on; ‘no point in her carrying on, like that.’ I said I supposed she had no choice. There was a moment’s silence, a grunt. ‘Pity,’ he said, then: ‘I won’t go and see her again. She never came to see your Mam all the years she was ill, anyway – never came near.’ ‘So this is tit for tat, is it?’ I said sarcastically. ‘You’re quits now?’ He ignored my tone. ‘No point going, any road,’ he said, ‘if she can’t talk proper. No point going to see her.’ ‘She can still hear,’ I said. ‘You could talk to her, tell her things.’ He didn’t bother replying to such an absurd suggestion, and then one of the carers he was especially fond of came back on duty and he turned his attention to her. ‘What have you been doing with yourself?’ I heard him say. ‘Your face is all red, you look like a beetroot.’ I heard her laugh in the background, and then he laughed at his own joke, though it was difficult to appreciate what it was.
I knew this particular carer from my flying visits. She wasn’t his absolute favourite, but she was one of the three he liked because they were young and lively. This one, so delighted to be told her face was like a beetroot, was only eighteen, earning £3.20 an hour for work which included cleaning up incontinent old people and feeding those who brought their food back up with more regularity than a baby. She lived in a village out on the Solway marsh and got a lift into work and a bus back, or the other way round, according to her shift. She was pretty and cheerful, always cheerful. It baffled me, this permanent cheerfulness. I thought how, in her situation, with no qualifications that could get her a better job, even if one had been available (which it probably was not in the current climate), I would rather have worked in a factory or a shop. The work there might be grindingly boring and equally low paid but at least I wouldn’t be surrounded by dying old people. How did she and all the others stand the sheer depression and misery of it? It wasn’t the sort of thing I could ask; not yet, not till I knew them all better.
On the second visit I made in March to see my father in the home there was the final clearing out of his bungalow to do before it was sold. Pauline had done all the hard work, disposing of the furniture except for a bed in the back bedroom where I slept. The living-room and the front bedroom were completely empty, suddenly looking twice as big, if twice as shabby. I hated being there. All the memories of the strained visits over the last thirty years oppressed me. They were all, except for the first five years, visits connected with illness of some sort, my mother’s and then my father’s. We’d bought them this modest little bungalow in 1967 when they were sixty-six and sixty-seven respectively and still fit and healthy. Then the strokes and cataracts and arthritis, and God knows what else, had begun, and I had no happy recollections of them here. Yet seeing their last home stripped and abandoned like this made it seem strangely precious all of a sudden – everywhere there were still reminders of how it had been cherished, the walls so regularly painted, the carpets renewed and the garden kept immaculate. The garden … It was unbearable to stand by the kitchen window looking at the lilac trees just beginning to bud, and at the ground neatly dug over at the end of last year and now waiting for my father’s planting of potatoes and onions. All that care. All that work.
I was glad when it grew dark, and for once I pulled the curtains together as early as my father used to do. But that only made the suffocating feeling grow worse. The place was almost empty, but it felt as claustrophobic as ever. Listlessly, I wandered from small room to small room, drenched in the pathos of it all. Everything in these rooms – utility furniture, mostly – had been beautifully looked after but was worth virtually nothing. Awful saggy beds, sad worn armchairs with the fabric of the arms darned and patched. Not one item of value – except to them.
Out in the garage there was still his work bench and gardening tools and my mother’s mangle. The garage had been his empire. My mother had rarely gone into it. There was an old sideboard there, bought for their council house when they married in 1931 and too big to go into the bungalow. It had held all my father’s paraphernalia for serious maintenance work – nails, hammers, saws, wire, screws, bolts, washers – all kept in little tin boxes, everything in its place and that place known only to him. It was always cold there, but he’d never minded, and rather dark because he relied for light on a small window, never opening the main up-and-over door. He whistled a lot in his garage, tunelessly as ever, but this was a dependable indication of his contented state of mind. Nearly always, even in these last difficult years, he had found something to do there, even if it was just shifting things about. He’d take pan lids and screw the knobs on tighter, or a curtain rail which was sticking and needed to be greased, and there were always the soles of his shoes to attend to. He had a cobbler’s last and liked trying to mend shoes. What he’d enjoyed best was hammering metal studs called skegs all round the edge of the leather soles. These made a terrible noise when he walked, but he found the ringing of metal on the pavement reassuring.
Going into the garage was hard. There wasn’t much there, apart from the sideboard and mangle. A box of his onions on the ground, half a sack of potatoes beside it. Two tea-towels pegged onto a little washing line he’d rigged up inside. The concrete floor was swept clean. There was no mess anywhere. Everything in and out of the bungalow, rooms and garage and garden, all so neat and tidy, everything so organised, no sign of neglect throughout. Life, for my parents had been about being orderly, never slacking, never letting things slide. There had been such pride in this.
