Untold Stories

  ‘Aren’t you good, Lily? You’ve eaten all your mince.’

  And Mam purses her lips over her toothless gums for a rewarding kiss. Twenty years ago she would have been as embarrassed by this affectation of affection as I am. But that person is dead, or forgotten anyway, living only in the memory of this morose middle-aged man who turns up every fortnight, if she’s lucky, and sits there expecting his affection to be deduced from the way he occasionally takes her hand, stroking the almost transparent skin before putting it sensitively to his lips.

  No. Now she is Lily who has eaten all her mince and polished off her Arctic Roll, and her eyes close, her mouth opens and her head falls sideways on the pillow.

  ‘She’s a real card is Lily. We always have a laugh.’

  ‘Her name’s actually Lilian,’ I say primly.

  ‘I know, but we call her Lily.’

  The strip lights go on this winter afternoon and I get ready to leave.

  I never come away but I think that this may be the last time I shall see her, and it’s almost a superstition therefore that before I leave I should make eye contact with her. It’s sometimes for the first time as she can spend the whole hour not looking at me or not seeing me if she does. Kissing does not make her see me nor stroking her hand. A loud shout may do so, though, and certainly if I were to squeeze her arm or cause her pain she would look at me then or even cry out. Otherwise, there is this settled indifference to my presence.

  To make her see me is not easy. Sometimes it means bringing my head down, my cheek on the coverlet in order to intercept her eye line and obtrude on her gaze. In this absurd position, my head virtually in her lap, I say, ‘Goodbye, Mam, goodbye,’ trying as I say it (my head pressing into the candlewick) to picture her with Dad and print her face on my memory, Mam laughing on the sands at Filey with Gordon and me, Mam walking on the prom at Morecambe with Grandma. If this produces no satisfactory epiphany (a widening of the eyes, say, or a bit of a smile) I do it again, the spectacle of this middle-aged man knelt down with his head flat on the bed of no more interest to the other old women than it is to my mother.

  Getting no response, I kiss her and go to the door, looking back for what I always think will be the last time. What I want to see is her gazing lovingly after me, her eyes brimming with tears or even just looking. But she has not noticed I’ve gone, and I might never have been in the room at all. I walk to the station.

  ‘You have given the best,’ says a hoarding advertising another home, ‘now receive the best.’ And in a film faintly would come the sound of the geriatric Horst Wessel, that sad and mendacious anthem, ‘I am H-A-P-P-Y.’

  Once her speech has unravelled, any further deterioration in her personality becomes hard for an onlooker to gauge (and we are all onlookers). Speechless and seemingly beyond reach, she dozes in the first-floor bedroom in the house above the bay, regularly fed and watered, her hair done every fortnight, oblivious of place and time and touch. In the other beds women come and go, or come and die, my mother outlasting them all. On the horizon ships pass and it is as if her own vessel, having sailed, now lies becalmed, anchored on its own horizon, life suspended, death waiting and in the meantime nothing: life holds her in its slack jaw and seems to doze.

  So much of my childhood and youth was lived in dread of her death, never seeing that what would unsettle and unstitch my life much more would be the death of my father. It was his going that had cast the burden of care on my brother’s family and myself and sent my mother stumbling into her long twilight.

  In the event her death is as tranquil and unremarked as one of those shallow ripples licking over the sands that I had watched so many times from her window. All her life she has hoped to pass unnoticed and now she does.

  As a boy I could not bear to contemplate her death. Now when it happens I almost shrug. She dies in 1995, I think. That I am not certain of the date and even the year and have to walk down to the graveyard to look at her gravestone to make sure is testimony to how long she has been waiting on the outskirts of mortality. My father’s death on 3 August 1974 I never forget. There was before and after. With my mother nothing changes. Did she look at me the last time I took my leave? I can’t remember.

  Mindful of the snarl on my father’s dead face I make no attempt to see my mother dead. Times are different anyway and in the self-loving nineties death is enjoying less of a vogue. Besides, there is little point in seeking out reminders of mortality. I am sixty myself now and my own reminder.

