HAIL AND FAREWELL . Snow on Pendle. Gales. Storms. A great sweeping coldness. The Aire has flooded its banks from Skipton through to Otley. In the hurled elms the rooks’ nests look like blood-clots, not about to be shifted.
The Craven Herald has a fame beyond Skipton because it’s one of the last newspapers in the country to devote its front page entirely to advertisements. Here they all are. Skipton Auction Mart announces the sale of 722 store and breeding sheep, 600 store and suckler cattle with young bulls, 209 in-calf dairy cows and heifers, 23 young feeding bulls, 250 gritstone ewes and shearlings, 127 hogs, 5 rams, 1 Lim X heifer with calf at foot. In the Soroptimist Rooms, Skipton Bookmen have a discussion by D. Price of Great Expectations . The Plaza is showing Home Alone . There are jumble sales, civic balls, car boot sales, barn dances, coach excursions for Christmas shopping at the Gateshead Centre, carol services, parties and bazaars. North Yorkshire County Council confirms the order to divert the bridleway from grid reference SD 8329 6509 south east to a new route at the C393. The Personal column offers clairvoyance and tea-leaf readings and bunny kissograms.
When the last-but-one editor, barely thirty, took over the Craven Herald , there was speculation that he’d end the tradition of these front page ads. But he’d barely had chance to settle into the job when he died in a potholing accident up in Malham. The current editor is sixtyish, an old friend of my father’s, and not about to change anything.
I’d feared what he would write in his obituary. When he came the other day he didn’t seem much interested in the shilling-life facts we had prepared for him; indeed we barely got a word in between his orotundities. It is so gracious of you to receive me in such a time of distress—would that it had been in happier circumstances.’ ‘Let it not be said that Arthur was a retiring man, for all that he had retired: some would say that, au contraire , he verged on the interventionist, nay even bullying.’ it seemed odd hearing this Latinate purple coming from a red-faced Yorkshireman, and I wondered whether it wasn’t meant for me, or in parody of me—the boy who’d gone off to London and written books. But I underestimated him: among the stories of repossessions and GBH, today’s paper carries a long piece, boxed off and brought forward from the obituaries page, informed by deep affection. The Barnoldswick and Earby Times , by contrast, has set a cub reporter on the job, who attributes my father’s pugnacious village spirit to his ‘RAF background’ and makes him sound like a militaristic busybody. But perhaps I’m bad-tempered because this paper makes its front page lead not my father (who is down below the centre-fold) but a woman celebrating her hundredth birthday, smilingly marking up a quarter century he never had. I feel the same looking at the obituaries in the Yorkshire Post : my poor dead father, a spring chicken among columns of octo-and nonegenarians. At least no one could mistake that he is dead: everybody else has merely passed on or fallen asleep .
The hail begins to turn to snow. At my mother’s behest, I go through my father’s wardrobe, his drawers, his bedside cabinet, in search of things I’d like to keep. It’s a scene I’ve always dreaded, the great elegiac moment of coming into my father’s clothes, but I’ve been through too many dress rehearsals for it to hurt, and not just in my head: ever since he retired my father has been handing down his shirts, his shoes, his money—‘You can’t take them with you,’ he’d say. So I would rummage about, trying not to show how badly I wanted to wear some of the things he’d worn when I was a child—his 1947 white cotton tennis shirt with his name-tag sewn in red on the collar; his bomber jacket, his velvet waistcoat, his flat golf cap, his black-and-white spotted silk scarf, his Tootal and Kendal Milne ties. ‘Are you sure you don’t want this … ?’ I’d say. ‘Go on, take it, I’ve not worn that for years.’ But now that he’s gone, I feel like a grave-robber. I take three jumpers, a dozen pairs of socks, two pairs of brown leather shoes, some cuff-links, and stash them in an old RAF travel-bag of his. Then I put on his white nylon shirt, black tie, grey suit, black woollen socks, black shoes. I am going to his funeral in his clothes.
Back in the living-room, the snow is creeping up the double-glazed doors. Every minute it rises a little further, a wind-drawn tide of nothingness. Who will brave the roads in this? There are friends and relations due to come over the Pennines—will they get through? All the while the wind gets stronger, the snow thicker, and the hills my father built this house to look out on can no longer be seen. My sister arrives with her children and husband, who says: ‘We might have known he’d choose a day like this, gales and hail and every bloody thing. I bet he’s up there, pulling the strings, having a good laugh.’
