Day 2 – Gone with the Wind

Hunt the Slipper

Each time we try and start to walk on time we are disadvantaged to find our shoes have been liberated by Dinah so we have to hunt the slipper all over the garden. Dinah thinks this a great game! She has also perfected the skill of tripping me up, which she does simply by winding the long lead round my legs so I am swaying unsteadily and immobile while she stares challengingly at me with her vast red tongue hanging out,

The highlight of today was Ruskin’s view outside Kirkby Lonsdale which has to be one of the most attractive small towns in Merrie England,

Two lovely walkers come with us and one drove all the way from Newcastle to do so

Gone with the Wind

Jane and I are now at an age when we could host rooms full of friends and relatives whom we have loved deeply and who are now dead. This culling appears to be a slow but inexorable process. The cast list of our lives remains static for a long time then suddenly the grim reaper plays catch-up and cuts down half a dozen with a single swish of his scythe. And these individuals have not “passed away” or been “gathered” – they are bloody well dead. Dickens was not being morbid when he described Scrooge’s late business partner, Marley, as “dead as a doornail”.

Yet, I find the absence of these loved ones an outrage. I can see their faces sometimes and we speak in my dreams. At unexpected moments, a voice catches me unawares, or a place, a smell, a picture or a snatch of music triggers a vivid memory. I can feel a presence so powerfully, it’s as if that person was with me still. But of course, I’m dreaming – they have gone with the wind.

Dying and Done For…

When people die, what happens to all their work and activity? Where does it go? I have a small photograph of my mother set in a silver frame. She must have been about 11 or so when it was taken; she is playing with a straw and giving a half smile. She was a deeply emotional woman and perhaps the fact she grew up without a father made it hard for her to express her feelings. In her youth, she was beautiful, talented and carefree until the experiences of wartime, betrayal and a broken marriage conspired to batter some of the innocence and joy from her.

After my father died relatively young – few fully recovered after being gassed during the First World War – there was little money to go around. In order to pay for schooling and the rest of the bills, Mum morphed into a highly successful scriptwriter and crossword compiler. For 25 years, she wrote the music and scripts for the Edinburgh, Glasgow and Newcastle pantomimes. Today her scripts lie forgotten, filed away in slim, neat envelopes buried in a grey trunk. Yet in her day, Mum’s clever scripts filled theatres and she made thousands of people laugh. She achieved all this as well as bringing up three children. This was before she coughed her lungs and life away in a slow and hideous death by courtesy of British American Tobacco (the outfit which, now I think of it, comprehensively did for my father too.)

Just before she died, when I was very busy being an MP, I managed to find a little time to fly to Edinburgh to see her. It was a shocking trip. My once magnificent and very able mother lay in a room surrounded by the ghastly apparatus of cancer: ranks of pills, bottles and potions. She had shrunk from nine to about four stone, and lay inert like a large bird as the illness pitilessly scraped the flesh away from her body. She was half drunk on morphine and her frightened, grey eyes stared large from her ravaged, parchment face. My mother was mentally acute and she knew exactly what was happening. She would gather herself for an immense effort, muttering softly between harsh breaths; then a fit of coughing would silence her and she would slump exhausted between the pillows. I heard a few whispers. In my despair at her plight, I wanted to give her a morphine overdose but I didn’t know how. If I could, though, I think I would have helped to end her suffering, for she was dying and to hell with the consequences. Then I wept, for it was far too late for me to restore our relationship to what it might have been. I could do nothing for Mum, for dying is a lonely business. As I watched her lying there, all the laughter, struggles and the achievements of her life seemed to slip away.

Now of course my mother is dead, but where have the laughter and love gone? Do the lines from Betjeman’s poem “Song of Nightclub Proprietess” sum it up?

But I’m dying now and done for,

What on earth was all the fun for?

For I’m old and ill and terrified and tight.

Does my mother’s striving and achievements make any difference to anything at all? Of course it’s now family history and of no interest to anyone except me, but I want to know. No wonder people drink and take drugs in order to hide the pain, despair and the utter randomness of it all. And then at Mum’s funeral, the bloody vicar got her name wrong.

Rage, Rage…

Some years ago, I went to Las Vegas and I saw an astonishing act where someone managed to make an elephant disappear on the stage. I am not a complete fool and of course I understand that the elephant disappears once a night on weekdays and twice on Saturdays, and that we are happy participants in a neat illusion. But the vanishing act of my parents, my relatives and so many of my friends troubles me. Are they such stuff as dreams are made of and is our little life really rounded in a sleep?

What happens in the great unknown to people with no faith? My mother was not a “believer” as tidy-minded Christians would have it, and I suppose some of them will think at worst she has gone to hell, or at best tell me, “God in His wisdom knows best.” But I don’t think Mum ever met anyone who knew the first thing about the Gospel so she ended up as a sort of wishy-washy, hand-me-down Anglican. So, where is she now? It’s as if God has pulled off a monstrous vanishing trick and I worry about it more than words can express. Dylan Thomas wrote, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light” – if anything, he understates my anguish for my mother by a country mile.

I told Jane about my sense of outrage. Being the Scottish farmer’s daughter with Presbyterian instincts that she is, she finds my anguish ludicrous. She never wastes time fretting about such “nonsense” and acknowledges that since so much is wrapped in a mystery, we are best to shut up and just get on with it.

“What’s the point in agonising about this sort of thing?” Jane asks. “The grandchildren have to be picked up from school and there are bills to be paid. We all do the best we can Dear, so stop wittering on in such a self-indulgent way.”

Okay, okay… to some extent, of course Jane is right. Life is as it is, and death completes the circle. All this I know… but still, I find the absence of the people I love an outrage. Perhaps the final paragraph of George Eliot’s Middlemarch sums it up well enough:

“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as the might have been, is half owing to the numbers who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

That will have to do for the time being… have another drink?