by Raynor Winn
We still had to tell my parents what we’d done. We’d sat on the mounded oak roots in the Park as my stomach churned and I tried to breathe, in the moments before we walked down to the house and unfolded the marriage certificate on the kitchen table. I’d lain on the grass there as a child during the lambing season. I’d been sent to bring a ewe and her lamb back to the farmyard. As I lifted the just-born lamb, making little lamb bleating noises to encourage the new mum to follow, I realized she was about to give birth to another, so put the lamb down and stopped to wait. Lying on the grass, the cool earth damp beneath me and white clouds drifting overhead, the ewe lying next to me as the second lamb slipped into life, I knew something stronger, more powerful than anything I’d known in my short life. It was all one: the earth, the grass, the ewe, me, the clouds. Just one huge whole, one cycle of completeness. I wasn’t on the earth but of the earth. It was a profound, deep molecular understanding that shaped the rest of my childhood and kept me separate from other children, and attracted me to Moth; it would allow me to survive homeless on a cliff top with awe and inspiration; and on that day it saw me walking to my family home, about to cut the cord between myself and my parents so savagely that it could never really mend. But their words still rang in my ears: You’ll never be happy without the land.
I’d moved into the dying room with Mum, sleeping on the upright chair by her bed. Nurses came and went, tending to her needs; doctors came, looked at her and then left, saying, ‘Not long now’; the air in the room shut down in still, suffocating finality. In the dimly lit corridors of the hospital, each night a man came shuffling from the men’s ward in his striped pyjamas, entered the women’s stroke ward and went to the bedside of the same frail old lady. Each night he held her hand and talked to her: ‘Mum, wake up. Mum, take me home. I need to go home.’ Each night as he shook her awake and she shouted that she was being attacked, the nurses would come and quietly escort him away. She wasn’t his mum, but somewhere in the darkness at the end of his life he was looking for the way back to the beginning.
Four days passed, then ten, and still the doctors came, ticked their boxes and said, ‘Not long now.’ Mum’s eyes opened occasionally, looking at me for long moments, then at the bright light of the window, but mainly they stayed focused at the end of the bed, before closing again. Her breathing became heavier and the pneumonia crept back, drying her mouth and blocking her throat. Days became a series of long-drawn-out seconds, crawling into minutes. I listened constantly for a variation in breathing, any sign that the agony of watching her go would end soon, but nothing changed and the days dragged on.
I began to understand that nurses aren’t allowed to tell you about anything except practicalities and mid-level doctors are programmed to pass you on to the consultants, so to catch one of those as he flew past was the only way to get an answer. Waiting for an unending time in the corridor, afraid that if I looked away he would pass like a wisp of smoke, I watched as desperately ill people were wheeled into the ward and then as one was transferred to an identical room opposite Mum’s, the family following, heads bowed and weeping. I was back in the corridor two days later when they shut the door on a quiet, still body, shaking hands with the nurses and leaving for the last time. The faces on the ward changed, people went home, their lives shaken and altered by strokes, but went home all the same, and finally on the third day I caught one. He looked briefly at Mum, ticked a box and was about to vanish when I stopped him.
‘You said three to four days, so why is she still here? If I’d known, if you’d explained …’
‘Most old ladies on this ward are frail, but your mum, she’s strong, she has a willpower to keep going. But soon, now the pneumonia’s here.’
The walls of a dark pit of self-recrimination began to rise around me. If she had the will to keep going now, against all the odds, maybe, just maybe, if I’d allowed them to insert the feeding tube it might have bought her time to recover. Had I chosen to allow her to die when she could have recovered? I went back to her room, pulled a blanket of horror over myself and listened to her harsh breaths.
‘You’re doing yourself no favours here, duck. She’s going nowhere today. Get out of this place for a bit – you’ll feel better.’
That word ‘duck’, that colloquial word, it bore the sound of childhood and home and belonging. I looked at the nurse as she held my arm and guided me to the door. I hadn’t met her before, but something in that one simple word made me trust her enough to put my coat on and leave.
