Start Reading
About Mosaic
About Michael Holroyd
Reviews
Michael Holroyd’s Memoirs
Biographies by Michael Holroyd
Table of Contents
www.headofzeus.com
‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins.’
T. S. Eliot
The Waste Land
This is a book of surprises – at any rate it has surprised me. Some may think it eccentric: I prefer the word experimental. Initially it arose out of letters I received from readers of my family memoir, Basil Street Blues, which was published in 1999. I thought of it at first as a sequel or postscript, even as a ‘postmodern interactive’ work. Beginning as a requiem, it evolved into a love story, then a detective story: an independent companion volume which I have composed so that anyone can follow the narrative without having read, or remembered, the earlier book.
What it shows, I believe, is the strange interconnectedness of our family lives. We are often reminded that we have only to go back a few generations to find that we are, all of us, approximately related one to another – which is why other people’s stories, however puzzling or extreme, contain so many echoes of our own dreams and experiences. Nevertheless, it has been an odd experience learning from strangers about events involving my own relations, as well as finding myself having more knowledge of some fathers and grandmothers than their own daughters or grandsons have. We live in a forest of family trees, and the branches reach out in complicated paths over unexpectedly long distances. In tracing some of these connections and involvements, I have tried to present an anatomy of well-researched, if wayward, family history.
The characters in this book are all ordinary people. But their exploits and adventures reveal how compelling fantasies, as well as mundane facts, guide our lives. It is how a writer mixes these facts and fantasies that divides the historian from the novelist, and determines whether a book is classified as fiction or (that most mysterious category) non-fiction.
A LAST GLIMPSE OF MY FATHER
I took a postchaise to Uttoxeter, and going into market at the time of high business, uncovered my head, and stood with it bare an hour before the stall which my father had formerly used, exposed to the sneers of the standers-by and the inclemency of the weather.
Samuel Johnson
‘The End.’
After three years I had finished. I had written it all after the old fashion, with a pen and paper, then sent it off to Sarah Johnson. Over many years she has made herself indispensable at this stage of a book – the only person, or so I believe, since she tells me this, who can read my writing and (which is sometimes more illegible) my typewriting. She puts it on to a disk and, after much to-ing and fro-ing, time for second or third thoughts and so on, I have the print-out before me – several copies of it. The time is now approaching for me, in the unconvincing guise of a modern technological man, to edge towards my publisher. But for myself, I believe, I have finished. It is the end. I sit back – then suddenly some words from Samuel Beckett come floating into my mind. ‘Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished.’ And then some more words: ‘How often I have said, in my life... It is the end, and it was not the end.’ Yet surely this really was the end, my signing off.
It was not, of course, quite the end. There would be editing, proof-reading, and then publication. For the publishers that would be the end – and for readers the beginning. But for me, its author, this felt like the end. It was the late summer of 1998, and I was free. Almost free.
As I made arrangements to deliver the typescript to my literary agent, a chieftain amongst agents, the ferociously named, mild-mannered Caradoc King, I began thinking over what I had done. Certainly I had not done anything quite like it before. This was a genuine variation on what I had spent my career doing: writing people’s lives. For this time it was my own life I had written. The typescript contained over a hundred thousand words. It sat there on the table. My life.
When people say that everyone has a book in him or her, they usually mean an autobiography – in whatever form it comes: a poem, a quest, documentary, confession, film or play, roman à clef. Mine was a family memoir.
Writers are naturally protective over their powers of language. If the magic works, then these mysterious marks we put on paper and send out like messages in a bottle can affect men and women, readers we never hear or see for the most part and do not know, making them laugh or cry, feel and think. Using this ancient technology, even the dead can communicate with us. Like the fabulous garment Prospero puts on in his cell, the writer’s art invades our dreams, raises sea-storms and summons kings, makes them excite or entertain us, chasten, enchant. It is a mantle, too, lending writers many disguises which, like the chameleon’s ability to change colour, help us find a way through difficulties and dangers.
But we do not always know what we are doing or the effect what we do will have. I didn’t even know at the beginning that I was going to write an autobiography and even now had no idea what others would make of it. When I began, I thought I was writing an essay which, following the deaths of my mother and father, might help to fill the gap they had left with some understanding of their lives, and my own. I delayed starting, strangely reluctant, but as soon as I did start I was carried along by a passionate need for those memories which rose up in me as I wrote. Usually a slow writer, this time I wrote quickly, urgently, memory coming to the aid of memory, sinking and resurfacing, as I completed a hundred thousand words and reached my parents’ deaths. Then I stopped.
How accurate was my story? That it had emotional integrity I felt certain. But was it factually reliable? Reading through it, I realised that I had pieced together stretches of the narrative from tales I had been told, conversations overheard (perhaps misheard), memories with a haphazard order of events which were themselves blurred by those legends that confuse all our family histories.
