We drove through the Lorton Valley and round the end of Bassenthwaite Lake on a glorious May morning. I remembered the long bike rides I’d had with my father, forty miles or more each time, all pedalled in silence, the only stops those at pubs when he’d go in for a pint and bring out lemonade for me. We passed the turn-off for Keswick, where he’d taken me on the bus to cross Derwent Water and climb Catbells. Next the road took us through Uldale and onto Caldbeck, where he’d taken me to hound trails. He’d loved the betting, but he loved, too, the sight of the dogs bounding across the hills, their owners whistling and shouting and banging on tins of food held out for them at the end. They were good memories, but what, I wondered, was I trying to make of them that was relevant to an analysis of my sense of duty – trying, I suppose, to make it more attractive? Was I suggesting to myself that nostalgia meant I was not merely dutiful? But I wasn’t nostalgic. I had no desire at all to be back, aged eight, on long bike rides with my father, or aged nine, at hound trails or climbing Catbells. The idea made me shudder. What I actually felt was nothing as sweet as nostalgia – it was gratitude. I was grateful for the time he had devoted to me. Many a child of a working man who had no car and little money never left Carlisle, never knew anything of the beautiful countryside around it. My father had made sure I did. He’d bothered. He’d shown me the glories of the Lake District without needing to say a word, and this was a gift more precious even than ensuring that I was adequately fed and clothed. Duty was distasteful, but gratitude was surely tolerable.
Swooping down from the fells, driving down Warnell towards the Eden Plain, where every stretch of the road held some memory or other of my father, I thought of something else: pity. A word as dubious as duty. Nobody wishes to be pitied. Sympathy is fine; pity, offensive. But it was pity I felt for my aged father as we neared his nursing-home. Worse still, it was not a particular kind of pity, but the common-or-garden sort which one feels for any extremely frail old person, pity nearer to compassion, for their infirmities and the hopelessness of their situation. The very words ‘I feel so sorry for you’ have always made me want to hit the speaker, but that was what I wanted to say to my father – ‘I feel so, so sorry for you.’
I wondered, as we came within the city’s boundary, about my father’s own attitude to his parents. His sense of duty had certainly been well developed. He’d looked after his parents in their old age with devotion but never, I was sure, with love. Yet he’d not been put to quite the same kind of test his own children were now facing. His parents had both died in their mid-seventies and, in fact, it was my mother who had fulfilled his obligations for him. He believed he had obligations, though. That was true. Unlike me, he firmly believed adult children had to look after aged parents. That was how the system worked: it was natural and allowed for no discussion. During my adolescent years, when I furiously demanded discussion on every banned subject, I’d tried to take this up with him. I’d asked what was supposed to happen, in this natural, immutable order of things, to childless people? Being childless was their own fault, he said. Greatly daring, I also suggested that times had changed and what was once natural no longer needed to be so – children need not be the automatic consequence of marriage and if they were chosen by people, not wished upon them, what then? In that case, I said, there was surely no unwritten contract. He said if I believed that, I’d believe anything, and I was talking daft. This attitude of his had never faltered. If he thought at all about why his children were looking after him now, he would see it as his rightful dividend.
At least none of us three children was doing it out of self-interest. Duty might be the prime reason, but there was no sinister motive. We were not hoping or expecting to inherit anything. My father’s parents had owned their own house, if a modest one, and had had a few thousand pounds in the bank. My father never owned a house, nor did he have money in the bank. He was much poorer than his parents. In fact, when I came to look into the particular history of his family I realised he was its poorest member for generations. His great-great-grandfather, another Arthur (who lived to ninety-three), had been a wealthy farmer with forty-eight acres of land deep in the Border Reiver country; his great-grandfather was a prosperous innkeeper (though he started off as a schoolmaster) in the same area; his grandfather Arthur (the one whose grave we visited) had been a successful carpenter who established a thriving business in Carlisle.