At twelve the two funeral cars come, the hearse waiting at the bottom of the drive. We are not due at church, two minutes’ drive away, till twelve-fifteen. Malcolm, the boss, drives up in a fourth car, his Escort estate. He comes to fetch us from the front door, and takes me aside a moment to hand over the pacemaker scalpelled from my father’s chest. It is the weight and size and shape of a stopwatch. I turn it over to find the clock-face and, when no one’s looking, hold it to my ear to listen for ticking. I clutch the pleasant plasticity of its sides, as if it were a precious stone—the talisman of my old man. I put it in my trouser pocket to fondle through the funeral, not letting go.
There is a wide tarmac area in front of the house, room enough in normal conditions for the two big black death limos to turn around, but in the ice and snow the manoeuvre is causing them trouble. Finally the cars are pointing in the right direction and—not rushing, not wanting to arrive early—we climb in. The front car moves towards the corner by the garage to turn off the forecourt into the drive. The capped chauffeur has not left himself much room. At the corner, between the drive and the garage, is a small path, edged with kerbstones, which deepens as it goes. When the front wheel crosses this it slithers down. The chauffeur stops, then revs and plunges forward to retrieve the damage, but only forces the front of the car deep and insurmountably down the path. He reverses, but he does not retreat far enough, and when he moves forward again, engine revving, he makes the same mistake. This time the back end of the car has slewed round and is no more than three inches from the garage wall.
We get out and have a look. It’s agreed we should stay out—our weight may be making things more difficult. It is now twelve-fifteen. The chauffeur is looking flustered, removing his cap—its chiselled line in the sweat of his hair. Four of us get our hands under the rear bumper and bounce the car further from the wall, laughing as we do so. My brother-in-law slides a fallen tile under the rear nearside wheel. The chauffeur climbs back into the driving seat, reverses over the tile and back about three feet, then drives forward with steady intent, no high revs. The result is the same, or slightly worse: front end down the gutter, back end slewed an inch from the wall.
By twelve-twenty, we’re resigned to the side of the car being damaged; only Malcolm is not. He stands there in the icy wind, fondling his chin, watching his profit margin being wiped out. Expenses: coffin/carpentry 500 pounds; hire of chauffeurs/pallbearers 200 pounds; cost to client 1,100 pounds; profit 400 pounds. A 500-pound repair on the Bentley would see that off. I can see his mind ticking over like a taxi meter, two sorts of panic wrestling in him—humiliation at getting the client late to the church, desperation not to let his car be scratched.
Now my brother-in-law remembers the pile of sand my father has accumulated nearby—a sandpit for the grandchildren it was going to be. He gets a spade and scatters the sand under the rear wheels of the car, the path, the drive, the forecourt. We bounce the car clear of the wall, as before, and this time the chauffeur backs slowly over the broken tile and sand, gives himself a long run and negotiates the corner safely, it is twelve twenty-five.
We climb in again and join the hearse down at the bottom of the drive. ‘I always used to tell him: you’ll be late for your own funeral,’ my mother says.
She’s been distracted, like the rest of us, by the thought of people in church sitting and freezing and wondering what’s gone wrong. But now there’s no ignoring the coffin in the hearse just ahead of us and her top lip trembles. We need not have worried about a poor turnout. It’s a quarter of a mile to the church, but before we’re halfway there we see the cars parked on either side of the road. And as we pull in by the church gate, three spaces reserved for us, we see the cars stretching on towards Barnoldswick. We huddle in the wall by the church gate, hailstones slanting past, slashing slow snow, my mother pulling her black fur coat more tightly over her black cotton jacket.
Four pallbearers slide the coffin out and up on to their shoulders. There is a standard-bearer, too, a guard of honour from the British Legion: my father was president of the Earby branch for thirty-five years, and this man has been sent to walk immediately ahead of the coffin while my mother, my sister and I walk immediately behind. As we move inside the church I have an impression of large numbers, of rows and rows of heads as far as you can see. I stare down at the stone flags, their familiar cracks and stains. One Christmas I stood here and sang the first verse of ‘Once in Royal David’s City’, suspecting that the mantle of soloist had fallen on me (like captaincy of the village cricket team, like the local reporter’s weekly attention to my soccer performances) not out of any merit but because I was the doctor’s son, or doctors’ son.