So I decided to become once more the professional biographer. Like an enquiry agent who asks questions and keeps watch, and then like a fictional detective who hopes to arrive at wonderful conclusions from a jumble of miscellaneous and apparently meaningless facts, I went back to work. I checked birth, marriage and death certificates, hunted for wills and probate information, examined street directories and census returns, travelled to places my parents and grandparents had told me about, and revisited places I had known when a child. I also wrote to people I had not seen for up to fifty years, asking for their recollections.
Gradually an alternative family history began to emerge, a sadder one than I had known. I began to notice how, to compensate for disappointments, men raise their status and the importance of their occupations on passports and marriage certificates, and women lower their ages. And there were more significant discrepancies moving through every phase of life: examinations never passed, money lost, illicit marriages and illegitimacies, breakdowns, secret elopements and liaisons, inexplicable deaths.
I hold the view that the lies we tell ourselves and others, the half-truths that through repetition we almost come to believe, the very fantasies that follow us like our own shadows, become part of our actual lives. Biographers are cursed by an ‘irritable reaching after fact and reason’. You have only to look at the enormous process of verification we have developed in modern times. Never has there been such a colossal apparatus got ready – such an array of scaffolding, cranes, pulleys and tackle – to raise into place, with much pomp and sometimes the trumpeting abuse of lesser scholars, one quotation, complete with its groundwork of notes to inform us who else has used it, where, and to what inferior effect. Despite all this, the best biographers, I believe, must also ‘pick about the Gravel’ with their subjects and come to feel that intense connection with them that Keats called ‘negative capability’.
Biographers walk a tightrope between passionate involvement that lures them into sentimentality, and historical detachment with its arid wastes of information. Those who write autobiographies walk the same line, though in an opposite direction, seeking not intimacy with another past, but some perspective on their own.
What I decided to do was to combine my two narratives, fact and emotion, memory and hearsay, what had been so often spoken and what remained silent. And then I added my discoveries – of events which, though never communicated, soon forgotten and eventually unknown, still formed an undetected pattern within my family. For example, I had discovered that my great-grandmother committed suicide at the age of thirty, leaving her husband to look after their three small children. One of those children was my grandfather, in whose house at Maidenhead I had passed my own childhood. I do not think he ever knew that his mother had killed herself in such an appalling way – swallowing carbolic acid and burning internally to death. Why would you tell a four-year-old boy such a terrible thing about his mother? And not having told him at the time, it would grow increasingly difficult, even pointless, to tell him later. Certainly no rumour of this tragedy reached me, and I feel sure that my father too knew nothing of it.
Yet once I discovered this unexplained suicide, I came to see it as a symbol that spoke for three generations of my family and, by implication, women from other families too: women in the attic, women with undiagnosed neuroses, suspect and unstable and a danger to themselves, women of no importance of whom little was thought or expected, women without self-esteem or occupation outside the family, solitary women who were unmarried or who sought death in marriage. I tried to tell their stories through the story of my aunt, the only one of those women I knew. Searching back for an origin to her predicament, I ended my memoir with my great-grandmother’s beautiful Book of Ferns which I had found hidden away in an attic when, during my researches, I went back to my grandfather’s house in Maidenhead. Into this massive volume, which had been presented to her in the early 1870s following her wedding in India, she had sewn and pressed, with great delicacy, arrangements of Indian ferns. After her death, this ill-omened volume passed briefly to her mysteriously ill daughter, and from her on to her niece, my Aunt Yolande, who began pasting in pictures of film stars from the silent 1920s, but left its final pages blank, as if a light had suddenly been switched off.
Basil Street Blues was, metaphorically, written on those last empty pages. But only when I had sent it off to my agent and publisher did I turn to a second volume that had lain many years with the Book of Ferns behind a curtain in that attic of my grandparents’ house. This was a Book of Lights, drawn and coloured by my father in the 1930s when he had been an agent in London for Lalique Glass.
It was a less imposing volume than the vast, sombre, calf-bound Book of Ferns. Its boards, some twelve by fifteen inches, were covered in a dull, slightly stained canvas, gripped at the spine by a pair of steel rings. But when I opened this rather drab, uninviting exterior, my father’s lights, drawn on French grey paper or on white sheets carefully pasted in, suddenly shone forth brilliantly. There were thirty-five of them, done mainly in greens and browns and yellows, all with their notes of scale and full size, none of them exposed to daylight for over sixty years. I was dazzled. Why had I not examined this book more carefully?
Every child’s progress depends on parricide – so Isaiah Berlin remarked – which is to say that we must kill off our fathers’ ideas and replace them with our own. My father had greatly strengthened the stubbornness I needed to survive as a biographer by pointing me towards almost any career, however ill-fitting, rather than writing. Reluctantly abandoning his vision of me as a tea-planter in Assam (a figure, as I saw it, from a Somerset Maugham story), he insisted that, despite a glaring deficiency in mathematics, I apply myself to the sciences at school, and when this petered out, he had me articled to a firm of solicitors where I languished for a year or two. Eventually, with a gesture of despair over my chronic lack of success, he recommended that I join the regular army and dig in for my old-age pension. But at this point I rebelled.
