Basil Street Blues (35 page)

My father’s letters over this period are as despondent as my mother’s, but written in an aggrieved tone. Shortly before I went abroad he had started a new company called Indus that specialised in brick buildings. Nothing, he remarked, would ever replace bricks and mortar. He wanted to get this business off to a brisk start, but one morning careered his car into a bollard and landed up in the cottage hospital with his leg in plaster. His dog Jonathan was really at fault. My father had bought what appeared to be a miniature schnauzer to keep him company after his wife left him, and this puppy got into the habit of sitting on his lap as he drove around the country looking for work. Unfortunately it soon grew to an enormous size and insisted on its right to occupy the driving seat of the car, squeezing my father to the side, his head and much of his body hanging out of the window in summer and, in the winter months, being displaced largely on to the passenger seat, from which position he did his best to continue driving. He had to chauffeur Jonathan each week between Ewell, the Surrey village where he lived, and Maidenhead because he shared the dog with Yolande (who took sole command while my father was in hospital).

It was a worrying time for my father. He worried, at the age of seventy, that he might be pressed into ‘the Great Army of the Unemployed’, and become bankrupt as his father had almost done. ‘I’ll probably end up in quod,’ he wrote to me. ‘Not a bad way to save money.’ He worried too about his dog Jonathan because the Maidenhead vet never agreed with the Ewell vet and both were wickedly expensive. He worried, of course, about me: ‘I imagine you may have to do something as well as write about Shaw if you’re going to make two ends meet. By the time Shaw comes on the market there’ll be no one to buy the book.’ But ‘I am most worried about Yolande,’ he confided.

By the mid-nineteen-seventies Yolande had lived and worked in the house for forty years, looking after her parents, looking after Old Nan. At last, in her early seventies, she owned the house. She felt that she had earned it. She knew she had. She enjoyed having half a dog to exercise, but she dreaded her brother’s visits to Norhurst.

What he was writing to me, he was saying to her. To live in a five-bedroom house by herself was utter madness. She had almost no money and ‘was trying to live on less and less’. She hardly dared switch on an electric light in case it cost too much, and she never used the heating. She would kill herself and drown the rest of us in guilt. The rooms were so cluttered with rubbish that ‘it’s hard to find room to put down a plate’. Nevertheless she ‘is so set in her ways (like the rest of us) that it’s impossible to alter things at all’. He longed to alter things for the better. But how could he when she refused his offers of help? ‘I go down weekly and do what I can,’ he wrote morosely. He would buy and cook some food for her – a brace of partridges, say, at which she nibbled with distaste. Otherwise she never ate anything cooked at all: only biscuits, bread, cake and fruit washed down with lavish cups of tea. The situation was so bad that ‘it really needs me to be there for a month or more’, my father concluded. But this was impossible because he was starting up a new company, Framed Building Installations, that made special use of steel.

My father could never understand why anyone should quail before his offers of help. Unfortunately, to help people, he had to make sure that they were worse off than he was. This was increasingly difficult. He was so impoverished now that being the target of his help became a peculiarly depressing experience for the beneficiary. He tormented Yolande with his generosity and advice. Everything he said was factual. But he did not see her fundamental need to keep Norhurst, a need that, though she could not explain it, was stronger than his battalion of facts. ‘Yolande won’t of course think of leaving as long as Nan is alive,’ he reasoned.

Old Nan had stayed on at Norhurst until 1975 and was then moved to the St Mark’s Hospice in Maidenhead where Yolande would take the dog to visit her each day. She was to die on 17 May 1976, four months short of her hundredth birthday. My father naturally concluded that ‘Yolande is more inclined to think of selling up & getting out, but the trouble is where to get out to.’

But he was wrong. He need not have worried where Yolande was going because she was absolutely determined to go nowhere. Why should she? Why didn’t other people mind their own business? The thought that some of the contents of the house belonged to her brother and that their sale would come as a great relief to him, did not occur to her. I argued that since Norhurst was gaining in value it should be sold later. But my father thought differently. He saw the future as so bleak that Norhurst might soon be unsaleable. Its condition was deteriorating rapidly. Besides, everyone knew that property prices would soon take a dive. ‘It’s on the cards,’ he wrote to me, ‘that a five bedroom house occupied by one person could be taken over by the State to solve the housing problem. One might get paid some small compensation in a worthless currency.’

