I Love the Bones of You

by Christopher Eccleston;

  In all those performances for the RSC, be it the better days or the more turbulent, I carried my family’s communal belief that we, I, could do this. When I got that part, I had no sense of personal vanity. All I could think about was their hard work. They had brought me up to have such a sense of belief in myself – positivity and possibility – and the Olivier Theatre at Stratford was the result.

  Ayub Khan Din was in that mix too, the same brotherhood with him as back in the day when we both chose to follow an unusual ambition alien to our families. Ayub had normalised the desire to occupy Macbeth, to speak those same lines, feel those same emotions. If he’d come from two people who owned a chippy, and I’d come from two factory workers, it was OK to be us. On stage at the Royal Shakespeare Company, thirty-six years after we’d toured the play with Theatre Beyond the Stage, with my head now beneath the crown, I would have flashbacks to Ayub and what he did with the role. But always there was someone of even greater significance in my mind – Dad. Back in 1982, I had become fascinated with Macbeth because I so recognised him as the man I lived with. I decided there and then I wanted to be an actor. That triangle – myself, Macbeth and Dad – has made up the three corners of my life and career ever since.

  21

  A MIND DISEAS’D

  When I first went to Old Trafford with my dad, he would put his hands on my shoulders to guide me through the crowds. In the last few years, I did the same for him.

  I’d keep talking to him. ‘All right, pal?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I’m good.’

  ‘Can you see where you’re going?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’

  Dad crashed his car, a bad accident, straight into the back of another vehicle. To this day, I don’t know how he walked away. As it was, he was taken to hospital, and I was first there.

  I rushed in. ‘My dad’s been in a road accident,’ I told the receptionist. ‘He’s just been admitted.’

  He looked at me, twigged who I was.

  ‘Can I have an autograph?’

  I’m pretty good with autographs on most occasions. This wasn’t one of them.

  ‘Not the time, pal.’

  With his cuts and bruises patched up, the next step was to find out what had happened. Dad was diabetic, so there was a possibility he might have gone into a hypo at the wheel. Equally, he might just not have been concentrating. Subsequently, Dad went back for CAT scans, and that’s when the doctors told us they’d found evidence of vascular dementia, where blood supply to the brain becomes reduced.

  Dementia is a very recent acknowledgement within social and medical circles. The word rolls off my tongue now, but initially when doctors used it in terms of Dad, I had so little awareness of either it or what it meant that I had to go home and look it up on the internet. I sat with a laptop on my knees and read about the seven established stages of dementia. I investigated the illness like I would a character until it too became a living, breathing entity. I chose not to share the seven stages with my mum and brothers. Alan and Keith could find out for themselves and I didn’t have the emotional stability to tell Mum.

  From what I could work out, Dad was at stage two, described as mild cognitive decline, forgetfulness, while still able competently to go about life. I looked down the list to stage seven – incontinent, incomprehensible – and it frightened me. But there was no great exhibition of anguish, from myself or anyone else. The way the family looked at any challenge was with a classic working-class stoicism – ‘We just have to get on with it.’ The diagnosis also made sense and I felt very, very stupid for not realising earlier. Behaviours started to slot into place. Looking back, my mum, my brothers and myself could see the condition had been revealing itself for the previous three years, sometimes subtly, as in a growing inability to concentrate, sometimes rather more obviously, the grass in my garden being a case in point. Dad became fixated with it and kept going on about how long it was, telling me to get it cut. In the end, I lost my temper and snapped at him about it. There’s some associated guilt and shame about how I spoke to him, but I can give myself a modicum of leeway because I didn’t know there was an issue.