The reason, I fancy, he set me stumbling over such a steep and unnecessary obstacle course was that his own life when young had appeared so deceptively easy – only to become impossibly difficult after the war. He probably should have been an architect – that’s where his talent lay. But it lay hidden. The closest he came to being an architect was during his last years when he worked for a series of building companies. Unfortunately, through one disaster and another, then another and again another, these companies all went out of business. Officially my father was their chief salesman. He had the reputation of being able to sell anything to anyone. But first he had, as it were, to sell whatever it was, however improbable, to himself – as he had tried to sell tea-planting and mathematics, the law and a military career to me.
Over the years, in brisk succession, glass, steel, concrete, wood, bricks and mortar became magical substances in my father’s imagination. They glittered and shone for him as he spoke of them, stood tall and proud as he praised their luminous virtues. Like a conjuror at a children’s party, he appeared to perform miracles, amazing everyone with his eloquence. But as soon as he stopped talking, the light seemed to fade; and when he left, his audience would go into a decline, dismayed by their own credulity and, like men betrayed, resenting my father’s hypnotic spell over them, his salesman’s bag of tricks.
During his sixties and seventies, like a shipwrecked sailor frantically repairing a small raft in a rising storm of bankruptcy, my father would sit long into the evenings bent over his drawings. He wasn’t meant to be drawing buildings, but selling them. Yet he loved plotting their contours on squared paper as if, through the sheer enthusiasm it generated, this devoted labour helped him to sell them – especially to people who sincerely, even desperately, didn’t want to buy them.
Occasionally he would show me these drawings, but I never took much notice. I do remember, however, how handsome, almost palatial, some of them looked, though they were no more than extensions to golf clubhouses, modest conservatories or additional changing rooms and lavatories. Still, he derived much satisfaction, almost happiness, from drafting everything with accuracy and making it look good on the page. I know the feeling. It is, I now think, a very English characteristic, this potent combination of aesthetics and usefulness, this draftsman’s contract.
It is a pity my family made such a habit, even a speciality, of misadventure. While the women seemed grounded in lives of miserable frustration, in strange maladies and unreachable loneliness, the men would float up into silver clouds of fantasy, and hang surreally suspended there. My grandfather, cutting loose from a legal career, sailed unsuccessfully into the tea business. My uncle, rather than my father, studied architecture before, finding himself miscast, he drifted vaguely into farming. My father, I suppose, was the most consistent: having studied nothing, except possibly gambling, he was optimistic about everything but ended up with nothing. We were all amateurs in an age of increasing professionalism. Innocents at home.
Yet there was a brief, bright interlude in this chaotic decline when, from the late Twenties to the late Thirties, the three of them had come together as directors of a company my grandfather founded called Breves, which was appointed the agent in Britain for Lalique Glass. Like the legendary King Canute, standing on the very shores of bankruptcy with his two sons, my grandfather commanded the waves of recession to retreat. But ‘what care these roarers for the name of king?’ – let alone the name Holroyd. No matter: this happy band of Holroyds grew convinced that a spectacular business boom was about to sweep through the Thirties leading to a decade of peace and prosperity in the Forties. They seemed mesmerised, my grandfather and his two sons, by this beautiful French glass: the goblets, flower vases, car mascots, paperweights and decanters deliciously decorated with sunflowers and gorgeous peacocks, dragonflies and swallows for ever held in flight, cupids and water-nymphs eternally playing. How could anyone look into such wonderful objects and remain a pessimist?
Certainly they couldn’t. My grandfather sold everything he possessed and borrowed more than he could repay in order to create a brilliant future in the West End of London. My father’s own speciality in all this marvellous enterprise was glass lighting. He hoped to astonish the world with his ingenious table-lights ornamented with opalescent shells, his wall-lights with their flared frames of frosted or tinted glass, and his hanging lights which were sometimes constructed from inverted fruit bowls suspended from the ceiling by ropes. Some of these lights were briefly installed in transatlantic liners, and others used by fashionable restaurants. Unfortunately ornamental glass was going out of fashion in the Thirties. Besides, there were catastrophic breakages when drilling this glass to the metalwork of his lights.
My father seldom spoke to me about this early period of his life. His expectations, I believe, were set too high and his disappointment grew too painful. After the war, when I got to know him, he was struggling to find other employment. Almost anything would do. But the world was now a dark and hostile place, and his days and nights became increasingly uncomfortable. Life, which had seemed such fun, was actually bristling with traps and obstacles, he liked to remind me, and he was eager to see that I got my own quota of difficulties over and done with as soon as possible. With my own best interests ever in mind, and using deep parental ingenuity, he marshalled these hardships, both real and imaginary, all sharp and blistering, and triumphantly presented them to me like an armful of barbed wire that I must immediately embrace. This was his fatherly duty.
