TWELVE
By The Mark On Her Hand
One May morning I chanced for to rove
And strolled through the fields by the side of the grove
It was there I did hear the harmless birds sing
Around 1993, my sister Dolly was back living again in Sussex. For some years, while she was married to her second husband, Stuart Hollyer, a geologist, her home had been in Lincolnshire. She had left that marriage and rented a cottage just outside the village of Balcombe, and was settled there with Fusty, her tabby cat, and her piano. Its wood had a deep honey tone that glowed in her living room, and had a wonderful, warm presence.
I was still working at the Job Centre in Brighton, and escaped every weekend to go walking or cycling with Dolly. Friday summer evenings we'd sit out in the garden, or in winter, by the fire, doing the Ladygram – a rather fiendish literary crossword in The Lady magazine. By filling in the clues onto a grid, you could work out the title of a book, its author and an excerpt. It took me a while to get the hang of it, but I still do it every week.
We had such good walks or long bike rides in the glorious countryside around Balcombe, whatever the season. Dolly once took me to see a wood ants’ nest; it was at the edge of a wood that bordered a lane. The large ants were on the move, and the entire swarm was flowing over the fence in their many thousands like a dark waterfall. We stood spellbound – and not a little queasy. One afternoon as we were walking along a lane by tall clumps of rosebay willow herb, the plants released their seeds in a cloud of white that floated above and around our heads before drifting on the breeze to find new places to settle. I've never experienced such a magic moment again. Then there was the morning in autumn when we had got up early to go mushrooming; the whole field was glistening silver in the pale sunlight, the grass hung with spider gossamer.
In the evenings at Balcombe Dolly would play her latest compositions to me, sitting so upright and straight-backed at the piano, as she always had, looking almost regal. While she was in Lincolnshire she had completed a secular mass, Missa Humana, her setting of the words written by the poet and novelist Maureen Duffy. In Sussex she was composing her settings of several First World War poems, and a new, full orchestral arrangement of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera. The text she was working from was a presentation copy, published in 1921 by Heinemann, with facsimiles of the eighteenth century tunes, and with colour plates of the costumes. It's printed on thick paper, now heavily foxed, which looks so appropriate, and has a name-plate: ‘This book belongs to Dolly Collins’. Now it is on my bookshelves, but is always called ‘Dolly's Beggar's Opera’.
She also wrote one folk-song arrangement that proved to be her last, the exquisitely tender ‘The Poor Drowned Sailor’, which she'd found in a book of folk songs collected by Cecil Sharp. I tried to sing it, but even in front of Dolly I didn't dare, and in any case it was too high for me. I kept the arrangement separately for years, hoping that one day I might attempt it; and eventually I did, on Lodestar, but called it ‘Washed Ashore’. Ian Kearey re-worked Dolly's arrangement for guitar.
I had always thought of Dolly as a strong woman, but I was aware that her health wasn't good. She had worked too hard all her life, and was always on the go, working extra hours in garden nurseries, even when she moved down to Balcombe. Evenings she spent knitting or crocheting or making preserves when she wasn't at her piano. She was wearing herself out, too, being deeply troubled by the plight of her dear friend Mike Clifton, the sculptor, cook, designer, singer and Morris dancer, who had worked often with us in the past and was now dying of AIDS. After his death, she felt that she hadn't done enough to prevent it. Of course, this cruel outcome was beyond her control, and she had spent many hours travelling up to his London hospice to sit by his bedside; but she couldn't forgive herself. It took its toll.
My mother and stepfather Harold Williams lived close by in Haywards Heath, and every Friday Dolly drove Mum to the shops. On the morning of 22 September, 1995, around 9.30am, I had a phone call from Mum, worried that Dolly hadn't arrived, and that when she telephoned her, the number was engaged. She asked me to phone Dolly's landlady, who lived in the house next door. I got through to her, and she said she'd go round to see what was up. A few minutes later she rang back to say that I should come up straight away, that Dolly had collapsed. ‘Is she alright?’ I asked. ‘I think you should come up,’ was her reply.
I didn't know whether my sister was alive or dead. In a daze, I rang for a taxi; when it arrived, it wasn't an official Brighton cab – it wasn't smart, and neither was the driver. He also wasn't sure where Balcombe was, he said, having never been there before. I gave him directions and off we set up through the Sussex countryside.
It was one of those golden September days, the air hot, but light, the sun gilding the fields, burnishing the stubble; a golden light shone through the trees, dappling the road. It was a day of such perfection that you'd have thought nothing bad could happen. The driver persisted in chatting; it was exhausting and I explained to him that I was on my way to see my sister who had collapsed, and that I needed to sit quietly.
