I

MY FATHER, WHO left school in 1913, aged thirteen, was certainly not illiterate. He could read and write perfectly well but he did neither fluently. Writing, especially, he found difficult, something he had to labour over, with even a signature requiring concentration. Writing of any sort worried him, and so it was a surprise after he died to find he had kept a diary and had written in it every day. He may have kept earlier diaries but the ones which have survived start in 1969. He gave that one up in May. In 1970, he got to July before he stopped, but from 1971 he completed the entire year and as time went on wrote more, not less.

On 4 June 1990, my father recorded that he was eighty-nine and a half years old, but only did so in one of the two diaries he was in fact keeping, the Expert Diary, a gardener’s diary published by D. G. Hessayon. ‘Got out Bright and Sunny. Dismantled edge. Big job. Tidy up. 89 1/2 year old.’ In his other diary (Nestlé’s, given to him by my brother, who worked for that company) the entry reads: ‘Bright and Sunny. Warm. Bit wind. Dismantling edge. Big job for me. All OK.’ Two diaries filled in, with almost exactly the same mundane information, simply because he had been given two for Christmas and it would be a waste not to use both. I don’t know what dismantling an edge means, though I expect gardeners do, but I know why he recorded a half-birthday: he wanted to reach ninety, like his grandfather. The nearer his ninetieth birthday came, the more impressed he was by his own age. It was hugely significant.

He was furious with himself on 2 July. ‘Light showers. Mild. Cut grass. Front and Back. Had a Fall in Back. No Reason for it. Damage glasses. Worse. Eye. Bit blood. Pack up for the day.’ Then he hid. He didn’t want his kind, caring neighbours to see his damaged face. They would be concerned and might tell somebody, and somebody might call the doctor and the doctor might make him go to the infirmary, and he was not having that. So on Tuesday and Wednesday he kept out of sight, though he worried that this in itself would cause suspicion. He was a man of rigid routine. He shopped every weekday in his local shopping area, Denton Holme. He walked the half-mile there and caught the bus back, arriving home at twelve noon precisely. This shopping was important and people knew it was. Strangely, for a working man of his era, my father had always liked to shop. It was a task he was always happy to do for my mother and he did it well, going to the covered market to buy heavy foodstuffs so that she wouldn’t be too burdened carrying them home herself. Once he’d retired and she had had her first minor stroke, he’d more or less taken over all the shopping. So the shopkeepers of Denton Holme knew him well. They knew he nipped into the betting shop after he’d been to the butcher’s for his sausages and before he went into the bread shop for his teacakes. Should he fail to turn up for more than a couple of days, enquiries as to his health might be made – which they were. Mrs Nixon rang up on Wednesday evening to ask if he was all right. ‘Grand,’ he said, ‘only I’ve been too busy to get out. I’ve been sorting bedding.’ Explanation accepted, he was relieved. He’d got away with his Fall and by the next day the cut over his eye had stopped bleeding and the swelling was down. He could go out again, and anyway he had to because he had no bread left.

This episode did rather emphasise how low he kept his stock of food and how shopping had taken on another dimension. In his extreme old age it provided the spur, indeed it fulfilled the positive need, to go out at all. It motivated him in a way he liked. Again and again I’d asked him to let me fill his cupboards with emergency provisions in case he became housebound, but he would not allow it. ‘No! I have to get out,’ he said. He accepted a couple of tins of Nestlé’s food which my brother occasionally brought him, but he would not permit any methodical piling up of nourishing foods that would keep. This was why they knew him so well in the local shops and knew exactly what he bought and where. They were kind to him in unobtrusive ways. Realising that it was a struggle for him to load his shopping bag and hold his stick to keep his balance, the shopkeepers were adept at helping him. His worn leather bag was not very large and it filled quickly, but then he had not much to put in it, since he only bought two ounces of this and a quarter of that. Bread was purchased once a week, a large thick-sliced white loaf, and filled the bag, but then he bought nothing else that day.

He didn’t attempt, after his fall, to go to town that Thursday, though it was his regular day for doing so. It was an adventure, by then, going ‘up street’ and he looked forward to it. He went to Marks & Spencer’s food hall, where they sold plaice, individual portions, in breadcrumbs, and since first I’d bought it for him he’d become addicted to it. He only bought this fish and a bag of Devon Toffees. The price of Marks & Spencer’s vegetables appalled him, and he still grew all he needed in his own garden. On his way to and from Marks & Spencer, he liked to take in what was happening in English Street. ‘Ruination’ was his description. He disapproved of the Town Hall being painted in a terracotta colour and saw no sense in pedestrianising the area in front of it – ‘it’s like the bloomin’ Sahara’ (the paving bricks used were rust-red and the space wonderfully large and open). The attractive benches dotted around were an abomination and only encouraged idlers to sit about. But he missed his weekly jaunt when he could not manage it, in spite of being spared the tension of getting the bus. He had trouble dismounting – the bus drivers often pulled up too far from the kerb for him to alight with ease and he would attempt to get them to correct their parking position, which could lead to heated exchanges of words. Then there was the performance over his bus pass. He always had it ready, but some drivers didn’t bother looking at it and he insisted they should. So it was exhausting going to town, but it was also stimulating, and he missed it.

Three weeks after this fall, my father’s sister-in-law died. Nan was eighty-two, seven years younger than he was. ‘Nan died. Change in weather. Carlisle Races’ he wrote in one diary and in the other, still without the slightest trace of any emotion, ‘Nan died. Change in weather. Dull. Run to Caldbeck H & M.’ So I and my family were staying in our cottage at Caldbeck, twenty minutes away in the northern fells, which is why I came to hear his comment that day on my aunt’s death. ‘She had it coming,’ he said. ‘She was a good age.’ There was neither regret nor the smallest evidence of distress in this statement. He had never liked Nan and there was about him that day an undeniable and not entirely pleasant air of triumph: she was dead, he had won, he was going to make ninety. He didn’t seem to regard Nan’s death as heralding his own. There was no sighing, no shuddering, no intimation of his own mortality. Yet, obviously, if he thought Nan had died at a good age and that she had had it coming, how much more was he and did he? But he appeared quite serene and untroubled.

Both diaries reported that 4 December 1990 was an exceptionally fine, mild, sunny day in north-west England. What a blessing. It made my father’s ninetieth-birthday lunch so much easier to organise and all the necessary travelling trouble-free. My brother Gordon and his wife Shirley drove up from Surrey, and my sister Pauline and her husband David from Northamptonshire, without any worries about icy roads or snowstorms. Hunter and I were already in Loweswater, where we’d moved from Caldbeck three years previously, preparing the house for the big event. It only involved seven of us, counting my father. It had been agreed that since 4 December fell on a Tuesday, and because the weather could not be depended on, the grandchildren would all telephone but not come up. So it was going to be a small party but the preparations felt immense. Roast beef was called for, best sirloin, a huge piece, or the birthday boy would think nothing of the meal. Roast beef of Old England was what he wanted, with all the trimmings – roast potatoes, boiled potatoes, boiled cabbage and Brussels sprouts and carrots and, of course, Yorkshire pudding with gravy. My mother (who died in 1981) had made deliciously light Yorkshire puddings. Alas, she had failed to pass the secret on to me but I was going to have to try to imitate hers, or the disappointment – ‘What, no Yorkshire pudding?’ – would ruin the dinner.

I’m not much good at cakes either but luckily a professionally baked and iced cake was not just acceptable but preferred. It gave status. My father only ever ate sponge cake of the variety known as Madeira, and he didn’t like icing, but for his ninetieth the cake must look impressive, so he conceded that iced the cake would have to be in order for his name and age to be written upon it in blue. Cards were of more importance than presents. Cards, to be, in his opinion, real cards, had to have verses – none of this ‘left blank for your own message’ cheating. I’d made mine out of blue cardboard using photographs of him which roughly corresponded to each decade. Arthur, aged twenty, on his motor bike on the Isle of Man (where he went for the TT races); Arthur, aged thirty-one, marrying my mother; Arthur, aged forty, standing by a machine in the Metal Box factory – and so on. And I’d made up doggerel to go with each one which would pass muster, just, as verses. My present was a copy of The Times for 4 December 1900. He’d never in his life read The Times, but I thought he’d like the idea.