I did not find it easy to feel gratitude for this intimidating gift. On the contrary, I felt irritation, anxiety, disbelief – all symptoms of a necessary rebellion that, since my father’s death, has been in retreat. A change is coming over me – I feel it as I write. I sense it too every day as I sit frowning over the newspapers, glare critically at the weather, complain about radio and television programmes, raise a judicious glass of wine to my mouth (is it the fuissé or the fumé?), press furiously down on the accelerator when approaching the amber lights, or simply look in the mirror each morning and see myself beginning the serious business of shaving. As I do all these ordinary things that are second nature to me, I seem to recognise my father, and can hear his voice once again paradoxically warning me: ‘I wouldn’t do that, Michael, if I were you.’
But, of course, he could never advise himself in this manner or escape his own second nature. He said nothing to me when I took such little notice of his architectural drawings and I regret my indifference now. As an exercise of atonement, I look carefully through the pages of illuminated glass I have found, his glass.
This Book of Lights reveals someone I barely recognise – someone with an optimism and confidence that were fading when I got to know him, and which were altogether extinguished at the end. As I turn these pages from his youth, looking at the array of lenses and beaded bowls, the feather and flared pendants, the multicoloured spheres, the Louvre lights, cylinders and cubes so much of their period which my father designed more than seventy years ago, and that do him honour now, I can see him again, an old man, bent over his drawings of brick or wooden buildings, concrete or steel. I see him through his window in the evening, see him suddenly look up as if some flickering hope momentarily touches him. Then his head goes down, and he is back at work.
DEATH OF MY AUNT
The leave-taking is a very, very great source of consolation... but before we part may I interest you in our Before Need Provision Arrangements?... Perhaps you think it morbid and even dangerous to give thought to the subject?
Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One
Costs is the only power on earth that will ever get anything out of it now, or will ever know it for anything but an eyesore and a heartsore.
Charles Dickens, Bleak House
THOMAS. I have come to be hanged, do you hear?
TYSON. Have you filled in the necessary forms?—
Christopher Fry, The Lady’s Not For Burning
The end came suddenly: a shock but no surprise. On Christmas Day 1998, among the buoyant bright balloons, the carols, cake and holly of the nursing home, my Aunt Yolande finally gave up, and died. Over her years there she had gone downhill very gently, hardly making any noise or movement, seldom noticing the well-intended festivities, the brisk comings and goings, the shouts and cries all around her, occasionally smiling at something but never joining in.
The nursing home telephoned me that evening and I went down a few days later when the holidays had abated. It was a blue day, sunny, clear and cold. The country appeared frozen in beauty as I drove along, sealed from reality in the warmth of my car, cheerful radio-music singing out.
I felt saddened not so much by the fact of my aunt’s death as by the contemplation of her life. For the last half-dozen years or so, since her last stroke, she was largely unaware of the hospital or the nursing home, and retained few memories of the past. Occasionally I would take her some old photograph albums, but she no longer seemed to recognise anyone. The past was dying for her, even as it was coming alive for me.
She was not, however, in pain, and seldom seemed distressed except when she fell ill. Towards the end I had tried to let the doctor know that I would be happy for him to assist her in dying, if dying was inevitable – not simply by allowing her to die slowly, but by positively taking her out of unnecessary anguish, as I believe I would wish for myself, and as I knew she had done for her much-loved dogs. But this kindness could not be granted her, and since she and I had never discussed the subject of voluntary euthanasia, I did not try to insist.
I rather dreaded the business of the day. At the nursing home I was handed my aunt’s meagre belongings. I could hold them in one arm: a small broken mirror, a few photos, some picture postcards and a bag full of odds and ends – a powder compact, lipstick, purse, comb, handkerchief and hairpins. ‘Is this all?’ I asked. It was. All that was left after more than ninety years. We agreed that her clothes could be of no use to anyone now and should be burnt. I signed a form, and we exchanged compliments on my aunt’s behalf: what a very polite patient she had been – never a complaint, indeed hardly a sound, over her five or six years there.
I felt grateful for anything the nursing home offered to ease the bureaucracy of death. But some things – making the funeral arrangements with an undertaker, notifying the death with the Registrar, helping a solicitor prepare probate – you must do yourself. I had done all this for my mother and father. I was a veteran. I knew what to do. Or believed I did.
At the nursing home I was given a formal notice stating that the doctor in charge had signed a medical certificate. I presented this to the hospital where the doctor worked, and received a sealed envelope containing the medical certificate itself on which was written the cause of my aunt’s death (bronchopneumonia). Adding this to the bulging file of family papers I had put together while writing my recently completed memoirs (papers which were travelling with me, my passenger on the back seat of the car), I drove on to the General Register Office at Epsom. I was supremely well-equipped, able to prove with the aid of this file that I was truly my aunt’s nephew, executor of her will, next of kin; and also (should anyone ask) that she had been my father’s elder sister. Among these papers was her birth certificate recording that Yolande Phyllis Holroyd was born at 29 Victoria Square, Bristol, on 22 April 1902. So she had died aged ninety-six.
‘A long life,’ remarked the Registrar as she quickly transferred these facts from the red certificate to a black one, birth to death. But had it, I wondered, been a happy life? I could not believe it had been. I remembered sitting beside her crippled figure only a fortnight before and thinking that no one seeing her in this condition could have guessed at her privileged beginnings.