Then what happened? This grandfather of my father’s left enough money for his son to buy his own house even though he was only a fitter. His comfortable circumstances were due to this inheritance and because he was thrifty, not to say parsimonious; and, never unemployed, he was able to save. Yet what he saved was not enough to leave to my father and his brother anything like the amount that had been left to him. But what he was going to leave them inevitably came into his relationship with them. My grandfather George Forster was an irascible old man and his sons knew he could change his will at any moment if they displeased him. But now my own father had nothing to leave. None of us would benefit financially from his death. He, at least, had no need to be haunted, as so many old people must be, by the suspicion that our devotion was motivated by greed. And his lack of money meant he could never play games, threaten us with being cut out of any will. We were all richer than he had ever been, with our houses, our cars, our standard of living. He, who had worked harder than any of us, was stranded between parents who had had something and children who had a great deal, whereas in a material sense he had nothing. Somehow this made me feel better about being dutiful. The duty, if nothing else, was pure. I liked that.
But even if feeling better about being motivated by duty and gratitude and compassion, unsullied by expectations of financial gain, cheered me up, there was still a piece missing from the puzzle when I tried to understand the power my father had over me. I decided, as we turned into the road where the nursing-home was, that it could only be due to one extra element, to which I had not given enough weight: his own personality. Old people, sick people, who have once been fierce and dominant don’t seem to lose their force of character when their physical strength ebbs. This power in them actually seems to increase instead of waning, and as it does so it commands even more respect than it did before. What I was seeing, in these years of my father’s final decline, was evidence of some inner power to which it was impossible not to respond. He had no actual power any more; he could not make me do anything at all, as once he had been able to, employing physical force if necessary, but he still drew forth tremendous allegiance that was far beyond duty. To be so old, to be so near to dying, and have the kind of determination to live that he had could only excite admiration – this, too, was part of his power.
This admiration always flared up, however gloomy I was feeling, whenever I saw him for the first time each summer. I dreaded walking down the corridors to his room, inwardly groaning at the realisation that all this was starting yet again for another five months, but as I turned into his doorway and saw him before he saw me I felt proud of him. He was visibly doing his best not to be a lump in a chair. But this time he was not as upright, not as alert, nor as smart as he usually was. Since March, there had been a noticeable deterioration. He had lost more weight, especially from his face, which looked suddenly gaunt, the cheekbones now very prominent. There was effort in the smallest of movements and his hands shook.
But he wanted to go out. There was no hesitation about that. ‘I’ve been sitting in this damned chair long enough,’ he said, and struggled to get out of it. He had a great struggle to stand and then, when he had managed it, his walking was so unsteady, in spite of his stick and my arm, that he knocked into the door frame. One of the staff, seeing him stagger, said she would bring a wheelchair. ‘You will not!’ roared my father. ‘I might as well give up if I have to get into one of those.’ It took ages to reach the front entrance and then there was the usual problem of coping with two doors opening onto each other. This almost defeated us. If a nurse had not rushed to help he woul
d have collapsed, caught for ever between inner and outer door. The same nurse helped us to the car and put my father into his seat, a task which I saw now required considerable skill. ‘What a carry-on,’ he said, as finally we set off. ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with me.’
We drove to Silloth. The new season always had to open with a drive to Silloth, twenty-two miles away, and for some time now too far to take him because of his fear of incontinence (a fear sadly solved recently by the use of pads). ‘Grand,’ he said, when we said where we were heading. ‘Have you checked the tide?’ I had. We weren’t catching any boat, but I knew we had to know the tides. His pleasure was complete when I said it would be high at three o’clock, just as we would reach the seafront road. I liked giving him pleasure. (What did that mean? Did it mean I wasn’t, after all, merely dutiful? I kept looking for ways to avoid that charge.) He made comments which showed his enjoyment all the way to Silloth – ‘That farmhouse has been painted since last year’ … ‘Wigton’s by-passed now, we’ll come to it in a minute.’ When we reached the coast road the sea was crashing against the wall, and no part of the shingle beach was visible. ‘Get out, then,’ he ordered me. ‘You’ll want to walk.’
