MY FATHER IS asleep, and has been for hours. His rasping slowness and stiff-mouthed, dry-lipped wide-openness remind me of Terry Kilmartin, my old boss, three days before he died in the Lister hospital. Terry’s had been a long, slow cancer, and on that last visit there seemed a peace and acceptance about him I hadn’t seen during the pain-tautened months before. His freckled hand lay on the white deck and I held it, just as I’ve held my father’s today: love, obeisance, the pupil paying respect to his mentor. But what sort of peace and acceptance is it that only morphine brings? I want my mentors back, awake and doubting.
On her long dressing-table stool at the end of the bed, my mother and I discuss funeral arrangements. We’re nervous with each other, not sure if this is the right way to go about things, prefacing each new item—the wake, the will, what to do with his ashes—with ‘I’m sorry, it sounds macabre, but …’ His dying is all we can think about, but is talking about it immoral, inauspicious, defeatist? She tells me how at his insistence she phoned the garage this morning to see if the new headlamps had come in and how they’ve just rung back and quoted seventy pounds—at which point my father wakes and says, ‘I’m sure Halfords could do it cheaper,’ then goes off again. We snigger at how the word garage sparked him into consciousness, whereas he’d slept through coffin and crematorium . Or is he just pretending not to hear? Mothers shut out the memory of childbirth pain once labour is over: my father has blanked off the diagnosis often days ago in much the same way. He can’t hear the word death because he knows he’s getting better.
I wander into his study. In one corner is the Amiga he acquired a year ago: in the last few months he’s been teaching himself to type and word-process. In the opposite corner is his old drop-leaf desk, and above it, on the wall, a map of the West Riding, circa 1616, a barometer stuck between Fair and Changeable, and brass plates engraved with cheeky pub mottoes (A WOMAN’S BEST 10 YEARS ARE BETWEEN THE AGES OF 28 AND 30; IF YOU’RE SO DAMN SMART, WHY AIN’T YOU RICH?; EVERYTHING I LIKE IS IMMORAL, ILLEGAL OR FATTENING; A WIFE IS SOMEONE WHO STANDS BY HER HUSBAND THROUGH ALL THE TROUBLES HE’D NOT HAVE HAD IF HE HADN’T MARRIED HER; and, his catchphrase, I MAY NOT BE RIGHT, BUT I’M NEVER WRONG ). In the middle of the desk is the letter he told me would be there, the one which he sat composing for three hours the day before I came, printed out on computer paper:
CONFIDENTIAL
Dear Drs,
I am writing to apologize for failing to keep you fully aquainted [sic ] with updates of our medical history.
When Kim and I retired I decided that we would look after each other as far as possible without having to trouble you busy practitioners. I even prevailed upon consultants, many of whom are our personal friends, not to forward any reports to Earby surgery—particularly as we all know how rapidly news spreads around the ‘grape-vine’—until WE gave the go-ahead.
That time now appears to have come!!!
About three and a half years ago, despite having no comlaint [sic ], I went to Airedale, just to try out the Treadmill, and I was very disappointed to leam that I had an irregular heart action. I was heavily reassured that it would not affect my life expectancy, nor my day-to-day activity, gardening, etc. To ensure additional care I was fitted with a Dual Chamber Pace Maker.
This, above all, made me determined that no rumour ‘Dr Morrison has a bad heart’ [sic ] and I continued to work and behave normally.
A year ago I developed auricular fibrillation and I was put on amiodarone 200 mgm daily, recovered rapidly and resumed my normal activities.
Now however I have a completely different story to tell. I have an adherent Splenic Obstruction with Ascites, now by-passed, and you will be getting full details via the post.
I do not require a visit, in fact I would hate one, at present—no offence intended.
Arthur Β. Morrison
The letter is unsigned. I read it several times, then put it back as I found it.
Why had he contacted his GP now? Because he knew that to get your death-certificate signed, without first undergoing a post-mortem, you have to have seen a doctor in the previous twelve months? But surely a hospital doctor’s signature would have done; besides, this letter specifically asked the local GPs not to visit him. Was it an atonement for his unprofessionalism? I could imagine him bollocking anyone who’d behaved as he had, who’d not been to his doctor for fifteen years—‘You’ve been avoiding me: well, it’s your funeral.’ But mainly, I think, the letter was intended for us, the family: he had printed out three copies, and from time to time would ask me if I’d read it. Still denying in conversation how near to death he was, he had written the letter to acknowledge that he did know, and wanted us to know, and wanted us to know he knew.