Her first twenty-five years must have been the best, living with her two brothers in a large, comfortable, Edwardian house just outside Maidenhead, a smiling, attractive girl whom I could still see in family photographs, playing tennis, going riding, bathing and water-skiing in the south of France during the long summer holidays. I had not known her in those days, and had only recently discovered a more sombre story behind the bright surface of this family-album life. She never married, though she had been unofficially engaged, apparently, for ten years or more. The love of her life, I was told, was a dashing yachtsman and soldier called Hazlehurst. The only letters she had kept over seventy years, which I accidentally came across in the lining of an old evening bag after she moved from her flat to the nursing home, had been signed ‘H’. They began as passionate love letters written mainly in the mid-1930s, and then subsided into an affectionate correspondence. But afterwards, in the Second World War, Hazlehurst was posted to Italy, and my aunt learnt that he had married a young Italian girl...
‘And what was your aunt’s occupation?’ asked the Registrar. I hesitated, as she waited to type my answer on to the black form. In the years I knew her, under increasingly difficult circumstances, my aunt had simply exercised the family dogs and looked after her ageing parents. Her father, having inherited a fabulous Indian tea fortune, allowed it to leak away through cautious investments in the City and then a highly incautious liaison in the bedroom. Both her parents naturally expected Yolande to marry, yet between them they had imprisoned her in spinsterhood. How could she leave her clinging, hysterical mother after her father, at the age of fifty, picked up a young married woman in his car, set her up in Piccadilly as his mistress and did not drive back home for almost eight years? – all this while his daughter was in her twenties. And what respectable man would happily marry her after such a scandal – a scandal that had left the family almost penniless? She was stranded.
So what had been her occupation? On her birth certificate there had been space only for her father’s occupation which he had given as being ‘of independent means’, though in later life he would, in so many ways and means, become dependent on his daughter. On her parents’ marriage certificate he had written ‘Gentleman’ as his ‘Rank or Profession’, while her mother left the space blank.
I quickly shuffled through these certificates and we decided to put a dash against Yolande’s occupation, as we had against her married name. We gave the nursing home as her ‘usual address’, and I filled in my ‘qualification’ as being that of ‘nephew’. Then I was handed a copy of the entry. Our business was complete. I was free to go.
I went next to my aunt’s bank and, brandishing the Registrar’s certificate, smoothing it against the glass window, mouthing my instructions, put a stop on my aunt’s account. I felt rather pleased with myself for having remembered to do this. Then I drove on again to the undertakers who, ten years before, had arranged my father’s cremation.
Both my parents had been cremated. I vividly remember walking at tremendous speed, as if trying to outpace the onset of grief, from the hospital in London where I had just seen my mother die straight to the undertakers half a mile away. It was a macabre place. As I strode briskly in, setting off a bell, there was a sudden commotion. Everybody stopped doing whatever they had been doing, hushed their laughter, adjusted ties, buttoned jackets and hastened to what appeared as formal positions appropriate for the bereaved. I remember sitting down opposite an official who, leaning reverently towards me, coming very close, whispered a stream of euphemisms on his pungent breath. By contrast, I was terrifically quick and cool, dry and businesslike, a very parody of efficiency, examining my watch and my diary, coughing importantly, as we made arrangements for my mother’s coffin and hearse. During these proceedings we were looked down on by two burly men in dark, shabby suits who stood with their backs to the wall, lined up like soldiers, at ease but still uneasy. They would be my mother’s pallbearers. Behind the taller of them a wisp of white smoke rose gently into the air. For a moment, in my heightened state, I wondered whether he was Satan risen from the underworld. Then I realised he was holding a cigarette in one of his hands clasped behind his back. When I looked down at the desk to sign some documents, he deftly moved this cigarette to his mouth and back again out of sight. I accepted an invitation to see the Chapel of Rest into which my mother’s body was soon to be moved, and the flowers gathered, before her cremation service. It was really no more than a shed in the back area given a covering of paint, and in one corner, I unhappily noticed, there stood a tin of fly spray. Then, as I drove back home, the tears suddenly came and went on coming. I sat in the car outside my home waiting for this fit of crying to cease, and when it finally did, I went indoors, apparently composed again.
My father’s cremation had been better, but it had disturbed my aunt. I had a rose planted in his memory, but there was no proper grave she could visit and no gravestone identifying him. He had simply vanished. She felt empty and unsatisfied when she was taken to the Garden of Remembrance after his death. Of course his name was in the Book of Remembrance – but where exactly was he? The word ‘scattered’ was, to her ears, nebulous and wrong. Neither my mother nor my father had spoken against cremation, and I favoured it. But my aunt did not like the idea. It smelt of hell to her. Those flames. So, I decided, she must be buried.