He arrived at midday looking incredibly smart in his best suit and with a sparkling white shirt to go with it and a new blue tie – but then he always looked smart. A little unsteady getting out of my brother’s car but soon upright, trilby hat firmly on, bright blue silk handkerchief peeping out of his jacket pocket, shoes polished to army standards. No beaming smile on his face, however. No. Smiling was always a difficult, faintly embarrassing business. His lips could never learn the trick of opening up into a generous smile. If they attempted to, as they were then trying to, they wavered and quivered, resisting automatically the necessary abandon. But, ‘Grand day,’ he said, and, ‘Champion,’ and he nodded in salutation to each of us. No embraces, no kisses, perish the thought. He stood for a minute, surveying Mellbreak, the fell above Crummock Water which soars over our fields. The sun was full on it and every rock, every patch of green, was brilliantly lit. ‘Grand,’ he said again, and then was happy to be led into the conservatory, where the presents lay on the table. He settled himself in a comfortable chair and admired all the (hastily bought) plants but could hardly take his eyes off the view. The fells, usually so bleak at that time of the year, were indeed made soft and beautiful by the nature of that morning’s sunlight and this was the best present of all. We were each thanked for our respective gifts – ‘Thank you now, thank you very much’ – and photographs were allowed. We opened champagne (which he didn’t like but agreed was mandatory for the occasion), and then we trooped through to the kitchen for lunch.

Our table was unrecognisable, its battered wooden surface covered for the first time in its humble life by a rigidly starched pristine white cloth. There was even a linen napkin for each guest, ironed into triangles of geometric precision. There were flowers, blue cornflowers I’d managed to procure with great difficulty, in a crystal bowl (which once belonged to his mother) in the centre. The roast beef, mercilessly overcooked so that not a hint of pink flesh was visible when cut, was lying on a proper platter, a great oval dish of willow-patterned blue and white. The carving knife was for once sharpened to lethal efficiency and my brother carved with suitable skill and authority. The cabbage and Brussels sprouts had been satisfactorily boiled to eliminate any chance of crispness remaining and were piled in sodden heaps in tureens. The potatoes (roast) were browned perfectly and the potatoes (boiled) floury. The carrots, cut into chunks of the prescribed length (two inches), added a touch of robust colour. About the Yorkshire puddings it is better not to speak. I’d made individual ones, thinking I had a better chance of success, and not a single one had risen to the fluffy heights looked for. The gravy was in that quaint article called a gravy boat and looked suspiciously thin.

We ate. My father ate more than anyone. Gordon gave him three slices of beef and he requested another, to be cut from the top of the joint where the fat was thickest. He relished fat, all kinds of fat, and had tortured us for years with his sucking and chewing of it. I gave him two roast potatoes and two boiled, and he said, ‘Put another of each on.’ He said he would risk a Yorkshire pudding but he might not finish it, and he swamped it with gravy, saying, ‘Is this gravy?’ I apologised for it and he very kindly said I was not to worry, there was an art to gravy which my mother had possessed and I did not, it couldn’t be helped. Such generosity. I was overwhelmed. He had seconds of the beef and then, after a short pause, we moved on to ice-cream. It was the only pudding he liked and he liked it plain, plain vanilla. The cake was lifted onto the cleared table and I lit the nine candles and we all sang: ‘Happy birthday, dear Arthur, happy birthday to you.’

There was an odd sound. I couldn’t at first identify it. As our singing, surprisingly lusty, tailed off, there was this strange, compressed noise, half sigh, half groan. My father was weeping. His head was bowed, his shoulders hunched, and he was weeping not extravagantly but quite unnervingly distinctly. Hardly had we all registered this than he had taken out a handkerchief (not the blue one in his suit jacket top pocket which was for show and never to be used, not even in emergencies such as this) and was blowing his nose vigorously. ‘Damn silly,’ he muttered, and: ‘Don’t know what’s got into him. Ridiculous.’ He took his spectacles off and held them up and peered at them, as though they might be to blame for such outrageous behaviour. Shaking his head, he put them back on and said, ‘I’ll have some more of that ice-cream with a piece of the cake when it’s been cut.’ I gave him a knife and he cut it, down through the ‘A’ for Arthur.

So it passed quickly, that one evidence of emotion we had ever seen him give way to. And we allowed it to, we encouraged the swift passing on to mundane matters, as relieved as he was that it was over. My father had never wept. When distressing things had happened – the commonplace tragedies of family life, the illnesses and accidents – he had always just grunted and said, ‘Pity.’ Even when my mother died he didn’t shed any tears before us (though he may well have done in private). He looked stricken, but he didn’t weep. In his diary for that day, he wrote, ‘Lily died. 7.30 a.m. Sad’ – and that was that. All his immense grief was rigidly contained before us. His concern when I went with him to the infirmary to see my mother’s dead body was over a missing knife. He hid his distress behind his fury that according to him it had been stolen. This wretched knife was a special knife, fashioned to act as a fork too, made specially for people, like my mother, who had had strokes and could only use one hand. It was not on the list of Patient’s Property we were given to sign before my mother’s few belongings could be released. One dressing-gown, one pair of slippers, one bed-jacket, six nightdresses, one hairbrush, one comb, one pair of glasses – but no knife. My father was livid. He held this list in a shaking hand and concentrated enough to read out the small print at the bottom: ‘I agree that the above list covers all the items deposited by me.’ Waving the sheet of paper about he raged. ‘It doesn’t. There’s no knife!’ I didn’t waste time trying to persuade him that it surely didn’t matter when the knife was of no intrinsic value and in any case was only a reminder of a sad disability. I signed it myself, without his being aware I’d done so, in the privacy of the sister’s office. He left the ward triumphant, convinced he’d stood up for his rights. The energy he’d used up, this forceful display of righteous indignation, had kept any tears at bay.

But now, on his ninetieth birthday, he had wept, if briefly. From happiness, I could only presume. After my mother died, when finally we were leaving him to go back to London, he said to me, ‘I suppose I might see you all some time.’ It was said as I was leaving his house, as I walked down the hall to the door, with him behind me. I turned and said, ‘Whatever do you mean, you might see us, some time?’ He mumbled, ‘With your Mam gone …’ ‘What difference does that make?’ I said sharply. ‘For heaven’s sake, we’ll be coming all the holidays exactly as always.’ But his thinking had been painfully obvious: our mother was the one we all loved, she was the draw, and without her we would discard him. We didn’t, of course, but if it had gratified him that our attentions had remained the same, he never said so. I imagined that those few tears at his birthday lunch were because he felt valued for himself and perhaps felt fortunate. But perhaps not. Nobody was foolish or brave enough to ask him. His embarrassment was ours and we all conspired to get over it as rapidly as possible with much eating of cake.

The rest of the day passed in a haze of relief – it was over, he was ninety, the great event had taken place, the celebrating had been well and truly done. He sat in the conservatory all afternoon with his binoculars trained on the craggy end of Mellbreak while he followed a particularly huge bird, hoping it would prove to be an eagle (it didn’t, it was at the best a buzzard). My sister and her husband took him home, stopping in Cockermouth, where the spire of All Saints was to be lit up in his honour (or anyone else’s, if they were prepared to pay for it). It didn’t light up very convincingly but my father, unusually, was prepared to be indulgent and told me later on the telephone that it had been a poor show but I was not to mind. In his diary, he wrote: ‘Good day. Dry. Sun. 90 year old. At Loweswater for lunch. Margaret cooking good. G & S, D & P, H & M. And me, AF.’

We expected him to shift his sights to a hundred now he’d reached ninety, but he didn’t. In fact, he seemed a little puzzled as to how to approach the rest of his life however long it turned out to be. ‘I can’t go on for ever,’ he said, soon after, and I made the smart and silly rejoinder, ‘I don’t see why not.’ It clearly fascinated him wondering how long he could indeed go on for, but meanwhile he carried on conducting his future around the demands of his garden. On 23 April 1991 he sowed three rows of potatoes and two rows of onions to feed himself for that year; on the 30th he planted six new rose bushes: Silver Lining, Tahiti Hybrid Tea, Colour Wonder, Fragrant Cloud, Sutters Gold, and Speraks Yellow. They would take at least three years to establish and flower to his satisfaction. On 1 June he bought a new raincoat ‘to see me out’. Considering his old one had lasted twenty-five years, this was alarming. Life was clearly continuing as normal and no lack of confidence in it was being betrayed.

We had good outings with him that summer, all recorded as ‘smashing’. The best of them were, as ever, to the seaside, to Silloth and Skinburness, lunching at the Skinburness Hotel. There was a special thrill for my father in patronising this hotel, which he thought of as very grand. The manager, an affable fellow, very formally dressed, liked to go round chatting to patrons, and my father liked us to chat to him. ‘You’ve been coming here a long time, I gather, Mr Forster?’ he said, having been told this by Hunter (who was far too talkative for my father’s liking). He grunted. ‘You know this place well, do you?’ the manager persisted. ‘Should do,’ my father said. ‘Put the boiler in, didn’t I? In 1921. No, 1920. Walked with it on my back from Silloth Station, didn’t I?’ Did he? The manager couldn’t know, we couldn’t know, but nobody dared dispute it. I actually didn’t want to, though it sounded impossible. It conjured up such a magnificent picture: my father, the working man personified, staggering along the sea wall all the way from Silloth, a boiler on his back, bowed down with the weight of it, the waves crashing to the left of him, showering him with icy spray, the wind howling all around, threatening to knock him over, but on he goes, arriving at last, drenched and exhausted, at the posh hotel, making his way to the tradesman’s entrance and being shown by some disdainful lackey to the boiler room, where he fits the new boiler … Really? Surely he meant he carried his tools on his back, or parts for the new boiler, and not an actual boiler? A boiler for an hotel would be enormous; he couldn’t have attempted to lift it on his own, never mind carry it. But we all smiled and raised our eyebrows at each another and said nothing. It wasn’t so much that we were being condescending, allowing him his unlikely story, as wanting him to be happy with his memory.