Beneath the three printouts I find his medical card, the old brown National Health envelope with red ruled boxes on the front. It’s been stamped twice—5 Jul 1948 in a circle and YN 24 Apr 1975 in an oblong. Inside is a single brown card and four new-looking, stapled-together letters: 1. 11 Oct 1991, confirming no abnormality at the Endoscopy Clinic but for a ‘moderate-sized hernia’; 2. A discharge certificate dated 27.9.91 after an earlier investigation of ‘bellyache’; 3. A letter from the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Centre in Swansea, acknowledging application for a driving licence but requesting details of any changes in his medical condition since his last application; 4. A letter of 28 November 1978 about a haemorrhoidectomy—‘Three primary piles (very large left lateral) and two secondary piles dissected up, ligated and removed.’
The card itself is terse—just twenty-two entries in forty-four years, seven of them to do with a lung infection in the long cold winter of 1962, and three others recording polio injections and boosters. There are no entries at all between 1964 and 1976—his fifties and early sixties. Hastily compressed in the small space at the top and bottom of the card, and written (like most of the other entries) in his own hand, is some detail about the fitting of a pacemaker (11.4.88) and about severe stomach pain (10.10.91). He has been a fit man, and there are only three entries of substance:
24.10.53 Diarrhoea, nausea and colic. PMA: SG age
8. Recurrent tonsillitis, Ts and As age 22.
9.6.64 Ruptured Tendon Achilles (L)
?.?.83 Ac Glaucoma. Bilaltl irridectomy
The last presumably refers to an eye problem, or operation, but did he ever tell me about it? What does PMA stand for in the first entry? Previous Medical Account? Ts and As must mean the removal of tonsils (and adenoids?) at twenty-two, an operation which, having endured or benefited from himself, he later inflicted on me and my sister. But what is SG? And why is there no record of the operation to relieve pain in his wrists? Here is the biography of his body, but so abbreviated and random I can find no way to connect it with him.
It’s only the Achilles tendon rupture I can recall. One Whitsun holiday he had gone swimming at Airedale baths with my sister, then twelve, and had been teaching her how to dive. The previous year, I had been his hopeless pupil (‘Don’t keep bringing your knees down. What are you so afraid of?’), and now it was my sister’s turn to be put through the hoop. He took her to the deep end to show how it was done. Running, leaping, then coming down heavily on the end of the board (and he was heavy then for a man of five foot eight: twelve and a half stone), he had snapped the tendon as he rose in the air, landed in the water with a flapping ankle, and had to be lifted from the pool. He realized what he’d done, but got himself home, strapped up the ankle and drove my sister the hundred miles back to her school in Windermere (less use of the clutch than usual?). Next day he saw the surgeon, who confirmed the rupture and kept him in hospital. It became family lore that this was what you got for showing off: three months in plaster, or worse. I wondered whether there hadn’t been some young women in the pool other than my sister he was trying to impress—maybe that had been his Achilles heel.
Apart from some complaints about the itchiness of the cast, he made a joke of it all—the doctor coming home in plaster not from some chic Alpine skiing trip but from the local baths. But jokes within the family were one thing; wearing his indignity in front of patients was another. Far from reacting as we expected—business as usual, a chauffeur wangled from somewhere to get him out on his visiting rounds—he refused to go to surgery in a wheelchair. It was an odd period, a long six weeks: while he languished morosely at home, the other two GPs in the practice (one of them my mother) had to cover for him. ‘Do you really need to go to Cawder Ghyll quite so much?’ he’d ask when she came back from the local maternity hospital: guilty at the extra surgeries she had to take, he somehow expected the pre-and post natal work she normally did to fade away, for babies to have the decency to stop being born for a bit. In the end, the third partner began to grumble: if my father was so wheelchair-bound, how come he was still drinking at the Cross Keys every night? The answer was that my mother, bullied into it, drove him there—unloading him from and reloading him into his wheelchair. But even her patience was wearing thin: people were beginning to notice what his wheelchair did and didn’t allow him to do. A few days later my father resumed surgery, on crutches.