We arranged at the undertakers for her interment to take place in nine days’ time at the annexe or extension of St Mary’s Church, some two or three hundred yards from the flat where she had lived before moving into her ‘usual address’ at the nursing home. I had also come to look through pretty pictures of coffins. The plain pine, the élite elm, the patriotic oak. What would best suit my aunt? Here, it was indicated, lay an opportunity for my aunt to make her final statement – a statement beyond words, something inspiring, perhaps, to encourage others. What should my aunt say? What would she want to say? She who had said so little in her last years. This was an awkward decision. There was such an extravagant choice. Would she rest easy in the Class 9 with brassed handles, polished mahogany veneer and a cover of maroon velveteen; or wait more comfortably in the heavy-style Brocklebank containing special satin drapery? Might she enjoy the Last Supper with press-panelled sides and swing-bar handles, corners patterned after Michelangelo’s Renaissance works and a scene of the Last Supper depicted on the lid? I glanced hesitantly at the hermetically sealed Trojan; the Lincoln, boasting a champagne interior; the Equinox with its adjustable bed; the solid timber Provincial, featuring pleated sunburst drapery; and the Tea Rose with its delicate lilac and copper shading. Eventually I picked the simple Windsor coffin for her to lie sightless in, with its gold plastic fittings, white side sheets, frillings and pillow. My aunt had lived most of her life a few miles from Windsor, I reminded myself, while also noting with satisfaction that this coffin was rather less expensive than many of the others.
Prices had certainly risen and the repertoire of euphemisms expanded since my grandfather’s death at the beginning of the 1960s. But there was less Disneyfication than Jessica Mitford predicted in her famous book, The American Way of Death. I was never entertained with a ‘Have a Nice Death’ video, or warned about cartoon ‘bugs and critters’ entering receptacles that were too cheap, or told stories of lamentably inexpensive caskets that blew up from an accumulation of methane gas. I can recall no invitation being made to render my aunt’s natural carbon into a gemstone. Nor was I given a caged dove to release into the sky. The funeral directors never presented themselves as belonging to an exalted class – messengers from the Beautiful Beyond. The English Way of Death still retained a Dickensian aroma.
It was now mid-afternoon and, quickly eating a sandwich, I drove over to look at the churchyard. The name of the church was actually St Mary the Virgin, but to avoid embarrassment when speaking or writing, St Mary’s rank or condition is never mentioned.
The extension of the garden cemetery, which must once have been a rough open field, perhaps belonging to a farmer, had evidently been made into a churchyard at the beginning of the Second World War. The difference between the gravestones here and in the main cemetery reflects a change in English life. A hundred or more years ago it was the custom to perpetuate men’s (and to a lesser extent women’s) exploits and achievements on great slabs of blistering Aberdeen granite or solid Portland stone. Ranks and titles, wealth and potency, were proudly recorded, family crests sculpted, grand pretensions conveyed by tall obelisks, cupolas and pomegranates, imposing sarcophagi, Egyptian extravaganzas and elaborate neo-classical canopies. Whole paragraphs were sometimes cut into the marble to remind us of fashionable addresses, political and military eminence, terrible battles and shipwrecks, and, failing these, even honourable employment for distinguished societies and on charitable committees. To walk two hundred yards past such notable monuments is to absorb an extraordinary narrative of imperial history. But the ground is now uneven, the bulbous urns split, the heavy slabs of stone and marble rent asunder, the very angels, horsemen, saints, crazily tilting in the silence, as if an earthquake had shaken the solid ground on which that imperial past had stood. These vast congregations of the dead, united by solitude and stretching to the horizon, are like arenas where at night old friends can steal out between the upturned roots and branches and be reunited, or battlefields for lifelong enemies to re-engage in mortal combat.
But after the Second World War, it is the domestic virtues that are more modestly celebrated: beloved wife, kindly grandfather, much-loved husband, daughter, mum and dad. No one actually dies: they are ‘called to God’, they ‘fall asleep’, they ‘enter into rest’ – and they live on ‘for ever in our hearts’, ‘always in our thoughts’, ‘until we meet again’. But, as the writing of a family memoir has taught me, in a few years almost all of us are forgotten, and it is the indecipherable inscriptions, worn away by the weather, that tell the true story.
Walking through these ranks of stone, reading their words of farewell, I feel a surprising poignancy over the enigma of departure. Here is genuine massed sadness, like a vast chorus, but inscribed without the language to express it. And this, it seems to me, conveys very well our inability to understand life and death, our need to cover the mysterious tragedy of our condition with simple conventions. As I drove back to London, I resolved to do better for my Aunt Yolande.
In the week before the funeral I opened up negotiations with the solicitor, sending him anything I imagined might be of use: the certified copy of my aunt’s death, and a copy of her will; a note of the money in her bank, the addresses of the nursing home, funeral directors, Department of Social Security and tax offices – to all of which I also wrote. Everything seemed to be in order.
Then I turned my attention to the flowers. Would I like a spray or a wreath or something more sophisticated, such as an arrangement of blooms shaped after the hesitant outline of Surrey, the county she was to be buried in? I chose the wreath.