And being there did make him happy. He loved the drive there in our comfortable car, especially the moment when we turned off the Silloth road to follow the small winding road that led to the marsh and we saw the Solway across it. The landscape is so empty and lonely there, so flat and wide, that the eye can sweep across it uninterrupted until it meets the Scottish hills on the other side of the estuary. We always drove very, very slowly, not at all in a hurry to reach the hotel. But he liked going into the hotel too. Every minute change in its interior decor was noted and commented on – ‘Hello! New wallpaper!’ – as though it was revolutionary. He preferred eating in the bar (more stories about 1920) but on Sundays he quite liked the thrill of lunching in the dining-room with the sense of occasion this gave. He approved of its formality, the pale-green linen tablecloths and the crystal goblets and the china plates, but he didn’t like the wickerwork chairs, which he said cut into his back. I said they looked pretty, though, and that always started us off on a discussion worthy of William Morris, of comfort versus art, of usefulness versus beauty.

Sometimes our outings were more adventurous. My father liked the old outings but he liked exploring too, especially if there was an object to the exploration. He liked it best of all if we were trying to find some place and got lost. One bitterly cold March day we drove to the Pennines in search of a restaurant we’d read about which was near Alston. He hadn’t been anywhere near Alston for decades and he was all excitement as we started on the long climb up to it, reminiscing about how he’d toiled up once on his bike. It began to snow, great swirling clouds of snowflakes billowing around the car. My father loved it. The mild element of possible danger delighted him. ‘We might get snowed in,’ he said. I winced at the horror of that prospect – snowed in, with my father … On we went, the snow first lessening, so that we could see perfectly, then sweeping down again in thick gusts of wind so that visibility all but disappeared. It was hard to credit we were going to find any building at all, never mind anything as fancy as a restaurant. We reached Alston and then left it behind, pressing on into even more remote territory, still climbing, still pursued by snow flurries. ‘Maybe we should turn back,’ I murmured. ‘Let’s find somewhere to eat in Alston.’ ‘Turn back?’ my father said, in tones of outrage. ‘After we’ve come all this way? Don’t be daft.’ He was so content himself, secure in the front seat of our big car driving through this wild landscape. ‘We can’t give up,’ he said, firmly, ‘no good doing that. We’ll carry on. We’ll find it.’

And we did. A strangely dark house up a lane, the way down to it treacherous. There was no one else in this ‘restaurant’, which was really just someone’s home. But once inside we sat very happily in a shabby, rather artistic sitting-room where there was a huge log fire and the owner, a woman who was both cook and waitress, served us the most delicious meal, steak so tender my father never stopped exclaiming and an array of vegetables of astonishing variety considering the time of year and the obvious fact that they had not been frozen. Her apple pie was sublime, the apples in quarters, firm but not hard, and the pastry light and flaky – oh, how we drooled, even my father who never touched puddings. We drank as well, which may have contributed a good deal to what followed. My father had two pints of beer, which he downed even more quickly than usual, and then, as it was so cold outside, a whisky. ‘Grand,’ he said, ‘and you were going to give up. Never give up. Never-give-up.’ ‘Thank you, oh wise one,’ I said. He sighed with what seemed like true happiness and then suddenly said, ‘One day soon, I’ll just pop off. Pop.’ We laughed – it was impossible not to, he had said it in such a droll fashion, making a real popping sound, and he repeated it. ‘Pop. I’ll just pop off.’ It was clear this is how death seemed to him, a matter of popping off, disappearing in a puff of smoke, all done in a second. He might not understand how this would be managed, but this appeared not to bother him. It would be arranged. All he had to do was what he called ‘put my time in’. Life was nothing more than a sentence fixed by a hidden judge and it did not frustrate him not to know its length. It was not his to reason why. He had no religious faith whatsoever but that made no difference to his conviction that there was a plan for when he would die.

For a man of ninety years, his health was still good. His experience of doctors had been brief. He first went to his GP in 1916, when he injured his right knee in a motor-bike accident, but then it was eleven years before he troubled the doctor again with what was diagnosed as sciatica. In 1933, he had his ears syringed, in 1939 the doctor paid his first home visit to him when my father had influenza. He had no contact with any doctor during the forties and only one consultation in the fifties, about a sprained ankle. More bouts of flu followed in the sixties, but it was not until the seventies that his medical notes began to need more than two sheets of paper. He had still never been in hospital, though he had been there once for an X-ray. As far as he was concerned he was fine except for arthritis, which began to trouble him in his eighties. He’d had twinges in his hands and feet for years but he wasn’t incapacitated by the arthritis as his mother had been. She ended up totally crippled but he remained mobile, helped by some medication. He was constantly on the move, walking a mile a day and gardening in all weathers, which probably also helped. Most winters he had at least one heavy cold, always entered in his diary as ‘flue’, but he didn’t count that as being ill. It wasn’t actually he who had ‘flue’ anyway. It was ‘A’. Whenever there was anything wrong with him he referred to himself in the third person as ‘A’ or ‘AF’ – ‘A. got cold’, ‘A. improving’. And he always did improve, rapidly, usually within three days. ‘A. in bed’ was followed the next day with ‘A. up’ and then ‘A. out. All OK.’ He simply went to bed with a hot-water bottle and a glass of whisky, and stayed there till he felt better, getting up only to go to the bathroom and to open and close the curtains so that nobody would suspect he was ill. Since one of us, his three children, rang every day at six o’clock in the evening he made sure he was briefly up then to take our call and then he retired to bed satisfied he’d fooled us. Afterwards, when he was better, he would tell us he’d been in bed ill and say, triumphantly, ‘But I managed.’ Managing was the purpose of life. And when he could no longer manage he’d just pop off.

At ninety, he visited his doctor’s surgery only to collect his prescription for his arthritis tablets and for some others to do with what he referred to as ‘the blood’. In March 1989, he’d broken his record of never having to go into the infirmary but he considered the record still stood because he was only there for a day while he had some kind of exploratory procedure to do with ‘the blood’. It was an odd episode about which he was deeply secretive. His diary records the unprecedented fact that he called for his doctor twice in January that year and again in February, and the reason was ‘BLOOD’, written in capital letters and underlined. The first I knew about his alarm was when he rang me in March to say he had to go into ‘that place’ for ‘an op, or something’ but if all went well and he had someone to take him home and stay with him they’d let him out the same day. ‘So I don’t know what I’m going to do,’ he finished in tones of the deepest gloom. I, of course, said I’d come and take him to the infirmary and stay with him. ‘I didn’t ask you, mind,’ he said. Quite. So I went to Carlisle, wondering if I dare ring his GP and ask what was going on, only to be greeted on my arrival with: ‘Don’t ask the doctor anything. Don’t you interfere. I know what’s what.’ I wished I did.

He was very nervous on the morning he was due to go for treatment (or investigation). He cut himself shaving, changed his shirt twice, put new laces in his shoes and then broke one tying it up. ‘I suppose I’ll have to take everything off, likely,’ he said, face contorted in anguish at the awful prospect. I said yes, very likely. He sighed and swallowed, and said, ‘Can’t be helped.’ We took a taxi to the infirmary and he sat staring straight ahead, failing for once to direct the taxi driver as to precisely which route he should take. I thought that once we had arrived at the day ward I might get the opportunity to ask what was going to be done to my father, but I couldn’t ask in front of him, and after he had been admitted and I was on my own I could find nobody who knew. At any rate, a couple of hours later it, whatever ‘it’ was, was all over and he had come round from his first anaesthetic quite charmed with the experience. ‘Count to ten, they said, and, blow me, I got to four and next thing I was awake and it was done.’ We went home with him in high spirits and I cooked him steak because he’d missed his dinner and the anaesthetic, far from leaving him nauseated, had sharpened his already formidable appetite. ‘Well, that’s that,’ he said, when he’d finished eating, ‘over and done with. I thought I was a goner.’ I wondered if it was all over, whether the problem of ‘the blood’ had indeed been solved, but since he was not called upon to return and was in due course given some pills to do with ‘the blood’ I presumed he was right and whatever was wrong with him hadn’t been serious. But it seemed so ridiculous not to know what had happened, though he didn’t think so. Ignorance was definitely bliss in health matters as far as he was concerned.