He was right, I did, and not just to please him. The car trundled slowly off, Hunter trying to make the last mile take for ever, and I set off, the spray from the waves showering me if I went too near. We’d done this walk so many times together, my father and I, in all weathers, and I knew he could still do it in spirit so long as I was doing the walking for him. The more the wind blew, the more colour came into my cheeks, the more he would be able to look at me and say, with immense satisfaction, when I joined him again, ‘You’ve had a good blow, then.’ I walked quickly, practically running, the wind in my face all the way. It was too early in the summer for many trippers to be in Silloth and the car park nearest the front was empty except for our car. Hunter got out the minute I arrived, all too eager to obey my father’s instruction to go and look at the docks. I sat there with him now, facing the wild sea, his binoculars trained on the seagulls perched on the buoys, until Hunter returned and reported a Greek trawler in the docks. We drove there and made a stately progress along the quay. Once these docks had been teeming with ships but now we were lucky to find this solitary boat. ‘Pity,’ my father said.
After the ritual visit to the docks, there was nothing else to do except creep round the streets so he could reminisce. Not many streets in Silloth, and all laid out conveniently on a grid system, so we were round them all in minutes. Since getting in and out of the car was such an ordeal for my father, and since the weather was still too doubtful (clouds over the sun by three o’clock and rain in the air), there was no question of hauling him out onto a bench. We parked near the Green and bought ice-creams where we’d always bought them and sat licking them, looking at the Green where the donkeys had once given rides. ‘Pity,’ my father said. ‘Everything’s gone, it’s all come to an end. Silloth was a grand place in the old days.’ I said it still was, that it was unspoiled and I liked the emptiness and sense of peace. ‘Well, I like a bit of life, like in the old days,’ he said. We sat a bit longer in silence and then couldn’t put off any longer the return to Carlisle. The treat was over, and it hadn’t been as satisfactory as usual. All that Silloth now meant was sitting in a car licking ice-cream.
He slept all the way back, head sunk on his chest, body held in position only by the car’s seat belt. When we drew up outside the home, he slept on. We waited for him to waken in his own time. He showed no signs of doing so. I thought how wonderful it would be if he had died peacefully in his sleep on his last outing to his beloved Silloth. But no. He hadn’t. No such luck for him. Or for me. I’d fantasised such perfect endings for him for years now. One last heave with his spade in his garden and then oblivion among his newly planted potatoes – that was one. I had variations on this same theme, of his dying while active, doing something he enjoyed before the cruelties of extreme old age were visited upon him. But no, another fantasy was grounded. He woke up. We couldn’t get him out of the car and had to fetch a nurse. She brought a wheelchair and this time there was nothing my father could do about it. He had to submit to being put in the wheelchair and he was wheeled away, his eyes tightly shut and mouth set in a grim line of revulsion.
From then onwards we took him to and from the car in a wheelchair. His only way round what he saw as this humiliating capitulation was to rename the wheelchair and treat it as something else. ‘Fetch my pram!’ he began instructing us and gave to the words a ring of ‘Fetch me my chariot!’ There was a bitter humour about his attempt to rise above the indignity of being placed in a wheelchair and he whistled loudly, pointedly, as he was propelled along. It was a means to an end, his ‘pram’, that was all. I suggested one day pushing him in it round the streets outside the home, but his tolerance did not extend that far. ‘No! I’m not starting that game.’ What game? It seemed that wheelchair-to-car was endured out of necessity, because he wanted to go for drives so much, but being pushed round the streets would make him a permanent not a temporary wheelchair-bound person and this difference was crucial. As usual, no discussion was allowed. He had his own standards and felt no need to explain or justify them.