By the time we went on holiday that August, he had recovered his old spark. Friends had lent us a caravan on the west coast of Scotland, and he was desperate not to sit it out while the rest of us went shrimp-catching and flounder-spearing. Fishermen’s waders would not accommodate the plaster cast; he used an empty plastic fertilizer bag instead, tying the top with string so he could wade out up to his thighs. It worked for a couple of days, until, inevitably, water penetrated the bag and the cast began to loosen and break. He had to go to the local hospital and get it reset. He came back, not shamefaced and reproached for having been so irresponsible, but triumphantly carrying the old cast, signed by most of the hospital staff.
I put his medical history back on the desk, and start opening drawers. A diary from 1940 (his spell as houseman in Charing Cross Hospital). A newspaper cutting from 1942 (‘CITY DOCTOR GOES ON MERCY TRIP … A Manchester RAF medical officer was among the crew of a Coastal Command Aircraft which saved the life of a Portuguese boy dangerously ill with Tetanus on one of the Atlantic islands of the Azores. Flight-Lieutenant A B Morrison answered an SOS call and delivered a supply of serum to 11-year-old …’). A programme for the Duke of York’s Theatre, October 1946, to see E. Vivian Tidmarsh’s farcical comedy Is Your Honeymoon Really Necessary? (it was his honeymoon). A menu for the Annual British Medical Association Dinner at the Swan Royal, Clitheroe, 1948 (shrimp cocktail, roast rib of English beef, assorted cheeses with celery, the toast to His Majesty the King). A ticket for the Colne Golf Club dance, 1949. The official racecard for the Pendle Forest and Craven Harriers Point-to-Point Steeplechase, April 1955 (winners marked in pencil). A diary record of our first family holiday abroad, Majorca, 1961 (what bought, what drunk, where visited, rows over sun-loungers on the terrace: ‘Fat Jew tried to pinch one we’d reserved’). Four torn-off cinema stubs (it must have been South Pacific , the only film we saw together as a family, my mother’s idea, but my father in his cock-eyed element: ‘A hundred and one pounds of fun/ That’s my little honey-bun’). A ticket to the stock car races, Bellevue Stadium, Manchester, 8 October 1963 (my birthday, one of his magical mystery treats). A receipt for the Regent Palace Hotel, 29 July–1 Aug 1966 (the World Cup Final: we were standing down by the Russian linesman when he gave that goal , and left thinking the final score was 3–2 because the Germans didn’t kick off again, joined the celebrations afterwards and heard the horns hooting all night in Piccadilly Circus). Another hotel receipt, for a week at the Cairngorm Hotel, Aviemore, 1969, cost forty-seven pounds, twelve shillings and threepence (our first shot at skiing, a holiday I’d buggered up for him by being confined to bed, my leg swollen from some insect bite).
I shut the drawer again. Every lunch and dinner, every theatre and sports outing, even the hotels where we stayed in the year of UCCA and my efforts to get a university place (he insisted on driving me to the interviews, of course, would have sat in on them if he could), nothing has been chucked, nothing let go of. I try another drawer, and another: cigarette lighters; leather watch-straps; a magnifying glass; Remembrance Day poppies; unsigned, cheeky-suggestive valentine cards (he to my mother, she or someone else to him, who could say: he always asked us not to sign greetings cards within the family, so they could be reused); a green plastic dagger with ‘Dettol’ written on it, his pharmaceutical freebie letter-opener. I shut the drawers again and close my eyes, and try to say their contents back to myself, like that memory game when a tray is put in front of you, then whisked away. And the objects I can recall all belong to the time before I was born. I hang on to them in a kind of desperation, as if, suddenly, all that I never had is lost and gone—a myth of having missed the best years by a breath: my parents first meeting each other; the war, and the strange numbness after the war; their marriage; their first and only practice. I close my eyes and try to see through the mist, the myth. But no picture comes into my head except a man at his desk under a Venetian blind, a man in a forties suit holding an HB pencil, a man trying to sketch something—a design for what? a valentine? a menu? the first National Health Card?—but drawing a blank, and finally screwing the paper up: ‘No good. Try again.’