He took his arthritis tablets seriously, never failing to follow the instructions on the bottles. His prescription he regarded as a highly important piece of paper which he handled with something approaching awe. He called it his ‘prep’ and the handing in of this ‘prep’ and collecting of the pills it entitled him to was a solemn business. The chemist in Denton Holme got to know him very well. My father would not queue, so if there was even one person waiting when he arrived in the chemist’s shop he’d turn round and leave. The chemist would offer him a chair to sit on and say he would only need to wait five minutes at the most, but, no, my father couldn’t possibly wait. It was a waste of time. He had all the time in the world, but no, sitting on a chair for a few minutes in a chemist’s shop was too much. Sometimes, during the five summer months when we were living at Loweswater and visiting him at least twice a week, he’d give me his ‘prep’ with instructions to be very, very careful with it and, once I’d handed it over to the chemist, equally careful with the pills he would give me in return. I was also honoured occasionally with the task of collecting the prescription itself from the doctor’s surgery. ‘You can get my prep,’ he’d say, with the air of conferring a great favour – ‘Put it straight in your purse, mind, not your pocket, take no chances.’ It was a mistake then to make some mocking rejoinder about getting a Securicor guard to accompany me – prescriptions were like gold dust and should be treated as such. They were what kept him independent, or rather gave him access to the means which kept him independent.

There was no doubt at all that as he entered his nineties what made his life precious to him was his independence. He did not want to feel in need of anyone’s support or help, not even his children’s. He liked to rule his own life, to decide each day exactly what he would do and when and how. It was what gave point to his existence. Activity of one sort or another was the key to the pleasure he still took in life, though pleasure is the wrong word. He never acknowledged doing anything for pleasure. Far too frivolous. On the contrary, he was motivated by obligation, by things having to be done with no choice about it. He had to get up every day, didn’t he? Well, then. And, once up, he had to wash and shave and dress and eat, didn’t he? So. Yet in the carrying out of all these rituals there was pleasure of a kind, even if he denied it. The first thing he did when he got up was to go into his kitchen, open the airing-cupboard door, and switch on the immersion heater for the hot-water tank. He loved this heater, which he called ‘the merser’, and he got definite pleasure from switching it on – click – and he was gratified, his day had begun. He’d wait a moment or two, feeling underneath the lagging round the tank, over which his socks and underclothes were draped to air, until the first faint warmth began and then he’d go back to bed until he reckoned the water would be properly hot enough to shave. A miracle of science to a man who’d spent half his life boiling water in a kettle if he wanted it hot.

He shaved every day, another pleasure, or rather the smooth, clean face afterwards was the pleasure. Beards and moustaches were an abomination, a sign of laziness, slackness, or of being foreign. But then came the real thrill of the day: the Cooked Breakfast. It used to be bacon, egg, sausage and fried bread, but now it was just bacon and toast. Good, thick, fatty bacon, though, from the butcher’s in Denton Holme, cut under his own eyes from a big joint and not any of that hopeless packaged stuff with all its flavour lost inside its plastic shroud. Three slices, fried until the fat oozed, then slammed between two slices of heavily buttered white toast – oh, and a generous dollop of HP sauce. He always used the same frying pan and if some of the bacon fat remained after the bacon was lifted out then so much the better. He left it there to congeal and start the next day’s bacon off nicely. He took his huge bacon sandwich through to his living-room and sat down to eat it at his table, spread with a tablecloth, keeping up the standards his wife had set. He had his Daily Express propped in front of him, leaning against the teapot sporting its woollen cosy. One cup of tea only, strongly brewed, with two sugars stirred into it. Grand. It set him up for the day, was the most important part of that day. He never, ever, started any day without his cooked breakfast. On the day the hospital phoned to say his wife had died at seven-thirty that morning he went straight to the kitchen, cooked his bacon and ate it at 8 a.m. as usual, grief-stricken though he was. He had to have his breakfast, didn’t he? Yes, he did. There was absolutely no question about it.

Nor was there ever any question about the shape of the rest of the day. Dishes had to be washed, almost before he’d finished eating from them, and dried and put away; clothes had to be soaked and scrubbed and then carried through into the garage (in which no car of his own had ever stood), where they had to be put through the mangle, then taken into the garden and pegged onto the clothes line, which then had to be hauled aloft with a long prop; shopping had to be done in Denton Holme, so it was on with his hat and coat and a firm grasp of his walking stick (only for use on such excursions) and off he had to go, at eleven o’clock, in order to get all his messages done and his bets put on and still be home in time for his dinner (bit of cold meat, bit of potato, another cup of tea) at twelve-thirty. Then a rest. A rest was not really in his plan for the day, it was not acknowledged as positively having to be allowed for, but it happened. A rest, a snooze, but only for half an hour, because he had to get into the garden to weed or dig, or cut the grass. In the summer the grass had to be cut every day so that it would not get too much for his old-fashioned mower and his waning strength. Then it was back into the house for his tea (a sandwich) so that he was ready to watch the Six o’Clock News on television and whatever programmes he fancied after that (sport, quizzes, gardening) until nine-thirty, when he had to have his supper (crackers and cheese) and go to bed, where he slept soundly and deeply.

He depended on nobody. What had to be done was done by and for himself. Life, his life, was about functioning on his own. Human contact and involvement were minimal. There was no need for them. He had his good neighbours to say hello to if he wished, he had shopkeepers to exchange the time of day with, he had his regular daily telephone calls from his children to keep him in touch. No friends came to see him. He had never valued friends and wasn’t going to start now. His wife had been the one with friends. Every day, when she was alive, there had been someone dropping in, but she’d died nearly ten years ago and since then his diaries had recorded ‘no visitors’. But this was not a complaint, nor was it noted sadly, not yet. If he wanted visitors he knew he could have them, but was still at the stage of not wanting them. They kept him back. They had to be talked to and listened to, and finally encouraged to leave if they were the stubborn type. Occasionally, an old friend of his wife’s did think she should call in on poor Arthur, all on his own, and would ring up and suggest a visit, only to be told: ‘I’m busy.’ Should anyone turn up uninvited he was perfectly capable of keeping them standing on the doorstep until they became discouraged and left and never, of course, came again. The only exceptions to this were children. Anyone with a child was welcome. Then, he became quite sociable and ushered the child in (ignoring the adult). He liked children, especially the under-fives, and they liked him.

What he liked best was playing with them. In his opinion, children didn’t need toys. Games could be made out of ordinary household objects and he proceeded to prove this with every visiting small child. Out would come his round, wickerwork peg basket and a pan and he’d start picking pegs out and throwing them into the pan and then, when six or seven had clattered in he’d put a lid on the pan and shake it violently before pouring them out and starting again. Children under three loved this and would immediately start to copy him and he’d cheer extravagantly as each wooden peg landed noisily in the pan. For older ones he had other entertainments. He’d bring out a leather pouch in which he kept old pennies and they were invited to scrutinise each penny, then put it on a pile according to its date, and soon they had a row of little towers balancing on the table. There was only one 1900 penny among them and the game was to find it. Then there was his bundle of knotted string which had to be unravelled to see who could get the longest length, and his box of postcards to be sorted into towns and countries, and his photograph albums in which babies now adults had to be identified, and his address book which popped open when each letter of the alphabet was pressed – oh, he was endlessly resourceful.

If these distractions flagged, he’d take the child by the hand into his garage to explore. He’d let them soak a towel in a bucket of water and then stand the child on a stool in front of his aged mangle and help them feed it into the rollers and turn the handle until the water streamed out. Children loved that. The compressing of the towel and the extracting of the water seemed a miracle to them unmatched by any modern washing machine, and they liked showing off their strength in the turning of the stiff handle, not realising my father was doing most of the turning. The pleasure he derived from their pleasure was visible and extraordinary and it created a bond between him and the children which other adults marvelled at. But his power over them vanished when the children reached puberty, especially the girls. Then he became awkward with them and critical, and he was inclined to label them ‘spoiled’ and separate himself from them.

This was how his life went on, his routine marking the days out and disturbed only when his family were staying nearby at Loweswater, forty miles away. Hunter and I were there for our five months each summer; Gordon and Shirley for a week in December for his birthday and a week in May; Pauline and David for three weeks at Christmas, two weeks at Easter, a week in October and very often a week in February. The grandchildren came and went for other odd weeks, so that for three-quarters of the year he had family visiting regularly. But even then routines had to be observed. No one could call on him before noon – ‘I’ll be out. Don’t bother’ – and he didn’t like outings or visits on Saturdays – ‘It isn’t convenient’ (i.e. sport on television). He wanted everything organised round his routines and we humoured him, even when his routine didn’t fit in with what we wanted. We drove obediently to his favourite places, with him directing. He couldn’t read a map but he knew exactly the route he wished to take and it was ‘turn right’ and ‘turn left, then left at the crossroads’, until often we had covered a hundred miles and were exhausted but he was in his element. If he misdirected us it was quite likely to be because he intended to – he liked claiming to be lost, because this would extend the drive.

