Slowing Down (2 page)

In her autobiography, dictated like Buñuel’s towards the end of her life, she expressed the hope that she would ‘die at a sparkling moment’, and so she did. Her happy end was rare though. Not to be relied on.

Indeed not! My mother, for example, died in her nineties, in Shakespeare’s seventh age,
sans
teeth,
sans
eyes,
sans
taste,
sans
everything. My father had died aged sixty-one of a perforated ulcer. My mother and I were at his deathbed in a Liverpool hospital. The West Indian nurse knew exactly when he was going. I looked at his corpse, but his humorous lethargic spirit had left only a shell, an envelope. What surprised me, and later on my sister when she got there, was
how calmly my mother took it. They’d been married for forty years, but she didn’t weep and all she said to the nurse was (embarrassing, as she often was), ‘My son has many coloured friends.’ A week later she even went on a fishing trip with me to a hotel in North Lancashire that my father had booked for us both some weeks before. I found out later that this calm interlude is by no means uncommon. Some block (chemical? psychological? both?) would seem to protect the bereaved from reacting immediately to the death. Maud was even in total control at the funeral.

A few weeks later the dam burst, the river broke its banks. She cried much of the time and reproached herself continually for sometimes criticizing Tom (not without reason) for drinking too much, all this interwoven with endless reminiscing about their life together.

Gradually she recovered. My sister, brother and I persuaded her, without too much difficulty, to sell the big house in Liverpool where she’d lived for twenty-six years and move to Brighton (we all lived in the south by then), and Andrée found her a big flat with a lift, on the front overlooking the wrinkled sea and the still splendid pavilion pier.

Her life seemed worth living again. There were grandchildren, visits to the theatre, family Christmas at one or the other of us in rotation, while, in Brighton itself, she kept up with several retired theatricals, most of them elderly gays.

She only revisited Liverpool once and came back to Brighton saying that she didn’t ‘care for it any more’, although, until she’d moved, she’d lived there all her life within a quarter of a mile. Too many ghosts, perhaps. Or, more likely, the fact that she was no longer at the centre of a mildly Bohemian circle, no longer the queen of queens?

Although eight years older than Tom she was to outlive him by over twenty years. She hadn’t drunk anything beyond the occasional ginger-beer shandy on very hot days, or, even more rarely, a Tia Maria, for she had a very sweet tooth. As for smoking, only very occasionally in the loo, if she felt it politic to mask the pong. Even so, and inevitably, true old age was beginning to growl quietly in its corner and show its yellow teeth.

Faced with various small accidents of a potentially dangerous nature, Andrée decided it was time to move Maud to somewhere where she could keep a closer eye on her and settled for a small flat in commuter-ridden Surrey. The flat was directly opposite a health-food store, somewhat ahead of its time, which Andrée and her husband, Oscar, had opened after their semi-retirement from the stage. This enabled Andrée to ‘pop across the road’, as Maud put it, to check she was all right. (‘Pop’ was a favourite word of my mother’s. Before it drew closer, she always referred to her own death as ‘popping off’.)

Andrée warned me after a time that Maud was beginning to lose her marbles, but I didn’t really take this in until, on one of my rather infrequent visits, I realized she was talking disconnected nonsense. Without ‘drawing breath’, an expression she used to describe non-stop verbalizers, she told me that footballers shouldn’t wear beards as it stopped them playing well (she had never shown the least interest in the game, but detested facial hair), that she couldn’t understand why she was so obsessed with Barry Manilow (she had always favoured thin, camp men) and finally asked what did Billie Jean King and her partner ‘do’. She had forgotten that during the forties she told me that she’d had several
erotic dreams involving a very glamorous actress at the Liverpool Playhouse. I didn’t remind her of this except to say that surely she didn’t intend to come out in her late eighties? She would once have found this funny, but no longer. ‘No, of course not!’ she said, crossly.

There were several later eccentric conversations, by then confined to her family and a few visitors. Andrée and I, while realizing how sad it was, also became on occasion hysterical with laughter.