I locked the door and returned to the kitchen to apply myself to the last sorting-out. I had put a large cardboard box on the floor labelled ‘To keep’, another beside it marked ‘Jumble’. Going through the drawers and cupboards, the jumble box was filled in minutes – with dusters, tea-towels, aprons, shopping bags. I couldn’t stand the sight of them, conjuring up, as they did, years and years of cleaning and shopping. The ‘To keep’ box remained empty. What did I want to take of all this? Nothing. And yet there was the impulse to save something, and so I took a mixing bowl and some kitchen knives, and some pegs. Hardly anything. The remnants of my mother’s wedding china had already been taken to Loweswater and so had anything else of sentimental value. I went to bed shuddering, though I wasn’t quite sure what with. Revulsion? Depression? More like despair: despair that two long lives, one still going on, could leave so little behind in the material sense and yet so strong a presence.
I couldn’t wait to get through the last night and escape for ever. This place needed to be claimed by some other spirit as quickly as possible and to vanish from my mind. I should have been doing this final clearing out when my father was dead. It didn’t seem right to be doing it while he was still alive. But how alive was he? Leaving his own home, giving up his most precious independence, was a kind of death.
Not, though, the real death, just the awful beginning of it.
V
IN MAY, MARION’S partner Frances went to Australia for a desperately needed holiday. Marion wanted her to go. She urged her to go, saying it made her feel less like an invalid, more as if she was getting back to normal, which she showed every sign of doing. She had put on weight, regained some energy, and was even contemplating a return to work in a little while. So Frances went and Marion came to live with us – she wasn’t quite strong enough to feel she wanted to be alone, and besides she knew Frances would worry less and be happier about going if she came to us.
I loved looking after her. I liked taking her breakfast in bed (though her breakfast was a meagre affair since she still had such difficulty swallowing), I liked laying trays and putting jugs of flowers on them and all that kind of fussing, and it amused Marion. Taking the morning tray in, I never asked her how she felt. It was a dangerous question, one I well knew she found impossible to answer. How she felt was full of contradictions. She felt fine, but awful; she felt lively, but listless; she felt cheerful, but afraid. But it made little difference how she felt because she knew feelings were not necessarily of any significance. She had no doubt that whatever was going to happen would happen without her being able to control her fate. Like my father, she knew only how to accept, and to go on to the best of her ability. They were two very different people, of very different ages, in very different situations, and yet they had exactly the same attitude as they faced the prospect of death: press on, keep trying, don’t waste time wondering what is going to happen, and how, and when, because nobody can tell you. Don’t moan, don’t wince, don’t beg for pity or sympathy, don’t loll around weeping, and don’t make others suffer because you are suffering.
But Marion did volunteer, at the end of her first week with us, that she felt quite hopeful that she was actually, and against all her own expectations, truly getting better. In fact, so much so that she decided to go on a little holiday of her own, to Carlisle, to stay with Jeff, and see her younger brother Johnny, and her good friends Dorothy and Dusty. She went by train (put on to it by me as though she were a six-year-old – I actually wanted to put her in charge of the guard) and enjoyed it. She and Jeff took drives to the coast and into the country, and she came back delighted with her own daring. Frances, returning from Australia, herself rested and refreshed, could scarcely credit the difference in her when she met her at the airport.
Leaving Marion when the time came for us to go to Loweswater for the summer was easy after all.
Once we arrived there, a new summer pattern had to emerge. My father had no complaints about the nursing-home, but he liked to get out of it more than he had ever needed to get out of his own home. Then, our outings with him had been about pleasure, entertainment, diversion; now, they were about something much more important: they were about preserving his identity. The expression on his face (a face usually devoid of expression) when we entered his room on each visit was strange. He was startled, disbelieving. Yet he always knew exactly when we were coming, to the very minute, because we pandered to his passion for precision by always writing down on his calendar the date and time of our next visit and by telling the staff for good measure. But, nevertheless, when he saw us he betrayed surprise and then massive relief. ‘You’ve come!’ he’d say, and I’d say of course we’d come, we’d said we’d come. Then he’d struggle to his feet, suddenly excited and in a hurry – ‘Good. Let’s get going then, sharpish.’
Sharpish it wasn’t, though he tried hard. It was a slow and rather royal progress through the corridors. He had to use his stick all the time now, but refused to hold on with his other hand to the rails that ran helpfully along the walls. Sometimes the staff had draped small items to dry over these rails and he took pleasure in stopping to unhook them, saying, ‘Dangerous’. Any danger was only in his own head, but we didn’t bother querying this judgement. Passing the bathroom (the individual rooms had only basins and lavatories), he liked to stop and point – ‘That’s the bath. Grand bath. They dip me in, then I steep.’ He said this approvingly, wanting us to be impressed. Any inhibitions he’d tried to cling on to about young women seeing him naked had obviously long since gone, though he did remark, ‘They do everything for me, mind, everything, and them just young lasses, most of them, and not married either’ – and then he shook his head, but more in apparent amazement than horror. He loved having proper baths again and would have been prepared to put up with any indignity to have them. In his own home, he’d stopped being able to get in and out of his own bath years ago and had been deeply dissatisfied with the all-over washes he gave himself at the sink. Getting into this bath was no problem – ‘See that pulley? See them ropes? See that thing, that cradle thing? In I go, over I swing, in I’m dipped, and then I steep. Champion.’
