Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill (3 page)

Diana Athill with her mother, 1918

‘O
H MY GOD
,’ said my mother. ‘Can I really have a daughter who is seventy?’ and we both burst out laughing.

She was ninety-two. It was eight years since she had driven a car, six since social services had supplied her with a seat to help her bathe without getting stuck in the tub. She needed two sticks when she made her daily inspection of her garden, and had given up the needlepoint embroidery she loved because her sight was no longer good enough. She was well aware of being a very old woman, but she still felt like the Kitty Athill she had always been, so it was
absurd
to have another old woman as a daughter.

Another person, however, might have forgotten her own name before reaching that age, so it is impossible to generalize about growing old. Why, I was once asked, do so few people send back reports about life out on that frontier; and the answer is that some no longer have the ability because they have lost their wits, some no longer have the energy because they are beset by aches and pains and ailments, and those lucky enough to have hung on to their health feel just like they felt before they were old except for not being able to do an increasing number of things, and for an awareness of their bodies as sources of a slight malaise, often forgettable but always there if they think about it.

I belong to the last group, touch wood (once you have made it into your eighties you don’t say something like that without glancing nervously over your shoulder). The main things I can no longer do are drink alcohol, walk fast or far, enjoy music, and make love. Hideous deprivations, you might think – indeed, if someone had listed them twenty years ago I would have been too appalled to go on reading, so I must quickly add that they are less hideous than they sound.

Drink, for instance: I did not have to say to myself ‘Drink is no longer good for me
so I must give it up
’. What happened was that I began to wake up in the night quite often with a horrid pain which got worse and worse until I threw up, and eventually concluded that what caused this unpleasantness was alcohol. I took a long time to get there because often I had drunk no more than one or two glasses of wine with dinner, and who would suppose that one or two glasses of wine could make one ill? But they did, and by the time I understood as much, I was so tired of all that miserable sickness that I said goodbye to alcohol quite happily and began positively to enjoy water.

Being bad at walking is tiresome, but not so tiresome for me as it would be for some. In my youth I never walked where I could ride a horse, and later never where I could drive a car, which I can still do. My happiest times have been spent in chairs or beds: possibly I would actually like it if I became wheelchair-bound.

The loss of pleasure in music because of increasing deafness is sadder. The sounds can still be heard, but are distorted into ugliness. The piano comes through almost unaltered, but strings and birdsong are scratchy and painful, while most high voices are squawks. But against that, silence, like pure cold water, has become lovely.

As for sex – some very old women say that it still gives them pleasure, so clearly it varies from person to person. With me its ebbing was the first of the physical indications of old age: my body began slowly to lose responsiveness in my sixties, long before my mind did. For a while it could be restored by novelty, which allowed me an enjoyable little Indian summer, but when it became a real effort, and then a mockery, it made me sad: being forced to fake something which had been such an important pleasure was far more depressing than doing without it.

It seems to me that once one has got over the shock of realizing that a loss is a symptom of old age, the loss itself is easy to bear because you no longer want the thing that has gone. Music is the only thing I would really like to have back (whisky would be nice, but not nice enough to fret about). If a hearing-aid is developed which truly does restore their real nature to those nasty little scratchy sounds which make silence seem lovely, then I will welcome it.

The big event of old age – the thing which replaces love and creativity as a source of drama – is death. Probably the knowledge that it can’t fail to come fairly soon is seriously frightening. I say ‘probably’ because to be as frightened as I suspect I might be would be so disagreeable that I have to dodge it – as everyone must, no doubt. There are many ways of dodging. The one I favour is being rational: saying ‘Everyone who ever was, is and shall be, comes to the end of life. So does every
thing
. It is one of the absolute certainties, as
ordinary
as anything can be, so it can’t be all that bad.’ Having said that, you then allow your mind to occupy itself with other matters – you do not need to force it, it is only too pleased to do so.

And I have also been granted another specific against unseemly fear, which is remembering the death of my mother. She died in June, 1990, the day before her ninety-sixth birthday. That week she had bought a eucalyptus tree, and Sid Pooley, who with his wife had been working in her garden for years, came to plant it for her. She went out to show him where, and when he looked up from digging the hole he saw that she was not quite herself. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked, and she said she was feeling a bit odd and had better go back to the house. When Sid had helped her back and put her into her chair in the sitting room, he telephoned Eileen Barry, her home help and friend, who came quickly. Having had much experience of old people, Eileen suspected heart failure, so before telephoning me and my brother she got my mother into the little cottage hospital which we are lucky enough still to have. It used to be run by Anglican nuns who have a convent in the village, and my grandfather was one of its founders. At that time it had only two private rooms and two wards, one for old women, the other for old men (most of its patients are very old: younger people are treated at the county hospital. An elderly cousin of mine, on hearing a rumour that our little hospital might be closed, exclaimed: ‘Oh no! Where shall we die?’). Both the rooms were occupied, and the women’s ward was full, so they found my mother a bed in the men’s ward and put screens round it.

I got there, after a misleadingly reassuring telephone call, early next morning, and found my brother Andrew and my cousin Joyce beside my mother’s bed. My sister could not be there because she lived in Zimbabwe. It was frightening: my mother’s face was almost purple, she was gasping for breath, and they told me she had just vomited black stuff. It seemed that she must die at any moment. When I put my hand on hers and leant over her, she opened her eyes, which wandered for a moment and then met mine – and a wonderful thing happened: a smile seemed to come flaming up from deep inside her, illuminating her whole face. Andrew was to say later ‘That was an
amazing
smile she gave you,’ and so it was: the complete expression of a lifetime’s almost always unspoken but never doubted love, coming to me like a precious gift.