We always stopped for lunch in pubs of his choice, most of them pretty to look at and horrible to eat in. When my mother was alive there was none of this. Then, I would make the lunch in their own kitchen and the drives were in the afternoons and the meal we ate out was tea. She loathed pubs as much as my father loved them, but once she was gone his way was open to patronise all the pubs in Cumbria – and how we worked our way through them. The gloomier the interior, the colder the atmosphere, the more overpowering the smell of staleness, the greasier the lunch, the more my father enjoyed himself. He’d establish himself on an uncomfortable wooden chair and make me read the menu out loud, not because he couldn’t read it but because he couldn’t seem to take menus in: however simple – and pub menus were very basic indeed – they somehow baffled him. What he wanted to eat was his favourite dish: fried plaice with chips. If this was not on the menu there was consternation – ‘Poor do, no plaice.’ I’d suggest haddock, or cod, but, no, if he was going to eat fish it had to be plaice and not cod, battered or otherwise. Haddock was quite beyond the pale. It had bones. Bones might stick in his throat. He was not going to take the chance at his age. He might choke to death. The Queen Mother, his exact contemporary, had once taken a chance on haddock and look what nearly happened to her. I said I’d no idea what nearly happened to her. He expressed exaggerated surprise and said he thought I was educated and kept up with what was important in newspapers. Dear me, fancy not knowing a fish bone had got stuck in the Queen Mother’s throat and she’d nearly been a goner.

We’d settle down to the awful meal with my father agreeing to have Cumberland sausage with his chips. While he concentrated on tucking in, I’d sit and wonder how buildings so attractive outside could be so ruined inside. In most of those where we ate, the old fittings had been chucked out and new ones put in. Stone floors had been covered with patterned carpets, stone walls plastered then wallpapered, old lamps replaced with strip lighting. Curiously, old prints and photographs survived and, though often garishly reframed, were the most interesting things to look at, a relief to the eye. Meanwhile, my father was finishing his pint and commenting on its quality. Some beers he detested. Jennings was one, which was unfortunate because Jennings is a Cumbrian brewery and ubiquitous in the county’s pubs. Luckily there was no one to hear his opinion of the beer, because when we ate there, on weekday lunchtimes, there was no one else in these out-of-the-way pubs. The barmaid was always slightly aggrieved at having to go and stick whatever we’d chosen into a microwave, and my father would say, ‘She’s got a face on her, that ’un. She’ll turn the beer if she isn’t careful.’

Sometimes we were blessed, sometimes we hit on a pub where real cooking was on offer. This was usually in the Eden Valley where the catchment area included monied folk. My father loved this valley but he had no regard for the superior cooking. If the pub had also made an attempt at any kind of artistic decor, and especially if it had a garden with tables and umbrellas, it was damned for ever. It wasn’t a real pub. It had lost itself. It was trying to be something it was not. He was against change. Life was about keeping everything the same. So, on the whole, we stuck to the dreary pubs and grew fatter and fatter, and felt more and more unhealthy as the summer went on. It was no good my ordering just bread and cheese – this annoyed him. I had to have something cooked or he was offended. Even refusing chips was an act of rebellion. If I asked for fish on its own and then picked the batter or orange breadcrumbs off it, he was displeased – ‘Waste not, want not,’ he’d say and shake his head.

The solution to this state of affairs was to have a picnic. Funnily enough, my father liked picnics, though we had rarely had them as a family when I was growing up, and even when we did they amounted to not much more than a few sandwiches and a packet of biscuits all wrapped in greaseproof paper and fitting easily into coat pockets. My picnics were something else and they amused him. For a start, I had a proper wicker hamper, large and oblong, the sort with cute little leather straps fastening the plates onto the inside of the lid, and compartments for bottles and cups, all lined with gingham material – incredibly pretentious, and I loved it. My picnics, even apart from the hamper, were sumptuous, with all kinds of cold meats, and often a whole roast chicken, and little tasty pies (kept hot in a special separate bag) and crisp salads (dressings in screwtop jars) and small sausages and french bread (in the hot bag too) and cheeses and masses of fruit (melon, cherries, strawberries) and beer and wine and coffee and tea … Oh, it was a sight to behold when the hamper was opened. I always spread a proper cotton tablecloth before I set out the plates (yes, china not plastic) and had real cutlery and napkins and glasses. There was a tartan rug, and some cushions for us to loll on, and a collapsible chair for my father. It was a great performance and he relished it.

Choosing where to have the picnic was a lengthy business in which my father and I conspired against Hunter, who was very easily satisfied and couldn’t understand why we kept rejecting what to him were perfectly good sites. ‘No, no,’ we’d cry, ‘not there. It’s too bumpy … too much gorse … not sheltered enough … can’t see the sea …’ Because these picnics were always beside the sea, always. On hot, still days in June and July, out on the Solway Marsh, at the end of the marsh road past Bowness-on-Solway where there was absolute peace and quiet, not a sound to be heard except for the seagulls and nothing to interrupt the view all the way across the Firth to the Scottish hills.

‘Champion,’ my father would say, having eaten and drunk heartily. Then he’d whistle before falling asleep, briefly, only to waken and say, ‘Champion’, again. Contentment mellowed him and he’d call me a good lass. Now, if ever, he was surely near to philosophising about life in his ninety-first year; now surely if asked he could say what life meant to him, why it was still so precious, why he wasn’t tired of it. But he said nothing and I asked nothing. He kept his thoughts to himself, either because he couldn’t articulate them or because he thought that was where they belonged.

He was always reluctant to leave a picnic. As I began to pack up, he’d look astonished and say, ‘Are we off? Already? Oh well, have it your own way.’ ‘Already’ was after at least two hours. He’d grumble, just a bit, about having to get into the car and he’d say, ‘That’s that, then. Don’t know when I’ll have another picnic.’ I’d say, ‘Soon. The next brilliant day,’ and he’d reply, ‘There might never be another’ (pause) ‘or I might not still be here.’

Once we departed for London at the end of the summer there was, of course, no question of more picnics. He missed them, but missed even more getting out into the country which he loved and knew so intimately. My mother’s death had released him from being more or less housebound, except for his short shopping forays, and for a while he’d tried to be adventurous and get himself out and about by bus. What he wanted to do, what would have satisfied him, was to go on a weekly Mystery Tour, but to his disgust the bus companies seemed to have phased Mystery Tours out – ‘Nobody bothers any more about them without cars,’ my father said. There was to be no more of the thrill of taking a Mystery Tour not knowing if he would end up in the Lake District or on the Solway coast. All mystery had gone. Now, he would have to choose his destination which wasn’t at all the same.

But after a lot of complaining, that’s what he was obliged to do. His first choice would always be Silloth, by train, but Dr Beeching had axed the branch line to it long ago, robbing car-less people like my father of easy access to their favourite holiday resort. My father had gone on that Silloth train all his life and the short journey, half an hour or so, had never failed to excite him. The train was always grossly overcrowded no matter how many extra coaches were put on the various engines – on summer weekends the platform for the Silloth trains would be literally packed solid with working-class people and their children. The fights to get on were alarming. My father had often travelled in the luggage van, thankful to get on at all, and he never minded the crush. He knew all the stops by heart, and exactly when to crane out of the window, as the train rounded the last bend, in order to see the church spire in the middle of Silloth. The engine would give a double toot at this point and everyone would swear they could smell the sea. As a young man he prided himself on being first off the train, jumping off before it had stopped, and racing ahead of the hordes to bag his favourite fishing spot on the sea wall. Later, encumbered by his children and a wife who thought it unseemly to rush in any circumstances, he’d been forced to shuffle along with the masses and he’d found it very frustrating.

The Silloth train no longer being an option, he had to condescend to go by bus or not go at all. He only did it once. He presented himself at 9.30 a.m. one September day, a Monday (so he hoped the bus would be empty and it almost was), at the bus station and was first on the bus. That pleased him. He hesitated only momentarily before choosing a seat on the right-hand side (the sea would be on the right when the bus got to the coast) halfway down, avoiding the seat over the wheels. He had a window beside him and was able to control the opening and shutting of it himself as well as be privy to a grand view when one appeared. He had his raincoat with him and his stick, but he didn’t carry any food or drink. The bus was bound for Maryport via Silloth and Allonby and it would stop there an hour before returning to Carlisle, which would give him plenty of time to refresh himself at a pub.