With no thought or sense of reason, I returned to the woods. It seemed so obvious; it was the only place to be. I had to be there, safe, held. Exhausted but alert with a numb, hollow fear, I lay on the dry bed of pine needles and watched the sun move across the sky between the dark branches.
I left the wood, past the black stump of the old elm tree. It had been a tall, mature tree, growing alone on the hillside, burrowed under by rabbits and giving shelter to cattle as they stood beneath its branches, swishing away flies with their tails on hot summer days. It seemed to have the strength to live forever, and yet one night at the end of summer, when I was only seven, just before the start of school, Dad had woken me to get dressed and go outside.
‘Where’s Mum?’
‘Still in bed.’
This felt momentous. It had never happened before: he’d woken me to take me out into the adult world of night.
‘You have to see this. I’ve never seen it before; you’ll never see it again.’
I held Dad’s weather-cracked hand and followed him into the field behind the house.
‘Dad, why? Why have you set the tree on fire?’
‘I haven’t.’
The elm that had stood alone in the field for possibly two hundred years was alight. Vast, leaping flames engulfing the branches, bursting into the black sky with bright orange heat. So much power released from one tranquil, green, shady habitat.
‘But why is it burning?’
‘I don’t know. It’s as if it lit itself, as if it chose to burn.’
During all the years I shared with that practical man, who prided himself on ‘calling a spade a spade’, this was the closest that he ever came to wonder. As the bright light lit his face, that’s what I saw: awe and wonder at the spectacle, a reaction so profound that I was witnessing it being burnt into his psyche. As the tree crashed to the ground and we cowered from the ferocity of flying sparks and burning branches, I could feel something in his hard-worked hands soften. The tree continued to blaze on the ground, but nothing else around it caught fire; it burnt alone. The tree released its own intense life heat, and all around it the night stayed still and calm; the cows grazed and the stars didn’t go out. As the flames subsided we walked back to the house; he was silent, but I could still see his face lit by a natural magic.
I walked away from the stump, a mass of intense emotions that I could barely name. My past, my present, my family and in there, amongst it all, Moth, casting a shadow across every day with the knowledge that this wasn’t the only choice I would have to make. That the choice I’d made for my mum I would have to face for him too. Or would he choose his own time? Choose his own moment to let go of his bright green light and say, This is the most perfect day I’ll ever see, and for that to be enough. I pushed the thought back into the shadows. Not now, not now.
In the churchyard the truth of life was laid out in neat rows. The farmers from the village, my grandad, the people from the cottages, the old estate owner and his family, my aunt and uncle. Everyone who had peopled the village of my childhood were there, collected together with my dad. I knelt by his grave, ripping the long grass from around the headstone with my hands and putting fresh flowers in the holder. I couldn’t feel peace there, just a sense of them all gone, sucked into the vortex of life that drew them all into the cold ground of a windy hillside. The weight of death was crushing me in visions of Moth standing at the church gate, waiting his turn.
‘Dad, please. I can’t take this, sh
e can’t go on like this, please come and get her, please.’
Feeling the pull of the hospital, I called back at the cottage and had my first shower for days, did some washing and looked for a book to read through the long hospital nights. She still had a box of books taken from the shelves in my old bedroom. I’d taken a few over the years, but somehow that box hadn’t been collected. Fingering the yellowed pages and folded corners of books I’d loved in my childhood and teenage years, I spotted one I didn’t know so well. The ruined house on the cover was familiar but the contents were elusive, blurred by time. I put Mum’s clean things in a bag and the battered old copy of Copsford by Walter J. C. Murray on top.
7. Breathing
Her breathing was heavier, catching on unseen obstacles, causing her mouth to dry and block with unswallowable saliva. It had to be removed with swabs to let the air past. At two in the morning, there was no time for sleep. Just time to listen to the breaths, saving them, storing them for when there would be no more. I opened the curtain, letting the car-park lighting turn the room into a burnt-yellow crypt.