  A little earlier, I had been filming Cracker in Manchester, while living at home, when Dad suffered a medical emergency. He went temporarily blind – the result, we discovered, of a blood clot. He also had some mini-strokes. Together, I think they marked the real beginning of his slide into dementia. The damage took a good few years to manifest itself, but from that point on there was a softening in his nature. I found him much more relaxed. I can remember feeling how the spike had been blunted in his character, a spike that itself had more than likely been a contributory factor. Anger, in the short term, can be a good feeling; it makes you feel empowered. In the long term, it makes you ill. In Dad’s case, it sent his blood pressure hurtling, a factor shown to damage and narrow blood vessels in the brain, which is, essentially, vascular dementia. His late onset diabetes, a disease of the circulatory system, only worsened an already delicate situation and was almost certainly another huge contributing factor. He’d been told to change his eating habits. There was a chance, if he did, he could put the diabetes into reverse, but he wouldn’t do it. My dad’s complex relationship with food meant he wasn’t willing to compromise. He comfortate. Remember, this is a man who spent much of his early life being denied the pleasures of food. And now he was being asked to do so again? He just wasn’t having it. Perhaps also, on some level, his self-esteem and confidence, dishevelled from the emasculation of breakdown and redundancy, meant he thought himself unworthy of saving. You can add into that a healthy dose of ‘What do they know?’ His idea of what and what didn’t constitute an issue differed somewhat from the medical profession.

  One doctor said to my mum, ‘I’ve done a questionnaire with Mr Eccleston and he tells me he doesn’t drink.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Mr Eccleston has told me he doesn’t drink alcohol.’

  ‘Doesn’t drink alcohol? He drinks six or seven pints on a Saturday and Sunday, sometimes on a Friday as well.’

  She quizzed Ronnie about his response.

  ‘I know I drink,’ said my dad, ‘but I don’t drink. I’m not a drinker.’

  To him, the question ‘Do you drink?’ meant ‘Do you go to the pub every night?’ The answer to which was ‘No, I don’t.’

  Smoking can also be a contributor to dementia. Dad had started smoking again on the Saturday night of his and mum’s silver wedding anniversary, stressed because the coach we were all travelling on to the restaurant was late. From that point, he smoked really heavily again. Dad didn’t want to deny himself the pleasures of life. What he was unable to see was that the pleasures of life can alter.

  Had Dad’s diagnosis not been made after the crash, which in itself may have been caused by the onset of dementia, it surely wouldn’t have been long in coming. His behaviour quickly became increasingly erratic. In late 2002, I played Hamlet at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. Keith and his wife Ann were driving Mum and Dad there, 70 mph down the motorway, when Dad opened the door and tried to get out. Keith slammed the brakes on, quite literally putting a halt to the situation before it went too far. Dad wasn’t stupid. He may have been in the foothills of dementia, but that doesn’t mean he was totally devoid of self-awareness. He knew opening the door of a moving car wasn’t a great idea. He also knew his mental faculties were disappearing and, as he never had done, wasn’t going to allow himself to be steamrollered. There was a lot of life to be lived and he fought to hold on to his old behaviour. On one occasion, as he’d always done, I saw him reading a book. But I could tell from the way his eyes were moving across the page he was retaining nothing. He was completely in the moment. Picking up a book was about trying to maintain normality, nothing more. It was about resistance. Except this time, the opponent wasn’t an all-elbows defender on a football pitch, a know-it-all manager at work; it was himself. And it was a fight he could never win. Once that realisation came, it could delive
r a devastatingly hard blow even in the most benign of circumstances. Dad once knocked over a cup of tea at Keith’s house. ‘No bother,’ Keith reassured him, ‘it’s fine.’ But it was far from fine to my dad. He was consumed by embarrassment and anxiety over what he’d done, to the extent he was down under the table on his knees trying to mop it up.

  ‘What’s happening to me, what’s happening to me?’ he kept repeating. ‘I am Ronnie Eccleston.’ Horrendous to experience. Perhaps even harder to watch.

  Other times, thankfully, there’d be an element of humour to Ronnie’s changing state of mind. Once he came downstairs with a shirt and tie on – and another shirt and tie on top.

  ‘Ronnie,’ my mum pointed out, ‘you’ve got two shirts and two ties on.’ He looked at himself and laughed. She had a stock phrase when mix-ups like this happened – ‘Confused.com’. Beautifully, and movingly, I experienced, on occasion, a phenomenon that sometimes happens with those with dementia where reserve is wiped out. One night, as he walked me to my car outside their house, he turned to me.