The bus started dead on time – more gratification – and he enjoyed every single minute of the ride, even going through the city and passing the end of the road where he had once lived, in the days when he’d cycled everywhere. The bus was relatively new, the seats well upholstered, and the noise of the engine not too loud. There were only eight other passengers, all women, all sitting at the back, so their cackling hardly disturbed him. There was an irritatingly long stop in Wigton, but the rest of the journey was speedy, and when they hit the sea road the tide was in and the sun fairly making the water sparkle. He saw several fishing boats and a big tanker turning to go into the dock and wished he’d had his binoculars with him. Allonby was deserted except for horses galloping on the sands (where I had learned to walk). He had a pie and a pint at Maryport and a walk around – ‘There’s not much at Maryport, mind, not these days’ – and then got back onto the bus. Someone was in his seat. A woman. He stood and glared at her and tapped his stick on the ground and ‘acted dumb’, as he put it later. She asked if she had taken his seat. He said she had that. She moved.

When he got home, he rang me to describe his day and say how smashing it had been and how he intended to take bus trips regularly, as a treat, and that he fancied Keswick the following week. But he never ventured forth on an outing again. I kept asking him why not and he said, ‘Reasons’. These reasons remained undivulged but I suspect may have had something to do with his beginning to need to go to the lavatory very frequently, and his terror of an accident on the bus. He stayed near home after this, getting his fresh air in the garden, looking forward to being taken on outings when we came again, but not noticeably pining for them. They were not part of his routine, of his life, when he was on his own, and he coped. He was still remarkably fit for his age and proud of his independence even if his freedom of movement had become curtailed.

It couldn’t go on for ever, of course. He might not have been waiting for a crisis, but we were, and in May 1992 it came.

On 25 April, my father spent a long afternoon in the garden, digging and weeding, pausing every half-hour to take a rest on a bench I’d persuaded him to let me put up against the garage wall. Next day, a Sunday, he walked his usual mile to and from the cemetery to visit my mother’s grave, as he had done every Sunday since she had died eleven years before. My mother wasn’t actually buried there, she’d been cremated, but we’d put her ashes under a sod lifted from her parents’ grave and so he regarded her as being there. ‘I don’t know why I go,’ he’d say, shaking his head. ‘It’s daft.’ When he’d seen the fine grey-white ash after the cremation he’d been shocked and turned white and said, ‘To think she’s come to that.’ But ever since, with the ash under the grass in front of the marble cross recording her parents’ names and dates, he’d liked the idea of something being there and of being able to pay his regular respects. Besides, Sunday morning visits to the cemetery became another routine, another way of giving his week a structure. By then the walk was quite an effort, involving the return up a steep incline, but it was just this effort he enjoyed.

So he was fit enough that weekend but on 30 April he fell again. He was watering some plants he’d just put in, going backwards and forwards to the tap with an empty soup tin because he could no longer manage to use his watering can and keep his balance. He didn’t really agree with watering – ‘Folk water far too damn much’ – but where new plants were concerned he conceded a little water was necessary. He tripped on the path as he was carrying the last lot of water. It was amazing he hadn’t done so before. This path was made of concrete slabs which he’d laid himself, unevenly, many years before and which were now lethal for anyone the least bit doddery. Again and again we’d offered to re-lay this path, but it was the usual story – ‘No!’ and ‘It’ll see me out, don’t you worry.’

This time, he didn’t hurt his eye. In falling, he put out his hand to save himself and fell on his right wrist. The pain was intense but he struggled to get himself up from the path before anyone saw him and managed to hobble into the house. Luckily – or, in his opinion, unluckily – he had in fact been seen by his neighbour Mr Nixon, who came to check he was not hurt. ‘I’m all right,’ my father said. ‘I’ll manage.’ He bathed his wrist in water as hot as he could bear and then he took two aspirin and rested. But the pain didn’t wear off and he was awake all night. In the morning, he could do nothing with his right hand and it was very awkward frying his bacon using his left hand to hold the pan. Just as he’d finished eating his breakfast (though he’d felt sick and hadn’t enjoyed it), Mrs Nixon came knocking on the door and he had to answer it. She saw how awful he looked and asked permission to call the doctor. ‘Go on, then,’ he said, grumpily, ‘have it your own way.’ The doctor came and, suspecting a fracture (correctly), said he would have to go to the infirmary. The obliging Nixons said they would take him, but, though grateful, this put my father in a foul mood. He made it plain that he was not going to ‘stop in’ even if ‘they’ said he had to. He was coming home, whatever.

He had always both hated and feared the infirmary and his, on the whole, tolerable experience in 1989, over ‘the blood’, had done nothing to endear it to him. This hostility dated from long ago, sometime in the forties, when he’d had some sort of accident at work and damaged his right leg. It was not broken but he could hardly walk and the pain was dreadful. Instead of going straight to the infirmary, or at least to the doctor (this was pre-NHS and would have had to be paid for), he insisted on being taken home. I remember him coming in just before I left for school, his face ashen, the lines of it set in a grimace as he tried to control the pain. My mother was full of commonsense as well as concern, telling him he would have to seek some medical advice, but he was adamant: he was not going near any doctor and especially not at the infirmary. A night went by as well as a day as he struggled to subdue the pain and recover, helped by doses of whisky and aspirin, but by the next morning the sweat stood out on his forehead and he couldn’t talk, he was in so much pain. It was frightening to see the exercising of such will power and even more frightening to see it fail. My mother meanwhile took matters into her own hands and organised the one neighbour in all the area who had a car to come and take my father to the infirmary.

He was gone a very long time. I went to school, came back from school, and he still wasn’t home. My mother was convinced he’d been admitted and was in the process of putting her coat on to go to the infirmary when my father walked into the house looking exhausted but triumphant. It seemed he’d been put in a cubicle when he arrived at the infirmary, and told to remove his trousers and lie on the bed. He’d obeyed, reluctantly, and eventually a doctor came along, examined him, and said the leg would have to be set in plaster, without explaining why. Someone else would be along soon to take him to the plaster room. But no one came along soon. Hours went by and the longer my father waited the more unhappy he felt about having his leg put in plaster. He wouldn’t be able to work, and if he couldn’t work he wasn’t at all sure he would be fully paid and if he wasn’t fully paid the rent and coal bill might not get paid … it was dreadful to imagine. So in this kind of mental turmoil, and still in acute pain, he made his mind up. He got off the bed, put his trousers on and limped agonisingly slowly out of the infirmary, almost fainting with the effort. But he wasn’t going home, or to any other doctor. He was going to Geordie Long’s.

Geordie Long was by occupation a barber, but was far more famous in Carlisle for being a bone-setter. He had a shop in Caldewgate, where he cut hair and shaved customers. Behind it, for those who wanted this additional service, he had another room, where he set bones. This had come about through customers complaining about their necks aching, so while Geordie was cutting their hair he had begun to massage necks in an attempt to ease the pain; and he had discovered he had a talent for it. He had no professional qualifications whatever but grew so interested in the problem, not just of sore necks but of sore wrists, sore legs, sore backs, that he began reading up on anatomy in the library. Soon he was not only massaging muscles but manipulating bones – with a pull there and a jerk here he found he could sort out all kinds of aches and pains. He was still primarily a barber, but the queues were outside the back room where he did his bone-setting (he was always called that, a bone-setter, not a physiotherapist or an osteopath). He charged people half-a-crown, if they could manage that, but if they couldn’t they were told to leave what they could afford on the mantelpiece. Everyone had complete faith in Geordie and never queried his lack of qualifications or worried about the safety of his methods. Unlike the doctors at the infirmary, he was a cheerful man, working-class himself and incapable of patronising anyone. He never claimed to cure people, saying only that he’d try to ease their pain, and always warned that whatever was wrong with them might not, in fact, be curable through his touch.

This was the man my father took himself off to. Somehow, he limped the half mile down to Caldewgate from the infirmary but collapsed as soon as he got to the barber’s shop. The bone-setting waiting-room was crowded, as usual, but nobody minded when Geordie (who had always cut my father’s hair) came out from his consulting-room – grand name for a bare room with only a high couch in it – and, seeing the state my father was in, took him straight in. What Geordie then actually did I don’t know, and certainly my father never did either, but it worked. He apparently put his hands on my father’s leg, felt it carefully over and over again, every inch of it, then he did what was merely described afterwards as ‘this’ and ‘that’ (which, seemingly, was excruciating and my father was ashamed to have to admit he’d let out a yell) and, hey presto, the leg functioned again. He invited my father to walk and he did, gingerly. The pain had not quite gone but it was a different and perfectly bearable pain and Geordie said it would soon go. He paid Geordie and left, arriving home to rage against the damned stupid doctor at that infirmary who would have had his leg put in plaster for weeks.