The most far-out demonstration of Maud’s gradual loss of reality was when she asked Andrée’s help to fill in a form. Knowing official forms can be difficult to fill in, Andrée asked to see it. It was an advertisement cut out, not too well, from the
Daily Mail
. ‘JOIN THE RAF AND LEARN TO FLY’ was the headline. Despite the fact that there was an age limit involved (18–25), Maud was convinced it was her duty. Her daughter reminded her that, apart from one childhood day-trip to the Isle of Man, she’d been too scared to go on a ship, let alone fly, and then there was the question of her age. So, finally, although it took some time, Maud relinquished her ‘duty’.

The thought of the old lady, very shrunken and bent by this time, doing her preliminary training on the parade ground, or putting on her goggles and leather helmet as she ran towards her fighter, really set us off. I laughed as if I’d been smoking too much dope.

It was sad, harmless and comic, but quite soon her growing dementia spread outside. The Cranley newsagent complained she had started to ring him up at two or three in the morning to ask why the papers hadn’t been delivered.

Not that she read them when they did arrive. At first she
used to tick off, and later encircle, every word, article by article, until the whole issue was obliterated. Then, a few months later, she began to scrumple all the pages into a ball and staple everything together to retain its shape. I asked Andrée if she thought an avant-garde gallery might be interested. Today it would have won the Turner Prize (Maud Melly’s three periods: ticks, circles and scrumples).

It was Andrée who convinced her brothers, Bill and me, that it was essential Maudie went into a home. Andrée had already had a disturbing shock when, crossing the road from Nuts of Cranley to check on her, she found our mother apparently dead. Andrée’s pocket mirror failed to cloud over and she could find no pulse, so she sat down to think about what to do next. Whom should she ring first? My brother and me? Maudie’s doctor? An ambulance? Do you have to tell the police first? Suddenly the phone rang. Maudie reached for it and said, in a perfectly normal voice, ‘Maud Melly, here.’

Andrée is a brilliant raconteuse, and when she told us this story it seemed very funny. But then, only a comparatively short time later, she yet again crossed the road and opened the door to find Maudie lying at the bottom of a steep staircase leading up to her flat. She was unconscious, her limbs splayed out like those 1920s Pierrot dolls you sometimes used to find flopped over the round pale green tasselled cushions on the rather grubby settees of ageing flappers.

This time it was to the hospital, with sprains, bruises and, I think, several broken ribs. When Maud returned to her flat Andrée had already contacted a suitable and sympathetic home. She had naturally become alarmed that her postmodernist parent might have another fall and break something,
scald herself or set herself on fire. Moving an aged parent into a home is considered a very cruel thing to do – and sometimes it may well be – but in Maudie’s case it was totally justified and besides she welcomed it. Having worked on the newspaper she had nothing to do before Andrée came over at lunchtime. In Liverpool she’d always read a great deal, mainly choice middle-brow novels with a pinch of what she called ‘spice’, but she couldn’t concentrate any more. She did spend a lot of time watching television, but it was difficult to say how much she took in. Among her favourite programmes was snooker, although as she obstinately refused to have a colour set she can’t have made much of it.

For her the old people’s home, despite being called Ally-blasters, a curiously aggressive name for a haven of rest, was a great improvement. She had a large room with a big picture window overlooking woods and fields and ‘her own things round her’, a condition for senile contentment supported by those who are not yet senile themselves. Who is to say?

The matron and staff were both helpful and attentive (it was after all a private nursing-home, although I recently visited a state institution in Hastings which, while less luxuriously appointed, seemed just as friendly). Maud had always gone out of her way to court popularity. She told me that at Allyblasters she was much the most popular inmate with the nurses. Perhaps she was, but I dare say her mixture of swanking (about us) and snobbery (about whom she’d known, preferably titled) must have tried their patience at times. Even so, once when I was leaving, one of the old ladies, as she invariably referred to her in some cases slightly younger contemporaries, ran out on to the landing and, leaning over the banisters, gave me a right earful of scatological
and anatomical abuse. Having a great-aunt, a saintly figure for most of her long life who did the same towards the end of it, I was not too surprised, but in the hall matron apologized and told me that, of course, ‘Mrs Melly would never do that.’

Her ninetieth birthday was quite a success, although I don’t think she recognized many of those present. She certainly ate an enormous quantity of cake – apparently greed is a common trait among the very old – and seemed quite pleased to be the centre of attention even among people largely unknown to her.