Now the doctors’ son, or doctor’s son, is following the doctor up the aisle, for the first and last time. We step in time, my sister and I, she on my mother’s left arm, I on the right, and just before we reach the front pew I risk lifting my face between the backs of necks and see ahead Heather and Amanda, the wives of my two cousins, weeping in the choir-stalls: this is for them that moment when you see the coffin and think of the body inside and the word ‘dead’ sinks home. We shuffle into the cold pew, and the first hymn starts up, ‘O God Our Help in Ages Past’—my choice, though I’m wondering now about its aptness, the bleakness of its vision of human ephemerality: ‘They fly, forgotten as a dream/Dies at the opening day,’ we sing, but didn’t our wreath say: ‘We will never forget you’? I lift my head again, and see my cousins’ wives still crying, and hear my daughter and her cousin in the row behind start to cry. ‘Time like an ever-rolling stream/ bears all its sons away’ makes me think of the moment during cremation when the curtains close and the coffin rolls away.
Now we are sitting. A neighbour from across the road is reading the lesson, from The Pilgrim’s Progress . He has chosen this, he explains, because my father seemed to have something of a pilgrim about him, a man of communal spirit, one sometimes inclined to bully his fellow-men into making greater efforts, a cross between Mr Valiant-for-Truth and Mr Standfast: ‘When the day that he must go was come many accompanied him to the River side, into which, as he went, he said, “Death, where is thy sting? ” And as he went down deeper, he said, “Grave where is thy victory? ” So he passed over, and trumps sounded for him on the other side.’ My father would be sniggering at the ‘trumps’. It was his word for fart. His trumps had filled my childhood as noisily as his snores.
We go to the second hymn now, ‘Lead, Kindly Light’, my mother’s choice—there are those lines about ‘encircling gloom’, and the second stanza (surely she didn’t intend this) brings back my father’s stubbornness: ‘I loved to choose … Pride ruled my will.’ Sitting down again, I see the snow behind the stained-glass window of Moses parting the Red Sea. I imagine my father going under the waves, or under the sea, and I hear out there or in my head a quote from Ecclesiasticus:
And some there be, which have no memorial;
Who are perished, as though they had never been;
And are become as though they had never been born;
And their children after them.
The vicar begins to talk—knowledgeably: you wouldn’t guess he didn’t know my father. The congregation is like a great wave pressing at my back.
‘The sermon I gave last Sunday, the day on which Arthur Morrison died, contained this phrase: “Some may think they have believed in Christ, though their life denied it. Others may not imagine themselves to have believed, though their life has affirmed it.” It must be readily admitted that Arthur Morrison found little time for the Church and organized religion. He regarded religious activity as almost a contradiction in terms. He hated the time-wasting tedium of the committee. His whole life seemed to echo St James’s words in his epistle: “Be doers of the word and not hearers only.”
‘Today we come to bid farewell to a loving husband and devoted father; a valued colleague in his medical profession; a caring counsellor and confidant; a good friend to high and low, rich and poor. The splendid Village institute stands as a memorial to his vision and energy. But there were other examples: the successful youth club he ran in his stables’ harness room; the Best Kept Village and Britain in Bloom competition successes; the car boot sales and endless raffles. We gather up these deeds and bring them before Almighty God.’
I half-turn, but the faces I see are all lifted to the vicar or sunk in memory of the car boot sales and Britain in Bloom. I feel time running fast through us all, and regret no one has brought a camera or camcorder, so we can play today back, so there can be a memorial. People video weddings—why not funerals, too?
The vicar is winding up: ‘St Paul had a constant companion on his journeys across Asia Minor and into Europe: St Luke, whom Paul described as “the beloved physician”—on account of the love both given to and received from his patients. That phrase, “the beloved physician”, sums up Arthur Morrison perfectly. May he rest in peace.’
We kneel with our psalters on blue-embroidered cushions, whispering to the children not to touch the large central heating pipe, black and hot beneath the pews. The last hymn, ‘Jerusalem’, isn’t in Thornton-in-Craven’s hymn-book; even in The English Hymnal , it creeps in only among the litanies, 656A, an annex to another hymn; we’ve had to get a sheet specially printed. My sister loves the music (she is crying before the first bar is over), and may have her other reasons: its fighting spirit; the ‘dark satanic mills’ that could be Earby’s; and because it’s by Blake, and my father’s middle name (his mother’s maiden name) is Blakemore—though he surely never read the poet in his life, would not have known who William Blake was if the name had come up in Trivial Pursuit.