Ever after, the infirmary was a place where they tried to trick you and was to be avoided at all costs. The first question he always asked if anyone was ill was, ‘Will it mean the infirmary?’ To be ill enough to have to go into the infirmary was the worst possible news, but then all illness was bad news. Everyone feels this, of course, but my father felt it in an exaggerated way. He had no patience with illness. He resented and resisted it, seeing it as an enemy that had to be fought and conquered, if possible unaided. Anyone who liked to talk about their illness irritated him. He had no interest in symptoms and even less in treatments. He looked for the same kind of determination to deny illness in his children as he had himself. We all tried hard to measure up, but my brother, who was often ill as a child, had a hard time of it and so, later, did my younger sister. I pleased him most by failing to succumb, as they did, to scarlet fever and all manner of other childhood diseases. But when I was ten, my luck temporarily ran out and I had jaundice rather badly. He had no idea how to cope. I lay in bed for weeks, hardly able to lift my head from the pillow and constantly sick, and he said it was ‘not like Margaret’ in a disappointed voice. My mother was irritated, said I was just a child like any other child and I couldn’t help being ill, for heaven’s sake. She said he should show some sympathy. But he didn’t know how to. In his lunch hour, when he’d cycled home from the Metal Box factory and had eaten his meal, he’d come upstairs to sit with me. I’d pretend to be asleep, embarrassed for him. I’d hear him coming up the stairs and I’d turn to the wall and close my eyes tight and breathe heavily. I knew he was sitting there, at my bedside, in his boiler suit but with newly scrubbed hands. He’d clear his throat. I’d stay still. Sometimes he pulled the blanket round me and tucked it in. Then, after a few minutes, he’d go. I’d hear him say to my mother, ‘She seems to be sleeping nice. I didn’t disturb her.’ I imagine he sensed I wasn’t sleeping at all, but he allowed me to pretend because it suited him. He cared, but he didn’t know how to talk to a sick child. He hated to see me, usually a fizz of energy, listless and he didn’t want to acknowledge I might be suffering. Illness, all illness, scared him and he didn’t believe that involving himself in it, learning to understand it, would help banish his fear or at least put it into perspective. Disease could lead to death and there was no need to think about that.

All this, then, was the background to his usual avoidance of going to the infirmary or ever admitting he felt ill. But go he had to, on this occasion, with much sighing and muttering to the kindly Nixons about how his father had died there, his mother had died there, his wife had died there, and if anyone thought he was going to stop in there they had another think coming. He did not, however, need to stop in. The orthopaedic surgeon, who saw him in the fracture clinic, said he had a fracture of his distal third of ulna (‘Double Dutch,’ my father commented) and put it in plaster, but not a full-arm plaster. A below-the-elbow plaster was not ideal for his injury but in view of his age it was considered advisable. All my father cared about was getting out ‘in one piece’, as he put it.

Once home, he set himself to manage with one hand, thinking up all kinds of ingenious methods of continuing to do all the things he usually did. He wanted no social workers ‘prying’. To all concerned, he gave the standard answer – ‘I’m managing grand.’ Maybe he wouldn’t have managed if my sister hadn’t come to help at first – to be greeted with: ‘What are you doing here? I didn’t send for you.’ No, but she’d deduced the situation from a telephone call and decided to come. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you can make yourself useful and finish planting my gladioli.’ She planted the flowers and then some vegetables and then she went home and we came up, conveniently, for our usual summer stay at Loweswater. Panic over.

By the time the day came for him to have the plaster taken off he’d become positively fond of the outpatients’ department. He’d been there three times, to have his plaster checked, and was supremely confident by 12 June, loving the fact that he knew exactly where to go and what to do and what would happen. I was directed by him as though I couldn’t read a notice or follow the evidence of my own eyes and, for a man renowned for being incapable of queuing, he settled down almost patiently when we reached the area where we had to wait to be called. I saw his eyes darting about, taking everything in, and though he initiated no conversation with the people either side of us (that would have been lowering his standards too far) he nodded when spoken to and managed to acknowledge various pleasantries.

I went in with him to watch him have his plaster taken off. I didn’t want to, but he clearly thought he was offering me a treat so I had to accept. The doctor was a young woman. My father concentrated on her left hand. Confronted with any woman, he always subjected the third finger of her left hand to minute inspection: ring, or not? The doctor was not wearing a ring. I knew this would be commented on later and that it would be pointless telling him that the lack of an engagement or wedding ring did not necessarily signify what he thought it did.

‘How are you, then, Mr Forster?’ the doctor asked (pronouncing his name as ‘Foster’).

‘There’s an “r” in it,’ my father said.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘There’s an “r” in Forster,’ my father said, pronouncing it as ‘Foster’, as he always did, just as the doctor had done, without sounding the ‘r’. My mother was forever telling him that if he wanted the wretched ‘r’ pronounced then he had to pronounce it himself. He never did, though he expected others to do so.

The doctor kindly didn’t point this out. She smiled and apologised and got on with her job.

‘We’ll soon have this off,’ she said; ‘then you’ll be as right as rain.’

‘You hope,’ said my father.

His wrist, his whole forearm, emerging from the plaster looked so frail, so desperately fragile, but he flexed his long, knobbly fingers strongly enough and the doctor was admiring. She said he would have to be careful, not to do too much with his right hand for a while, not to lift anything heavy or grip anything too tightly. The wrist would feel weak and there was bound to be some stiffness and loss of mobility at first, and some slight pain, but the fracture had mended remarkably well, which it often did not do in elderly people. To this my father said, ‘I’m ninety-two’ (though he was not, not until December). The doctor exclaimed that she couldn’t believe he was a day past eighty and he smirked. He loved confounding people with his great age.

‘Come back if there are any problems,’ the doctor said.

‘Oh, I won’t be coming back here,’ my father said. ‘No fear of that.’

I couldn’t imagine how he could say that, but he was absolutely convinced he would never need to visit the infirmary again. His accident, the injury to his wrist, was merely an aberration, never to be repeated. He didn’t even think about the possibility of this being the beginning of a whole sequence of calamities – no, it was the end. He’d made a silly mistake in allowing his wrist to be fractured and he would not make it again. On 15 June, three days after the plaster was removed, he was back in the garden, tidying it up. He walked carefully round the spot where he had tripped up (it was now precisely marked and cursed for ever), trailing his rake behind him. I sat on the bench and watched. He raked a flower bed, using his right hand without any care not to grip the rake too tightly, and whistled. He was home, back in his garden, back in his routine. He had survived. He might put nothing into words but his buoyancy after this wrist episode was visible: life was good again. It might be a battle, but then life had always been seen by him as a battle above all else, and the point was he was still winning. He had no intention of, or desire to, lay down his arms and surrender to old age and fractures and, ultimately, death.

But the next year, his ninety-third, saw a definite change in attitude. With it came the first hint of boredom with his life, imperceptible initially and then registered reluctantly. It was the garden that started it. On 11 March, he cut the grass front and back for the first time in the season and found it ‘heavy going’, as he dolefully recorded in his diary. It depressed him to have to acknowledge this. Then when he went to town the next day, he wrote afterwards, ‘Glad to get home. A. so-so.’ He struggled on, but preparing the ground for his usual vegetables and bedding plants became harder and harder. It distressed him to look about his garden and see the state it was in with the growing season not yet really begun. Weeds everywhere, soil not turned over, shrubs straggly … suddenly he was overwhelmed by the size of it. He couldn’t keep up. Nature was getting ahead of him, everything was getting out of hand and he didn’t know what to do. Mr Nixon was very kind and had taken over the trimming of the hedges, but he couldn’t, and didn’t want to, depend on Mr Nixon any more than he already did. He didn’t want to depend on anyone – what kind of life would that be? A little of this worry seeped through into our phone conversations but whenever I said I’d hire a gardener to help him, dared to suggest it, he’d bellow, ‘No! I’m not starting that game. I’ll manage.’