  So while she rests at the undertaker’s my brother and I consult our diaries and decide on a mutually acceptable date for the funeral, and I take the train to Weston-super-Mare for what I hope will be the last time now, though getting off at Nailsea, which is handier for the crematorium. It’s a low-key affair, the congregation scarcely bigger than the only other public occasion in my mother’s life, the wedding she had shrunk from more than sixty years before.

  Of the four or five funerals in this book, only my father’s is held in a proper church; the rest, though scattered across England, might all have been in the same place, so uniform is the setting of the municipal crematorium.

  The building will be long and low, put up in the sixties, probably, when death begins to go secular. Set in country that is not quite country it looks like the reception area of a tasteful factory or the departure lounge of a small provincial airport confined to domestic flights. The style is contemporary but not eye-catchingly so; this is decorum-led architecture which does not draw attention even to its own merits. The long windows have a stylistic hint of tracery, denomination here a matter of hints, the plain statement of any sort of conviction very much to be avoided.

  Related settings might be the waiting area of a motor showroom, the foyer of a small private hospital or a section of a department store selling modern furniture of inoffensive design: dead places. This is the architecture of reluctance, the furnishings of the functionally ill at ease, decor for a place you do not want to be.

  It is neat with the neatness ill-omened; clutter means hope and there is none here, no children’s drawings, no silly notices. There are flowers, yes, but never a Christmas tree and nothing that seems untidy. The whole function of the place, after all, is to do with tidying something away.

  In the long low table a shallow well holds pot plants, African violets predominating, tended weekly by a firm that numbers among its clients a design consultancy, an Aids hospice, the boardroom of the local football club and a museum of industrial archaeology.

  In the unechoing interior of the chapel soft music plays and grief too is muted, kept modest by the blond wood and oatmeal walls, the setting soft enough to make something so raw as grief seem out of place. It’s harder to weep when there’s a fitted carpet; at the altar (or furnace) end more blond wood, a table flanked by fins of some tawny-coloured hardwood set in a curved wall covered in blueish-greenish material, softly lit from below. No one lingers in these wings or makes an entrance through them, the priest presiding from a lectern or reading desk on the front of which is a (detachable) cross. A little more spectacular and it could be the setting for a TV game show. Above it all is a chandelier with many sprays of shaded lights which will dim when the coffin begins its journey.

  Before that, though, there will be the faint dribble of a hymn, which is for the most part unsung by the men and only falteringly by the women. The deceased is unknown to the vicar, who in turn is a stranger to the mourners, the only participant on intimate terms with all concerned, the corpse included, being the undertaker. Unsolemn, hygienic and somehow retail, the service is so scant as to be scarcely a ceremony at all, and is not so much simple as inadequate. These clipboard send-offs have no swell to them, no tide, there is no launching for the soul, flung like Excalibur over the dark waters. How few lives now end full-throated to hymns soaring or bells pealing from the tower. How few escape a pinched suburban send-off, the last of a life, some half-known relatives strolling thankfully back to the car. Behind the boundary o
f dead rattling beech careful flower beds shelter from the wind, the pruned stumps of roses protruding from a bed of wood-chips.

  My mother’s funeral is all this, and her sisters’ too; gruesome occasions, shamefaced even and followed by an unconvivial meal. Drink would help but our family has never been good at that, tea the most we ever run to with the best cups put out. Still, Mam’s life does have a nice postscript when en secondes funèbres she is brought together with my father and her ashes put in his grave.

  This takes place in the graveyard in the village where the vicar, the bluff straightforward bearded Mr Dalby, digs the little hole himself and puts together a makeshift service. Consolation is inappropriate as no one is grieving and, the prayers over, we are uncertain what to do. We stand there with the wind threshing the sycamores, wondering if that is all there is and if we can go now.

