So why didn’t we live in Loweswater full time? As writers, we could have lived anywhere. It was a question friends asked us. And we asked ourselves. People also asked which we liked best.
We usually said Loweswater, for the simple reason that our spirits rose, our hearts fluttered, every time we were driving down the Lorton valley, ticking off all our favourite spots. Our hearts did not soar when driving back to London.
There was another question we pondered. If we had to choose, forced to pick one place to live full time, where would it be? We always knew the answer would have to be London. As the years went on, that’s where our three children and their families lived, that’s where we have medical help on our doorstep. Both our London GP and the Royal Free Hospital are within walking distance. These things matter as you get older, even if we hoped never to have a serious illness again. In the countryside, it is advisable not to get ill. At Loweswater, any of our friends suddenly taken ill with an emergency or a complication always ended up in Newcastle or Lancaster, miles and miles away.
We never actually thought about the future, only when asked. We knew it was inevitable that we would leave, but it did not hang over us. We loved and treasured every moment of being there. It was such a wonderful combination, town and country, the best of all worlds.
‘This is the life, eh, Madge,’ I used to say, getting into bed after a particularly wonderful day, having met nobody, just written all morning then walked and wandered around the rest of the day, beside the lake or the fells, across the fields or in our garden.
The wording was a joke observation. Mocking myself for making such a banal remark, and also calling her Madge. Like many domestic jokes and family nicknames, which you find yourself using without thinking what they mean, you forget how they began. Or even that you are saying it. This is the life, Madge, eh. Madge would not reply. Just smile and roll over.
I think Margaret was at her happiest in Loweswater. By being there from May to October, we got the best times of the year for light and warmth, sun and the changing seasons. It also meant we were there every year for Margaret’s birthday on 25 May.
On her fiftieth birthday, in 1988, she proposed to climb Red Pike before breakfast, as a treat to herself. I said great, I’ll come with you, as I had never done Red Pike. By 1988, I was beginning to get awful arthritic pains in my knees, so there were days I could not manage the high stuff. But I felt pretty good at the time. However, on the morning of 25 May, I slept in.
About eight o’clock I was awakened by Margaret, bringing me a cup of tea in bed, as she did all our married life. I noticed she had her walking boots on and her hair was wet.
She had got up at six, she said, tried to wake me, but I was so sound asleep she decided to leave me. She walked round Crummock Water, climbed to the top of Red Pike, describing a lone walker she had met on the top, what he looked like, what he had said. Then on the way back along the lake, she stopped at Ling Crag, which is a little peninsula on Crummock, and had a swim in the lake. She had no swimming costume with her but as there was no one around the lake, she swam in her underclothes.
I had not heard her getting up and going out, not a thing, and was not aware she had gone, till she woke me up with my tea.
But then for years she had always been much fitter than me, effortlessly climbing to the tops of all the fells, looking so healthy and wonderful.
It became a legend in the family, what she did, on her own, on her fiftieth birthday. It was not quite as legendary as Wordsworth climbing Gable on his seventieth birthday, which makes me sick, because I always knew I would never manage that, but pretty good for fifty, doing it on her own, before breakfast.
Very recently, Jake, our son, got out the map and declared that he now thinks she was lying. She could not possibly have got from our house, up to the top of Red Pike and back in two hours, plus having a swim.
Margaret enjoyed lying. Hard to explain her lies, but they were really exaggerations. If someone asked her where she had been or what she had done or why, sometimes she could not be bothered trotting out the truth, because the truth was usually boring, and people should not have asked her, so she would make it up, not wild fantasy, more embellishments, and always convincing. If ever caught out, she would just laugh and say, ‘You didn’t believe, it did you?’
That walk and that swim on her fiftieth birthday could, at a pinch, jogging all the way, climbing at a trot, swimming like fury, have been done in two hours, if perhaps not quite getting to the very top of Red Pike. So I have decided that I will always accept her word that she did do it. Because that’s what I like to believe.
19
BLISS IN THE WEST INDIES
For my fiftieth birthday, in 1986, as a treat for me, and for ourselves, we went for the first time to the West Indies. Bit different from climbing Red Pike. Took longer and was slightly more expensive.
I had always hated having a birthday on 7 January. All those years in Carlisle it was hellish, so cold in the bedroom, trying to get dressed under the blankets, knowing if you put one bare foot on the lino you could be frozen to the floor and be stuck there till spring.
I had for years been saying oh wouldn’t it be lovely on my fiftieth to wake up on a tropical island. So we did it. In January 1986 we flew to Barbados on Concorde. It was quite cramped inside, just 100 seats, two seats either side of a narrow aisle. It was like flying in a large cigar, but oh so exciting and special, especially when a sign announced we had reached Mach 2 which meant we were about to fly faster than sound (Mach 2.04 signified the speed of sound, or 1,354 mph). The food and the service were top class, but ever so discreet and tasteful. I kept all the menus and luggage labels as mementos. I always do that sort of thing, but also because even at the time no one really believed supersonic flights would last. We all knew Concorde was losing money on every flight, so how could it survive? So it felt historic, even in the present.
