by Les Dawson
It could have been a fault on the appliance or perhaps someone had used it earlier on and hadn’t switched it off properly, or maybe you’ll say it was my imagination. All I know is that from that incident I found a strength of will that I hadn’t possessed before. I went back into the study and told the children to draw the curtains back and put their record players on.… I wanted sunlight in the room where she had died because she had been a sunny person.… I needed to hear music, preferably loud and with a beat that would bring life back into a house of death.
I was amazed by the number of people who called at the house in genuine sorrow.… I had never realised how many lives my Meg had touched.
I was overwhelmed by the masses of floral tributes, from friends and relatives and strangers. Telegrams arrived from all over the world, including one from Buckingham Palace which read simply:
Buckingham Palace
PLEASE ACCEPT MY DEEPEST CONDOLENCES ON YOUR VERY SAD LOSS
PHILIP
There was a chill in the air and a light, misty rain on the day of Meg’s funeral. The service was at the Lytham Crematorium but at the children’s request Meg was to be buried, so that any one of the family could go along and chat with her at times of anguish.… I thought it was a nice idea. Over two hundred and fifty people attended the service, not counting the hordes of good folk standing outside in the rain. There were show business stars, neighbours, close friends, acquaintances, immediate family and distant relatives.… Strangers came and wrung my hand. From them, I heard stories of deeds undertaken by my wife.…
The little old lady who told me how Meg would call and give her provisions.…
The elderly gentleman who ran a small charitable organisation for disabled folk, taking them for a free lunch. Meg was his main driver.…
The good ladies from Meals on Wheels … a similar group told me how much Meg had done for them, taking the very aged for little trips in her car.…
As the stories unfolded, I realised that my wife’s life had been one of giving to others.… I hadn’t really completely known the woman I had married all those years ago.
Floral tributes … so many for one small lady. I was only dimly aware of the newspaper reporters running across damp burial mounds, their ill-kempt photographers eagerly snapping every tear and show of grief. I held Pamela close as we walked to Meg’s last resting place. My mind was a turmoil of questions and despair.… As the coffin began its descent into the earth I placed a white rose on the lid and whispered, ‘I will always love you – and please look after us all, darling.’
Does that sound a stupid thing to say? It probably does, of course, but I had that feeling that Meg was still around … and something was to happen that only confirmed this view.
As the casket descended, I remembered.…
1958, I meet Meg at a club where I am appearing. She’s engaged to another guy.… We don’t like each other on sight. She says, ‘Do you want to use the clavoline?’ (This was something that was fastened to the piano and could reproduce the sound of an organ.) And old smart arse here says, ‘No love, I’ve just been.’
1960, 25 June.… We are wed at St Thomas’s church in Crumpsall, and after the reception held in a pub, we set off for Austria on our honeymoon. The soaring peaks and fine wines and the long nights of love and getting to know one another.… All the good years to come. The shared poverty in our early marriage, the shared disappointments, the tragic miscarriages … many bad times but all good years together. The triumphs and the flops … we shared them all, and now I’ve lost her, my Meg, aged 48 years – that’s all she had, 48 summers and winters, and now she’s gone … and with her my life as well.
The funeral feast, for want of a better phrase for that most odious of customs, was held in the St Ives Hotel. The sight of the food made me sick; instead, I drank – a lot. Suddenly before me stood the beautiful young woman who worked behind the bar and who had been so kind to me when I’d been in my alcoholic states.
‘I’m very sorry about your loss, Les,’ she said softly, and her enormous eyes were full of moist compassion. She didn’t have to say anything more but I knew by her look that she understood.
I walked away hurriedly to the toilet. I had to be alone.
Of course the popular press had a field day. In every major newspaper and the tabloids there was some comment, ranging from ‘Agony of a Comic’, to ‘Les loses his Meg’. One that really hurt me with its cold prose was: ‘Comic’s wife killed by cancer’.
Another thing that convinced me that Meg’s spirit energy was still around was the presence of the sweet smell of freesias … her favourite flower. The scent of it could be detected all over the house, particularly in the kitchen, and once again I speculated on the possibility that when we slough off the physical body, we go into some sort of limbo in order to adjust to our new change of energy matter, and possibly assist the living to come to terms with their loss.
One thing I do know for certain is that it helped me to pull myself together and face the reality that I had lost my wife for ever.… I would never see her again.
The children were marvellous, and for their sake I had to put on a braver face than I felt like wearing.
Time does dull; it doesn’t heal, but before long I had accepted that Meg wasn’t around any more. No more would I hear her wheeling down the hall giving out instructions.… I decided to become mum and dad for the kids. I would fill both posts.
One incident made me realise what terrible anguish can boil beneath an apparently calm exterior.… Pamela, my younger daughter, took a lot of sleeping pills. Luckily, as it turned out, she hadn’t taken enough to do any harm. When I asked her why she’d done it, she said sadly, ‘I didn’t intend to kill myself, Dad. I thought if I took more than I should, perhaps I’d just be able to see mum one more time.’
Time dulls … it doesn’t heal.