  It ought to be me or my brother who takes charge, but after a moment or two’s awkward waiting with wonderful inappropriateness it is my friend Anne, unrelated and now entirely unconnected with the family, who picks up some earth and throws it into the casket, whereupon we all follow suit.

  ‘Well,’ I can imagine my mother saying, as she did when excusing some lapse or discounting the gossip, ‘well, she’s right enough.’

  Now we stroll back up to the village where she had come in such despair and anguish of mind twenty-five years before. I still live here with my partner, as the phrase is, who is fonder of the house and the village even than I am. He is thirty years younger than me and what the village makes of this I do not know and now at last I do not care. That, at least, my parents’ lives have taught me.

  Postscript

  The church in our village is not one that Philip Larkin would have thought worth stopping for and I fancy he wouldn’t even have bothered to take off his cycle clips. Rebuilt in the early nineteenth century, it’s neither frowsty nor much-accoutred but barn it certainly is, a space that on the few occasions I’ve seen it full never seems so and even a large congregation in full voice sounds thin and inadequate.

  I think of this church often these days as it will be where my funeral will doubtless be held and hymn-singing, though I seldom do it nowadays, has always been for me a great pleasure. But not in our village church and I feel sorry for the congregation that has to sing me out.

  Nor, I’m afraid, is there much to divert the eye, with few monuments to muse on, no glass to speak of, no screen, just a plainness and lack of ornament that in a small church might be appealing but in a place the size of this seem frigid and bare.

  There are, it’s true, glimpses through the clear glass of the trees in the churchyard outside, and the churchyard is altogether pleasanter than the church it surrounds. Painted once by John Piper for Osbert Sitwell (his series of paintings of the village now at Renishaw), the churchyard is backed by trees with the beck on one side and a waterfall behind, and it looks over some cottages across the lane and down to the village below. Not a bad place to end up, I think, except that I shan’t, as the graveyard is full and burials nowadays are in the overflow cemetery on the other side of the bypass (built circa 1970) and en route for the station. To reach this graveyard means walking down to the end of the village and then, since the A65 is the main road to the Lake District and traffic incessant, taking the underpass put in specifically for cows and schoolchildren living south of the village. The tunnel also carries the beck which, if in spate, tends to flood the gate at the other end and so means wet feet.

  None of which matters if coming by car (or hearse), though mourners should be prepared for a long wait at the bypass and an unhearselike scoot across when there’s a rare break in the traffic. On the left as you go down the road is one of Coultherd’s fields, which if it’s a weekend will have its quota of caravans and the occasional camper.

  The cemetery is small and surrounded by trees, sycamore mostly and horse chestnut but not the preferred beech. When we first came to the village in 1966 there was still a chapel of rest here, but that has gone, though a patch of red and buff tiles still marks the spot, some of which we bought from the parish and now form our kitchen floor. The only other building is a dilapidated shed in the south-eastern corner which also shelters the water butt.

  The graves are in rows, some of them unmarked and very few of them with kerbs and plots, the graveyard largely laid to grass. My father’s grave and my mother’s ashes are on what is currently the last row on the eastern edge. He died in August 1974 aged seventy-one, and my mother nearly twenty years later when she was ninety-one. His neighbours in death are folks he may have known to say ‘Good morning’ to, most of the people buried here on those sort of terms, some of them families like Cross and Kay and Nelson who have been in the village for generations.

  When I ordered the gravestone for my father I made some effort not to have one of the shiny marble jobs with gilt letters that most people seem to go in for. I wanted it plain, as plain as one of the war graves in France. And so it is, though not looking quite like that, as stained by damp and with too much in the way of lettering and so rather crowded.

  On the grave is a kitchen storage jar which we use for flowers, anything more elaborate likely to be stolen. The flowers I periodically put there are from the garden, which Dad would have liked, though in the summer when the grass grows the place is a sea of dog daisies which he would have liked more, the whole graveyard a haven for wild flowers. One in particular grows here and is a favourite of mine, the water avens (Geum rivale), which Richard Mabey describes as having ‘cup-shaped flowers, flushed with purple, pink and dull orange’, which for some reason suggests strawberries though the strawberry flower is white. He also says it’s ‘a glamorous and secretive species’, and in the cemetery it grows round the water butt where I fill the storage jar.