Concorde was a joint UK and France creation, with BA and Air France running the planes. They never fell out, which has not always happened in Anglo-French relations. It was so beautifully shaped, with that bird-like swoop and elegance: a work of art as well as technology, one of the most attractive pieces of engineering to emerge in my lifetime. And then disappear. A shame it lasted only twenty-seven years. Service flights began in 1976 and ceased in 2003.
Because of the four-hour time difference between the West Indies and the UK, if you left London at nine in the morning you arrived at Bridgetown at eight. The flight itself took only three hours. So you could have two breakfasts.
We went on Concorde three times in all to Barbados. Once we had an emergency stop in the Azores. Something to do with needing to refuel, so we were told. Everyone moaned, but when we landed at a little airport on one of the islands, we were all able to get out and take photos of ourselves standing beside Concorde. Which we had not been able to do in London. Getting on the plane at Heathrow, you entered through various lounges and never actually saw the plane from the outside.
In 1986, on that first trip, I went straight into the Caribbean the moment we arrived at our hotel – and ran straight out again, screaming in agony. I had stood on a sea urchin. All my fault, going in at a rocky bit. Two waiters heard my shouts and rushed down on to the beach in their waiter’s uniform. One had a lemon, which he squeezed onto the wound, while the other had a candle. He lit it with his cigarette lighter and let the candle grease drip on to the bite, then waited for it to harden. When the candle grease fell off, it removed the sting from the sea urchin. Clever, huh.
From then on, we went every year in January for my birthday to the Caribbean, always going first to Cobblers Cove hotel in Barbados. Barbados is so easy to get to, so civilised, everything works. Eventually, we decided it was a bit staid and westernised so we started island hopping, spending five or six days in other islands. In the end, over the next twenty years, I stayed at thirty-two different Caribbean islands. Naturally I got a book out of it – A Walk Round the West Indies. In fact t
wo books, as I also did the Columbus biog which involved travelling to the West Indies and to Venezuela.
A Walk Round the West Indies had a theme, so it was not quite a travel book. In each island I went in search of two sorts of people. Firstly, I talked to expats who had come from Europe to live in the West Indies, escape to the sun, and settle in paradise, so they all said. How was it for them? In so many cases, if they were couples, they had split up. What they were usually running away from was themselves, something wrong in their lives, in their relationships.
The other sort of people I was looking for were black West Indian returnees, who had emigrated to England many years earlier, the post-Windrush generation who had lived in England, always saying they would go back one day. Now they had done so. So how was it for them? Most of them found it tough. They had gone back comparatively rich, because if they had worked on London Underground for thirty years, had bought a little terraced house in the sixties or seventies, they had probably sold it for a good profit. Back home, when they returned to Grenada or Antigua, they were considered dead rich. But they didn’t fit in either. They missed England. The ones who had never left Grenada or Antigua felt jealous of them.
While in the West Indies one year, we also did some research for a biography Margaret was writing of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Her family wealth came from the sugar plantations in Jamaica and she wanted to see the place where they had lived. So that was a good excuse to go there.
The thing about the West Indies is that the landscape is benign, no horrible snakes or crocodiles, no dangerous beasts that might attack you, as in Africa and elsewhere. And it is never too hot, not like the landlocked tropics, where you can’t breathe during the day or step outside. In the West Indies, there is always a slight sea breeze. It does rain, but usually only for forty seconds at a time.
I did get mugged in Jamaica. I was there on my own, on the Columbus trail. I went to the museum in Kingstown to look at the Arawak exhibits. I stayed so long that when I came to leave, the door I had entered by was locked. I went out the first door I found open, and got lost, having little sense of direction. I realised I had wandered into the docks area, and found myself walking down a narrow street, clearly lost, passing blokes mending cars in the gutters.
Two youths started following me, one about eighteen, and one about fifteen. I quickened my step, and so they did, till they both passed me, saying something to each other I did not catch. The younger suddenly stopped, standing in my way. He produced a knife and lunged at me, ripping my shirt – a silk shirt, as it happened, my best favourite.
I was lucky that he did not appear to be trying to stab or injure me, just to rip open my shirt pocket where I had my passport and Visa card. He pulled them both out, holding the knife to my face. I pleaded with him to give them back to me, saying I was leaving next day. They were no use to him, he couldn’t use them.
I pulled some money out of my back pocket and offered him all I had on me. It wasn’t much, just a few Jamaican dollars, but he took it, roughly checked it, then slowly gave me back my passport and card.
I think, on reflection, he was just as nervous as me. Probably his first mugging, egged on by the older boy. He was probably quite pleased to have got something out of it. I lost a good shirt, which was ruined, but I did come out of it with my life and body intact.
It was all over in seconds, but at the time seemed to happen in slow motion. I had been in a dream, my own world, thinking about Columbus, and did not see the attack coming, my mind and body elsewhere. The next day I was flying to Haiti, which everyone had told me was the most dangerous island in the Caribbean. That did turn out scary, with the sound of gunshots in the street all night outside my hotel, but I never felt personally in danger.