From then on it was increasingly ‘Old Fools’ Time’.

My sister was with her when she died. Maud, she told me, looked at her intensely. She held on to her daughter’s finger like a vice. She didn’t let go until she let go. She seemed to remember nothing.

Maud was born into a world of cab-horses and died after people had walked on the moon. She’d ‘come out’, put her hair up and worn huge hats, cemeteries for dead birds, before the First World War. Admirers had written to her from the trenches. In the twenties she’d danced the Charleston, met and married my father, given birth to two boys and, unexpectedly, a daughter. She ‘went up to London’ once a year and ‘did’ several shows, mostly revues. She entertained a great deal and was a successful amateur actress. She sat out the Blitz and, although she always maintained her forties were her best decade, had quite a good time until Tom’s death. All forgotten. Nothing in the end but Andrée’s finger.

At her funeral in a Surrey crematorium, after we’d witnessed Maud’s boxed disappearance between the blue velvet,
multi-screen cinema curtains and emerged into ‘the garden of remembrance’, my brother Bill said to me, ‘Death is a mysterious thing, isn’t it?’ It wasn’t a startling observation, nor yet an eloquent image, but it’s true enough.

2. A Prisoner on Remand

It’s 6.35 on a January evening and I got up only about an hour ago. Increasingly I am becoming a sleepaholic, but this, coupled with wide-eyed insomnia between around 3 and 6 a.m., is temporary (at least I hope it’s temporary). The explanation is that quite recently I was appearing at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club and never in bed much before 4 a.m. (and then in a state of euphoric over-stimulation). I’m hoping my extended or disturbed sleep pattern is caused by this variation of jet-lag and not just old age. Since I got up I’ve eaten two bananas, swallowed a small Irish whiskey and watched an instalment of
The Simpsons
, my top-favourite programme.

It’s dark outside in Shepherd’s Bush and, it would seem, very cold. I’ve gathered this from my friend and lodger Desdemona, who comes from Zimbabwe. She has just got in from art school and put a freezing hand on my cheek. Her role here, in exchange for a rather small room and other advantages, is to make sure I’m on course, to sort my laundry and do some shopping if Diana’s away or in the country. She’s witty and chatty, although her high-pitched African accent and rapid delivery are sometimes difficult for me to understand. She’s not unique there, however. I find almost everybody difficult to understand due to my escalating deafness.

I ask Desdemona to show me how to insert, play and eject a DVD. As the twenty-first century’s Ned Ludd this took me some time to grasp and, as my memory is more
and more like an old colander rusting away at the bottom of a polluted canal, I’ll no doubt need a refresher course almost immediately. Finally I get to sit at my desk and get on with this book, a New Year’s resolution after a long prevaricatory delay. At 1 a.m., after yet another banana and a glug of the Jameson, I climb wearily to bed. Was three bananas all I had to eat all day? Yes. Diana, who always cooks supper, was at the pictures with a friend and, although there is a small kitchen on this floor that I share with Desdemona, plenty of food in our fridge and a microwave I have finally mastered, I just couldn’t be bothered. In general in the last few years my appetite has become much less demanding.

People who know nothing of my set-up will wonder who Diana is and of course she will appear from now on, frequently, in the text. I’ve been married to her for over forty years and more or less take it for granted that everyone is aware of our situation, especially as I’ve written about our meeting and subsequent life in earlier books. This volume I don’t think would ever have been finished without her pressure. Our marriage began passionately and is finishing with compassion. She makes sure I do what I have to do, go where I’m meant to go, and I still love her very much.

10 January

Despite a sleeping pill, admittedly not a strong one, I woke at four and channel-jumped on my bedside television. On BBC 1 I found a riveting if repellent documentary on human parasites, giving pride of place to the tapeworm, a surprisingly recent discovery. It was partially dramatized, so I watched a rather unpleasant-looking Victorian hirsute doctor
who, suspecting the existence of something of the sort, fed an egg to a condemned criminal six weeks before his execution. After this had been carried out, he was cut down, and an autopsy revealed the creature growing in his intestine. The doctor, explained the narrator, was much criticized for his methods.