The day of the funeral opened under a brilliant blue sky which, by midday, had turned to furious rain. I was shown into the Chapel of Rest where my aunt’s body lay, rather grandly, on the frilled white sheets and a pillow in the Windsor coffin which, her name plate on its mount, had been placed on a table under a series of pink-shaded lights. I remember thinking that this coffin was too small to have contained the streams of red tape that had festooned and entangled her final, quiet years. I sat there somewhat vacantly, looking at the crimson carpet, the Regency wallpaper, the pictures of heroic Scottish landscapes, while the rain hammered on the roof. I was glad to be alone. Margaret, my wife, had wanted to come, but she had not known my aunt – indeed my aunt had known no one besides myself in these last lost years; no one except, in an undifferentiated way, those who had professionally looked after her. She had outlived her two brothers and all her contemporaries, and, even before her first stroke, was fencing herself off from friends. It seemed to me proper that this isolation should be marked at the end, and that I should be her solitary mourner.
I remember feeling grateful that the nursing home, when writing to me, ‘Mark Holroyd’, a personal letter with ‘sincere condolences for all the family’, had regretted being unable to send a representative to the funeral due to ‘prior commitments’ (did they mean prior committals?). So I am surprised when the door of the Chapel of Rest bursts open and a rather plump young woman in black, whom I have never seen before, runs in out of the wet. She is swiftly followed by the ‘funeral arranger’, who introduces her to me. She has that very week joined the staff at the nursing home and, though she has not ‘had the pleasure and privilege’ of meeting my aunt until now, wanted to come to her funeral in order to gain work experience. At that moment the minister arrives and further introductions take place. We laugh and chat, and suddenly it seems as if we are at a cocktail party. The minister is retired, he tells us, but always happy, even in atrocious weather (he laughs and we laugh) to turn out and lend a hand. In his hand he carries an authorised edition of the Bible, a battered and creased copy, in which some passages are illumined with an orange highlighter.
I get into my car and follow the hearse from the undertakers to the churchyard, peering through the steamed-up windows between the whizzing windscreen wipers. Next to me sits the young woman in black from the nursing home. The cemetery looks swollen with water as we get out and watch the coffin being unloaded and hoisted on to the pallbearers’ shoulders. We form up in military fashion – a sort of Dad’s Army – raise our black umbrellas and, as I walk slowly behind the coffin along the green darkness of the pathway, I see several covered trenches dug for other new bodies, with pyramids of dark brown soggy earth beside them. What a forlorn group we must look, a sad remnant, as we pass along the track, and then straggle diagonally across the wet grass, picking our way cautiously between the gravestones. We are heading for a hole on the edge of the field, covered by two wooden planks that are lifted off as we approach. Despite the rain, a gravedigger is at work in a corner of the field and, thinking of the First World War, I suddenly feel an urge to hum that song the soldiers sometimes sang on the march:
‘The bells of hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling
For you but not for me…
O Death, where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling
O Grave thy victor-ee?
Of course, I don’t. But all at once I hear some humming from the probationer beside me and, glancing across at her, see that she is crying volubly, luxuriously, her tears mixing with the rain, while I, apparently quite unmoved, a prey to all sorts of unlikely, out-of-season thoughts, walk silently under the same umbrella. Anyone seeing us must have concluded that she is the sorrowing relative and I the bland official.
We stand by the deep watery trench, and the coffin with my aunt’s body is lowered, swaying, into it, while the minister reads passages from one of the Epistles to the Corinthians, from St John’s Gospel and Psalm 23. They are words of miraculous comfort, hope and confidence: ‘If it were not so, I would have told you.’
As we wander back, amiably chatting, I tell the minister what a good choice I think he made, and hear myself sounding as if I were reporting on a British Council reading. Then we emerge on to the road and are in another world. I discreetly tip the minister, and it is over. But not quite over. There is a moment of embarrassment, a pause, no one liking to say that he or she looks forward to seeing me again in case it should be taken as referring to my own funeral. Silently we shake hands and go our ways.
I had been managing my aunt’s affairs for fifteen years, even before I was formally granted Power of Attorney in 1985. I had sold her flat, next to the cemetery, after she finally moved into the nursing home in the mid-1990s. The £50,000 it went for became her capital, though it was very much reduced by the time of her death. I and my cousin Vicky paid irregular sums into her bank account so that they would legitimately count as gifts and not income. I was particularly pleased by what I felt to be an ingenious strategy, not realising until too late that had we allowed Aunt Yolande’s capital to fall below £8,000, and even in due course below £3,000, the state would have been obliged to step in and help pay the nursing expenses. This was typical of my imperfect understanding of the maze-like benefits system.
Cousin Vicky is my Uncle Kenneth’s daughter, a bright, blue-eyed, blonde girl much younger than I am, now married with two children. Her life has been very different from mine and we have few interests in common. Yet when I see her I feel an instant affinity. This is all the more surprising as I have met her only a few times in my life, and so had Aunt Yolande. But Vicky is Yolande’s niece, as close a blood relation as myself, and she generously volunteered to contribute some of this quixotic financial help.