  ‘I love the bones of you,’ he told me.

  It was wholly unexpected and, at that moment, I felt embarrassed. ‘All right, Dad!’

  Dementia had removed his inhibitors and allowed him to tell me something so intensely emotional.

  As an actor, I became aware, right from the start of Dad’s illness, of life imitating art. Flesh and Blood was a case in point – eight intense weeks playing a character desperately trying to gain recognition from a father who doesn’t recognise him, as played by an actor who himself isn’t wholly cognisant of the process. There’s a scene where my character shows his dad a picture of himself as a baby.

  ‘Do you know who that is?’

  ‘No, no, yeah, yeah, no,’ says Peter Kirby.

  ‘That’s me.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. I know it is. I know it’s you. Yeah, yeah – do you like James Bond?’

  There is, of course, no reconciliation at the end of Flesh and Blood. There is no scene where father recognises son and everyone skips off into the sunset to live happily ever after. Joe reaches another destination, and that is to realise, ‘There’s a biological connection that this man can never comprehend. I’ve got to stop thinking about myself and celebrate him for who he is, because actually he’s a great positive in my life. He’s never going to know who I am. But I know who he is, and I can have a relationship with him and accept him on his terms.’

  Accepting a father on his terms. Hmm. We wrapped the production on Friday, had a party, and then on Saturday morning I’d arranged to go to Old Trafford with my dad. I was really looking forward to it – and he turned up with the season tickets from two years before. I’m disgusted with myself thinking about it now, but I gave him a bollocking. I was pissed off because I couldn’t go to the game. More than that, though, I was pissed off because he had dementia. That is shameful on my part, but genuinely that is the case. Maybe that shame is something others in the same position will recognise, an occasional presence of a selfish internal voice, one that so desperately craves ‘normality’.

  I put my anger at his illness down to coming straight off the back of Flesh and Blood, with its fictional narrative so unflinchingly similar to my own non-fiction life. Amid that emotion, present as he always was whenever me and my dad knocked heads, was that little boy who was frightened of him. I definitely harboured residual anger towards him, a straight reflection of the anger he’d exhibited towards me. Sounds harsh, but he was getting back the temper he taught me. I was in control now. I’m not proud of that, and I’m not saying it’s right, but that’s how I justified it to myself.

  I looked into his eyes and could see him trying to process what was going on. He was staring at the season tickets, semi-computing that they were the ones from two years ago, while trying to work out what the situation meant, and what should happen next. For ten seconds, my peripheral vision was blacked out, blinkered. All I saw was this big, fierce bird-like face looking around lost in confusion. I put Dad on the bus home, the route being familiar to him, and walked away. I rang later and explained to my mum what had happened. And then I started crying. I cried for four hours. That night I had a date with my girlfriend. I told her about it and cried all over again. I broke my heart like I’ve never broken my heart since. That moment of seeing his confusion had left a mark – not a bruise, but a deep, lasting weal. Until that point, I’d understood intellectually that my dad had dementia because we’d been told. But emotionally I hadn’t understood it at all. And then there, in the street outside Old Trafford, I’d been given a window into somebody going mad. Becoming demented. That’s the truth of it – demented. It’s a shocking word. We used to talk about demented dogs, and we shot them. When we say dementia, there’s no hiding the truth. It means people are demented. We can dress that up however we want, but there’s no denying the naked reality beneath. That day I had been presented with the stark vision of a man floundering in a maze of his mind’s own making. Not knowing who and where he was. And I’d just been horrible to him. And he was my dad.

  Progressively, Dad’s independence of action and thought was being taken away. On one occasion, he went for his paper and an hour later wasn’t back – from a newsagent that was a five-minute walk away. Two hours later, he still wasn’t home. Mum had to ring the police, and Ronnie was eventually spotted and returned. That was the end of him going for his paper on his own, although Mum never couched it so obviously. Pre- or post-dementia, you never told my dad anything – you cajoled him. After his disappearing act, whenever Dad announced he was going for his paper, Mum would say, ‘I’ll come with you.’ That way they could go for the paper together. Without admitting it, I expect he was relieved.