I found that people react most strangely to someone who has lost someone dear to them. Let me explain.
I did the shopping in the mornings, hoping to get finished before well-meaning neighbours and the other shoppers were about. Don’t get me wrong, their concern was wonderful, but you can’t stop in the middle of taking a tin of baked beans off a shelf in order to grunt and relive the loss for somebody else’s benefit. The oddest thing I found was that people would approach me, bend slightly from the waist then peer up my nose and say earnestly: ‘How are you coping with things?’ ‘It must be hard for you, love.’ ‘How are the children taking it?’ ‘Do you miss Meg, love?’ ‘God works in mysterious ways, doesn’t he?’
There was a lighter side. From elderly ladies I learned the art of finding a tin of produce that hadn’t been stamped with an increased price! One old woman dragged me to a heaped column of tinned peas, and with incredible dexterity, removed a dozen layers until, grunting with triumph, she produced a battered tin that was one penny cheaper than the others.… She had beaten the system.
I learned how to tell a good tomato from a bad one; my aged mentors taught me how to prod, fondle, poke and sniff out the better product. After such tuition, you couldn’t pass me off with a duff melon! No haddock shoved under my nose could lie about its age, and I could gauge the weight of a chicken with one furtive pinch. I became an expert at choosing the best cut of beef; I wallowed in my new-found expertise at picking out the better fruits.… In a state of high exaltation I would troop along with my batch of old ladies to different supermarkets in order to save twopence on a jar of rough-cut marmalade. I would stand in a darkened corner of Safeways and hug myself with glee at finding a jar of gravy granules threepence cheaper than the ones at Tesco’s. I spent hours with my basket gossiping with my tottering old girls and I learned many dark secrets of the parish.
I had a lady doing for me, but frankly she wasn’t a great success. She would prowl around the Hoover as if the thing might suddenly rear up and bite her. She used a duster rather timidly. In fact she never really removed the dust, she merely rearranged it.
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sp; The house was looking decidedly shabby. Because of Meg’s protracted illness, we hadn’t looked after it the way we should have done. Spring was in the air and the dark curtains gave the house a distinctly sinister appearance. Also, my garden was in peril. Oh, I had a gardener, an elderly gentleman who charged me the earth for plucking a clump of groundsel. He seemed strangely indifferent as the grass on the lawns crept slowly past his waist. If I mentioned the word ‘lawnmower’ he would turn quite pale, clutch his chest and mutter ‘angina’. Now, when Meg was alive the old devil had done what he was told, if the wife had said ‘Plant these dog roses’, by God he did, and I began to realise what running a house meant.
As a widower, everybody took advantage of me.… The plumber for instance. Once, when we had a burst pipe, Meg had phoned him up to come round immediately. He had hummed and hawed and tried to put her off, but she was adamant and he duly arrived. Now I had reason to ask him to call and mend a washer on a tap, you would have thought I was telephoning a Harley Street specialist! First of all, his wife said she would have to look through his appointment book – that took ten minutes and a great deal of tutting. Eventually she put me on to the Great Man and he condescended to consider me in three days’ time.
I had to come to grips with door to door salesmen who promised me paradise if I purchased a can of their wonder polish; a double glazing whizz kid came at least twice a week then stayed on the doorstep for an hour. Religious nuts were a constant factor – Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses by the battalion dragging peculiar converts with them, fussy female Methodists selling me endless bundles of raffle tickets, and one loon who kept popping up trying to get me to buy a piece of wood from the Cross of Christ. Never before had I understood half the problems a housewife has to contend with. Then in my loneliness, I made the fatal mistake of inviting a neighbour in for a coffee. Over that cup of coffee came a kindly but rigid determination to oversee life. She started to bring round a tray upon which was a hot meal for the kids and me. When I threw a bit of it to our dog, he spent an hour with a paw down his throat. Next she fixed me up with a window cleaner who must have spent years in the Navy washing portholes, never once did he complete a full pane. I started hiding under the settee when she rang the bell, but that didn’t deter her, on the doorstep she’d leave a homemade hot-pot, a pudding or a baked fish dish which was so appalling the dog left home. It took my eldest daughter to open the door to her one day whilst I cowered on the floor of the lounge, to tell her straight that she appreciated what she had done but thank you, we could manage. The good lady sniffed audibly and took her pots back.
* * *
Julie returned to her nursing, Stuart had a job as a motor mechanic, and Pamela left school and went to work with the Blackpool Tourist Board.
I badly needed to get back to work; I simply wasn’t strong enough to cope with running a home, so in May I toured a show around the smaller resorts and did fairly good business. Two of the kids were at home looking after things. God only knows what they got up to in my absence, and I thought it prudent to remain in ignorance.
And another thing – widowed ladies had started beaming at me and offering me a cuppa in their homes. At first I thought they were just being friendly – until one bright-blue-rinsed predator put her hand on my thigh and boomed: ‘A man wasn’t meant to be alone.’
I received letters from women who made it quite clear what their motives were, and although I found a lot of it amusing, it also saddened me to think how much loneliness there is in the world. The thought of ever getting married again never entered my head; I’d had the good fortune of knowing a fine woman, I would never find her like again in my lifetime.