Now the last prayers are over, and we stand to leave our pews, and the bearers are picking up the coffin. As the British Legion man walks ahead out of the choir-stalls the top of his pole catches the carved wooden screen, and for a long horrible moment it snags there. He retreats a step and waggles it, and still it won’t come loose, but then he tries again, less discreetly, and it is free, and we turn behind him into the aisle, my mother, my sister and I in line together. I want to lift my head to nod meaningfully at the faces we now face, as if to say: It is all right, we are grieving but appeased now, thank you for coming. But I keep my head down until we are out of the porch and on to the wet flags and think: Now I will never know who was in church. The snow blows past, and I feel, belatedly, and with a sort of queasiness at feeling such feelings at all, the sort of pride my father once felt in me. His life had not flowered unseen, or been wasted on the desert air: the numbers proved it—here was a man of substance.
The crematorium is six miles away and it’s a slow route. I imagine the funeral procession as the line of boys walking behind the teacher on a school outing in Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cent Coups —at each street corner someone slips away until only sir is left. The snow has stopped by the time we get there, but the wind is icier, and we wait in wreaths of breath while the coffin is unloaded again.
it is a short service: two minutes of Albinoni on tape (his Adagio in G Minor, a piece I’d taken to playing with doomy repetitiveness just before my father’s illness), then the tape fading for three minutes of the vicar. As he speaks of committing to God this beloved servant, he reaches for the rope-pull which will swish the curtains round the coffin and activate the conveyor-belt—at which point Malcolm leaps from the front stalls and whisperingly intervenes: the family wish the coffin to remain visible and in place until after the service; it is they who will disappear, not the deceased. The vicar nods, the service ends, Albinoni resumes. We file out, a last look back at the big wooden box with the flowers on: it has so little to do with him, yet he is lying in it. As we reach the door, half a dozen mourners push through, late for this ceremony or early for the next. Outside, more cars pull up—one with my cousins in, who have lost their way. We stand for a moment or two in the knife of the wind. People shake hands with us, sorry for our trouble.
Down the side of the crematorium, by the little wooden makeshift cross marked A B MORRISON , are the wreaths: my mother’s, the children’s, the grandchildren’s. I stand in his clothes—how well they fit me now—gazing down at the earth. Snow blows across his black scuffed shoes, the bottom of his greatcoat, his trouser turn-ups. Whoever put his cross up must have had trouble knocking the stake through the soil’s icy heart. A tear of catarrh drops from the end of my nose. I dig my heel in but the ground won’t give. I feel the frozen earth coming up through my soles.
*
We have put a white cloth over a table in his study, and this is where the bar is. I’ve arranged it, as he used to, in descending order of alcoholic strength: the serious bottles of brandy, whisky, rum and gin to the right; down through the sweet-sickly shades of vermouth, sherry and wine; on to the cellar-brown gleam of pale ales, Guinness and bitter; finally, far left, the bright, feel-good cartons of fruit juice. To one side of the bar, in front of his desk, its drop-lid firmly shut, is a lower, smaller table where the glasses and tankards are. He had a range of these: the dimpled pewter RAF tankard; the silver golf club mug, with its humanizing dent just below the twirly engraving; and countless other presentation cups—silver, brass, glass—won at squash or golf tournaments, or given at Christmas, one or two of which must still be hanging for him on hooks in local pubs. Among the glasses, in bowls, are crinkly crisps and salted nuts. Down the corridor, in the kitchen, are squishy, lard-tasting prawn vol-au-vents; ham and egg quiche; cheese and crab paste in thin-sliced, freckled brown sandwiches; old-fashioned Lancashire meat pies, yellow-crusted and serrated, and with a small jellied hole at the centre.
The mourners step into the house, rubbing their cold hands, stamping the snow from their shoes. They stand with drinks and cigarettes, and there’s a strange euphoria about it, the release of afterwards and the illusion that the man we have come in memory of must be about the place, somewhere. Once there’d been a party like this every New Year’s Eve, a Jacob’s joint—the host supplying drink and everyone else contributing a cold dish or salad or dessert. The guests were always the same thirty or forty people, and the venues had varied at first, but in time it came down to my father to organize things, and—being an eager host and reluctant guest—this meant holding it at his home. In time, too, the numbers dropped: last year there’d only been twenty. This year there won’t be a party at all—here it is, ten days early.