We had reached this point in the debate when, one day in 1980, everything changed. Even when my aunt was not looking after her brother’s dog Jonathan, she would still charge up to the fields and into Maidenhead Thicket as if leading a phantom pack of all those dogs she had aired and exercised for half a century. She moved amazingly fast for someone now in her late seventies, urging herself on, looking utterly absorbed, fighting old battles. Then, coming into All Saints Avenue from the children’s playground, she suddenly staggered, fell, picked herself up, lurched sideways, and began calling incoherently for help. A few people in the street stared and hurried past, probably thinking she was drunk. She tried to stop a car, but it swerved onwards. Eventually she was assisted on to a milk-float and driven slowly back with the rattling bottles to Norhurst. The milkman helped her in, but she refused all other help.

My father, telephoning that evening to make arrangements for Jonathan’s next visit, got no reply. After a couple of hours, he spoke to the police. They went round, saw my aunt through the window lying on the floor, and broke in. She was then rushed to hospital.

After her stroke she was severely paralysed. There was no question now of her returning to Norhurst. How could she? But this was what she wanted. She would have preferred to die there, I think, than live anywhere else. The house was full of painful memories. There was no room that had not absorbed years of reverberating anger and the awful atmosphere of our unhappiness. But these echoes from the past now seemed to bring her a ghastly satisfaction. The place was in a terrible state, barely inhabitable, yet she took a grim pleasure living there, a bitter comfort. After all, she had come through. Norhurst was her home. She belonged there: and it belonged to her. There was justice in that, and she did not want to be deprived of justice. To abandon the house, whatever the circumstances, would be a betrayal of her father who had left it to her. She would not abandon it. No one could make her.

Yet she could not go back. She was in a wheelchair, able to move one arm and one leg, but unable to dress or undress, unable to wash, eat or do anything else without help. Years ago the question had been: ‘What shall we do with the boy?’ Now it was: ‘What shall we do with my aunt?’

Until her stroke, I had used whatever male arguments I could summon to support my aunt’s need to continue living at Norhurst. But once her course of physiotherapy showed that she was unlikely to regain much movement in her body, I changed my mind. If we sold the house, I told her, we could buy her a flat on the ground floor of the building at Ewell where my father lived. We would have enough money to adapt it for a disabled person, to make it comfortable, and to employ someone to look after her. My soft words sounded so pleasant – almost as if it were worth becoming paralysed to qualify for such luxury. But my aunt would have none of it. From her hospital bed, unable properly to form her words, she fought us all the way. But she could not win because she had granted power of attorney to my father. We were taking away the shell of her life, she believed, wherein her powers of speech and movement might marvellously be restored. She attacked the estate agents even when they brought flowers; she told the auctioneers who sold the contents of the house that they were crooks; and she accused my father and myself of acting as her enemies as we struggled with landlords, bank managers, doctors, the social services and local authorities on her behalf. One day, when she had been particularly dreadful, it seemed to me, about my father/her brother, I stood over her hospital bed as she lay there, still and fearful, shouting at her that she should have had the nerve to leave the house years ago, shouting that her brother had at least tried, and tried again, to make something of his life and been given nothing for his pains, shouting that he was trying now to salvage something of her life as best he could. It was a wretched confrontation.

Norhurst was finally sold for £65,000 and with that money we moved Yolande into a flat close to my father. We had brought over some bits and pieces from Maidenhead to make her feel at home – a couple of Lalique animals, a drawing by Lewis Baumer and one by Anna Zinkheisen, her hairbrushes, a mirror, handbags, familiar china plates and cups – and she moved into her new world.