I put my feet up on the bed and tried to let sleep come, but there was no hope of that, so I propped Copsford on my legs, letting it catch the light from the window. Why couldn’t I remember this book? But as I opened it and thumbed the worn, discoloured pages, a faint memory began to stir. I did remember it. It was one of the books that had come from Glin, Mum’s artistic, book-loving friend. I’d tried to read it, but, too young and disappointed by the lack of animals, I’d discarded it on the bookshelf. Too young to understand what had driven the young Walter J. C. Murray to leave the city and live for a year in the ruined house depicted on the cover. A year without running water, or electricity, in a house where rain leaked through the roof and wind howled through the doors. Maybe now it would make sense. As the night wore on and nurses came and stood by Mum, watching, listening, I read my way out of the room and into a hidden place in rural post-war England. But in the quiet stillness of the room I became increasingly irritated by Walter Murray and his inability to stick to anything. He grew up in Sussex, playing in the fields and lanes of the village where he lived. Too young to be affected by the early years of the First World War, when he was finally old enough to join the war effort he entered the Merchant Navy, only to find he hated the nauseating endlessness of the sea, so left and joined the RAF. But he was never to become a pilot; the war ended before he learnt how to fly. Returning to the village of Horam, he was listless, an irritated youth who felt he’d missed out on the big show, so he packed his bag and left for the city and a job in journalism. But he was bored by reporting on trivial incidents and again began to grow dissatisfied.
I became quickly bored with Walter and put the book down to go out into the corridor for a cardboard cup of tea from the drinks machine. The man – his name was Harry – came shuffling towards the women’s wards in new blue checked pyjamas, taking up his seat by the sleeping old lady. ‘Mum, Mum, let’s go home.’ I waited for the nurses to usher him out, but they didn’t come. He held her hand, stroking it carefully, almost tenderly, as she started to rouse. I expected her to shout, but she didn’t, she just reached out and patted his arm. ‘We’ll go home tomorrow. Go back to bed now and get some rest.’ Harry stood up without resisting and left the ward the way he came, a hunched old man, but inside the shell a lost, frightened little boy who just knew he had to get back to some vague memory of an earlier time. I went back to the room, shutting the door quietly behind me. Mum’s eyes were open, staring again at the end of the bed. I tried to stand in her gaze, but she wasn’t seeing me; something else held her transfixed.
‘Try to sleep, Mum. I’ve got this book …’ I began to read to her and within seconds her eyes were closed and her breathing heavier and harsh. I knew how she felt; there aren’t many things as sleep-inducing as a teenager who can’t just get on with something. But I stuck with it as Walter became disillusioned by his dull job and his dismal accommodation, even finding he no longer had inspiration to write: the one thing he’d hoped to do. He was suffocated by the city and started to dream of returning home where he could ‘live close to nature’. The pages turned and I stopped needing him to explain himself; I knew him already, I knew what he was searching for – it was the same force that drove me to walk the cliffs or run to the woods. The same inexplicable, magnetic pull. Hooked now, connected, unable to stop reading, I followed Walter’s year of living alone in the countryside, immersed in the wild exuberant nature of the English landscape in the mid-twentieth century.
As night turned into morning and the hospital day began, I started to understand what it was that didn’t feel quite the same about the fields and woods of the estate. What it was that had changed in such a silent way that its passing was hardly noticeable. There was a lack of something, but that lack had been almost invisible until I held up the mirror of Copsford and what was reflected wasn’t the estate of my childhood. I looked up from the book at the leafless branches of the birch tree outside. Of course the hedges weren’t full of wild flowers, or the grass buzzing with bees: it was the end of January. But it was something less obvious, something more than the converted sawmill and the commuters living in the farmworkers’ cottages. It was a stillness, a wild silence beyond the emptiness of the pine trees. A silence on the wind, the deadness of something having gone. The farm had become a different, neater, more barren place, the wild things had gone, the skies were quieter and the earth was empty and dark. An invisible change, almost imperceptible until it shone out in Copsford’s blinding light.
Then everything changed.
‘I can’t stand to think of you there. Don’t you need me with you? Let me come.’ It was hard for Moth not to be with me; it made no sense to him. ‘I know she hates me but it’s too late for that.’
‘I know, but please don’t come.’ I could already feel the difficulty of what was happening that day and I couldn’t have him there. It was almost too awful to cope with myself, but if he was in the room he would know what it was to die this way and I couldn’t let him see it – I could barely hold Mum’s death separate to his as it was. For him to be in the same room would have meshed the two inextricably in my head and I was already close to drowning in my own maelstrom of thought. ‘Please don’t.’