*
At three I take his car out, pulling on the pair of leather gloves he’s left on the passenger seat. I drive towards Elslack Moor, which I can see ahead fighting clear of the roak. I take the right fork in Elslack village and wind up the steep hill, over the beck, past the farm where the sheepdog used to run out and chase the car, up to the fir plantation where my father and I once found a magical object made of metal and canvas with a piece of withered rubber and a tag: a weather balloon (we had to complete and send back the tag), but to me, aged seven, a miracle.
I stop the car and walk to the summit, the white concrete cairn. The mist has wiped out the valleys below and I can hear only the tug and chomp of grazing sheep. My father used to say the places up here got their names from the time that Charles the First, or was it Cromwell, crossed the Pennines, en route to one of the great Civil War battles, Preston or Marston Moor. ‘Hereby I pitch my tent’ became Earby. ‘Lo, there’s a dale’ became Lothersdale. ‘What’s yon foul ridge?’ became Foulridge. I’d not believed him—as if the King or Lord Protector had had a scribe diligently at elbow to rename the kingdom—but never mind: he had told me, that’s the only history that matters.
I walk back to the car. A Range Rover crashes across the cattle grid. There’d been a time when a drive out on the tops would be a long stop-start process through the sheep-dividing gates of various hill farms, my sister and I taking it in turns to get out and swing the five-barred gates open while the car passed through. You never got traffic in those days; you were the traffic. Now this is a busy road, the scenic cut-through from Colne to Keighley. I drive on a bit, then park again at the viewpoint the council has created above Earby. How different had it been when my parents arrived in 1946? There must have been half a dozen mill chimneys then, not just the one. The houses would all have been in that dark cobbled centre of terraces, not sprawling off in estates towards Sough and Barnoldswick. There would have been the wooden sleepers and iron flash of a railway line, whereas now there’s only the white limestone underlay and (hapless, capless) two pillars where a bridge once stood. There would have been haberdashers and ironmongers, not Chinese take-aways and video rentals. There would have been more smoke, more fields, less noise, fewer cars.
But the huddle of streets round the surprising green clearance of the cricket ground is little altered. And I can see our old house, the Crossings, where the main road, the A56, meets the Colne—Skipton railway line. There was a song when we lived there, ‘The Train Runs Right through the Middle of the House’, which seemed to have been composed especially for us. It wasn’t a good place for patients to come with migraines, but until the practice moved to Water Street, in the fifties, they had no choice: surgery was held in the side of our house. I could remember a roll-top desk, antiseptic smells, a leather-covered bench in the waiting-room, silent, head-down, pale-faced visitors. The trains were an hourly nuisance. My mother’s weighing-scales vibrated. My father gripped his syringe tightly. I was once found standing in the middle of the tracks.
What had he felt about Earby in his first years? He couldn’t pretend to like the place much, the last and least of an eastward sprawl of mill-towns. He’d said during the war that, when it was over, he’d never want to stray more than fifty miles from his home, Manchester. Once out of the RAF, he’d begun by looking for something in Cheshire, nearer his parents. But the money his father had lent him to get started wasn’t enough, could secure only this dead-end practice. There were consolations. He loved the Dales. He wanted to be topdoc, number one GP, and succeeded in wooing patients from the other two local practices. He was still young, just over thirty, when the National Health Service began in 1948, and—though a Tory voter most of his life—was in many ways a model NHS pioneer, receptive to new ideas, with a woman partner, and glad that he no longer had to chase up patients for the two and six or four and six or whatever it was they owed him. In the sixties he flirted briefly with emigration to Canada or Australia, and with lusher practices in North Yorkshire, but in the end he stayed put until he retired—for thirty-five years, decade after decade of inexorable routine: surgery at eight-thirty, visits from twelve till two, a quick pint, home for a sandwich, zizz and cup of tea, surgery again from four-thirty till seven-thirty, another visit or two squeezed in on either side.