When we reached Haywards Heath, instead of heading onto the Balcombe Road, the driver somehow managed to turn into Sainsbury's car park, then had difficulties finding his way out of it. We were just going round in circles. This was a nightmare. I didn't know what was waiting at the other end, although I think I knew in my heart that Dolly was dead. The gold of the day mocked, rather than comforted me. How could she die on such a beautiful day?
It brought back memories of those walks we'd had as children, particularly on early autumn days when, with baskets full of field mushrooms and blackberries, our fingers and mouths stained with their juice, our skins sweet and salty from the heat, we'd walk back over harvested fields, the spiteful sharp stubble scratching our bare legs. We just had to make it to the Guestling bus stop, and sit on the bench in the black wooden hut waiting for the East Kenter with its maroon livery to carry us and our bounty back to Ore Village…
When we eventually arrived at Dolly's cottage, there was a police car parked outside, and standing at the gate, a small group of people: Dolly's landlady, a neighbour, a nurse who lived just up the lane, a doctor and a policeman. ‘Is she dead?’ I almost shouted, the words springing from my mouth. They nodded. For a long moment I was numb, then started weeping, the young policeman holding me gently against his shoulder. The doctor told me that Dolly had suffered a massive heart attack. She had been found by her phone, which was dangling from its cord. Oh God! Had she tried to phone for help? The thought that she had failed was unbearable.
I asked if I could see her, but the doctor said it would be better if I didn't, explaining that Dolly's face was suffused with blood; better that I wait until later. Then came the dread realisation that I would have to break the news to Mum and to Dolly's son Tom, or Buz as he had chosen to call himself. The policeman offered to do this for me, but I knew I would have to do it myself and in person to my mother. I said I must go straightaway to see her, and the policeman drove me there. I was so grateful for his kindness and sensitivity and his willingness to try to make things easier. I knocked at Mum's door, and when she answered it, instead of breaking the news gently, I found myself blurting out, ‘Mum, Dolly's dead!’
And her response, ‘I'd better put the kettle on’, was not uncaring, it was stoic in the extreme.
Later, once home that evening I phoned Buz on his narrowboat in Leicestershire. ‘I'm afraid I've got very bad news, Buz.’ ‘Has Granny died?’ he asked. ‘No, darling, it's your Mum.’ What can you say to news like that? He said he'd have to call back later, and when he did, asked if he could come down with his wife straight away and stay until the funeral. Of course, that was alright. I then phoned Stuart, Dolly's estranged husband, who asked if he could come straight down. It was going to be a houseful.
Stuart was a tower of strength, even while he was suffering the loss of his wife. He told me that he'd fallen in love with Dolly many years back on her wedding day to her first husband, Dave Busby, in November 1968 when he, as one of the Chingford Morris, danced down through Battle High Street, and that he'd loved her ever since. I don't know how he stayed so focused throughout everything there was to do, driving us to the Registry Office in Haywards Heath to get all the necessary paperwork done, to the funeral directors, preparing for the funeral; I see it as his final act of love for her. Really, though, for all of us it was a stunned calm, we were sleepwalking through it all.
On the day Stuart, Pip and I went to the undertakers to see Dolly in the chapel of rest, we gripped each other's hands as we were shown in. Dolly was lying there; a coverlet over her and her hands neatly folded across her chest. ‘That's not Dolly!’ I cried. ‘We haven't lost her!’ But, of course, it was her. The pathetic sight of her hands, scratched from the gardening she loved to do, her fingernails still with earth under them, stays with me. Yet there was a feeling of elation that somehow she was still with us.
Well, of course she is with us in the sense that her music can still be heard. She had a rare ability to support a song and enhance it with her beautiful harmonies. If I was praised as a singer, it was in great part due to Dolly's accompaniments. She died too young at the age of sixty-two. Alan Bush, the composer under whom Dolly had studied, died that same year, a month and a few days later than her, but he had lived to the age of ninety-five.
I had lost a sister and a great companion, but had all my memories. I remember our happy Christmases out at Bodiam, where she lived for many years; the family crowded into Dolly's small front room that held the Christmas tree and was hung with foliage and the old-fashioned paper chains she insisted on making each year, the sort, that as children, we had made at the kitchen table, gluing strips of coloured paper together with a paste made of flour and water. No wonder they kept falling apart and floating down! The walls were pinned with quizzes that Dolly had been saving from The Guardian and The Observer.
One very merry time when the rum punch was flowing, we were sitting in a circle playing the alphabet game – on this occasion it was ‘name a ship in alphabetical order’. We had reached F – and it was my daughter Polly's turn. There was a long thoughtful silence, then suddenly she leapt off her chair and shouted ‘Oh Frigate!’ ‘Polly!’ her grandmother admonished her, begging her not to swear, which set off a chain of laughter, and it was some time before the room was brought to order again.