The harsh, snatched breath had become a deep wheeze. Every intake a growing battle, and with each hour it became worse. I called the nurses in.
‘She’s choking. Can’t you do something?’
‘She’s on nil-intervention. We’d have to get approval from the consultant. He told you she would aspirate.’
‘What the hell? How could I know that aspirate meant this? You can’t let her suffer.’
The wheezing became a hauling suction of air, her body taking over in a primal, instinctive fight for oxygen, her face and throat distorting with the force of each deep, desperate attempt to breathe. Her lungs were producing vast amounts of mucus, but her throat couldn’t swallow.
Hours passed in the agony of watching her suffer. Hours of doubting the decision and hating myself for making it. Hours of mind-shattering, nauseating despair as I fought for each breath with her, thinking each one must be the last and she couldn’t possibly survive this. Exhausted, harrowed, I held her hand and watched in useless horror. As the afternoon wore on, when I thought neither of us could take any more, the matron appeared.
‘We’re going to give her hyoscine. It’s a drug that will stop the mucus production and ease the choking.’
Slowly the miracle relief left the syringe and her throat began to relax, the breathing became quieter, and the stillness returned. I crawled on to my chair, curled in a ball and shuddered with sobbing. I just wanted blackness, where no thought or sound or fear could enter.
‘I’ll get you a cup of tea, duck. That’s the hard bit over now.’
Over now, it was nearly over now. But it wasn’t. I was sobbing through one death, with the weight of another bearing down on me. I had to call him.
<
br /> ‘It’s been an awful day, but just tell me about yours.’
‘Why won’t you let me come?’
‘Just tell me about your day.’
‘Another weird one – definitely not the best. I had a really blank moment like I’d just switched off without knowing it, then I was so stiff I could hardly move. The lecturer was shaking me, saying I’d been staring out of the window for ages; then I couldn’t get up, nothing seemed to work, so someone drove me back to the chapel. Today I’m doubting if I’ll make the end of this degree, let alone teach afterwards. I’m just going to go and lie down. Can I call you later?’
I curled back into the chair, pulling the cotton blanket over my head and dragged Copsford into my cave with me. Take me away from this, Walter. Take me to green spaces and country lanes filled with herbs and wild flowers. Let me pick agrimony and comfrey with you. Take me away; give me the green safety of my childhood. I began to reread the book in the filtered light from the fluorescent strip. The world, Mum, Moth, all of it shut outside, just alone with Walter, wading through a stream on our way to pick blackberries.
In the twilight of a hospital night I couldn’t hide any more. Moth had begun university in hope. Not the sort of hope a normal student would have, that their degree would give them a long and prosperous future. His hope was that he would survive to the end of the degree and in doing so maybe his brain would stay alert enough to take him on to the next stage of his life. But he didn’t have to tell me; I knew he was slipping backwards from the high point at the end of the path. That euphoric point when he’d taken his rucksack off and his body had lost the stiffness and restraint of CBD and moved to his command. Or was he actually slipping forwards, slipping into the future that had been predicted?
We began our epic walk of the Coast Path with no sense of hope or possibility. Moth had been told he couldn’t survive, that the tau protein in his brain had stopped functioning in its normal way and was now clustering together in what the consultant called aggregates. A creeping process of tau phosphorylation, which would slowly close down the parts of his brain that instructed his body what to do. I imagined the tau forming like plaque on teeth, but in a place where the brush wouldn’t reach. So it could spread and grow until it suffocated all those beautiful brain cells that told Moth how to move, to feel, to remember, to swallow, to breathe. And yet as we walked along that incredible strip of wilderness, forgetting the existence of the normal world that lay to one side of the path, with our eyes always drawn to the endless horizon of the sea on the other, exhausted and starving, something had changed. He had changed. He’d grown stronger, the fog in his brain had cleared, his movements had become surer, easier to control. Why, why, why had that happened? There had to be a reason, but maybe it was time to accept that the doctors were right, that there was nothing that could be done other than face the inevitability of the end.