At least it meant we could now get him to the car swiftly and that he was not exhausted when he reached it. But there was still the problem of getting him from the wheelchair into the car seat. He could never believe he couldn’t do it himself. Always, he expected to be able to. There was the same ‘Wait, wait’ that there had been with Marion when she fell, the same determination that mind should overcome matter. Soon he had to admit defeat, though only for that particular day, and then we tried to manoeuvre him into the car. And failed. Two strong people unable to lift a frail ninety-five-year-old man, who weighed nothing, into a car. The staff could do it with ease. There was one girl, a carer not a nurse, who could do it on her own without any help at all. She was eighteen, tall and heavy, and she simply picked my father up, getting him (very reluctantly) to put his arms round her ample waist. ‘Where is it?’ he would shout. ‘I can’t find any bloomin’ waist, lass, you’re that stout.’
Sometimes, after all the anxiety this induced, he would take a while to recover. The regular loss of dignity was always traumatic and he never got used to it or became philosophical about it. He would sit silently, calming down, and I sat in the back, also in a state, wondering if going for a drive was worth this. But of course it was, there was no doubt about that. He loved those car rides. They were the focal point of his dreary days, and he didn’t care where we went. He no longer made any attempt to direct us. He was happy simply to be on the move and out of the home. But then, around the end of July, a strange change took place. He began to say he didn’t think he’d bother going for a drive. He looked amazed himself as he said this – ‘I don’t think I’ll bother.’ This was hugely significant, surely. Why had going out become suddenly a bother? He didn’t plead ill health, he didn’t blame the weather (which was good, anyway). I wondered if I should try to persuade him but decided that would be a waste of energy. He had always been oblivious to anyone’s coaxing.
If we were not to go out, there was instantly the problem of how to fill the two hours usually spent in driving somewhere. The time had never exactly flown by on those expeditions, but since it had taken fifteen minutes to get my father into the car, an hour to drive to the sea, or some country village he liked, and back (including halts to look at anything remotely interesting, even a sheep with its horns stuck in a fence), the rest of the afternoon had been easily accounted for in settling him in his room again. Now, when we never left the room, two hours were an eternity, just as they had been when I made flying visits on my own. Hunter talked valiantly, telling my father all kinds of things he liked to hear about football and lottery winners and suchlike, but even he was defeated after an hour and took to roaming the corridors restlessly or departing for some imaginary appointment. It was no good consoling our
selves with the thought that my father just liked our company, that in itself this was sufficient and we shouldn’t worry about filling the time for him. It wasn’t true. Company was an irritation to him unless it was performing. When talk flagged, I had to be doing something he could watch. Otherwise his attitude was that he might as well be on his own.
I took to sewing nametapes on his clothes. Pauline had marked them all hastily, as required, when he came into the home, but she’d simply written his name in ink on plain tape and after all the zealous washing that went on this had worn off. She’d ordered proper Cash nametapes and these had now arrived. I showed them to him. He liked to see his name, A. G. Forster, in bold blue capitals. He watched while I began sewing them onto his shirts and trousers and cardigans, onto every single sock and handkerchief. It was going to take a blissfully long time. I sewed as I always sewed (when I forced myself to sew at all), with large, careless stitches, my aim being to secure the tape to the garment and not concern myself with neatness. For good measure, and to take longer, I crossed back across each jagged stitch. My father glared at my handiwork, frowning fiercely, and said, ‘That’s a fine mess.’ I agreed, cheerfully. ‘You’re no needlewoman,’ he said accusingly, as though exposing some hideous fraud. I agreed I wasn’t. If I’d said so in a penitent fashion, he would doubtless have overlooked my abominable sewing, but since I obviously didn’t care he was annoyed. ‘Pauline is the sewer. She sews grand,’ he said. I said Yes, she did, he was right, and weren’t her tapestries exquisite, and didn’t her— But he cut across all the compliments to my sister. ‘If you’re no good at it, why are you doing it, stabbing away with that needle and making a mess?’
I thought about saying:
To give me something to do and you something to watch.
Precious Lives Page 21