Eventually a doctor came and gave her a shot – morphine, I suppose – and one of the little rooms was made ready for her. She fell into a deep, drugged sleep and the sister in charge said firmly that nothing was going to happen that night (the day had seemed endless – it was astounding to realize that it was over), so we had better go away until next morning. Andrew drove off to his home sixty miles away in north Norfolk, and Joyce and I went to my mother’s house, fed her dog, scrambled some eggs and went to bed – I in my mother’s bed, which felt odd but comforting.

And next morning she was better, sitting up against a bank of pillows in her quiet little room, pale but like herself. Her voice seemed almost strong when she said ‘Oh darling – could you brush my hair? It feels so horrible.’ When I had done that I went to find Sister, exclaiming when I did so ‘She’s much better!’ That kind woman put her hand on my arm and said: ‘She’s
feeling
much better, but she is still very very poorly’ – and I understood that she was warning me not to expect recovery.

All that day my mother was sleepy, but herself. From time to time she murmured that she would like a sip of water, or the bedpan, and she told me that although her desk looked untidy I would find her will and other necessary papers in one of its drawers. ‘But Aunt Kit,’ said Joyce – my mother’s eldest niece, and the one dearest to her – ‘you’ll be back there yourself in a few days,’ to which she answered sharply ‘Don’t be absurd, I could go any minute.’ Twice she emerged from a doze into a state of slight confusion, once thinking her dog had been in the room, then reminding me to pay for the wreath of poppies she put on my father’s grave every November, which was five months away. The next time she woke, after quite a long sleep, she said: ‘Did I tell you that Jack drove me over to Raveningham last week to buy that eucalyptus?’

‘You told me he was going to,’ I said. ‘Was it fun?’

And she answered in a dreamy voice: ‘It was absolutely divine.’

Then she turned her head away and went back to sleep.

Jack, who drove her that afternoon, told me later that it
had
been an exceptionally lovely day – June at its most beautiful – and that she had asked him to go by a lane she specially loved because she often rode that way as a girl. ‘She did enjoy every minute of it,’ he said.

A few minutes after she had fallen asleep Joyce and I decided that we had better go to feed her dog, and before we had been in her house fifteen minutes, Sister telephoned to tell me that she was dead.

The nurse who let me into her room when I went back to say goodbye to her was embarrassed because, although they had closed her eyes, they had not propped up her chin. She looked just as she sometimes looked when she went to sleep in her chair with her head leaning back, so that her jaw dropped: not a dignified deathbed image, but too familiar to be distressing. And anyway, I was far from distress. I was full of gratitude because she had come to the end of her days with an image in her mind of an afternoon that had been ‘absolutely divine’. One dreadful day, one of sleepiness, then that. She had bequeathed me, as well as that wonderful smile, the knowledge that an old person’s death is not necessarily terrible.

My mother in her garden

 

That a woman of ninety-six was lucky enough to die an easy death without losing her wits or the ability to enjoy her chosen way of life in her own house: there was nothing much to mourn in that. Naturally I was to miss my mother – would often catch myself thinking that I must tell her something amusing or ask her something important – but I would also come to feel that mothers are never quite lost. Increasingly I see how much of her is still with me, literally in that I carry her genes within me, and also because of how much my attitudes and outlook were shaped by the upbringing she gave me. And when she died I avoided – though narrowly – what is sometimes the worst part of mourning: the burden of guilt about the dead person’s last years which can threaten people after a parent’s death.

My mother would never have dreamt of saying that she was lonely and sometimes afraid, but of course she was; and it became worse when, a few years before her death, she began to have attacks of vertigo. She knew they were not dangerous (unless one of them caused her to fall dangerously), but they were very unpleasant and enduring them alone called for considerable courage. My brother and I bullied her into accepting one of those lockets which send out an alarm call, but we couldn’t make her wear it. I knew she ought to have someone living with her – and I also knew how relieved and happy she would be if that someone was me.

Because I was one of the founding directors of the publishing house André Deutsch Limited, I was still working there, and I still needed to work. Publishing had been rewarding in many ways, but not financially (partly owing to my own indifference, which I now see as foolish, if not reprehensible). I had almost no savings, nor did my mother have any money to spare. She was the extravagant one in a set of sensibly frugal siblings, and although her extravagance was touchingly modest (buying a hundred daffodil bulbs instead of twenty, for example) it had left her in an awkward position. My father had retired from the Army as a lieutenant-colonel, so the pension paid to his widow was small, and although my maternal grandfather had set up a trust for his four daughters which no doubt seemed generous when he did it, by the time my mother reached her nineties it brought her in less than a thousand a year. Like her sisters, when widowed she gravitated home, which meant to the estate then owned by my uncle, where their mother still lived. My uncle sold her very cheaply a tumbledown cottage, and she somehow scraped together the money – helped, I think, by a sister – to convert it into a charming little house … and then found herself without enough money to live in it. Her brother came to the rescue. He bought back the now much more valuable cottage and let her go on living in it on condition that it would return to the estate after her death, so she was able to buy herself an annuity. It was a relief to her children that she could continue living in the house which suited her so well, but it did mean that if I were to give up my job she could offer me no security in return.