  A couple of times the bookie knocked on the door. Dad had always loved a bet – it delivered an adventure, an element of excitement, the unknown of what was going to happen – and he still liked to go to the betting shop even when he had dementia. ‘Elsie,’ the bookie would say, ‘Ronnie’s had a win but he’s not come and picked it up.’ I still find that touching. They’d known Dad in the bookies for years and were looking out for him now he was ill.

  Occasionally, Mum left Dad at home and went out to do her own thing. It wasn’t often, but every now and again she needed that bit of space. He knew she was out, but if I asked him where he didn’t know. He’d keep looping back to it – ‘I don’t know where your mum is’ – to the point where he’d stand by the curtains until she came back. His life was dictated by whether Elsie was there or not. To a certain extent that was true before dementia. She was his anchor and his touchstone and his lynchpin, much more than his children were. He loved his children, but Elsie ran everyday life and the house. He was familiar with that arrangement, and for those with dementia, familiarity is everything. When I had a bit of success, I enjoyed taking Mum and Dad out to posh places, splashing out a bit. One time they came down to London to see me deliver Robert Laurence Binyon’s war poem ‘For the Fallen’ as part of a Remembrance event in Leicester Square. It was live on television and I was asked to take part as my stock was high as the Doctor. Afterwards, we went to an upmarket fish restaurant, J. Sheekey, in Covent Garden, a place a lot of actors go after West End shows. On the menu, Dad saw fish and chips. Great, one of his favourites. Then he saw the price of it.

  ‘How much? For fish and chips? I’m not bloody paying that.’ He was kicking off, trying to leave the restaurant.

  I tried to calm him down. ‘Dad, Dad, it’s fine. I’m getting it.’

  ‘I know, but look at the price!’

  The dementia was already feeding him a great plateful of anxiety. He was in a place where he had no control over what was happening – and that was a big thing.

  This was a man floundering, becoming submerged beneath wave after wave of affliction and change. He was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer and had to have a total gastrectomy. It wasn’t an easy conversation to have with a man with increasingly little understanding of his own being,
let alone the intricacies of his health.

  I was walking up Coniston Avenue with him to get his paper. ‘Now, Dad,’ I looked at him, ‘you know you’re going in hospital tomorrow?’

  ‘Why? Why am I going in hospital?’

  ‘Well, Dad,’ – and this is hard to say to anyone – ‘you’ve got cancer.’

  ‘Cancer? I’ve got bloody cancer?’ It was as though it was the first time he’d heard. He was having none of it. ‘Look at me, Chris! Look at me! I can run. I can jump.’ He was actually doing the actions. ‘What are they talking about?’

  He was scared, as we would all be. Scared of cancer, scared of being in hospital, scared of being away from Elsie.

  Dad had been told from the off about the size and potential ramifications of the procedure. ‘Mr Eccleston,’ stated the surgeon, ‘it’s a very risky operation.’ It wasn’t that Dad’s confusion cleared at that moment, but he appeared to comprehend the urgency, the seriousness. He somehow recognised the doctor’s emotion.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘you have got to do it for me because otherwise it’s nowt down for pal.’ Dementia took a lot of things, but it couldn’t take the Salford out my dad. ‘Nowt down for pal’ means you’re dead.

  ‘If it goes wrong,’ he also told the surgeon, ‘it’s not your fault.’ To see my dad, in the state he was in, mentally and physically, give that to the doctor, to show such empathy with him, I don’t think I had ever been prouder. But there was an unspoken truth about what was happening in that theatre. They were operating on a man in the mid-stages of dementia. They were saving his life so he could go mad.

  Dad was taken to critical care after surgery. It was the same hospital, Hope Hospital, now sadly renamed simply as Salford Royal (what better name for a hospital than Hope?), in which he was born. For his complete helplessness, his naked reliance on others merely to exist, he might as well have been a baby again.