The Caribbean island we eventually decided we both liked best of all was Bequia. This is a small island in the Grenadines, not far from Mustique, but totally different. Mustique is manicured, like a garden suburb. Bequia is like the West Indies used to be, with real people doing real work, living real lives, not living on tourists. It has the most fantastic harbour which is always full of yachts which have crossed the Atlantic, so there are lots of ship chandlers, boat builders and little supply boats buzzing around the harbour taking water, laundry and provisions to the yachts.
Our favourite beach became Lower Bay, but the first time we stayed there, in a wonderful cottage right on the beach, the sound of the sea kept me awake all night and I moaned and groaned.
Margaret loved the Lake District, and was always happy there, but she also loved the West Indies, as we both did. We only ever went for two or three weeks a year, every January. We never for one moment ever thought of living there, as the life there is so unreal. We always knew from our first experience of living abroad, all those years earlier, that after six weeks of perfect weather you wake and say oh no, not another perfect day. But during every long winter in London, for months and months ahead, we so looked forward each year to the thought of swimming in the Caribbean.
We always knew how lucky we were, having found our fantasy house in Loweswater, as well as our London home, plus a glamorous West Indian holiday every year. We were always aware, counting our blessings, never took it all for granted, trying not to feel too smug and self-satisfied.
And most of all, we always felt lucky to have each other. Even when we were shouting at each other. We always still argued, although not as vehemently as in our teenage courting days. We never went to bed on an argument.
By argument, it was usually just Margaret telling me I was stupid, I had done something really silly, or wanted to do something really silly. Or I had forgotten to do something I had promised, left a mess somewhere, not cleaned up after doing something.
The children, at various times, were a worry, as with all families, and there is always a temptation to blame the other for what has happened or arguing about what we should do about it, now it has happened. All totally normal marital behaviour for a long-married couple.
On holiday, especially in a place like the West Indies, so far away, so different from normal domestic life, you do tend to forget all the domestic and family cares and problems back home.
Margaret always became particularly happy in the West Indies, letting herself be relaxed, almost forgetting herself, and what had happened to her, back in the 1970s.
Swimming and sunbathing all morning, then a lovely long lunch beside the sea with fresh fish, caught that morning by Cobblers’ own fisherman, and a bottle of Chablis. Then we would go to our lovely bedroom all afternoon and have a long siesta, or what we called a siesta. Which of course was a euphemism.
It was about the only time in the year, when we were in the West Indies in January, that Margaret seemed able to forget or ignore that she had a double mastectomy, managing to wipe it from her conscious mind.
I had long wiped it, or ignored it, ever since 1978, but then I am a denier of anything unpleasant. In London, or Lakeland, in our normal daily lives, especially in bed, I felt she was always aware and self-conscious, if just at the back of her mind, holding back, not letting herself go or be seen. In the West Indies, however, every year for over twenty years, it was bliss.
That particular form of bliss came to a sudden end in 2007.
20
THE BIG C RETURNS
After Margaret’s double mastectomy in the 1970s, she did of course have regular checkups. Every three months she was tested, then six months. When it finally got to a year, I went around saying, ‘Brilliant! Isn’t the National Health wonderful, the magic medicine has worked!’
She would sigh, snort, give a weary smile, and tell me not to be totally stupid. ‘You know there is no cure for cancer, it is always there, lurking in the background, so just shurrup making those sort of inane remarks . . .’
So for about twenty years the subject of cancer had never really come up. I forgot she had had the mastectomy, or at least wiped it from my mind. And she never talked about it. When interviewed for her books, which
now and again she would be forced to do, and her health came up, she would change the subject. She never wanted to talk about it, be known and categorised as someone with cancer.
From time to time she had worries about pains in her legs or back which seemed to have no explanation or cause and sometimes would take weeks to clear up. But they always did clear up. She then assumed she must have pulled something, stretching for something in the kitchen, getting out of bed the wrong way, walking too far, and that was the only reason. When you have had cancer, regardless of how many years earlier, you are bound to think that any mysterious pain, which otherwise you would ignore, is the Big C, trying to make a return visit. She clearly feared that, without ever voicing it.
In 2002 she had pains in her ribs and hip which did seem to take an unconscionably long time to clear up, despite anti-inflammatory pills from the GP. She assumed this time it could be arthritis. In the end, she had a spine scan. It took some weeks for the results to come through as they had got lost. The GP rang to say bad news, the bone scan has shown ‘hot spots’. She would be getting an appointment with an oncologist at the Royal Free. That took more weeks of waiting; meanwhile she had other X-rays and blood tests.
Hot spots sounds quite fun, as if you are going on holiday somewhere nice, but clearly it meant the cancer was back. We would have to cancel going to the West Indies, going to the Lakes. We would have to tell the children this time, as they were grown-up. We were convinced that was it. It has returned.
‘Oh well then,’ I said, ‘I will sell the car, if we are not going to Lakeland again, so some good will come out it. I have always hated driving. Will be good not having a car.’
One evening over supper, while still waiting for the oncologist’s appointment, I happened to be twitting on about what might happen if it did return, how I would have to sell up Lakeland, but the worst thing would be having to learn to cook.
A Life in the Day Page 22