The best way of dealing with my aunt’s affairs, I had resolved, was to make them as simple as possible. But simplicity is a more complex matter than I imagined. I sold her few Indian Mutiny tea shares, put an end to her small building society account, and placed everything she possessed in her bank. But the solicitor now needed evidence of those long-ago-sold shares, that ancient cancelled account, to smooth away the prickly problems of probate. Searching through the large cupboard where my aunt’s records, fifteen years of them, were piled up, I grew once more baffled and appalled to see how her single, straightforward life became weighed down by such a density of paperwork. It lay, like a thick geological layer covering an immensity of time, above the forms, the statistics, the charts of my parents’ illnesses and deaths: my private registry, an archival incoherence of ageing papers, with their faint, sickening smell of dust and despair. How could all this have happened? And why had it needed to devour so much of what people call ‘spare time’? I suppose that, in a small way, my aunt and I had strayed into that obscure world, clouded by labyrinthine ‘accountability’, by opaque ‘transparency’ and the ever-circling prevarications of ‘efficiency’, which blights the careers of doctors, farmers, teachers and other professions. After its benign beginnings, this inhumane bureaucracy has been engulfing us all like a monstrous organism. Conceived originally as a method of helping everyone, it has been programmed so as to prevent the cheat from benefiting, and then re-engineered so that we are all identified as potential cheats. I remember how depressed I was made to feel by a language that no ordinary person speaks, an incomprehensible totalitarian language of computer-talk and committee-speak, reinforced by the convoluted jargon of local government loquacity. It seemed as if little of what I wrote to them was ‘applicable’, and little they sent me made sense. I communicated in paragraphs, they sent me boxes to fill in. But my lines would not fit into their spaces. We were continually at odds. All the evidence of this non-communication I had been advised to store. I tended it gingerly, gave it quantity time.
Some weeks most of my mail was actually for and about my aunt: a voluminous puzzle of papers from the Health Centre, Twilight Nurses, Age Concern, Willing Hands and the Homecare Service; from the Residents’ Association, the Citizens’ Advice Bureau, the Locality Team in the Social Services Department of the Surrey County Council, and the Treasurer of the Borough Council; from the Caps Central Data Team in Room 82E of the Department of Social Security office in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the Review Section of the Disability Unit at Blackpool, the Benefits Agency at Epsom, the Inland Revenue offices at Leicester, and something called Taxguard in Peterborough; from the solicitor in Greenwich, the estate agent in Ewell, two banks, three hospitals and eventually the nursing home. Are matters as convoluted as this in other countries? The people in these places were usually patient and kind, but I often felt that I was in a surreal festival of circumlocution.
And here it all was, the awful evidence, the remnants, a mad litter of vacuity filling my cupboard, tumbling out of it, such a macabre debris of paper trailing over the years. I picked up a small bundle and read through it. What had I got? Here I was writing to my aunt’s doctor asking for a report on her medical condition following what I believed to be a small stroke while she was still living in the flat we had had adapted for ‘a person with disabilities’. He replies that ‘it would be extremely unethical to disclose details of her medical care to you or to anyone else without her formal permission’. But formally she has no permission to give. She is too ill and besides, with Enduring Power of Attorney, I am, for such purposes, my aunt. I remind the doctor of this and, to circumvent the ethical blockage, allow some common sense to flow, I provide him with formal permission on my aunt’s behalf to speak to me. Once this topsy-turvy act is performed, the doctor is able to disclose that although all the support services including consultant geriatricians have been mobilised, my aunt’s ‘living circumstances are unsatisfactory’. She should be moved ‘as a matter of urgency’ to ‘correctly structured sheltered accommodation’.
The trouble is that my aunt does not want to move. Anyone who advises her to do so is seen as a messenger of death. Against her will, she was made to leave Maidenhead following her first paralysing stroke in 1980, and has never been well afterwards. She is determined not to make the same mistake again. The doctor, gravely putting all the facts in front of me, hopes I will persuade her ‘to gracefully accept them’. His split infinitive reflects a split in our understanding. I cannot persuade my aunt. No one can. And she doesn’t feel in the least graceful. She clings to where she is, what she knows. But the doctor feels he has now been placed in an exposed position since I will not use my power of attorney to force my aunt to accept his advice. It is all most unprofessional and he risks being implicated in the mess. He must therefore protect himself. If there is no practical way of doing what he has recommended, he warns me, ‘serious illness or death’ might eventually ensue – and it will be the wrong sort of death, an unstructured event. My aunt is then on the verge of her ninetieth year. I decide to follow her wishes and continue employing a private army of nurses to take care of her at home. It seems to me a question of whether she dies correctly soon or incorrectly later on.
I picked out another file from the cupboard. What was this? My aunt is now in the nursing home and I am trying to make sure she receives the financial help to which she is entitled. As I interpret it, the law says that she needs £128.65 each week. She has less than half of this coming in, and the difference is made up from Income Support. But the cost of the nursing home is approximately three times what the law says she needs to live on. The social services are not able to pay any of this until I have sold her flat. Increasingly I need the help of several organisations. One of the most difficult is Barclays Bank Taxation Service. It is not beyond them to take more than a year obtaining a small tax repayment from the Inland Revenue. When I urge them on, explaining my aunt’‘’–’’