For relaxation I used the bar of the St Ives Hotel and as always it was nice to chat with the beautiful Tracy. She was married with two children, and very popular with everybody who used the hotel. What chance would I have had with her, even if I’d wanted to get to know her better?
Tracy
* * *
The guests at the St Ives Hotel saw the little fat man drinking heavily as he sat at the bar, exchanging jokes with other drinkers who laughed loudly at his silly stories, especially the one about the man who looked into the shaving mirror and saw a small tree growing on his cheekbone. He wiped some shaving soap off his chin and saw a little stream running from his ear to his mouth, and halfway down the stream was a bridge with a milkmaid on it, and the sun on the man’s forehead was shining down on to a basket of flowers that the milkmaid was carrying towards a cottage nestling under his lip.
The man went to see the doctor and the doctor said: ‘Don’t worry over it … it’s a beauty spot.’
The guests saw the other drinkers slap the little fat man on his shoulder – but what they didn’t see was the way the little man looked at the lovely young woman behind the bar.
It was now six months since Meg had passed away, and I was just about feeling my feet again.
I went out a lot and once or twice in a drunken stupor I would go out with a woman then instantly regret it before anything came of it. I couldn’t forget Meg.… But sometimes I would think of Tracy behind the bar, with her broad smile.… I was confused and diving into a well of self-imposed depression again. The answer was to work, and I shot off to London to finish off a series of Blankety Blank.
Even in London Meg was still with me. She had been so well liked and loved, people simply couldn’t help talking about her. Yes, it was nice, we had been a team, Meg and I. We had been one of show business’s most respected couples … but that was now in the past.
When one partner in a marriage is left on his or her own, no matter how kind people are towards you, all they talk about is the past – and you find yourself relegated to that past along with your partner. It’s as if they cannot see you having a separate future. It was that attitude that took me to Meg’s graveside, where I spoke about my feelings to her photograph on the headstone.
I was fifty-one years of age, not in the best of physical shape, but none too bad considering the life I’d led. Should I now allow the years to slide by and content myself with watching the children find themselves, or should I look to my life and salvage something worthwhile from it?
I had talent, I could make people laugh, couldn’t I? I couldn’t believe that God had put us on this earth to wallow in what used to be, rather than to strive for a future that might be.… I talked and talked to Meg, and the comfort I received in return only confirmed my belief that death is not final, it is merely a transition.
I was approached by the Daily Mirror for an interview about life without Meg, and to write a three-part article. I agreed on condition that I had copy approval before publication and that I was to be paid the sum of twenty-five thousand pounds, which would go to Christie’s Hospital for any equipment they might need. The newspaper agreed, and a contract was signed.
Meanwhile I found myself spending more and more time in the St Ives Hotel. It was no good kidding myself, I was drawn to Tracy, mainly because she was a sympathetic listener and she seemed to care. She herself, I discovered, had experienced many tragedies. She had lost both her parents; her mother from cancer and her father in a car accident. She was about to give birth to her son, Richard, when the police came to tell her that her father was dead. At the time she was alone, still mourning her mother, who’d been dead only a few months. She had nearly lost her young son when he was terribly scalded in a household accident, and soon afterwards she herself had nearly died of peritonitis.
That summer, I opened in Ray Cooney’s farce, Run For Your Wife at the Grand Theatre, Blackpool. It had an excellent cast: Eric Sykes, Jan Hunt, Peter Goodwright, Paul Toothill and Jilly Foote. Bookings were good and we were all set for a fifteen-week run.
Together with Hilary Bonner, a friend who was a feature writer on the Daily Mirror, I worked on the article about life without Meg, and we were both pleased with it. One night, my agent rang to say that another newspaper, a Sunday publication, wanted to do a feature on my latest book
s, A Time Before Genesis and A Clown Too Many. I agreed to see the reporter – quite an affable chap – and we sat in my dressing-room and talked about the books. Only once did he ask me how things were now that I was alone. I replied ‘Fine’ and that was that … or so I thought. But then an article appeared in this Sunday newspaper about life without Meg – virtually the same article that was intended for the Daily Mirror. A tearful Hilary Bonner rang me. Apparently she knew the man who’d interviewed me; he’d put together the free two-page spread with information dug out of the archives. I was desolate, it looked as if Christie’s wouldn’t get the money now. Fortunately, I hadn’t reckoned with my agents’ experience with this sort of situation: the Mirror held to the contract and I received a cheque for twenty-five thousand pounds made out to Christie’s Hospital, Manchester. Now came the part I was looking forward to.
I telephoned the hospital and spoke to the head administrator. The conversation went something along the lines of:
ME: ‘Oh hello, my name is Dawson, Les Dawson, my wife was under your care for cancer.’
HIM: ‘Yes, I know, we were all terribly sorry, Mr Dawson, or may I call you Les?’
ME: ‘Sure. The reason I’m ringing you is to find out if a donation would be of any help to you.’
HIM: ‘Oh yes, we’re grateful for anything we can get, no matter how small.’