Pride was saved by my nephew Simon, my brother-in-law Johnny’s son, aged twenty-three and temporarily living back home in Rockcliffe, near Carlisle. He would go twice a week and do the heavy work, and I would pay him, but my father need never know that. He was fond of telling us how, when he was a lad, young folk had helped old folk (and he tolerated no cynicism about the reality of this) and he would see nothing suspect about a young man coming voluntarily to help him garden, especially one he’d known since he was born. ‘At a loose end, is he?’ he said when I tentatively mentioned Simon’s willingness to garden for him. ‘Send him along, then, and I’ll find something for him to do.’ If he was playing a game, my father played it convincingly. Simon, anyway, fully understood the delicacy of the situation and responded accordingly. He had actually never gardened in his life and hadn’t the first idea what to do, but he was strong, willing and, most important of all, quite happy to accept my father’s orders without question. He did what he was told how he was told. And he was not a chatterer. If asked a direct question, he replied, but he asked none himself, which was entirely to my father’s liking. The two of them would have a break, sitting on the bench in the garden, and say virtually nothing to each other for the twenty minutes it lasted. These sessions gave new meaning to the phrase ‘companionable silence’. Sometimes my father would fish a pound out of his pocket and send Simon to the nearest shop to buy a coke for himself and some beer for him. While Simon was with him in the garden he felt secure enough to garden and firmly believed he was doing most of the work himself. After the grass was cut for the last time on 25 October, Simon wasn’t needed any more. Gardening was effectively over. He’d made it, another summer was over.

This was when ‘Nothing Doing’ began to be the standard entry in his diary. The winter approached and again and again he recorded ‘Nothing Doing. Dark Soon. Long Day.’ Not even the weather seemed worth describing in all the previously enthusiastic detail. A lot of sorting went on – ‘Sorted Garage’ … ‘Sorted Drawers’ – but not much else. He’d had to stop taking his daily walk to Denton Holme, unless a neighbour gave him a lift there and back, because he couldn’t manage the whole distance and getting on and off the bus had become too perilous. He shuffled along instead to the Spar grocery at the end of his road and made of this a new routine. He couldn’t make it to the cemetery any more so there were no more Sunday visits to my mother’s grave. Going to town was out of the question, even given a lift. Mrs Nixon kindly got him anything he wanted from there. All his beloved routines, in fact, had either been wrecked or severely trimmed. He was restless and frustrated and, worst of all, bored. Even watching television had palled – ‘Rubbish On’, he wrote, and ‘Bad TV’. And ‘the blood’ was back as a worry. On 28 April he referred to it mysteriously in his diary as ‘A. had A Loss. But OK’. This ‘loss’ was of blood and it scared him. He was very much afraid that blood in his urine was a sinister sign and that it signified something rather more serious than a fractured wrist. But he didn’t consult his doctor. He waited to see if this ‘loss’ would be repeated. It wasn’t, to his relief, reinforcing his belief that if abnormalities were ignored they would go away.

But what didn’t go away was this new boredom. Suddenly, he actively wanted visitors, to break up the monotony. Visitors, of course, had always been mere irritations. While my mother was alive, he had had to put up with them for her sake. Visitors were liked by women and he accepted that. But once she’d died, and he had discouraged them, he’d cut the few social contacts he had had other than his family. Now he wanted them restored. He was even aggrieved that these ties had been severed, forgetting he’d done the severing himself.

‘I don’t know what’s happened to Mrs G——’ he said. ‘She hasn’t come near for years.’

‘And how often have you been to see her?’ I asked smartly.

‘Eh?’

‘How often have you visited her?’ I repeated.

‘Don’t be daft,’ he said, angrily.

‘It isn’t daft. She’s a widow, she likes visitors too, a bit of company, but you never think of visiting her, you just expect her to visit you.’

‘I never said that. I just said she hadn’t been near for ages.’

‘Well, I’m telling you why. Visiting is a two-way affair. You can’t expect visitors if you don’t visit. It’s no good wanting them if you give no sign you want them.’

‘I don’t want them. I never said I did.’

But he did want them. Complaining that he had no visitors was the only way he could bring himself to admit it. It was a weakness he’d never experienced before and he found that recognising it was uncomfortable. He decided it was his right, as a very old man, to be visited and in his head he began compiling a black list of those who, in his opinion, were failing in their duty. It infuriated him to learn that one nephew had had the audacity to drive through Carlisle on his way to Scotland and had not visited him. ‘Scandalous,’ he said. But when one cousin, also just on her way through Carlisle, this time on a long and tiring drive south, did make the effort to call, he was furious because her visit was so short. ‘Twelve minutes!’ he roared that night on the telephone. ‘Twelve minutes, that’s all she warmed the seat for! Haven’t seen her for ten years and she turns up without a by-your-leave and stops twelve bloomin’ minutes. Wasn’t worth opening the door.’ I asked if he’d offered his visitor a cup of tea. ‘Tea?’ he echoed. ‘I’m ninety-three.’

Where once the ringing of the doorbell had enraged him, he now longed for it to ring. A phone call a day from one of us wasn’t enough human contact. He wanted someone to keep him company on the long, dark, wet winter days, though on his terms. His two most faithful visitors were my brother-in-law, Johnny, and Marion’s husband, Jeff. Both popped in as often as they could. Neither ever received any noticeable signs of welcome. ‘Oh, it’s you at last,’ he’d say. ‘I wondered where you’d got to.’ Mrs Nixon began coming in for half an hour or so in the afternoon on weekdays, bringing with her a piece of delicious home-made cake, or a scone, for his tea, but very quickly she’d created out of her kindness a trap for herself. In no time at all he began to regard her visits as obligatory and she got the same kind of response as Johnny and Jeff if she failed to come – ‘Where have you been, then? I waited for you all afternoon; didn’t know what had happened.’ When I tried to suggest maybe he was expecting too much of Mrs Nixon, who might after all have her own life to lead, he maintained, ‘She likes to watch the racing on my TV. I don’t mind – keeps her happy.’ Poor Mrs Nixon was forced into feelings of guilt if she did not visit him every day and any remonstrations on my part were greeted scornfully with ‘She’s got nothing better to do’ by my father.

Going into 1994, there was no more cheerful talk of just popping off. Instead, a siege mentality was setting in. He announced now that he was ‘hanging on’ and, as ever, ‘managing’, but the old defiance had gone. He wasn’t as sure of himself, though there was still no suggestion that he wished he were dead – absolutely not. Nor was there any mention of possibly having to give up his own home. If he thought about this, he never confessed it. The game was one of stoicism, as it perhaps always had tended to be, though never played in such difficult circumstances. Whereas my mother had endlessly wished aloud to die, my father never did, not even now, at the mighty age of ninety-three. Such talk he rated as daft. It was pointless wishing to be dead. Your time would come when it came and that was that. It irritated him when my mother, or anyone else, wished for their own end. It was morbid and ridiculous. Death would come soon enough, they could count on that, so they should shut up.

By May 1994, he was frequently jotting down, ‘A. off colour’. He could do even less gardening than the year before, but that summer he had Anthony to help. Anthony was a proper gardener, trained at an agricultural college, a farmer’s son who lived near us at Loweswater and whom I’d discovered was currently going into Carlisle twice a week to study for another A-level. He was only too pleased to stop off at my father’s and earn a bit of money helping. At first, my father was wary – this was no Simon, he knew nothing about Anthony – but after the boy’s first afternoon he was thrilled. Anthony was apparently a wonder to behold, knowing everything there was to know about every aspect of gardening. He worked so hard and to such purpose my father was amazed to find himself telling the lad to slow down, there was another day coming. Like Simon, Anthony was not talkative but he was amiable and polite and took enquiries of the ‘Are you courting?’ variety good-humouredly. My father was intrigued by him – it was odd how, for a man so unsociable, he liked to find out about strangers if he could do it over a period of time and in his own way. They, naturally, were not allowed the same liberties with him. Anyone trying to find out anything about my father had always been given short shrift. But Anthony, not surprisingly, had no desire to cross-examine my father and came and went without any need to establish any but the most professional of relationships. He regarded my father as a character and left it at that.

So did most people, and my father liked the role. He certainly had no pretensions to being thought of instead as a wise old man. Old age, in his own opinion, had brought him no automatic wisdom. I once asked him if he thought he was wiser as an old man than he had been as a young man, and he said no, the world still made a monkey out of him. He’d worked hard and kept his nose clean and it had done him no good at all. Politics were beyond him and by then he was quite happy that this should be so. All politicians were out for their own good. When I protested that this wasn’t true and cited examples he was derisive. ‘Nelson Mandela? I’ll tell you what, he likes his suits, cost a pretty penny of somebody’s money.’ It was no good reacting to this with anger or by trying to disprove the insinuation – my father was entirely cynical about the great and good. Nobody, in his twisted opinion, was ever motivated by the common good. ‘Mother Teresa? She gets a rake-off somewhere along the line, likely.’

His grandchildren thought these kinds of absurd, illogical statements hysterically funny, but they weren’t, they were perverse and bitter and sour. My father had cast himself long ago as the disadvantaged working man, endlessly exploited, never able to beat the injustice of the way life had dealt with him in material terms, always having to bow his head and put up with things. He was putting up by then with a life whose quality had been seriously eroded and which, it was beginning to occur to him, might go on too long. His urge to live was still incredibly strong – life was still precious to him – but so was his growing despair that he wouldn’t be able to go on organising it as he had always done.