We would pass the nurses’ desk at exactly 2.30 p.m. when shifts were being changed, and one of the going-off nurses would call out cheerfully, ‘Going out, Arthur?’ He’d stop and glare and say, ‘What does it look like? Why have I got my hat and coat on, eh?’ Used to him by now, the nurses would laugh and then one would say, ‘Going anywhere nice? Can I come?’ My father would say no, she could not, that he’d had enough of her for one day and she could get herself home without wasting time chattering. He was always pleased with himself for this banter, and we’d proceed on our way again with him whistling.
Whistling would change to swearing when we reached the front door. ‘Damned doors, damned stupid; they want seeing to.’ They were double doors, one opening in, one opening out, and difficult to co-ordinate, entering or leaving. As I held them open for him my father banged his stick vigorously against each door to indicate his disapproval in case it had failed to register. But once in our car he was all contentment, sinking into the comfortable front seat with a great sigh of pleasure, and grunting with satisfaction when the engine leapt into life.
Where we went on our drives was no longer of such importance. He didn’t try to get us to go to the Keilder dam or make tours of the lakes, for which we were grateful. Now all he wanted was to be out of the home and he didn’t care where we went. So we did short journeys, of not more than twenty miles there and back, and sometimes on days of poor weather half that distance. If we went further, if we took him to his beloved Silloth, he fell asleep on the way back or, far worse for him, lost control of his bladder. This appalled him and it was no use assuring him it didn’t appal us. His dignity had to be preserved and every strategy employed to make sure he survived each outing safely. ‘Not too far,’ he’d say, ‘not for too long, or else.’ No need to say more.
We went to the Solway Marsh most often that glorious summer of 1995. The nursing-home was right on the boundary of west Carlisle and, leaving it, we had only a corner to turn before we were on the road to the marsh villages and out into the real countryside. Every inch of that road was precious to my father and familiar to me. Here, he’d taken me on the crossbar of his bike to pick brambles in the fields and hedges where he’d picked them with his own father; here, he’d marched with the Boys’ Brigade on their summer outings; here, he’d seen a man rush out of the pub in 1914 shouting that war had been declared. Every mile of the way to Burgh-by-Sands and Port Carlisle and Bowness-on-Solway, the isolated and utterly tranquil villages strung out on the flat marsh road, was full of memories, all of them important to him.
We usually parked at Glasson Point, almost at Port Carlisle, the place where we often used to picnic and paddle. There were no picnics now. There was no point in having a picnic. He didn’t want food or drink of any kind. He was still too full after his excellent breakfast. And he was reluctant ever to get out of the car – the struggle to do so was tremendous and exhausted him, so he preferred to stay in the parked car, looking towards the sea. He had his binoculars with him and scanned the horizon intently as though looking for enemy planes. Whether the tide was coming in or going out was of prime concern, but once that had been established he was content just to sit and look. What he looked at was the marsh itself, empty except for the od
d bird, and then the sea, calm and grey here, and beyond it the Scottish hills with a vast expanse of sky over them. Peace and silence. It was a place highly conducive to reflection and contemplation, but whatever was going on in my father’s mind remained there. He said nothing. I said nothing. Hunter got out and walked along the edge of the sea and then came back, and eventually we went home.
But home was not home, it was the nursing-home. Returning to it made me tense. Sometimes, my father would say, as we turned into the road where the home was, ‘Where are we going now?’ He’d ask in a tone of genuine bewilderment, and when I said we were going home, to his nursing-home, he’d make a noise of irritation at his own forgetfulness, berating himself for being daft. The moment passed. There were no sighs or moans. He knew his bungalow had been sold, his real home broken up, his boats burned. But he never made us feel dreadful for selling it, for doing this to him. There were no resentful remarks, no accusations, no recriminations. He accepted what had happened without reproach.
The next awful moment was the actual point of re-entry into the home, when we took him to his room and helped him off with his coat and went to get him a cup of tea. He was always so grateful, so full of thanks – ‘Thank you now, thank you very much, thanks for everything.’ And what did this ‘everything’ amount to? Very little: a matter of a drive to a pleasant place for an hour or so.
All summer we made these outings, twice a week, in the set pattern he preferred. His calendar was enthusiastically filled in even if the handwriting was faint and wavering – ‘Good day. Run to Burgh’ … ‘Smashing day. Sun. At Bowness.’ He was in good spirits, doing well, walking well, sleeping well. Life was worth living, however reduced in quality. Moving into the home had not been all loss after all. At the age of ninety-four, an unsociable man had discovered he could, if put into the right situation, be sociable. The staff spoke to him and he found it easy and even pleasant to speak back to them. He liked the company and appeared to thrive on it. His room had become a place the carers liked to linger in and the matron had begun to issue tactful reminders that Arthur was not the only patient, that there were others who would appreciate some attention. And my father hadn’t just gained through having people to talk to – he’d gained better health too. So many minor problems had been sorted out and he felt the benefit. His diet was better, his feet more comfortable; his eyes (which had easily become infected) were clearer and his mouth less sore. Careful hygiene alone had partially rehabilitated him. For his age, he was in remarkably good shape once more.
Precious Lives Page 12