I’ve often wondered what kind of doctor he was. ‘One of the most irascible buggers I’d ever come across,’ was how one patient had described his first impressions, adding: ‘It didn’t take me long to realize my mistake.’ But perhaps those first impressions were right. My father could be brusque and bad-tempered. He didn’t go in for kind words and placebos. ‘Fresh air and exercise’ was to him the greatest cure for everything, and though by the end he handed out pills as freely as the next doctor I sometimes thought he’d have been happier in an older world of quack medicine and home-made cures. ‘Give them drugs and they’ll be better in a week,’ he’d say, ‘give them nothing and it’ll be seven days.’ I knew how unscientific he could be: masturbation was bad, he warned me when I was a teenager, ‘because it weakens the organ for adult life.’ He had his passions, notably diet: blaming himself for his father’s coronary (if only he hadn’t let him get so overweight), he cut down his own weight (from twelve and a half stones to eleven) and drew up a diet sheet for his patients. But what a diet sheet: ‘YOU MUST NOT EAT bread, cakes, pastry, biscuits, butter, margarine, cream, fatty meats, sugar, jam, chocolate or potatoes,’ it ran. ‘YOU CAN EAT , in small amounts, green vegetables, lettuce, fresh fruit, fish, chicken and lean meat, ALWAYS get up still a bit hungry after each meal, and remember that if you eat enough of anything, grass even, you get fat—look at cows. AND REMEMBER: NO FAT PEOPLE CAME OUT OF BELSEN .’ Earby and Barnoldswick had quite a few Polish refugees. We ourselves had an Austrian Jew for a housekeeper. He was lucky, perhaps, that no one passed his diet on to the local paper.
My father hadn’t the temperament to be anything other than this kind of offensively no-nonsense doctor, though my mother—who worked less full-time in the surgery than he did, but to whom many patients, especially women, preferred to come—always justified his blunt manner by saying that it was what your average Earby patient needed: he didn’t talk down to them, didn’t dissemble, didn’t muck about. And his toughness didn’t run very deep: there was vulnerability and cack-handedness, too. One night he was called to deal with a drunk and violent man and decided that he couldn’t sedate him by conventional means (impossible to get the needle in) and would have to knock him out instead: ‘I went for a right hook rather than a jab.’ The man was mildly shocked by the blow to his chin, calmed down and quietly went off to bed. My father had to go to hospital, having broken his little finger.
I peer down on the dimming lights of Earby and try to remember the last time I saw him in action. Only this morning, on his desk, I’d seen the chart he had with the names of his ‘chronic’ patients, fifty or sixty or more. Since retirement he’s had a ritual of going to see them around Christmas, and of recording the date of every visit. The names of the deceased, marker-penned through in yellow, now outnumber those alive. This is going to be the first year he’s not paid his Christmas visit. So maybe his last time as a doctor was five months ago, on holiday with me in Suffolk. A girl came off her bike outside our gate, a fat, piggy-pink twelve-year-old moaning and bleeding all over the road. I was worried about moving her, but he dragged her on to the lawn and pushed her hair back, trying to find where the blood was coming from. I ran inside for cotton wool, ran back, went in again to ring her parents. By the time I got back he’d washed the blood from her and was dabbing iodine on her face and legs—the iodine left ugly yellow stains, uglier than wounds. Her parents came and took her to hospital, ‘for an X-ray, just in case’. A Thank You card came next day. My father was elated to have been useful again, to have helped and healed. But I kept thinking of those yellow stains and imagined the doctor in Casualty saying, as they brought her in: ‘God, iodine, we don’t use that on face-wounds any more. Who the hell’s done this to her?’
Chastened, afraid, it’s tempting for me to melt all his contradictions into a stream of hagiography. But I know the contradictions are there: the unsnobbish protector and defender of ‘ordinary decent folk’ had his big house, his Merc, his live-in maid, and was acutely aware of his social status; the sentimental family man could be a bully and tyrant; the open-hearted extrovert had a trove of secrets and hang-ups.
I drive down the hill past his old surgery in Water Street, the stream running fiercely under the stone footbridge that links the terraced houses to the street. When I get back to the house around five—the moon pouring in with a new child in its arms, grief coming through like a tooth—I find my mother still sitting as I’d left her, nothing and everything the same.