Dolly's Christmas dinners were feasts, with so many dishes being brought out from both the Aga and the gas oven, along with a huge roast goose, that there was scarcely room on the table for the dinner plates. Throughout the year though, Dolly was more frugal. Being a keen gardener, she grew most of her vegetables and fruit. She also still cooked dishes that had been typical of our childhood diet: steak and kidney suet puddings, bacon and leek roly-poly, stews with dumplings, bread and butter pudding, apple charlotte, steamed jam puddings, baked apples stuffed with raisins, drenched in golden syrup (although there hadn't been much of that during the years of rationing) then wrapped in a suet crust. Sometimes you could not get up from the table.
Going for walks with Dolly was a constant delight. In the evening, she knew where the badgers’ sett was, where the bats and the barn owl flew. She knew the names of so many wild flowers, names that have enriched the English language: enchanter's nightshade, goldilocks, hairy bittercress, shepherd's purse and speedwell, woodruff, lady's bedstraw, saxifrage, milkmaids, creeping cinquefoil and creeping jenny, water avens, viper's bugloss, yellow archangel, bird's foot trefoil, touch-me-not, and devil's bit scabious… and that scarcely skims the surface.
She noticed things that other people might miss – perhaps a bird's nest deep in a hedge – and she knew which trees made a proper hedgerow – hawthorn and blackthorn, dog rose, field maple, hazel, hornbeam and holly. Once, as we were walking through the woods towards Ardingly Reservoir to watch the crested grebes fishing, diving under water and surfacing a fair distance away, Dolly stood still and shushed me. We watched spellbound as a purple emperor butterfly fluttered around the tall foxgloves growing there. It was the only time I had ever seen one. I have Dolly's collection of books of wild flowers, fungi, apples, birds, moths and butterflies, all with their unique names. Who could resist the skippers, dingy or grizzled, chequered or silver-spotted, the clouded yellow, the brown hairstreak, or the painted lady and the gatekeeper (there's an alternative title for Lady Chatterley's Lover if you like!). The name of a moth, the lappet, is one of my favourite words, along with lynchets, those long, ancient terraces that can still be seen on Dorset hills, and on the South Downs.
Excerpt from a score for ‘The Poor Drowned Sailor’ by Dolly Collins.
Dolly's ashes were scattered on open country in Balcombe where deer roam, and rabbits abound – a favourite walk of hers. It still feels too lonely a place to me, and there is no marker there, except for the daffodils that we planted. Far better as a way to celebrate her life is the Woodland Trust's Springfield Wood, at Salehurst, near to Bodiam, where I think she was at her happiest. Twenty years ago, not long after her death, Stuart, Pip and I planted many saplings there in a field that the Trust had acquired; it's now a healthy young wood.1 Later Pip and I had a bench in Dolly's name placed in Butcher's Wood, the Woodland Trust's ancient wood at Hassocks, and we visit there each spring at bluebell time.
Seven years after Dolly's death, her son Buz committed suicide, in August 2002. He had been living on his narrowboat ‘The Maid in England’ in Loughborough, and had been suffering from depression, although I hadn't been aware of this. When I took the phone call from his estranged wife, I felt that my blood had turned to lead. I had never experienced such a sensation of unbearable heaviness before, even when Dolly died. I felt grateful at this point that she had gone and wouldn't have to bear this, but I also thought that if she was still with us, this tragedy might not have happened.
I was tormented by the fact that just a few weeks earlier, Buz had come down with his little daughter Amie, to spend a few days with me in Hove, having separated from his wife. We had all gone kite-flying on the Downs, Buz skimming his kite just a couple of feet above the ground on the long ridge of a brow, before letting it soar. We spent long days on the beach in perfect summer weather; Buz so handsome and tall, lean and tanned, seemingly so full of life, loving the sea. He turned to me at one point and said, ‘I could stay in the water forever.’ How I wish he had.
The funeral was held in a woodland site in Leicestershire; Buz's coffin a replica of a narrow boat. Pip was asked to be one of the six coffin bearers; he told me how heavy it was, and that as they reached the grave, he remembered how he used to carry Buz as a six-year-old on his shoulders when we went out to visit Dolly in Bodiam in our early days together.
When we left to drive home, there was a double rainbow in the sky above the burial ground, which was some sort of consolation. My lasting and still heartbroken memory of that sad and dreadful day was of his little daughter's utter bewilderment. Photographs show me standing there wringing my hands… I wasn't even aware that I was doing that – I'd only heard of it in songs:
Following his suicide, Buz's name was added to the plaque at Butcher's Wood – mother and son together.