  Filling the jar at the water butt reminds me of a similar watering place, a tap and an iron trough in New Wortley Cemetery down Tong Road, where I used to go with my grandmother as a child to tend that unmarked grass-covered tump that was my grandfather’s grave. Because it was unmarked I was never certain of its precise location, and finding my way back there from the cistern, both hands gripped round a brimming vase, was never easy. Grandma is a tall woman, but she is likely to be bent down over the grave and invisible behind the gravestones. I dodge in and out among the graves, holding the heavy vase, trying to find a way through this sepulchral maze. I think I am lost and will never find it but then that is what I always think and suddenly, rounding an angel, I come upon Grandma on her knees snipping at the grass with her kitchen scissors.

  The anemones she has bought at Sleights, the greengrocer on the corner of Green Lane, are put in the vase and we thread our way out, walking back hand in hand down the main avenue towards the cemetery gates with the battlements of Armley Gaol looming up behind us.

  Sometimes as I’m standing by their grave I try and get a picture of my parents, Dad in his waistcoat and shirtsleeves, Mam in her blue coat and shiny straw hat. I even try and say a word or two in prayer, though what and to what I’d find it hard to say.

  ‘Now then’ is about all it amounts to. Or ‘Very good, very good’, which is what old men say when a transaction is completed.

  * During the war Dad was a warden in the ARP, his companion on patrol a neighbour, Joe Fitton. Somebody aroused Joe’s ire (a persistent failure to draw their blackout curtains, perhaps), and one night, having had to ring the bell and remonstrate yet again, Joe burst out, ‘I’d like to give them a right kick up the arse.’ This wasn’t like Joe at all and turned into a family joke – and a useful one too, as Dad never swore, so to give somebody a kick up the arse became euphemistically known as ‘Joe Fitton’s remedy’. With Dad it even became a verb: ‘I’d like to Joe Fitton him.’

  * See ‘A Common Assault’, p. 557.

  * See ‘Uncle Clarence’ in Writing Home, p. 22.

  Written on the Body

  MATRON: I don’t know what Mr Franklin will do without you.

  HEADMASTER: Don’
t you? The first thing he will do is abolish corporal punishment, the second thing he will do is abolish compulsory games. And the third thing he will do is abolish the cadet corps. Those are the three things liberal schoolmasters always do, Matron, the first opportunity they get. They think it makes the sensitive boys happy. In my experience sensitive boys are never happy anyway, so what is the point?

  (Forty Years On)

  I sit at my desk in Form 4A, at thirteen just into long trousers, and noting, as he stumbles through some French translation, that since last week Ackroyd’s voice seems to have broken. Stones across the aisle is growing out of his blazer, his head down on the desk, chin resting on one thick-wristed hand, the other out of sight somewhere beneath his desk. Stuart Jennings has shaved, I see, the faint moustache he has had for a month or two now gone, and even Simpson, nearly a year younger than me, is starting to fill out and, silhouetted against the window onto Otley Road, I note how thick his eyelashes have become.

  The chief burden of my youth (and I do feel it as a burden) is that I take a long time growing up, and on that score feel myself set apart, stigmatised even. Boys matured later then than they do now, but none as late as I seem doomed to do when even at sixteen I am still a boy in a classroom of young men. They complain about acne; I long for it. They shave; I have no need to. In those days at the onset of puberty boys abandoned their fringe and ‘put their hair back’, a process which means enduring a few weeks of mockery while they look like hedgehogs before settling down to floppy adulthood. This hurdle, too, I fail to take, my hair at sixteen still the fringe it has always been and which it has remained ever since. So whereas my friends are no sooner out of the school gates before they thrust their school caps, the badge of boyhood, into their pockets, I don’t bother. Why should I? I still look like a boy.