I move among the wake, offering drinks, receiving condolences. People have their memories: they pass them on (and I flesh them out). Jack Jones, from down the village, remembers coming back here one summer midnight two decades ago and walking round the rough paddock (whisky glasses in hand, a heavy dew), my father complaining of the lack of village spirit and outlining his plans to start a Men of Thornton evening, a monthly gathering in the bar of the Manor House Hotel. Uncle Ron remembers lying on his back in the November wind under my father’s chalet, the two of them wirebrushing the sub-frame (the rust of sea salt, a drizzle of orange flakes). Brian and Hilly Thackeray remember staying in that same chalet one teenage summer, a crowd of us swimming in the dark (the lighthouse, phosphorescence, an angry man poking his head through the bedroom window after midnight demanding his daughter). Cousin Kela remembers the lobster my father caught by Llanbedrog headland; she had been sent back to fetch a bucket while the men used sticks to keep it from escaping (plunged grey in the boiling saucepan, it screamed and came out pink). Auntie Edna remembers how old Harry Hall took my father to court for refusing to chop the branches which hung over and took the light from his little cottage (a man in brown, suddenly frail and hard of hearing, winning the magistrate’s sympathy; my father to comply, lop and pay costs). Cousin Richard remembers my father inviting him over from Manchester during the school holidays to chop dead trees for firewood at one-and-six an hour: he filled the stable with chunks of elm (faint ripple rings on their white sawn surfaces, rosettes of fungus on the side), and went home a rich man. Perhaps he also remembers (but it’s not the day to mention it) my father forcing him to eat up his Brussel’s sprouts one Christmas dinner (turkey, paper hats, the heat-blown fairies in the wire candle-holder tinkling round and round). And Auntie Beaty, who’s here too of course … only Beaty’s memories stay closed.
I keep the drinks topped up, his old job, ignoring the protests. The party has its own momentum now—wake or wedding, in the drink and cigarette smoke it’s easy to forget which, easy to think it’s just another New Year’s Eve. But then I catch sight of my father’s leather dog-lead hanging on the back of the door, and I think not just of him but of the others who aren’t here, either—those whose deaths had made him morbid in his last decade. No Granny. No Auntie Mary. No Florrie Wallbank, with her beauty spots and her hair piled high in a swirl of silver (died of cancer). No Bobby Dickinson, diminutive in his yellow V-necked golf jumper and a handicap of eight (routine operation that went wrong, haemorrhage). No Uncle Charles staring from his violet pock-marked face (leukaemia), nor Auntie Selene, with her kind magistrate’s eyes and dead, pasty, like-kissing-baking-powder cheeks (she had come six months after Charles’s death complaining of stomach pains, and when my mother laid her down on the bed she could feel tumours as big as golf balls). No Joan O’Neill, with the hollowed horse face, my mother’s great confidante, who lost two husbands from brain tumours before her own stroke. No Billy Cartwright, with his soft, doggy civility (keeled over from a heart attack while mowing the lawn). Above all, no Uncle Stephen, my godfather, who epitomized the exuberant unthinkingness—golf, alcohol and practical jokes—of my father’s crowd. A year ago, home from the hospital where he was being treated for depression (Stephen? depression ?), he had trooped down the garden to light a bonfire and was found in flames next to his petrol can; the inquest returned an open verdict. Fun and fresh air and cock-eyed optimism: it had all gone, with Stephen. Now my father had gone too.
As the light darkens, everyone prepares to leave, putting down paper plates and empty glasses, hunting for coats. We kiss or shake hands at the door: ‘See you again,’ I say, but when will the next time be—my mother’s funeral, their own funerals? You have a childhood, and move away, and think vaguely that if you choose to come home again it will still be there, intact, as you left it. What was left of my childhood were these frail widows and widowers, stepping out into the snow, the coming night.
Back inside, on the living-room floor, among the wine spills and dropped crisps, my daughter and her cousin are sitting with paper and crayons. They have an uncanny intimacy for children who live two hundred miles apart and who hardly ever see each other—perhaps not uncanny since they were born on the same day within hours of each other, a coincidence which became one of my father’s great triumphs (‘How often does that happen—two grandchildren at opposite ends of the country, born on the same day?’). Now they are seven. Their arms twined, their legs tucked under them, they have drawn a boat and written a story. They hand it to me, eighteen words long: ‘When a ship gets poorly it goes to port. Then it dies, then it dies, then it dies.’