The contrast with her previous life was extreme. She, who had been so independent, now depended for almost everything on a team of nurses and helpers who came and went from morning until evening. Instead of disappearing across the fields, she sat all day in her wheelchair; instead of eating alone she was fed meals-on-wheels. I did not think she could endure this imprisoned life; I did not think she would consent to continue living. But she adapted to the restrictions miraculously. A peculiar sweetness grew up in her. She was anxious not to cause anyone trouble and, once reassured about this, she became extraordinarily cheerful. Jean and Rita, her two special helpers, wheeled her round the village and up to the library for tea. They wrapped her up and took her into the garden so that she could watch the birds. They brought her clothes, washed her, dressed her, arranged her hair, told her about their families, restored her self-esteem. I was touched by how fond they were of her, and she of them. As an embodiment of her class and time, my aunt would have been regarded as something of a snob in the nineteen-eighties. Snobbishness was her form of self-protection, her superior reason for not doing things that frightened her. She had overcome it in the war; she overcame it again now in her adversity with the help of Jean and Rita and others who looked after her. When she said in her indistinct yet still decisive voice that socialists, foreigners and anyone who criticised the Queen Mother should be shot, Jean and Rita would dance round in laughter – and my aunt happily joined in. All this merriment delighted her. In their game these foreigners and socialists were cartoon characters who could be shot again and again with no harm done. She came to feel quite protective of them.

One advantage of this new chapter in her life was that my father could keep an eye on her. Framed Building Installations had buckled almost before it was set up, leaving him at a loss. But Yolande’s illness gave him something to do, and the sale of Norhurst and its contents gave him the money with which to do it. Her affairs occupied him a full year, but when she was finally settled into the same building as himself, things started to go wrong.

It began with his teeth. ‘Had to have them all out with a general anaesthetic and a plate made,’ he informed me. ‘I reckon to finish paying for it around the year 2000.’ Then it was his eyes. I took him for a couple of cataract operations: one worked well; the other didn’t. Suddenly his handwriting, which had marched so straight and clear through all the ups and downs of his adult life, wobbled and veered crazily off the page. His hearing had also begun to fail. I attempted to get him a new hearing aid in London, but he became irritated with it, being unable to see the tiny batteries or adjust the volume.

My aunt’s slithering speech and my father’s foggy deafness made communication between them an unhappy business. He would find his way to her flat, his dog Jonathan waddling before him, but within minutes the two of them had grown furious with each other, as if their impairments were being purposely exploited. ‘She does it deliberately,’ my father complained to me after my aunt had failed again to ‘speak up’.

He had forgotten her stroke. Soon he was forgetting more: where he was, what he had gone out for, whether it was morning or afternoon. Though I did not realise it, he was more seriously ill than his sister. I would go down to Ewell, take him out to lunch, then have tea with her. I would telephone beforehand to confirm the arrangements, but when I arrived my father had disappeared. When I did find him in the street, he was surprised to see me: ‘Oh hello, Michael. What brings you here?’ Once I let my impatience show. Then, in a passionate riposte, he came back at me: ‘Wait till you’re my age and you’ll find out what it’s like!’ I hear his voice more clearly every year.

His lonely figure had become a well-known sight moving through the village streets, standing at a kerb. He did not drive any longer, but would sometimes stop at the traffic lights as if he were a car, his dog Jonathan looking up at him. Occasionally he went to the pub and also for a time to church, hoping to meet someone. But his deafness, poor sight and other ailments isolated him. People occasionally spoke to his dog Jonathan which pleased him, and there is a picture of them together in the local paper under the caption: ‘One Man And His Dog’. My father is not quite in focus, but Jonathan spreads himself amply across the page and appears to be drinking my father’s half-pint of beer.

One day my father was unable to find his way back to his flat. Someone got hold of his doctor, and his doctor got hold of me. He sounded indignant. ‘I cannot have one of my patients wandering round the village like this,’ he protested. On his advice, I took my father to be examined by a specialist who told me his heart was beating very slowly and that he needed a pacemaker to restore his circulation. Later I drove him to the hospital for the operation, after which he seemed more his old self, though still far from his young self. My anxieties receded. But by then my mother was ill.